darelrex

Apple is pretty unusual among big companies in that it's not divisional; it's structured like a startup. That's a huge part of how it's able to make products that are so well integrated. And more so than most other companies, Apple would be particularly badly damaged by a forced breakup.

Imagine, for example, if Apple's processor team was made a separate company, and was required to sell chips to, and make chips for, whomever wants to buy: Samsung, Google, Microsoft. Apple's spent maybe a decade and a half investing in building a processor advantage, and just as it's reaching its big fruition, boom, let's force them to give it over to all their competitors.

Unlike Judge Rogers who mostly ruled for Apple in Epic Games's suit, saying "success is not illegal," I think Warren believes that success is illegal. Or least for one particular company it is.

gatorguy said:

darelrex said:

I think the hardware devices that hack iPhones (Celebrite, Graykey) don't work anymore on today's fully updated iPhones. Apple figured out what they were doing, and fixed it. Now you get a very limited number of tries before the Secure Enclave wipes itself, erasing the only copy of the 256-bit AES decryption key. Then, even the person who knows the unlock code can't get the data back: all the encrypted personal data in that iPhone is forever unreadable — unless some theoretical quantum computer of the future can crack 256-bit AES.

Celebrite (and Graykey?) are constantly buying new zero-days as they become available as well as crafting their own methods. I'm pretty sure they can gain access to even the latest iPhones with up-to-date firmware. When one door closes....

When you seize a locked iPhone, iOS doesn't even have the strong-AES decryption key for the user's encrypted personal data. Nor does it have the user's unlock code. Only the Secure Enclave has those things.

Zero-days might get you into iOS, but not into the Secure Enclave which is dramatically simpler than iOS and totally separate from it. Apparently there was some flaw in the original Secure Enclave that made Celebrite and Graykey possible for a while, but that is reportedly fixed. Will there be an endless new supply of flaws in the Secure Enclave, to keep Celebrite and Graykey working on iPhones? I seriously doubt it.

But point to you: I keep finding reports on the internet that Graykey works against very recent iPhones. Not sure what to think of that!

I think the hardware devices that hack iPhones (Celebrite, Graykey) don't work anymore on today's fully updated iPhones. Apple figured out what they were doing, and fixed it. Now you get a very limited number of tries before the Secure Enclave wipes itself, erasing the only copy of the 256-bit AES decryption key. Then, even the person who knows the unlock code can't get the data back: all the encrypted personal data in that iPhone is forever unreadable — unless some theoretical quantum computer of the future can crack 256-bit AES.

Just to cite one issue in the suit: Apple is accused of denigrating SMS messages with a déclassé, lower-contrast, green color to make them harder to read and to make people think of non-iPhone devices as inferior. (a) If Apple was doing that, would it even be a crime; (b) that coloration is only for outgoing messages that you typed yourself, so you already know what they say; and (c) Apple's been using that exact, outgoing, color scheme for SMS since the very first iPhone in 2007 when Apple's messages didn't even do any other kind of messaging.

I sincerely hope Apple's lawyers plan to patiently go through things like this with the jury. The DOJ lawyers that filed this case either are very poorly informed, or they're intentionally dishonest and hope they can score with a poorly informed jury, just for the sake of scoring at all against a big, rich company, for no actually good reason.

It's not just the size of the fine that's retroactive; it's the whole idea that Apple has been violating the law for years. Apple's had the same App Store rules for 16 years (if anything, they've just gotten more lax), long before it was even a small fraction of its current valuation, and long before iPhone was much more than a sliver of the mobile market. Nobody running the EU thought anything was illegal about it. But now that iPhone is a trillion-dollar, smash success, suddenly it's not only illegal, but it's been illegal for years, and we need to hit them up for that. What's $2 billion here, $5 billion there, to a $3T company? They'll probably just pay, right?

But Apple's thinking, what happens in the long run if we do pay this? Next thing we know, every government in the world is hitting us up for big bucks, and demanding we trash our most successful product so the "little guys" can screw with it. Better to draw a line now, than to wait until it gets much, much worse.