For one it’s just technicalities for another it’s the distinction between a company going out of their way to block repairs or a company just not caring and mainly focussing on their own repair process.

There are a couple of concerns with biometrics.

The big one is, as you already mentioned, spoofing biometrics.

The FaceID or TouchID sensor essentially saying “I got that face/fingerprint that you have in your Secure Enclave”. Granted it is a sophisticated attack, but nevertheless one you’d want to prevent if only because it’s good practice to maintain a secure chain in which the individual links can trust each other.

For similar reasons the lockdown mode exists, which is mainly useful in limited scenarios (e.g. journalists, dissidents, etc).

On the other hand, if ever there was a potential attacker, it would be a government because they unlimited funds in theory and it isn’t hard to imagine the FBI trying to utilize this in the San Bernardino case if it was available.

A different risk, which would make the above quite a bit easier to accomplish, would be an altered biometrics scanner that, in addition to working the way it’s supposed to work, stores and sends off your biometrics or simply facilitates a replay attack.

Lossless is understood to have a bitrate of at least 1411kbps, or about 1.4Mbps.

Theoretical sustained bandwidth capability of Bluetooth on the 2.4Ghz spectrum is 1Mbps, but in practice it’s a chunk lower in part due to overhead.

Even if we assume if you could just cram a higher bitrate through a smaller bandwidth (spoiler, you can’t), everyone would be up in arms about Apple lying about lossless and class action suits would ensue.

That said, you can’t. This is not like your internet connection where you’ll just be buffering for a minute.

As for what is and isn’t perceptible, I think you’re mixing up your tonal frequencies with your bitrates here.

Honestly the most frustrating part is that there is plenty to criticize Apple on, so there’s no reason to get caught up in fabricated clickbaity nonsense.

But instead of focusing on genuine concerns, people would rather hop on some misinformation train.

All the while, if you espouse opinions that are bit more nuanced than “Apple bad”, then you must be a bootlicker like you said.

It’s as if people are more concerned about missing out on joining the hype and showing off their armchair skills, rather than exercising a modicum of critical thinking.

Obfuscating what you have to do ≠ not providing you with a roadmap on what you have to do.

If they didn’t obfuscate it there would be many tools out there already to let it be done.

This is a non sequitur.

It doesn’t automatically follow that a lack of tools means there is obfuscation. The simple fact that there can be many reasons why tools aren’t widely available alone breaks that logic.

But I’d say the fact that we already know exactly why difficulties arise when replacing parts, definitely proves that there’s no obfuscation.

Which again circles back to the difference between anti-repair and not pro-repair.

Just because Apple doesn’t go out of their way to provide a roadmap and hold your hand and as a result you are having difficulties when you’re trying to do it yourself, doesn’t mean they are actively thwarting you.

Apple doesn’t even think about you and me, their concern is to facilitate their own repair processes.

They literally serial lock almost half of their parts.

They don’t.

Aside from biometrics none of the parts are serial locked.

What you’re thinking about is parts based factory calibrated data loaded into the parts from a central database.

Just because the system ignores the calibration data once the part doesn’t match the one the calibration was intended for, doesn’t mean it’s “locked”, it just means that you’re trying to use calibration data for the wrong part.

Dude has reverse engineered pretty much the entire hardware stack of Macs to be able to provide the global community with Asahi, but because he says something you disagree with he’s supposedly “uninformed”.

Talk about childish…

I’m not sure if you’re serious or trying to be sarcastic.

Bluetooth and WiFi are two different things.

For starters standard Bluetooth operates on 1MHz wide channels, BLE on 2MHz wide channels, whereas WiFi (nowadays) operates on 20 or 40 MHz wide channels.

Modern Bluetooth (on 2.4Ghz) can theoretically do bursts of 2Mbps, but in practice even 1Mbps is hard to hit in a sustained fashion.

2.4Ghz is just a frequency band and is not the same as bandwidth.

You might as well argue that a pickup truck and a formula 1 race car should be able to reach the same top speed in the same time because their wheel distance is the same.

I think […]

Think again

Good for them, but this whole clickbait nonsense about Apple “locking” things is just that, nonsense.

Hector Martin, creator of Asahi Linux said it best so instead of repeating his words I’ll just leave a link to his comments on the matter: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110803356645502548

You’re right that a lot of Terms of Service documents and similar agreement documents have language that reserves the right to modify those terms.

