I carry around a separate Fiio DAC and headphone amplifier with battery in it for listening to music.
You wanna talk about a company that is NOTHING but HYPE, that's Fiio.
I almost peed my pants from laughing while reading the sales brochure for the X5 Gen II. OMFG the utter bullshit!
First off, you simply can't design something that runs off batteries that has a power supply impedance low enough and grounding and shielding good enough to do a 24 bit DAC justice. And since pretty much ALL digital music is 16 bit, there is only SO much dithering can do with those other 8 bits. Sure you can hunt down a FEW 24 bit downloads; but (unfortunately) they simply are few and far between; so your 24 bit DAC, like lossless encoding formats, is simply assinine on a portable music player or phone.
Well, the IAP2 chip and license is about a buck, and then you'd need a DAC and amp. It's around $4-$5 minimum to do Lightning to powered analog for the electrical. Add the packaging required (either an on-cable box, or a separate box) and battery and you're up to close to $10 for the Lightning-to-highend headphone adapter. So figure $40-$50 MSRP. Not an insignificant amount!
I assume you're building these by hand in the U.S. out of off-the-shelf parts from TI or someone similar. I submit that, at scale, these could be manufactured in some faraway land for $2 to $3, landed cost. That puts them in the $20-30 retail world, even with insane margins. Just like nearly every other Apple adapter. They'll build the whole thing into the Lightning connector body, and have a short cable with the 3.5mm jack at the other end.
Apple has always been a parody. Except for maybe a breif period in 1983 with the Apple 2, and again in 2007-2009 when the iPhone was leading product of its type, but other than that, Apple products have been mostly stupid and gimmicky.
First off, the Apple ][ pretty much supported Apple from 1977 through 1992, and there wasn't a school from K through University in the U.S. that didn't have several dozen to several hundred of them. During the same time, at least up through the mid '80s, it was relatively rare to see a Wintel PC in a school. The terms Stupid or gimmicky has never been applied to the Apple ][ series.
Then we have the Macs, starting in 1984. I'm not sure what metrics you use to determine "Stupidity" or "Gimmicky-ness" (maybe if a computer doesn't come in a beige steel box, eh?); but Macs have been every bit as "Serious" of computers since at least the advent of the Macintosh II in 1987. Actually, the "toaster" Macs were pretty serious, too, compressing 80% of the software and hardware technology of the $10,000 Lisa (the computer so far ahead of its time that almost no one could understand it) into a cube 1/4 the size of the Lisa, and for nearly 1/10 the price. True, the Mac was SUPPOSED to be a Laptop (a "Dynabook", actually); but what they did was still pretty neat, compared with the competition of the time.
Fast-forward to the present: Apple makes the best laptops, as opined by, well, most everyone, and does a pretty damned good job at their other product lines as well.
Curiously enough, though: The one thing that they have NEVER done is make a beige steel box. The PowerMac 9500/9600 are about as close as they got to that; but even those weren't just generic Wintel PCs.
That's two components, at least one of which is based on licensed block designs from ARM, who could simply stop licensing them for future use and BAM, no more A series chips can be made. Go on thinking Apple invented everything in the iPhone, really, go ahead, don't let those pesky facts get in the way. Don't get me wrong, I've got a number of apple products and I do love them, but i don't bullshit myself about what Apple actually does as a company. The AC you replied to is absolutely correct.
Actually, Apple has a "Soft Core" ARM license that actually lets them design their own CPUs (and they do), rather than just licensing IP from ARM. Being a founding member in ARM doesn't hurt, either. There are a few other companies that have such a license (Samsung and Qualcomm being two of them, IIRC); but Apple actually does design A-series chips from the CPU-on out.
This would mean a DAC, headphone amp, and batteries in every headphone.
So, IOW, a single, fairly simple ARM microcontroller to negotiate the Lightning protocol and do the D/A conversion, likely sub-dollar at Apple's quantities, with possibly a 5 cent amplifier chip and a few passive components. No batteries, since Lightning has power pins. The most expensive thing would be the connector.
Apple could sell it at $20 and still make a handy profit.
If you're talking about bluetooth, I am less sure what would be required; but yes, that would obviously require batteries and a bit more guts to deal with the RF stuff.
