I have been curious as to how rules on in app purchases would be enforced. If I were developing an app that supplements some form of service, I'd have *zero intention* of integrating with IAP. Technically its another code path to maintain that duplicates shit elsewhere, and needs to be integrated with existing infrastructure. From a business viewpoint its that additional engineering time, another source of financial transactions to monitor, and a 30% tax for the pleasure of it. ... Or am I missing something?

I was looking at a repository for an Open Source ventilator this morning; so I browsed the issues to see if there was anything I could tick off this afternoon as I have a spare few hours. The first issue I saw was someone requesting a *Code of Conduct*. Something that contributes absolutely zero to the project, suggested by someone who contributes absolutely zero to the FOSS community, on a project which is actually quite admirable and should really be placed above people's petty identity bullshit. I wouldn't mind if this person held those beliefs and felt entitled to make the suggestion based upon their own involvement with the project, but he's yet another serial abuser of the PR system - just finding projects to copy/paste a Markdown file in to.

Yup. Banning Chinese channels wreaks of "*look, we did something!*". The real sources of influence and propaganda are going to be much more subtle; in fact, I dare say much of their messaging likely wouldn't even mention China directly.

> (I know you know what that's like) lmao, that's fucking savage. > The FCA is extremely serious about stuff like this. I agree completely, I've had dealings with the FCA twice and they've seemed to scare the shit out of everyone I've spoken too. Considering the recent PR issues with Robinhood, and the fact they'd be launching with an active userbase of 250,000 UK clients, I can imagine the FCA would've been paying even closer attention than usual.

Call me cynical, but I'm always dubious when companies make moves like this in response to the news and current affairs. I can't help but think it's little more than PR-friendly way of pushing a pre-planned strategy. Also, lol... > In a related development, TikTok - which is owned by the Chinese firm Bytedance - has said it plans to exit Hong Kong within days. Then the article goes on to state that *Bytedance* have their own version for their home market - so this move *means nothing*. In fact, **its the opposite of their claim** - its likely unifying their HK service with their CN one. But hey - it helps bury the PR issues they currently have. Their app is shady as fuck; the way it gathers data, takes its configuration from the TikTok servers, runs a small unauthenticated proxy on the device, and adapts its behaviour when investigated... some real scary and sophisticated stuff.

My thoughts exactly, the quote about how they managed to "track down the codepath" for it was quite bizarre. A ndedless and blatant lie. Even if they did have to go and find it: `grep -r UIPasteBoard .` - ta da!

> “We tracked this down to a codepath in the post composer that checks for URLs in the pasteboard and then suggests a post title based on the text contents of the URL,” At best this was a copy/paste from [StackOverflow](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12454857/how-to-know-when-text-is-pasted-into-uitextview) - surprisingly iOS can't detect paste events. I still can't work out how the official version of events is supposed to work though; every time you want to make a post, the paste board is checked, and it presumably makes a HTTP request to try and generate a title..? That sounds dumb, and I can't see that being the case. It would disclose paste board contents to the active network connection - not great if you're on a corporate network. It would also completely fail if a user manually enters a URL? If you wanted to do that surely you'd just monitor the input from the text field, waiting until the user is finished? I haven't touched iOS in years, so I'm guessing here.