At the same time just because something is in the terms doesn’t mean it can stand the test of adjudication and terms as well as changes are often challenged in court with success.

Unity is in a particular tricky situation because the clause that governed modifications in their last ToS explicitly gives the user the option to pass on modifications that adversely affects them and stick with the old terms:

Unity may update these Unity Software Additional Terms at any time for any reason and without notice (the “Updated Terms”) and those Updated Terms will apply to the most recent current-year version of the Unity Software, provided that, if the Updated Terms adversely impact your rights, you may elect to continue to use any current-year versions of the Unity Software (e.g., 2018.x and 2018.y and any Long Term Supported (LTS) versions for that current-year release) according to the terms that applied just prior to the Updated Terms (the “Prior Terms”). The Updated Terms will then not apply to your use of those current-year versions unless and until you update to a subsequent year version of the Unity Software (e.g. from 2019.4 to 2020.1). If material modifications are made to these Terms, Unity will endeavor to notify you of the modification. If a modification is required to comply with applicable law, the modification will apply notwithstanding this section. Except as explicitly set forth in this paragraph, your use of any new version or release of the Unity Software will be subject to the Updated Terms applicable to that release or version. You understand that it is your responsibility to maintain complete records establishing your entitlement to Prior Terms.

https://web.archive.org/web/20201111183311/https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/TermsOfService/blob/master/Unity Software Additional Terms.md

You can still do this if you use https://www.shodan.io/

It’ll let you find IoT devices and cameras connected to the internet if you know what to search for and an alarming amount of them are locked behind an admin/admin login.

I advise against nosying around because there’s a near 100% chance that it’s illegal to do so in your jurisdiction.

Most doxxers don’t technically release the information, rather they’ve acquired it and point others to where they’ve acquired it or simply disseminate it further.

That’s what I’m saying. In most cases the doxxer isn’t the one who originally provided the info, but rather someone who has found the information online via a Google search or something similar.

Isn’t that a little bit of circular reasoning?

If I doxx someone online then it gets indexed by Google, if someone then Google’s the information it stops being doxxing?

I’d assume most doxxing isn’t done by someone who has unique firsthand knowledge (e.g. “Oh I know John, he lives on so and so road”) and instead is done by finding the information online whether via Google or a different public source.

At least in the US, where a ridiculous amount of private information is deemed “public”.

Typically low level attacks such as these is where it starts because they grant access to parts that can be used to learn more about the system as a whole.

This understanding then can be used to find easier to exploit avenues.

A good example of this is the history of exploits on Nintendo hardware.

They almost all started with finding an exploit at the hardware level, which then subsequently lead to finding software exploits and ways to leverage them in an easy way for end users.

The proposal is bad enough as it is, but it’s the duplicitous gaslighting BS that really pisses people off.

If they came out and said “We came up with this thing to prevent loss of revenue on ads and prevent LLMs from capturing data” then people would still be against it, but at least it would feel like an honest discussion.

Instead it’s just another page out of Google’s playbook we’ve seen many times already.

1. Make up some thinly veiled use cases that supposedly highlight how this would benefit users, while significantly stretching the definition of “users”
2. Gaslight every one by pretending that people simply misunderstand what you’re proposing and what you’re trying to achieve
3. Pretend that nobody provides reasonable feedback because everyone is telling you not to commit murder in the first place instead of giving you tips on how to hide the body
4. Latch onto the few, inevitable, cases of people going too far to paint everyone opposing it in a negative light
5. Use that premise to explain why you had to unilaterally shut down any and all avenues for people to provide comment
6. Make the announcement that you hear people and that you’re working on it and that all will be well
7. Just do what you want anyways with minimal concessions if any and rinse repeat

For what it’s worth I blame W3C as well.
Their relatively young “Anti-Fraud Community Group” has essentially green lit this thing during meetings as can be seen here:

https://github.com/antifraudcg/meetings/blob/main/2023/05-26.md

https://github.com/antifraudcg/meetings/blob/main/2023/07-07-wei-side-meeting.md

WEI can potentially be used to impose restrictions on unlawful activities on the internet, such as downloading YouTube videos and other content, ad blocking, web scraping, etc.

Did the author of the article come from some dystopian parallel universe?

Well that explains why they did a 180 on their “no AI” rule, which has the mods in a tizzy.

Who knows, maybe it’ll cut back on the toxicity in the sense that you don’t have to interact with toxic people ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Most of these services are US-centric because a lot of the necessary records to provide the information isn’t public in many countries outside of the US.