...digital audio to the speaker is the future, and then it might as well be wireless.
I've wanted that for the past 25 years. No reason that it can't happen.
Most subwoofers are "powered"; why not the "main" speakers? LOTS of nice things can happen when speakers and amplifiers are "matched". For one thing, passive crossovers (which are responsible for a LOT of bad things in a LOT of speaker systems) become a thing of the past. Another is "tuning" the amplifier's response to "flatten" the system. For another, A/V Receivers stop having to be behemoths, and can actually start being modular control systems, where consumers can easily choose their particular needs for number and type of audio in/outs, virtual tape/processing loops, EQ "plugins", etc. In fact, your entire A/V control system can become an App, with faceless boxes that do your bidding, and can distribute the signals to wherever. Yes, they have these things to some extent already; but to really do it right still costs quite a bit, and is really fairly limited.
I disagree to some extent on the wireless part for phase-coherence reasons; but I suppose the same signal that can carry the audio information can also carry a syncronization/timestamp so that samples are presented for conversion at the "same" time. And wireless SURE makes doing surround-sound setups easier in a LOT of homes (including my own).
yep, I have a headset with a 2.5mm connector that includes stereo and microphone channels. I use it with a breakout splitter to separate 3.5mm jacks nowadays. But that kind of stuff is too cheap... I buy handfuls of earbuds for my kids' devices from Daiso, and they're happy with them. There's no way for big companies to make money off them anymore.
But this is fine, unbalanced analog signal wires suck. It's about time for Bluetooth audio to finally catch on or something, despite the annoyances.
You obviously don't understand what Balanced audio lines are for. Balanced (differential) audio inputs are GREAT for the teeny-tiny signals from microphones, especially when they are carried long distances (like from a stage to a soundboard a hundred feet away). But they are essentially useless when talking about "line-level" (or above) signals. And when you are talking about speaker outputs, at the current levels that are sent to headphones/earbuds, the amount of possible intermodulation distortion reduction that could possibly be gained could be much easier accomplished by simply making headphone cables a little thicker than a human hair.
There's a reason that NO headphones, even high-end ones, have EVER had "balanced" inputs (except perhaps the speaker-powered electrostats): It just isn't necessary.
Executive summary: It's a regular connector, with one side flattened so that it's slightly thinner. Means you have to insert the plug the right way around, which is a terrible idea. My vote: They won't do it. But then, I thought they wouldn't get rid of the magsafe connectors, and they have. In their defence, magsafe connectors are rather prone to dirt on the contacts preventing them from working
Since when have they gotten rid of Magsafe connectors (except on the low-end MacBook). The most recent refresh of the MacBook Pro which just happened about a month ago, sports a Magsafe 2 Connector.
"After all, why can't they just redesign the audio socket so it's a couple of millimeters thinner?"
They probably can but then, what would you call an object 1.5mm width and ending on a point? That's a connector no more but a needle. And a needle has two problems: it's fragile and it can hurt. Not such a wise decision for a connector.
Back when we used to call them 1/8" phone plugs, there was another standard (usually only 2 conductors, but could easily be modified for 3 or even 4) that was about 1/2 the diameter of what we now call a 3.5mm plug. They were very common as the "pause" control on old cassette recorders.
So, since a smaller diameter barrel means a smaller diameter socket, why can't Apple just adopt that connector, then it would be a simple adapter (or headphones/earbuds manufactured with that connector already) to allow for a slimmer phone/tablet?
Developers making money is not a problem. Companies selling their computing infrastructure products with inscrutable software is.
LOL! Let me ask you: Just how far are you going to move those goalposts?
There is NOTHING "inscrutable" about pf. Not only is it a standard FreeBSD package, but Apple also provides ample documentation of the pf.conf file. This is, IIRC, all of the typical documentation that any "computing infrastructure product" is provided with in Linux, right?
Apple just chose to only expose some of the many capabilities of pf, most of which the vast majority of users wouldn't have an interest in, in their standard GUI for pf.conf.
Nothing "inscrutable" here. Just the typical design decisions when a GUI is overlaid on a sophisticated OS, whether we're talking about OS X, Windows or Linux. And you very well know that; so do the Internets a favor and STFU.
Because I hadn't run across the free one when I wrote the first post. And if you notice, the same guy is actually responsible for both projects.
