To make people nervous about doing it, whether they are somewhere that they are somewhere they are being heavily monitored like a parade, or out with friends some night on a side street. Telling people there is a chance they could get caught goes a lot farther than catching a few in secret.
If they do not have a good way of catching people this thinking makes sense. As a deterrent. Assuming they could easily catch them, it's more logical to do so and find out what subversive stuff people are sending each other. They can also blackmail those who get caught into giving up more info about their friends and networks. Gives them a lot more control vs warning people that airdrop is compromised. Thanks CCP, that's good to know for anyone who's active against the government :)
I do agree with your take but I think they're lying.
I'd wager that most Chinese citizens are aware that the government monitors most domestic communications and sends thousands of warrants to Apple every year. It's really not that different in America, given how people joke about the FBI agent in their cellphone with disquieting regularity. If you're a target of either government, your brand allegiance doesn't matter when the white van shows up outside.
China could be lying, but it seems like they already have a high degree of control over domestic electronics. Demonstrations like this are probably more valuable as a threat to political whistleblowers than as an exploit to learn what they likely already know.
Why bother catching and jailing all those people if you can scare them from their criminal acts in the first place? The Party wants to stop criticism; arresting people for it after-the-fact doesn't undo whatever damage the Party perceived to itself, whereas scaring them prevents the criticism entirely. And scaring people is a lot more scalable than arresting them.
That's what I'm saying. It's far more valuable to use Airdrop surveillance as a deterrent than it is to actually try gaining intelligence on systems they already control.
Under Xi the regime has become ever more authoritarian. Chinese citizens are aware of the surveillance but dissidents have been using airdrop for a while now to share anti-government media and information anonymously with random strangers in crowded places, like the subway. The kind of stuff they'd previously share on the internet but which has become too risky.
This has been a thorn in the Party's eye for some time now. If it's true and they cracked it, it would mean the final major way Chinese residents can share information outside of government control is gone. I wouldn't take their word for it though. Announcing it just means Apple would work on a fix. So why not keep it secret and exploit the vulnerability?
> If it's true and they cracked it, it would mean the final major way Chinese residents can share information outside of government control is gone.
Airdrop was the final way? That sounds unlikely. With iPhone marketshare in China at like 20% I would be surprised if it was even the current primary way, let alone the only way.
Except that this doesn't make things much harder for those willing to share.
If you use your main phone, connected to your sim card - sure it's easy to identify you. OTHO you can just get a burner iPhone 6 or something similar at a flea market, keep it off the Wi-Fi/cellular network and still run the airdrops with little risk of your real id being leaked.
I have longer term plans to bring more of this to web and windows. I’m tracking what Arc is doing with Swift/UI on Windows. Also working on self publishing and self hosting functionality so that material can be shared on web beyond inside the app. Solving cross plat will be critical for expanding this to classrooms.
Just curious, did you ever think about using Flutter for this instead of Swift? To me it seems like a pretty obvious choice given you are a one-man team and want to get it onto multiple platforms.
Good question. Yes it's the biggest question of course, what to do about cross platform. I started this codebase during iOS 7 so Flutter didn't exist yet, but I did decide to lean into serving a niche better than going wide from the start, which is why I stuck with native.
I'm pursuing a "Transmission app"-like model - native frontend, cross platform core (+ also some cross platform frontend, in my case). I believe this can translate to high value for users, and I get positive feedback on the design and native feel of my apps.
I have a lot of this app implemented within the webview/user scripts and am expanding the web part more with my next (adjacent/overlapping) project. I'll also be using Flutter for the upcoming mpv player as a component. This is still unsolved for me though, so far I am creating optionality and a direction toward a solution, but yes I need to go faster than just myself (and I refuse to seek investors for anything).
I'm also trying to get some worker cooperative structures going with one or two others on adjacent projects, around some shared codebase foundations, strategically to expand faster into web or other platforms. I bought IndieDevStack.com and will later blog about and also productize this approach with another app + open source.
YMMV but I just asked the same question to both and GPT-4 calculated 9.64 laps, and mentioned how you cannot complete a fraction of a lap, so it rounded down and then calculated 24.5L.
Bard mentioned something similar but oddly rounded up to 10.5 laps and added a 10% safety margin for 30.8L.
In this case bard would finish the race and GPT-4 would hit fuel exhaustion. Thats kind of the big issue with LLMs in general. Inconsistent.
In general I think gpt-4 is better overall but it shows both make mistakes, and both can be right.
If the person doing the calculation knows how timed races work, the math is very very straightforward. In this one GPT-4 did not seem to understand how racing worked in that context, where bard understood and also applied safety margin.
