Tim Cook's letter to customers

[seebart]

It's more than pain. The whole idea of the union is in question and undergoing the toughest challenge now with this refugee crisis. No one knows how this will play out...

[Muirium]

Yet this is Europe we're talking about. A hundred years ago precisely, we were up to this:

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk ... end-verdun

Everything we face today is nothing compared to what we suffered in the past. No mistake!

Incidentally, Kaiser Wilhelm is my mental model for what a Trump presidency would be like. Both were deeply flawed, aristocratic, narcissistic baby men who never grew to understand the sheer suffering their dreams required.

[webwit]

Back to the fearmongering with Total War. I'm still waiting for the Swiss invasion.

[Muirium]

I'm glad your fruity faith gives you such confidence. I don't think Donald Numptie in the White House spells the end times either, but we're in for another rough ride. Presidents matter. I know you disagree, and you know I do too!

Here's a Scottish politics blogger thinking aloud about the Donald's route to World War 3:

But if by any chance the eventual contest is Sanders v Trump, it'll be a straight all-or-nothing choice between America becoming a normal western country at last, and a descent into madness and possibly darkness. Without question it'll be the scariest election anywhere in the world since Germany went to the polls in 1932.

http://scotgoespop.blogspot.co.uk/2016/ ... r-war.html

We're marching into new territory. More than just a wee bit like the years leading up to 1914. The angrier the man, the weaker the brakes. Donnie and Putin make quite a chilling pair.

[webwit]

I prefer facts. Trump is a business man who killed no one. It's Nobel Obama, Cameron and others who are currently in numbers the word's biggest war mongers with their cowardly oil drone wars.
http://www.salon.com/2015/05/07/the_mid ... s_partner/
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/10/06/middl ... e-history/
etc.

[Muirium]

You'll get your numbers soon enough.

[Halvar]

Can I come back to Tim Cook once again? (Well hello Demongolator!)

After I read his post again today and more of the discussion, I think his argument is flawed in this case, and his "letter to customers", as much as I agree with the need for privacy, is not much more than an Apple PR stunt after all.

In the end, it isn't the government who asks Apple to open a new backdoor in the iPhone, but it was Apple who left a backdoor by leaving for themselves the possibility to upgrade the firmware of a locked phone, thus leaving a lever to shortcut all of their own security measures.

The FBI is only asking Apple to do something that Apple can do: to provide access to this particular phone, by going though the door that they themselves left open in the first place. And that, after all, is a legitimate request given that they have a search warrant for this particular phone for good reason.

What Apple should do, and what they didn't do so far, is make sure there is no way left for Apple to access the data. If they were forbidden to do that by the govenment, well then they'd have a case. But not now.

Why they're not doing this I don't know. Could be because they are afraid of locking the data of milions of people with one buggy firmware upgrade. Could also be that it has to do with their will to compromise with other countries like China.

However, as long as Apple is leaving a way to open a backdoor for themselves, they have no good reason to deny opening it for the government when faced with a warrant.

Cook's argument that, once they wrote a software for going through this backdoor, they would have a hard time to keep this software secret is bullshit, because there already is a secret that they need to protect in order to secure the integrity of the Phones, namely the signing key that allows them to update the firmware on the phones with whatever they want. That signing key is their key to the backdoor they already left.

The other silicon valley companies support Cook, but for all the wrong reasons: they, too, want a legal solution where they themselves can access the data if they want to, but can deny agencies access even with a warrant. That's not the kind of solution that will ever happen, nor is it the solution we as customers want. The IT companies should not be the gatekeeper to our data. Users must be the only ones who can make that decision wherever technically possible.

tl;dr: If Apple wants to keep the goverment from accessing iPhones, they need to make sure they can't do it themseves, not whine.

[webwit]

It would be a late career move for Trump to massacre the Mexican immigrants.

[Muirium]

W. didn't get elected on a policy of invading Iraq and creating Isis, either.

[webwit]

So of the line of warmongers, Bush is bad, Obama is good, Trump is bad, and let me guess, Clinton is good? Perhaps you should tell that to the relatives of the next wedding they bomb. It's boringly politically and demographically colored.

