Tag: Apple

How Big Tech got so big: Hundreds of acquisitions

For decades Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google gobbled up their competition to become behemoths of the tech industry, which has drawn attention from Congressional leaders and other critics who claim they’ve stifled innovation in the industry.

Source: How Big Tech got so big: Hundreds of acquisitions

If the government had said, “You know what, guys? You’re big enough already,” most of those acquired companies would probably have continued to offer a nice living to their founders and employees. And the employment market for talent would be richer for it. And taxes would have been paid. But, no, the government bends over, and lets these vertical monopolies accrete ALL the profits in their sector, while they stick out their hand for the next campaign contribution.

I had written this as a draft, and then watched The Laundromat. Not as entertaining as The Big Short, but just as approachable in its treatment of what us arguably one of the most byzantine, global subjects in modern history. I can’t find the final scene online in order to link it, but Meryl Streep’s last line is a powerful summary of the problem I’ve been complaining about here for some time.

“Now is the time for real action. It starts with asking questions. Tax evasion cannot possibly be fixed while elected officials are pleading for money from the very elites who have the strongest incentives to avoid taxes, relative to any other segment of the population. These political practices have come full circle and are irreconcilable. Reform of America’s broken campaign finance system cannot wait.”

Global mega corps like Apple can no longer hide behind the excuse that “everyone is doing it” when it comes to using essentially-slave labor in the orient, and a offshore tax havens to avoid paying corporate taxes, while they accumulate… <checks Google>… two hundred billion dollars (give or take) in their cash on hand. I predict, at some point, they will be pressured to change both of those practices. Maybe that will lead to a domino effect, and to laws being changed. I’m not holding my breath, but I can envision a scenario, even if it’s one in “fourteen million, six hundred and five.”

Scam iOS Apps Still Raking in Millions in Revenue on App Store – MacRumors

As of writing, the scam app “Star Gazer+” is still listed on the App Store with 4.5 star average rating and over 80,000 reviews.

Source: Scam iOS Apps Still Raking in Millions in Revenue on App Store – MacRumors

As I keep saying on comment threads all over the internet: you cannot trust any review system. They’re all being gamed. They are worse than useless. They are actively hostile against users. Apple, Google… everyone should immediately take them all down and start over. Congress ought to ban Amazon’s system entirely. Right now. Forever. I’m not even joking. It’s that bad.

I guess I still give some credence to reviews on Steam, but only barely, and only because, when I read them, I’m reading about indie games, which don’t have the kind of money behind them to rent a room full of people in a 3rd-world country for a month to publish thousands of fake reviews.

Microsoft Released a Bizarre New Surface Pro Ad and It’s Hoping You Won’t Notice It’s Pure Gaslighting | Inc.com

Microsoft made a point of mentioning that price point–since the Surface Pro is cheaper–but it’s worth mentioning that it means the MacBook Pro in question is sporting Apple’s new M1 processor. It raises an interesting question: How do you compare two things that are not at all like each other? And, maybe more importantly, why would you?

Source: Microsoft Released a Bizarre New Surface Pro Ad and It’s Hoping You Won’t Notice It’s Pure Gaslighting | Inc.com

Whatever sales figures Microsoft might release about the Surface, they are continuing to struggle to sell these units. How do I know this? Because of jumbled and confusing ads like the one referenced in the article.

The kid in the video complains about not having a stylus or a touchscreen, but you can get both of those things in an iPad. The only reason alluded to in the ad about why you wouldn’t just want buy a tablet in this scenario is “gaming.” LOL WUT? You can’t pay me to believe that people are buying a Surface to play games that you couldn’t play on a MacBook.

Microsoft continues to try to sell people on the idea that the Surface somehow bridges a theoretical gap between a laptop and a tablet, but if that market segment exists, it’s very small. And, when your competition has so completely dominated the tablet end of that spectrum, any effort to wedge a hybrid device into that market gap is going to be difficult at best.

The issues with using a touchscreen while it’s not-horizontal have been beaten to death, and I won’t rehash them here. I know 3 people who have Surfaces, and they seem to like them. But I watch them fumble around with their keyboards as they switch between tasks, and wonder why they put up with it. Microsoft is betting they can make money selling to people who don’t mind living in the usability gap. Maybe they can, but they’ve obviously not created a segment-defining product the way the iPhone and iPad have.

My advice to Microsoft’s advertising department would be to simply sell the devices on their merits. The people who are interested want to live in that “convertibility” space. Market that. Play to that strength. I don’t see it, but there are people who do. Sell to both of them.

Apple Developer Program

In the endless internecine wars about Apple on “Hacker” “News,” there’s a common complaint that the Apple Developer Program costs $99/year. I can never get my head wrapped around that particular protest, as though it were some great barrier to entry. To put it in perspective, I subscribe to <deep breath> Prime, Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Now, Apple One, Office365, PS+, and Xbox Live, and that’s just off the top of my head. Most of them are for purely-optional entertainment, and all of them cost more money than the developer program. I suspect most people who frequent the board pay for several of these too. So, in comparison, the $99/yr for the developer program is not a lot of money. It’s certainly comparable with other optional digital services. It’s less than a single restaurant lunch per month.

