Really? The Acquerello example really made me pause – like there are forces pushing in a gentler older-school direction than the surveillance tech I've grown up with.
> The researchers found the expanding gap was driven by rapid growth in the number of women living in rural places who succumb young to treatable or preventable diseases. [...] Pregnancy-related deaths also played a role, accounting for the highest rate of natural-cause mortality growth for women ages 25 to 54 in rural areas.
> If this was a native app on Linux or even Windows, you could attach a debugger and do the same kind of things whether or not you had the source code.
Notably, though: for a certain value of "you" more narrowly scoped than the "you" capable of writing a few lines of JavaScript.
Nah. Most people can't even write the JavaScript and the ones who can learn that are also generally capable of learning the desktop equivalents.
If there was any difference in difficulty it would be purely arbitrary as a result of which one currently has easier to use tools to do what you're trying to do. A lot of these kinds of things can be done in a few lines of bash or PowerShell.
If there is any fundamental difference, it's that in traditional desktop applications everything is local and the inability to run without an internet connection is something you might complain about. Whereas for a browser you might be surprised if that was even possible, and then there will be things you can't do because you'd need data which is only on the server and is never supplied to the client, or run into rate limiters or be unable to do it privately because your activity generates logs on the server etc.
Different strokes for different folks, I guess - she's involved with a couple of organizations that over the peak of the pandemic used videoconferencing software heavily, so everyone needed each other's emails for that. Plus another organization that just runs via email AFAIA. (I'm not saying she's the absolute hardest-hit by this kind of thing; e.g., some of the volunteering she does where this failure mode would be catastrophic is fine because those contacts reach her via WhatsApp.)
Sorry for the incorrect assumption, and thanks for replying. I use email a ton also, in a lot of different contexts, but I've never needed to match up email addresses with contact cards, for whatever reason. I could see this becoming more common now that Apple is making it easy to share selected info with a nearby phone. I suppose I'd share my email address under those circumstances, even though I wouldn't normally spell it out for sharing with someone.
I think a fair criticism of my post might be that it was written in a moment of obvious annoyance, and failed to spend enough time connecting the griping about the personal experience to larger problems, but it was definitely not "written to manipulate people into believing a false narrative."
> the whole faux-drama would have been solved by simply turning off iMessage on his or his mother's device.
We tried turning off iMessage on the laptop, as mentioned in the post. It does not revert other devices' behavior to SMS.
> Which is false: the messages would be sent to her mac, and they'd be visible as unread to him, so he'd already see that there was an issue.
She certainly won't receive them on her phone, no? It's bad enough, never mind that I'm not around to surveil her computer.
> It's how a normal, not-tech savvy, person chooses a different phone number for a contact that has multiple phone numbers, and iMessage will remember that choice for the future.
Unless, as here, the contact email becomes associated with something that supports iMessage, in which case Messages will stop using the chosen phone number. Neither of us have data to make an argument about how common it is for people to mess with this, so I can only note that I myself have never overridden the originally-chosen contact method before. Either way, there is no signal that someone might need to do this, since, as mentioned, the blue bubbles look to have been delivered just fine.
> And if all of that is too hard, his mother could simply send him a message and the messages app will reply to her phone number, it won't auto switch to her email address.
We tried this, and this is not the behavior we observed. Also, even if this had worked, she would have needed to quickly text... all of her contacts with iPhones in order to get them on the right pathway?
Ultimately, if you think there's no problem here, that's your right. I chose not to include screenshots because a. that would have been more effort, and b. they'd have my mother's PII in them, and properly censoring that all out would have been even more effort.
This whole situation is a PITA that I didn't intend to bring upon my family. The comments here evidence a divide between people thinking this behavior is obvious and people thinking it's highly non-obvious. That's interesting enough to me to feel it was worth having shared.
You cannot, however, deassociate the Apple ID email address when there is no associated iPhone and thus no registered phone number reachable via iMessage. (This is mentioned in the link.)
You can’t remove your last option. It’s probably happening because her Apple ID is her real email so she’d have to first change that which is way unintuitive.
I think it’s best with Apple to log in with an iCloud email address even if you don’t use it.
Oh you're right, you can't remove the last option (just confirmed by trying).
It's the worse case then, and she'd have to change/remove her email from her Apple ID [1].
Apple should do better and make it easier in this kind of case. They already allow one to deregister a phone number from iMessage via a web page, how hard could it be for them to do the same for an email...
I and my sibling were homeschooled, decades ago, and it was stellar. They have a child now and are planning to homeschool. It is with this success story background and in a personally rose-colored context that I would like to say: This piece's framing introduces conspiratorial thinking (teachers' unions' machinations!) and ideological precommitments into a topic that deserves to be taken seriously and evaluated empirically. There is a lot wrong with a lot of homeschooling as it exists today, and the gaps in our understanding should trouble anyone looking at this issue with the next generation's interest in mind. If you're curious about this topic, I'd recommend https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/ for the resources it collects and its general stance – informed by a lot of experiences of homeschooled alumni.
