iPhones, particularly with the advanced security/hardening turned on are light years in front of Android devices for protection against advanced/sophisticated actors. Which is why VIPs use iPhones.
Apple responded to Pegasus with Lockdown Mode, which is probably the most hardcore security modality that's ever shipped in mass produced consumer hardware.
Apparently Cellebrite is able to crack open iPhones but not phones running GrapheneOS. There's no doubt iPhones are reasonably secure but I wouldn't say they have "the most hardcore security".
This cuts both ways - ADP requires changing some settings on-device, and (in some cases I've heard) calling Apple to disable. So it is baked in, but it's hardly easy to enable and disable
GrapheneOS (which, FWIW, I do trust at least as much as ADP) has a web-installer IIRC, making it similarly easy to enable, but a little harder to disable for normal users. Moreover, it's not built-in to the Pixel. It's entirely third-party, and did not ship on mass-market hardware
Being an option on the default OS, with OEM support, can make all the difference sometimes
People have been getting zero-click hacked on iPhones by Israeli malware now also in use by ICE, even recently. I don't blame Apple too much given what they're up against, but zero-clicks are the worst thing possible.
Empirical evidence doesn't support this. IIRC the bounty for an Android exploit is 500k more than an iphone... Let alone the number of people killed from an Android exploit is... 0? Iphone is at least at 1... Let alone the 1000 other VIPs.
Induction says, its dangerous to have an iphone. There is no deduction based answer here that has been validated by experiment.
Other than price, in what ways are they streets ahead? I’m a bit of an EV nerd and that would not be my assessment at all. Unfortunately for Western manufacturers price/volume is probably the most important thing right now, so they are still in serious trouble.
Well the software for one (excluding Tesla), it's faster, more advanced, more creative (probably more gimmicks but still).
Domestically (in China) they also offer much higher charging wattage.
But yes quality is at parity and they're cheaper.
Most Chinese cars still have massive software quality issues that you don’t hear about because there are few of them around here. ADAS are usually much worse as well.
My biggest software issue with my GWM relates to how they gamed the DPF, which is a local requirement. They built in the required automaticaly regenerating DPF, but also set the temperature/rev requirement so that it never automatically regenerates (even if it indicates it is doing so). So I have to manually regenerate every other month.
Otherwise the software is pretty good, with the occasional midflight reboot.Its definitely no worse than the honda I ran previously.
Their interiors on midrange+ vehicles seems leagues ahead of European automakers.
A 100k+ euros Mercedes Benz E class doesn't even get you real leather from a decade (by the way I prefer MB tex, but what are you paying for exactly?).
I dont drive one of their EV's, but the 20+ year veteran Diesel Engineer who took my DPF filter complaint escalation does and thats really all I need to know. After I run my current vehicle into the ground, that will probably be next.
What.cd was the Library of Alexandria for recorded music, the depth of what was collated and properly labelled there was far beyond anything that has ever existed on any other service, paid for or not. Every permutation of every release, endless live recordings, often multiple of the same event, absolutely incredible.
Private trackers as I understand it, are still a thing in the mid 2020s. Did a replacement that matches (or surpasses) What.cd not pop up in the meantime?
I'm just wondering how a strong community like that was struck a deathblow. It's not like all of its content disappeared.
Orpheus and redacted (previously passtheheadphones) both appeared shortly after what.cd’s demise. I believe they both now have more total torrents than what.cd, however the depth is still not what what’s was 9 years on (I know this because some of my uploads from what are still missing, partially because I no longer have the source material). And, the “cultivation” (ensuring no duplicates, recommendations for releases, general community, etc) is nowhere near what’s.
I would say all other media (or at least, the media I care about - film, tv, books) has what.cd equivalents, sometimes multiple. I think Spotify and AM killed 95%+ of “true” private tracker interest for music, especially with lossless and surround releases being available. The diehard core are still there (names from 15 years ago are still active) but it’s really not the same.
Orpheus and Redacted existed but it's kind of hard to beat the convenience of streaming for the low price in 2025.
