Today in "No I don't want your fucking app"

4 years ago

Just a reminder that every time you share a link to "apple.news", I cannot smash that "Cancel" button hard enough:

Previously, previously.

Tags: computers, corporations, doomed, spam, www

20 Responses:

1. MattyJ says:

   4 years ago at 11:04 am

   Not sure why anyone wouldn't love a glorified RSS reader that drains 25% of your battery every day when you don't even open the app.

2. Kyle Huff says:

   4 years ago at 12:24 pm

   I sanitize the links before sending them out to avoid the embarrassment of people knowing I sometimes use News.

3. LW says:

   4 years ago at 3:21 pm

   is there any way to uninstall News, by chance?

   • jwz says:

     4 years ago at 3:30 pm

     

   • dunham says:

     4 years ago at 7:39 pm

     On iOS, you press the icon until everything starts wiggling, and the press the X. I did this back when apple started aggressively upselling. I should have done it much earlier - I'm much happier not knowing the world is burning.

     On OSX it's protected by the sandbox system. But all that goes away if you boot from another partition. So boot from another partition and rm -rf as root. This might make incremental updates unhappy, I haven't tested.

     Recovery partition can probably be used for this, but mine disappeared, so I used my beta partition.

     Catalina, BTW, takes all this to the next level - most of the system is on a read-only root partition, and the directory trees that apple deems you worthy to touch are "firm-linked" from a separate read-write partition.

     • jwz says:

       4 years ago at 7:57 pm

       Deleting it on iOS doesn't make the URLs start working, however. Booting single user to turn off sandboxing only lasts until the next macOS upgrade. I also wouldn't 100% bet on that making the URLs work.

       • asan102 says:

         4 years ago at 12:44 am

         They play this same delightful trick with iTunes podcast listings/the garbage Podcasts app, BTW. You just don't get to use those links anymore, even though they point to perfectly functional webpages. (I was delighted to read some Gruber article going around recently regarding this stupid Luminary app which went on and on about what good stewards of the podcasting community Apple have been.)

     • tfb says:

       4 years ago at 3:54 am

       Of course, putting great chunks of the filesystem on a read-only volume is also a pretty good approach to dealing with things which might want to modify it for their own nefarious purposes.

       • Rich says:

         4 years ago at 7:57 am

         I wouldn't call 'opening webpages' nefarious, but fine okay

4. Different Jamie says:

   4 years ago at 3:48 pm

   Christ, Apple is going to force me to run a Linux desktop yet.

   • James says:

     4 years ago at 11:31 pm

     I love Apple, but the new $120 4GB Raspberry Pi 4 starter kit, is what I'm going to be asking from any client who wants to own what I'm developing on, from now on. Debian is now supporting UEFI Secure Boot, which means that the rapture has already occurred, so it's important to not accidentally support the antichrist. It's also sandboxed with seccomp-BPF, LUKS uses LUKS2 for cryptsetup, and systemd has become, well, slightly less horrible.

     And given the upswing in malware affecting MacOSX 10.14, arm linux is pretty clearly the smaller vulnerability surface now, and probably will be for at least two or three years.

     Plus, Buster's new Mesa 3D Graphics will probably impress jwz.

     • jwz says:

       4 years ago at 2:47 am

       Frsrs, my only question about the new Pi is this and whether it supports browser GL graphics well enough that I can stop using decade-old Minis for my flyer screens.

       • mattl says:

         4 years ago at 7:35 am

         I have a couple in the mail. Once they arrive, I'll let you know.

5. Narr says:

   4 years ago at 8:03 pm

   I deleted Mail, too, but now I can’t use email links. It comes up every year or so. MS got punished for less.

   • asan102 says:

     4 years ago at 12:48 am

     Oh god, I had almost successfully repressed this headache. Even enterprise admins have no way to change the mailto: handler except directing users on how to do so from within Mail.app. Which setting cannot be accessed without first setting up an account in Mail.app.

6. Winston says:

   4 years ago at 12:05 am

   Hey, take a look at this: https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/StopTheNews.html

7. Legooolas says:

   4 years ago at 8:18 am

   So when you say "news links", these are nntp links, right? Right? :(

   (I feel old)

   • Aidan Gauland says:

     4 years ago at 3:56 am

     You're making me miss Gmane. ;_;

8. Tim says:

   4 years ago at 1:58 pm

   At least they aren't using the "dark pattern" wherein the "cancel" and "allow" buttons are randomly swapped ... are they?

   • TCG says:

     4 years ago at 8:57 pm

     Screw that infuriating bullshit.