A: This has been happening since at least macOS Catalina (10.15.x, released 7 October 2019). This did not just start with yesterday’s release of Big Sur, it has been happening silently for at least a year. According to Jeff Johnson of Lap Cat Software, this started with macOS Mojave, which was released on 24 September 2018.
Hmm, now I'm wondering exactly which version of macOS my parents' old, no-longer-supported iMac is running. I want to say it's from... 2011, maybe?
(Next time I update/replace their computer -- which may be imminent, as they're complaining of screen brightness problems that sounds like the backlight failing -- they'll finally be switched to Linux, of course. I didn't quite feel Linux was fire-and-forget enough for me remotely supporting computer-illiterate users back in 2011, but I think it is now.)
Which version of Linux? I’ve been trying things out and considering swapping but things still don’t seem as solid as macOS or Windows. Most recently I’ve been trying Ubuntu, which is almost there but not quite.
It's crazy for me how some people go to hell and back just to keep using a spying operating system, which could be replicated basically one to one with Linux. Excluding spying and tracking. It's not like they want specifically iMessage, Facetime etc., as they even disable that.
I'm a Linux-only user of 3 years, been familiar with Linux for 5 years. No, you cannot replicate neither Windows nor Mac one to one with any Linux distro.
it's not clear from the lemmy.ml post and the edits, but the blog post describing the behavior is from november of 2020 and the description of how to mitigate/block it is from february of 2021.
five days after the blog post in november of 2020 apple made a statement about deleting their ip logs, encrypting the communications and giving the option to disable these processes. those three actions seem to address everything in the blog post directly related to the complaint.
i haven't had time to check definitively and see for myself on my own hardware and network yet, but the comment from the cross-post that "apple doesn't seem to have been using their old servers for this" (paraphrasing mine) seems to be accurate at first blush looking at the house's traffic logs.