Apple creates central point of failure and then fails

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chaosmonk

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https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/12/apple-widespread-outages-big-sur-downloads-catalina-imessage/

during which users can't run third party applications, or programs they wrote themselves, because macOS connects to Apple's servers before running unsigned applications.

commodore256
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Due to users expecting rich features in modern web, (client side scripting) it would be idiotic to sell a product with that turned off and therefore, no platform is unhackable. If that doesn't work, worse come to worse, people will freeze the RAM with liquid Nitrogen and dremel out the RAM chips and find fun things in RAM.

The Arm Mac Mini will be jailbroken in the first month of release and a semi-free GNU/Linux distro will run on it in less than a year.

If there were a blobless coreboot for it, I'd love to buy a Mac modified by Retrofreedom.

J.B. Nicholson-Owens
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You wrote:
> If there were a blobless coreboot for it, I'd love to buy a Mac modified by
> Retrofreedom.

I wouldn't want to give Apple my money for anything. I'd rather find some other
computer I could run in freedom even if it cost significantly more and wasn't the
same architecture so that I wouldn't have to jailbreak it (one of the few en vogue
tech terms that is a good term to use, by the way).

commodore256
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Yeah, good point, maybe a librebooted game console would be a better idea, those things are sold at a loss. If you just buy a console and no games and no multiplayer subscription, they lose a little money.

andyprough
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From the article: "Apple Pay and Apple Card are now down as well."

Weren't able to get to their money either.

lutes
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According to French consumer law and competition law, Apple should be split into two entities unless they accept to sell their hardware separately.

I think that would be a great thing to do, because Apple's hardware does not seem to be as problematic as their software related tricks might let the unsuspecting user think it is.

Freeing a Macbook is such a breeze.

EDIT: sorry, I meant: "injecting some freedom into a Macbook by replacing its OS" is such a breeze.

chaosmonk

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> Freeing a Macbook is such a breeze.

> EDIT: sorry, I meant: "injecting some freedom into a Macbook by replacing its OS" is such a breeze.

It depends. Newer Macbooks need a recent graphics stack and kernel, so Trisquel won't work at all, but other distros will. Many Macbooks have Intel graphics, which work well with free software, but some have Nvidia cards that are not well supported by the free drivers. As far as I know, all Macbooks except for very old ones require a non-free BIOS that does not allow you to swap out hardware components, which is a problem because their WiFi cards and webcams do not work without non-free software.

chaosmonk

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Not to be outdone, Google takes out Gmail, Google Calendar, YouTube (for authenticated users), and the lights in people's smart homes.

=> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/dec/14/google-suffers-worldwide-outage-with-gmail-youtube-and-other-services-down

lutes
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Brilliant move.

Now they will be able to charge an extra fee for authenticated user support. No fee, no heating.