iOS 13 Privacy Feature Will Force Total Overhaul For Facebook Apps (arstechnica.com) 68
Privacy has been a renewed focus with Apple's next operating system update. One new feature in iOS 13 that seems centered on user privacy could have sweeping consequences for messaging and online call apps. From a report: In iOS 13, Apple will not allow apps to run voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) in the background when the programs are not actively in use. Many apps that offer VoIP services currently run in the background, and they will need to be rewritten to adjust to Apple's upcoming rules. The change is slated to roll out when iOS 13 is released in September. However, app developers will get a grace period, and they have until April 2020 to comply. VoIP services ostensibly stay running in the background so they can connect calls quickly, but they also let those apps collect information about what users are doing on their devices. Restricting the programs that can simply be open at any time on its mobile hardware fits the narrative Apple is crafting about being a trusted place for customer privacy in an increasingly untrustworthy industry.
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Nah, just a scheme with cellular providers so apple users can't use VOIP phones correctly and they are stuck with using their cell line for reliable communication. It is already hard to make a VOIP phone work reliably on an apple device by the way...
Direct clients (Score:5, Insightful)
This also means that direct VOIP clients speaking standard protocols (e.g. a SIP client) simply can't be implemented anymore. You can only have tethered connections through some third-party server that can send push messages, which in practice means proxying the whole connection through a third party and so is death for any standards-based chat/VOIP client. Since Apple doesn't allow just anyone to send pushes, in practice this means it is impossible to have any VOIP client that connects to a server you control instead of a server the app developer controls.
How does requiring a man-in-the-middle improve privacy again?
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If it does require the app to run a server in the middle for everything, it doesn't give them access to more data. The app already would have been collecting it locally during use. It would, however, make it easier for the devs to collect the data without you knowing.
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There did not used to be any requirement at all that the client app connect to any server owned by the app developer, and, without that, there would be no possibility of intercepting communication, signalling, or impersonating the user;
First, there is a difference between it not being required to send traffic through a server and it not actually sending traffic through a server. Second, there is a difference between the devs saying it doesn't happen and it not actually happening. Third, there is still a possibility of intercepting communication without a central server.
My original point was that if (and I haven't personally seen anything proving it will be) it's required that the traffic go through a central server, it only gives them a
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Device privacy features are to Facebook as... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Kryptonite is to Superman.
To be fair, Superman always found a way to beat Kryptonite.
Privacy Is Now For Sale (Score:3, Insightful)
From the start when corrupt corporations abused the term 'Digital Rights' and stole it from the public so they could not fight for their digital rights, our rights were up for sale by those corrupt corporations. Leader of the pack Google being the most invasive and manipulative, targeting it own marketing to promote a false image of itself to its customers. Now other corporations will be selling back our privacy, a privilege you have to pay for because of corrupt politicians paid by corrupt lobbyists in turn paid by corrupt corporations like Google, https://time.com/5116226/googl... [time.com], Google bought your privacy and will have to be forced to give it back, amongst others like M$ and Facebook.
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Privacy is ultimately a matter of physics, and the arrangement of your environment such that it has particular properties which you call, "privacy". If I don't want light to reflect off the page I'm reading and bounce into the sensor of someone's camera, I have to arrange it such that that path doesn't exist.
This has a cost. It always has, and always will.
I have yet to see an actual, working social solution to privacy issues in the face of active adversaries--only technological ones.
Not as much of a loophole as it seems... (Score:2)
Although it's good they are clamping down on abuse of this, something to remember is that even today you have to give a decent reason for an application to actually request VOIP capabilities in review... it just happens that with all the things Facebook does inside apps, they have reasonable reasons to be granted that ability.
It's not light Apple is going to pass a Flashlight app in review that also requests VOIP abilities.
i never owned an iphone (Score:5, Interesting)
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Don't bother if you use Windows to manage the phone. You still have to use iTunes to manage it (worst software known to man) and it STILL will not load downloaded music without running it through iTunes on a PC first. My mom has one, I have to support it, and it's a royal pain in the butt.
Also don't bother if you like having control of your phone. It's a very locked down device, and Apple has the final say on what it will and will not do.
I do feel your pain on the third party apps, though. Fortunately,
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i've used androids, blackberrys and iphones. i find iphones do the best job at phone things - calls, sms, emails, apps. android app store is infested with malware and the 3rd party stores arent much butter. androids are riddled with unremovable bloatware that is either unstable, unpatched, or a combo of things. sure apple has a walled garden, but who cares, given the malware, etc. iphones just work. i dont want to hack my phone for stability.
blackberry was the best IMO, just not in terms of the app ecosyst
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It works the same way on the Mac. The whole "killing iTunes" thing is a lie. What they're doing is rebranding iTunes "Music" and moving the sync UI into Finder. But it's the exact same software. (Literally: part of the iTunes install on Windows includes ports and in some case WINE-style emulation for macOS libraries.)
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Why do you need to use a PC to "manage" the phone? I never plug mine into a PC.
How do you load MP3 or M4A music onto an iPhone without using a Mac or a Windows PC? My roommate is interested in switching to Linux once Windows 7 support ends next year, but she doesn't want to lose the ability to copy songs from her CD collection or my performances of classical pieces onto her iPhone SE.
Re: i never owned an iphone (Score:2)
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Recording my own performance (Score:2)
she doesn't want to lose the ability to copy [...] my performances of classical pieces onto her iPhone
Wow you're still curating and moving around actual mp3 files? I haven't seen anyone doing that in 10 years.