And I wasn't "shilling", FFS.
And in case you hadn't noticed, it really ISN'T a fucking crime to want to make a little cash offa your development efforts. $10 probably works out to about.000013 cents per hour for him. Yeah, he's the next Bill Gates! You would think that a site frequented by so many alleged Developers would have more members that understood that; even the ones that strongly support, and/or contribute, to F/OSS.
Let me ask you a question: Do you have a job, Mr. Labowski?
if you define "everything" as your Spotlight searches. And as you point out, it's very easy to opt out.
The real annoyance I have with Apple and OS X is that unlike MS, unless you have a Time Machine backup there is pretty much no way to easily step back to the systems prior state after an upgrade... unless you re-install the prior release and lose all applications and settings you had up to that point.
Which is EXACTLY what happens in Windows when you use a System Restore Point. And as you say, they "Sometimes work"; in my experience, about 25 percent of the time.
...and now the Windows.old folder ( that worked for me at least ) that you can back out the Win10 "upgrade" from.
LOL! Talk about damning with faint praise! Even Microsoft knows that Windows 10 is SO shitty that they HAVE to give you a way out!
Here's a thought: Howabout not changing 80% of the UI in one version-change? Howabout not building an OS that bends over backwards to soy on you at every single turn?
Compared to that, OS X is a model of good User Interface design (I.e, there are FAR more similarities between the 1984 version of MacOS and El Capitan than there are between Windows 7 and 8), and Apple is the bastion of liberty (easily-defeatable Spotlight Suggestions vs. a SECRET list of 100 URLs that your every KEYSTROKE and MOUSE-CLICK get sent to).
That $10 application is simply a GUI front end for OS X's built-in Firewall. Apple just doesn't provide a GUI for configuring OUTGOING filtering. That's what the $10 product is for. It simply provides a GUI frontend for the more advanced features of OS X's "PF" (Personal Firewall). It's all in there; but no GUI for the Outgoing stuff. But that shouldn't be a problem for a Linux guy like you. You could simply use OS X's command-line to configure the outgoing filtering, as I said in my original post...;-)
I believe you'll find Siri collects similar data if you want full functionality.
This is true; but Apple anonymizes the data. But yes, be careful with any voice-recognition on any platform.
Here's some answers to what is collected, how it is used, how your identity is protected, and when it is deleted.
Hell, I *also* seem to recall a post from the other day that mentioned that if you didn't pay for the music service that you couldn't search for music - I don't know how valid that is, some subscription thingy for the Apple Music Store or whatever they called it.)
Of course that's ludicrous. How could people find things to BUY on the iTunes store if they couldn't SEARCH? I expect more critical thinking from the likes of you... I think what you are thinking of is that there was a bug in the first version of iTunes that supported Apple Music that messed with some people's music collections depending on whether they were using "iTunes Match", but that was quickly fixed.;-)
I'm off in Linux-land so I'm not terribly concerned
And yet you seem compelled to respond to nearly every post I make concerning Apple...
But, again, they [Windows Users] did consent to being tracked. They might not like that they did. They might not have been smart enough to read the EULA and understand it. But, they certainly gave consent either explicit or implied.
And yet you curiously didn't point out that "defense" when it came time for you to point fingers at Siri and iTunes; both of which contained EULAs, too...
Anyway, have a great Thanksgiving; and I look forward to our next sparring-match, LOL!
So MacOS "does the same thing" but doesn't exactly "do the same thing". There's a BIG difference between blowing something away entirely and just moving it off to the side.
If anything, it looks like Apple took the arrogance level down a notch or two.
I'm glad you could figure out what "chmod" was talking about. I thought he was talking about OS X Spying on you, like Windows 10.
And for those that would complain that OS X's built-in firewall (pf, which has now completely replaced ipfw) doesn't block OUTGOING traffic, apparently it can; but Apple has not made that available in the GUI. So, here's a nearly-free ($10) GUI manager for Apple's Firewall, that DOES support Outgoing controls, and is fully compatible with El Capitan. Full disclosure: I haven't tried this yet; but I think I will. BTW, if you're well-versed in the OS X Command-Line, you can do all this for free. But remember, you will likely have to defeat SIP on OS X 10.10 and above to write to/etc.
