So Apple is publishing an audit of Apple private closed source components and declared them totally private... trust us bro.
I have absolutely 0 reasons to believe Apple Private Cloud is not a data extraction mechanism for the gullible. Unless I can manually inspect the source, or at least run the binaries on my own hardware that I can firewall and inspect the network traffic, I'm absolutely confident Apple steals all the data to build better ad targeting models, or to sell to the highest bidder.
Because... they want to corner that market opportunity themselves at the system level? I doubt it'd be anything less given LG (and other smart TV manufacturers)'s track record.
Tangentially related to Device ID: Apple is significantly worse when it comes to machine identifiers; even with Autopilot enabled you can still install Linux on a Microsoft Surface device (or even Windows if you don't use a Microsoft Account). With MDM locks, Apple devices are literally bricks (especially since all ram and storage is soldered down and locked/paired to the secure enclave chip).
> The court record itself says a reinstall produces a new GDID
That's a half truth if I ever saw one. Telemetry also includes the hardware hash (which does use SMBIOS serial number, CPUID, TPM identifiers, etc.) and that one survives OS reinstalls and even hardware swaps. It is the underlying id used for things like Autopilot (the equivalent to Apple's remote MDM lock).
Individual firms can cut jobs while the overall economy sees more of that job pop up. That’s what happens when individuals become more efficient, new projects become more economical and more companies end up requiring these jobs.
Sure, but it's basically a very thin wrapper on the built-in RichEdit control, with some added menus and niceties.
Don't get me wrong, it's hundreds of times better than whatever UWP abomination they call Notepad in Windows 11 nowadays (with logins and AI features), but it's not an actual text viewer / editor from scratch.
I think the original notepad.exe was just a Win32 Edit control (whatever it was called) with a window and some menus. I expect that Apple's TextEdit.app is just a wrapper around the rich text control in Cocoa, too.
But yes, it's hardly writing a text editor to write a Win32 app in assembly. (Although, if they used the COM control and did that in hand-written assembly, that would at least be an impressively tedious mortification of the flesh.)
Kind of weird for both of those things to be true. I thought the latter was mostly the former. But I’ve been away from Windows for a loooooong time it seems.
Holy dystopian shit, you might be right. This might just be their new favorite answer when people ask what are all the jobless humans to do after the AI takeover? This... live in squalor, hooked up to VR headsets and doing menial work remotely for the oligarch class, while the AI learns the last few non-automated tasks from them. It's a theme I've seen in many movies over the years.
Alex Rivera's 2008 movie Sleep Dealer is not without flaws, but it left quite an impression on me. I watched it it after seeing it recommended here in a comments thread on an article about military drone operators, I should probably watch it again with fresh eyes.
EDIT: Jeez, it looks like that's an 11 years old thread. Time does indeed fly.
EDIT 2: The source for the claim is paywalled, but this is how the Cultural impact chapter of the movie's Wikipedia page closes:
> In 2025, Rivera noted that a tech CEO claimed the film had been an inspiration for his company to employ a remote labour force in the Global South in order to operate robots in the Global North, and that the film has been used in pitch decks for various start-ups.
... once again bringing to mind the "At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus" meme.
That's an ever-dwindling section of the population. Middle class and upper middle class is going away, we're very clearly heading towards ultra-polarization.
For some reason I always get pushback for pointing it out, but we are very quickly heading towards a bifurcated world like Elysium, possibly minus the space station, where a tiny ultra-rich class lives in luxury while physically separated and protected from billions who live in squalor. We're producing everything needed to build and enforce that world!
How is it worse compared with workers that are currently employed by the oligarch class? It's not like they don't have people doing menial work for them right now. And automation of menial work is a good thing!
Do you think the current AI automated menial work and left only the fun parts? It seems like the opposite, it took any fun from coding and left the drudgery of debugging code one didn't write intact.
Or maybe it can be used to provide job opportunities to people currently underserved, for example, if you are bound to a hospital bed you can get a VR telepresence job to make some money and help pay your medical bills.
We're doomed if regular people have fully absorbed the propaganda to the extent that they'd think asking invalid hospital-bed-ridden people to work remotely for the uber-rich rather than fixing the tax situation so that those uber-rich can buy one less golden toilet for their private planes (and the state can provide for those poor people) is a good idea.
The math doesn't math. You could tax all the ultra rich people at 100% and it wouldn't significantly change the social contract. The part people don't like hearing is that it's a lot of the middle class that has to pay much higher taxes if you want those guarantees of minimum living standards.
If you assume your taxation mechanism is actually perfect and actually gets you the theoretical maximum amount of money from the ultra rich, or even the fairly rich, it's still orders of magnitude less than it costs to make sure everyone is taken care of like the scenario we were talking about above.
I think that's a very different goal post. We were talking about the social contract, publicly funded services. You must realize it's just not a meaningful amount, right? That was my initial point. If you want a real safety net, you have to tax the middle class, and a lot.
That's not really how that works. Almost all of that money is tied up in operating businesses. Most very rich people mostly hold investments in stock - and generally at large companies. That's debt, not an asset I think the way you're thinking of. Overall, taking that money out of market holdings reduces the value of those holdings, for everyone else as well. You really end up lowering the retirement savings value of everyone who has a retirement plan by some amount.
Teens will just pass around micro SD cards full of memes, warez, and porn, like kids did in the old days with floppy disks. Finding creative ways around restrictions is pretty much the definition of being a teenager.
I have absolutely 0 reasons to believe Apple Private Cloud is not a data extraction mechanism for the gullible. Unless I can manually inspect the source, or at least run the binaries on my own hardware that I can firewall and inspect the network traffic, I'm absolutely confident Apple steals all the data to build better ad targeting models, or to sell to the highest bidder.
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