> The bigger news to me was that Apple blocked AirDrop in China - specifically to limit dissent and for preventing people from organizing [1]. A company that misses no chance to showcase its liberal credentials, bending over backwards for perhaps the most dictatorial government in the world to suppress the most basic of freedoms.
It's a private corporation, which are known for manufacturing sweet-smelling lies. I mean, a "new an improved" label on a package often literally means they're just giving you less product. If they'll be that blatant, there's no limit to how low they'll go.
Short-sighted Western economic policy has allowed China to grab companies like Apple by the balls, which means the Chinese government is the one Apple ultimately is accountable to (with varying amounts of smoke-and-mirrors to obscure it). Tim Cook knows who his boss is.
> By default, AirDrop is set to allow incoming connection requests from Contacts Only, but that setting can be changed to Everyone–popular among protesters and teens alike. Starting with iOS 16.1.1, users in China will find that the “Everyone” option has changed to “Everyone for 10 minutes.” Apple won’t admit why this change is being made in China, but the peer-to-peer nature of AirDrop has made it popular for spreading anti-government protest material, and hopping into your settings every 10 minutes to re-enable the ability to receive AirDrop from strangers makes it a lot less useful for that.
Framing an action that thwarts censorship circumvention as preventing "spam and abuse" is exactly the kind of sweet-smelling lie I was talking about.
It's a private corporation, which are known for manufacturing sweet-smelling lies. I mean, a "new an improved" label on a package often literally means they're just giving you less product. If they'll be that blatant, there's no limit to how low they'll go.
Short-sighted Western economic policy has allowed China to grab companies like Apple by the balls, which means the Chinese government is the one Apple ultimately is accountable to (with varying amounts of smoke-and-mirrors to obscure it). Tim Cook knows who his boss is.