But all this stands in stark contrast to Windows 10, Spyware Edition, that produces a veritable flood of information back to the mothership, and which is relatively difficult to defeat, and even harder to keep defeated.
even without the gross violations of user privacy and attempts to entirely take over a user's computer.. windows 10 is still the biggest piece of shit to ever come out of redmond.. and we're talking about the company that released bob into the wild.... it's *that fucking bad*
Wow! And I thought that the OS X El Capitan Upgrade was bad! But at least they FIXED most of their issues within a month or so. (And they never DID have all that W10 Spyware crap)
Honestly not trolling here; but I hope that my work W7 laptop continues to run until the sun goes out.
I can only wonder how many times Terrorist IT has asked someone "Have you tried turning it on and off again?"
Ok, now try pressing the button again...
[Loud sound, then Line goes dead]
Thank you for calling ISIL Technical Support. Have a good day. If you would like to participate in a survey of your experience today, please stay on the line
What is being danced around here is the fact that, messages that are encrypted are almost assuredly already given a higher "score" in the SIGINT world than non-encrypted messages.
That is likely one of the reasons the Terrists in Paris used UNENCRYPTED SMS to communicate. So the "signal" gets lost in the "noise" of a gazillion other SMS messages-per-second, instead of creating a "Sore Thumb" by being "encrypted".
And it is a foregone conclusion that another staple of SIGINT, the "connections" and frequency-of-communications between one known bad guy and others is often as important, and sometimes even more important, as knowing the CONTENTS of the messages themselves. And that kind of "signal" is much harder to eliminate.
If bad guy "A" communicates with bad guy "B", who then communicates with bad guys "C", "D" and "E", who then communicates with unknown guys "F" through "AA", even without knowing the contents of those communications, we have gathered enough intelligence to start actually surveilling some or all of those people, which WILL, in short order, reveal what is being planned, and by whom.
So, if we outlaw all "cipher-based" encryption, the real baddies will simply build "codes" that ARE cleartext, and APPEAR to be innocent "what's up? Wanna do lunch?"-LOOKING messages; but are in fact, messages of a far more nefarious sort. And so in the end, the terrists continue to have the jump on law enforcement, and all of us regular citizens lose the ability to have private, encrypted communications with business partners, friends and family, or just because we don't particularly like writing our emails on postcards.
In other news law enforcement magically found multiple cells of terrorists in the aftermath of the Paris shootings. Yet they could not find these three suspects before they committed mayhem in the city? The government sat on intelligence hoping to be led to bigger fish instead of arresting the Paris shooters. I do not believe a damn thing the government says or the media reports. While Obama and Hollande twiddled their thumbs at least Putin struck back decisively against ISIS/ISIL in Syria.
This. This. A THOUSAND times This!
Meanwhile, we get "treated" to more and more Security Theater.
If the gummints would aggressively go after each and every of the credible leads they OBVIOUSLY have, the life of the Terrist on the ground would be seen as less and less "glamorous", and sooner, rather than later, the likes of ISIS/ISIL would start having "attrition" numbers, and lack of new recruits, that would start putting a severe damper on their plans for world domination.
And no, I don't believe that the "Martyr Effect" would work in their favor.
Slashdot Mirror
I carry around a separate Fiio DAC and headphone amplifier with battery in it for listening to music.
You wanna talk about a company that is NOTHING but HYPE, that's Fiio.
I almost peed my pants from laughing while reading the sales brochure for the X5 Gen II. OMFG the utter bullshit!
First off, you simply can't design something that runs off batteries that has a power supply impedance low enough and grounding and shielding good enough to do a 24 bit DAC justice. And since pretty much ALL digital music is 16 bit, there is only SO much dithering can do with those other 8 bits. Sure you can hunt down a FEW 24 bit downloads; but (unfortunately) they simply are few and far between; so your 24 bit DAC, like lossless encoding formats, is simply assinine on a portable music player or phone.
Well, the IAP2 chip and license is about a buck, and then you'd need a DAC and amp. It's around $4-$5 minimum to do Lightning to powered analog for the electrical. Add the packaging required (either an on-cable box, or a separate box) and battery and you're up to close to $10 for the Lightning-to-highend headphone adapter. So figure $40-$50 MSRP. Not an insignificant amount!
