I agree. There are pretty clear grounds here to think about opening an investigation here into illegal tying, or a misuse of market power. Not sure if the FTC maintains a presence on here, but if you're listening...
I'm not sure if this meets the bar for substantive and thoughtful discussion, but this kind of corporate cowardice, enforced by unelected bureaucrats standing at the bully pulpit is only going to get worse as the noose tightens on the open web.
The combination of hardware attestation and walled garden "app stores" is the end goal of most policymakers in this area, and it happens to suit the monopolists in Google and Apple and Facebook down to the ground.
Perhaps a timely reminder that things do not always get better over time, and that we may have lived past the high point of secure communications in our lifetime.
Can anybody briefly explain what a “rot economist” is? Is it meant to be capitalised “ROT economist” which stands for something? Has my browser not rendered the characters correctly or something?
This story of course includes the now almost mandatory attack on e2e encryption, which according to this account when coupled with the people you know feature is “a dangerous tool” - with little explanation as to the nature and size of the danger.
This part is interesting: “Worse still, accounts that were less than 15-days-old now made up 20 percent of all outgoing friend requests, and more than half of friend requests were sent by somebody who was making more than 50 of them a day…”
The explanation leaves a lot to be desired though:
“…heavily suggesting that Facebook was growing its platform’s “connections” through spam.”
Doesn’t this make perfect sense where a new user joins Facebook with no friends to start with, then in the first few weeks of using it finds all of their friends and adds them?
The whole thing reads like a grab bag of grievances rather than a forensic takedown, shame.
Off topic but this is a real gripe of mine - analogue speedos that go all the way up to 240 kmph (~150 mph). I am only ever going to do half that speed, so why not just make the dial go to only 120/(80) and give the needle (and me!) twice as much precision!
The report [0] itself even mentions Apple's abandonment of on-device scanning, as well as its plan to add end-to-end encryption to iCloud. eSafety has been curiously quiet about both of those announcements.
I love ncdu and install it on all of my machines. But at the risk of sounding like a broken record - why isn’t its functionality baked into stock file managers on windows and Linux?
Why can’t either of these systems do what the Mac has been able to do since the 90s, and display the recursive size of a directory in bytes in the file manager, allowing one to sort directories by recursive size?
I am not exaggerating to say this is the single biggest roadblock to my permanent migration to Linux!
(I would love nothing more than to hear I’m wrong and “you fool, Dolphin can do that with flag: foo”!)
> This is just completely wrong - banks only loan out money they have. If you go to a bank and get a loan the bank didn't just edit a database entry - they had that money. Banks loaning out money they don't have is extremely illegal.
I'm afraid to say that this is completely wrong. Commercial banks do in fact create money via lending! The 101 textbook explanation offered here is at best outdated and at worst misleadingly perpetuates a myth that simply must die.
The Bank of England's note on money creation in the modern economy [0] is the place to start - and more or less reflects the explanation in the article.
We had a lot of smoke tainted “experimental” wines out from Australian vineyards as 2019 and 2020 releases - some were really interesting, others simply dreadful (with winemakers just glad you were happy to take a punt and get rid of it for them).
Not sure repeating the bushfires that created those releases is a long term strategy though…
What a lot of the comments in here are bumping up against with regards to “fairness” is the fact that willingness to pay is a function of both preference intensity and ability to pay.
The way to make sure TS tickets go to the biggest TS fans is to remove the influence of ability to pay and sort only by preference intensity.
Solving wealth inequality fixes this problem entirely - among others!
Edit: like all good economists, I leave solving that particular bit of the problem as an exercise to the reader.
In perfectly competitive markets, producers are price takers. That includes at a wholesale distribution level.
Being able to pick and choose your customers (and apply conditions to any sale that favour Apple and disadvantage the customer) is a perfect indication of the level of market power that apple possesses.
Most businesses in competitive industries don’t get to do that.
This from the EFF seems to create a bit of a circuit split with Electronic Frontiers Australia [0] - though I hasten to add the two are not affiliated.
My only comment is that this stuff is hard. Really hard. Consider that a two line HN comment may not be able to fit all of the relevant considerations and case-law in.
I know it is gorhill that wrote that, but I completely disagree that uBO is nothing without the filter lists. I use it the way I used to use uMatrix (rip) to default deny bits and bobs across the web, unblocking as necessary. It’s everything that NoScript should be!
The issue for commercial cinemas is not necessarily handling storage and playback of DCinema packages - it’s the DRM that the studios insist upon playing nice with the projectors. Most cinemas converted their screens at least a decade ago, financed partly by distributors, and the industry is sort of stuck in time as a result.
It’s almost worse than that - the common commercial playback servers I’m familiar with run Linux 2.6.x and fail in all kinds of weird and wonderful ways!
This suspension has been a genuine Rorschach test for commentators online. There really is something in it for everyone - unreliable coal generators, the startling reality that we don’t have enough storage to live without those coal generators, inflation issues, potentially poor market design, privatisation in the first place… whatever you want to see to file your particular newspaper column is there!
I think what this argument misses is the complete monopoly Apple has over distribution. This is not about backwards compatibility and tech debt, this is about distribution.
Yes, you can keep an old device around to use old apps or play old games. But to do that you must have preinstalled the old app, and that device can never be broken or reset, lest you lose the app.
The analogy to VHS is not a bad one, but when VHS players (and DVDs, and BluRays) stopped being current, all the old players and tapes didn’t stop working. That is the power that Apple has right now - to remove old apps from existence even for devices and operating systems that support them completely.
Same as the argument about the Mac - sure, new macs don’t run PPC software. But old ones do. And importantly, I can still install old software on an old Mac.
Remember the reports of phones with Flappy Bird selling for a premium of hundreds and hundreds of dollars? For a digital good that has no nominal cost, that shouldn’t be possible. It is only possible because of Apples monopoly on app distribution for the iPhone. You will not see a premium on a Windows 3.1 machine with Doom preinstalled, or a DVD player that comes with a copy of Lord of the Rings in it. Only Apple can do that, and it’s that power that people are upset by.
You’re right, which is why I didn’t call it bad. I called it a cartel.
In fact I probably agree with their demands, but on its face this is a) not a strike and b) in need of authorisation or similar mechanism under completion law.
Of course you are allowed to change your output - but independently and in reaction to your own circumstances.
Collectively agreeing to simultaneously stop selling in order to force a change in the cost of your inputs is in most cases not legal.
The easy test is to ask yourself if it makes sense for an individual seller to reduce their output in the absence of any other changes. In this case, the answer is no. Only when they all collide to do it at the same time does it work.
They absolutely are warping market forces - that’s the whole point.
We can argue about whether or not this is good (by the sounds of it, probably?) but the entire purpose of them agreeing to restrict their output is to influence the cost of their inputs/outputs.
In the absence of market power, individual firms can’t do that!