> and it's "better for the environment" because every year you don't buy a new phone, the environment is happy.
This seems wrong. I am still on an iPhone Xs Max from 2018 and it still gets software updates. It looks like the last software update on the G6 was in 2020. The lack of even security patches limits the life of the phone for many people.
The primary reason I'll eventually need to upgrade is because of 5G support. Coverage is getting worse as 3G has been shutdown and all new towers are focusing on 5G. My battery life sucks now too, but that can solved easily.
The older iPhones still hold resale value pretty well too, which means most iPhones have a second life as a "cheap" option. Combined with the software updates you mentioned, that's pretty good for the environment. The best case scenario is most iPhones get to be used by multiple people and new iPhones contain a lot of recycled material. That's not too far from reality.
The problem with tech is nothing is ever "good enough." Sure, you could make a phone that is durable for 10 years... but someone will invent new battery chemistry, CPUs will get considerably more powerful/efficient, and Sony will come along with even better camera sensors.
So it's really not possible for that high-end "old" phone to keep up after a few years. That's true for most consumer tech, even if the pace is slowing down somewhat. An expensive LED TV from 2013 will not compare favorably with a good value mid-range one today.
We can either stop innovating, which is also bad for the environment (technology improvements allow for vast efficiency and energy-use improvements in a huge range of products), or we can make sure things have a lot of re-use value. That can be done through the used market with good repairability and software support, and by making sure phones can be recycled and also use a lot of recycled materials.
People have been saying that the new iPhones are unimpressive/shit for years. Yet, compare an iPhone X to an iPhone 15 and the leap is clear. Incremental improvements are unimpressive, but do build up over time. You can only realize that by taking a pause and look back where you were 10 years ago.
I also still have an XS and don't plan on upgrading until updates stop. I thought it was this cycle, but apparently not. Supported until 2025. That's pretty reasonable!
I have an 8 plus and the only reason I'm gonna buy the 15 this year is because they're no longer supporting it. 6 years of support for a phone is pretty damn good.
> The lack of even security patches limits the life of the phone for many people
Maybe. (I'm not one of them, but ok.) But that doesn't have much to do with the environmental impact? It's still greener to keep phones longer, even if they don't get updates.
Not necessarily; I fired up some old devices last month, and the way their bitmap icons and apps and screens appeared, can only be defined as "Crips" and "Sharp". I'm not saying prettily or beneficially so! But they were definitely very stark and constrasty (let alone colourful and "stand-out-ish"!) holding them next to my modern phone or PC.
I don't think "Vector vs bitmap" is necessarily the cause - more of design sensibility. When I look at the lineup of google apps on my phone which all look EXACTLY the same (3 primary colours in random rotation; I can only effectively use / distinguish them if I memorize location of icon), and then the same as slack and my son's daycare app which also use swirls of same 3 primary colours; and when I compare my Windows desktop and icons and browsers to old apps - there's a definite brutal sharpness to old stuff.
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I used Grammarly in the past and I stopped because the privacy issues were concerning. I switched to https://www.antidote.info/en, which works entirely on-device, without sending your data to a cloud service. They now do offer a fairly minimal web application that can be used if you have their subscription, but they offer a one-time purchase for the desktop application.
Similar to Grammarly, the growing use of AI-based pair programming tools, like Github Copilot and similar, poses similar serious privacy risks. While the intelligent autocomplete is helpful, it uploads large parts (or all) of your source code; which most companies should be very concerned about.
Actually, SSO is usually a requirement for even basic security audits. So SSO is essentially required for companies operating in specific sectors, regardless of their size. Healthcare and military contracts are two obvious ones, but any company dealing with sensitive information, going through SOC compliance, or similar will likely need to enforce SSO to enforce and audit access policies.
Besides, SSO is a major convenience. Assuming that SSO = large company is a flawed perspective, although, I understand the reasoning you're conveying. I believe, however, that only very small companies (less than four people) can easily avoid SSO, because it is complicated to deal with on/off-boarding employees, SSO helps.
And I agree with OP in most regards, for most services, advanced security controls should be available. I think it is far more likely that most companies segregating their security features are not secure by design, so the functionality they're offering is poorly implemented, and by restricting access they limit the amount of support they need to provide to those features.