I assume you're building these by hand in the U.S. out of off-the-shelf parts from TI or someone similar. I submit that, at scale, these could be manufactured in some faraway land for $2 to $3, landed cost. That puts them in the $20-30 retail world, even with insane margins. Just like nearly every other Apple adapter. They'll build the whole thing into the Lightning connector body, and have a short cable with the 3.5mm jack at the other end.
Apple has always been a parody. Except for maybe a breif period in 1983 with the Apple 2, and again in 2007-2009 when the iPhone was leading product of its type, but other than that, Apple products have been mostly stupid and gimmicky.
First off, the Apple ][ pretty much supported Apple from 1977 through 1992, and there wasn't a school from K through University in the U.S. that didn't have several dozen to several hundred of them. During the same time, at least up through the mid '80s, it was relatively rare to see a Wintel PC in a school. The terms Stupid or gimmicky has never been applied to the Apple ][ series.
Then we have the Macs, starting in 1984. I'm not sure what metrics you use to determine "Stupidity" or "Gimmicky-ness" (maybe if a computer doesn't come in a beige steel box, eh?); but Macs have been every bit as "Serious" of computers since at least the advent of the Macintosh II in 1987. Actually, the "toaster" Macs were pretty serious, too, compressing 80% of the software and hardware technology of the $10,000 Lisa (the computer so far ahead of its time that almost no one could understand it) into a cube 1/4 the size of the Lisa, and for nearly 1/10 the price. True, the Mac was SUPPOSED to be a Laptop (a "Dynabook", actually); but what they did was still pretty neat, compared with the competition of the time.
Fast-forward to the present: Apple makes the best laptops, as opined by, well, most everyone, and does a pretty damned good job at their other product lines as well.
Curiously enough, though: The one thing that they have NEVER done is make a beige steel box. The PowerMac 9500/9600 are about as close as they got to that; but even those weren't just generic Wintel PCs.
That's two components, at least one of which is based on licensed block designs from ARM, who could simply stop licensing them for future use and BAM, no more A series chips can be made. Go on thinking Apple invented everything in the iPhone, really, go ahead, don't let those pesky facts get in the way. Don't get me wrong, I've got a number of apple products and I do love them, but i don't bullshit myself about what Apple actually does as a company. The AC you replied to is absolutely correct.
Actually, Apple has a "Soft Core" ARM license that actually lets them design their own CPUs (and they do), rather than just licensing IP from ARM. Being a founding member in ARM doesn't hurt, either. There are a few other companies that have such a license (Samsung and Qualcomm being two of them, IIRC); but Apple actually does design A-series chips from the CPU-on out.
This would mean a DAC, headphone amp, and batteries in every headphone.
So, IOW, a single, fairly simple ARM microcontroller to negotiate the Lightning protocol and do the D/A conversion, likely sub-dollar at Apple's quantities, with possibly a 5 cent amplifier chip and a few passive components. No batteries, since Lightning has power pins. The most expensive thing would be the connector.
Apple could sell it at $20 and still make a handy profit.
If you're talking about bluetooth, I am less sure what would be required; but yes, that would obviously require batteries and a bit more guts to deal with the RF stuff.
...digital audio to the speaker is the future, and then it might as well be wireless.
I've wanted that for the past 25 years. No reason that it can't happen.
Most subwoofers are "powered"; why not the "main" speakers? LOTS of nice things can happen when speakers and amplifiers are "matched". For one thing, passive crossovers (which are responsible for a LOT of bad things in a LOT of speaker systems) become a thing of the past. Another is "tuning" the amplifier's response to "flatten" the system. For another, A/V Receivers stop having to be behemoths, and can actually start being modular control systems, where consumers can easily choose their particular needs for number and type of audio in/outs, virtual tape/processing loops, EQ "plugins", etc. In fact, your entire A/V control system can become an App, with faceless boxes that do your bidding, and can distribute the signals to wherever. Yes, they have these things to some extent already; but to really do it right still costs quite a bit, and is really fairly limited.
I disagree to some extent on the wireless part for phase-coherence reasons; but I suppose the same signal that can carry the audio information can also carry a syncronization/timestamp so that samples are presented for conversion at the "same" time. And wireless SURE makes doing surround-sound setups easier in a LOT of homes (including my own).
