uroshnor

lenn said:

The government has the legal right to enter your house and search every inch of it with a warrant but Apple's Cook says even with a legal warrant we will do everything in our power to stop the government from searching someone's stupid mobile phone?????? So if someone invents a "new technology house" that includes encrypted locks and a system that will destroy all the contents of said house unless you know the right password to enter it that's ok too??? For some reason people today feel that their phones are some how special and above the laws of this and other countries. I personally would much rather have the police search my phone than my entire house, car, ect. Hell the police can even get a warrant to search someone bank safely deposit box! But someone's iPhone is off limits. People keep saying their phone is personal so it's different. So your home, car, ect isn't personal?

1. Thats not what Cook has said. Apple will happily hand over everything they have with a warrant. The fact that Apple doesn't have very much dat to hand over is by design, is good from a security perspective.
2. The reality is that criminals are considerably more skilled than most governments in these kinds of attacks against people. If something is made secure against criminal activity, it will coincidentally be more secure than what most governments can deal with.
3. You can't pick and choose which governments to share any "back door" with - if you allow one to do it, then they need to allow all of them to do it.
4. There is nothing stopping you from allowing the police to search your phone any time you feel like sharing with them.
5. Read the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights (which the US helped write in 1947), it uses absolute language around right to privacy (Article 12 and 30 , IIRC) If you compare it to the language around privacy for companies, there's a clear distinction - lawful access exists as a requirement for a companies communications, but not for individuals.

The issue is today, the memory of an authoritarian government abusing right to privacy as part of the process of killing millions of innocent people is not longer fresh in everyone's mind, and most people today have been brainwashed into thinking that the mass collection of data on people in exchange for advertising is a healthy thing for society.

gatorguy said:

Mike Wuerthele said:

anantksundaram said:

gatorguy said:

seanismorris said:

The Bloomberg story seems politically motivated...

There isn’t enough information do determine fault in the separate firmware incident.  It also doesn’t say if Apple resumed using SuperMicro as a supplier...

Bottom line is Apple found a problem and addressed it before it could cause damage.  We don’t know the results of their investigation into whom was responsible.  Was the firmware modified by a third party?  Was it a beta firmware? Was the hardware intercepted and modified after leaving the manufacturer, but before getting to Apple and an exploit introduced?

No enough information... but Bloomberg needs to get their facts straight before publishing rumors.

Bloomberg says they DO have their facts straight.
"The companies’ denials are countered by six current and former senior national security officials, who—in conversations that began during the Obama administration and continued under the Trump administration—detailed the discovery of the chips and the government’s investigation. One of those officials and two people inside AWS provided extensive information on how the attack played out at Elemental and Amazon; the official and one of the insiders also described Amazon’s cooperation with the government investigation. In addition to the three Apple insiders, four of the six U.S. officials confirmed that Apple was a victim. In all, 17 people confirmed the manipulation of Supermicro’s hardware and other elements of the attacks. The sources were granted anonymity because of the sensitive, and in some cases classified, nature of the information."

He said, she said...

I find it utterly inconceivable that Apple -- especially Tim Cook -- would not be at least as concerned about such a security intrusion as some Bloomberg reporters or unnamed "former senior security officials" (it's the same crowd that kept harassing Apple to create backdoors and to give intrusive access to iOS devices to the likes of the FBI).

I am quite satisfied -- as both a consumer and a shareholder -- with Apple's unambiguous denial of this claim. I'd take Apple's word over that of these media/Washington DC types.

If Bloomberg is wrong, nobody will care in a month.

If Apple is lying, then the SEC will ultimately dole out a massive fine and the entire saga will be in the press for a very long time.

Yeah. I'm pretty sure that Apple's presenting the situation accurately.

I suspect this is a national security issue which means the involved players can deny all they want without fear of the SEC who would be prevented from interfering or involving themselves if it's truly an active case.  The Bloomberg articles says as much, that it's still an open and classified investigation.

On top of that there never were allegations of a "wide-spread attack" on Apple's servers as alluded to in the AI article so of course that's deniable, and calling any source making that claim (they haven't) laughable might be perfectly appropriate.

Every reference to Apple in the investigative piece (and they were few) indicates Apple caught this early on, never once implying it was persistent and widespread. Amazon also denies anything happened and the whole thing is made up, someone's imagination, despite 17 sources including 6 hi-level current and former intelligence officials claiming otherwise. 

That’s not correct.

A gag order like an NSL does not give you carte blanche to make up stuff. You just have to neither confirm or deny - which typically means say nothing or very little.

if Apple is lying, they have committed a serious breach of SEC regulations as stuff like this effects the share price.