I don't know which security audits you're referring to. PCI doesn't require SSO for all SAAS apps. There's no standardized HIPAA/HITECH audit at all. SOC2 is probably the primary driver for SSO adoption, and even SOC2 doesn't actually require SSO (SSO is just the easiest way to meet a bunch of SOC2 security scope requirements). SOC2 is also the price-insensitivity threshold product managers are relying on for segmenting: most sane companies don't SOC2 until they're past product-market fit and are reliably closing sales (anybody who tells you to speculatively SOC2 before then is selling you something).
Again: it's obviously an inconvenience, or the sso.tax wouldn't be super annoying. I would of course prefer it if SSO were free everywhere.
This is another comment that makes insinuations about the competence of companies that tax SSO. But you can just look at the sso.tax site and see several companies with world-class security teams, so that argument doesn't work so well.
> There's no standardized HIPAA/HITECH audit at all.
HITRUST is the standardized audit for companies that care about HIPAA/HITECH, but your argument certainly holds there as well (everything you can say about SOC2 is just multiplied by an order of magnitude or two for HITRUST).
Do you really believe that these world-class security teams have the authority to influence this detail of the pricing models of their organizations, or the political naivete to fight this fight?
Ok this is a _fascinating_ comment. (thanks for the discussion as always by the way!)
Is there a link between the market for security engineering talent and the leverage that the security engineers have within their organizations? Are you seeing anecdotes play out in the industry that inspire hope that the balance of power in business decisions is shifting toward the engineers?
I don't think engineers automatically agree with you that organizations should pay less money for the services they're working on, is the issue here. It feels like a lot of people on this thread are convinced that Very Annoying Things are, per se, moral catastrophes. But they aren't. Services cost what they cost.
A literally equivalent way to look at the SSO tax is "the no SSO rebate". As a security engineer, I'm not prepared to launch a moral crusade over SMBs who don't adopt SSO on all their random SAAS apps; meanwhile, we're SSO on everything, and it costs us extra money, and that's life in the National Foosball League.
Since the whole point of the SSO tax is to segment out small companies from larger ones, mass adoption of single signon by small companies is a problem that will solve itself, as SSO stops being a good segmentation signal.
Are we talking past each other? It seems like we just disagree on when segmentation on SSO will no longer be prudent - I believe we’ve crossed that point, and you believe it’s in the future. Seems like we agree in substance though.
I don't think Thomas has an opinion on the "when". He's just saying it's being used that way. If it's being used that way, then it's still a good signal (in the markets where it is being used in that manner).
If it's actually true that we have crossed the point where it is no longer prudent for companies to segment their customers this way, then there are a whole lot of companies making unsound business decisions, and the problem will solve itself.
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Thank you. Everyone on this thread should read the original words instead of the pull quotes. I am a staunch progressive and am afraid to make my own comment on his words. We are living through a strange political moment.
If I understand what you're saying, you're setting aside the context that [the state of Israel exists and has a controversial military doctrine], and reading the Google guy's post as specifically targeted at people who share the Jewish faith?
if i understand what you’re saying, your setting aside the direct text from the article which targeted the jewish people and reading the google guys post as specifically being about israel?
The fact that he ends the essay with "If I were a Jew..." and not "If I were an Israeli..." makes it pretty clear to me which group he is referring to. Especially considering the author's other comments praising bigots like Louis Farrakhan
Though not every anti-Israeli is anti-Jewish, fact is, most ardent ones are anti-Jewish.
BTW. Anti-Jewish bigotry [ethnic Arab racism and/or religious Islamic intolerance] by Arab Muslim Goliath middle east against the 'other'... is the root cause of "conflict" at least since the Ottomans banned the FALASTIN periofical for racism in 1914. Then the hate mongering by ex Mufti al-Husseini (invertor of the cry 'itbakh al-Yahud' and years later the: 'Kill the J..s wherever they are") in the 1920s pogroms --especially against non-Zionist pious Jews, as in 1921 and 1929-- through his and Ahmad Shukeiri aiding Hitler in WW2. [Yes, that Shukairy who justified the Holocaust in 1946; in 1956 still said Palestine is nothing but southern Syria, first PLO chairman; has invented the apartheid slander in oct. 1961, infamous for his genocidal plans as in "none of them will survive," pre-1967].
____
"Jews Urge Arabs To Shun Bigotry..."
Wireless to THE NEW YORK TIMES.
July 18, 1930, Page 7:
'JERUSALEM, July 17.--Deep emotional feeling marked the Jewish representatives' final addresses before the League of Nations Wailing Wall commission today. In stirring terms the Jews appealed to the Moslems not to be influenced by religious bigotry but to seek a settlement of the present dispute as generously as possible.'
