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Why Are Apple's Competitors Staying Silent On the iPhone Unlocking Fight?
erier2003 writes: A court order forcing Apple to help the FBI access a terrorism suspect's iPhone has drawn responses from leading tech companies, newspaper editorial boards, and security experts. But one major faction is staying largely silent: the computer and smartphone manufacturers who compete with Apple for business and could be subject to similar orders in the future if the company loses its high-profile case. Silicon Valley software firms have universally backed Apple in its fight against the Justice Department, which won a ruling Tuesday from a California magistrate judge compelling Apple to design custom software to bypass security features on an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters. But Apple's hardware competitors are staying on the sidelines.
Finally we have a debate on whether or whether not the state should have access to people's personal data. This is what snowden wanted, his goal is reached.
asked phone manufacturers LG, Samsung, and Sony and computer manufacturers Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo (which also owns phone manufacturer Motorola) whether they agreed with the government or Apple in the unfolding legal battle.
None of them also make the OS, they're just the hardware guys. The FBI is asking for a software backdoor.
Google (those guys behind Android) has stood by Apple
What good would it do them? Since Google has taken point on designing, evangelizing, and (recently) mandating strong, backdoor-less crypto -- actions they, along with most of the technologentsia, are firmly in favor of -- they can ride the wave of inevitability, rather than stick their neck out with broad anti-government pronouncements. Sometimes the best PR is no PR.
The opinions stated herein do not necessarily represent those of anybody at all. Deal with it.
If Apple wins, everyone of them win. If Apple loses, and they could, they lose alone.
Listen to the proffered positions of the pretenders to the Presidential nomination. To many non-tech people, Apple's stance is bordering on treason.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Newsweek: Google and Microsoft Back Apple on Encryption Battle With FBI
There is a backdoor if the device is capable of installing new firmware without unlocking (or destroying the encryption keys) first.
...but it's the second mouse that gets the cheese.
They are watching Apple to see if they get hammered by the DOJ or win business due to not selling out their customer's privacy.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
If you bothered to read any of the news articles, Apple currently doesn't have that capability. What the FBI is asking for is to update iOS on the phone with a custom version that removes the time delay between unsuccessful passcode attempts, the 10-try limit before wiping the phone, and a way to enter passcodes via the lightning connector rather than the keypad --- all of this so the FBI can brute-force unlock the phone.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
One of the big reasons to spend $600 on an iphone instead of $100 on an Android is privacy and security. I need a smartphone about $100 worth, but I was just about to bite the bullet and get an iphone because of the phone's built-in encryption and Apple's pro-privacy policy. Now I'm going to wait and see. A backdoor into iphone makes me less likely to fork over the extra money, to the good of Apple's competitors.
So basically, if Apple can do it at all, then the backdoor already exists, and is already awaiting exploitation.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
If you bothered to read any of the news articles, Apple currently doesn't have that capability.
Too good to be true, I believe is the phrase....
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Let's look at a few good reasons to stay silent if you're an Apple competitor.
1. Apple's competitors are based in South Korea and China. They're going to have a much harder time arguing privacy with the US government.
2. Apple has lots of money and excellent legal counsel. They'll put up a better fight than their competitors possibly could.
3. Staying silent won't piss off any American lobby groups, and it probably won't piss off the American general public.
4. This could be a PR nightmare if someone mis-words something. You don't want to accidentally paint yourself as pro-terrorist.
5. There's no obvious win here. If the corporations win and privacy remains paramount, eventually someone is going to do something awful that involves encrypted communication. At that point, the corporations look bad. If the government wins, things could devolve into 1984 if the wrong people ascend to power.
Is WinZip responsible for cracking passwords that their customers' set on their zip files? No! That's their product and that's what their product does. It's a security and privacy product so naturally the company doesn't "hold the keys" or put in a backdoor. All cellphone makers should leave encryption in the hands of the customer and tell the FBI to fuck off.
The United States tax payers are going to foot the bill for this if it happens. Apple is allowed to bill the F.B.I. for reasonable costs. So we get to pay for our own screwing.
No matter where you go, there you are. So Enjoy it.
So basically, if Apple can do it at all, then the backdoor already exists, and is already awaiting exploitation.
Absolutely not. To exploit this, you'd first have to write working iPhone firmware. You know, firmware that can boot the iPhone and make it run. Obviously firmware with the passcode security removed. That's difficult. Even say the Samsung engineers that built the firmware for the Samsung phones would have a huge problem doing that, because they can talk to the Samsung hardware engineers but not to Apple's hardware engineers.
Then comes the minor problem that this firmware must be codesigned with Apple's must secretly kept key. How do you get access to that? Let's take again Samsung's firmware engineers, because they are likely among the people in the world most capable of doing this. At this point, they would be stuck. They have no chance to build any firmware that an iPhone would even consider loading, because they lack Apple's firmware signing key.
Now if Apple _builds_ and _signs_ that firmware, then you do have an exploit that just has to find its way in the open.
the Error 53 thing has been disabled, and now, as long as you have an electronic copy of someone's fingerprint, you can pretty much unlock their device.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but:
If Touch ID on your device didn't work before you saw error 53, the feature still won't work after you update or restore your device. Contact Apple Support to ask about service options for Touch ID.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205628
Also see virtually every other site that reported the error 53 fix.
TL:DNR: Disabling Touch ID when an unauthorised repair is made was intentional and hasn't changed. Bricking the entire phone so you couldn't even unlock it with your passcode was a bug, which is what has been fixed.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Apple is being compelled to create speech in violation of the first amendment. It's not an issue of if they can do it. Unlike previous cases such as the Elayne Photography case when a photographer asserted first amendment rights against photographing a wedding where the couple was gay, the photographer hung out her shingle as a business for photographing weddings. Gays are protected in the state where this happened.
In this case, Apple is in the business of selling iphones, not selling custom firmware for iphones. They can't restrict sale from gays, for example, but forcing them to create custom firmware for random customers is not their business. Not to mention, the FBI isn't exactly a protected class, nor is apple refusing based on the fact they're FBI. They're refusing because they won't do it for anyone.
There were other cases where a 1st amendment defense wouldn't work, such as lavabit where they were handed a piece of equipment and ordered to install it.
Apple doesn't claim to protect the rebellion from the government, they claim to not be in the business of hacking phones or writing custom firmware to do so. They claim the data on the phone is very private and nobody can access it without the password, and the data on the cloud is less private but requires a legit government request according to local customs. Of course China can get access to data stored on servers in China. Duh.
Why try to shout BS when you knew you didn't have the details? Oh, right, you're just here to shout "China Scary!"
In chess if your opponent dies during the game, the result is a draw. If you think you're winning and your opponent is trying to commit suicide, it is in your best interests to stop him; it might be his one way to save the game!