> Maybe grandpas and grandmas should get a different phone then, like a Doro

They did, they got an iPhone.

> my mother has been scammed by legitimate App Store apps that have charged extra-fees just because they could.

Did it empty her bank balance by abusing the private NFC payment APIs that Apple are being ordered to open up?

Did it cryptolock all her files?

Did it activate the camera and mic to spy on her for blackmail?

These are things that we need to worry about with random things we download on desktop these days. It's not 2007 any more, I have an entire spare computer for untrusted software.

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tekkk 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I don't want to get into politics but dont you think it's funny when you can purchase assault rifles, made for killing people, yet we are so afraid of having the poor individuals in control of their own phones. Or farming equipment - the list seems to keep growing.

It's just corporate propaganda that all hell would break loose, you could just offer installing baby mode at Apple physical store that can only be removed at said places. Yeah some people would still climb the fence and touch the power lines but look, can we save them all? Should we? In this world of merciless exploitation, wouldnt it be just fair we stopped pretending it never was about anything else but money?

	▲	ben_w 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> I don't want to get into politics but dont you think it's funny when you can purchase assault rifles, made for killing people I'm British by birth, living in Berlin. We definitely think Americans are a bit "funny", in the not-at-all-funny sense of the word, about guns. > It's just corporate propaganda that all hell would break loose, you could just offer installing baby mode at Apple physical store that can only be removed at said places. Thing is, with computers, we've had decades of watching malware infect, destroy, corrupt, ransom, and blackmail. It's still happening, even. And we even have a way to get past "baby mode" restrictions: be a developer. But guess what? Developers also face supply chain attacks, because malware is everywhere. I do miss the olden days when I didn't need to care. A mac online in 2009 was worry-free.

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ohdeargodno 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

>Did it empty her bank balance by abusing the private NFC payment APIs that Apple are being ordered to open up?

NFC payment APIs have been open on Android for decades and no such thing of the sort has ever happened. You cannot magically conjure up a payment from Apple Pay to <X> without user involvement and confirmation.

>Did it cryptolock all her files?

Apps do not have write access to all your files.

>Did it activate the camera and mic to spy on her for blackmail?

Every mobile device now has a giant notification saying that the device is using the microphone or recording video.

The disingenuous "having an open app store/not being locked in the walled garden is a security risk" is getting tiring, especially when it's basically all lies now. Unless your argument is that Apple is too incompetent to write APIs properly, in which case I wonder why you think that said APIs being private would prevent anything.

	▲	ben_w 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		> NFC payment APIs have been open on Android for decades and no such thing of the sort has ever happened. Google is also getting legal action for monopoly abuse of their app store, so what's possible today on Android is not sufficient to say what's safe or not. Despite this, they're also already facing legal action for sharing too much data from Google Wallet. Fail on all directions at the same time. > Apps do not have write access to all your files. > Every mobile device now has a giant notification saying that the device is using the microphone or recording video. And this can't be circumvented ever, even when private APIs are no longer vetted? And none of the voices describing downloads warnings as "scare screens" aren't making the same demand on this? > The disingenuous "having an open app store/not being locked in the walled garden is a security risk" is getting tiring, especially when it's basically all lies now. Unless your argument is that Apple is too incompetent to write APIs properly, in which case I wonder why you think that said APIs being private would prevent anything. The disingenuous "force platforms to be open, there's no security risk" position was tiring decades ago when the iPhone was brand new, especially when it was obviously lies even then. Apple obviously isn't magically competent enough to write APIs properly, they had "goto fail" and all the jailbreaks we've seen in so many versions of iOS were specifically some random doc that users could install that included a way to escalate privileges, and even without that evidence we've also got access to the black market prices for zero-day exploits that for a long time showed they're cheaper than Android, and the obvious reason why this prevents "anything" is that "anything" is a massive subset of "everything".