____
"Haj Amin el‐Husseini Dies; Ex‐Palestine Grand Mufti," The New York Times, July 5, 1974:
'In 1952 the Mufti explained ... This land, he pointed out, had belonged to the non‐Jewish peoples of Palestine ...'
____
Hamas senior jihadist in his interview to Sky News on May 24, 2021 openly said, the Jews don't "belong" there, as it is all Arab Muslim land:
'“You are not a citizen. We are the owner of this area – Arabic area. This is well known as an Islamic area.”…'
It's not a competition to get to the bottom of the oppression ladder, i can imagine nothing more dystopian then a chart ranking minorities with an "opression" score or something.
Thanks for linking that. It puts the issue in perspective. To be honest, I'm amazed that a blog post like that can make someone lose his job as a "head of diversity." Apparently, diversity at Google means that people should never voice critical opinions about the Israeli government, not even privately.
For me, the lesson to learn from this is that to never apply for a job in the US or for a job for a large US company. That's easy for me to say, though, since I'm working as a philosopher in academia and these are not wanted or needed in corporations anyway.
this isn’t just criticizing israel. this is criticizing all jewish people as being war hawking hypocrites unable to remember history who don’t care about anyone but themselves. it’s clearly antisemitic. and if he wanted to make this about israel it should have been phrased “if i were an israeli” which still isn’t accurate cause not everyone in israel suppported this
maybe the lesson is if you are going to make sweeping, negative, generalizations about a population you are probably going to look like an idiot. and especially if you feel the need to publish them to the world
While I wouldn't put it the same way he did, calling this "clearly antisemitic" goes way over board and is in my point of view unacceptable. Besides, albeit regrettable, it is common for Israelis to mix up their religion with political matters, too.
The kind of ferocity with which people reject other people's opinions and evaluate them to the highest possible moral standards once they disagree with them is a special kind of modern savagery. We're talking about a blog post this guy wrote ten years ago as a private person. Maybe he even changed his opinion or regrets the way he phrased it then?
This has been annoying for me. I build a healthcare EMR software, and the browser trying to autofill the employee's information into every patient field is often a problem. By accident we end up with patient's phone numbers, addresses, and emails being set to employee's information. Since its software, I don't have control over those employees, but we have had to put in recommendations to disable autofill in browsers being used to cut it down.
We've spent countless developer hours trying to work around password managers. I agree that sites shouldn't attempt to disable password management for login and sign up pages, but it's annoying how often these password managers do the wrong thing and break the user experience for pages… like Safari is doing for livewire-ui/spotlight.
I’ve made this error and will admit to being utterly baffled the first time I hit it.
As an administrator was trying to work though a users problem. But their account details all matches mine. It took an embarrassing amount of time for it to click.
I agree entirely. I've tried zsh and other replacements, but I keep coming back to Fish. It's intelligent, loaded with features, and ohmyfish adds a lot.
No other machine I connect to has fish, but for my own machines, it's my top choice. Still, I write a lot of utility scripts in bash for the compatibility and it can be annoying when I copy a command and I know it won't work because it uses some unsupported syntax in fish. Every now and then, and it is rare, I switch to bash locally to run something.
No one wants used products for "new" prices, but plenty of people would be willing to buy open-box items at discounted prices. It's a huge thing for appliances.
In most situations, however, things are simply repackaged and sold as new. Clothing, for example, is commonly returned; then hopefully re-washed before selling again as new. In most situations this applies to electronics as well, although electronics can be different. There are stories out there of people buying new SD cards that had photos on them. Most companies have a return center that processes returns, inspects them, resets them, and repackages them to be sold again as new.
Exceptions are when returns are sent to stores… like Amazon or Best Buy handle returns differently than returns going back to the manufacturer.
In the USA, "simply repackaged and sold as new" is illegal for all products, even if the first purchaser hadn't even opened the box. You have to sell it as "refurbished" or some such.
This seems wrong. I am still on an iPhone Xs Max from 2018 and it still gets software updates. It looks like the last software update on the G6 was in 2020. The lack of even security patches limits the life of the phone for many people.
The primary reason I'll eventually need to upgrade is because of 5G support. Coverage is getting worse as 3G has been shutdown and all new towers are focusing on 5G. My battery life sucks now too, but that can solved easily.