Computers

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Safari in iOS 13 was sending browsing data to Chinese tech giant Tencent
http://flip.it/_rQW_A

I find it a little amusing in a way. Having had internet access since about 1996, I’ve long since gave up on considering my browsing habits to be private—it’s my browsing contents that I want kept private.

Between how browsers work and how much control we yield to the other end of a socket, I think it fool hearty to assume you can remain private about the basics. If you have ever visited a web site in recent times, it’s a fairly safe bet that someone, somewhere can collate a unique identifier for you across several websites. Yielding things like your IP and resources (you know, the /blah/blah part of urls you visit) are integral to how user agents (browsers) and servers work. Cookies have been a fact of browsing virtually forever. You don’t have enough control over how any of this shit works, to be able to enforce strict privacy from being tracked.

Anonymity is the difference between sending the Gestapo to 742 Evergreen Terrace and f24088cc-4914-43ab-9810-07cdc069ebac visited five websites about donuts, and then logged into Yahoo mail; let’s ask Yahoo about them.

What we do however have some control over is the secrecy of our session content. Transport Layer Security, ala HTTPS, provides for some measure of privacy where it matters in our browsing. Nothing is going to stop donuts dot com from using an obvious /glazed resource for finding out about glazed donuts, but telling that you typed “HJS” into the search box and it popped up a super secret bulk ordering form, and your transaction details, is a different story. The security measures make it harder for someone to be dropping eaves if the other side is trustworthy; not being tracked is just hopeless at this point.

I have more hope in solutions that are technical and procedural in nature. Because if you can’t trust donuts dot com with where to bill and ship donuts then you probably shouldn’t be ordering donuts from them. If donuts dot com isn’t allowed to do business in your country without being obligated to offer up your payment data to the request of law enforcement, or pushing it to government donut databases, that’s a social problem and therefore political.

For better or worse there’s only so much that can be done on a technical front without changes to how the World Wide Web functions, and that shit just isn’t going to change for the sake of personal privacy.

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Tapped the notification and was greeted with this view of the Tips app:

After annotating the screenshot it remained glitched, but did recover when I changed orientation to portrait and then back to landscape.

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Supplemental to last, a nifty thing as well—the per-app directory things in the Files app virtualizes the Documents directory associated with an app’s private-ish data container; or at least iVim makes it appears as such.

E.g. placing a file in iVim/Documents makes it appear in {container}/Documents when exploring it with netrw.

Likewise, while I can’t find any way to make Files express the concept of Unix hidden (.)files, the Files app does show a count that includes the .vim / .viminfo entries that come up when browsing through iVim itself.

This is kind of nice IMHO. If iOS just exports the thing somehow to a trusted Files app rather than making a separate directory outside the per-application containers, that makes the application directories in Files potentially a lot more useful for shuffling data around via the file manager. On the downside, I suppose, could mean Files would get a huge bullseye painted on its forehead for anyone wanting to find a way around some of the file system security.

By contrast, Android is a bit more liberal. The per-app area  (e.g. /data/…) is generally a total no-no to any other application, and apps are given explicit support for the “Shared” storage area (e.g. /sdcard) and a separate directory of their own located beneath it (e.g. /sdcard/Android/…)

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Well, I might be a sorta happy camper. Looks like iVim is a decent port of Vi IMproved to iOS. From what I can tell, seems like a rather old (7.4) version, compiled as Big with external scripting and various mice/gui things disabled.

Limitations seem to be principally iOS imposed ones, such as Extreme Sudden App Kill Syndrome and overly restricted file permissions. So in effect, it’s about as good as you can hope for on anything more fruity than a Mac.

On a related note, I can also say that iPadOS doesn’t do key repeat. E.g. holding j doesn’t move the cursor in iVim, nor does it insert a bunch of j’s into Safari. But the repeat stuff works fine when combined with a modifier like doing and keystrokes, which makes me happy since that’s an action I use more freqently than holding the vi arrows (hjkl), etc.

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iPadOS review: The iPad is dead, long live the iPad–Step by step, Apple is taking the iPad in a wholly new direction.

Ars’ is probably the best in depth review that I’ve seen of iPadOS 13, outside of YouTube videos.

