This fiasco stirs up a lot of different topics for me, none of which seem like they are likely to be resolved anytime soon.
First, with so much importance placed on an Apple/iCloud account in our current era it's not good that they can be shutdown so trivially. Someone can be shut out from using Messages, Apple Wallet, Digital Identification (depending on where they live) and all their subscriptions and media purchases without any recourse, in an instant. It's not hard to imagine someone being put into a pretty bad situation as a result of this with just a little bad luck and bad timing. It's easy to point out that you shouldn't be overly reliant on these technologies but I think it's more important that there be ways to safe guard people from this scenario. Apple should do more to handle these scenarios given the importance of an account now.
Second, there are other recent events that point out the failure modes and gaps that Apple (and Google?) need to address. There apparently is no way to cleanly divide purchases in a Divorce or separation, even if the person was fleeing an abusive situation. There's also no way to leave a "family" account even as an adult or how to assign children to multiple families. Again we can trot out the easy "Just don't use these things, use FOSS, Nextcloud, etc..." but I think Apple should do more to address these types of scenarios regardless of what people choose to use.
Absolutely. The current level of service these companies provide is functionally identical to what would have existed 25 years ago. Losing your Apple account would have been a minor annoyance - the relationship involved trivial amounts of money, and wasn’t deeply integrated into anyone’s lives. Even if you lost an email address, losing access to it wouldn’t have locked you out of hundreds of important accounts, and any important accounts would probably be easily updated to a new address with a phone call, and likewise for a few friends. If you got fully locked out forever, it really wasn’t important.
So, we now have the same “who cares, it’s just some dumb online account” level of service with much more critical accounts. Because big tech has scaled users to the 9-10 figure range, while not investing almost anything in customer service. Instead of having thousands of CSRs like the phone company, tech employs a few disempowered call center operators overseas, whose only job is to read FAQ answers at callers and ask them to try restarting their computers.
I shudder to think how vulnerable the current system would be to intentional denial of identity via other parties tripping fraud systems on an account.
1. It is objectively true that Apple and Google accounts are extremely important to many people.
2. It is also objectively true that most users will only need one of each, a few at most. Fraudsters have no such limitations, and may want to create thousands of them per day if the possibility arises.
3. Therefore, it's likely that a significant percentage of all accounts ever created are fraudulent, even if the actual number of fraudsters is much lower. This is the crucial observation many people miss in this debate.
4. Real users do not want constant iMessage spam and other problems resulting from fraudulent accounts remaining open. Therefore, normal users care deeply about fraudulent accounts being closed promptly (and so do money-laundering regulators, but that's another discussion).
5. Normal users also care about their accounts remaining open. Apple has to balance these two problems.
6. If we force Apple (by regulation, PR crisis or any other method) to be softer on closures, the only way to do that without exacerbating #4 is to make opening fraudulent accounts harder.
7. The only reliable way of preventing fraudsters from opening accounts is strict and invasive identity verification.
8. Therefore, if we're asking Apple / Google to keep more accounts open, we're also asking for more surveillance.
This may actually be the right tradeoff to make, but it is important to point out that there is a tradeoff here, and that no decision in this regard goes without consequences.
It is kind of astonishing to me that the entire chain of logic was put together without "The company could invest in better customer service to resolve disputed identity" as a third possibility.
It was certainly my first priority for an e-mail provider when I started to de-Google my life.
Why cant they give a task which is reasonable for a real customer, e.g. show up with ID in an apple store and lets us reserve $100 on your credit card to unlock an account which is under investigation immediately?
This is not more surveillance - Apple already knows the real name of their customer.
"On X, anyone can pay to obtain the ‘verified' status without the company meaningfully verifying who is behind the account, making it difficult for users to judge the authenticity of accounts and content they engage with."
As stated in you source the EU is (among other things) not happy about Twitter calling users 'verified' while the meaning of 'verified' switched from "we did sth. to make sure the account owner is indeed the thing/person they say they are" to "the account owner is paying a monthly fee".
> There apparently is no way to cleanly divide purchases in a Divorce or separation, even if the person was fleeing an abusive situation
Believe it or not, google is even more stunningly incompetent than that.
If you have someone in your contacts there literally is no way to (1) retain him/her, and (2) ensure they are never, ever, for any reason, suggested in any product. eg in google docs, I do not want "@" autocompletions to suggest the person. No sharing, no drive sharing, no email cc/bcc, etc.
In my case, there was a breakup with a cofounder / exit from a company and ongoing collaboration with a friend who shared the same first name. I actually had to delete the former cofounder's contact, which made me miss some calls from an unknown number.
Having someone that you need to occasionally maintain contact with that should never be prompted in any way (exes of all types, divorced, stalker) is a basic need in real-world systems.
I’m realizing maybe I should just use Amazon or iCloud AND Google Photos for backing up my images. My whole life is in Google Photos. I could lose it from something stupid and never even have a person to contact about that.
Shutterfly will upload all your photos and store them for free if you buy a few magnets on sale now and then. Works from iPhone well enough and it's my "third backup."
iCloud is overrated, it was not encrypted at rest for ages. I much prefer using Time Machine and keeping the passcodes in a PW manager, and maybe a safe deposit box as a backup.
iCloud is a whole lot of things. What you describe is a backup storage solution.
Time Machine does not handle:
- photo sync between devices and users
- shared storage between devices and users (no, not backup, but actual directories and files etc)
- private relay
- state sync for games and other apps
- etc etc
Maybe I am being a jerk but I think a tool that is working on local filesystems should be written in something that will make syscalls like Go and it should just be a binary so I don't have to install npm/npx/python/whatever.
