You don't have to "hazard a guess", one of their engineers gave you their email address in that other thread. They also invited you to their discord. Have you tried talking to someone directly at the source?
Necrophagist[0] is also a good example of this technique. They also employ almost magical instrumental ability both in studio and live which is a hard feat to accomplish--especially with blast beasts and hyper-technical solos. Too bad they have pretty much retired. Rumor has is Muhammed Suiçmez (lead singer/songwriter, main force behind the band) went to work for BMW, would not be surprised if it were as a SE :)
Stuff like this is why I'm an Apple fanboy. I'm happy to pay a premium and be locked into their walled garden for some things if it means supporting a company that has the power to shift policy in favor of human rights (privacy in this case).
In fairness, Meta has said the same thing re: WhatsApp, so while Apple deserves _some_ credit here for sticking to their principles, they're not exactly leading the pack. Which brings home the point that if _Meta_ isn't onboard with your privacy-obliterating proposal then you know you've really lost the plot...
In even more fairness, Meta has literally skipped the EU for Threads instead of increasing privacy. In their case, it's just a careful balance of virtue signaling, it had no qualms about pushing their spyware to hundreds of millions of people, violating basic human rights in the process.
Your comment would have been stronger if you left out the piece re: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, because it's an eye roller. Article 12 is:
> No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
I'm no fan of Meta or their privacy violations, but saying that voluntarily downloading an app (which by the way does clearly outline their privacy practices) is equivalent to having my humans rights violated just really waters down what "human rights" should mean.
that's all true until an app becomes the only way to interact with certain groups of people. i certainly wouldn't call my usage of Discord voluntary. it doesn't actually matter how often i read their privacy policy and shake my head. either I break off contact with a large part of the internet that's important to me or I begrudgingly agree "voluntarily" to their terms and conditions.
People miss the forest for the trees here. Democratic society needs a way for people to communicate freely. Those ways are dying out fast.
In modern life, people don't discuss politics in townhalls, pubs, or whatever anymore. Online communication is by now far too siloed and supervised to the point of being unusable. Media are one-way streets, pushing the agenda of billionaires.
But you need to be able to have controversial discussions about "heavy" topics without fear of being ostracised. You need to have a back-channel to give feedback to "higher ups". Etc.pp.
A society where the individual is degraded to a mere drone (even if only loosely via framing) controlled by the "hive mind", without any recourse to voice constructive criticism is a lot of things, but certainly no democracy. There looms a dystopia on our doorstep.
To be honest, I think you've got at least part of it backwards.
> But you need to be able to have controversial discussions about "heavy" topics without fear of being ostracised.
Uh, why? People should have freedom of speech, but it feels like a lot of people want freedom from the consequences of the their speech. If anything, I think a lot of our current social disharmony is a direct result of the extremely recent development of people being able to mouth offline with very little social constraints.
Mike Tyson probably said it best: "Social media made y'all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it."
Not even that, if I’m not mistaken Facebook imported contacts from users agenda and then allow third part apps to access the information, so even if you didn’t have a Facebook, you data was leaked.
Have you ever actually tried to convince a non-technical friend or family member to use a different platform for communicating? Now try that with 10 people at the same time. The only reason Discord ever became successful is the huge vacuum of good UX that existed before it. A fragmentation of Skype, Steam, XFire, Teamspeak, Vent and Mumble. Jabber if you were playing certain MMOs. Signal and Keybase aren't even close either. Matrix is a little better, but still far off, and they have the Mastodon problem where explaining federation turns off normal peoples brains.
And aside from that, a lot of software communities are on Discord now. People are gating download links behind it, use their threading feature for support and put their knowledge base in channels. And not just small communities and developers. ASUS has made their main communication channel Discord too.
I understand! It's just that I never had to download Discord for anything.
I agree it's difficult. I've had success showing keybase to people because of how barebones simple it is - but it's not a solution for everything of course.
You are a very ignorant if you think there is no barrier to getting someone to try an app with a substantially less good UX than what someone's currently using, and that that barrier doesn't border impossible in a group of 10.
I can't even get my wife to install Element - and she works in tech as a senior python / automation engineer. People want neatness on their phone and low total complexity, and installing a messenger for a single person is over the line for most.
You have insults I have numbers. We are not the same…
> You are a very ignorant if you think there is no barrier to getting someone to try an app with a substantially less good UX than what someone's currently using, and that that barrier doesn't border impossible in a group of 10.
Yet many people do have multiple messaging apps.
And Discord the one you think is so popular is not even in the top 10…
This isn't compulsory, it's just personally beneficial. There are plenty of beneficial contexts you need to opt into, and include some cost or compromise.
So what you're really complaining about is that other people will not follow your choices. If your relations have such a hard line that a single app is "the only way to interact with certain groups of people", they are the ones to blame, not the maker of the app.
It’s just that there was a time in Europe (about 80 years ago) when among other cruel things, the honor and reputation of a lot of people were actively destroyed for arbitrary reasons.
>> No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation
If I cannot attack the honor and reputation of a person, and by extension, artificial person like a corporation, what good is freedom of speech? How can I call someone out for being a scammer, or for doing horrible things? How does one seek public redress of a grievance against a company, or an agent of the government? Does arbitrary apply to timing, or the circumstance? Who is the arbiter of arbitrary? This is not a human right. It is a nice tool for a tyrannical government to strip away rights from people. Oh, you've violated Mr. Arresting Officer by accusing him of falsely arresting you. Now you get to deal with the false arrest and a human rights crime. Likewise, Ms. Bought a Mansion with Public Money can no longer be accused because she has a human right to not have to trifle with public accountability.
Arguably it's not the voluntary downloading of an app that's the problem; it's the mandatory government imposition of privacy interference across all apps.
I think that the problem is that Meta has normalized this violation so it doesn't feel like a big deal. It feels watered down even for someone like you who appears to be very aware of the problem.
It's like exploited workers and people living in quasi-slavery, many of them don't understand their rights and "voluntarily" waive them. My parents didn't really understand the implications of "voluntarily" accepting Meta's privacy statement - once I explained it to them, they were in complete horror.
Meta already have Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp in compliance with EU legislation.
Threads is not an attempt to push spyware on users, that would be incompliant in the EU. (And what is this spyware you believe is in Threads?)
More likely they know exactly how much work it entails to be compliant and they decided to initially skip the EU market to speed up their launch.
I don’t think it’s because of not wanting to preserve privacy I think it’s because it takes a shit ton of time to comply with all the orders the EU has pinned on them.
