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dan-0 commented on Obtainium: Get Android App Updates Directly from the Source   obtainium.imranr.dev/... · Posted by u/janandonly
dan-0 · a year ago
In the same way as walking. Stick to well trafficed places you know and your risk drops significantly.
dan-0 commented on Cops suspect iOS 18 iPhones are communicating to force reboots   macrumors.com/2024/11/07/... · Posted by u/tosh
toomuchtodo · a year ago
The phone is going to default assume a hostile environment without need for comms.
dan-0 · a year ago
Ah, that makes sense.
dan-0 commented on Cops suspect iOS 18 iPhones are communicating to force reboots   macrumors.com/2024/11/07/... · Posted by u/tosh
dan-0 · a year ago
My time as a digital forensic investigator was short and over a decade ago now, but it was standard where I was to put each phone in a faraday bag to help reduce concerns around remote wiping capabilities.

What's odd to me in this article is it doesn't seem like faraday bags are being used. I'd assume concerns over this type of thing are greater than ever now.

dan-0 commented on New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike   washingtonpost.com/style/... · Posted by u/ChrisArchitect
9x39 · a year ago
There are many commenters that talk past each other given the emotionally charged topics of unions, pay, negotiations, etc. I think this is one of them.

What I read from parent is that lifestyle inflation must be high in some of these demographics when the rhetoric used is about survival, despite evidence of many more people 'surviving' on far less income.

What I read from you is that you fiercely maintain negotiating power because you can and feel it's only right given your high value. Why WOULD anyone leave money on the table, after all?

Both can be true.

dan-0 · a year ago
I called out my high value solely because I fall into the "privileged propagandist" rhetoric the comment I responded to and some other siblings are pushing.

Yes, the notion you need 300k to be comfortable anywhere is absurd, but just because someone makes more doesn't mean their desire to achieve a better quality of life is any less valid than anyone else. Do people with higher salaries need more? No. But why assume that just because an individual or group of people want a better quality of life they're "privileged?"

FTR, 100k as a average base salary is pretty low for tech in NYC. When the other 90k is bonus and RSUs that probably vest over 4 years, the stock has fluctuated 50%, and this being the journalism space, I wouldn't expect to see the full value. They have every right to try to negotiate better quality of life improvements out of NYT, especially for something as low impact on revenue as pet bereavement, as ridiculous as that is. I feel a lot of these comments don't understand tech compensation, where sometimes companies can't meet market value in cash so resort to all kinds of quirky benefits to attract/retain skilled workers. That is exactly where I see such a crazy request coming from when a company pushes back against giving more than a 2% annual raise.

dan-0 commented on New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike   washingtonpost.com/style/... · Posted by u/ChrisArchitect
z3ncyberpunk · a year ago
So what, if it costs you 300k to be comfortable then you are being suckered. When people are struggling to make it by on $30 and $40k and see these privileged propagandists complain about making six figures, no one has sympathy.
dan-0 · a year ago
Sorry, I don't see a valid point in any of these salary arguments. In fact, they're down right insulting and ignorant.

I did strenuous manual labor for next to nothing once upon a time. After about 8 years of that, on top of regular 60 hour work weeks, I spent almost every waking moment of 4-5 years to learn and better myself with about every sacrifice you could imagine short of divorce. I'm now making significantly more and working much less with an extremely happy family.

I'm not some trust fund kid. I have a high school education. My father worked 3-5 jobs to provide for my family growing up. So if you haven't picked it up, I know what the other side looks like.

I work in tech now, I wouldn't even reply to a recruiter presenting a 190k job offer if it meant living in New York. I can get more working remote. It's not because I'm spoiled, it's not because I make bad financial decisions, it's because I know my value and won't compromise and I sure won't reduce my family's quality of life because some multi million dollar company wants to short change me.

I get paid fairly for my experience and what I bring to the table, I make sure of that. If my employer isn't matching what I know I can get on the market, I will first negotiate (which is right where the NYT Tech workers are at), then leave for greener pastures if that falls through. I can do that because I worked hard to bring more value to myself in an in demand field.

I'm sorry if you're making a lower salary, but that doesn't mean everyone should just take what they're given. That's how people are exploited.

These arguments aren't just wrong. They are backwards and self limiting.

dan-0 commented on Touchscreens are out, and tactile controls are back   spectrum.ieee.org/touchsc... · Posted by u/pseudolus
praptak · a year ago
Touchscreens are anti-accessibility.

Lack of tactile feedback for the sight-impaired is the obvious part but there is another thing:

Touchscreens just stop registering your touch when you get old. The older you get the less moisture there's in your skin, which at some point makes touch screens ignore you.

https://www.gabefender.com/writing/touch-screens-dont-work-f...

dan-0 · a year ago
The opposite side of this is unpredictable or unintended behavior from too much moisture, which in my experience has been an acknowledgement with touch screens for quite some time.

