Dave

I thought this was a new Chuck Tingle novel.

I think so.

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.

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.

I will sleep well tonight.

Misleading headline: it has not yet passed. It passed both the house and senate, but has not been signed by Gavin Newsom.

Slow news day at Business Insider, I see.

I wrote a similar blog post recently, about magnetic tapes in minivans. https://www.humancode.us/2023/02/03/a-minivan-full-of-magnetic-tape.html