And in even more fairness, privacy was not the reason Threads didn’t launch in the EU. It is in violation of the digital markers act, not GDPR. The leveraging of market power in one platform to boost another platform is what is at fault, and seeing the meteoric rise of Threads on the back of Instagram’s popularity the stratagem worked.
Is WhatsApp still requiring access to your phone's address book before it allows you to use it? It did last time I tried it. There is no chance in hell I'm giving it all the phone numbers, emails and names of people that trusted me by giving me their details. At the time I set up a virtual android environment (samsung called it knox) just to setup WhatsApp in a way it couldn't access my phone's address book. It is extremely unethical on Meta's side to continue with this requirement. So I'm dubious every te they're presented as champions of privacy protection.
I currently have WhatsApp installed without access to my address book (on Android). It doesn't require it, but it makes it harder to use and locks out some features. Among other things, you can't start a new group / direct message, but you can participate / reply if someone else messages you first.
I use an app called "Open In WhatsApp" which lets you paste / write a phone number and it will open a conversation with that number (by using android intents). You can also share contacts from the Phone app to this App, so you don't have to copy/paste manually.
If only there were a strong, centralized app store that could perform app review and prevent applications from degrading user experience beyond the extent actually necessary without that permission.
Good thing the EU just outlawed that model and forced everyone to support "third party app stores" that are thinly-veiled shells for Facebook/Google/etc to bypass that review process.
the "I wanna sideload" crowd are nothing more than allies of convenience for FB and others. Facebook was already experimenting with getting users to manually sideload the full-telemetry build and now they can just say "oops not supported on safari, install the native app".
I recently had to install whatsapp. No asking for contacts at all. The web app (via a qr code) is ok, and i run that in a vm set up just for wa.
I don't let friends and fam know i have it...I prefer keeping out of dramas, 'news', and memes. I did check that i do not appear as 'x is online' on anyone's phone (but only checked with the person i needed to wa with).
The app isn't bad, tbf. It's just not for me.
I think Meta _needs_ WhatsApp to be their loss-leader (not really, but you know) when it comes to security. They always get to say "oh but WhatsApp is E2E!! We do care about security!"
It's debatable whether or not that was true, and even if you believed it it was up for another debate whether that security was by design or because Apple's vanishingly small share of the PC market made it uneconomical to write malware targeting OSX.
This isn't to say that Microsoft was doing security properly back then either, they weren't.
>Apple didn't give two stones about security until it became a marketing/selling point
I don't much care. Companies don't have ethics, they have fiscal goals. If Apples fiscal goals happen to line up with my own goals, so much the better.
I would tend to trust a company who is doing something to selfishly support the bottom line way easier than I would trust a company who claims to be doing it for the common good of all humanity.
Google famously started off trying to not be evil and also be a profitable company simultaneously. It didn't work out great in that one of those goals became slightly more important than the other.
The ironic thing is that WhatsApp very heavily pushes users into Google account backups, which are unencrypted, giving government agencies all the access they want.
I remember some talk about those getting encrypted, don't k ow if that has happened yet.
They seems to be end to end encrypted now. It asked me a password to encrypt the backup with. It's a recent feature and you must trust a closed source app. No idea of I can download the backup from Google drive with a web browser and decrypt it with some common decryption program.
25% of the entire population is a pretty popular application! Not “hardly anyone”. Also, I’d like to know the volume of messages shared, I have WhatsApp, but wouldn’t miss it it it disappeared. iMessage disappearing would be very inconvenient.
I'm surprised it's even 25% in the UK, and I wonder how that's measured. Maybe the 25% includes things like "opening the iMessage app to read SMS messages sent by two-factor authentication services" etc.
I’m not surprised, SMSing people is still common, and sliding from that to iMessage is totally frictionless for iPhone users. With iOS market share being around 50%, I’m surprised (skeptical even!) that it’s not closer to 50%.
But who is that 25%? iPhone users have money. I’m sure there is some significant overlap between iMessage and WhatsApp users (I know I and everyone I know use(s) both). But if you threaten politicians with losing their blue bubbles they’re gonna fall in line.
> But if you threaten politicians with losing their blue bubbles they’re gonna fall in line.
This is not a thing outside the United States, and I doubt that most British politicians are even aware of 'blue bubbles'.
For example, the recent controversy regarding the release of Covid-related government communications was centred on WhatsApp, with no reference to other platforms like iMessage.
I prefer iMessage over the other messengers, but I still haven’t met anyone who cares. A lot of people don’t even know why the bubbles are sometimes green.
I've noticed that too and it is super annoying having family in the UK that will only communicate via Whatsapp. Is this because cell providers outside the US charge for SMS? Even the ones who have iPhones end up using it because it is too much of a pain to use separate messaging apps.
It's because SMS is simply inferior to Whatsapp, Messenger, Instagram, Line, kakaotalk, Snapchat, Signal, etc unless you own an iPhone. All of them are cross platform and aren't intentionally broken for people who don't have or use iMessage. I personally avoid giving out my phone number as much as possible as all the other platforms have much better tools for communication, blocking, media, etc.
Signing into your personal accounts on a work machine is a terrible idea, as it opens up your personal accounts to search if there is a lawsuit (against you or against the company). That's assuming it's not already strictly forbidden by the company rules to prevent you from sending yourself confidential data.
Also outside of programmers, IT, and designers, you rarely get a choice in the company issued laptop. It never makes sense for a company to issue more expensive Apple computers instead of ThinkPads or Dell computers.
> Signing into your personal accounts on a work machine is a terrible idea, as it opens up your personal accounts to search if there is a lawsuit
The machine is mine and I do work on it. Thanks for the concern but I’m not worried about getting sued. I’m sure it’s happened here previously, but it’s not like the US.
> Also outside of programmers, IT, and designers, you rarely get a choice in the company issued laptop. It never makes sense for a company to issue more expensive Apple computers instead of ThinkPads or Dell computers.
I’m not one of those professionals and I can get my job done quicker on a Mac. My employer doesn’t dictate how I get things done and paid for the machine I want. I think this is a good thing.
Any job that requires a crappy trackpad isn't a job worth having.
> My employer doesn’t dictate how I get things done and paid for the machine I want.
That is very much not your machine. If your employer ever gets sued, or runs into some investigation, or some internal dispute escalates enough, all the data on it is now likely available for them for review.
Given large enough company and enough people, you'll get that "preserve documents for discovery" email one day. It happens outside of the US too.
When you need to travel between workstations I work docked all day, once in a while I need to be mobile, but it’s much easier to work on one machine vs two.
