tl;dr: The full list of countries comprises of Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Bhutan, Bosnia, Brazil, Burma, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Colombia, Cote d’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dominica, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Fiji, Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Nepal, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Republic of the Congo, Russia, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Uruguay, Uzbekistan and Yemen
Gps is free to use. Running your own gnss service requires an atomic clock and possibly separate transmission hardware, which is possible, but adds cost, volume, and weight.
According to [1], “[o]ne of the current generation of GPS satellites (Block III) weighs over 2,200 kg (4,850 lb), the weight of an average pickup truck. The body of these satellites are 1.8 m x 2.5 m x 3.4 m (5.9’ x 8.2’ x 11.2’) in size”. In comparison, “the current V2 Starlink satellite version weighs approximately 1,760 lbs (800 kilograms) at launch, almost three times heavier than the older generation satellites (weighing in at 573 lbs or 260 kg)” [2]
> Gps is free to use. Running your own gnss service requires an atomic clock and possibly separate transmission hardware, which is possible, but adds cost, volume, and weight.
Thanks you provide some great insights on why starlink didnt use gps but still if starlink wants to focus itself as the uncensorable internet in places like protests etc. I feel like they can probably do this after this recent incident
I just can't feel but sad right now because starlink was still providing activists ways to report outside and that helped protestors a lot and information. Now even starlink got removed because starlink tried to save money and I think might not have thought about what if gps itself gets blocked.
This is giving very bad signals for Iran. Is there any way now that Protestors are able to communicate to the outside world/ activists be able to report data outside?
Yes, ask their Mossad direct and local handlers (as per Mike Pompeo [1]) about how things are going, I’m sure that this being Mossad they have a ground-based way to get the information out.
Mike Pompeo is a private citizen; is there some reason to believe that he has direct knowledge of foreign involvement in these protests? It seems unlikely, and doubly so that he’d actually disclose it if he did.
“Former” is operative. I don’t see any reason to believe that Pompeo has special insider knowledge here, and sharing it makes zero sense even if he did. The more parsimonious explanation is that he’s a sidelined grifter whose only way to stay relevant is to speculate on social media.
After reading Walter Isaacson's biography of US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, I would be extremely surprised to find that a former Secretary of State was suddenly out of the loop on major events.
Henry Kissinger was a notorious power broker, and basically remained "in the loop" until the day he died. Pompeo is neither of these things.
But there's an even simpler way to reach this conclusion: given everything you and I know about Pompeo's politics, is there any reason to believe he'd want to introduce doubt about the legitimacy of popular protest in Iran?
In 2022, Elon Musk denied a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink's coverage up to Russian-occupied Crimea during a counterattack on a Crimean port, from which Russia had been launching attacks against Ukrainian civilians; doing so would have violated US sanctions on Russia.[18] This event was widely reported in 2023, erroneously characterizing it as Musk "turning off" Starlink coverage in Crimea.[19][20] SpaceX executives repeatedly stated that Starlink needed to remain a civilian network;[21][22][12] in late 2022, as Starlink was being used as a tool in combat in Ukraine, SpaceX announced Starshield, a Starlink-like program designed for government customers.[23][21] Musk is reported to have said that Ukraine was "going too far" in threatening to inflict a “strategic defeat” on the Kremlin.[24]
Musk, like Trump, has an interesting relationship with Russia. The investigations into that have been quashed, so we don’t get to find out about the rumoured Kremlin calls he was making.
The allegation at the time was that he turned off Starlink. That was not true. He did not turn it on at Ukraine’s request because US law prohibited it.
Because Musk is a fickle, unethical individual with poor impulse control and too much money who only talks about high minded concepts like “free speech” and “battling censorship” when it serves his interests at that moment.
GPS comparison is moot in this case, as there's no need for Starlink constellations to provide full GNSS capability, just locating the satellites precisely enough to facilitate beamforming.
Chip scale atomic clocks are quite small[1], have been used in space, and could be part of the existing Starlink satellites. Finding reliable details about the orbital vehicles the internet eludes me.
The author is in Estonia. Appliances in the European Union have different energy standards and labels, and run on different voltages, so you don’t ever see Energy Star fridges there.
Estonia joined the EU in 2004, and I don’t know what the energy labelling on appliances was like before then.