As touch screens for applications started to become common, this naturally filtered into tactical and service work fields. There is an advantage in this as it allows a more compact interface that can change more easily based on what the user needs. However the down side is, in harsh fast paced environments where the user may be moving quickly and sweating, it's much harder to register intended user feedback to the interface.

The problem is not just if touch screens should be used, but also how they should be implemented. Especially on the side of general consumer electronics, like mobile phones, iOS and Android have built in interfaces for accessibility. In some cases you can get built in accessibility out of the box with very little effort, but the reality is, it takes a decent effort in most cases to get it right and users who need this behavior are not a heavy majority. This results in a deprioritization of accessibility in many mobile applications.

This gets much worse with more hardware centric devices like thermostats, ovens, refrigerators, etc which have a higher tendency to have user interfaces developed in house and lacking any accessibility. Compounding this problem, with the popularity of touch screen interfaces, and post COVID supply chain problems, many users who needed accessible functionally were (maybe still are) left without many options, likely either having to pay a heavy premium for something with usable accessibility features, but probably more realistically, just taking what they can get.

Modern technology makes accessibility easier than ever now, and enables accessibility in places that didn't previously exist, but the lack of willingness to implement accessible features on the part of some corporations is not just providing terrible accessibility, it's taking accessibility away from places where it previously existed.

dan-0 commented on Taking Apple to Court: Their mistake wiped out our $33,680 MRR mobile business   old.reddit.com/r/iOSProgr... · Posted by u/oidar
AnthonyMouse · 2 years ago
> When your work poses a risk to the bottom line of another company, they have every right to be protective and implement the policies they feel will bring in more customers and money.

The issue is when that interacts with this:

> I do believe Apple is anti competitive in the US due to this

For two reasons. First, if the flea market is being unreasonable, you can just flip them off and go set up your stall in a less unreasonable flea market. Whereas if it's Apple, you have to find a way to get a working account with them or you're done.

And second, because of that, it allows them to be unreasonable because the developers have no other options, whereas normally the different stores would be competing with each other for both suppliers and customers.

But it's not that different with Google, because of this:

> People want to be on the Play Store and not FDroid or the many others because that's where the customers are

And specifically because of why that is the case.

Why are all the customers on Google Play? There many companies in a good position to create a competing store. Major retailers like Walmart and Amazon already have your payment information, already have a system for vetting third party sellers, how come they don't have Android stores as popular as Google's? Shouldn't Paypal be in a good position to put up a store where you can buy apps via a URL to the developer's site? Where are these things?

It turns out Google suppresses them in various ways. Notice how there are zero major Android OEMs who ship a preinstalled third party store that isn't their own. Normally that sort of thing is like free money. OEM gets like $1/device from each of Walmart and Amazon just to put their store on the home screen. But that's nowhere. Weird, right?

Alternate stores in theory is not the same as viable alternate stores in practice.

So to reiterate, the problem is not that they can boot you out for arbitrary reasons, it's that they can boot you out for arbitrary reasons and then you have no viable alternatives. Then innocent people reasonably try to create a new account or do whatever they have to do given the circumstances.

dan-0 · 2 years ago
Back to the flea market example, if that's the only market available, you can either abide by their policies or not, if not you can't sell.

The fact that Apple has made itself the only market available is what makes it anti-competitive. Even then you could argue that's what you bought on to when you opted into their currated ecosystem.

Apple and Google's customer reach is a direct result of them footing the effort to create a store and relationship with OEMs and currating the store in a way that works for the customers that use it.

If Google hadn't tightened the rope on the Play Store polices, it'd be a mess, just like it used to be and like some 3rd party stores are, not user friendly and full of low quality or malicious apps.

This doesn't change the core of the argument. Companies and customers have their free will. If a company doesn't serve quality products in their store, customers will leave, if they make their store too painful for other companies to host in, so will they. If you agree to a contract and don't follow that contract and get booted, that's in your.

If you want reach into Apple's customers, you have to buy in to the whole deal, doesn't make them right for being the only store for their ecosystem, but doesn't make you right for giving them the bird and crying foul when you violate the policies agreed upon.

I won't buy the argument for Android you're throwing out there. Publish to another store of you don't like the Play Store, I do. Google's store is their customers, and their customers to make policies to protect from bad apps. If another store was better, people would use it readily, and they have the open option to. That's why FDroid exists, don't like closed software, well it doesn't exist there, and the customer made that wants it uses it.