I've never really understood what people mean by this. For me, iMessage is indistinguishable from SMS, except for the color of the messages, and the fact that I can use iMessage over WiFi.
Using it over WiFi is big feature alone for a lot of people who are often in spaces with good WiFi but poor cellular reception. Some carriers support SMS over WiFi in the same way they do "WiFi calling" which can alleviate that.
The other major feature I see for other messengers over SMS/MMS is much larger attachment sizes. It can be challenging sending an MMS with attachments >1MB. Meanwhile, I can send a 100MB file/video or an 8MB photo over Signal. WhatsApp allows for 16MB attachments. Sending a quick video in-line with the chat thread in MMS is miserable and gives an incredibly trash quality video while most other chat apps you can stick a decent quality 30 seconds or so video without any issue. Photos sent over MMS are usually junk while one could get a decent 4x6+ print off an 8MB photo.
If I send an SMS message to a group of people, they all see a message from me. They don't know who else got it. And if they reply, they reply only to me. Is your experience different?
WhatsApp (and I think iMessage) allow me to create a group with a name/purpose and send messages to the group and receive replies to the whole group.
(P.S. I went from dumb-phones to Android and have limited exposure to iMessage's feature-set).
I imagine your experience of sending a message to multiple people and it not making a "group message" was your older dumb phones weren't switching to MMS, it was keeping it as pure SMS. In the SMS world, there is one recipient. In MMS, it's like an email, you can list a lot (100+ in some cases) of receipts and they can all see the list.
Just checked my provider's pricing ( in the UK) MMS are capped at 300kB and cost 30p (0.39 USD) per message.
That kind of pricing made WhatsApp an infinitely preferable alternative.
Phones automatically switching to MMS would be catastrophic.
Data (WhatsApp) is essentially free in comparison. £10 (13 USD) per month gets you 20GB: which doesn't care how many messages/recipients/photos you send.
Dang, that's some highway robbery pricing right there.
Here in the US its common to have at least 1MB MMS max size. Back in the day 300-600KB was often the max size, but that's definitely changed over the years. Maybe its just splitting it up and re-assembling it behind the scenes, I'm not sure.
I can't speak for all history, but from about 2004 or so in the US MMS and SMS were often bundled and billed the same, especially for networks which had rolled out 3G/EV-DO. Having a plan with 500 messages usually meant 500 combined SMS and MMS message.
> If I send an SMS message to a group of people, they all see a message from me. They don't know who else got it. And if they reply, they reply only to me. Is your experience different?
Interesting. Here in the US, plans that don't include unlimited talk+text are hard to find, even among the budget MVNOs, and that's been the case for at least a decade.
It's easy for me to forget how different my circumstances are from most other people. I'm far more likely to be in a place where I have no WiFi than a place where I have no cell service. And I don't personally know anyone outside the US, so I don't send international messages. I guess I've never paid enough attention to the fidelity of pictures I'm sent or am sending over SMS to notice a quality difference.
It is mostly because international SMS and MMS is not free. People in the UK travel more to other countries, and communicate more with people in other countries.
Not to mention MMS is vastly inferior to WhatsApp and iMessage for sharing media and other information.
The price of built-in text messaging whether SMS or iMessage (or a combination of the two) largely went to zero for most people in the US texting especially other people in the US by the time other apps gained traction. And services like appointment reminders and verification codes pretty much all use SMS in the US--whatever its potential security vulnerabilities.
So I use 2 or 3 other apps for mostly a few international people I know but basically everyone I know just defaults to SMS/iMessage.
To be fair a slightly better comparison would be MMS, but even then it doesn't compare. It's simply because data is cheap, the app is free, and the rich media features that came before iMessage/RCS existed (voice, photos/video, attachments, group chats, voip/video calling, etc), and because it's multiplatform (ios to android usage is near 50/50 or 60/40 depending on the country)
SMS was historically expensive and today is still worse with regards to features. (Also international texts as others mentioned) And once you have to choose a specific system, why would you use one that's limited to just part of the market? If you want to use a communicator to talk to people, you may as well go with one that's accessible to everyone.
I'm not even sure anyone apart from Signal is really sticking to any principles. This system would be annoying to implement, costly to legally manage, and introduce some ops overhead and security exposure. There's way more incentives for WA and iMessage here to oppose it than just protecting their users. But only one is a cool talking point.
Has Meta threatened to boycott? I know Signal has, and now Apple. However my searches for Meta/WhatsApp seem to show that there’s been contention over their introduction of E2E but they haven’t actually threatened to pull out over it.
That said, I’d be very happy to see that they did threaten a boycott as well.
> Some countries have chosen to block it [WhatsApp]: that’s the reality of shipping a secure product. We’ve recently been blocked in Iran, for example. But we’ve never seen a liberal democracy do that.
They said they won't comply. UK would have to simply block WhatsApp.
For me at least, it is the opposite. It is not that I think Facebook is principled, it is that I don't think Apple is particularly principled. They care about money. Unlike many of their competitors, they are not fundamentally an ad-tech company which means your personal data has much lower value to them. This has caused them to build their brand around privacy because that is something their competitors have difficulty doing due to their business models. Apple's pro-privacy stance is just as much a capitalistic position as a principled one.
Interesting. I was going to say that many people use WhatsApp anyways, so if both of them go down that might actually lead to some pushback against these regulations.
Didn't Facebook (now Meta) buy WhatsApp, and it was originally its own thing? I guess you can say Meta kept WhatsApp operational, but I don't necessarily consider it a privacy win for Meta to just buy up some privacy-centric technologies with their billions.
> didn't eta just move to make WhatsApp not end to end encrypted?
If so I missed the memo (that isn't unlikely, I'm not saying you are wrong!). Any references/links for that? A quick search doesn't turn up much, but Google isn't what it used to be…
This is pure speculation. WhatsApp is banned in some authoritarian countries such as China and UAE. It probably remains unbanned in others simply because it is so important for business.
What do you mean? WhatsApp rolled out E2E encryption between 2014 and 2016.
It’s by far the largest messaging service that is e2e encrypted by default. I think it’s more than fair to call it ahead of the curve for a service of its size.
But, let's go to the start - WhatsApp started in 2011.
Encryption arrived in varying degrees until there was some pressures to change the amount of privacy messages had for advertising purposes.
Lots in the news at the time.
2018 "Another point of disagreement was over WhatsApp’s encryption. In 2016, WhatsApp added end-to-end encryption, a security feature that scrambles people’s messages so that outsiders, including WhatsApp’s owners, can’t read them. Facebook executives wanted to make it easier for businesses to use its tools, and WhatsApp executives believed that doing so would require some weakening of its encryption."
