That is indeed one area of privacy but I wouldn’t say that Apple is far worse. There is countless number of examples where this just simply isn’t true.

Also regarding the App Store, you don’t have to enter a credit card, you can make an account with a new email address.

What's worse than the inability to NOT have a permanent standardised real-name identifier on your device at all times and on all devices?

Apple has really questionable security as well. There's lots of people who have reported Apple randomly asking for Apple Account passwords all of a sudden in popups, on both iOS and macOS, the same way as malware would; or forcing password resets every day or every week.

BTW, do you know how many customer accounts did Apple terminate in 2024? It's 128'961'839 — nearly 129 million customer accounts terminated in just one year.

I’m from a technical background and so I understand this but being a Brit sentences like this are always funny to me

For those who didn't understand this comment (like me)

Nonce is also British slang for alleged or convicted sex offenders, especially ones involving children.

That's why you should call them pervs (per-instance values).

Why not pedos (pedantic objects)?

Makes some discussions with non-technical stakeholders interesting.

I always just call them "n-once" and I read it that way too (which I think is what it comes from right? Number you use once?).

At least that way it stops me from making childish jokes.

> put nonces on form > all spam, normal traffic gone > received e-mail complaint from sex offender registry because i am downloading too many images

I was this close to putting it on a car license plate unaware of the British use.

I've never been happier to just, check, before clicking a submit button.

Not On Normal Courtyard Exercise

Basically A Creative Kind of Reverse Origin Naming You Make

It’s funny (and annoying) the disparity between Arm builds for macOS and Windows. I understand why it happens but even Microsoft has produced Arm native versions of apps for macOS before Windows.

I signed up for BuyMeACoffee recently. I did some work for free that’s important for the industry I work in and a few people donated money to me. That was almost 2 weeks ago and I’m still waiting for them to review my account. The only support seems to be just an email address?

In regards to the fact they pulled out of countries that are hard to operate in, yeah it’s annoying but you know, can you blame them?

Good for them. I’m a huge supporter of unions. Union busting is quite different here in the UK, so I should imagine they’ll successfully join the union without too much fuss.

The problem is if you go for a free market "vote with their wallets" approach, you end up with a problem like the US did with Microsoft having too high of a market share and control on browsers, media players and operating systems.

Customers can only really vote with their wallets when there is choice and no de facto standard. On top of that, many consumers don't really understand that things like their privacy and and choice has been taken away from them.

I do not agree with all parts of the DMA and I think it's overbearing in some areas but also lacklustre in others but I do think it's important that we don't let monopolies control our lives.

This is interesting, sure, but you would need more data to create a better identifier.

I’m on an iPhone, which isn’t an uncommon device using Brave which is just WebKit because of iOS restrictions. So there would be lot of iPhones that would just end up being with basically the same identifier.

Do you happen to remember which bus company this was? Is there any article you can link me too as I’m quite interested in reading some more on it.

I think it was Arriva. Defineitely one that operated in Manchester st the time. Cannot find a link.

Yes it is Arriva. Independently I also extracted all the ticket codes when I was a kid.

Thanks both!

In what way?

Who is going to provide a competitive browser for the price of $0 other than Google?

Before Google, there were multiple competing browsers based on different technology, all of which were either offered for free or explicitly licensed as FOSS. Google used Chrome to put the web on an upgrade treadmill. The only way to keep your own code up-to-date with what websites expected was to either commit unending amounts of resources to the problem (Google), do the bare minimum to keep websites working as your resources are stretched thin (Safari, arguably Firefox), or just ship modified versions of Chrome so that it's easier to merge in new features (Edge, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, etc).

Before Google, all of those options sucked. Chrome was a breath of fresh air, which was why it exploded in popularity.

I don't do web dev, but from what I've heard, web devs also suffered trying to support multiple conflicting browsers, and Chrome's dominance actually makes life much easier.

Microsoft could end up buying it

And do what with it? They already are using Chromium for Edge. They would still need to monetize it.

A far worse monopoly than Google is going to solve your monopoly problem?

It’s not even true that you can’t update an Apple Watch without an iPhone.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204641

I popped into an Apple Store (Covent Garden) recently and directly asked (as I want the heart rate monitor Apple has)... and the assistant's response was that you need an iPhone to set up the watch initially, and that same iPhone must be used periodically for updates (which ruled out using one in-store to set it up, apparently the watch is paired to an iPhone?). I trusted what the Apple person told me.

But you need an iPhone to set one up. It's a weird vestigial requirement at this point, and I suspect it's more about cell carrier limitations than Apple's preferences.

why would a cell carrier be involved in setting up a wifi apple watch

Don't you need an iPhone to even set up the watch?