Bottom line, you sign a contract and agree to the policies, don't cry foul when you get bit for violating it, like anything else. You put yourself and your company at risk by not reading and understanding what you agreed to.

dan-0 commented on Taking Apple to Court: Their mistake wiped out our $33,680 MRR mobile business   old.reddit.com/r/iOSProgr... · Posted by u/oidar
AnthonyMouse · 2 years ago
I feel like this is the difference between bureaucracies and individuals.

If you're an individual developer, you interact with many bureaucracies. Not only the app store, but probably two of them, and a bank, and a couple of social media platforms, and a hosting company, and you use a bunch of software that each has its own license etc. Each of these come with a wall of text which is like 50 pages long. You have not read them, you would not understand them even if you did because they're written in lawyer, and the thrust of most of them is something like "the company reserves the right to do whatever they want".

No one is ever in compliance because the rules are designed to be broad enough to allow the company to declare you persona non grata under an unrelated pretext if they want to, so complying with the rules is not only not expected but purposely impossible. Then people have little idea which rules are real and enforced and which ones are just there so the company can act with impunity, and you can't glean this from reading them (which you don't have the time or understanding to do anyway), so instead they just behave as an ordinary person would while ignoring whatever it says in the documents, which is reasonable enough to keep most people out of trouble until it isn't.

Bureaucracies behave completely differently. They hire lawyers, because they have the resources to hire lawyers, and then demand that the rules are something they can actually comply with because otherwise they engage in malicious compliance and are big enough for that to cause problems for the entity making the rules. Then they pretend it would be reasonable for individuals to do the same thing, even though it's not.

dan-0 · 2 years ago
I agree to a degree, in that the policies are a lot to take in.

When your work poses a risk to the bottom line of another company, they have every right to be protective and implement the policies they feel will bring in more customers and money. If the store policies are too much for you to understand, that's on you for blindly adding to the risk of that company.

I'm speaking specifically from the Android side of things. People want to be on the Play Store and not FDroid or the many others because that's where the customers are, but you're free to use another store or distribute directly, which is not the case for iOS, particularly outside Europe. I do believe Apple is anti competitive in the US due to this, but it doesn't change the fact that you're your own victim for wanting to be in their store and not following the contact you agreed to. They take in the risk of hosting your app, you take on the risk and pain of dealing with their store policies.

It's no different than having a stall at a flea market, if they say you can have a stall, but have policies against selling certain items, and you sell them anyways, you can get the boot. If someone falsely accuses you of doing so and they suspend your stall while they investigate, then you come back the next week under a different name, don't be surprised about the result when they recognize you.

dan-0 commented on Taking Apple to Court: Their mistake wiped out our $33,680 MRR mobile business   old.reddit.com/r/iOSProgr... · Posted by u/oidar
AnthonyMouse · 2 years ago
> I don't know the Apple ecosystem much, but on Android, it's very well known that this is a quick way to get completely banned from the Play Store.

You're describing the behavior of the store rather than the expected behavior of the developers. Of course a developer is going to try to create a new account, you just broke their existing account for unexplained reasons and this is their primary source of income. They have to fix it right away or their business is destroyed, and it's just as well known that appeals are often capriciously denied without recourse. So how is it suspicious behavior? It's the same thing you'd expect someone to do even if they're naive and innocent.

> I don't like that this is the way it's handled, but don't disagree with it either or it'd be a fast path to bypassing quality and compliance checks in the app stores.

In order for this to be reasonable you'd need the appeals process to be both swift and accurate, and yet it isn't.

It also goes without saying that any actual scams are just going to do it anyway, and make up new company names etc. as necessary, so it seems like all they're doing here is punishing innocent people who try to open a new account using the same information, because unlike the scammers they're actually using a consistent identity.

dan-0 · 2 years ago
The process should be more accommodating of these situations, but if you're a developer you should know the policies and limitations of your deployment environment. If you don't and get bit by a policy violation, I feel bad for you, but it is still on you to know and your failure to own it.

Development isn't just slamming in code because Product wants a feature.

dan-0 commented on Taking Apple to Court: Their mistake wiped out our $33,680 MRR mobile business   old.reddit.com/r/iOSProgr... · Posted by u/oidar
duxup · 2 years ago
That worries me about 3rd party app stores. I'm not opposed to them, but it feels like there is just a wave of scam type activity waiting to be unleashed on them...
dan-0 · 2 years ago
This is exactly what Google has been trying to clean up. The Play Store is much cleaner and safer now than it was 10 years ago.

Unfortunately small companies and independent devs take the brunt of the downside as their ability to get timely support is almost non existent. Big companies often have a Google rep they can reach back to.

u/dan-0

KarmaCake day195January 27, 2018View Original