Hilariously the guy who wrote this paper also used AI to help write it. Guh.
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B-b-but Apple cares about privacy. They would never spy on you like the filthy Microsoft. That's why I brought an iPhone.
I need to arrange a meeting with every apple user I know so I can remind them that they're Tim apple's wholly owned bitch, I told them so, and they fucking suck.
Apples odd in that they are pretty protective of your personal information, as in they won’t sell it or lets 3rd parties come even remotely close to it, but have very little qualms in abusing it themselves.
I read that Apple was implementing ads in their maps software now. Quick search seems to confirm it. Below is a page blurb originating from Apple's domain.
Now businesses can run ads on Apple Maps — right where customers are deciding where to go.
My initial comment was just satire, but reading through the document I'm just... tired. This sort of analysis originates from America's intelligence organizations. It's not surprising that the technique's bled into private-business--it always happens. Intel. orgs. create a software solution that solves one of their problems and entrepreneurs within those organizations realize private-businesses have similar problems.
(I will state--because it's tangentially related--the matrix-protocol originates from individuals linked to mossad. I encourage users not to use matrix.)
Apples not odd. It's the same as every other technology corporation.
(I will state—because it’s tangentially related—the matrix-protocol originates from individuals linked to mossad. I encourage users not to use matrix.)
Are you referring to the historic link to Amdocs?
Ads don’t violate privacy.
Yes they do
Only personalised ads do. If someone pays to be shown ahead of competitors no matter who's doing the search, there's no personalization.
If they were random, sure.
But can be a demonstration of a violation
Not even Google sells any of your data. They collect data and sell advertising spots but not the data itself.
Selling data only works as a business model if you cannot sell ad spots. That is why news websites have cookie banners with 1000 partners but Google, Facebook, Apple, et al. do not.
they won’t sell it or lets 3rd parties come even remotely close to it
If they secretly let the government double dip, I don't think I want to trust any other claims they and their marketing makes.
Apple admits to secretly giving governments push notification data - Ars Technica
What are the odds that Google also claims it doesn't sell your data, it "shares" it.
But would you trust them?
I mean… they did market this as having your personal context, so I don’t think it is a surprise. The idea is it’s not accessible to anyone but you.
The data in this case is local on the device, but I agree it’s still an invasion of privacy
Is it? Remember when you couldn't launch an app on OSX because apple was down for some reason.
No I don’t remember that, but codesigning doesn’t require all of your data to be shared remotely, just a few encryption keys. Not even enough to know what exactly you are running (although it’s likely something from the App Store in which case they have records of what you bought or downloaded in the App Store of course).
For all the problems of Steve jobs, he at least kept the company fairly honest in this sense. But the instant he died, Tim cook immediately rushed to install PRISM backdoors into all their systems while still carrying the image of privacy.
If you install Linux on it, it fixes it, right?
To answer what other have missed, if you run Linux then that will fix this.
Linux is great for any of the Intel series max, but apple silicone is so new that they've barely cracked the surface of M3 full capabilities with any Linux distro.
I will not post a link to it for privacy reasons, but I wrote an article on this the day before the original M1 was announced warning of this situation. Apples move to their own chipset meant that any attempts at maintaining compatibility would always end up behind the curve.
I am surprised that Apple manage to keep their chips constantly changing as much as they do between generations. Most others seem to be on the 'same but more' path nowadays but Apple is still shifting the baseline almost yearly.
The real issue will come if they lock down the boot loader.
I will say this, I love my M5 Air and it doesn't have An Apple Account. Like, at all. Nor did my last M2. Apple allows me more desktop privacy than Ms or Google will, and I don't have to gut the OS. I'm not motivated to because they make the horsepower available to me.
Every other machine is running some debian/Ubuntu variant today, principally. I got tired of the cat-and-mouse and all of the uosells under the hood of MS, and I just can't trust Google in this era.
also PowerPC
You know I thought about that as I was commenting, and also kind of rolled the dice on someone calling it out. And ancient Apple equipment are built like tanks.
But I remember running Minecraft Beta on an ancient iMac G5, and it was too choppy even back in the day. I can't imagine you being pleasant on one in the modern era.
So I think looking back, I would put a hard limit at only putting machines in service that were manufactured at or after 2012 or so. Get a cute Haswell Mac Mini and call it a day.
If you insisted on vintage Apple hardware older than that, I would recommend getting the system and throwing a Raspberry Pi in there instead. I really wish the G4 lamp Macs would make a come back.
