I’m sad PGP didn’t become a popular way to log into websites. A challenge-response protocol could have even been built into web browsers. Big tech is reinventing that idea as Passkey, but with a very big tech flavor.

I missed that part. Thanks for the correction.

Looking at the court’s opinion (PDF), it appears this case did not raise that issue. I think it’s unlikely it would be considered a bill of attainder because what it does is technically not punishment, but that’s a question for people who know more about law than I do.

Very likely, but I’d be surprised if they couldn’t achieve 80% of that on the web. Targeted surveillance, as they’ve been caught doing to critics before would not work as well.

This is correct, but the law doesn’t do that. It mentions TikTok in the title, but the text describes what is banned in terms of user count and control by a foreign adversary. It would apply to a future product made by a Russian company, for example.

No, but I imagine they can still run profitable ads, and probably more effectively than most websites.

I’m really surprised they’re not pushing the web version, which can operate in a way not covered by this ban.

Most of them[1] know a whole lot more about constitutional law than the average lemming.

When things are working correctly, the Supreme Court’s role is usually not very concerned with the facts of the case; its role is to resolve questions of law. Congress considered the facts including some classified briefings, decided that American app stores should be forbidden from distributing TikTok to American users, and made a law. The court was asked whether Congress has the authority to make laws like that, and the court decided that it does.

[1] Maybe not Clarence Thomas

I’m surprised they’re taking that approach rather than pushing the web version.

So can installing a faulty third-party cooling fan, but in the USA, the law requires the warranty provider to prove the fault was caused by improper maintenance or defects in third-party components.

In most situations, even that is giving too much power to the manufacturer. It’s fair for them to flash the original software as part of any diagnostic or service process, but not fair to refuse to repair or replace a product that actually has a hardware defect just because the owner put different software on it.

Agreed. Microsoft proposed something along those lines under the name “Palladium” a couple decades ago and was widely criticized, even in the mainstream press. Apple and Google doing the same thing to our phones barely got a whimper.

Locked in the technical sense of being able to verify the operating system isn’t a bad thing. The problem is when the device owner can’t add signing keys of their choice.

The latter is what GrapheneOS does.

It’s more likely that a fork becomes dominant, making him irrelevant. That’s almost the same thing.

I do review flashlights.

I did not say that they’re not important. I said that they’re hosted services, which traditionally don’t have the same expectation of user control as computers that users own.

It’s fine that he has an opinion. It’s even fine that he’s a fanboy, but important for people evaluating what he says about Apple to know that he has a decades long record of being barely more neutral than the company’s PR department.

By time spent, the iPhone is probably used for media consumption more than anything else, but media consumption is not just entertainment.

A guy who nearly always defends Apple’s controversial decisions. It’s probably not reasonable to treat him as neutral or fair in a dispute between Apple and any other entity.

What’s really rich about Meta and Zuckerberg’s incessant complaining about being restricted by Apple’s rules for third party software on Apple’s platforms is that Meta doesn’t allow third parties any sort of access to their successful platforms.

This is a bit of a false equivalency; “Apple’s” successful platform is a general-purpose computing device owned by the user while Meta’s are hosted services.

These traditionally have different expectations, with game consoles being the exception. Occulus devices seem more like game consoles to me, while iPhones are closer to general-purpose computers with a few weird restrictions. I don’t like either, but I see game consoles as less problematic because their use case isn’t important.