> "When you apply for a mortgage you are informed in advance that it might be sold. In fact, when I got mine I was told it would be sold. This information is given to every applicant as a legal requirement and people who don't like it don't need to go through with the application."
Ah yes, the good ol' American practice of victim blaming: "Well, we specifically told you we'd screw you over; look, it's in paragraph 151, subsection 15, article G of the document you signed as we hovered over you impatiently that time you came in when we didn't tell you we were closing 10 mins after that appointment we setup the day before the deadline to sign... so it's really YOUR fault!"
If you agree to something, you are not a victim, you are a participant.
Don’t agree to things you don’t like and claim to be a victim, unless you had a gun to your head. We should have higher expectations than that.
Don’t like the mortgage process? Don’t get a mortgage. Pay cash, or rent. The world doesn’t owe you the exact terms you want. That’s not the fault of capitalism, it’s as bad or worse under any other system.
You also seem confused about how the process works. Nobody hovers over you under time pressure. Escrow takes like 30 days, and during that time the lenders will freak out about any reason to prevent you from getting the mortgage. They are more worried about getting screwed than the applicants are.
> If you agree to something, you are not a victim, you are a participant.
If you cannot give informed or willing consent, you are not a participant, you are a victim. Impenetrable, hard to read terms are not informed consent, particularly when the terms are in a contract of adhesion.
> Don’t like the mortgage process? Don’t get a mortgage. Pay cash, or rent.
Couple of points here. First, I take it you've never read a modern leasing contract. In most jurisdictions, especially where the large corporate landlords have almost entirely conquered the market, they are just as opaque. Landlord associations promulgate so-called "standard leases" that contain myriad difficult to comprehend terms.
> The world doesn’t owe you the exact terms you want. That’s not the fault of capitalism
Perhaps it does not, but yes, it is the fault of capitalism. When all of the participants in a market operate in virtually identical ways because the optimal path, under capitalism, is to legalese first and ask questions later, that is absolutely a failure caused by the capitalistic system. It all stems from the idea that, under capitalism, an individual or group's highest and best course of outcome is to feverishly grab for every single available resource to hoard it against use by others. Along the way, some of those resources are (often temporarily) lent out at an inflated rate to ensure that more resources are grabbed.
This works fine when it comes to a mobile phone device or a book or a toy. Those are optional, often called "luxury", goods that we can leave or take as we desire. Housing, water, food, transportation, energy; we need all of these to live as humans, yet that's where capitalism extracts its most gains because the more desperate someone is for one of these, the more resources they will throw in to fill the need they must fill.
> "What about the 268,000 employees who work at Wells Fargo, 99% of whom had nothing to do with this?"
Boo-fukken-hoo. They were all part of the problem - the grease of the machinery if you will; something this bad doesn't go unnoticed by so many people. This was clearly an "inside job" with many, many people involved internally.
I would have no sympathy for any of them, even if they'd end up losing their own homes as a result (sweet, sweet irony that would be!)
While the OP is referring to a "work" machine, I feel their setup is besides the point - it's the fact that it's auto-joining a synced-in Wifi that's the issue...
Essentially, what happened to me is that on my iOS device I was setting up an IoT device (which, similar to the OP, I keep IoT stuff on a different network segment from the rest on my home network by having their own 'IoT devices only Wifi'), which you can only do so via an app, by joining an 'ad-hoc' network created by the IoT device. And that's where all that began; the sequence of events:
1. joined the IoT's Wifi network from my iOS device to set it up; doing this records that Wifi connection in iOS, and the default is that 'auto-join' is enabled for newly joined networks
2. this new Wifi network is synced to my Mac(s) (all personal machines) since I have iCloud Keychain sync enabled
3. Later on, my Mac lost its primary network connection (from router reboot, or other event, etc.); Mac goes "Hmm, network down. Oooh! There's this other new Wifi that's available, lemme join that one automatically!"
4. Me later, after noticing my internet doesn't seem to work on my mac, even though it shows having a network connection: "WTF is this connected to that network?!? I don't want anything else connecting to that!!"
So essentially my mac(s) joined a new network not meant for them, automatically, without my explicit action. That potentially opens it up to security issues of the IoT device because of this auto-join it does behind one's back.
While it could be said that the user shouldn't be mixing a "home" keychain (iCloud) account on a "work" machine, perhaps their work have a BYOD policy, and/or perhaps a policy of using Keychain for work-related password storage, and since iOS doesn't allow the use of multiple user accounts even on their so-called "Pro" devices (hello, Apple? It's 2022!) maybe they don't really have a choice.
But I think that whole argument is beside the point, because the real issues as pointed out are:
- one network used on one device shouldn't necessarily mean that it's suitable for *all* the user's devices [1]
- but more importantly: syncing of Wifi network should only be a convenience; actually connecting to a synced-in Wifi network should only happen by explicit user action, and the 'auto-join' feature should never, ever sync across devices (it should only ever be a device-specific setting), defaulted to off when synced in via iCloud Keychain sync. [2]
That second point is what I also believe to be a security risk.
Yeah, sure, it's a "feature", but with what I feel is a massive security risk.
They seem to want to keep work segmented from personal. Why not just use a separate Mac user account that isn't connected to his personal icloud account?
Again, the whole work vs. personal networks isn't what's really relevant here - it's the auto-joining of synced in Wifi network(s) from other devices that's the real issue (see my other post(s) here for an example).
I got bit by this myself not too long ago; glad to see it getting some traction from someone at Apple, even though it's from the totally wrong department.
For me, on a Mac, I consider Safari dead in the water ever since they crippled its extension support, so that's a no-go.
Chrome is made by whom I consider a privacy rapist, so I refuse to use that. As for any Chromium derivatives - well, given its origins, I consider them tainted, so no-go as well on those.
That leaves only Firefox, which to me is quite capable and fast, and I really have no issues using it.
I do think governments should look closely at Chrome's monopoly, since it's Google's (or Alphabet, or whatever name-du-jour) power play in vertical integration/takeover for its own advantage, and way to crush competition.
Safari uses Web Extensions now.
You can import a Chrome/Firefox extension’s source code into xcode and you have a Safari extension.
Doesn’t work for everything yet, I expect they’ll add more APIs this year at WWDC.
FWIW, I’ve been using the Orion beta on my Mac and it’s great. It’s a WebKit based browser with a built in ad blocker and tree style tabs and can run most Firefox and chrome extensions while having lower resource usage and better battery life than safari.
A nearly perfect browser for me with only a few downsides.
- Not available on windows or Linux yet
- No open tabs sync across apple devices (yet, planned)
- Doesn’t support all extensions (yet, also planned)
Among official responses from game platforms - what I meant by 'the field'. Note that I personally like the creator of itch and respect his opinion, I just did not think it was a professional use of platform.
Ah yes, the good ol' American practice of victim blaming: "Well, we specifically told you we'd screw you over; look, it's in paragraph 151, subsection 15, article G of the document you signed as we hovered over you impatiently that time you came in when we didn't tell you we were closing 10 mins after that appointment we setup the day before the deadline to sign... so it's really YOUR fault!"