As with virtually any apple device, there will be a $75 piece manufactured for 85 cents that will be a lightning to headphone jack connection.
As with the other lightning connectors, if you plug it into your mac it will crash when it wakes on sleep.
Excuse me. How do you plug a Lightning connector into a Mac? Are you talking about trying to plug one into a Thunderbolt socket?
yep, I have a headset with a 2.5mm connector that includes stereo and microphone channels. I use it with a breakout splitter to separate 3.5mm jacks nowadays. But that kind of stuff is too cheap... I buy handfuls of earbuds for my kids' devices from Daiso, and they're happy with them. There's no way for big companies to make money off them anymore.
But this is fine, unbalanced analog signal wires suck. It's about time for Bluetooth audio to finally catch on or something, despite the annoyances.
You obviously don't understand what Balanced audio lines are for. Balanced (differential) audio inputs are GREAT for the teeny-tiny signals from microphones, especially when they are carried long distances (like from a stage to a soundboard a hundred feet away). But they are essentially useless when talking about "line-level" (or above) signals. And when you are talking about speaker outputs, at the current levels that are sent to headphones/earbuds, the amount of possible intermodulation distortion reduction that could possibly be gained could be much easier accomplished by simply making headphone cables a little thicker than a human hair.
There's a reason that NO headphones, even high-end ones, have EVER had "balanced" inputs (except perhaps the speaker-powered electrostats): It just isn't necessary.
Grrr
Clickable link for the lazy
Executive summary: It's a regular connector, with one side flattened so that it's slightly thinner. Means you have to insert the plug the right way around, which is a terrible idea. My vote: They won't do it. But then, I thought they wouldn't get rid of the magsafe connectors, and they have. In their defence, magsafe connectors are rather prone to dirt on the contacts preventing them from working
Since when have they gotten rid of Magsafe connectors (except on the low-end MacBook). The most recent refresh of the MacBook Pro which just happened about a month ago, sports a Magsafe 2 Connector.
"After all, why can't they just redesign the audio socket so it's a couple of millimeters thinner?"
They probably can but then, what would you call an object 1.5mm width and ending on a point? That's a connector no more but a needle. And a needle has two problems: it's fragile and it can hurt. Not such a wise decision for a connector.
Back when we used to call them 1/8" phone plugs, there was another standard (usually only 2 conductors, but could easily be modified for 3 or even 4) that was about 1/2 the diameter of what we now call a 3.5mm plug. They were very common as the "pause" control on old cassette recorders.
So, since a smaller diameter barrel means a smaller diameter socket, why can't Apple just adopt that connector, then it would be a simple adapter (or headphones/earbuds manufactured with that connector already) to allow for a slimmer phone/tablet?
Developers making money is not a problem. Companies selling their computing infrastructure products with inscrutable software is.
There is NOTHING "inscrutable" about pf.
1. I didn't say pf is inscrutable. 2. pf is not the only software shipped on computing infrastructure products sold by some companies.
You just want to argue. Go away.
Developers making money is not a problem. Companies selling their computing infrastructure products with inscrutable software is.
LOL! Let me ask you: Just how far are you going to move those goalposts?
There is NOTHING "inscrutable" about pf. Not only is it a standard FreeBSD package, but Apple also provides ample documentation of the pf.conf file. This is, IIRC, all of the typical documentation that any "computing infrastructure product" is provided with in Linux, right? Apple just chose to only expose some of the many capabilities of pf, most of which the vast majority of users wouldn't have an interest in, in their standard GUI for pf.conf.
Nothing "inscrutable" here. Just the typical design decisions when a GUI is overlaid on a sophisticated OS, whether we're talking about OS X, Windows or Linux. And you very well know that; so do the Internets a favor and STFU.
Why were you shilling for the $10 one then?
Because I hadn't run across the free one when I wrote the first post. And if you notice, the same guy is actually responsible for both projects.
.000013 cents per hour for him. Yeah, he's the next Bill Gates! You would think that a site frequented by so many alleged Developers would have more members that understood that; even the ones that strongly support, and/or contribute, to F/OSS.
And I wasn't "shilling", FFS.