I think it would be more accurate to link to something as a better source than blind. All I can find about this is a gizmodo article, which does not provide any source other than this statement from Google: "A Google spokesperson said in a statement to Gizmodo that the payments given to laid-off employees were “100% accurate” and has corrected the stock calculation. Meanwhile, former employees expressed confusion to Business Insider, and one source said, “They did not outline it well in the first emails to us all so tons of people were confused.”
The Google spokesperson said, “We have followed up and corrected the calculation—and this doesn’t change the fact that all departing employees will still be eligible to receive salary and stock units for both the notice period and the severance payment, as well as their 2022 bonus, unused vacation, six months of healthcare and additional support.”"
It does not sound like they are lowering it as much as confusing wording? I would want to see the OG email and the correction email, but I can't find anyone actually sharing out what their email to laid off employees actually was.
If this is actually a walk back on severance rather than clarification then they should honor the original statement.
The amount of bloat they acquired over the pandemic is pretty insane.
I was interviewing for a position at coinbase in 2021 and man, it was the worst interview process I have ever gone through. All technical interviews seemed to be extremely specific around knowledge for tools outside of what I was interviewing for. (Senior/Staff level IAM) I am not sure why an IAM engineer needs to be asked tons of questions about specific big data and ML libraries but that level of bad interviewing made me tell them no before finishing all of them.
The real red flag though was that not 1 interviewer had been at CB for longer than 3-9 months. It sounded like in 2021 alone the company 2-3x'd headcount. I can only imagine the absolute shit show that must've been on the inside.
I still think CB seems like one of the better companies in their sector, but compared to the larger tech industry, I think it still has some maturing to do.
COVID + biggest crypto bubble (so far). I can’t imagine what a sustainable level for them is. For what it’s worth I found their site totally usable if high on the fees but I’ve lost all interest in the fools game of crypto
Not specifically AWS, but the entire space of identity and authorization, including organization of permissioning of groups within platform apps and corporate apps.
I want one just to get a notification LED back. Thats up there with the headphone jack as something that shouldnt have been removed from basically all phones in my book.
I go back and forth on the headphone jack debate. But the notification LED I just don't get. They aren't large and intrusive like a jack - so it's not space saving. I like to leave my phone on my desk and only check it if I see an LED blinking. Not constantly wake it up to see if I missed something. I assume most people want that?
I came to two possible conclusions - 1) it's about engagement, and for some reason companies want you opening your phone often, or 2) so many apps notify for everything anymore, the LED would just constantly blink. At least 2 could be solved by only allowing certain apps or classes of notification (like say, phone or text) notify the LED.
I believe it could be one of these mistaken A/B testings - do we have hard data that a significant portion of users actually use the notification LED? No? So let's ditch it and save a huge amount of money in total. I bet someone was very proud over the idea.
Not sure if you need a physical LED when many phones these days have OLED displays that can mimic the LED without consuming too much power. Some Android brands have this built-in and there are also some 3rd party apps that do the same.
Right, but it's what most flagships use anyway (iPhone, Google Pixel, Samsung, even this phone), so if you're an OEM that uses OLED and don't want to have a dedicated LED, it can be done with the display. Burn-in wouldn't be a problem for this fake LED because it can move around as it blinks.
The original Google Nexus type color configurable notification would be such a welcome addition.
Got mail? Red blink. Got a tweet reply? Blink blue. Even Nokia E72/73/75 had beautiful breathing lights.
Too bad the Nothing Phone doesn't have a headphone jack. I couldn't agree more.
For anyone else who won't even consider a phone without a jack... I'm much more excited for the upcoming Asus Zenphone 9, which is roughly Pixel 5 sized and slightly smaller than the standard iPhone size, and features a headphone jack! It's the smallest (and headphone jackiest) flagship in quite some time, slightly smaller than its predecessor.
Always-on displays have basically obsoleted the notification LED.
I used to consider it a required feature when buying a phone as well and would carefully configure the colours of each app and their priority.
But these days I am happy with the default Android always-on display and a row of icons for the notifications. I can imagine that some people miss the colour but the detail offered by the icons makes it much easier to know what notifications you have.
I feel that, I find that when I want the answer to something I add "reddit" to the end of the question or query. I dont use a lot of reddit but I have found that usually you get much better / non-paid answers on there. So much of todays internet are just advertising in disguise.
Usually when it comes to questions or comparisons with products, at least with reddit its more likely to be akin to a customer review than some random article that who knows who paid them to tell you x is better than y.
I do this too and also sometimes substitute "reddit" with "forum" if I'm researching DIY projects.
Niche forums are still incredibly valuable resources and somehow their solutions don't revolve around me buying a product that the website happens to sell.
I can confirm that vanced had Google/YT eyes on it for many years now, or at least that someone I know on the Ad abuse team at Google was talking about them finding ways to stop vanced for years now.