2018 "Acton said he tried to push Facebook towards an alternative, less privacy hostile business model for WhatsApp — suggesting a metered-user model such as by charging a tenth of a penny after a certain large number of free messages were used up." https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/26/whatsapp-founder-brian-act...
> a company that has the power to shift policy in favor of human rights
Well you're _technically_ right; they do indeed have that power. However, it sounds like you're suggesting they are using that power _to_ shift policy in favor of human rights (emphasis is of importance).
Whilst I can't prove that their intention has nothing to do with human rights, it's only in the same way that I can't prove the last U.S. invasion of Iraq wasn't about protecting the world from weapons of mass destruction.
It is patently obvious to me that this is a business decision fuelled by the drive to keep profits up, that just happens to coincide with happily with a PR friendly action. It's great that they're doing this, but it's just a coincidence that it aligns with what we want.
> but it's just a coincidence that it aligns with what we want.
I agree with your comment, but I think it is naïve to assume that Apple does PR by happenstance. Effective marketing/messaging is the bedrock of their business strategy.
So yes they probably did this primarily for raw profit/power reasons, but the positive PR is a close secondary.
It doesn't have to deal with compliance issues, which are not only getting more complicated, but also increasing in number.
"Sorry guv, I don't have the keys for that, so I'm not responsible for what went on as I couldn't have known".
Though the biggest money maker is the idea itself. Many believe that Apple is "on their side", and these kinds of plays re-enforce that. The moment it's more profitable to sell you out than "stand up for privacy", they'll do it.
>Stuff like this is why I'm an Apple fanboy. I'm happy to pay a premium and be locked into their walled garden
Such statements rarely end up ageing like wine in the long run. Why would you be so happy about being owned by some big corporation just because it's your favorite big corporation?
Self preservation has taught me not to trust any big corporation, regardless of how good their PR is.
Apple has been around for a pretty long time as far as tech companies go. I have grievances with them, but mostly they do a better than average job on privacy.
>Apple has been around for a pretty long time as far as tech companies go.
So have 100 year old car companies, and I'm old enough to remember many people saying the same things about their favorite car brand in the past ("I'm only buying X brand because they make quality stuff and they never broke my trust") and I also know they changed their opinion recently after a couple of decades.
And changing car brands is way easier than changing smartphone ecosystems, should one of the two players decide to screw you.
My point is people should not be fanboys of any corporation. History has proven they can always turn against their customer, even if Apple so far hasn't done it, but there's time, company management and culture can, and will always change with time, and with constant shareholder pressure for infinite growth there's plenty of opportunities in the future for the tides to turn, mark my words.
>I have switched from iOS to Android and vice versa multiple
times while still driving the same car.
Did your app purchases form the Google Play Store automatically transfer to your Apple App store, and did your photos off your Google drive transfer to your iCloud, or vice-versa?
Read my comment again, I ware referring to the ecosystems not being interchangeable, not the phones themselves.
The incompatible ecosystems is the tie-in that keeps people tied to their respective walled gardens, not the physical HW phone brick itself which is interchangeable. Once people invested enough money in one ecosystem, they're less likely to switch to the competition as all their data and purchases are trapped.
Not sure why you got downvoted, it’s purposely hard to switch ecosystems, I’m in the middle of switching from android to IOS, but still have over a decade of data in gmail, google photos, and google drive. And I waited until my wife was willing/ready to switch because it’s harder to share across ecosystems. Fortunately we don’t own many apps (mostly things with external subscriptions like news, streaming media, etc) so purchasing replacement apps wasn’t painful.
> still have over a decade of data in gmail, google photos, and google drive
And apps are available for iOS that let you access all of them. If you install Google Drive on the iPhone, your drive shows up along side iCloud in the Files app and open/save file dialoga
Yes that’s what I’m doing for now, but I left android because I didn’t like sharing so much data with google, now I’m still sharing that data with google, and now apple too.
Fanboys don't like you pointing out the hard to swallow truth pills. They expect comments to validate their lifestyle choice, not contradict them. Any contraction is a direct offense to them.
> I’m in the middle of switching from android to IOS
At least for you it's easy, because all google apps exist for iOS, but switching away from iOS is absolutely impossible as there is no iCloud or iMessage for Android, so all your data remains hostage with Apple if you try to move.
> Did your app purchases form the Google Play Store automatically transfer to your Apple App store, and did your photos off your Google drive transfer to your iCloud, or vice-versa?
Which apps would those be that you have to buy on iOS and Android separately? Most non game apps are subscription based that work across platforms.
My photos are already sync to Google Photos on my iPhone and if I had an Android device, I would just download the Google Photos app.
Music bought on iTunes has been DRM free since 2008 and Apple Music is available on Android.
Apple, Google, Amazon and a few other platforms and most of the studios participate in MoviesAnywhere where you buy movies from one platform and it shows up as purchased on the other platforms
This is why, every where I can, I only use a company's web app and not their installable app. The few apps that I use as apps, I buy for each platform. This is also why I avoid subs for most apps. Not paying a sub for both platforms for a calendar app.
It’s not that hard to pivot ecosystems. Unless you have extremely high-end devices and an extremely low end car, you can almost always move from Apple to another ecosystem for a lot less than changing cars (assuming you’re buying new devices and a new car OR used devices and a used car). You can even make the move gradually over months or years.
China had all the bargaining power, in that non-compliance meant no more iPhones, and Apple going out of business. Apple wasn't ready to move production entirely to India or another country.
It's very strange because like OP, huge fanboy. Early on it felt wrong to also burden Cupertino with being a cultural leader, but somewhere around $1.0T+ market cap, that has evolved.
Vaguely remember a charity used to have a thing where they'd auction off a dinner with Steve, then later Tim. Given time with a leader who has literally revolutionized supply chain in CN and a CEO who made Apple his own following the most notable CEO ever, going after various gotcha points would feel like a wasted opportunity. But think I'd have to ask why a company designed in California of the 1960s and 1970s doesn't have line in the sand policies when dealing with a genocidal government and perpetual backdoors in software and politics, but will take a move like this. Would hope for something more than a canned answer.
Capital. Once you grow to a certain point, politics and ideas are only good for marketing. Companies will happily work with banana republics and dictators if it outweighs the losses from paying your PR team a little more for a few months. Companies are not your friend, as in the end they only care about your money.
You must love Meta then, who refused to compromise to enter China (and boy, they tried). While Apple happily shares data with Chinese government to make billions.
