I might want (and have wanted) to reinstall macOS and start fresh without any intention of relinquishing or transferring ownership of the physical device. And I might want to log out of iCloud because I don't want to sync my personal stuff on that computer anymore, or because something funky is happening with how messages or photos are syncing and I just want to reset it all. I'd be pretty pissed if, six months after reconfiguring everything, someone nabbed my laptop and I discovered that activation lock had been automatically disabled for me the whole time without my explicitly doing so.

Given these mutually irreconcilable user expectations, I can see why Apple would opt for a design that favors the more cautious approach where you have to press a very specific sequence of buttons to disable the lock. Maybe I'm just selfish, but knowing a laptop I sent away couldn't be repurposed but ended up as e-waste would make me feel a little guilty, but knowing a laptop I didn't want to lose got stolen with all my stuff on it exposed to the thief would make me apoplectic with rage.

To make a simplistic analogy (necessarily imperfect but sufficient for these purposes), consider instead a computer virus. If an antivirus company patches the binary in order to make it easier to study its behavior (for example, in order to make it more debuggable), that’s “engineering” the virus but it’s not “gain-of-function.” If the company instead patches the virus so that it can take advantage of a new 0-day exploit and spread further, that’s “gain-of-function.”

Whether gain-of-function research is capable of revealing new insight into transmissible diseases not obtainable elsewhere is a point of debate among biologists, but one can be well assured that a for-profit operation isn’t going to touch it with a ten-foot pole. Engineering the virus on the other hand, or in other words making mutations in viral components, is basically a description of “doing basic molecular biology” and is non-optional.

The sort of allegation that Pfizer is responding to is more or less the equivalent of someone recording an engineer calling themselves “hackers,” visiting “Hacker News,” then writing an exposé claiming that this proves Company X is in the business of computer crime.

The activity mentioned in the Pfizer press release that skirts closest to “gain-of-function” is actually a bit you didn’t mention at all, where they’re required by regulatory bodies to determine how the virus might resist an antiviral. Unlike computer viruses, biological ones mutate under treatment pressure. The closest analogy for a computer virus might be if it phones home and downloads a new payload to modify its behavior when it detects the presence of some antivirus software. For obvious reasons, studying how a pandemic virus would mutate in response to approved drugs is both necessary and icky, hence why Pfizer discussed its biosecurity measures. The distinction they make (rightly) between this research and a “directed evolution” or “gain-of-function” experiment, is that they’re reading out an answer to the question “Does the virus mutate when we treat with this antiviral drug, and if so, how?”, not culturing viruses iteratively in the presence of drug until they obtain an optimized treatment-resistant virus.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/9/23500838/apple-csam-plans...

macOS Ventura exposes new object and scene recognition features for images, including background removal in Preview (analogous to "Copy Subject" in Photos but without requiring the use of that app):

https://www.tomsguide.com/how-to/how-to-remove-image-backgro...

You can also use Spotlight search with keywords such as "flower" or "cow" to find images on your local storage that have those subjects; I don't recall if that is new to macOS Ventura or has been possible for several versions of the OS.

mediaanalysisd is a daemon which has for years been responsible for, well, media analysis and would perform any network tasks required to support features such as the above when previewing an image. It would not surprise me if not all image recognition tasks are done exclusively locally, although I haven't found documentation of how much exactly is or isn't. It has long been the case for speech recognition, for example, that not all of it could be done offline (although more of it can be on Apple Silicon machines).

The only way to opt out of OS-level features that send any data to Apple at all is to opt out of using macOS; even then, as I recall, the Asahi Linux installer has to pull certain bits from Apple servers for copyright reasons.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34023804

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One caveat is that I’d been using the betas, so I didn’t upgrade straight from iOS 15 to 16.0 as released, but I really haven’t encountered any difficulties with dictation in any of the betas or in the final release.

(Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/contra)

Wirecutter: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/

https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...

A similar conclusion regarding lack of evidence is discussed in NIH treatment guidelines:

https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/therapies/ant...

In line with consensus in the field, ivermectin is not contained among the treatment guidelines of any institution at which I have practiced.

So, while the update was downloading, I changed my firewall settings specifically to allow built-in software to receive incoming connections, but disallow downloaded signed software. I also specifically set GarageBand to block incoming connections but not other programs among those listed.

I'm happy to report that all of these settings were maintained after updating to macOS 11.2.3 exactly as-is. I wonder if the OP is referring to a different update (none that I'm aware of recently).

There is no Privacy > Advertising > Limit Ad Tracking setting on macOS 11.2.2 or 11.2.3: there's a checkbox for "Personalized Ads," which remains turned off after the update also, just as it was before.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25524722

Points: 7

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136740

Points: 3

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“Who the hell elected you?” The implied statement here is that, because you (Jack) aren’t elected, you can’t decide what people read; the corollary being that, because I (Ted) am elected, I can decide what people read. This is entirely backwards! “Congress shall make no law,” says the Constitution. It’s precisely because Ted Cruz is elected that the Constitution says he cannot make laws deciding what people read. That’s the entire point of the exercise!

https://www.google.com/search?q=swift+evolution+%22currency+...

For example, although there are a variety of range types in the Swift standard library ('Range', 'ClosedRange', 'PartialRangeFrom', 'PartialRangeUpTo', etc.), 'Range' is considered the currency type. Similarly, among string types, 'String' is considered the currency type, as opposed to 'Substring', 'StaticString', etc.

Like currency (money), the idea is that APIs in different libraries across different domains of programming will generally take values of the currency type as input and produce values of the currency type as output unless there's a good reason to use a different type.

For Swift System, the stated goal is to provide low-level currency types; if that goal is accomplished, other users of Swift can rely on these types instead of supporting multiple disparate third-party wrappers of system calls that may provide similar functionality just so that they can interoperate with other libraries.

I work at one of the New York hospitals mentioned in this article. Yes, I'm scared too. [Opinions not that of my employer, etc.] But we're all still showing up every day to take care of our patients, and we'll keep doing so until we can't--and then we have backup lined up. There will be hard days, but those will be in the privacy of the hospital, away from prying eyes. New York will pull through.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22399395

Points: 25

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19213935

Points: 4

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