The baffling thing is that iOS+MDM has been fantastic over the years. macOS is a completely different beast though.

MacOS used to be excellent for a short period of time when Fleetsmith existed. Then Apple purchased Fleetsmith around 2020 and killed the product not long after.

Fortunately around the same time, JamF ended the practice of the mandatory Jamf JumpStart (£5K fee), which finally made Jamf a feasible option for the company I was in at the time.

True, I remember looking at jamf at one point and the mandatory consulting was so annoying because we already had it dialled in on the free trial.

In the end we just made do with intune. It's a lot less capable for Mac but these days you can get by with it.

hopefully there's no kill switch for macs on intune, if not, the threat of wiping machines with one click is real, just ask stryker; https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/stryker-attack-device...

Of course there is a kill switch. This is one of the key features of an MDM/endpoint manager. You won't be able to sell one without it. It's also built in to apple's management protocol (which most endpoint management systems leverage) and in activesync.

You just have to secure it properly. Have limits to how many one admin can wipe etc. But trust me every company with managed IT assets has this capability. Often even in BOYD scenarios! Stryker just failed to secure access to it properly and to set sensible limits.

However, the feature isn't very effective in the field. It's very unlikely for an attacker to be smart enough to bypass the password on a stolen Mac which is needed to connect it to WiFi, yet at the same time be dumb enough to connect it to the unfiltered internet so it can receive the wipe command. The overlap between these sets of people is almost zero. We do fire a wipe at every stolen computer but I doubt it ever actually happens. If it ever happens it'll be a total end user fail (like writing the password on a post-it with the laptop)

Either you will lose it to a common thief who won't be able to breach the login (99% of cases), or to a really targeted adversary who has cellebrite or something similar and won't connect it to the internet ever again. This is still the most risky scenario because if someone like that steals it, there's bound to be something really valuable on it.

In practice this is something more suited to mobile devices.

It can be done that way, but it is definitely not the norm. Businesses will generally “purchase” (many for €0) apps in ABM that are to be used for business purposes and push those to devices, the user can then use an Apple ID to download any other apps they want for personal use.

If they’re using Managed Apple IDs they will have no access at all to the app store and won’t be able to download their own apps anymore. IT department will have to buy and assign any apps that anyone needs, even the $0 ones that only 1 person needs.

Yep. Truly horrid policy. Where I work our issued iPhones suck to use without App Store access; no Bitwarden was the killer for me personally. Everyone I checked with uses their personal email/Apple ID instead of the MAID, and there's a sword over your head if you ever accidently copy/paste something from internal emails to something like Notes which has iCloud sync (we're semi serious about leaker). Absolute failure of an MDM setup by Apple.

MDM can restrict pasteboard from managed apps to non-managed apps, as well as allowing iCloud sign-ins but restricting which iCloud services are allowed.

It's an absolute failure of the MDM server administrator for allowing such things, not on Apple.

You’ve never been issued a work computer that’s not yours to fuck around with?

I haven’t. Did have issued laptops that were company managed but I basically didn’t use and, in any case, I like many others reinstalled a clean operating system image and did my own support.

At most decent sized companies with a cyber security and network admin team, this is probably the fastest way to get disconnected from the internal corporate network with no way to reconnect.

I always seem to end up with local admin at the bigger places I've been at because I'm so annoying with onboarding and requesting access to download development tools.

This was a larger company and they did not care so long as you followed policies like turning on encryption. Companies do differ.

You could do that in our place but you'd lose access to everything due to not being in compliance.

In a small shop that might work but not in an enterprise with ISO norms and security certifications to meet.

Just on a personal note, tying your personal devices to your work email account is a very silly thing to do. Even if it's your company you could be locked out of your company email account at any time (HR grievance, SEC investigation, hostile takeover...) Losing access to your devices and not being able to access things like reset emails at the same time would not be fun.

Sue for what? Do you think you own the company email address?

€1500 or so for Tesla to replace the screen, cheaper in many other cars.

Energy ≠ electricity

I guess if your goal is just to stream aircraft telemetry and black box like recordings then latency may not be high on the agenda.