Zuckerberg was courting China hard around 2015-ish, to allow them to operate. He learnt mandarin, spoke at Tsinghua University in Beijing, met Xi, etc.
Of course, we don’t know real reasons why they didn’t open there, but end result is that Apple shares data with China and Meta doesn’t.
Seeing that every non Chinese social media company was banned and that Zuckerberg later tried to get back into China
> In 2018, Facebook attempted to set up a $30 million subsidiary in Hangzhou to incubate startups and give advice to local businesses. Permission to run the startup was quickly withdrawn
Do you really think that Facebook is out of China for any moral reason?
Yea, and even if it is actionable and "real" - they're .. i think, correct me if i'm wrong, by law a for-profit company. Meaning none of this is noble, this is just aligned with our interests because they believe that to be the most profitable image for them currently.
Which is all well a good for now, but profit directions can change, and i suspect it's easier to change a direction guided by profit than a direction guided by morals. Ie i suspect their current "good direction" is less stable than some would suggest.
The company doesn't have a hundred thousand armed officers with the ability to arrest / kill me for anything they can claim they found. Government comes equipped with legal violence, the company comes equipped with targeted ads
It's true, they merely have enough cash on hand to fund a small army, enough legal power to crush you in court with anything you attempt.
Make no mistake: if Apple needed to get someone killed, they would. They're not some miraculous pinnacles of good in a sea of evil. It's just that they merely need to flex the law at you to destroy your life forever. Apple is no different, they'll hire the Pinkertons and break your fingers should they find the need to. Carnegie Steel did it, Apple's not above it either.
You lack creativity. You have multiple billions available for that. Where do you want your remains to disappear ? Hell, even sharks with lasers isn't far fetched with that amount of money.
But all playfulness aside:
* Pay professional hitmen.
* Pay a hobo enough to go beat you up in your home.
* Pay enough people enough money to kill you pretty much anywhere.
What are they going to do, plead in front of a judge that sees 90% of his murder cases unsolved or solved through guilty pleas that Tim Cook gave them a wad of cash when all they saw was a subordinate of a subordinate of a subordinate ? There's nothing fancy about it. Especially with an economy that drives people to drastic measures: a huge wad of cash that you're guaranteed to keep is enough for most people.
You mean, pay an undercover cop who is advertising himself as a professional hitman?
> * Pay a hobo enough to go beat you up in your home.
He'll pay the hobo, and hobo will run off with the money
> all they saw was a subordinate of a subordinate of a subordinate
This is even more crazy than the earlier suggestions. You think there is going to be a chain of subordinates at apple who will all go along with a murder conspiracy? Try arranging a surprise party with five people, see how well people can keep a secret.
"My favorite multinational trillion dollar worth conglomerate that has a history of not caring about human rights when it comes to the production of their devices surely would never do that!"
You're naïve. Less than 100 years ago the Pinkertons were still murdering workers and nothing happened to them.
Depends on your crime. If you outed his human rights overlook, then he will send you on a vacation to the place with the Human rights violation. And somehow you will get in trouble with the mob there because for some reason they don't like you for threatening their jobs.
If you don't take his vacation offer, he will invite you to a party on his dime. If you don't attend, he will use your location data, make it seem like you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And depending on the severity and nature of your crime, the outcome will be just low ball enough to make it seem like apple needs to do something bigger than focus on human rights, like making better devices for your security.
It doesn't even have to be good. It can be a "robbery" where you get professional-grade double-tapped on your front lawn but nothing's taken, or a "suicide" where you hang yourself from a tree whilst simultaneously shotgunning yourself in the chest. The news will just parrot the local cops' PR statement.
Are you saying that the internal accounting controls at Apple are so lax that Tim Cook can pay contractors off the books out of his own travel expenses?
I also imagine the post-arrest interview of the $5000 hitman going like this:
"You're charged with Murder 1, which is a capital offense in this state. Are you ready to die for $5000?"
Yes, misuse and misappropriation of funds is such an uncommon event for fortune 500 companies. Especially the CEO, they have to justify every little expense!
> we know that governments do this sort of thing all the time.
they also have better tools than hiring hitmen
contract killing is a fraction of all the homicides
OP asked how the multi billionaire CEO of a trillion dollars company could kill someone
He could simply hire an hitman, it would cost him peanuts
If the victim is also using one of the products the company makes, they would also be in possession of all the information an hitman would need to complete his task, no investigation would be necessary
Costs vary: In Australia, contract offers ranged from $500 to $100,000, with an average of $16,500. One undercover investigator, hired as a hit man more than 60 times in 20 years, lists his largest proposed payoff as $200,000 in jewels (and that was just the down payment) and his stingiest as “seven Atari computer games, three dollar bills, and $2.30 in nickels and dimes.”
Some of the highest-profile hits nowadays happen in Russia, where the rise of wild-west capitalism has led to a boom in contract killings, with victims including politicians, editors and journalists, businessmen, even poets.
How much do you think it would cost to hire a Russian blackop/elite troop fleeing from his country?
There are plenty of unhinged people in this world who do illegal shit for enough money. Do you think some Ex-Wagner mercenary would pass up that offer?
If they choose to sure, but I dont see what incentive they would have. After all, the post is about a company removing products from a market rather than being subject to a law that would allow the gov to force them to do so.
All of these are their own accord. That's even what OP's article is about - if Apple is legally required to break their encryption in the EU, then they will discontinue their product.
Let's not pretend this is a privacy-motivated decision. Where Apple doesn't have negotiating power (eg. China) they have been forced to compromise user safety and privacy[0]. We live in a post XKeyscore world, pretending like this doesn't also happen in America or the UK is a bedtime story for helpless capitalists.
Which is a good reason to avoid giving your data to either one in the first place. If I don't have a choice though, I'll take the company over the government any day.
Downvoters: instead of reflexively downvoting, why not try reading? Here is some recent history:
Blood for Bananas: United Fruit's Central American Empire [0]
The lawyer who took on Chevron – and now marks his 600th day under house arrest [1]
(Debatable) Business Plot, aka Wall St Putsch [2]
WTF? I can buy a phone from another company if I disagree with Apple's approach, or use no phone at all. Try doing that with your government sometime and see how it goes for you.