And in case you hadn't noticed, it really ISN'T a fucking crime to want to make a little cash offa your development efforts. $10 probably works out to about
Let me ask you a question: Do you have a job, Mr. Labowski?
Sorry to Reply to my own post; but it seems like there is a free, open source GUI for Outgoing traffic using pf.
So I guess that means that OS X is ready for prime time now, eh?
No free (not to mention open source for credibility) GUI for outgoing firewall? OSX is not ready for prime time.
Android and Fedora Linux (other flavors too) both have had free and open source firewall GUI for years.
There was one for ipfw, but not for the outgoing rules for pf.
Everything gets sent to Apple servers
if you define "everything" as your Spotlight searches. And as you point out, it's very easy to opt out.
The real annoyance I have with Apple and OS X is that unlike MS, unless you have a Time Machine backup there is pretty much no way to easily step back to the systems prior state after an upgrade... unless you re-install the prior release and lose all applications and settings you had up to that point.
Which is EXACTLY what happens in Windows when you use a System Restore Point. And as you say, they "Sometimes work"; in my experience, about 25 percent of the time.
...and now the Windows.old folder ( that worked for me at least ) that you can back out the Win10 "upgrade" from.
LOL! Talk about damning with faint praise! Even Microsoft knows that Windows 10 is SO shitty that they HAVE to give you a way out!
Here's a thought: Howabout not changing 80% of the UI in one version-change? Howabout not building an OS that bends over backwards to soy on you at every single turn?
Compared to that, OS X is a model of good User Interface design (I.e, there are FAR more similarities between the 1984 version of MacOS and El Capitan than there are between Windows 7 and 8), and Apple is the bastion of liberty (easily-defeatable Spotlight Suggestions vs. a SECRET list of 100 URLs that your every KEYSTROKE and MOUSE-CLICK get sent to).
You don't have a decent free firewall for OS X?
That $10 application is simply a GUI front end for OS X's built-in Firewall. Apple just doesn't provide a GUI for configuring OUTGOING filtering. That's what the $10 product is for. It simply provides a GUI frontend for the more advanced features of OS X's "PF" (Personal Firewall). It's all in there; but no GUI for the Outgoing stuff. But that shouldn't be a problem for a Linux guy like you. You could simply use OS X's command-line to configure the outgoing filtering, as I said in my original post... ;-)
I believe you'll find Siri collects similar data if you want full functionality.
This is true; but Apple anonymizes the data. But yes, be careful with any voice-recognition on any platform.
Here's some answers to what is collected, how it is used, how your identity is protected, and when it is deleted.
Hell, I *also* seem to recall a post from the other day that mentioned that if you didn't pay for the music service that you couldn't search for music - I don't know how valid that is, some subscription thingy for the Apple Music Store or whatever they called it.)
Of course that's ludicrous. How could people find things to BUY on the iTunes store if they couldn't SEARCH? I expect more critical thinking from the likes of you... I think what you are thinking of is that there was a bug in the first version of iTunes that supported Apple Music that messed with some people's music collections depending on whether they were using "iTunes Match", but that was quickly fixed. ;-)
I'm off in Linux-land so I'm not terribly concerned
And yet you seem compelled to respond to nearly every post I make concerning Apple...
But, again, they [Windows Users] did consent to being tracked. They might not like that they did. They might not have been smart enough to read the EULA and understand it. But, they certainly gave consent either explicit or implied.
And yet you curiously didn't point out that "defense" when it came time for you to point fingers at Siri and iTunes; both of which contained EULAs, too...
Anyway, have a great Thanksgiving; and I look forward to our next sparring-match, LOL!
So MacOS "does the same thing" but doesn't exactly "do the same thing". There's a BIG difference between blowing something away entirely and just moving it off to the side.
If anything, it looks like Apple took the arrogance level down a notch or two.
I'm glad you could figure out what "chmod" was talking about. I thought he was talking about OS X Spying on you, like Windows 10.
By the way, what WAS he talking about?
And yet OS X does the same thing that is being complained about here.
If you're talking about Spying; you're dead wrong. Apple has realized that Privacy is a "brand differentiator", and so has avoided the baked-in Spyware trend completely on both OS X and iOS. This is one of the biggest reasons why Mac sales are up globally 16% Year over Year.