Granted you can set up automated *arr systems with PLEXAMP to get a pretty seamless "personal Spotify" setup IME getting true usefulness out of trackers of What's quality always required spending real money - to obtain rare records/CDs on marketplaces - or at least large amounts of time if you went the "rent CDs from the library" route. I personally haven't ran into much RYM releases lacking on Apple Music and what is lacking I can find on Bandcamp or YouTube.
We are in a situation where it's a choice between unchecked corporate/oligarchic power or government power, at least the latter is nominally accountable in a democracy.
X controls Musk, not the other way around. Foreign influence campaigns control X. Thus governments buy the services of a rich patsy to control/destroy their opponents.
$1000/person is reasonable? You could literally have a secretary/admin spend _multiple days per year per person_ managing things for that much. The software administrative complex is completely mad.
The thing is, they don't need to be more complex. Their administration bloated because it could in order to enrich the people in the administration. It's the MBA/middle management disease.
Why exactly are Universities all-inclusive day cares for young adults covering every life need under a single administrative umbrella? It's like a capitalist commune. Landlord, hospital network, a few professional sports teams, dozens of amateur sports teams, several restaurant chains, life coaches, a police force, and on and on and on.
They do everything, the things they do they overcomplicate, and they overreach control of every tiny thing all under one umbrella. Of course it's absurdly expensive, but there's no reason it needs to be besides there's no incentive for anybody to cut back on anything ever.
Countries understood in the age of TV/newspapers that control of the media was a sovereignty issue. Any nation that wishes to remain truly sovereign, particularly in the English-speaking world is going to have to grasp the nettle and block or force divesture of Meta & the other US social media giants.
Cambridge Analytica was the canary, the gloves are off now. Australia's under-16 social media ban is a good first step but we need to go much further and fast, as much as government control is undesirable at least a democratic government is somewhat accountable, the nexus of US tech giants and it's sprawling intelligence services is not.
There's zero overlap between banning social media for kids and banning news from Rupert.
P.S. that soveregnity issue is not likely to be acted on because there are always a lot of people who prefer foreign influence to domestic opposition! Just ask the Roman Empire.
Completely agree with this. There's a reason the FCC exists and it has nothing to do with electromagnetic frequencies. This agency, just like the Fed, needs to be broken away from politics completely. It's almost too late.
Workday, Palantir, ServiceNow - a new generation of Accenture/Oracle et al 'consulting' parasites that wine and dine their way into organisations (and governments) and then bleed them dry. There's a reason software spending endlessly goes up but productivity has flatlined.
These companies exist because non-tech companies building in-house software for their complex workflows also tend to run millions over budget and create brittle, bespoke software.
Also, I wouldn’t put Palantir in the same bucket as Workday and ServiceNow. It’s expensive, but it does work.
So now 'professional management' bring in these firms and instead run hundreds of millions over budget to create brittle, bespoke software. It's profoundly damning on our industry that decades of software development later most productivity gains stopped at about the point Excel and email became widespread. Software has eaten the world('s budgets) with little to show for it. No wonder all these parasites are so excited about AI, another whease to flog to naive orgnaisations that will inevitably spiral in cost, deliver nothing of value and suck more budget from anything useful. Then sell them 'cybersecurity' and 'observability' on top because now their security is Swiss cheese.
I empathize with you, but it’s also worth saying that not all firms are the same. Just as not all in-house teams are the same. There are good ones and bad ones. Even inside firms there are good teams and bad teams. Enterprise software is complex and good software engineers are expensive. These projects are delayed and go over budget because their complexities are grossly underestimated.
ServiceNow is so terrible I genuinely wonder how it is ever deployed anywhere. Seriously, do the purchasers never look at it? Is there no product demo at all during the purchase process? Do the sales people actively hide it or something?
I work in a department that has been using ServiceNow for at least 5 years, and I still do not know how to look up a ticket by ticket number. I just pretend I'm following along when my colleagues reference a ticket.
I just spent a minute poking at it: my dashboard page didn't load, then it told me there are no open tickets in the system, then clicking on a different ticket number to open it didn't do anything, and then the server stopped responding. (Edit: it took 48 seconds to load the ticket.)
They also have a little stopwatch button on some pages that pops up a "Browser Response Time" window that tries to put the blame for slow page load times on the user's browser. Weird, wonder why they need that...
