And at its worst it prices residents out of their own city while destroying the local hospitality industry. For every "common person with an unused spare room showing tourists cool local things" there are at least ten faceless investment firms treating them as de-facto hotel rooms you get the honor of cleaning yourself.

Seriously, AirBnB is your shining example of why we shouldn't view tech bros with extreme skepticism?

Want to talk about the rest of the gig economy which only exists by evading decades of hard won labor rights/regulations?

Being ordered by a court to do something doen't make Apple a part of that something. What it does mean is Apple has to respond to court orders, and typically the US Courts find there is no user privacy right in data held by a third-party provider. When Apple is subpoenaed for the contents of an iCloud account, they legally have to turn over that data.

But Apple has made design decisions that have reduced the visibility of data in the cloud, as over time Apple has encrypted more of it when it's sent to their servers from user devices. But Apple has been moving to protect more user data, instead of leaving protections as-is. Apple led a change of the needle on messaging security, as other platforms have worked to catch up to the end-to-end encryption of iMessage.

It may be that the US Government sees getting iMessage to use the same color for iMessage & SMS as a way to help keep people on older, more spying-friendly systems...well, at least the dumb criminals.

The US Government at various levels has been rattling the saber at Apple for a long time, long before quantum-secure key exchange was a thing. But Apple has been a consistent thorn in the side of American law enforcement, as they have legally demonstrated they cannot recover data from a locked iPhone. The curious bit of the timing may be more about Apple getting an improvement out ahead of concerns that the government could compel them not to.

The US Government's investigative agencies want access to iMessage conversations. That's just within DOJ. It doesn't require any coordination with multiple agencies. It's the DOJ potentially aiming to get a consent decree that lets other services federate with iMessage, including their own servers that could try to intercept (and decrypt) data in flight.

The DOJ's competence is getting court orders to tell companies to help. Apple has been good at delivering systems they can show to a court and legitimately say, "sorry, nothing we can do, it's about the security." Apple's own commentary about how opening up would weaken security could simply have been chum for the DOJ's staff.

Fully replace the OS, sure, it's hardware, let people run their own software. A lot of it has already been figured out to put Linux on Apple Silicon Macs...

Require Apple to open up the actual iOS interfaces to allow functionality that could compromise Apple's design goals, which are part of the story of why to pick iPhone? No, that's just the Government regulating "ease of intrusion" into systems. I mean, who wouldn't trust our Governments with backdoors that could break into our secure systems, right? Right?

But just letting you replace the OS doesn't help the Government; the likely uptake rate would be low, and it doesn't guarantee the replacement OS has a doormat out for the government. Requiring unsanctioned sideloading, though, will make it easy for Government agencies to get code into a device to find new security holes to get around protection. That means ALL GOVERNMENTS; United State, Canada, Mexico, Panama, Haiti, Jamica, Peru.... and China, Russia, and Israel, too.

It's much easier to sell it to people that "we're trying to save you money!", isn't it?

</tinfoil>

The Sherman Anti-Trust Acts prohibit cartels as well, as the recent settlement over real estate commissions has proven again. But, yes, what people defend often comes down to their pre-existing preferences. Game companies good, anti-hacker companies bad unless they are also "game companies".

What cut do the hardware manufacturers take from game developers? Sure, you can buy it on disc in retail, but the hardware vendor is still getting their cut, even without operating any of the 'store' infrastructure to sell it to you. Or, if you're going digital, they're making sure they're the store vendor. There is no "Epic Games Store" on PlayStation, Xbox, or Switch. They didn't even announce it for Android until after they'd announced their iOS store. I do hope Epic reports revenue from them separately.

...of not letting the US Government spy on Apple's users.

After years of investigation, Apple pushes out updates for iMessage to use quantum-secure key exchange, and then action finally comes. Curious timing...

When I hear media reports of lock-in on iPhone, I typically think of green vs blue bubbles in iMessage. And how Apple keeps people using iMessage and not other, more spyable platforms. But the Government would look really bad if it filed suit against an American company for protecting user privacy, wouldn't it?

And, it's campaign season. Hey look, the current Administration it being hard on big tech!

You can't fine them, so tell them to do it or we'll fine them! *headdesk*

Apple's App Store doesn't seem much different from game platform marketplaces. Epic has their Game Store on Windows, sure, but do they also have it on Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch? Is Epic lobbying to bring their own Game Store to those Game Platforms? Heck, Epic only announced that they're going to make a store for Android yesterday. On a platform that has had no restrictions on opening additional stores. Weird, innit?

There is no "monopoly of the iPhone market". Just because there is a device with hardware that you would like to make/sell an app to do something with doesn't give you the absolute right to do that. Really, Apple should have responded to the EU DMA by just letting people replace iOS on the iPhone hardware, and then releasing an Android image for it that lets you sideload apps. And let Microsoft make a new 'Windows Phone" ROM to compete.... But remember PlayStation 3, just because the hardware is in there doesn't mean you'll get to use it with an alternate OS.

Sure, let the US government say Apple has to let people replace iOS on their iPhones. Let someone make an Android ROM for it, or their own OS platform. And while you complain about who controls the software that runs on a platform, also get the DOJ to go after Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo for limiting homebrew developers from making their own games to give out or sell on their own web sites, separate from each platform's built-in store.

C'mon, side with the consumers...

In Soviet Russia, correlation causes YOU!

The EU does capitalism better than the US does. What we have in the US is not capitalism. The correct term is crony capitalism.

Gulfstream.

You didn't think they flew commercial with the dirty plebs, did you?

Those products all paid licensing fees to whomever owns the underlying IP. You can find examples where the IP owner decides to be a dick. I'll call out everyone's least favorite, EA, and point out that you can't legally get the SNES version of Sim City on modern hardware via any sales channel that I'm aware of. Of course, there are "gray" options to play it, but you won't find it in the Wii store and there's no (legal) packaged emulator for it on Amazon.

Meme: After years of working in tech the only "smart" device in my house is an inkjet printer. I keep a gun next to it in case it makes a sound I don't recognize.

It's pretty trivial to install your own certificate authority and perform MITM attacks against all encrypted traffic coming from a particular endpoint over which you have control. It's less trivial but still doable to decompile a program and look through the source for hidden processes like you describe. All of which is to say I doubt Google could keep something like you describe a secret for very long, if they were inclined to try it, which seems unlikely. Why risk the bad PR and inevitable lawsuits when the majority of the unwashed masses happily consent to being spied on?

It absolutely is. What Google is doing here is no different than how most endpoint protection suites work. They all submit visited websites to a real time authority to check for known pfishing/malware sites. They will block in the moment where possible and retroactively alert the IT team when a visited site is later determined to be bad. I'm assuming Chrome will at least do the first. The second would be trickier while maintaining privacy but would still be doable locally, if the browser can download the database and compare it against its own history.

You're not wrong to call out the nonsensical equation to slavery as being silly at best and highly offensive at worst....

But where do you see a choice to go to work or not? Did you mistake Amazon's home country for one with a meaningful social safety net? Did I sleep through humanity waking up in the Star Trek utopia where we only work doing the things we love and not to meet our basic needs for food, shelter, healthcare, etc.?