[Muirium]

You and your false equivalences. I don't think Obama is a saint. I don't think a saint can get elected. But I do reckon the Bush years were a nightmare compared to the Clinton and Obama administrations. So many unforced errors. Bush could have led America to a golden era. He took over at a great time. But he squandered it and unleashed Islamic terror on the world with his botched response to 911. Bill Clinton wouldn't have done that. Obama was against it. Hillary, alas, wasn't as smart. I have many issues with her to this day. But Trump, oh brother.

[webwit]

I see, when it comes to the continuation of the oil wars, Obama and Hilary are the victims of previous administrations.

[Muirium]

Victims? Why?

[webwit]

Obama was against it (so after he got the vote, he continued to do nothing about it) and Hilary doesn't have the brain to counteract on the brilliance and genius of W.

[Halvar]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/19/techn ... .html?_r=0

...the judge this week granted the order requiring Apple to create a special tool to help investigators more easily crack the phone’s passcode and get into the device.

Apple had asked the F.B.I. to issue its application for the tool under seal. But the government made it public, prompting Mr. Cook to go into bunker mode to draft a response, according to people privy to the discussions, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The result was the letter that Mr. Cook signed on Tuesday, where he argued that it set a “dangerous precedent” for a company to be forced to build tools for the government that weaken security.

[seebart]

While Apple is looking for a dialog with the feds Bill is backing them...conservative crazyrich old man.

http://mashable.com/2016/02/23/bill-gat ... J_uR9N8mqh

[Halvar]

"This is a specific case where the government is asking for access to information. They are not asking for some general thing, they are asking for a particular case," he said.

He's right. Cook has chosen the wrong battle here by denying access to an iPhone that Apple can access if they want. A device that the manufacturer can access if they want to by changing its firmwware is not a secure device.

EDIT: Apart from that, Microsoft is in fact the company I trust the least to even try to keep my data secure from US agencies, after Bill made very dubious staments regarding Snowden.

[seebart]

It's an example of disassociation, they are using this particular example to argue their case for general access to encrypted data. The only reason this is such an issue now is that Apple choose to respond publicly in the media which of course pisses them off. And yes it seems there have been similair instances:

https://theintercept.com/2016/02/23/new ... d-iphones/

[seebart]

After watching this I do believe that Tim Cook is right, but it still remains a difficult issue.

[Muirium]

Yup. If it wasn't difficult, we wouldn't have heard of it. All because the FBI hadn't damn foolishly reset the dead guy's iCloud password. The phone was his employer's. He and his fellow gunner shot their *own* phones to pieces in the attack.

http://daringfireball.net/2016/02/san_b ... word_reset

Not even the killers' main phone. And it was wide open (for Apple to access) when the cops picked it up. Totally worth banning all security worldwide!

[seebart]

Apparently an NY judge rules feds can't force Apple to unlock an iPhone, surely this is not the end of it.

http://www.engadget.com/2016/02/29/ny-j ... an-iphone/

[webwit]

Why is Tim Cook not in jail? He is a traitor and helps terrorists and pedophiles! Patriots unite!

[Muirium]

Well, I don't know if he's richer than Trump, but he's surely richer than God. And that goes a long, long way in Murica.

[XMIT]

You know, joke all you want about the US, but a good number of us (myself included) are for the most part sane, reasonable people who don't even talk about what folks like Trump want to do in jest.

[Muirium]

Aye. America as a whole is still reasonable. But that right wing over there has been trailblazing the way to cuckoo crazy pants for a generation now. Gingrich, Dubya, Palin, Santorum, Trump. Each one more devilishly irresistible to conservative whackjobs than the last. The most dangerous part: they don't always lose.

[Redmaus]

You know, joke all you want about the US, but a good number of us (myself included) are for the most part sane, reasonable people who don't even talk about what folks like Trump want to do in jest.

Truth be told, all candidates are quite rubbish.
EDIT: Except Rand Paul

But the Republican options are far more preferable than the democratic alternative such as Sanders or Clinton. Even Trump is better than those candidates.

A liberal talking about conservatives being crazy is a little ironic don't you think?

