jony0

Swear said:

Ah, Apple the company that all major terrorist organizations around the world recommend for it's member's use.....

Ah, the pervasive clueless drive-by single commenter. In the unlikely event he she it or others of their ilk would actually read this far :

There are many other encryption products for Android. Al-Fajr, one of Al-Qaeda’s media arms, released a new Android encryption application early June 2014 on their website. […] GIMF, another media arm of Al-Qaeda, also launched a new version of their Android software since our last post. Interestingly, between these two new product releases this continues the bet on mobile and Android as the preferred platform for these groups. The large availability and affordability of Android phones, especially in underdeveloped countries, is probably the reason for this.
https://www.recordedfuture.com/al-qaeda-encryption-technology-part-2/

ireland said:

So when's the trial for the NSA heads who broke privacy laws and lied to congress on the record? And the Wall St. bankers who broke the law and caused the worst global economic crisis in decades?

Also, this shows the state of US media and journalism when all people talked about was iCloud hacking, when 1. no hack took place and 2. more gmail accounts were message with and I never even heard about the gmail part of the story until now.

And unfortunately that state of US media and journalism includes AppleInsider that also uses hacking case right in the title. I just wanted to double-check before posting and to my dismay the Mac dictionary has this for hacker :
   a person who uses computers to gain unauthorized access to data.

Surprised and disappointed, I turned to Wikipedia :
   someone who seeks and exploits weaknesses in a computer system or computer network.

Now that’s more like it. Excluding the other hacker meaning of an enthusiastic and skillful computer programmer or user, my own perception and that of family, friends, acquaintances and strangers, both technically savvy and not, a hack is akin to a break & entry, whereas what the phishing issue here is like leaving the key under the mat. And you can’t blame the lock manufacturer for that. I had to repeat this many times to explain that iCloud was never hacked, the people responsible are not hackers, they’re just thieves who got the key. I would’ve expected an Apple centric news service to know that distinction as well.

jfc1138 said:

michael scrip said:

That's the thing... the hacker rarely has to guess your extremely complex password.

By using various phishing attempts... YOU give them your password!

And that's what is so scary about this stuff.  The users themselves are a big flaw. I know plenty of people who wouldn't question an email from Google if it asked them to type in their password.  Or an email from Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, etc.  People are gullible.

Me?  Not so much.  I'm very careful... plus I use two-factor authentication on all my major accounts.

But the average person can be easily tricked into giving away their password with no problem. And that's the biggest hole in security.

Indeed: the issue isn't the mathematics of encryption, it's the biology of Darwinism. 

Exactly. The issue is indeed not technical, it is a human weakness issue. 
This is also what the FBI vs Encryption battle is all about. I would want law enforcement to have the best tools available within the law and within human tampering. I tried to come up with a simple explanation to convey this to my mother and kids and so, using the simplest of words that even a politician could understand, here is the issue :
It is a simple technical task to create a key given to responsible good people doing a good thing for the benefit of all, we all want that, but there is no technology in the near or distant future that can or could detect if the legitimate key is actually being used by a bad person instead, or even by a good person doing a bad thing, and that’s what nobody wants.
Access to those photos was granted with a key by a human wrongdoer who appropriated the key through human failings. This is also why we can't create a master key to give to humans and expect that they will also fail to keep it in their pants.

VisualSeed said:

Strong encryption prevents more crime than weak encryption would allow to be prosecuted. Weak encryption funds more terrorism than strong encryption enables. 

Exactly. Both the technology and civil liberty worlds know this but it would be helpful for the other side to see actual numbers. Although many have probably also seen the horrific numbers of deaths by guns compared to terrorism yet have a greater and visceral fear of the unlikeliness or being a victim of terror and still won't give another thought about the fact that it was still guns that killed and hurt those unfortunate people, not a phone or the presumed information it could hold. If only legislators and whoever people they cater to cared as much about their private information as they did for their guns we might not be in this mess. Yes, I did say 'might', because, well, here's a visual reminder :

radarthekat said:

I feel I should post this on each article about this Apple/FBI case as a means to bring those newly engaging in this debate up to speed.

Good idea, it's an excellent summary of the situation in language that's hopefully simple enough for even the most simpleton of trolls to understand, even though they will almost certainly still disagree just to fulfill their dire need of attention by being antagonistic. To the smaller group of smarter and welcomed newcomers it would also serve as an ad hoc manifesto of where most of us here stand.

Terrorists will hold up this incident and the fallout from it as a major victory in their attempts to weaken and manipulate free society

Totally agree. I've been stating this to friends lately that if, heaven forbid, the FBI would win this, it would be one of the greatest terrorist coups in years. It fulfills the obvious terrorism goal to instil terror in the masses, yet this goes even further and persuades them to unwittingly exchange real security for a false sense of security and give in to government surveillance. Our latest newcomer here is a case in point and readily admitted as much. Although there is always a possibility that it was the original master plan all along of some evil genius to plant the iPhone and start this whole mess, I suspect the murderous SB terrorists specifically as well as their terror organization as a whole didn’t dream of the extent of the total damage they will inflict, and as a ludicrous bonus, accomplished with the complicity of the original victims’ law enforcement demagoguery.