Jon Skeet? He’s my hero, but he hasn’t worked at MS for quite some time I believe.

Yeah everyone talks about how cheap android phones are for the specs, but specs aren’t important if your device doesn’t even work. The market is too fragmented, and that is where Apple’s iron fisted approach shines. You will have the same experience on every iPhone, and you don’t have to worry about manufacturer, service provider, or anyone putting software on it that the average user can’t remove.

I’m not gonna pretend iPhones are perfect. They have their own issues, and I’ve recently learned that setting up parental controls requires a second Apple device (I’m certainly not going to intentional have children, so this doesn’t affect me, but it’s messed up), which definitely seems like it should be illegal. I have never had an iPhone die on me, however.

I switched to iPhone around the time honeycomb came out. I switched from Windows Mobile 6.5 on an HTC shadow that I adored. When the Google g1 came out, I switched to it immediately. It was amazing and I was so excited about the better experience than winmo.

I went through about 6 or 7 android phones over the next few years. HTC, Samsung, Motorola (the Cliq, it was fine until I was stuck on cupcake and everyone else had eclair).

I had two galaxy s 2s die in the same year. I’ve never broken a phone physically. I had an htc espresso (i really liked hardware keyboard at the time) that got capped at froyo. I naturally installed CyanogenMod on it so I could get my that sweet sweet Gingerbread animated wallpaper functionality. Then the keyboard died. By that point I could type on a touch screen fine. Nbd. Then the power button died.

Obviously my warranty wasn’t honored, as I had changed the software, despite my phone being less than a year old, and having had a hardware failure. I couldn’t reflash it because the power button didn’t work.

These aren’t even all of the failures I had. I eventually decided to go iPhone, and I’ve NEVER had an issue. I have kept my iPhones for a minimum of 3 years.

Price? I got the iPhone 15 pro for $170 (free and clear, not that rented bullshit) when I traded in my 3 year old iPhone. I’m not stupid. I’m not illiterate. I just would like my phone every now and then. I don’t use it for all the crazy shit other people do. It’s a gps with texting and sometimes calling/Lemmy usage. It works amazingly.

I’m sure Android is much better now. But why switch when what I have works and is honestly cheap. I could get a new one every two years for free if I didn’t want to own my phone. But Apple bad so I must be brain washed.

C++++ because I see sharp.

I’m a literal wizard. I spend hours writing in an esoteric language known only by those who study it in order to bend the world to my will and make things happen as I wish it.

The structure of my magic spells determine what the outcomes will be, and things can get really strange if you mess up the syntax.

A lot of services now accept physical security keys for logging in. These keys use FIDO similar to how a phone-based passkey works. You just plug the dude in and then you are good to go.

Obviously not every company works with these just yet, but a lot of major companies do. Honestly most of the big tech companies support them.

GitHub and Bitwarden are the two I’m immediately thinking of, but that’s likely because I just used my passkey for those lol.

It’s way more secure than SMS MFA, and I prefer it to a phone app because I don’t have to look at then enter a code while hoping the time doesn’t run out for that code, forcing me to wait for a new one.

That doesn’t change the claim that the vending machine is GDPR compliant, though.

First party software. I buy Nintendo consoles for their ip, not their power. My desktop is where I do most of my gaming, but I have an attachment to Zelda games that I don’t think will ever go away. I still have my official prima guide for links awakening dx. I have a map on the wall of twilight princess’s over world.

I don’t even like the switch for portability because it feels bulky and uncomfortable. But connected to the dock, I can forget that it’s supposed to be portable and enjoy my Zelda games. My wife also likes animal crossing, and I got her to play her first Zelda and Pokémon games in the last year, and those were games that shaped my childhood.

So I guess my answer is shared experiences and nostalgia.

Yeah I remember that story about those kids killing an entire school with their smartphone.

That’s definitely not a flash equivalency at all.

Remember when video games were making kids kill each other? Because when I was a kid, that’s what people were trying to ban instead of smartphones.

Yeah I do t use it for anything other than messages on my phone. I think the new ui is a huge improvement personally.

I actually like it lol. I guess I’m in the super minority.

Couldn’t the same be said about the TOS updates though? Would they not need to prove it was delivered?

My dad works at Nintendo!

The public key doesn’t decrypt the information. The public key is used only for encryption. The private key is what is used for the decryption. Since the private key is on-device, there’s no way to get access to the decryption. It’s actually a bit more complicated than I wanted to go into for an already ridiculously long comment, but I’ll explain a bit more here.

