Right, where that "external payment method" is the PayPal or Shopify or whatever wallet app you have installed, and you one-click buy just like with Apple Pay. If I were one of these existing payment services, I'd be scrambling to update my iOS app to to be easily tied into by all of the developers.

Wild guess here, but I'm thinking Lockhart will replace XB1X, probably at higher margins, since a lot of the hardware is shared with XB Series X (Anaconda) so they might get better economies of scale. I expect to see XB1X disappear in 2021 or sooner, replaced by Lockhart for less than the current XB1X price of $479 CAD in my case, and with better performance and full compatibility.

I doubt apps have access to the raw BLE stream from the hardware. Maybe they do, but that would surprise me. If not, then apps are only getting a curated stream of events, and the OS should filter out these particular ones, especially the outbound ones.

Also, why would the IDs ever need to be made accessible to any apps? The API to submit IDs should be "Please send whatever IDs you have to server id xyz", and the OS does the rest. The submission format is well-known, so any OS instance can submit to any server. The OS provider keeps a list of known server ids and only sends to those. Or maybe the apps are self-identified cryptographically and the OS provider knows where to submit IDs implicitly. Either way, the apps never see the IDs; nothing is exposed.

Do you know for certain that Apple and Google aren't going to release this particular bit of source code to be independently verified? No.

Even if they do, will that assure you that everything else in the OS that this code interacts with is behaving? No.

I think you're confusing "accurate" with "honest".

It's accurate that photos are "Shot on iPhone", but you won't get the results presented in the ad unless you also apply whatever the fine print says, which you have to pause the ad to read.

It would be honest to say "Shot on iPhone with no additional accessories or post-processing", which the ads definitely _don't_ say.

Not really related to Zoom and conferencing in general, but:

I also suspect that WhatsApp transmits the end-to-end encryption keys via... wait for it... WhatsApp's network. So yes, messaging is encrypted end-to-end, but WhatsApp may also have those keys and could read your messages anyway.

As for conferencing, are there any products that claim peer-to-peer end-to-end encryption of the audio/video media? I haven't done much research, but it seems tricky unless the endpoints do all the mixing.

With Lightning, the male end is thicker than USB-C, and it's also attached to the inexpensive part (the wire).

With USB-C, the male end is thin and embedded into the expensive part (the device).

When the male end breaks, which would you rather have to repalce? Lightning seems to be better engineering to me. I don't use any Apple products, so no skin in the game.

If @drinkypoo is correct, then the EU law seems to state that the Steam platform must not be required in order to re-sell the game. So if I buy Destiny 2 on Steam (for PC), I should be able to sell it to anyone with a comatible PC, even if they don't have a Steam account. In other words, Destiny 2 could have some sort of "package for resale" option that puts the game on a USB stick and removes it from my PC, and then I can sell that to someone else, who may install and run it on their PC, without ever contacting Steam. I can accept the argument that Destiny 2 for PC is a different product from Destiny 2 for Xbox, since the game binaries are indeed different, so no expectation of cross-arch resale is fine.

Apple knows all of that already. iOS knows which apps are running and which network connections they have open and when traffic is sent/received on those connections. They can already infer when you receive a WhatsApp message. The changes to force most apps to wake via their notification system probably make it more obvious, but no new information is being revealed.

Do you know for certain that iOS _doesn't_ track all of this "telemetry" and send it back to HQ?

I own an Xbox 360. I do not own an Xbox One. For the past few years, MS has been giving me Xbox 360 and Xbox One games every month as part of my Xbox Live Gold membership. I already own close to 100 Xbox One games that don't require an optical drive to play. This new Xbox One S All Digital is a perfect way for me to get into the Xbox One hardware generation. I don't need an optical drive to play 100 games I already own. I don't need or want a BluRay player. Why pay more for something I don't need? I'm also certain that MS knows how many people like me are out there, so perhaps they plan on marketing it to us. If you don't care about this optical-drive-less option, why complain about it?

How about we make advertising worthless by not clicking on the bloody ads?!? Then we wouldn't have these massive advertising giants controlling what we consume. Charging for content would be the norm again. People would evaluate and choose their preferred aggregator, and journalism could thrive again via pay-per-view revenue - just like the old days. Information is free; good information is not.

The only way consoles can be sold for their current (loss leader) prices is to have consumers make up the difference buying games. The manufacturers need to be able to predict that X consoles + Y games per console = profit. If you remove Y, then X consoles = loss. That's why they don't want you using your console for anything but licensed games.

So how about we keep that system, which works well for millions of consumers, and add a system where you can purchase a legitimate hardware unlock for Z. It would be trivial for manufacturers to work out Z, since it's essentially the same as their cut of the Y games per console. Then you could purchase a console, and if you wanted to unlock it, you could do so without any negative consequences. It would just cost you more, since you bought the console for a subsidized price to begin with.

Do you think that the rest of Google's vast data apparatus _hasn't_ been used for military purposes before this? Puuhleeeaze :)

Damn right, and 80 column code too!