"Eliminate energy efficiency standards for appliances. Pursuant to
the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 as amended, the agency
is required to set and periodically tighten energy and/or water efficiency
standards for nearly all kinds of commercial and household appliances,
including air conditioners, furnaces, water heaters, stoves, clothes washers
and dryers, refrigerators, dishwashers, light bulbs, and showerheads.
Current law and regulations reduce consumer choice, drive up costs for
consumer appliances, and emphasize energy efficiency to the exclusion of
other important factors such as cycle time and reparability."
It's surprising and disappointing that Apple didn't catch a bug like this in QA. This affects popular apps, and many people will have at least one of these apps with outdated Electron frameworks.
Put it this way: if I were in charge of a major OS, and I having one of the major app frameworks used on my OS tested on for my annual upgrade, I'd feel pretty embarrassed, even if there's a figleaf excuse why it's not my fault.
This doesn't exactly instill confidence in Apple's competence.
Apple doesn't care, they know their users will eat anything they throw at them.
Electron used non-public pieces to workaround an issue with Apple code which Apple knew about and was not interested to address, now it's broken after it changed. Nothing new.
if I were in charge of a major OS, and I having one of the major app frameworks used on my OS tested on for my annual upgrade
Each program contains its own version of Electron. How is Apple going to know the version of Electron your particular version of your particular app that you installed on one particular date perhaps years in the past works?
n apps in the world × n versions of Electron
The problem isn't Apple. It's that the developer of your program is using an outdated version of Electron, or it's put out an update and you haven't updated.
They only needed to test with the latest Electron at the time of release (or indeed, any chance version - they're all affected - but latest is a reasonable baseline). If they had, they would've seen this.
There are patches out now, but only after Apple released the OS to the entire team world and people reported the issue to the Electron team.
Imo, Electron is sufficiently popular that somebody should test at least one Electron app on a major new OS version sometime before releasing it as done! Any app would've worked, and there's plenty of popular ones, as this post shows.
There's just no way for Apple to maintain and run comprehensive test suites for all the different software platforms out there, even "popular" ones.
That's why they release betas early -- that gives each project an opportunity to run their own test suites, however comprehensive they may be.
It's a little hard to hold Apple responsible when there are a lot of app teams in a better position to catch this than Apple, and apparently none of them did.
(Maybe it was a late change in Tahoe? Still, no one found it in the RC either it seems.)
No, this is possible, but again, just drain the bathwater of "all, everything, comprehensive 100%" while blocking the baby of glaringly obvious system-wide visible bugs any good 9x% testing would've caught.
There's also the alternative of announcing this breakage publicly to electron beforehand; and the alternative of having a hack and publicly announcing it will be removed in a year. There's even the alternative of just announcing the caveat at all, so your users aren't unwitting guinea pigs. If they don't want to support a million workarounds forever, they don't have to it's not all or nothing.
Why is it on Apple to make sure that their private APIs (as in you SHOULDN'T USE THEM, because they will change without regard to your software) are backward compatible?
It’s not on Apple. They explicitly warn developers not to do this because stuff exactly like this can happen. If it were an issue involving public APIs, then yes, it would be on Apple.
I get it. I’ve used private APIs in some of my Apple apps. But when you do, you take on a certain level of risk and responsibility when you’ve got customers.
The bigger question is why none of these Electron app developers, particularly larger outfits like Slack, didn’t catch this issue in the last 3 months they had access to Apple OS betas.
Do they have a QA process? Perhaps they should start.
Because ultimately Apple is making software for its users. Something that negatively affects their users experience is something they should factor in with new releases no matter whose "fault" it is. Such is the pain of making operating systems.
You're right in the purest sense: use a private API, get burnt. But when it's something this widely used and depended upon you could argue Apple should have made it into a public API by now.
It's on both. Apple should probably have caught this in beta considering how widespread Electron apps are, and have worked with Electron to fix it or they should've worked around it (which Microsoft would probably have done).
If they're not supposed to be used, why can they be used? Hyrum's law strikes again!
With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody. (https://www.hyrumslaw.com/)
Given enough motivation, access control is irrelevant too. See early Windows "private" API that was used for decades and Microsoft supported despite being "private", because they knew it was being used and they (used to) care about their users.
