I think it's a privately-owned, profit-focused endeavor that is nevertheless beholden to the Chinese government and which the government wants to take as much advantage of as possible. Deep down, I'm certain that their sole goal is to make as much money for themselves as they possibly can. If they also need to exfiltrate some data and send it to the CCP, that's just a necessary business expense.

That’s why it would need to be a small piece of a greater set of information. Imagine a person walking through an office and into a stairwell. If you know the person is there, and you know the stairwell is darker than the office, you could infer the appropriate location of the person in the building

That has nothing to do with the technique described in the article. It's also still quite a stretch. Holding up a piece of paper and casting a shadow on the ambient light sensor will also make it appear darker. Are they in the stairwell or is Bob from accounting stopping by to tell a "funny" anecdote and blocking the afternoon sun? If you've managed to compromise a device enough to access sensor data, you're not bothering trying to make sketchy assumptions based on the light sensor.

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.

Australia's government said on Monday it would bring Apple Pay, Google Pay and other digital payment services under the same regulatory umbrella as credit cards and other payments as part of legislation set to be introduced to parliament this week.

This is complete nonsense. Does the government even know what it’s saying? Apple Pay just refers to a credit or debit card loaded onto your device. It’s already fully covered by all regulations that apply to the cards themselves.

I think it's pretty solidly in the Tex-Mex category, which is so much more popular in America than actual Mexican food that "Mexican" is better considered a casual alternative to saying Tex-Mex. If you actually mean authentic Mexican, you should probably specify that, or even better, name the specific region. It's normal to see a restaurant advertised as Oaxacan or Yucatan, for example.

Tethering burns through battery and a laptop's battery is much bigger. I believe Apple's smallest laptop battery has roughly three times the capacity as their biggest iPhone battery. Tethering works well for occasional use but if you've got a job where spend pretty much your whole work day roaming around to different locations, having it built in can be quite useful.

E-bikes are kind of a red herring here anyway; there’s little practical use-case for them that isn’t already covered by unpowered bicycles unless you live somewhere very hilly.

Even in a place that isn't very hilly, an e-bike could make the difference between arriving to work sweaty or not, which can easily mean the difference between biking or not. The extra help also expands the available user base to those who are less fit, and expands the range of what is doable for any given person. And, again, I want to emphasize the sweat difference, which also ties back into range (how far can you bike on a regular bike versus an e-bike without breaking a sweat?)

OK, I finally read the original allegation and this is grossly irresponsible reporting. We can put our pitchforks down. The plaintiffs never even claim that the automakers can access your text messages in the first place. This is entirely about the car’s hardware locally caching the messages it displays, some of which could possibly then be read from the cache using specialized and not commonly available equipment.

Is it something to be aware of? Sure. Is something the average person should be concerned about? Not really.

The abbreviation i.e. is short for "id est," literally "that is." English-language alternatives would be "that is to say" or "in other words."

The abbreviation e.g. is short for "exempli gratia," meaning "for example."

In retrospect, I think there could have been ways we could have made it work by perhaps reinventing the category of computing between PCs, tablets, and phones.

I'm sorry but no, Microsoft was never going to be capable of reinventing any category of computing. They've never done it before and it's just not within their expertise. I think Nadella was right at the time to cut their losses. Windows Phone represented Microsoft's best efforts in that space and, while it had its fans, it just wasn't enough.

Meanwhile, they've done really well with their "apps and services on every platform" approach. How many millions of people use Outlook on their phone? How many apps are running their back end on Azure? Microsoft may have given up on an aspect of "mobile," but is still raking in piles of cash from what people actually do on mobile devices. Take the win where you can find it.

This is curiously similar to the premise of the Broadway musical, Dear Evan Hansen.

I'm not sure what accidental journey through Gmail's options OP took but it looks to me that they inadvertently started setting up a passkey, which is tied to the hardware but can sync between Apple devices using iCloud Keychain. Apple certainly isn't blocking you from changing Gmail-specific settings.