Related, the Indian Government (Telecom Department) bullied Apple into building an iOS feature for reporting phone calls and SMS by threatening to stop iPhone sales in India.
I'm so done. I'm sorry to dump a pointless rant like this on HN but... what the hell is going on these days? Nobody seriously seems to care about legitimate privacy concerns anymore. If I were in a position of power, like being CEO, CTO, or even just an engineer on the team at Apple that implemented this, I'd do EVERYTHING to make sure that my power is in check and that I'm not pushing a fundamentally harmful technology.
I just feel so lost and powerless these days, I don't know how much longer I can go on when every piece of technology I own is working against me - tools designed to serve a ruling class instead of the consumer. I don't like it one bit.
What is going on is that reality is slapping some techno-utopians in the face and they are shocked, shocked, that governments are more powerful that businesses.
That's not at all what the lefty geeks learned by reading Chomsky or what the righty geeks learned by reading Heinlein.
All along these people thought algorithms and protocols (e.g. bitcoin and TCP/IP) would somehow be a powerful force that would cause governments to fall on their knees and let people evade government control. After all, it's distributed! You can't stop it!
Well, that was all very foolish, because they mistook government uninterest in something for the equivalent of government being powerless to control it, and when governments did start taking an interest in something, it turns out that protocols and algorithms are no defense against the realities of political power. It is to the field of politics, and not the field of technology, that one must turn in order to increase collective freedoms. Individual freedom can be increased by obtaining money or making lots of friends, but collective freedom cannot be increased this way, it can only be increased by organizing and influencing government.
Bingo. I wish I could upvote this comment more. All the geeks get distracted by words like “cloud” or “virtual” and forget that all this stuff we depend on has a physical presence at some point in the real world. That physical presence necessitates humans interacting with other humans. Humans interacting with humans falls squarely in the “things governments poke their noses into” bucket. It’s like the early days of Napster when people were all hot for “peer to peer”, as if that tech was some magic that was going to make record labels and governments throw up their hands over copyrights.
Maybe we could make this framework future-proof by using blockchains? Somehow? Maybe it can use blockchains, or it can be stored on a blockchain, or maybe both at the same time. Surely that will help society in some nonspecific, ambiguous manner.
Remember the people who, decades after the invention of the Internet, kept on insisting that it was useless and only for porn addicts?
Remember the people who, after the invention of the phone, insisted that it was a nice trick but probably only useful for a few businessmen with dictation needs?
Yeah, they all had to change their tone at some point, under the shame of having been wrong for so long.
> All along these people thought algorithms and protocols (e.g. bitcoin and TCP/IP) would somehow be a powerful force that would cause governments to fall on their knees and let people evade government control. After all, it's distributed! You can't stop it!
But that's the underlying problem here. Apple isn't a standardized protocol or a distributed system. It's a monolithic chokepoint.
You can't do this with a PC. Dell and HP don't retain the ability to push software to hardware they don't own after they've already sold it and against the will of the person who does own it.
People pointed out that this would happen. Now it's happening. Qué sorpresa.
Dell ships laptops with tons of Dell software, as well as tons of third-party software. Do you really think that, if they wanted to, they couldn't just update one of those pieces of software to enable remote installs?
Hell, Dell has shipped more than one bug that allowed attackers administrator-level access or worse, I wouldn't put it past them to come up with some kind of asinine feature that not only lets them push new software/drivers/whatever to the machine, but lets attackers do so as well.
> All along these people thought algorithms and protocols (e.g. bitcoin and TCP/IP) would somehow be a powerful force that would cause governments to fall on their knees and let people evade government control. After all, it's distributed! You can't stop it!
The internet and its design and associated protocols were designed to work around external forces - a nuclear attack or natural disaster. It was never designed to be government-proof. People who thought that would be the case were being idealistic and naive.
If you want real change in the world, as you said, you have to affect the political world, which is an option available to any citizen or corporation who can spend millions on lobbyists.
