I’ve been trying to reduce the storage that the Photos app uses, both on my Mac and in iCloud. I use Lightroom for my photo library, so I would like to delete all the photos that are not referenced by projects (calendars and photo books).
Unfortunately, Photos is unable to display any of my projects from before December 2018, so I guess those are lost causes. (Maybe in theory I could restore from a really old backup with older versions of macOS and Photos and prevent it from syncing with iCloud Photos?)
Focusing on the newer ones, my first thought was to create a smart album of photos that are not referenced by any projects/albums. Photos does have a referenced condition, but I think that refers to files that have not been copied into the library.
This TidBITS-Talk thread recommends adding keywords to photos that are referenced, but that doesn’t seem to be possible with projects and the current version of Photos. If I select photos in a project, there are no relevant menu commands enabled, and the Info window doesn’t show anything about keywords.
What ended up working was creating a new album called In Projects. Photos does let you add to an album from within a project. So I did this for each project, adding the photos that were placed to the album. Then I created a smart album for photos that were not in the In Projects album.
Datacide iCloud Photo Library Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Photos.app Storage
Juli Clover:
Apple today said that Meta has made 15 interoperability requests under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in the European Union, which is more than any other company.
In a statement provided to Reuters, Apple said that Meta is asking for changes that could compromise user security and privacy.
[…]
In response to Apple’s comments on Meta’s requests, Meta said the following: “What Apple is actually saying is they don’t believe in interoperability. Every time Apple is called out for its anticompetitive behavior, they defend themselves on privacy grounds that have no basis in reality.”
John Gruber (Mastodon, Dithering):
Apple says Meta is seeking low-level access that would break both user privacy and device security.
Meta says Apple is using “privacy” as a bullshit excuse to avoid even reasonable interoperability.
But without reading the requests, there’s no way to say which side is more right than the other.
Apple:
It’s getting personal.
How abuse of the DMA’s interoperability
mandate could expose your private information.
[…]
If Apple were to have to grant all of these requests, Facebook, Instagram, and
WhatsApp could enable Meta to read on a user’s device all of their messages and
emails, see every phone call they make or receive, track every app that they use,
scan all of their photos, look at their files and calendar events, log all of their
passwords, and more. This is data that Apple itself has chosen not to access in
order to provide the strongest possible protection to users.
Except that with the OCSP preference that Apple reneged on, Apple does get to track the apps that you use.
It’s not clear to me which request would enable Meta to “log all of [the user’s] passwords.” I doubt that’s actually what they want to do.
Separately
Meta also wants to access their
message history. Access to private
communications needs to remain fully
under the control of users.
I would love for apps to be able to access my message history because right now Apple doesn’t let me back up or search my own messages.
For instance, if a user asks
Siri to read out loud the
latest message received via
WhatsApp, Meta or other
third parties could indirectly
gain access to the contents
of the message. No one is in
a position to understand the
full risks of that.
This is one of the scariest examples they could come up with?
Nick Heer:
These are, so far as I can tell, similar to the things the Commission is requiring here.
Nick Heer (via Hacker News):
The EC preliminary findings under the DMA indicate that Apple must take steps to enable the operability of devices from other brands with its iPhones. The EC has launched public consultations with interested companies to gather feedback on compliance.
Steve Troughton-Smith:
The European Commission is going through Apple’s OSes feature by feature, with the help of interested parties and industry collaboration, and deciding where the API lines should be drawn. It’s absolutely fascinating.
[…]
“If Apple presents end users of [3rd-party apps] with a choice regarding the level of background execution capabilities or background connection to a connected physical device, it must present the same choice in the same manner, including regarding time, place, and cadence, to end users of Apple’s connected physical devices. Apple may only present end users with a specific choice […] if Apple implements and offers this choice for its own connected physical device.”
[…]
This proposal effectively states that Apple should provide private headers to internal frameworks on request, and developers should subsequently decide whether they need to submit an interoperability request to make the frameworks or APIs public.
[…]
Also, just to acknowledge the spin Apple is taking on this, which I have no interest in linking to: they just threw Meta under the bus for interoperability requests, something that is forbidden under the EC’s proposal, triple-underlining why the EC needs to legislate all of this in writing in the first place.
Previously:
Update (2025-01-09): See also: Natasha Lomas (Hacker News).
Update (2025-01-10): Andrew Bosworth:
If you paid for an iPhone you should be annoyed that Apple won’t give you the power to decide what accessories you use with it! You paid a lot of money for that computer and it could be doing so much more for you but they handicap it to preference their own accessories (which are not always the best!). All we are asking for is the opportunity for consumers to choose how best to use their own devices.