Apparently you lose a lot of functionality. I wanted to install Linux on my old Intel Mac but the research showed I'm gonna struggle even getting the kb to work, cause it goes through the T2 security chip. This was about a year ago. Hopefully by now people have worked around those issues with Claude.
We had Linux on M1 before Claude was really a thing.
I have a 2018 Mac mini running Mint. I haven’t had any problems like that.
I had always wondered why so many people have had compatibility issues with Linux systems, that was until I realized that because I am basically a computer scrap-man, I almost always a decade behind and everything had been long hardened by then.
Mac mini is different, it doesn't have kbm, touchID etc. I've run Ubuntu on older minis as well.
You need a T2 patch and touchpad software, it's not that hard to get working if you follow the right tutorial
I know about the patch, but I think back when I checked last, it was in rudimentary state and not very reliable. Hopefully it's better now. I remember there were more issues, like for sure touchID doesn't work, but I think there was other stuff, too.
As soon as Asahi ships M4 support I’m relegating macOS to an as-needed partition or VM. I can’t wait, I love the GNOME UI aesthetic. Unforkable software needs to die.
I’d love to contribute to OSS but breaking in to a community, learning a codebase, its dependencies, its build systems, its docs, its community rules, its politics all at once by myself is too much.
Same for Iphones? This says MacOs.
Is there a file or database that can be deleted now and then ?
Anyone got a version without the llm word diarrhea? This is completely unreadable
Yeah, here is my graph
Not surprising. This era of capitalism is built around spying on you in order to find out how to sell you stuff better. We love it.
Just a PSA: the entire article is AI generated
Is it? I know there's ai in the domain, but I don't get that vibe from the style, and I just checked out the claimed authors and am confident they're real people who've been writing since before LLMs could do it well.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50403613
The author says it's mostly AI. "In my defense, only the technical parts are AI. But, thanks for the feedback; I thought I had unsloped it enough..."
Also at Git, in the readme for the tool to explore the data, "iKnow is fully LLM-generated and may not be 100% accurate."
so this whole story is bullshit?
No, it is definitely there and real, I deleted the databases and blocked them from being rebuilt on my mac yesterday. People can use LLMs to do useful work, especially if they already know what they are doing.
How does one do this?
Delete ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform (or back it up to a different directory if you're worried about things breaking and want to be able to put it back) then make an empty file in place of the directory with touch ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform
Maybe so, but if someone can't be bothered to write it, I can't be bothered to read it.
The AI accent has progressed and Claudespeak is essentially this. There's no blatant tells but my brain has been fried from seeing too much ai content that I can detect it now. This is a surprisingly deslopped version but it still feels pretty ai generated to me (not to mention the website design).
We know Amazon's doing practically the same thing, and Google, Facebook, etc. are doubtless doing it too.
The difference—for better or worse—is that Apple’s using your own machine instead of their servers.
The difference—for better or worse—is that Apple’s using your own machine instead of their servers.
And this is why I trust Apple the most out of all the big corps.
I mean, I still don’t trust them very much, but as a large corp they have demonstrated the fewest and least damaging psychopathic/abusive behaviours against users.
They also use these data points for some useful features with auto suggesting map directions if it has a pattern figured out. Or to get directions to mom’s house or other shortcuts.
I know you cou add this info to the contacts and search for locations with voice, but it’s handy to just 2 clicks to directions to a weekly soccer practice or whatever.
I'm just gonna talk about the 4-way fork of the knight. White's a doofus for not eating the knight with a pawn
I looked through the whole article and did not find chess.
Ew gross. I’m going to find a way to block this.
Would a crontab running every minute to kill the relevant deamons work?
Hmm, this must also be implemented in iOS right? Like there's no way this isn't also being used on mobile devices.
Oh, yeah there it is:
And even more recently, a forensics tool went looking on the phone: in September 2026, Alexis Brignoni taught iLEAPP to read the same store on iOS, where graph.db and the ontology.db that decodes its predicate codes sit under /private/var/mobile/Library/IntelligencePlatform; he writes it up in Reading the iPhone Knowledge Graph, and Checking Its Work.
This links to https://leapps.org/blog-post?post=apple-intelligence-platform-knowledge-graph for more information.
Your iPhone runs a daemon called knowledged. It sits in the background and does exactly what the name suggests. It builds knowledge. Not files, not logs, but a graph of things the phone has decided are true about you. Who your contacts are. Where you have been. Which apps you run and who made them. It ties all of that together and stores it on the device.
Fucks' sake. Everything is Big Brother. Makes me want to give up everything and move to a rural area in Africa or India or something, someplace away from cities and big tech corpos.
Android must be doing similar things, though for Google it's probably server-side and might not be available on the local device.

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