kirklennon @ kirklennon @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

The government has sovereign immunity and can be sued only when it allows itself to be sued, such as under the Federal Tort Claims Act.

Unless the court can forcibly remove the funds from their accounts

Yes, the courts can and absolutely will, though not in this case, because he's going to cough up the cash quickly (well as quickly as he can sell some stuff because there's no way he has that much in liquid assets).

This is about third-party apps.

I'm going to go ahead and just call this a nothingburger. The context is that you're already a registered user signed into the Facebook, etc. app. You've already volunteered the valuable profile data and the analytics data from actually using the app. If you're already OK with all of that, there's effectively no additional concern with the relatively minor data that can be collected or inferred from the notifications. The very idea that someone should or would turn notifications off on, for example, Instagram because they're concerned about privacy is ridiculous. It's like telling someone not to crack the windows on their car because it might rain, but they're in a convertible with the top down.

One of the more obvious use cases for the Apple Vision Pro is watching videos on a plane, which means you need to be able to download to the app first to watch offline. Netflix's iPad app already works perfectly fine on Apple Vision Pro so supporting it required literally no effort at all. They went out of their way to disable availability.

This isn’t going to fly with the EU.

If the EU didn't want to allow this then they should have written the law differently, but poorly-written regulations are their specialty. Apple's plan complies with the letter of the law. Developers are free to use a direct sales channel and can offer any price they want, along with various conditions that aren't an option in the App Store. They just have to pay a commission for access to the lucrative market Apple built. The specific percentage of the commission is such that it's not actually a desirable option for developers, but the law didn't say that Apple had to make it desirable to avoid the App Store's existing sales system.

For what it's worth it's possible to test the contents of an egg, but it's moot because it doesn't actually matter when we know. It exists independent of observation.

No, that's not right. The species transitioned from the proto-chicken to the chicken. Whichever specific individual we call the first chicken started off as (say it with me) an egg. The mother's offspring was different enough to be the first chicken.

This is not correct. At no point can the offspring in a single generation be differnet enough to be called a different species.

I'm not saying we should call it a different species but if we're saying species Y is the direct descendant of species X, then, we can imagine a dividing line, and the line must always begin with an egg because eggs are different from their parents but adults are not different from the egg they started off as.

In reality things change very slowley over a large amount of time and there a no clear transition points.

Isn't that obvious?

"Proto chicken" in this context refers to a genetic ancestor of the chicken. An egg hatches into the exact same species as the egg itself, but the egg is genetically different from the mother that laid the egg, and in this thought experiment, we're talking about the mother being different enough to call a different species.

Chickens evolved from earlier animals. The process is gradual, of course, but we can say that at some point some proto-chicken ancestor laid an egg that was different enough genetically that it counts as a chicken. In other words, a non-chicken laid a chicken egg, which eventually grew up to be the first chicken. Therefore, the egg came first.

You’re not missing anything. There was a period of time where a lot of patents were granted for “basic idea, but on a computer!” The USPTO stopped doing it and these patents, which should have never been issued, have been systematically invalidated, including most of this guy’s. He’s a classic patent troll suing over patents that were then invalidated.

Sorry, it loaded without a paywall when I originally found it.

Short on time but they’re identified early on in this decision:
https://www.bloomberglaw.com/public/desktop/document/SmartflashLLCvAppleIncNo201610592017BL62739FedCirMar

I'm not sure if you're aware, but games consoles are a completely different market with completely different laws and standards governing them. Game consoles are not general purpose devices. They are closed platforms where you gotta sign lengthy NDAs and pay thousands just to get yourself a fucking dev kit.

iPhones are a closed platform. Ditto for iPad and Apple Vision Pro. They are essentially an app console. They have never been sold to consumers or presented to developers as anything else. For what it’s worth, almost all of the in-app revenue at the center of this discussion is gaming revenue. Everything else is a rounding error.

My understanding is that it’s the reverse of this. The iPad app is available by default. They’re putting in the (minimal) effort required to proactively disable availability of the iPad app.

No, we are discussing services not sold through their store and not using their payment provider. That is literally the topic of the post.

This is about purchases of virtual goods made by users of the app either directly in the app (30% combined commission and payment processing fees), or who click a link in the app to make the purchase using an external payment provider (27% commission). In all cases, these are sales originating from within the app.

Third party console games don't literally pay money to not use services.

I’m not sure if there have been any changes in the last few years (I doubt it), but developers paid Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony a 15% “licensing” fee for physical media games sold for their consoles. That has been the basic business model for all consoles for decades.

You also forget they also charge 30% for anything sold through their store.

That’s literally what we’re discussing.

Not for services they aren't providing, it isn't.

Third-party console game developers paid money to the console maker even for physical sales.

Again, these are for services that are being provided. Apple is charging people to not use their own payment service.

The payment service is 3%; the commission is the other 27%. That’s what a commission is. It’s for access to the market.

That’s why it would need to be a small piece of a greater set of information. Imagine a person walking through an office and into a stairwell. If you know the person is there, and you know the stairwell is darker than the office, you could infer the appropriate location of the person in the building

That has nothing to do with the technique described in the article. It's also still quite a stretch. Holding up a piece of paper and casting a shadow on the ambient light sensor will also make it appear darker. Are they in the stairwell or is Bob from accounting stopping by to tell a "funny" anecdote and blocking the afternoon sun? If you've managed to compromise a device enough to access sensor data, you're not bothering trying to make sketchy assumptions based on the light sensor.

Nobody is going to use it against you, but a state actor could use it against a specific target like a politician or military to develop a more accurate assessment of information they already have been collecting.

I read the whole article and I think even that is a ludicrous stretch. In order to get a vague image of your hand it requires either several minutes of projecting a precise black and white bright checkered pattern on the screen, or over an hour of subtly embedding varied brightness in a video. The checkered pattern represents a best/worst case scenario for this kind of attack, and even that is completely impractical for anything in the real world. This is literally zero risk for everybody. Forever.