[…]
Many iPhone users don’t realize the experience with (for example) Ray-Ban Meta glasses is better on Android today because of limitations Apple has put in place on their system that do not apply to their own first party accessories.
Via David Barnard:
Apple’s built-in advantage in AR can’t be overstated. It’s mostly the US-based, iPhone-toting early adopters that are going to help fund and publicly beta test the first few waves of AR glasses. Without being able to integrate deeply into iOS, Meta will be severely hamstrung.
That said, it’s easier than ever to imagine a world in which visionOS plays second fiddle to Android XR and/or Horizon OS.
So many of the use-cases that will be unlocked with AR will benefit from, if not be completely dependent on, AI. Both Google and Meta already have multimodal foundation models publicly deployed, getting more and more capable by the month. Meanwhile Apple shipped Apple Intelligence with the same dumb Siri we’ve all built a love/hate (but mostly hate) relationship with. And partnered with OpenAI.
[…]
While Apple’s privacy protections do matter to a certain extent to many consumers, billions of people using Google and Meta product daily demonstrates that a better experience is often worth some amount of tradeoff in privacy.
Ian Betteridge:
Apple’s statements about what Meta is demanding through its DMA interoperability requests need to be taken with a giant pinch of salt.
Previously:
Digital Markets Act (DMA) European Union iOS iOS 18 iOS Multitasking Legal Messages.app Meta Privacy Private API Security Siri WhatsApp
Reuters (via Hacker News, Court Listener):
U.S. judge ruled on Friday in favor of Meta Platforms’, WhatsApp in a lawsuit accusing Israel’s NSO Group of exploiting a bug in the messaging app to install spy software allowing unauthorized surveillance.
[…]
WhatsApp in 2019 sued NSO seeking an injunction and damages, accusing it of accessing WhatsApp servers without permission six months earlier to install the Pegasus software on victims’ mobile devices. The lawsuit alleged the intrusion allowed the surveillance of 1,400 people, including journalists, human rights activists and dissidents.
kdbg:
I’m not a lawyer so maybe I’m misunderstanding something but the plaintiff is Whatsapp, not the journalists. This isn’t really about holding NSO Group accountable for hacking journalists at all
The fact journalists were compromised seems only incidental, the ruling is about weather or not NGO Group “exceeded authorization” on WhatsApp by sending the Pegasus installation vector through WhatsApp to the victims and not weather they were unauthorized in accessing the victims.
[…]
Adding a little more detail that comes from the prior dockets and isn’t in the judgement directly but basically NSO Group scripted up a fake Whatsapp client that could send messages that the original application wouldn’t be able to send. They use this fake client to send some messages that the original application wouldn’t be able to send which provide information about the target users’ device. In that the fake client is doing something the real client cannot do (and fake clients are prohibited by the terms) they exceeded authorization.
Think about that for a moment and what that can mean. I doubt I’m the only person here who has ever made an alternative client for something before.
Whatapp (that I recall) does not claim that the fake client abused any vulnerabilities to get information just that it was a fake client and that was sufficient.
I guess the vulnerabilities they exploited were in the operating systems, not in WhatsApp, but Apple withdrew its suit against NSO Group.
See also: Nick Heer.
In other news about old lawsuits, I just received my small settlement checks from Peters v. Apple and Equifax.
Previously:
Update (2025-01-09): Tim Cushing (Slashdot):
The win here is limited. And while it does seem to expand the definition of unauthorized access that has so often been a problem in CFAA cases, it only does so because NSO refused to make the source code available to WhatsApp, which means the court has to assume Whatsapp’s allegations are true because NSO is unwilling to prove them false.
iOS iOS 14 Lawsuit Legal NSO Group Privacy Security WhatsApp
Dag Spicer (via Hacker News):
Bitzer studied electrical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), obtaining a PhD in 1960. Following graduation, he joined the UIUC faculty, where he learned of efforts to bring lessons to students over a closed-circuit television network. While a committee of engineers, psychologists, and educators were unable to agree on a single solution at the time, Bitzer wrote up a proposal within a week, got it approved, and immediately started developing his PLATO system for the university’s groundbreaking ILLIAC I computer—the first electronic digital stored program computer built by a university. (PLATO stands for Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations).
[…]
To make things easier on the eyes for students sitting in front of computer terminals for many hours at a time, in 1964 Bitzer, with colleague Gene Slottow and graduate student Robert Wilson, invented the flat panel display: plasma screens do not flicker and their clever design also saved memory in the computer by having the display itself store data.
Display Education History Rest in Peace
