My wife and I both had the G2. I loved it so much! I feel like the foldable phones coming out may someday give me the same feeling.

I’m too lazy to look it up, but there is a settings in either the office products or group policy that makes it use the old open/save dialogs. I remember setting it up for an octogenarian relative who couldn’t adjust to change.

My only complaint with it is the lack of support for personal vault. I don’t use it heavily on my Mac so maybe I just haven’t encountered other issues.

I get not wanting to use a google, microsoft or crypto laden browser, but I would be willing to use a well supported browser that used chromium as the page rendering engine. It seems to be extremely difficult to get another engine to be competitive in the marketplace. Maybe the resources would be better spent putting the chromium engine inside a different container. I’m sure there would be drawbacks, but I think there would be compatibility benefits too.

Article says you cannot side load books on Apple Books. That is incorrect. You just send an epub to books via the share menu on Mac or iOS and it loads it. Also syncs it via iCloud if you want it to.

Perhaps the author meant you cannot download purchased books off of Apple Books.

I would feel that it would be a reasonable if it was my local paper running the story. Arstechnica IS a primarily technical news site—I believe they should have a higher bar—otherwise they are just parroting a report and not providing useful (to me) news.

I generally think arstechnica.com does a decent job of being a non-garbage news site. I pay a couple bucks a month for the ad-free RSS feed. This story feels terrible to me. I don’t doubt a law suit has been filed, but I would expect some investigation by the reporter of the extra-ordinary claims of privilege escape the application is claimed to be capable of.

Depending on the site, you can use one device to login to another without installing additional software. For instance, if you have an iPhone with a passkey for microsoft.com stored on it, you can login to Microsoft.com using the iPhone.

Here is a webpage that has some screenshots to show you what I mean. You can probably google some other examples.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/05/02/microsoft-finally-lets-users-sign-into-accounts-with-passkeys

It is possible to sync passkeys across devices but at this point is mainly within a single ecosystem.

Surprisingly, I thought the article was a reasonable summary of the actual paper. I think some people might think this was a poke at privacy on Apple, but it really focused on how hard it is to create accessible settings despite the enormous number of options.

I have found that navigating the menus in Apple iOS is quite a bit easier than on my Android devices. Mac seems more difficult as the settings tend to be inside the individual apps and don’t surface as well through the search.

The paper hammered home the point that Siri configurations were particularly hard, but they also mention that Siri data is end-to-end encrypted. I thought all those points were fair.

I do believe settings need to be improved, but I have little faith they will ever be useful for 99% of users who will simply never change anything from the default. At this point I believe any meaningful improvements for the majority of users will come from useful defaults that include E2E encryption on basically all user data. I feel Apple is coming close with iCloud Advanced Data Protection that was introduced last year, but that needs to become a default. Maybe it cannot though—too many users will lose all their data and then the trade off of security to convenience will not be worthwhile.

I don’t think a big business should have an advantage over a small business that cannot afford that technology while using public airwaves. A better solution imo would be to prioritize all very low-bandwidth traffic.

109 devices per capita? I just walked through the house looking at what my partner and I have that plugs in. We don’t have 109 together. And it isn’t like I we don’t have stuff. Mesh wifi routers, camping gear. Heck we even have a refrigerator. What do people collect?

I agree that decrypt/encrypt is bad—it is simply not E2EE. The solution would have to be a better method of public key distribution for ‘federated’ systems.

While I don’t know anything specific about facebook messenger, E2EE doesn’t necessarily preclude what you suggest. A messaging service could store the entire chat history encrypted without decryption keys. When you get a new client you could restore the entire history in encrypted form onto your device. You would then use a recovery key you would possess to decrypt the message history on your end. At no time would the messaging service have the keys to decrypt. I’m not saying that is what facebook does.

Why do you need to control both ends for E2EE? Both ends need a public and private key to encrypt and decrypt messages. You need a method of key exchange. I would prefer to have an offline method (phone call, in-person) of validating a key (like iMessage and Signal have). But I don’t see a reason to need to control both ends.

If you enable advanced data protection apple cannot recover your account. You need your recovery keys or a designated recovery contact.

The apple doc implies (to me) that a SIM swap only works after you authenticate on an apple device (e.g. using your password) even without advanced data protection. I have never tested that.

You can use the long process (many days) to recover an account assuming you haven’t enabled advanced data protection. I’m okay with that as it is perfect for my grandparents (I had an older relative who got their account back through this method).

I get that you could SIM swap to recover other accounts (not Apple) if they have SMS as a recovery method. That sucks and it really sucks for people who don’t get that an email or SMS recovery can be a giant hole in security.

The document you linked says it requires a combination of your apple account password plus an SMS text sent to a pre-registered phone number? Seems like a pretty good setup for most people. Also has the alternative of recovery contacts and recovery keys.

It looks like turning on advanced protection would eliminate the SMS method but I am not 100% sure. Then you would need recovery keys or recovery contact.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651

My biggest worry in these cases is not that I get locked out, but rather that Apple mangles my keychain. I have a USB CSV of my passwords in my bank safety deposit box. With passkey I am not sure of how I would get a similar backup.

I will vouch for it. I use it on my iPad constantly and have few complaints. I don’t think it syncs well between iPad and Mac or Phone when using iCloud sync, but I think they have other methods and I don’t really need sync since I do my media consumption on the iPad.

arstechnica has a premium RSS for $3 a month that has no ads. I love it.

What was the prank?

Oof. I would buy more efficient hardware with those rates too!

Get a power measuring device if you don’t have one and consider the real cost of buying something new if you already have something. For instance, I have an older gaming laptop I am considering repurposing for my home automation stuff. While idling it draws about 10w which is amazing to me and a number I never would have guessed. For me that works out to (24 hours * 10w * 365 days* 1000w/Kw ) 87kwh per year. I pay about 10 cents per kwh so say $10 a year. Buying something to save a little power will never work out.

My current home server is an intel NUC from 2013! It can’t do some of the things I would like to add on, but it is a great media server and downloader. Powerful hardware isn’t really a necessity.