You do realize this is a very infantilizing attitude? Why can't the end user choose its own level of security vs usability? Letting a corporation decide this for all users is just creating a nanny state in different clothing.
I tend to agree with this, but if you look at the PC ecosystem, you'll see that 'leave users to figure out their own security' is a shit show.
Phones, for better or worse, contain much more private and personal information about users than their computer I would bet on average.
So I understand the urge to make phones more secure by default and to help users avoid foot guns, even if it means restricting their choices.
You are likely not the average user, and I think it's a bit selfish to demand total freedom, that you can manage safely, when for most users they would be worse off.
In a perfect world we wouldn't need this but we certainly don't have one of those.
> I understand the urge to make phones more secure by default and to help users avoid foot guns
There's secure by default, and then there's stuff users can't override even with great effort. Android restricts some dangerous operations by default and makes users jump through a couple hoops to acknowledge the risk. iOS usually forbids them entirely.
> I tend to agree with this, but if you look at the PC ecosystem, you'll see that 'leave users to figure out their own security' is a shit show.
I do not in fact see that. PCs work pretty damn well, security-wise, even with clueless users. I'll grant you it isn't as secure as phones, but it's by no means horrible.
Were you around for the first 10-15 years of the widespread consumer Internet?
I actually disagree with you that things are good, security-wise, today.. They are still pretty bad.
Back then was extremely bad.. Back then, Windows was never designed to be a networked operating system and was just full of security problems like you wouldn't believe.
The problem is that we're in a duopoly on the most important metaphorical ecosystem on the planet. If the market were competitive and efficient, I'd agree, but it isn't.
The upshot of this is that Apple can unfairly compete in all sorts of verticals just by owning that platform. A lot of companies could make a good Airpod competitor, but without access to the same functions as Apple's they're hamstrung. Watches have this problem even worse.
Say what you want about Microsoft at their zenith, you COULD compete with their browser, in fact, people did. You just can't with iOS. That's more important than some users having poor security. (And really, how are we going to worry about phone security when there's a system as stupid as passwordless social security numbers being the key to your financial life?)
The natural duopoly needs to be regulated such that it doesn't spill over into every tangential market.
Without that "shit show" you would never end up with devices like iPhones and useful software that drove last decades of innovation and progress.
The ability to build better things is the reason why you can now sit here, using technologies built on that "shit show" machine, and bloviate how new generations aren't allowed to build new things anymore because a megacorp needs to feed its greed.
It doesn’t follow that the past had to be a shit show for the future to not be a shit show.
In any case we are largely still learning when it comes to security and I don’t really want to make things less secure for the many just to satisfy the few.
While I agree with you (I daily a rooted Android phone), anyone who cleaned up a few Windows machines for non-technical people 20 years ago probably at least understands where Apple is coming from. The average person is really bad at system administration, and it doesn't take many bad actors creating malware and scams to have a big impact.
It's not really about system administration.
The average person is a low effort moron who will do whatever he pleases without thinking about the consequences.
The difference with computing is that since it's "new" and sometimes it has bugs, they will blame the hardware/OS any chance they get.
Have you done a lot of tech support for people?
If not, you really don't know the extent of it. It's not insulting, it's just how people are.
You should meet the guy who had a lot of issues on his MacBook Pro, related to low storage left (barely a few gigs) that was entirely due to his extremely large porn collection.
When asked about it, he doesn't have too many files. What do you do in that case? Isn't he a moron both for storing so much porn and at the same time (somehow) believing a tech support person wouldn't find the root of the problem. It was in a "hidden" folder, so not only he is a moron for the first offense, but doubly so for thinking a competent person wouldn't find something so obvious.
So, I reiterate, most people are morons, and technology just reveals their ineptitude in plain sight, it's simple as that.
You are free to believe in your idealized version of the world, but it doesn't match my experience at all.
Yes, I do. In fact I had someone visit my house literally today because she needed to fix her SMS setup for her phone and I have been her tech support for years (as I am for most of my family and their friends). The people I help are quite smart but they have better things to do than figure out exactly how technology works. I explain what they need to understand and they know they can always ask me when they are confused.
I actually think your example illustrates this: people use their computers for porn. There's nothing wrong with that. If it's so large that he has no space left, I mean that's a pretty actionable thing to tell him. He's not an idiot for not figuring it out himself. That he "hid" the folder from you–I mean, people hide things from professionals all the time. Nobody volunteers to their doctor that they wipe in the wrong direction and thus have chronic UTIs. It's your job to work around the reasonable things people do that make your work harder and bring them to "oh, that makes sense, thanks" perspective.
So you are telling me that someone who doesn't make the connection between low storage on their computers and their large porn collection which is the reason of this low storage causing issues is not an idiot.