You can complain that it’s not right to charge for the program, purely out of principle, but I look at it as though the developer program has a cover charge to keep out the riff raff, and I don’t think this is a bad thing. We all know how much junk is in the App Store as it is, and how long it takes to get a review. Imagine if they didn’t charge for the opportunity to submit apps? How much quickly-abandoned junk would suddenly appear, and how long would it take for proper apps to get approved?

Apple and Privacy, So Far

This is good news. The whole incident raised a lot of privacy concerns. Apple’s track record and extrapolated trajectory remains good on this front. Having been a programmer through the 90’s, and watched Microsoft (and Oracle, et. al.) through their most malfeasant years, I’m very cautious about giving tech companies the benefit of the doubt. However, the fact that Apple is leaving something like hundreds of billions of dollars on the table by not monetizing their aggregated user data does seem to indicate that their will is strong here, and that “they” mean what “they” say about privacy. The kind of money they aren’t making from this move would try any mortal’s soul. It’s a good reason to watch them like a hawk, but, so far, so good.

Apple Removing SD Card Slots

A couple of friends installed flush-sized SD memory cards in their MacBook Air’s, which are used as hard drives by the OS, because they were running out of room on the internal drive. It occurs to me, well after the fact, that a non-trivial reason Apple removed those slots was to prevent this scenario, as upgrading to a larger hard drive is a primary reason to upgrade your laptop.

‘Wormable’ Flaw Leads July Microsoft Patches

Microsoft today released updates to plug a whopping 123 security holes in Windows and related software, including fixes for a critical, “wormable” flaw in Windows Server versions that Microsoft says is likely to be exploited soon. While this particular weakness mainly affects enterprises, July’s care package from Redmond has a little something for everyone. So…

Source: ‘Wormable’ Flaw Leads July Microsoft Patches

Every time I read a lede like this, I’m struck with the stark difference between Windows and macOS in terms of security posture. Apple releases patches for their operating system once every couple of months, and they contain a dozen or so patches. Microsoft releases hundreds of fixes every month. Sometimes multiple times a month. HUNDREDS! Every month!

Apples fixes are primarily about local privilege escalation. Microsoft? It seems like every patch note is for a “random interweb haxxor can pwn you”-type of problem. I’m sure I’m being overly generous with Apple, and completely unfair to Microsoft, but the difference in the general nature of the two kinds of problems is also starkly different.

The Microsoft fanboys will say that it’s because Windows is still the majority of the desktop market, but Microsoft has lost a lot of ground lately. macOS is around 15% of the market, making it a perfectly viable hacking target. So that can’t be the reason. I say it comes back to Windows having a DOS heritage, and macOS having a BSD heritage. The foundational assumptions these two systems were built on could not possibly be more different, and the ramifications of those differences are still present 30 years later. One is holding up very well. The other… isn’t.

I bring all of this up because the prevailing wisdom in Fortune 500 companies is that we 1) must run Windows, and 2) load it up with all sorts of first- and third-party software to A) “secure” the system, B) guarantee the integrity of the build, and C) lock it down as tightly as the internal staff can understand and manage. All of this approach is a holdover legacy from the 90’s, where we didn’t have much choice. What were we going to do? Run Linux? As much of a Linux zealot as I was — and continue to be — even I know that’s not workable. Now, it’s become a house of cards, with alternating layers of vulnerability mitigation and policy enforcement.

But macOS has matured. Almost all commercial software runs on it now. (The only things I know of that don’t are high-end CAD/FEA systems, but even AutoCAD does now.) And Apple has grown into a behemoth of a company, in terms of support capability. A truly staggering amount of money is being wasted in the Windows-ecosystem-based approach. It’s time for corporate America to stop — really stop — and think about the situation with a fresh set of assumptions. Do we really need to continue as we have for the past 25 years?

And maybe — just maybe — if we didn’t have to load up the corporate desktop image with layer after layer of software, trying to stem the flow of Windows’ suckage, my work laptop wouldn’t run its fans at full blast all the freaking time…

Twitter DMs of Obama, Musk and Biden Could Have Been Stolen in Hack, Experts Warn

“Absolutely, 100 percent that the DMs could have been compromised,” Jackie Singh, founder of Spyglass Security, told Newsweek. “I mean it looks like they had ‘god mode’ with seemingly few limitations and we don’t know how long they had it for.”

Source: Twitter DMs of Obama, Musk and Biden Could Have Been Stolen in Hack, Experts Warn

So Twitter has an internal backdoor system, which has been exploited by “the bad guys,” including access to people’s private messages. Since politicians are all over the platform, there are now national security concerns in play. Apple should bring this story up the next time the FBI/CIA/NSA demands that they implement a backdoor system that only “they” can use, in the name of the “war on terror.”