The gist is that keyboards are optimized for ease of use but that there could be other designs which would be harder to learn but might be more efficient.
>> There's a reason keyboards haven't changed much since the 1860s when typewriters were invented.
> The gist is that keyboards are optimized for ease of use but that there could be other designs which would be harder to learn but might be more efficient.
Here's a relevant trivia question; assuming a person has two hands with five digits each, what is the largest number they can count to using only same?
Answer: (2 ** 10) - 1 = 1023
Ignoring keyboard layout options (such as QWERTY vs DVORAK), IMHO keyboards have the potential for capturing thought faster and with a higher degree of accuracy than other forms of input. For example, it is common for touch-typists to be able to produce 60 - 70 words per minute, for any definition of word.
Modern keyboard input efficiency can be correlated to the ability to choose between dozens of glyphs with one or two finger combinations, typically requiring less than 2cm of movement to produce each.
Only if individual digits can be articulated separately from each other. Human anatomy limits what is actually possible. Also synchronization is a big problem in chorded typing; good typists can type more than 10 strokes per second, but no one can type 10 chords (synchronous sets of strokes) per seconds I think.
I can't comment on this idea but I will say that I would have expected press fittings to have brought down the cost of plumbing because they don't require soldering up to certain diameter. But they don't seem to have had any impact on the cost of plumbing despite not requiring as much skill.
The skill of a plumber isn't in knowing how to solder. I've run copper pipe and soldered fittings on my own plenty of times, it's not hard. The skill is in either knowing the building codes inside and out when dealing with new work, or for remodel work it's knowing all the tricks of how to alter existing plumbing quickly, cleanly and efficiently. Both those skills are only developed with experience.
Press fittings have a well earned reputation of leaking after a few years (they mostly rely on rubber o-rings that will dry out over a decade). They are rarely used by anyone who knows what they are doing.
Note that crimp fitters (which your link discourages!) do not have the same problem and are what most are moving too. Soldering still has a place, but is rarely used because modern PEX is so much cheaper and easier to work with.
My experience with push fit and press fit is that if they aren't perfectly done (or have a manufacturing defect) they can appear to be secure, only to fail catastrophically at some random point hours/years in the future...
With a solder joint or a traditional compression fitting (the ones with olives) it's obvious if the connection is no good.
Perhaps because you do not do plumbing yourself, you do not realize that making the pipe connections is a trivial part of the job. I learned how to sweat a copper pipe in about 15 minutes of training. You can learn it off YouTube. It is not a high-skilled operation.
I don't know much about plumbing and didn't mean to offend any plumbers but yeah pipe connections definitely seem trivial but I guess that's not most of the job in reality.
I don't think DIYer even bother learning how to sweat copper pipe anymore. I plumbed an entire house myself using pex for the supply. All I had to know was how to press the trigger to expand the pipe.
The only copper I had was a copper stub for the toilet supply, but I used pex expansion to terminate there too because they make copper-pex stubs.
As of right now it seems like if you have the old V2 apps installed they can still be (re)activated with your old Serif/Affinity license that is tied to an email. I was able to just do that with Designer v2. I also seem to be able to re-down them through the Apple App Store and they work fine. You do get a prompt "Would you like to keep your app linked to your Affinity Store account? This allows you to automatically stream any free or purchased content you have directly to your app." But its unclear to me what that means at the moment given that Canva has changed the licensing model.
I had the same thought but I also wonder if these highly trained illustrators were happy with making corporate renderings or if they had imagined themselves working in a more creative capacity?
I also don't think its gone. We still have great illustrators but someone somewhere has to decide to use illustrations instead of a photo, CGI, or something else and then they have to pay the premium for that service.
I know nothing about the industry let alone in the era, but I imagine 'drawing glassware for Pyrex catalogue' wasn't a full-time job - but either a temporary contract, or just one project for an agency. So you might view it as an opportunity to perfect your drawing of glass, or just a boring gig but paying the bills.
If you reflect on your own profession & career though... Well, rather than speak for you, I too 'had imagined [myself] working in a more [x] capacity'!
Who says they're not also being more creative elsewhere?
Plus wouldn't it be a sense of creative pride knowing that you can create an illustration that perfectly depicts refraction through glass, such that people find it hard to differentiate it from a photo? (which did exist in 1938)
To you second paragraph, the output of a CAD model is often used for line art of a product, and sometimes for an illustrated parts breakdown.
First, with so much importance placed on an Apple/iCloud account in our current era it's not good that they can be shutdown so trivially. Someone can be shut out from using Messages, Apple Wallet, Digital Identification (depending on where they live) and all their subscriptions and media purchases without any recourse, in an instant. It's not hard to imagine someone being put into a pretty bad situation as a result of this with just a little bad luck and bad timing. It's easy to point out that you shouldn't be overly reliant on these technologies but I think it's more important that there be ways to safe guard people from this scenario. Apple should do more to handle these scenarios given the importance of an account now.
Second, there are other recent events that point out the failure modes and gaps that Apple (and Google?) need to address. There apparently is no way to cleanly divide purchases in a Divorce or separation, even if the person was fleeing an abusive situation. There's also no way to leave a "family" account even as an adult or how to assign children to multiple families. Again we can trot out the easy "Just don't use these things, use FOSS, Nextcloud, etc..." but I think Apple should do more to address these types of scenarios regardless of what people choose to use.
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