darelrex

Hedware said:

Somehow everybody gets asked except for consumers. As an owner of Apple products,  I do not want my privacy and security compromised because some lazy developers want to have open skies. They should attempt to build some decent apps. 

Exactly. Are all those people who voluntarily choose to shop at Macy's being unwittingly "harmed," and the government needs to save them from that harm by outlawing the Macy's markup? (which, BTW, is much larger than Apple's)

caladanian said:

What has trust to do with it? Either you follow the rules within the laws or not. You can’t distrust preventively without them making a mistake with their new developer account – after all I can understand. 

Epic Games blatantly violated its existing and agree-to contractual terms on 2020-08-13, against both Apple and also Google. That pretty much ruins their trustworthiness, right there. Getting a new developer account doesn't magically reset Sweeney's trustworthiness.

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.

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.

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.

"We applaud President Biden for upholding the ITC's ruling," AliveCor CEO Priya Abani said in a statement to AppleInsider, "and holding Apple accountable for infringing the patents that underpin our industry-leading ECG technology."

I haven't studied these patents myself, but I've heard that people who have say it's nothing more than a patent on the very idea of using ECG in conjunction with a smartwatch. It's not "industry-leading ECG technology." ECG is an incredibly simple technology that's been around since before anyone alive today was even born.

AliveCor was probably hoping for a juicy settlement, but Apple chose to fight it. The patents have already been invalidated, and now it's just a question of whether the appellate forum agrees with that invalidation.

Apple in its turn has sued Ericsson over what it describes as "standards-essential patents."

All patents contained in the 5G phone standard (or 4G before it, etc.) are standards-essential. Nobody is supposed to need permission to use them. Nobody is supposed to need to sign licensing agreements to use them. Nobody is supposed to be able to get product-sale injunctions against people who use them, even while wrangling over money in court.

The only valid dispute is how much do they have to pay. And that's supposed to be the exact same (per-device) amount that everyone else is paying for those same patent(s). If no such amount exists (because the patent holder isn't following the rules of the FRAND agreement), then the amount owed should be zero.

It's stunning that phone communication standards — without which you can't make a working phone at all, and your whole company could collapse if your most successful product is suddenly unavailable for purchase — can be used in court to try to extort any amount from any phone maker. Hopefully, Apple got a good deal in this settlement, based on the strength of its case against Ericsson and the actual content of the FRAND agreement Ericsson long-ago signed.

applecolin said:

...

Read on AppleInsider

I removed all the deceptive opinions you flooded your article with and left behind the facts. Apple won’t allow iMessage on Android, and this is absolutely against the consumer. This is why we need better messaging protocols like XMTP and Farcaster. 

Let me get this straight: Company A has some servers that are performing A-internal functions for A's own products, then company B discovers a way to hack into those servers and make them do stuff for company B, and company A responds by disabling the hack a few days later, then company A is "absolutely against the consumer," because you say so? And your opinion trumps that of A and all of A's customers even if 99% of them are perfectly OK with A's actions in disabling that hack — but that doesn't make you anti-consumer at all.

I can't imagine how I would justify such an opinion.. unless I had a severe, ulterior dislike of Apple and its customers, and on that basis I hungered for any rationale for Apple to be screwed with in any way possible.

It was inevitable that somewhere, some day, a government was going to demand such immense fines, and such massive, "antitrust" changes to Apple's products, that Apple would have to bow out of that market until/unless things become viable again. Not sure if this is that breaking point, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was.

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!