Yes! It always amazes me there seems to be no obvious URL scheme for servicenow.sadcompany.com/<ticket-number> Like, did the developers forget to implement that?
Yeah, and there's no search field, either. Surely, this is my misunderstanding and I should click the "Show Help" icon for a product tutorial, right? This pops up a window saying:
> Now Assist offers real-time guidance and support for users seeking help with Virtual Agent. This feature’s generative AI skills blah blah blah
Ok...? There is no input box to interact with "Now Assist" or the "Virtual Agent", it's just like a marketing blurb for some other feature.
F500, we have a pretty custom ServiceNow, but all I do is put the ticket or any other identifier in the search box and go. Takes 2 seconds to be in the ticket. Granted, that interface sucks too, but I suspect your main problem is internal to your org and the people that configured your ServiceNow.
Your system was configured by muppets if you don’t have a search box - it’s a massive beast that like all enterprise-grade software is a toolbox for you to bend to your will, but the downside is that if your configuration people don’t have empathy for the users (and looking at you especially, contract architects) you end up with a system that is optimised for whoever talks with the vendor, and not for anyone else.
What? Unless someone actively removed the search field, you should have quite a big search field in the top right corner, where you can basically search for anything you'd need.
> my dashboard page didn't load, then it told me there are no open tickets in the system, then clicking on a different ticket number to open it didn't do anything, and then the server stopped responding.
Like all SaaS in-house implementations, this is entirely on how your company's ServiceNow developers.
I've worked on multiple SNOW implementations and things can go really bad when you go crazy with the customizations.
Your comment makes me understand the product even less. So it’s SaaS where you have to develop it yourself? What exactly is the company providing? Why do its customers simultaneously want to outsource this to a vendor and then spend resources customizing it down to the level of “basic CRUD operations work” and “the user sees a search field”?
ServiceNow is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS), not a SaaS, that allows development of new products on top of it.
At its core, there is a workflow management engine that third parties can use to implement their own, stateful, process centric products and services.
We have ServiceNow proper (the CRM) and a completely unrelated to CRM third party product that we have purchased and which is implemented on the ServiceNow platform. Both have nothing to do with each other and are used by different business users.
You don't develop it, you develop on it. SN provides the underlying software, implementations, hosting, upgrades, etc. Salesforce is another example of this.
Not to say that ServiceNow is great, but not being able to type the number into the search bar (top right) sounds more like a user issue than anything else.
I love that ServiceNow has completely broken the back/forward behavior in its own unique way.
Yes, many other sites also break this navigation, but SN takes it to a whole other level.
Want to open and edit multiple records in different tabs? You're a braver soul than I. Better also double check what record you go back to when you click Update. Which is of course different to when you right click and choose Save.
What comes after UI16 for user interface design? Well, UIB, of course. UI16 still looks straight out of 2016.
I, too, made this assumption. Then I learned it was an actual product my ex-employer had selected and kept using.
It still didn't make sense why an enhancement request and a fix request couldn't be moved between queues. Or why I received three (at least) emails when an issue was closed.
> ServiceNow is so terrible I genuinely wonder how it is ever deployed anywhere. Seriously, do the purchasers never look at it?
When I first saw ServiceNow, I was impressed - because my point of comparison (I worked for a university at the time) was BMC Remedy, which was terrible. And some years later I did some consulting for a major bank which was using some 3270-based IBM solution (Tivoli something… I believe it has finally been discontinued) and ServiceNow is light years ahead of that too.
I get the impression the innovation drivers at OpenAI have all moved on and the people that have moved in were the ones chasing the money, the rest is history.
The real secret sauce is that Valve is private and doesn't have external investors. As soon as you're owners are primarily interested in short term capital extraction everything else is inevitable.
I think you are correct here. If you want to look at the decline of the US ... this is perhaps a good place to start. Short term capital extraction little long term strategic planning. Maybe Cisco is a good example.. lets move all of our switch hardware production to China and still charge the consumer 3500$ per switch. Equals short term gain, makes lots of millinaires... and then just a few years later.. now Huawei makes excellent switches that are mostly on par with Cisco at a better price point.
Apple responded to Pegasus with Lockdown Mode, which is probably the most hardcore security modality that's ever shipped in mass produced consumer hardware.
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