They could have deleted their stach (or at least part of it) anytime to see if things would improve, which is how not moronic people work (you know, the try and see feedback loop of proper learning).
You are just of bad faith, pretending to be outraged about what I said even though it only describes the reality of the world. Your newfound religion is so bad that you find offensive something that doesn't even have any moral implication to it and is factual proven by so many statistics that it is not even worth arguing about.
If you what you mean is "not every computer user is a moron" you need to work on reading comprehension because that's not what I said. I stand by my original statement and you are somewhat proving me right.
That's unfair. Modern computers are extremely complicated to the point that even the most knowledgeable person has only a partial understanding, and nearly everyone is required to use them to function in western societies.
There's probably something important and complicated in the world you have to interact with regularly that you don't understand very well. Based on this comment, I think it might be people.
Modern computers are complicated to build and to use for complicated stuff but they have been extremely easy to use for regular stuff since the late 90s.
Pretending otherwise is nonsensical, since the richest economies in the world depend on it and surely not everyone is at a genius level.
There are some things important and complicated that I don't understand very well but they are not about basic operation of relatively simple things. It's like saying operating a washing machine or using a knife is something special.
And I do understand people very well; in fact, much more than I wish, by necessity. Your average person is frustratingly basic to the point of being extremely annoying on top of boring. I just choose to not pretend and "be nice" anymore, because it just hides reality and doesn't help anyone.
The fact that we have some people designing complex computers or sending people to the moon while others are barely able to cook a meal is largely a testament to that.
You might want to get rid of your ideologies if you believe what I said is controversial or wrong. Most people, by statistical definition, are idiots. Technology just reveals that fact very clearly, it's as simple as that.
Word. When my kids were pre-teens and teens I moved their computers onto Red Hat because I was tired of cleaning spyware off of it when it was a Wintel box. I moved my wife onto a Macbook Pro for the same reason, and she used to do user support for a community college back in the day.
Because with iMessage, it's not about your own security, it's about the security of everybody that you're allowed to message from a given device.
I suspect Apple can significantly cut down on abuse prevention measures just by making it harder to automatically send iMessage spam.
If any random Bluetooth smartwatch was allowed to send those, there's no telling how that capability could be abused, we all know how IoT vendors are with device security.
The adverse consequences are not limited to the end user that made that choice, and few people will subsequently admit culpability for the external consequences of poor choices. Which is to say, people are hypocrites. How surprising. Thus is the boundary of rational individualism identified.
Not all corporations make better choices, however, which motivates a regulatory role. Thus is civilisation identified.
Because the end user aren't computer scientists. End users should have NO capability in determining their own security, since they could LITERALLY BE infants playing with the iPad.
It is the responsibility of the systems designer to make sure the system is secure, not the end user.
And if you require instructions on how to secure your system, then you have already failed. A properly designed system is secure with zero knowledge.
Remember, it takes work to learn anything, and the goal of a tool is to reduce work, not to increase it.
Throw away customization. Throw away configuration. Both of those are bad design principles.
At some point you need to accept that there are sufficient hoops necessary to jump through to disable security that no one would accidentally do it. If you really think that security is so paramount that no level of compromise is acceptable, then
you should be outraged that devs can test their apps on their iPhones.
You should be up in arms at the existence of the App Store that lets you install software written by third parties.
You should be petitioning Apple to remove safari as what could be more insecure that downloading and running arbitrary code from a completely unknown website?
And you should be happy paying $1500 for a function-less, featureless, slab of Titanium with an Apple logo etched on the back, secure in the knowledge that it has no security vulnerabilities whatsoever.
You do understand that “make it work by default” and “customization” are not exclusive, right? you can definitively pick defaults and allow customization for those who want it.
You're right. This is a good reason to restrict this class of drugs. There is a finite usefulness, oh which each person who uses them consumes a tiny little bit.
You can't be serious, right? I don't even want to imagine how many people would accidentally kill themselves or at least seriously damage their health if that was the status quo.
Is that my job to prevent? If someone wants to do the most damaging things possible, to intentionally kill themselves, should I feel entitled to stop it?
People should be free to do stupid things, so long as they don't hurt others (the antibiotics example that another poster gave us a much stronger argument)
This sounds like a libertarian take, in the sense of "libertarians are like housecats - convinced of their own fierce independence but totally dependent on systems they neither control nor understand".
There are prescription drugs with side effects that cause real second-order societal problems (OxyCodone and related opioids are one the come to mind immediately). Amphetamines can cause psychotic behavior (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stimulant_psychosis for an accessible read). If the person using and abusing those drugs were isolated from others and couldn't harm them it would be one thing but they usually aren't.