Nobody worries about the government giving customer data to Apple, do they? Why do you suppose that might be?
the tendency to retroactively ascribe positive attributes to an option one has selected and/or to demote the forgone options. It is part of cognitive science, and is a distinct cognitive bias that occurs once a decision is made. For example, if a person chooses option A instead of option B, they are likely to ignore or downplay the faults of option A while amplifying or ascribing new negative faults to option B. Conversely, they are also likely to notice and amplify the advantages of option A and not notice or de-emphasize those of option B
https://www.wired.com/story/apple-photo-scanning-csam-commun... This scandal about scanning your end-to-end encrypted photos on one of the ends, kinda defeating the purpose and reducing everyone's privacy. It lead directly to the legislation that Apple is coming out against today, which I would call ironic but is very predictable. How dare governments require us to do this thing we already planned to do.
That CSAM detection method was something that apple published a whitepaper about to get feedback. The feedback was strongly negative, so they never implemented it.
I would hope that the grandparent was not referring to this thing that never existed as "the client side scanning ability that is built into the OS."
Actions like this is why I used to trust Google. Fighting government overreach should have been a critical part of technology and data.
But it seems Google was more political in its relationships than idealistic. And now the entire sector is compromised.
Apple will be one day compromised too. In some crevice of some unknown government office is a person working on a ten-year initiative to get access to inaccessible information in the tech sector. AT&T was compromised this way. Microsoft was compromised this way. Google was compromised.
Apple is a participant in the NSA's PRISM mass surveillance program. They've been compromised for a long time. I doubt any decent sized corporation isn't.
I am going to give them the benefit of doubt in the case of PRISM. It is not clear whether PRISM is the result of forced/voluntary participation, or the result of vulnerabilities found in their systems. Because of the diagrams in the PRISM powerpoint mentioning some of the integration is "coming soon", I feel it is definitely not legally coerced, otherwise everyone would participate at once. Also due to the integration having varying limits from service to service tells me this not given to NSA on a silver platter. Lastly, the outright denial of these companies further tells me that they are unaware.
PRISM is the result of vulnerabilities found and purchased from hackers. And integrated together in a project codenamed PRISM. Each source has different levels of information sharing. And with Dropbox being a less integrated and more primitive resource for search, I know the entire PRISM program was a gum and shoestring project.
It is possible that their involvement in PRISM is involuntary. However, as a member of the "screeching voices of the minority" [0], I will not extend them the benefit of the doubt.
Exactly this. When some government makes a big public proposal to invade privacy, Apple will speak up with bravado. But they won't say a word in all the other cases when a government demands to invade privacy when those demands are made in secret.
The right to repair is a direct extension of "banging the rocks together" - i.e. toolmaking, the main thing that defines us as humans. How can that not be a human right?
> the main thing that defines us as humans. How can that not be a human right?
Plenty of animals use tools [1]. And this isn’t how we define human rights. Bipedalism is quintessentially human, that doesn’t make tunnels a crime against humanity.
I'll push back on this. I think that Right to Modify[0] is a human right. I think that software freedom and user agency (especially where it relates to vendor lock-in) is closely related to human rights, in the sense that it can directly impact people's ability to express those rights.
To say that right to repair in specific isn't a human right because the actual human right is agency/ownership/modification/whatever, is a bit like saying that encryption isn't a human right because the actual right is privacy and encryption is just a way to maintain privacy.
The end result is still that people aren't able to exercise rights. I would argue very strongly that having a degree of autonomy over the devices/objects that you own is an intrinsic right.
And if you look back at the history of Open Source software, you'll find that conversations about Libre/Free software have been regularly grounded in discussions of human rights from the start; from rights to ownership, to modification, to communication.
Sure, I'll agree they're closely aligned but software freedom and "user" agency (I'm guessing as opposed to general human agency?) require software to be relevant and therefore I wouldn't say they're universal human rights.
I sort of see where you're coming from but I would somewhat disagree, I think that software is just an expression of device ownership and modification rights more broadly. Maybe that is kind of what you're getting at, that right to repair is a higher-level concept on top of a more universal human right? It's software-specific in the sense that software makes it harder to use those rights, but I also think I should have the freedom to take apart my toaster or to modify a shovel that I buy. But...
I don't know, I don't want to argue too much, and I don't want to give you a pedantic reply when we seem to be in agreement that privacy, agency, repair are all important and whether you or I would stick them in a specific category probably doesn't change much about that or necessarily mean that we actually disagree on anything practical related to those concepts.
I think it's bad that Apple isn't willing to fight for right to repair or user agency, but it is good that Apple is willing to fight for privacy regardless of its motivations. I don't think Apple is a universal advocate for human rights and I don't like deifying the company and I don't think its positions on privacy excuse its positions on repair or agency. But it's pretty objectively good for Apple to make a statement that it will pull these products out of the UK rather than comply, and it would be silly for anyone to say that the statement is meaningless just because Apple has bad positions on other freedoms. Apple's positions on right to repair do not make it any less good for Apple to have issued that statement about encryption.
From a security point of view, there is no difference between being able to access your data and actually doing it. You may picture such or such company as better than another one (and maybe it is, though I strongly doubt it) if you want, but behaving yourself as if that company really cares about your privacy is extremely naive.
I would rather suggest firmly believing whatever company you chose is spying you (be it true or not), and adjusting what you can accordingly (settings, apps, usage, etc.).
I used to think like this about Google, back in the "Don't Be Evil" days.
I end up living day by day, knowing that nothing is permanent. Right now, I'm with Apple, acutely aware that someday, this will change -- probably when some snake finally manages to slip through similar legislation in the US and it becomes profitably unattractive for Apple to maintain it's privacy stance.
Apple's privacy stance is a marketing thing, after all.
Even with the new iCloud e2ee, which is not on by default, if you enable it, Apple and FBI/DHS/et al can still read all your messages (unless each and everyone you iMessage with also enables it), because iCloud still escrows iMessage sync keys in non-e2ee iCloud Backups, breaking the e2ee in iMessage.
For 99.99%+ of iMessages, they ARE NOT E2EE and can be read at any time by Apple and provided to the state without a warrant. This is by design. HT202303 explains this, because for some reason Apple doesn't like to publicly lie.
This article is brand marketing, nothing more. It worked on you.
Apple has the ability to ship private devices. They don't because they choose not to fight city hall.
Thanks for the reply. So am I misunderstanding their data security overview page?[0]
>For additional privacy and security, 14 data categories — including Health and passwords in iCloud Keychain — are end-to-end encrypted. Apple doesn't have the encryption keys for these categories, and we can't help you recover this data if you lose access to your account. The table below includes a list of data categories that are always protected by end-to-end encryption.
The table includes Messages in iCloud with the caveat that the key is stored in iCloud backups if enabled, but the e2e key is still private, no?
iCloud Backups are enabled by default, and the Messages in iCloud key is in the non-e2ee iCloud Backup.