There are many of us that DO care! Unfortunately, even though we are many, we are still a small minority among the general population, or probably even among software developers.
Convenience and fashion tend to trump security and principles for most people. (Oftentimes, I'm one of those people as well, though I try not to be. It's exhausting to be an activist 100% of the time. But let's keep at it!)
I'm as surprised as you are that a giant like Apple doesn't just tell them "go ahead, ban iPhones, see how popular they'll become" to someone as powerless as the government of India. It would be a huge free publicity campaign for them in the rest of the world while the public in India would either put pressure on their government or buy iPhones via import websites.
For additional fun, strike a deal with the #2 non government owned carrier in whichever country you do this to. Offer the iPhone at a special rate for a few months. They would kill the government telco while selling record numbers of phones with free publicity. And at the same time scare any other government into not trying this kind of stunt with Apple ever again.
I wonder how Apple's shareholders would react if the company threw away a market that was worth $1.8bn in revenue in 2020.
Then there's China; 17% of Apple's global revenue, $43.7bn. I don't think shareholders would much appreciate that.
> the public in India would either put pressure on their government or buy iPhones via import websites
The iPhone had 2.97% market share in India in April 2021, down from a high of 3.54% in June 2020. I don't think the people who wanted to buy iPhones but couldn't would be able toput any significant amount of political pressure on politicians.
Rich people would just import them from somewhere else like they always have before, and everyone else would switch to some available Android phone that had the modifications that the government wanted.
How much fun would that be for customers if India then decided to confiscate every iPhone it encounters within India (maybe excepting tourists, but maybe not)?
> I don't know how much longer I can go on when every piece of technology I own is working against me - tools designed to serve a ruling class instead of the consumer.
This made me think of the Butlerian Jihad in Dune:
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
I'd say the typical remedy that societies have adopted for these sorts of things is legislation, though regulatory capture[1] is an issue that blocks the way.
Buy Sony Xperia 10 ii, then buy an official SailfishOS package from shop.jolla.com and flash it over Android 11 - enjoy a polished mobile OS without snitches, which you fully control, a real pocket computer instead of a future pocket policeman.
Maybe I did. But what difference does it make? There's plenty of other instances where Apple has reportedly been bullied into action or inaction (being dissuaded from implementing E2EE for iCloud is one example). I've really just reached a breaking point and I'm sorry if logic does not apply.
I'm amazed on how much mis-information is spread. Featured we are talking about here is for reporting spam number which is a done by user not automatically. This is widely available in Android already.
Correct me if I'm wrong but this feature needs an app install from the app store.
They added a feature which is off by default and allows a user to select a supported installed app to use as a spam reporting app.
IMHO this is great, I wish more countries would enable this feature. Something like 95% of my phone calls are spam, to the point where I just don't answer the phone anymore unless they're in my contacts list. Users being able to actually report them as spam might actually result in this BS finally stopping.
I think few people are making the appropriate parallel. What we’re looking at is not necessarily government overreach, but fascism.
When the hell did it become Apple’s job to do this? Apple is not a branch of law enforcement. The government needs warrants for stuff like this. We are merging corporate and government interests here. Repeat after me, Apple is not supposed to be a branch of law enforcement.
It also says a lot about us, that we are beholden to a product. We have to ditch these products.
> When the hell did it become Apple’s job to do this?
Apple provided a pathway, however unintentionally, to greater power. And those in power used their existing authority to gather even more for themselves, as they always do.
Like drops flow into streams into rivers into oceans, power aggregates at the top until regime change spills it back to the ground.
I get about 10 every single fucking day, super annoying, and they are spoofing numbers too: I get calls from hotels and restaurants in my address book, yet they are not being called from there, I hear a series of clicks and then someone asks me about my auto insurance... The moment I hear clicks now, I just hang up, if I answer at all. I am ready to simply give up phones entirely. Fucking complete failure by the telecoms, their entire industry is a consumer failure.
Apple complied.
https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/mobile-tabs/app...