Bloomberg faces no such penalty, unless it could be proven they were manipulating stock prices. They’ve been increasingly negative on Apple all year, so maybe, but without something exceptional in evidence  they have nothing to lose by lying or playing fast and loose with the truth. Balance of probabilities is Bloomberg are either wrong (deliberately or accidentally) or got played by their “sources”.

nunzy said:

Apple is second to none. Google sells you to the highest bidder.

Google is the highest bidder. When you dig in to it, yes they are collecting an insane amount of data that no organisation should ever have. But (unlike Facebook) they are super guarded about how much of it they share. They know it’s their frown jewels. Historically Android has been a huge enabler for third parties to collect data as well , but that’s subtly different from sharing what they have collected.

The threat to to privacy between Facebook and Google is different:

- FB is mostly opt in to services that frankly you can live a happy and functional life without, but they casually and carelessly allow third parties access to the information

- Google is much more insidious, collects way way more data, and is sitting on a mountain of it that they are trying to work out how to monetise. But they are also far more careful than FB about not casually sharing personsl info with 3rd parties. 

So long as you did not choose a career path of “social media influencer” , anyone can live without Facebook & instagram, but getting through modern life without search and maps is a whole different ballgame.

if a government collected as much info on people as Google, it would be viewed as an outrageous violation of human rights. Now they don’t have to , and can just order Google to hand over when they need it.

It was totally tone deaf of Apple to propose the Federation Square site. Much as I normally hate NIMBY behaviours from lobby groups resisting change, it is really likely the right call for planning permission to be refused here. More humility required.

tallest skil said:

50 billion dollar fine. Now. Why? For human rights violations. Let’s try to catalog the meaningful ones.

The United Nations. Putting aside how much of an enemy to humanity itself the United Nations is, it does have some interesting documentation. One of these documents recognizes (which generally means fuck all for a government in practice, but hey) the human right to privacy.

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

The United States. The Constitution implicitly grants a right to privacy in the 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 5th amendments. “BUT THAT’S ONLY THE GOVERNMENT!” the leftists will scream. Ah, but which multinational corporation receives FUNDING FROM MULTIPLE GOVERNMENTS AROUND THE WORLD? I wonder…

India. The Indian constitution implicitly grants the right to privacy under Article 21, and affirmed in Kharak Singh v. State of U.P.[lxxi]

It held that “an unauthorized intrusion into a person’s home and the disturbance caused to him thereby, is as it were the violation of a common law right of a man -an ultimate essential of ordered liberty, if not of the very concept of civilization”

China. LOL, just wanted to have a laugh today.

EU. Do you guys even recognize the general right to privacy? I see an act for a “digital right to privacy” including “anonymization on request” (like, the deletion of stuff from a website), but you clearly don’t honor that. Would I have to look at each constituent country’s own laws to see if they include a general right to privacy? 

tallest skil said:

50 billion dollar fine. Now. Why? For human rights violations. Let’s try to catalog the meaningful ones.

The United Nations. Putting aside how much of an enemy to humanity itself the United Nations is, it does have some interesting documentation. One of these documents recognizes (which generally means fuck all for a government in practice, but hey) the human right to privacy.

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

The United States. The Constitution implicitly grants a right to privacy in the 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 5th amendments. “BUT THAT’S ONLY THE GOVERNMENT!” the leftists will scream. Ah, but which multinational corporation receives FUNDING FROM MULTIPLE GOVERNMENTS AROUND THE WORLD? I wonder…

India. The Indian constitution implicitly grants the right to privacy under Article 21, and affirmed in Kharak Singh v. State of U.P.[lxxi]

It held that “an unauthorized intrusion into a person’s home and the disturbance caused to him thereby, is as it were the violation of a common law right of a man -an ultimate essential of ordered liberty, if not of the very concept of civilization”

China. LOL, just wanted to have a laugh today.

EU. Do you guys even recognize the general right to privacy? I see an act for a “digital right to privacy” including “anonymization on request” (like, the deletion of stuff from a website), but you clearly don’t honor that. Would I have to look at each constituent country’s own laws to see if they include a general right to privacy? 

Yeah they do. Generally the european euro & national laws are framed to reflect their consent to the UN UDHR . The GDPR is more stringent than most US legislation , and the cool thing is it adopted the Scandanavian’s pattern of “fines as percentage of revenue”, which is appropriately brutal. 

Much better penalities than say the UK Privacy act, which is otherwise pretty good , where FaceBook recently took the maximum possible fine, which amounted to 18 minutes of revenue for FB.