Slashdot Mirror
Apple Will No Longer Unlock Most iPhones, iPads For Police
SternisheFan writes with this selection from a story at the Washington Post: Apple said Wednesday night that it is making it impossible for the company to turn over data from most iPhones or iPads to police — even when they have a search warrant — taking a hard new line as tech companies attempt to blunt allegations that they have too readily participated in government efforts to collect user data. The move, announced with the publication of a new privacy policy tied to the release of Apple's latest mobile operating system, iOS 8, amounts to an engineering solution to a legal dilemma: Rather than comply with binding court orders, Apple has reworked its latest encryption in a way that makes it almost impossible for the company – or anyone else but the device's owner – to gain access to the vast troves of user data typically stored on smartphones or tablet computers. The key is the encryption that Apple mobile devices automatically put in place when a user selects a passcode, making it difficult for anyone who lacks that passcode to access the information within, including photos, e-mails, recordings or other documents. Apple once kept possession of encryption keys that unlocked devices for legally binding police requests, but will no longer do so for iOS8, it said in a new guide for law enforcement. "Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore cannot access this data," Apple said on its Web site. "So it's not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants for the extraction of this data from devices in their possession running iOS 8."
So everything is protected by a 4 digit passcode?
Wow... Impregnable.
News for merdes. Shit that matters.
Ask me about my sig.
i'm sure the cops can image your encrypted phone and try to break the encryption offline without risking loss of data. if they can't break it now, they will simply store the data for the next 10 years until they can and go back to it then. sort of like fingerprints, DNA or any other crime scene evidence
Not to mention their warrant canary is dead.
NSA: "Just tell them this, it's technically true because we'll hold the master key and you wont. "
Apple: "can we also keep a master key and just lie about it, how's that fingerprint data base working out?"
NSA: "have my babies"
Blackberry used to be secure until they wanted to sell phones in India and the Indian government demanded a backdoor in order for them to sell phones there.
Will India now also refuse the sale of iOS8?
id think in even a few hundred years our best encryption would be trivial to break.
Not without huge advances in theoretical mathematics, no. We have encryption that would take longer to crack than the heat death of the Universe, even if every atom in it were a modern computer.
On the other hand, advances in the factoring of large numbers, could, for example, make some modern encryption method a lot more vulnerable. But I am told, by people who do research on that topic at MIT and Caltech, that momentous breakthroughs in that area are unlikely - modest improvements, certainly, earth-shattering advancements, no.
No good deed goes unpunished...
What does "Most" mean? Sounds like another loophole..