I'm not from the U.S. but as my country's elections work the same way, I feel compelled to weigh in on this. Here in the UK, you go to your local polling station, you give your name, they check it against the list, then cross you out and hand you a ballot. (This was tweaked in the last few years to require government ID, but the process remains the same. More on that later).
While it's true you could in theory say you were anyone on the list, you'd have to first know you were picking a name that wasn't going to be used, or hadn't already. This is already something of a reach. If someone uses a name that had already been used, or someone turns up later to vote and finds their name crossed out, it's going to set off alarm bells.
On top of the logistical challenges, this is a high-effort endeavour. A single person going to multiple polling stations repeatedly doesn't scale super well. Obviously you can try and do this en masse but the more people are involved the harder it would be to keep secret. If you're trying to rig a local council election with low turnout, it might make a meaningful difference. Does it work if you're trying to swing a congressional race or higher? I see the mentions of carousel voting, and am aware of the likes of Tammany Hall, but these are more of an open secret. What the likes of the GOP are alleging is that there's an invisible epidemic of voter fraud to engineer distrust of the system generally.
Sadly in the UK our long-established voting system was tampered with by the government of the time, who took a leaf from GOP voter intimidation and suppression tactics and mandated government-issued ID at the polls to solve a an almost non-existent issue, leading to tens of thousands of eligible voters being turned away at the polls. Thankfully this moronic and clear abuse of process is likely to be reverse before our next major election, however.
I have set up Time Machine backups for literally hundreds, if not thousands of people in a support role over many years and have hardly ever witnessed this happening. It's one thing to say you may have had to do this once or twice in a decade or the like, but every few months is ridiculous and speaks to some other underlying issue with your setup, like a quietly failing drive or bad cable, etc.
I'm not one of these 'it hasn't happened to me, ergo it's impossible people'. I completely think that many of the design elements of Tahoe are a horrendous regression versus even Sequoia, but I think asserting that Time Machine is completely broken in the shipping version of macOS is a bold statement that deserves a bit of pushback, even among the fire raging in a lot of other places in macOS!
This is a very common error case, more common with storing the backup on a network share (Wifi / Ethernet doesn't matter). If you look for "Time Machine must erase your existing backup history and start a new backup to correct this." you'll find a lot of references for this problem.
To be clear, I'm not saying it's Tahoe related, it has been there for many years.
Did you only set up Time Machine? Or did you continue supporting all those users for years and years. If the issue is that eventually the backup store becomes corrupted then you may not see it at all if you're only setting up backups but never dealing with users who actually need to restore something from backup years later.
For me, it's backing up over a network share. My Synology NAS works perfectly and flawlessly for literally everything else. It's RAID 1. It supports Time Machine. But somehow it would get corrupted every few months and I'd have to start it all over.
Tons of people complain about this. I suspect it's some subtle bug with sparse bundles and SMB.
This is incorrect. Mac minis (starting with the M4 model) and Mac Studios simply need to be restored via DFU mode following physical installation of another SSD (be it a larger one or simply a replacement) to function. There are third parties who have reverse engineered the design of the PCB and paired it with the same Hynix and Sandisk NAND chips Apple use.
I can never understand this tired line. Do you and all the people who bleat the same thing also post the same thing about Nintendo and PlayStation bloggers? He’s an Apple commentator. Doesn’t it stand to reason that he does that full time because he’s fundamentally a fan of the company, rather than because he’s suborned his integrity in service of… getting to play with new Apple hardware a week before it goes on sale?
Assume you are referring to "Apple's official defense attorney" and yeah, that's not fair to Gruber, as others point out he's a very good and thoughtful writer.
I'd say less "fundamentally fan of ..." and more "deeply understands ..."
There is a different between a Fan of something, such as Nintendo and Playstation. And making reasons up simply to protect the company it loves. Which is what Gruber and DED on AppleInsider does.
USB-C Invented by Apple? AirPod selling at cost or loss? And countless other things.
Yeah but apple gave in to Chinese government and all their server in China are under monitoring of the CCP, the party have keys to decrypt every bit of data that goes through them, Chinese icloud private relay included.
That's like when apple still refuses after years to fix the airdrop protocol so that Chinese police forces can't find anymore who sent what file to who. Since 2022, Chinese police forces openly brag about the fact they can retrieve the identity of people who spread unallowed propaganda through airdrop in crowded area.
Good guy apple for pretending to do the right stuff but no one should rely on them.
I don't see how this could prevent unsafe sites leaking credentials (Assuming unsecure == No TLS) as unencrypted data will be sent through the exit node to the web server. It does however help for wifi snooping.
I’m not validating the automatic anti-China sentiment you can sometimes get in these discussions, but there is a major difference between the two. If you live in any mainstream European, or for simplicity’s sake, ‘Western’ country, regardless of your feelings towards U.S. intelligence gathering, these are political allies who share intelligence as a matter of course anyway. China is an actively hostile power who just recently penetrated the domestic U.S. phone network.
Obviously skepticism on this topic is a generally good thing, but I think nihilism to the point that one thinks the U.S. is no different to China, Russia or North Korea is neither accurate nor particularly helpful.
As an individual I am more concerned about the spying that is effectively hostile to me personally. As a Westerner, I am fairly certain that this will be Western spying. I would expect a Chinese person to be more concerned with Chinese spying for the same reason.
Political allies or not, the US has been caught spying on us just the same.[0] US companies constantly spy on EU citizens and use the data they illegally collect to influence our habits. While I don't fear a military conflict with the United States, there is an ongoing threat of having our elections, our culture, and our purchasing habits influenced by US businesses.
I'm not saying that the US is no different from China. I am saying that unlike the Chinese threat, the threat of spying from the US government and US businesses has been going on for a while already.
Fire up the built-in Screen Sharing app, type their Apple ID email address in and hit connect. It should bring up a prompt their end that they can accept and you can then observe/control their screen!
I use this all the time for tech support (for family and work).
