wux (u/wux) - Readit News

wux commented on Stolen iPhones Will Be Even More Useless from iOS 18 Onwards macobserver.com/ios/stole... · Posted by u/miles

throwaway48476 · a year ago

I have no problem with blacklisting stolen parts. What does concern me is when devices are abandoned or given away, not marked as stolen but still activation locked with no means of getting it unlocked.

Last month I reset my device to reinstall macos and selected log out of icloud and wipe. I assumed this would remove the activation lock but it did not and I had to put my password in. I've found that removing activation lock is an intentionally confusing and misleading process. This only exists to create ewaste and pad the bottom line.

wux · a year ago

Yeah, I can see why someone might assume that the activation lock would be disabled in that scenario. But on the other hand, I can also see why someone would absolutely expect that it wouldn't be.

I might want (and have wanted) to reinstall macOS and start fresh without any intention of relinquishing or transferring ownership of the physical device. And I might want to log out of iCloud because I don't want to sync my personal stuff on that computer anymore, or because something funky is happening with how messages or photos are syncing and I just want to reset it all. I'd be pretty pissed if, six months after reconfiguring everything, someone nabbed my laptop and I discovered that activation lock had been automatically disabled for me the whole time without my explicitly doing so.

Given these mutually irreconcilable user expectations, I can see why Apple would opt for a design that favors the more cautious approach where you have to press a very specific sequence of buttons to disable the lock. Maybe I'm just selfish, but knowing a laptop I sent away couldn't be repurposed but ended up as e-waste would make me feel a little guilty, but knowing a laptop I didn't want to lose got stolen with all my stuff on it exposed to the thief would make me apoplectic with rage.

wux commented on eSIM is altering how consumers interact with operators opensignal.com/2023/07/25... · Posted by u/signa11

ezfe · 2 years ago

You've already acknowledged that most of the issues you encountered are specific to your phone or carrier. For example, eSIM works fine with 5G on iPhones and in my experience there is no delay to activate an account. I've set up multiple phones on eSIMs and never experienced something like that.

Regarding backing up, yes it would be nice if you could backup your eSIM alongside the rest of your phone contents, however the real solution is just making it easy to provision a new eSIM.

In my experience, if I need a new eSIM I just open the carrier app and reinstall it to the phone.

wux · 2 years ago

I think they've got a fair point, though, that a number of those issues with the eSIM reflect reliance on factors outside their control (for example, whether or not one's carrier has competent backend systems) where before swapping a SIM card was a physical action within their control. It's a frustrating feeling when a new technology takes something out of your hands in the name of convenience but, far from being seamless, actually introduces problems that are entirely out of your hands to fix.

wux commented on Pfizer Responds to Covid Gain of Function Research Claims pfizer.com/news/announcem... · Posted by u/JulianRaphael

zug_zug · 3 years ago

So the way I read this statement, they explicitly say state "Pfizer has not conducted gain of function."

Then they later admit, " In a limited number of cases when a full virus does not contain any known gain of function mutations, such virus may be engineered to enable the assessment of antiviral activity in cells." (I'm not exactly clear what that means, but it reads like they do gain-of-function to me. I've learned that when people are usually unclear on very important statements it's often the worse interpretation that's true, otherwise they'd have a reason to be clear).

Then they quickly defend "It is important to note that these studies are required by U.S. and global regulators for all antiviral products and are carried out by many companies and academic institutions in the U.S. and around the world."

So I'd take this to mean one of two things:

1) Gain of function research is required & happening everywhere and they just stopped telling everyone because it's so political so we now weasel-word around it; if you were technical you'd understand

or

2) They are twisting words very hard in this press statement about what is "required"

wux · 3 years ago

Engineering the virus doesn’t mean making gain-of-function mutations. “Function” has a specific meaning and it’s not a synonym for “does anything.” Instead, in broad strokes, think of “function” as referring to biological activities that give the virus some advantage over its host.

To make a simplistic analogy (necessarily imperfect but sufficient for these purposes), consider instead a computer virus. If an antivirus company patches the binary in order to make it easier to study its behavior (for example, in order to make it more debuggable), that’s “engineering” the virus but it’s not “gain-of-function.” If the company instead patches the virus so that it can take advantage of a new 0-day exploit and spread further, that’s “gain-of-function.”

Whether gain-of-function research is capable of revealing new insight into transmissible diseases not obtainable elsewhere is a point of debate among biologists, but one can be well assured that a for-profit operation isn’t going to touch it with a ten-foot pole. Engineering the virus on the other hand, or in other words making mutations in viral components, is basically a description of “doing basic molecular biology” and is non-optional.

The sort of allegation that Pfizer is responding to is more or less the equivalent of someone recording an engineer calling themselves “hackers,” visiting “Hacker News,” then writing an exposé claiming that this proves Company X is in the business of computer crime.