That means the iMessages being synced are encrypted to an endpoint key which is held by both the endpoint and the middle transit service (iCloud/iCloud Backup). That's end-to-middle-and-end encrypted, i.e. not end to end encrypted.
Even if you turn on iCloud Backup e2ee (it's an option now) then your iMessages to everyone who hasn't (99.9%+ of people) aren't e2ee because the other end of the conversation is backing up their endpoint sync key.
Pretty sure it's just section 75 that Apple / Meta take offense to.
(1) OFCOM may require a provider of a regulated service to pay a fee in respect
of a charging year which is a fee-paying year.
(2) Where OFCOM require a provider of a regulated service to pay a fee in respect
of a charging year, the fee is to be equal to the amount produced by a
computation—
(a) made by reference to—
(i) the provider’s qualifying worldwide revenue for the qualifying period relating to that charging year, and
(ii) any other factors that OFCOM consider appropriate, and
(b) made in the manner that OFCOM consider appropriate.
Seems that the UK market is not big enough. In China Apple had no problems with ceding control of their local servers to the Chinese government [1]. Not to mention of using forced labor (mostly Uyghurs, against which China is committing acts of genocide [2]). So, Apple and human rights my ass!
None of those investigations showed that parts supplied to Apple came from Xinjiang. Only that one of their suppliers operates a plant there. These suppliers are huge conglomerates with plants all over China. Apple is one of a tiny handful of companies that actually audit their supply chain, but they only audit the chain that actually supplies them.
From now on though any kind of audit in China is going to be almost impossible. They've started arresting researchers who perform due diligence reports for revealing 'state secrets'.
I don't think it has anything to do with the market size, which after the Brexit fiasco and the pandemic has shrunk considerably, but it has the most to do with the UK labelling itself as a democracy while behaving like a dictatorship when it comes to surveillance and other "think of the children" laws.
I have seen some arguments that they don't care about your privacy and it's all right there in the privacy policy if you're willing to read it. A video on the subject [1]
I hope they really do this. All too often Companies will say this then when the law is passed they back down. Why, stockholders.
Has Apple really removed iMessage and FaceTime anywere else ? Are these available with 100% full encryption in China ? If so then they are just blowing wind :(
FaceTime was banned in the UAE up until ~2021 when it suddenly started working again for non-UAE phones[1]. For the longest time iOS/macOS has had feature and region flags at a lower hardware level that could dictate system policy for things like FaceTime as well as the camera shutter sound required in Korea/Japan.
Well here is something for you to read, if you are a Chinese Citizen living in China, then these messages can be seen by the Government because iCloud data must be stored in China.
Yeah, ok, try harder than a Reddit thread where supposedly authoritative commenters can’t even spell encrypt.
The idiot pmendes is wrong (if he was correct then no one knowledgeable on the subject would classify that system as E2EE - something more to read about). The encryption keys are not managed in iCloud which you can read yourself:
iCloud backup is an opt in feature - you use it full well knowing it effectively damages the affordance of E2E regardless of locale if ADP is not available.
> The idiot pmendes is wrong (if he was correct then no one knowledgeable on the subject would classify that system as E2EE
What exactly is pmendes wrong about? Are you referring to this comment:
> In iMessage the message contents are in fact end to end encripted. Each device encripts the message using the recipient keys and then sends the message. The problem is that iCloud manages the keys by itself so you have no way of knowing who is the exact owner of the key. Addionaly, on group chats, they don't even need to be a man in the middle. They can just add their key to the list of encription keys for that chat, and receive a copy of each message.
What's wrong there, aside from spelling? The nit I would pick is that in "iCloud manages the keys", I would change "iCloud" to "Apple" or "Apple's IDS".
How, specifically, does iCloud backup damage the affordance of E2E? This doesn't make any sense.
If you have somebody's GPG public key, you can encrypt a file to that public key and then put up the encrypted file on a public FTP site [0], whence they can download and decrypt it. iMessage does nearly exactly that, except that 1) Apple's identity service effectively solved the key distribution problem, 2) the messages are, even though already encrypted, themselves also transmitted by encrypted channels to Apple's servers during transit.
[0] Well, I wouldn't do this if I were at all concerned about the contents because it doesn't allow for forward secrecy.
If you’re going to classify every critical fact as a “nit” then nothing is ever wrong.
IDS vs iCloud is far more than a nit. They’re completely different services. iCloud is run by a 3rd party in China, this is well publicized, whereas IDS is not. So that’s like not a minor detail.
iMessage does not depend on iCloud. You don't need an iCloud account. These are unrelated.
Contact key verification is a more recent addition, and again not dependent on iCloud.
> How, specifically, does iCloud backup damage the affordance of E2E?
Just saying, you can sync your data to whatever encrypted or unencrypted service you want if you choose to. This may diminish the value to the end user of E2EE but it is unrelated.
I'm not the one that brought up iCloud first. Take that up with the original commenter.
I was looking around to see what china has access to after seeing this post... However, people mention their messages can only be visible if icloud backups are enabled? Seems risky to trust either way.
People should read actual documentation and expert or academic writing rather than a bunch of terminally online nerds on Reddit.
I’ve seen nothing credible that the E2E for iMessage and FaceTime isn’t as advertised. If you backup to the cloud you’re electing to disclose your data outside the boundaries of encryption.
Then they should read the leaked government documents from around the world that contradict what Apple says themselves. Failing that, they should at least be able to read the actual code to corroborate its security, but that's not an option either.
> Then they should read the leaked government documents from around the world that contradict what Apple says themselves.
On what specifically?
> they should at least be able to read the actual code to corroborate its security, but that's not an option either.
Why does that matter? You're already trusting Apple hardware. Public access to source code doesn't make security systems safer. I'm not sure what a journalist or even 99% of webshits on this forum would do with trying to audit crypto.
For starters, PRISM and XKeyscore. Both are damning indictments of the state of surveillance a decade ago, and are so damaging that pretty much every FAANG company denies knowledge of their existence. PRISM was about the outreach the US government has with domestic companies, and XKeyscore showed just how far those connections could be abused.
Simply the fact that these leaked documents exist and Apple denying them is a contradiction. Everything else is speculation, but my brain can imagine a lot happening over those past 9 years.
> Why does that matter?
Accountability purposes.
> You're already trusting Apple hardware.
Ideally I don't do that either. I'm not a fan of closed firmware interfaces and if possible, I'd like to audit the code for those as well.
> Public access to source code doesn't make security systems safer.
