kirklennon

LOL what? That’s literally the only thing it is…

Merchants do not have any relationship with Apple for Apple Pay transactions. You tap your phone and it's treated the exact same way as when you tap your card. The merchant sends it to whoever they use for card processing, who eventually sends it to the card network (Visa, etc.) and to the bank for approval. That's what payment processing is. Apple isn't involved at any step. They are involved in the provisioning process where cards are added to your device.

Not correct. Apple doesn’t provide this service out of the kindness of their hearts. They charge 0.15% transaction fee.

Apple charges a fee to the issuing bank, which comes out of their share of the card processing fee paid by merchants. The original (2014) reported fee for US credit card transactions was 0.15%. Card processing fees are, in general, significantly cheaper in Europe (and indeed most other countries). We don't even know if the US fee is still 0.15% but it definitely isn't in the EU.

Apple Pay charges much higher rates than competing payment processors.

Apple Pay isn't a payment processor. It's a system for banks to provisional additional cards on their customer's devices, which are then processed the same way and for the same fees as tapping the physical card.

Banks want direct access to the NFC because they want to bully people into making their app the default handler for payment cards. One of the great things about Apple Pay is that all banks must compete as equals for every transaction. It's trivially easy to switch which card you use when you pay and every card gets the same best user experience.

Forcing NFC open is, paradoxically, anti-competitive, because it makes it easier for the biggest banks to stop competing and instead lock their customers in.

I’m not clean bubble anymore.

I'm assuming you meant green. Are you aware that received messages on iPhone all look the same regardless of whether they're iMessages or SMS? You were gray before and you're gray now.

This headline is ridiculous; I expect better from Ars Technica. You "admit" to things you shouldn't have done. In this case the government compelled Apple to disclose certain data and simultaneously prohibited Apple from disclosing the disclosure. Thanks to a senator's letter, Apple is now free to disclose something that they previously wanted to disclose, about something they were forced to do in the first place.

Compare to the Reuters headline: "Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications - US senator." The emphasis and agency are correctly placed on the bad actors.

And that their two-letter country code, commonly seen in Swiss domain names, is CH for Confoederatio Helvetica.

This person is an actress and comedian. This is not an iPhone error; it's just a manually-edited photo from three separate takes that she pretended came out of the phone as-is. It's a hoax for laughs/attention.

So just start a government subsidy program for news, and increase corporate taxes. That would at least be honest. The lie that this is somehow compensation for something of value is the part that I can't abide. There's not even any advertising on Google News. It's literally just linking out to news articles. If you search for news topics, you usually won't find any paid links on that either. People bid on search terms related to stuff people might buy, not on hard news topics.

That’s the BS line publishers have been trying to trick people with but that extra stuff such as the lede and photo are explicitly provided by the publisher to enable rich preview cards/links. They literally add extra code in the page for that exact purpose. View source on any of their articles and you’ll see Open Graph metadata tags, which were created by Facebook.

They added code specifically so their links from Facebook would look better, and are now pretending like the rich preview cards are stealing their content.

The World Wide Web is a web of links. Websites link to other websites. These publishers want to be paid when certain companies link to them. That’s an affront to a core functionality of the web.

What a disgrace. This law is hostile to the basic principles of an open web; Google should have refused like Meta is.

You know, when I wrote it I actually questioned whether I should use the word "lying," or if doing so would cause an overly nit-picking response, but I decided to expect the best in people. Surely they'd see that I was establishing a shared premise that he wasn't lying, which is the usual opposite of "telling the truth," while pointing out that he wasn't necessarily telling the truth. There's a middle ground of ignorance.

But by all means, thank you for interjecting yourself in the conversation to state the obvious.

I think he's experienced enough to know that when your movie is out in theaters right now, the studio always wants you to use every possible opportunity to talk up the film, and would prefer you not go off on tangents. If nothing else, that's a reasonable request.