With a hard drive, you have one key. This kind of encryption is called symmetric encryption. It uses a single private key, and that key can be used to decrypt at any time.

E2E encryption uses what is called asymmetric encryption. The key used to encrypt the information is actually the recipients public key. This is where some information is exposed to Apple (or anybody else who uses a directory lookup to find a public key). That lookup tells Apple who and how often you are messaging. This they will absolutely give to law enforcement with a warrant. It doesn’t tell a lot, but it does give information about your correspondence.

Once the information is encrypted, the matching private key is the only thing that can decrypt the content. This also places a vulnerability because if somebody sends a different public key, now the message is decryptable by the bad actor.

So because of the two key system, the private key for each individual is inaccessible to anyone except the individual. It’s actually a really cool concept. This is how HTTPS functions as well. TLS (it’s just the cryptographic protocol HTTPS uses) creates a secure connection using asymmetric encryption. The information it sends then uses symmetric encryption.

I’m a developer, and not an information security expert, so some of this may not be completely accurate, but it should be accurate for the most part. If you’re interested at all I would definitely suggest looking into it because I think it’s super neat.

Of course if you have any more questions I’m willing to talk as well.

Honestly the biggest reason was that college kids are more likely to buy the accidental damage warranty or have parents that will.

-doesn’t agree with/like what somebody else says: immediately jump to insults.

Come on. Let’s not insult people because we don’t like what they say. We can do better. We should do better. If people just got along with others who are different or have different interests, the whole world would be a better place.

Genuinely, I am asking you to reevaluate how you respond, and maybe just try to be a little nicer to others. It costs nothing and makes the world a little bit better every time.

I used to work at Microcenter for awhile. The best time to buy was always back to school. Holiday deals start at the beginning of November and are the exact same as Black Friday minus a few small door buster deals and maybe a special on a few models of pc. During back to school, pretty much everything is heavily discounted.

Yeah as the previous commenter said, e2e encryption just doesn’t allow anyone to access the data but the owner of the keys. E2E is prized because of this. There are two keys: public and private. If you and I are both using iMessage, you send a message to me that is encrypted on your device using your private key, and sent to my device using my public key. Only you and I can ever see those messages unless someone gets access to one of our phones.

Now, iCloud is backed up to apples servers. If you have iMessage backup enabled, it’s possible, and maybe even likely tbh, that Apple has access to recent messages. iMessage is also (potentially, but again in this case, I’d argue likely) susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks. Because you need my public key for our communication to be decrypted, if you receive some else’s public key instead, they now have your messages and I don’t.

The DEA and FBI have both had documents leaked mentioning they can’t track or trace or unencrypt iMessage. The same is true for WhatsApp or any e2e messaging service.

Again, this is all contingent on not using iCloud backup. If you use iCloud backup, then the encryption keys used can be accessed with the proper authority. I assume (but haven’t looked into it) that Google is the same. If you don’t backup your e2e encrypted content, it cannot be decrypted without the private key only you have access to. Of course iCloud backup is enabled by default, so for the vast majority of Apple users, their messages and information are all available anyway so none of this matters.

In addition, iMessage uses a directory lookup to find the correct public key for your recipient. This information Apple does keep (I am unsure how long). What this means is that law enforcement (with a warrant) can see who and how often you are messaging. That alone is information we really don’t want people having.

So the moral is: if you don’t use backups for e2e encrypted communication, your content cannot be read externally. It’s just the way cryptography works.

This doesn’t mean that companies do not share information with law enforcement. There is a lot of unencrypted information Apple, Google, et al will share with government agencies when a warrant or subpoena is served. In addition to that, your phone provider will share information with them. In addition to that any SMS or MMS messages sent from any device will lack encryption and be easily discoverable.

Tl;dr: e2e encryption is secure, as long as you follow best practices and have an idea of how encryption works.

Yeah software is definitely more complex. But modern languages are easier and have more syntactic sugar. And being a junior dev is mostly boiler plating or copy and pasting. A lot of devs don’t even get into the real complicated stuff. I’m a mediocre dev with no degree and I’m constantly surprised at the terminology people who’ve been doing for years don’t understand.

He’ll, kids shows have been essentially advertising platforms for decades. Shows and movies exist to sell toys and make profits.