Birth records, death records, marriage records, divorce records, voting records, criminal records, etc. is considered public information in much of the US. Even address information can be found publicly and immigration records become available to the public after a certain time.

In a lot of countries, especially in many European countries, these are hard to access for people that aren’t the subject of these records, if accessible at all.

For example while court records are public in much of Europe, often times the names of private persons are censored because it’s not deemed necessary to know who the parties are to be able to check if the courts make fair decisions.
This automatically excludes criminal and divorce information from disseminating into the public.

Some countries will make some records public once the subject of those records have passed for X amount of years, but that’s still pretty rare.

As such services like these have limited use outside the United States.

@[email protected] was talking about European companies doing fine despite strong unions in Europe and there being a lack of companies toppling over due to the strong unions.

They actually undersold it, because in many Western-European countries everyone benefits from union negotiations, even people that aren’t members of a union because the collective bargaining agreements unions manage to negotiate will affect everyone working in the relevant industry by virtue of laws deferring to those collective bargaining agreements.

You in turn decided to reframe the discussion at hand from companies doing well to unemployment numbers and not just general unemployment numbers, but youth unemployment numbers because you felt it would serve your argument best.

But if you look at the trends for unemployment then the story isn’t as bleak as you’d make it out to be. For starters general unemployment averages under 6% with only two countries being above 10% (and below 15%).
Average youth unemployment sits at 13.9% with a hand full over 20%.

However, both general and youth unemployment are on a steady downwards trend since 2013.
One exception to this trend for general unemployment is during the pandemic, where it shows a bump and for youth unemployment there’s an additional minor bump in 2022, which suggests a correlation with the influx of refugees from Ukraine. This is the European source on these statistics.

There will always be a higher unemployment rate in the EU compared to the US, especially when it comes to youth unemployment.

This lies mainly in the fact that most European countries have a civil registry system that automatically keeps track of certain data, unemployment being one of them, whereas in the US this data is collected by the Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor Statistics by conducting a survey of roughly 60,000 households.
Another factor is a difference in definitions. A good example is the one from the website of the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Garrett is 16 years old, and he has no job from which he receives any pay or profit. However, Garrett does help with the regular chores around his parents’ farm and spends about 20 hours each week doing so.

Lisa spends most of her time taking care of her home and children, but she helps in her husband’s computer software business all day Friday and Saturday.

Both Garrett and Lisa are considered employed.

Neither of them would be considered employed in most European countries. There are other such discrepancies, for example the US doesn’t include people under 16, whereas Europe looks at 15-24 for youth unemployment.

And then there’s the cultural difference between the two markets about when people are expected to start working and subsequently the jobs that will be available.

Which makes sense. Companies still need people, but if it’s more expensive to get low-end workers you just won’t hire entry level workers unless they’ve proven themselves beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Your hypothesis is quite lacking.
As stated, the trends have been going down for a decade now, if your hypothesis was true we’d see an upwards trend.
Additionally, these labor protections, including protections against being laid off, have been around for decades, your hypothesis doesn’t offer an explanation why, despite these protections, unemployment is going down.
Also, minimum wage, as is often paid for these kinds of jobs, is lower in most EU countries than in many US states, making it comparably cheaper to hire those kind of jobs in Europe than it is in the US, your hypothesis doesn’t explain why, despite this, the unemployment rate is higher in Europe than it is in the US.

In short, your hypothesis nor the unemployment rate is relevant to what @[email protected] was positing, so lets refocus to the topic at hand: the lack of companies toppling over like domino bricks despite the copious amounts of employee protection facilitated by strong unions.

Perhaps afterwards, we can talk about the lack of landlords, corporate or otherwise, going bankrupt despite the strong tenant protections as well as the lack of companies selling merchandise to consumers pulling out of the market despite the strong consumer protections, and so and so forth.

And then, maybe, just maybe, we can afterwards all come to the conclusion that these QoL improvements are attainable without some kind of economic doom scenario.

Like some have pointed out there are ways to circumvent this, but it doesn’t make for a great experience, might cause issues down the line in particular with updates and there’s no guarantee it’ll keep working.

If you’ve purchased this form your company’s surplus and they refuse to unenroll from MDM I’d just give it back and ask for my money back, it’s not worth the hassle and the warranty is a nonsense reason since they can take the MBP off of their warranty service plan.