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Bill Gates Sides With FBI In Apple Spat (ft.com)
Fudge Factor 3000 writes: Bill Gates has now publicly stated that Apple should cooperate with the FBI in the San Bernadino terrorist's phone unlocking case. He states that it is for this specific case, but seems to miss the point that there are other law enforcement officials waiting on the wings with their requests should this precedent be set. The war against privacy escalates. Setting aside the actual practicality of unlocking the San Bernadino phone, the teams that are emerging on this issue include some pretty strange bedfellows: John McAfee and Bill Gates on the pro-unlocking side, and Woz, Edward Snowden and even some of the victim's families on the con.
the same Bill Gates who's companies latest offering backs up everly last secret it can find on your computer to server in the US?
Bend over more Bill, it's not quite far enough yet.
See, the billionaire class wants to make sure that we little people can be monitored and tracked.
The man is the founder of a company with a terrible privacy record and you are surprised? I am more surprised that he does not realize you cannot create a specific solution for this that is not also a general solution for all phones.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
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It comes as no surprise that Bill Gates gives privacy so little weight, with less privacy users have less choice and control.
Yeah we all know that once law enforcement gets access to something they NEVER ask again. The disengenuousness of people claiming this is only about one phone is astounding.
I am sure that China will wait till they have a clear terrorism/criminal case, ask Apple to give them the same software they give the FBI, then make a copy of it and use it on every single dissident.
The San Bernidino phone SHOULD be cracked - by the government, not a private company. Apple should have nothing to do with the cracking.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I thought that McAfee's position wasn't so much 'pro unlock' as "Me and my hacker posse will hack the shit out of it!";
I thought McAfee's position was more along the lines of "Look at me! Look at me!" with the idea that he could say any old shit, get the attention he craves and then not have to deliver anything as no-one in their right mind would let him near that phone.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
The biggest problem is that people are reacting to the headline - not the back story.
1) This was the terrorist's WORK phone. He tried (and failed) to destroy his personal phone - and the FBI have all of the data from that. If he didn't destroy the work phone, there probably wasn't anything important on it.
2) The FBI already have his texts, IP address lookups, voicemails and phonecall meta-data from the telco's - so this is only stuff like photos and documents stored inside the phone.
3) The FBI already have an iCloud backup from 6 weeks before the attack.
4) If they hadn't screwed up and changed the iCloud account's apple id - they'd have a recent backup too - and this would be a moot point. They screwed up.
5) If this was so important - why didn't they demand it back in December when they first got the phone? Any information on it now will be horribly outdated.
6) We already know that this was not a big ISIS plot or anything like that. It was a 'lone gunman' kind of a thing...so it's unlikely that there is anything on the phone that would incriminate anyone else who isn't already incriminated.
7) If they succeed - you can bet that Apple's next phone will make it impossible to circumvent the security with an OS upgrade by putting more stuff in ROM.
Knowing those things makes it very clear that they are using a high-profile case to demonstrate a capability (both on behalf of Apple - and on the behalf of the legal system to compel Apple).
The reason to do this is to provoke a debate that they hope will produce either laws or a legal precedent that they can apply to future cases - there is no other reason to fight Apple and public opinion.
The reason MOST people are agreeing with the Fed is that they didn't take the time to look at the facts.
www.sjbaker.org
It's not conspiracy and conjecture, it's "legal precedent" and it's an actual thing. Once it's happened in a single instance, that single instance can be pointed to in future cases until it's refuted by a higher level judge. Which, in this case, would mean either the Federal Appeals Court, or the United States Supreme Court.
It's how the whole legal system has worked for 225+ years. And you can bet that there are hundreds of phones in evidence lockers with assistant District Attorneys and assistant US Attorneys lining up to get a court order to have Apple unlock them, depending on how this plays out.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Nice argument, but that's not what happened. Apple already made the contents of the iCloud account available to investigators, as they were ordered to. This is entirely different. They're being asked to build software that doesn't exist to subvert a security feature in iOS.
It's more like going to a safe company and asking them to build you a key that unlocks every safe. It's more complex than that, really, but it's less wrong than your analogy.
The point that you are missing is that the precedent to be set is that the government can make Apple write software.
This isn't about breaking into a phone, it's about exactly how much the court can compel them to do It's not "use your key to unlock this door". It's "write new software to this exact set of specifications that the FBI has written."
can the court compel Apple to write code? If they can, what else can they compel people to do?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
FBI doesn't want to ask for volunteers or buy a zero-day/jailbreak/exploit. It wants the power to compel a manufacturer's engineers to break their own security. "Break this phone or go to jail."
Which is why the summary is so wrong that it hurts the brain, and while I understand slashdot editors aren't exactly professionals, they should have the dignity to remove that comment. Bill Gates wants cooperation with big brother, McAfee wants policework. There's a huge difference between them.