Then you must not know many musicians. If I record myself performing a piece of music on a piano, I end up with a .wav file. If I encode the file using a lossy audio codec, I end up with .mp3 or .m4a, which an iTunes user can copy to an iPhone.
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As mccalli says, manipulating actual music files is quite necessary if you have musical tastes much outside mainstream pop. The classical and jazz selections available on the streaming services are much improved from a decade ago, but still thin. I assume the situation is similar for non-western pop music. For example Spotify lacks Empresses of Africa [discogs.com], a CD from my collection with some material I rather enjoy.
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I also work with my own recordings.
And 10 years ago, moving mp3's or similar around was still quite normal.
I just got my iPhone 3GS ten years ago. (It still works!)
Even Spotify wasn't available in most places ten years ago.
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Why do you need to use a PC to "manage" the phone? I never plug mine into a PC.
How do you load MP3 or M4A music onto an iPhone without using a Mac or a Windows PC? My roommate is interested in switching to Linux once Windows 7 support ends next year, but she doesn't want to lose the ability to copy songs from her CD collection or my performances of classical pieces onto her iPhone SE.
There's about a million media players in the App Store that let you upload files over WiFi, but unfortunately there's bound to be some ideological, made-up technical or financial reasons why the average Slashdotter can't use them. She should buy a cheap Chinese Android piece of shit instead, wait 3 weeks until it's permanently disowned by the manufacturer, install custom firmware and then spend years acting as an unpaid Sys Admin to try and keep it running.
iPhone music outside Apple store (Score:2)
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Previously in this thread, another Anonymous Coward wrote:
You wrote:
Loading iTunes is hard for people whose PC operating system is no longer supported, such as owners of a Windows 7 PC as of next year once Windows 7 reaches the end of support date that Microsoft has announced. A lot of these PCs are likely to end up
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Last I checked, keeping more than 2 GB (about 1000 minutes of music) in a Dropbox account cost $99 per year. Are you on the $99 per year Dropbox plan?
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Really? Most cloud services - OneDrive, iCloud - give you 5GB free, and Google Drive gives you 15GB. For $0.99 a month, I get 50GB from iCloud.
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Dropbox has no plans between its free, 3-device 2 GB plan and its $99 per year 2 TB plan. (Source [dropbox.com])
But the only reason I still use Dropbox is that it offers a stable bidirectional sync client for desktop Linux, whereas OneDrive and Google Drive offer no app. Third-party apps such as rclone exist, but they are designed more for a use case like an FTP client than bidirectional sync. Or is it satisfactory to upload and download files and folders through a web browser?
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Don't bother if you use Windows to manage the phone. You still have to use iTunes to manage it (worst software known to man) and it STILL will not load downloaded music without running it through iTunes on a PC first. My mom has one, I have to support it, and it's a royal pain in the butt.
Also don't bother if you like having control of your phone. It's a very locked down device, and Apple has the final say on what it will and will not do.
I do feel your pain on the third party apps, though. Fortunately, my Google Pixel just came with the Google apps and stock Android. After using it, no way in hell am I going back to the likes of Samsung.
I thought that iTunes was being discontinued in favor of Apple Music. Will Apple bother porting them to PCs, when their Macs have the best chance ever at making a dent in Wintel?
Re: i never owned an iphone (Score:2)
Windows is still stuck with iTunes, sadly.
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Apple doesn't allow carriers to bundle any 3rd party apps on the iPhone, except for maybe the carrier account app, which you're not forced to use. The only apps initially on there are Apple's. The software on a new iPHone you buy in New York has the same clean IOS as the one you buy in Seattle, Montreal, Tokyo, London,etc. no matter what carrier you use.
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And this is one of the primary reasons for buying an iOS device...
I've used various phones where the carrier messed with the firmware and in every single instance their version was significantly WORSE than the stock version provided by the handset manufacturer.
Extra unremovable bloat.
Features of the handset which are disabled or broken.
Poor stability.
Updates lag way behind the handset manufacturer's version.
Carrier modified handsets are an absolute plague.
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This! When I owned a Lumia Icon, it was stuck on Windows Phone 8.0 despite having the capability for 8.1 for a while b'cos Verizon didn't certify the upgrade. That's the real beef w/ both Android and Windows phones: you had to depend on the carrier. Even beyond that, despite the fact that Android has been theoretically upgradable from Lollipop onwards, good luck upgrading your Android phone w/ 6.0 or so to the current version. First, the OS won't necessarily certify it, and then even if it does, the car
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Both major mobile OSes are customer-hostile. Google runs roughshod over Android, and it's always updating/downloading Google crap whether you want it to or not (you only have the option of blocking automatic 3rd party app updates, everything else is forced upon you). If you hate/don't trust Google, it's a huge pain to beat Android into Google-free submission. On the plus side though, it is doable. It is impossible to de-Apple an iPhone.
iOS isn't bad until you want to do something or run an app that Appl
Lineage OS Based Phone (Score:2)
You need a Phone that you have root and Lineage OS level control over.
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but i might buy one if it does not come bundled with third party apps that can not be removed, i dont want to see facebook or microsoft software bundled and unable to be completely removed from the phone, samsung has really angered and frustrated me on the whole android thing with all that crap i can not remove like bixby, facebook and other third party kludge that i never asked for, and i am looking for an alternative that does not embed third party kluge that can not be removed
I originally had an iPhone and a Lumia. When the latter died, I tried out Android for a while. Neither the iPhone nor the Lumia came w/ pre-installed third party apps that couldn't be removed, but Android did, even for configurations that had storage as low as 8GB. That, and all that spying by Android, did it for me.
Now both my phones are iPhones