The activity mentioned in the Pfizer press release that skirts closest to “gain-of-function” is actually a bit you didn’t mention at all, where they’re required by regulatory bodies to determine how the virus might resist an antiviral. Unlike computer viruses, biological ones mutate under treatment pressure. The closest analogy for a computer virus might be if it phones home and downloads a new payload to modify its behavior when it detects the presence of some antivirus software. For obvious reasons, studying how a pandemic virus would mutate in response to approved drugs is both necessary and icky, hence why Pfizer discussed its biosecurity measures. The distinction they make (rightly) between this research and a “directed evolution” or “gain-of-function” experiment, is that they’re reading out an answer to the question “Does the virus mutate when we treat with this antiviral drug, and if so, how?”, not culturing viruses iteratively in the presence of drug until they obtain an optimized treatment-resistant virus.

wux commented on Apple Has Begun Scanning Your Local Image Files Without Consent sneak.berlin/20230115/mac... · Posted by u/sneak

wux · 3 years ago

Apple has confirmed to the media that as of December 2022 that they are not pursuing on-device CSAM scanning:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/9/23500838/apple-csam-plans...

macOS Ventura exposes new object and scene recognition features for images, including background removal in Preview (analogous to "Copy Subject" in Photos but without requiring the use of that app):

https://www.tomsguide.com/how-to/how-to-remove-image-backgro...

You can also use Spotlight search with keywords such as "flower" or "cow" to find images on your local storage that have those subjects; I don't recall if that is new to macOS Ventura or has been possible for several versions of the OS.

mediaanalysisd is a daemon which has for years been responsible for, well, media analysis and would perform any network tasks required to support features such as the above when previewing an image. It would not surprise me if not all image recognition tasks are done exclusively locally, although I haven't found documentation of how much exactly is or isn't. It has long been the case for speech recognition, for example, that not all of it could be done offline (although more of it can be on Apple Silicon machines).

The only way to opt out of OS-level features that send any data to Apple at all is to opt out of using macOS; even then, as I recall, the Asahi Linux installer has to pull certain bits from Apple servers for copyright reasons.

wux commented on Is dictation on iOS 16 broke for you? discussions.apple.com/thr... · Posted by u/zwilliamson

zwilliamson · 3 years ago

I’m a heavy user of dictation via Siri and keyboard on iPhone. iOS 16 completely broke it somehow. Curious is all iOS 16 users having same issue?

wux · 3 years ago

I don’t use dictation often, but I’ve not had any issues on iOS 16 (US English, iPhone 12).

One caveat is that I’d been using the betas, so I didn’t upgrade straight from iOS 15 to 16.0 as released, but I really haven’t encountered any difficulties with dictation in any of the betas or in the final release.

wux commented on Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier dynomight.net/ikea-purifi... · Posted by u/Ariarule

idk1 · 3 years ago

Can anyone tell me what 'Contra Wirecutter' means. It's like I've gone mad, everyone seems to know what this term means, both of these words mean nothing to me and I've spoken English my entire life. You're all acting like they're two words that make perfect sense. Haha. It would be really great is someone could explain the two words to me.

wux · 3 years ago

Contra (preposition): 1: AGAINST — used chiefly in the phrase pro and contra 2: in opposition or contrast to

(Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/contra)

Wirecutter: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/

wux commented on Germany locks down unvaccinated people, as leaders plan to make shots compulsory cnn.com/2021/12/02/europe... · Posted by u/Tomte

wux · 4 years ago

The Cochrane Reviews are regarded as one of the preeminent collections of systematic reviews in medicine. They conclude that “overall, the reliable evidence available does not support the use of ivermectin for treatment or prevention of COVID‐19 outside of well‐designed randomized trials.”

https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...

A similar conclusion regarding lack of evidence is discussed in NIH treatment guidelines:

https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/therapies/ant...

In line with consensus in the field, ivermectin is not contained among the treatment guidelines of any institution at which I have practiced.

wux commented on The Elephant at WWDC eclecticlight.co/2021/06/... · Posted by u/ingve

moralestapia · 4 years ago

Could you please, then, point me to a creditable source regarding what 'powerd' is?

wux · 4 years ago

You can use the 'man' command in Terminal to pull up the man page (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_page) for 'powerd' (that is, by typing 'man powerd'). By doing so, you'll see that it is a "launchd managed daemon" that "manages Energy Preferences."

wux commented on PSA: macOS updates often modify your System Preferences to violate your Privacy · Posted by u/webmobdev

wux · 5 years ago

This report worried me, but it was timely because I was literally in the process of upgrading to macOS 11.2.3.

So, while the update was downloading, I changed my firewall settings specifically to allow built-in software to receive incoming connections, but disallow downloaded signed software. I also specifically set GarageBand to block incoming connections but not other programs among those listed.

I'm happy to report that all of these settings were maintained after updating to macOS 11.2.3 exactly as-is. I wonder if the OP is referring to a different update (none that I'm aware of recently).

There is no Privacy > Advertising > Limit Ad Tracking setting on macOS 11.2.2 or 11.2.3: there's a checkbox for "Personalized Ads," which remains turned off after the update also, just as it was before.