And we primarily have Microsoft (and Windows 10) to thank for that.
Prove me wrong, or STFU.
Just like every other OS is heading or is already there? Always connected to the internet and always listening and watching what you are doing.
Speak for yourself. OS X doesn't do that crap. And the little that it does do they tell you about and is easily disabled.
/etc.
And for those that would complain that OS X's built-in firewall (pf, which has now completely replaced ipfw) doesn't block OUTGOING traffic, apparently it can; but Apple has not made that available in the GUI. So, here's a nearly-free ($10) GUI manager for Apple's Firewall, that DOES support Outgoing controls, and is fully compatible with El Capitan. Full disclosure: I haven't tried this yet; but I think I will. BTW, if you're well-versed in the OS X Command-Line, you can do all this for free. But remember, you will likely have to defeat SIP on OS X 10.10 and above to write to
But all this stands in stark contrast to Windows 10, Spyware Edition, that produces a veritable flood of information back to the mothership, and which is relatively difficult to defeat, and even harder to keep defeated.
even without the gross violations of user privacy and attempts to entirely take over a user's computer.. windows 10 is still the biggest piece of shit to ever come out of redmond.. and we're talking about the company that released bob into the wild.... it's *that fucking bad*
Wow! And I thought that the OS X El Capitan Upgrade was bad! But at least they FIXED most of their issues within a month or so. (And they never DID have all that W10 Spyware crap)
Honestly not trolling here; but I hope that my work W7 laptop continues to run until the sun goes out.
Capitalism is basically the systematic harnessing of greed for social good. It has some flaws, but it's less bad than anything else we've tried.
And what else have we tried in the U.S.?
I can only wonder how many times Terrorist IT has asked someone "Have you tried turning it on and off again?"
Ok, now try pressing the button again...
[Loud sound, then Line goes dead]
Thank you for calling ISIL Technical Support. Have a good day. If you would like to participate in a survey of your experience today, please stay on the line
Hello?
They hung up.
What is being danced around here is the fact that, messages that are encrypted are almost assuredly already given a higher "score" in the SIGINT world than non-encrypted messages.
That is likely one of the reasons the Terrists in Paris used UNENCRYPTED SMS to communicate. So the "signal" gets lost in the "noise" of a gazillion other SMS messages-per-second, instead of creating a "Sore Thumb" by being "encrypted".
And it is a foregone conclusion that another staple of SIGINT, the "connections" and frequency-of-communications between one known bad guy and others is often as important, and sometimes even more important, as knowing the CONTENTS of the messages themselves. And that kind of "signal" is much harder to eliminate.
If bad guy "A" communicates with bad guy "B", who then communicates with bad guys "C", "D" and "E", who then communicates with unknown guys "F" through "AA", even without knowing the contents of those communications, we have gathered enough intelligence to start actually surveilling some or all of those people, which WILL, in short order, reveal what is being planned, and by whom.
So, if we outlaw all "cipher-based" encryption, the real baddies will simply build "codes" that ARE cleartext, and APPEAR to be innocent "what's up? Wanna do lunch?"-LOOKING messages; but are in fact, messages of a far more nefarious sort. And so in the end, the terrists continue to have the jump on law enforcement, and all of us regular citizens lose the ability to have private, encrypted communications with business partners, friends and family, or just because we don't particularly like writing our emails on postcards.
In other news law enforcement magically found multiple cells of terrorists in the aftermath of the Paris shootings. Yet they could not find these three suspects before they committed mayhem in the city? The government sat on intelligence hoping to be led to bigger fish instead of arresting the Paris shooters. I do not believe a damn thing the government says or the media reports. While Obama and Hollande twiddled their thumbs at least Putin struck back decisively against ISIS/ISIL in Syria.
This. This. A THOUSAND times This!
Meanwhile, we get "treated" to more and more Security Theater.
If the gummints would aggressively go after each and every of the credible leads they OBVIOUSLY have, the life of the Terrist on the ground would be seen as less and less "glamorous", and sooner, rather than later, the likes of ISIS/ISIL would start having "attrition" numbers, and lack of new recruits, that would start putting a severe damper on their plans for world domination.
And no, I don't believe that the "Martyr Effect" would work in their favor.