What does Apple even get out of it? I don't think anyone is clamouring for new MacOS releases, so I can't imagine it drives hardware sales. MacOS is no longer a paid product either.
The regular update cadence and the lack of stability for developers sets an expectation that developers must be active (forever) or their product will stop working.
That way, they never have to deal with fallout from breaking a 20 year old program like Microsoft got for breaking whatever version of GTA. There's no way a 20 year old program still runs on current macos, so nothing to worry about.
I worked on some Mac security software. WWDC and that first macOS beta in June dictated whether we were going to spend the summer on features, or on compatibility with the new platform. There were a few crazy years, like file protection in Mojave, system extensions in Catalina, and Apple Silicon and other changes in Big Sur. Not to mention yearly device management changes and UI changes like dark mode, completely reworking the menu bar icon, etc.
The Windows team never faced anything like this. Not only did Windows change slowly and with backward compatibility, but the users didn't upgrade right away, even if they were buying brand new laptops. But in the Mac world, a laptop bought in September/October is going to have the new macOS on it no matter what.
I'm not sure. Perhaps Tim Cook just likes schedules, which fit naturally in his MBA brain. Or it could be that Apple previously set the expectation of annual releases and now can't stop, because getting off the update train would be a kind of indicator or admission to stockholders and the media that Apple is falling behind somehow. On the other hand, annual OS updates with updated system requirements would provide a convenient way to implement planned obsolescence of hardware.
In any case, Tim Cook clearly doesn't have the same standards as Steve Jobs did. Cook will never complain, "This is shit!" As Jobs reportedly lamented, Cook is a not a product person. So QA problems are not necessarily a problem for him. I suspect that Cook actually believes everything is mostly going well, and perhaps some "metrics" tell him so, though the metrics likely ignore the fact that developers have been disillusioned and alienated by Apple's hostile bug reporting system. If I thought Apple cared and would do something, I'd file literally thousands more bug reports.
it's been a while since you used macos? apple has completely stopped giving a shit, extremely basic functionality like spotlight and settings search have been completely broken for years now...
spotlight routinely fails to find existing files, newly added programs or system stuff, settings search ranks search results incorrectly, doesn't have fuzzy matching, fails to find stuff, for some languages parts are unfindable in that language at all, parts of the ui are sometimes straight up untranslated...
like, you learn to work around this, mostly by just using raycast, but it's just unacceptable that they've spent BILLIONS on useless ai shit, while stuff THAT HAS WORKED CORRECTLY ALREADY IN THE PAST gets broken and goes unfixed for literal years
Unfortunately on machines doing a lot of software development, the various dependency cache locations need to be excluded from indexing, otherwise Spotlight is essentially doing full text search over millions of lines of code
For me newly installed apps from outside the Appstore are excluded from Spotlight until I manually open them and trigger the 3rd party “untrusted” confirmation dialog. After confirming with Open they show up.
MacOS 26 actually has some really great new features around Spotlight, from actions to clipboard history, and the heretofore-underloved Control Center has been really improved (and is clearly being positioned as the new solution to the plague of ever-increasing menu bar icons). There are improvements to Shortcuts automation. And, for nerds (hi), Terminal finally got 24-bit color and support for Powerline fonts.
I see a lot of "ugh, Tahoe is just the iOS-ification of macOS" on HN, which, on the surface, I get -- the visual changes by and large make things worse, and ironically I think they're actually not as good as the changes on iOS. But the Mac got stuff that the iPad didn't, and there's still a lot you can't do on the iPad that you can on the Mac. I don't think the two are merging any time soon, even if they're becoming more visually similar. (Actually, I don't think the two will ever merge, strictly speaking, but that's another post.)
It's possible that happens to me, and I've not noticed it. I don't add new applications that often, so I can't recall the last time if it showed up immediately or not.
For example let's say I want to go to display settings from search. I enter 'monitor' in search since I forgot how it's called. First results: accessibility, privacy and security, control center, and only 4-th category Displays. It's 8-th line if you count sub-categories.
I usually google where a particular setting is now since I don't use the exact same words and the settings search is very literal.
The search in Settings not working is an issue Apple carried over from iOS (where it was broken for years) into macOS. One of my pet peeves is all the Catalyst apps (like Reminders) that don’t work well with keyboard navigation.