While pretty much every freaking thing about the Fruit Company’s operating system demands you learn to swipe friend in Elvish, Dwarvish, and sometimes enemies in Klingon, the multitasking is pretty win. In my eyes: Google mostly frakked it up with Android 9/Pie, and the ubiquitous metaphors of stacking window managers just suck when you throw fingers at them.

Coming from Android land: the iOS home screen is pretty damned primitive. Like any more primitive and iOS 12 would have had me pounding rocks together to make fire. It still mostly smells of cave men in iPadOS 13, but has a longer beard.

The floating keyboard supporting swipe style typing, pretty much rectified my only true issue with Apple’s keyboard. Not that I like it being one glitchy mother fucker. The amount of times I’ve had my FKB decide to reposition itself, usually by zig zagging its ass until the drag bar is offscreen — or simply fscked up input, is insane for a released product. But when it doesn’t make me have to reboot my iPad it does work really, really well; much like Gboard on my Samsung. Like Mr. Axon, I’d rather see the input as part of the regular full sized touch keyboard but I’ll take whatever progress I can get.

Editing text in iPadOS 13 being improved, I don’t think can be overstated. When I first booted up my iPad Pro, I felt like trying to move the cursor for editing text was bad. Somewhere between having my hands wrapped up like a movie burn victim and fuck it, I’m returning this shit level bad. Seriously, the two finger trackpad trick the keyboard does is the only reason I persisted to see what iPadOS 13 would bring. By contrast, iPadOS 13 feels like someone finally admitted that the era of 3″ phone screens and being totally hopeless typing at all on the damned thing, is long since over; or needs to be.

I for one, look forward to 13.2 in the hopes of less bugginess–and have high hopes for 14.x being an iterative improvement on the system.

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Rebooting for the modern age:

BSD: time for kernel updates.
Linux: power outage finally won.
Android: dog ate the charger.
Windows: every update and driver fart.
Chromebook: whenever it gets funky.
iPad OS: more often Chromebook but same concept.

In vague order of frequency, lol

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Remarkable raises $15 million to bring its e-paper tablets to more scribblers

I’d actually like to see a lot more devices like this, and find the reMarkable particularly interesting. The main negative imho behind the cost compared to more general purpose devices.

Which is to say for most folks, you may as well buy an Apple Pencil and the cheapest iPad that’ll work with it. It won’t be the same thing but it would be more value to the average user.

E-Ink and styli are both tech I’d rather like to see more commonly used, so my bias is fairly obvious 😜

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iPadOS review: 50 percent more computer

Little surprised to see the top note about bugginess, which has been something more experienced than heard about from things I see or read on the Internet.

It does amuse me though that this article’s leading beef is the lack of multi user support. Which I think is only half valuable.

On our side of the coin, or at least mine: it is a Personal Computer world. A large part of the success of the microcomputer owes to beefing so cheap that we can all have our own instead of time sharing a larger system with our peers. In fact, PCs were really damned slow to become multiuser if you ran something closer to DOS/Windows than Xenix/SCO. But hey, even dumb ass Windows people had to get with that program by the 2000s 😜.

For me, my iPad is probably far more personal than my desktop. Much as your desktop is probably more personal than a corporate main frame. It’s just that like laptops, most  tablets aren’t cheap enough to use as a frisbee.

Where multiple users really make sense to me on tablets, are the case where you may have a communal tablet on a counter or table somewhere. In which case, I’m sure Apple would rather you buy two iPads for more than one iPad Air, or better yet just buy a new higher end model and repurpose your old model 😄.

For business and class room use, I think you can make the case for multiuser support far more seriously than with tablets in people’s homes. Where it may be more important that a device remain on the premises and within a certain area of operation. Not sure about commercial uses but to my understanding Apple already has some kind of multiuser stuff if you’re using a school provided iPad.

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Looking at the iPad From Two Angles

Skimming through the Wikipedia entry on the original iPad, I found a reference to this old review from the NYTimes, and I can’t help but scratch the feeling that I probably read it a micro-eon ago closer to when I bought the Asus EeePad Transformer, my first tablet, or closer to when the article was written. Let’s just say that it’s probably been a long time!

In any case, it’s a pretty great double view on the iPad, and general tablet concept, and in many ways still rings true. I also find it a little amusing that at the bottom, it notes having made it into a print edition for April 1st 🤣.