Apple effectively did the same thing with AirTags and turning everyone’s iOS device into a listening post for the Find My network, but there’s no uproar there.
There's a very real difference in that Apple's Find My is using Bluetooth LE and pinging a location/identifier string back to iCloud. Sidewalk literally takes over a slice of your Wifi and shares it with devices that aren't even in your home. Your neighbor's Ring cam could be permanently on your WiFi connection without your knowledge or consent. They should at least ask.
I don't think SideWalk is for high bandwidth audio/video communication. It uses LoRa for communication, which tops out at 27 kbps, and usually no where near that.
I'm expecting both systems transmit well under 50 MB/month. They use fundamentally alike premises. Find My also literally takes over a slice of your wifi & share info on gobs of devices it sees. That there is less user interaction with Find My does not make me- like it seems to make you- feel much better about the situation. But it also ought be a relatively negligible amount of throughput
Alas, as usual, these cloud-run devices seem to offer no visibility, no way to see or understand what devices we "own" are doing, gives us no grasp on how they are behaving.
In that sense, Find My takes "a slice of your Wifi" (or even mobile data) as well.
There isn't a qualitative difference between the two in my view (there might be a quantitative one – Sidewalk's data cap is 80 kbit/s or 500 MB per month; Apple isn't publishing this data, but I'd expect it to be lower, although not limited to wi-fi and also using battery power).
Your smart speaker connects to your wifi AP and acts as a node in the Sidewalk mesh network. Your neighbour's Ring device connects to your speaker through Sidewalk and uses it as an exit point. The good thing is that 900 MHz narrowband has a 400 ms on air time limitation.
The maximum bandwidth of a Sidewalk Bridge to the Sidewalk server is 80Kbps, which is about 1/40th of the bandwidth used to stream a typical high definition video. Today, when you share your Bridge’s connection with Sidewalk, total monthly data used by Sidewalk, per account, is capped at 500MB, which is equivalent to streaming about 10 minutes of high definition video
*Amazon Ring. If they don't have to ask to make the mesh in the first place, why will they ask for, use by themselves, permission to use their mesh to further entrench their business and cut out other competitors.
I think this comes down to an amount of perceived bad faith. Amazon’s goal, like Facebook and Google, is to collect as much as it can about everyone to sell more things. That makes anything like this feel nefarious.
Apple of course wants to sell you all the things, but they put privacy first, at least publicly, and don’t collect this information in order to do so.
How much is perception vs. reality? Not sure. But it doesn’t really matter.
You say that like it’s a bad thing (and if their business interests change, it will be) but I trust a corporation to follow its business interests much more than I trust one to act ideologically and to its own detriment. So for now, at least, that makes Apple’s privacy claims more credible.
Apple's marketing, which constantly gets shit on by tech professionals, does work. Those guys need a raise. Apple, Google & Amazon are equally invasive, all track usage in apps and websites on their devices, but Apple gets a free pass.
It honestly just strikes me as one gets way more favorable press coverage and everyone is swayed.
Apple makes the bulk of their money from devices, Google from selling your data. I don't see how you can't see the difference. Sure, Apple is not pure, but their ad revenue is like 1 billion dollars (out of 272), compared to 80% out of 196 for Google.
It's because Google and Facebook do much worse things, and Apple is shouting: "We don't do these (specific) terrible things!"
This is really an excellent marketing strategy. Ask anyone and they'll tell you that Facebook is trying to sell your data and Apple is a privacy-focused company.
- As far as I can tell, Apple still has extensive analytics about App Store usage, iOS usage. Google does too, but they aren't pretending Android is private, just private from anybody not called Google.
- That data is considered "first party" so Apple gets a massive exception when it comes to running targeted advertisements. iAd 2 could be just round the corner, and after crippling AdMob and FB it's highly likely it will be more profitable this time.
- Anything in iCloud (files, photos, text messages, browsing history) is accessible to law enforcement. Apple China keeps their encryption keys on the mainland.
They’re not the same, but I’m more curious how you managed to miss the pages of outraged comments here on every thread pertaining to AirTags (for extra fun you can also check the outrage in the thread where Apple announced they were giving higher quality music to subscribers for free).
Shit, this is a thread about Amazon and Apple are still getting flack somehow.
My understanding is that it is on by default if you use it. If you haven’t enabled Find My $device it is _not_ turned on by default.
Of course that isn’t much of a distinction since the vast majority of iPhone users will
have Find My Phone turned on and I believe are encouraged to turn Find My Phone on during device setup.
I stand corrected. Just turned off “Find My iPad” and the switch for “Find My network” disappears. So I guess it’s “opt-out of this if you’ve opted in to that”? Regardless you are right, thanks.
This is my understanding too, it isn't immediately clear so I understand the confusion but if you do not onboard your device into the network on setup, you won't be pinging other devices (like AirTags) via ULB Bluetooth
Anyone know if it is possible to use airtags without an iPhone? I am interested in getting general location information of a tag, say within a few hundred meters.
I’ve researched this for probably the same reason. The simple answer is „no“. As far as I know you can locate an AirTag through the Find My-App on a Mac, but you can’t add one to your account.
Retrieval of the data from Apple requires an iCloud account and the keys required to decrypt it is stored in the key storage of your iDevices.
By my knowledge it seems to be theoretically possible to use the network with no iDevice and a bunch of faking, but I think it hasn’t been done so far.
I am trusting more the apple than the amazon. Former is having privacy as key of brand image, so not in interest for to violate privatcy. I am also still not use the apple track tag but am understanding why there exist more trust for these.
WTF is with this Borat-level parody of "bad English"? That's not how people actually sound when English is their second language, and you didn't sound like that two months ago. What's with the act?