The majority of networked servers online today beg to differ. Over time the industry actually found that it's much safer to use an open and transparent OS than it is to trust a black-box with UB that may-or-may-not be fixed.
> I'm not sure what a journalist or even 99% of webshits on this forum would do with trying to audit crypto.
This speaks to a lack of either experience or imagination, I can't tell which.
> For starters, PRISM and XKeyscore. Both are damning indictments of the state of surveillance a decade ago, and are so damaging that pretty much every FAANG company denies knowledge of their existence.
Where's this denial by Apple? Or is your argument that because Apple doesn't admit colluding with the NSA they must be doing it. Well that is not falsifiable and what evidence are you speaking to of Apple specifically colluding with the NSA.
> I'd like to audit the code for those as well.
Firmware is not hardware. That would still not address the hardware issue.
> The majority of networked servers online today beg to differ. Over time the industry actually found that it's much safer to use an open and transparent OS than it is to trust a black-box with UB that may-or-may-not be fixed.
Yes, the neckbeards chant since CatB. There are extremely few people not putting their trust in blackboxes. Slapping linux on a box doesn't magically make it transparent - nor does linux have a security record you want to brag about.
That's from a decade ago. Verb tense matters. Apple denied knowledge of PRISM before the leak, I don't see where they are denying it since. In any event, you may not believe it, and it's not the craziest thing to be suspicious, but you also unfortunately don't seem to have any counter.
> What a conspicuous coincidence that all of the exonerating evidence.
What exonerating evidence? How does one generally exonerate themselves that they don't know something or were never privy to it.
And I'm no fan of Apple (I'm also not a fan of baseless conspiracy theories), and the flip side of this is what benefit would it be to the NSA to disclose a program to a multinational company of >100k employees if they didn't have to.
You're trying to make it sound like there is a smoking gun that Apple has been lying about their NSA involvement, moreover insinuating in ways that don't seem to serve the best interests of the NSA - and I might even believe you - but so far you have put up nothing but innuendo.
> Is there a hardware issue?
Ok, so you audit your firmware. Why do you trust the hardware you're going to run this audited firmware on? You have thus far proven my point about general public access to source code.
The bottom line is that for the threat model faced by most developed nation citizens, Apple's privacy value proposition is pretty good. If you're up against a large nation-state that is willing to spend some resources you're fucked - and auditing your firmware isn't going to change that.
The fact that there are companies that have the power to shift public policy is the problem. Because they use that power for their interests that don't align with our interests.
They also have the power to redefine what a text message is. They don't care about people like you think they do. They're a company who makes decisions to make money.
They will only continue to do so while it remains profitable, at some point they will give in. They are a capitalist company, profits are their only concern.
The way I put it, is Apple's business is selling high added value products (i.e. luxury, overpriced whatever you want), while most of the other big tech companies have you and your data as their main product. I'm fine paying for the luxury and privacy that comes with it
Apple, while imperfect, is the only large tech company with anything like a principle when it comes to user privacy. Meta/IG would sell literally any piece of information about you they can get their hands on and monetize.
I'd have thought it'd be more profitable to sell access to you based on criteria rather than outright selling your data. If they sell your data then anyone can buy it and use it whereas only they can sell your attention.
Flags aren't for rule breaking, they just mean enough people found your comment inflammatory or otherwise objectionable enough to hit the "flag" button.
If you have a link to the flagged comment, I can probably help you understand why HN users would have flagged it. This comment is getting downvotes because complaining about downvotes and flags always does.
It doesn’t show as flagged for me. Time heals all wounds, if your comment is not objectionable it will usually be vouched for eventually. Which is one of the reasons it’s a rule here that you don’t complain about voting. Such comments also rarely age like wine :)
You can complain, you'll just get a small karma hit for it. It's inevitable because it's off topic, but karma on HN is more or less meaningless anyway.
It's usually brigading by other Apple fanboys. Their master can do no evil. You could see this alot during the local device scanning controversy, but anytime you try to point out obvious facts (like Apple building the largest Ad empire for example, while virtue signaling about Meta's ads on their platform) you get downvoted and flagged.
Ridiculous stuff like this is why I'm cringing everytime any apple fanboi appears.
Are you dense? Apple and all other major companies are cooperating with FBI/NSA/CIA all the freakin' time.
These things they throw up is actually smart play from these global police agencies, so sheeps like you feel safe.
(Android is the same thing)
Why would this get downvoted "as usual"? I suffer from migraines and did not know this so I appreciate the info very much. I will do just about anything to avoid a migraine as will likely most who suffer from them would. I don't get why HN would be against spreading this info?
I haven't voted on that comment, but it's overconfident, it jumps to conclusions too quickly.
It's possible aspartame is bad for migraines. Given that migraines are really bad, then you might as well avoid aspartame, it's not like you're losing much compared to the potential gain.
But what's very bad is to talk like we know for sure. Maybe cheese causes migraines, maybe alcohol causes migraines, maybe not enough cheese causes migraines. Maybe we'll think something completely different a few years from now, because collecting good information is just incredibly hard.
The truth is medical science hasn't figured it out yet. It's okay to try things and see if it works for you, but do it with care and humility. There's no secret knowledge being censored here. But overconfidence ends up doing more harm than good, so we should be more careful than that.
Because people not suffering from migraines did not have firsthand experience and assume it is the same as other conditional triggers such as sunlight or anything that induces vasodilation or especially vasodilation after vasoconstriction (workout + caffeine comedown into a hot shower can do you in easily).
It's normal if you just need some place to send bills & cheques and register your business in the country. They might have an administrative assistant working from home go check the mail twice a week, or maybe forward it internationally
I don't get it. What's funny about the water tower? That it has the town name? Even with that, I couldn't find the name on the map reliably. Or am I looking at the wrong picture?
I don't get it. What's funny about the water tower? That it has the town name? Even with that, I couldn't find the name on the map reliably. Or is it a different picture?
I learned about WR class stars from this post. They are apparently the brightest of stars and the James Webb Space Telescope has already captured some stunning images[0] of WR stars.
If you view the full-res[1] of the linked image, if you look carefully at the bottom-left of the purplish plume, you will see what looks like an entirely separate yellowish-green spiral galaxy. Mind blowing.
I made a GIF blinking JWST's and Hubble's photos of WR-124 and its nebula. That background spiral galaxy in the mid-infrared ("green" ↦ 11.3 μm) isn't visible to Hubble at all.
Very cool. Thanks for sharing. Super interesting how much difference there is and how much more can be seen with the these newer IR cameras. The Hubble ain't too shabby though.