[webwit]

Yeah just forget that the left wing just like the right wing killed people by getting into bed with the war/weapons industry and the copyright industry, among others, because it's convenient for you in your partisan little world. Whatever you do, don't mention that, so that the other asshole doesn't get elected. Blech. Wedding bombing fans.

[Redmaus]

How did the copyright industry kill people? And what do you mean by getting into bed with weapons industry?

[Hak Foo]

Yeah, nobody's *died*, but it's been an economic and social mess nobody wants to touch because they've obtained the moral high ground with the image of the starving artist.

There are three huge issues with the copyright situation right now.

First, since the terms have expanded so much (14 years in the late 1700s, typically 140+ today,. combined with a much wider range of what is copyrightable and what is considered infringing), there's simply a lot of content that's "trapped" -- copyrighted to someone who may well refuse you the ability to build on it-- even if there's little or no commercial value. A tangible example: Under the original copyright terms in the US, *Windows 2000* would be in the public domain today. Imagine what a resource that would be as a learning tool, or even to be maintained by third-party developer communities. Or in a more speculative sense-- thousands of novels written in the last century-- author's dead, publisher's bankrupt, no clear line of succession, but if you dared to start making a movie adaptation, the heirs would suddenly start crawling out of the woodwork with cease-and-desist orders.

Second, the system is designed with no "second source" principle built in. If you want to use product ABC, you've got to deal with whoever owns the rights to it-- no matter their politics or delusions about pricing. They may well be unwilling to license under the terms you need, regardless of price, or insist on impractical terms. (This is my big hatred of copyleft supporters. Not every project is suited for every license, but a lot of the permissive-licensing people are almost morally driven about their choices of license)

The closest thing we have to a workaround is to do the sort of black-box re-engineering seen in things like the original Phoenix BIOS. It might be possible, but it's apt to be expensive, a pain to defend yourself over legally, and may not be practical for every possible thing you'd want to produce. (I'd love to see someone try to make, for example, a black-box re-engineering of the Star Wars films)

Finally, there's no good way to scale it up. If you wanted to open an iTunes/AmazonMP3 competitor, or put a kiosk on your college campus that printed textbooks on demand, you'd be looking at dealing with hundreds or thousands of rights-holders. The logistics of that far exceed any technical complexities of the task. Innovation, in that regard, will suffer-- if you built a technically better competitor to Hulu, for example, it wouldn't matter because you'd not be able to stock the catalog big and fast enough.

I think what we need is basically a mandatory license option-- you'd buy a license from the state, rather than the author/rights-holder. This would probably be priced modestly above the expected market price (you're paying for the convenience of not having to track down and negotiate with the rights-holder), and they'd hold the payment in trust for the rights-holder to collect if and when they ever show themselves. Only one person to deal with, only one payment to make, and they aren't allowed to say "no", only "this might cost a little bit more."

[Redmaus]

Thank you for the thoughtful and accurate writeup Hak Foo.

Part of the reason I am afraid of the TPP mainly because of its IP chapter.

https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp

It will effectively make everything already bad about Intellectual property far worse.

It would allow severe penalties for victimless crimes like piracy. Direct quote from a TPP leak:

penalties that include sentences of imprisonment as well as monetary fines sufficiently high to provide a deterrent to future acts of infringement, consistently with the level of penalties applied for crimes of a corresponding gravity;

Imagine being sent to prison for something as innocent as downloading songs on the internet. A terrifying premise.

Usually, once a group whether it be government, minority, or corporations will try to take as much as they can. Simple human greed. Once you get the model M, you want the model F now. If we cave now, it will keep going like this until we have no privacy or personal freedoms left. It is very hard to repeal these kinds of deals.

Which leads me back to the argument that started this topic. If Apple or whatever company it may be bends over now, the government will want more permissions in our digital lives. It would eventually be the norm for backdoors and vulnerabilities in phones and we might even see the government use their new found power to arrest people for other things beside terrorism.

People would be arrested for drug possession and crimes that have nothing to with national security because they had incriminating information on their phones.

But none of this crap is covered in mainstream media, because they would rather obsess over race baiting and how Donald Trump is a meanie.