(Sorry, mods, for the unrelated thread. It's just so weird.)
Wow that is really interesting. This person was writing regular, fluent sounding English sentences and then around 73 days ago they switched over to writing like this. I agree, it's very strange.
Yep, this is the thing no one is talking about. Dallas has easily added 10k apartment units in the past 5 years. Almost all of them are all electric (no gas heating).
Considering it’s more energy efficient to cool with Air Conditioning on the hottest summer days than it is to heat with electricity in the winter, it’s no wonder the grid collapsed when the region was below freezing for several days and some generating capacity was lost.
Another thing worth noting: HEB is privately (family, I believe) owned. The difference is night and day between their stores/employees and those of the competing grocer in my area that is owned by private equity.
Which could explain the lack of interest in squeezing every bit of profit out of it. For them their name is literally on the business so being prepared to do the right thing is important to them.
Yes, sadly so. I worked as a vendor to a retail company. Every time I went to their office (which was attached to one of their facilities that held product) I had to undergo a bag check. I never had to do the bag check if I went to an office that wasn’t attached to a location with product in it.
I’ve been on Southwest flights so sparsely full (maybe 40 people on a plane with capacity for 120) where the flight attendants have to repeatedly tell people to “spread out for weight and balance.” That’s about as scientific as their calculation got.
Which is drastically different from my experience from flying a different carrier with a very empty plane. The original seat assignments had all of the passengers bunched together and the flight attendants denied anyone's request to move to empty rows until the plane reached altitude. They finally explained that the plane's load master stated that's where the weight needed to be during take-off/landing. Once they explained that, everyone complied without any further complaints.
Yes, when they made the announcement about making the descent on approach, they asked everyone to move back to the seats they were in on take off while return your tray and seat to their upright position
I just took a nearly empty southwest flight last week. The flight attendant asked me to move further back in the plane, and appeared to have an iPad or notepad she was using to track passenger count per zone. First time I’ve seen this system.
I have this feeling that 5G is more about cheaply deploying faster Internet (ie. comment about these things going up next to people’s bedrooms) versus a more expensive fiber deployment to the premises.
Having driven around Dallas and seen a few of these things in residential areas, I can say that yes they are ugly. Unlike a regular cell site, it doesn’t appear that there is any kind of permitting process around these deployments as they just pop up suddenly.
I’m all for progress, but there are ways to make utility infrastructure less noticeable to the urban landscape. Unfortunately with the approach I’m seeing with 5G deployments, the telecom companies will take the cheap way out.
That’s the problem with a lot of franchise agreements. So many things are set and specified for you that you have no room to optimize your business as an operator.
In a way, you’re almost just like an employee of the franchisor, but without any of the benefits and a lot more liability. But it’s a great relationship for the person selling the franchise.
Depending on the tax system, being able to structure yourself as a « business owner » can mean more money in your pocket than being a salaried manager.
AWS employee here--thoughts and opinions are my own.
Prior to AWS, I was in IT Operations at a large financial services company. I saw the writing on the wall that over time, companies would not want to manage this part of their IT infrastructure themselves. Keep in mind, I was someone who was responsible for keeping the lights on for a decent number of Linux severs.
For an individual company, there really isn't much value in having to maintain firmware levels on all your hardware, patch hypervisors (and try to coordinate all of the maintenance around a fixed pool of hardware), perform months-long evaluation of new hardware before purchasing, test and validate configurations on new hardware, etc. I used to do all of this. I don't miss it either.
Yes, the items above are important, but doing them right is really table-stakes for any reliable IT Operations department. You can choose to spend time getting these right, or delegate that responsibility to a service provider whose main job is to get that stuff right (and recoups that cost across a much larger customer base).
What seems to often go unsaid in these discussions is that the choice isn't between cloud and colo. There's a third, hugely popular and mature option: dedicated providers - which address all of your issues.
It's convenient for cloud vendors to have people believe the choice is between them or having to deal with hardware.
But isn't dedicated providers a subset of cloud providers? I can see how having a focused provider with a narrow mission might be beneficial in some cases, but I can't say it's that much of an advantage compared to the ecosystem & convenience of a cloud provider.
There are thousands (tens of thousands?). OVH is probably the biggest by server count. Softlayer arguably had the most potential (prior to its IBM acquisition). Hivelocity, ReliableSite, WebNX, Hetzner, LeaseWeb, Online.net, DataPacket, QuadraNet, PhoenixNap, ...
Yeah, I think the other factor that seems to be missed here is access to security patches for the hardware/frmware and OS. If you look at recent history with even the CPU attacks over the last few years Amazon and MS had access to the issue and vender workarounds months before even other large cloud players did. Digital ocean and other very large players were left holding the bag when the announcements were made with very short windows to get their systems up to speed. Consumer level onprem were waiting sometimes months for the patches/firmware and software to be available.
Not saying at all that is how it SHOULD BE, but if you are planning on pulling back to onprem (or colo) it should be a concern as it is a hard to mitigate risk.
correct me if i'm wrong, but I thought basically all recent exploits (including spectre/meltdown) were only really viable on shared hypervisors?
so while yes, there weren't any fixes for your onprem virtualizers -- there also wasn't any immediate danger as the attacker had to compromise one of your nodes before actually using these attack vectors...
What is missing from this discussion is level of control and tradeoffs.
First, having a full level of control can be desirable.
Second, you trade off maintaining firmware levels on hardware and software levels on hardware to managing the way cloud providers build networking and servers themselves (and the cost control as well).
Maintaining your own hardware and keeping it up to date really isn't as bad as people make it out to be. Its not hard to get right either, assuming you can hire any sort of decent system engineer.
