gunner1954

msantti said:

cali said:

Good thing he's smart. Here's one guy in the tech industry who's thinking. Imagine Tim turning his back on Apple fans?

I'm happy Apple products protect their users globally.

"I'm happy Apple products protect their users (and terrorists) globally."

Fixed.

And protects all the government agents from the hackers who might abscond with gov't iPhones. Agents have lost entire computers, no less. A phone is much easier to misplace.

As PROX mentioned (through news articles) China wanted the Apple iOS source code to ensure that there are NO backdoors in the code, as Apple alleged. Apple (allegedly) handed over the source code to iOS, NOT the security keys, and they DID NOT create a NEW version with a backdoor, nor did they hand over firmware code (to anyone's knowledge). If all the FBI wanted was the source code, Apple probably would have handed that over, but that is not the NY judge's order.

To me the FBI is asking of Apple the equivalent of asking a safe maker, not only how the safe is designed, AND not only the best way to defeat the safe, but also to build in a special combination to the safe usable only by them (yeah, right) to circumvent any combination set by the owner of the safe.

volcan said:

How did they change the Apple ID associated with the phone if the phone was locked?

The didn't change the Apple ID. They changed the passcode (I will use password from here on) associated with the AppleID probably via appleid.apple.com.
However, that new password would have to be entered into the iPhone (Settings-iCloud) to have that iPhone activate iCloud backup, else it can't connect.
Somebody probably thought they would change the password to get at the data in iCloud, found out the data hadn't been backed up in months (or at all), then learned that they couldn't get the iPhone to start auto backup without entering the new AppleID password in settings, and because they didn't know the original password, could not set it back. 
Now they are stuck with an iPhone that can't back up to iCloud and they can't change to the new password because they don't know the 4-digit PASSCODE to access the iPhone. Thus, because the FBI screwed up, they want Apple to create a software hack to bypass the 'Wipe data after 10 wrong passcode attempts' so they can brute force the device; easier to do with only 4 numeric digits, especially when you have to use 4, not 1, 2 or 3.
Once the iPhone passcode is broken, then the FBI can enter the NEW AppleID password to get the phone to sync with iCloud, but then it won't be necessary because they can now simply copy everything to a computer.

In other words, they want Apple to save their butt for doing something they thought was smart, but didn't work, so they try Plan B and Apple balks.