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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Dave@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*deleted by creator*
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    9 months ago

    Apps can get woken up when a remote notification arrives that has the content-available key. Apps are woken up in background mode, at which point they have a few seconds to do whatever they need to do to refresh their content cache. This, of course, often leads to the app making a connection to the server, which exposes the user’s IP address.

    I think the sin here is that some apps always set the content-available key regardless of whether there is content to be retrieved or not. That turns the notification into a surveillance tool, allowing the app to check in periodically.



  • Dave@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldAmazon's Silent Sacking
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    10 months ago

    Among tech companies, RTO has primarily been about one thing: maintaining real estate investments. This was likely the primary reason Apple began RTO much earlier than most of its peers (Aug 2022). Apple has enormous RE investments in Apple Park, in San Diego, Austin, and a bunch of other locations, and RTO was a way to ensure their values stay up, and they can remain qualified for tax credits by bringing commerce to those areas.

    The fact that RTO also causes the most expensive people to leave was a fortuitous bonus. In 2023, interest rates went high, and money (and thus revenue) became tight, so companies like Amazon enacted RTO to force their most expensive employees to leave.

    Make no mistake: Apple, too, used RTO as an attrition tool. They fully expected some single-digit percentages of their engineering workforce to quit due to RTO.





  • The open secret of Open Source is that successful projects are largely the playground of capitalists. Who has the time to develop and maintain a whole mobile OS with all of the services people have come to expect, for no compensation? Surely the money flows in from interested parties who can then use the software to their advantage.

    Much of the fundamental pieces of iOS and macOS is open source too. Darwin/XNU are open-source, but no one is under the impression that any of this effort is to benefit anyone other than Apple. Sure, Darwin-based alternative OSes exist, but let’s not kid ourselves that they are anything but curiosities, waiting to be derailed by Apple when they get too large.