Black box data doesn't need that crazy throughput either though. Traditional RF is much easier to get right, and works even when the aircraft starts losing track of where it is and stops being able to track the satellite with its laser

I think it's the opposite? For small telemetry you want it now, but for the big data products there's no hope of "now" and so you settle for soon.

That seems like a rather cynical take. I think you’re conflating philosophy as guidance for how to live (stoicism etc) and philosophy as more of a science to explore unanswered questions, which are naturally going to have very different practitioners and audiences?

The latter can be applicable to the former. Traditionally the connection was acknowledged, with Socrates the prototype of the philosopher who believed that happiness, ethical living, and philosophy were inextricably linked. Obviously philosophy has come a long way since Socrates, but academic philosophers continue to give lip service to the idea that philosophy can be valuable in everyday living, if not in ethics then in processing information, critiquing arguments, and understanding the origins and limitations of ideas.

I think we've known since the time of Socrates that the practice of philosophy is not the practice of happy living. Philosophers tend to be miserable. Socrates himself chose to drink poison over moving to a different city. I think most philosophies, despite their myriad differences, agree that what people tend to want is not what philosophy will give them. Maybe some of the answers philosophy yields can be applied to increase happiness, but philosophy in practice tends to produce questions.

Most philosophers would not agree that yielding questions instead of answers makes philosophy unhelpful, nor that the happiest life is necessarily the one in which pain is most successfully avoided.

I get what you’re saying but I think it misses that battery longevity can be a competitive advantage for the companies with better technology.

The Nissan Leaf 15 years ago came with a 5-year/100,000km battery warranty, now Toyota are at 10-year/1,000,000km.

You’d be proving me wrong with this fact if the data showed that they’re moving more units because of this marketing.

As it stands the Nissan Leaf is an outlier only in Norway, where it was practically a free car due to subsidies, otherwise their growth is pretty much in line with other EVs.

I was giving the Leaf as an example of a worse warranty offering from 15 years ago sorry. Toyota now have the longer warranty compared to all the others, and even as a fairly poor EV they’re hugely popular with taxi drivers etc.

I’m a bit EV obsessed so spend a lot of time answering questions about them online, the longer warranty is 100% impacting buying choices.

This seems like something EV buyers would care about. If they don't, it raises the question of why a solution is needed at all.

“I’ll sell my car before it becomes an issue” - common statement I’ve heard.

It needs to be fixed, because aside from someone being left with the economic bag of disposing of the vehicle, it is actually an environmental issue to build these batteries.

Just not as bad of an issue as running ICE cars for the same period of time.

People tend not to think more than a certain amount of time away for some reason.

I disagree. They could for example make it mandatory to grant more stock options to employees so the wealth they are generating is more broadly spread beyond the founder/CEO. I’m sure there are plenty of other approaches that would still handsomely reward innovation and growth but prevent where we ended up today.

Sam Bankman-Fried. And I think he’s a bit of a special case, others do not need to be worried they’ll succumb to multi billion dollar fraud schemes if they try to earn-to-give.

I'm not defending SBF, but I think you may not be completely taking into account how strong the pressures are on someone like that. I'm pretty sure he didn't set out to commit a multi-billion dollar fraud, he was sucked into it as a consequence of the expectations on him and so forth. My point here is just that this is a symptom of a societal problem, and SBF is just a well-positioned scapegoat.

SBF was really unusual in that he claimed to be a pure expected-utility maximiser. He admitted that he would take 51% coin-flips forever on Conversations with Tyler in March 2022, long before everything blew up:

> COWEN: Then you keep on playing the game. So, what's the chance we're left with anything? Don't I just St. Petersburg paradox you into nonexistence?

> BANKMAN-FRIED: Well, not necessarily. Maybe you St. Petersburg paradox into an enormously valuable existence. That's the other option.

I'm not saying the pressures are absent, but they are hopefully vastly less compelling for any normal person with a more standard view of risk and utility. ("Sure, I'll just cover up this little bit of fraud, because that's got a better than 50% chance of success" is a course of action SBF all but said he would take, months in advance!)

If you have a billion dollars to give me, I'm pretty sure I can manage to not to use them for outright crypto fraud. You'd have to give me a billion dollars to be sure, but I promise really hard.

Don’t think they’re dumb, their goals are just shorter-term, they need to juice the numbers before the next election cycle.