My experience with Android One phones from Xiaomi is that they have no bloat when they are released (probably because they have to have no bloat for them to be certified by Google) but then they keep sneaking bloat with every little update they make.
There is nothing wrong with being sexist. Reality is sexist. She is only successful because she's an attractive female. And there's nothing wrong with that. Not everybody is equal.
I don't believe this can be ever solved. I think the best thing that can be done is wait 1-2 generations; by then nobody will believe anything they see in the media or in social networks.
> I think the best thing that can be done is wait 1-2 generations; by then nobody will believe anything they see in the media or in social networks.
That's not the best thing, that's the worst thing. The goal of disinformation campaigns is to make people so distrustful and confused that the adversary's social cohesion is compromised to the point where they become disorganized and less able to respond to threats.
>Local digital-rights activists like Artem Kozlyuk are worried, saying that these apps could “secretly collect information: location, tools and services being used and so on”.
Technically impossible.
>The apps can be deleted, but only if users know to do that
Like any other app.
>and there are suspicions that they might leave behind backdoors into users’ phones after they are gone.
Technically impossible.
I can't read the rest of the article. What are the apps about?
It's only technically impossible if the system software and/or hardware can't be compromised/exploited.
If you are just going by the intent and marketing of any platform vendor, plenty of things are technically impossible. But exploits and flaws in software and hardware exist, and the resources a nation state can bring to bear to find and use them are significant.
There is a reason vendors run bug bounty programmes, why the jailbreak scene is still a thing, and cybercrime in general is booming.
I know someone would come up with this argument. But Apple and the community will be looking at those apps closely. Even if they managed to slip an exploit into them, it wouldn't last long.
How are those technical impossibilities? They're all essentially what Snowden says the NSA has been doing. It's a perfectly logical concern of a country demanding apps to be installed. Hell, it's been a problem with the Facebook app getting information people didn't realize it was capable of collecting.
I'm afraid there aren't many details in the rest of the article. Just scare-scare-scare. "The world’s biggest company" (is Apple the biggest? I thought it's smaller than Google, but never checked) vs "an autocrat with nuclear weapons". You know who to root for :-)
Anyway, full text of the article below:
====
Who will win the tussle between Apple, the world’s biggest company, and Vladimir Putin, an autocrat with nuclear weapons? On December 2nd Russia’s president signed a controversial law that will prohibit the sale within Russia of devices that do not come pre-loaded with locally produced applications. The legislation, which will come into force next July, has been dubbed the “law against Apple”, as it disproportionately affects the tech giant, known for its insistence on keeping tight control of the apps it allows on its devices.
The law’s sponsors have described it as a way to protect Russian internet companies, as well as to help elderly citizens who may find smartphones difficult to use, though it is not yet known which Russia-made apps will have to be installed. Local digital-rights activists like Artem Kozlyuk are worried, saying that these apps could “secretly collect information: location, tools and services being used and so on”. The apps can be deleted, but only if users know to do that—and there are suspicions that they might leave behind backdoors into users’ phones after they are gone.
The legislation follows another recent law promoting a “sovereign internet”; from November 1st the government has awarded itself the power to sever the Russian internet (known as the “RuNet”) from the rest of the globe. This is worrying for many local internet activists and experts, even though there are doubts that current network infrastructure could support it. Even before that, in the name of data protection, websites that refuse to build data servers on Russian territory, including LinkedIn, have been blocked. And this week the Russian authorities alarmed techies by raiding the Moscow offices of Nginx, an American-owned web-server company in dispute with a Russian one. The Apple showdown may be intended as a lesson to other giants, particularly Google (which owns YouTube) and Facebook; these companies present grave challenges to the Kremlin’s monopoly on information.
Apple officials may think the Russian market too small to be worth the policy change, but the company has recently proved willing to make another controversial concession. Starting in late November, Apple’s maps and weather apps, when used inside Russia, have denoted the Crimean peninsula, Ukrainian territory illegally annexed by Russia in 2014, as Russian. Even when used outside Russia, the weather app shows Crimean cities without (unusually) stating which country they are in, while Apple maps introduces a mysterious dotted line dividing the peninsula from the rest of Ukraine.
Apple may have offered this olive branch in the hope of smoothing relations with Moscow, but its actions have contributed to a growing sense of insecurity in Ukraine, where the foreign minister, Vadym Prystaiko, has accused Apple of “not giving a damn” about his country. A spokeswoman for Apple says that it is “taking a deeper look at how we handle disputed borders”. But a group of European parliamentarians has lodged a formal complaint and damage has already been done to the company’s reputation.
Unlike Facebook and Google, Apple had mostly avoided political scandal until now. It has six months to decide whether or not to quit the Russian market. The world, and Ukraine, will be watching to see if it caves in to the Kremlin’s demands.
This is like the Cambridge Analytica scandal: people allowed 3rd party apps to access their data and then they complain when, eh, they had their data.
Solution? Facebook closed the API. And now people complain that Facebook is a silo and they hold onto your data and they don't allow 3rd party apps to access it.
That’s an oversimplification. The Facebook API had a gaping hole in it that allowed third party apps to access data on the authorized user AND friends.
Facebook discovers these kind of issues on a regular basis. The idea that they’ve clamped down on this type of thing is the joke of 2019.
Facebook could have restricted 3rd party access to only those applications that had given permission, or provided a way to manually export it so users would become familiar with a process they should probably know anyway.
FileCoin is a blockchain and is the incentivization layer on top of IPFS that allows users to rent hard drive space. It is intrinsically connected with IPFS.
The parent comment is still accurate. IPFS isn't a blockchain and shouldn't be dismissed for this use case, which is more or less what it was designed for.
Filecoin is just for incentives, but IPFS has been running for years without it.
>“If I may dare to ask those who initiated the amendment of the Fudan University charter, how do you expect our generation of Fudan people to face our ancestors?” said one Weibo user.
