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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.
Not that his opinion matters nearly as much as the others(he's still loaded; but he's more busy playing the Hunter S. Thompson of tech than being a tech leader these days); but 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!"; which is a vote in favor of getting the contents of the phone(not that anyone is really against that, if there were some non-problematic way to do it); but not obviously a vote in favor of the feds having the right to force Apple to make it so.
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.
and this is why America is no longer the land of the free, its the land of the afraid.
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
He disputes so in a video in Bloomberg..
Bill Gates, co-founder at Microsoft and co-chair at Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, addresses his view of Apple's battle against an FBI court order to unlock an iPhone belonging to a shooter involved in the San Bernardino, California terror attack and the need for a balance between privacy and government access.
Clippy: Hey! It looks like you are trying to violate U.S. citizen's Constitutionally-protected rights! Would you like help?
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
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 appears to me that Microsoft is selling itself to secret U.S. government agencies. Who tried to kill the excellent TrueCrypt? The old original TrueCrypt web site pushes people toward a Microsoft product.
Can Microsoft be trusted? Here are some articles:
Windows 8: NSA Backdoor Exploit in Windows 8 Uncovered (Aug. 22, 2013)
Windows: NSA "backdoor" mandates lead to a computer-security FREAK show Quote: "Microsoft Windows OS vulnerable to hackers, thanks to National Security Agency requirements." (March 6, 2015)
Windows: NSA Built Back Door In All Windows Software by 1999 (June 7, 2013)
Windows 10, Microsoft hiding what it is doing: Microsoft has no plans to tell us what's in Windows patches. Quote: "Each update is a black box, and it's going to stay that way." (Aug 21, 2015)
Windows 10, Microsoft takes even more control: Windows 10 is spying on almost everything you do -- here's how to opt out But, of course, Microsoft can change the spyware to avoid blocking. (July 31, 2015)
Microsoft can't be trusted: How Can Any Company Ever Trust Microsoft Again? (June 17, 2013)
Microsoft releases EXTREMELY buggy software: Microsoft Kills Many Critical Flaws, Some 0-Days, Un-Trusts One Wildcard Cert It is likely that there are many bugs Microsoft hasn't yet found. Are Microsoft products intentionally made insecure? (December 9, 2015)
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.
"...some pretty strange bedfellows: John McAfee and Bill Gates on the pro-unlocking side..."
Actually, John McAfee is not on the side of forcing Apple to unlock the phone-- he's against that. He is on the side of don't force them to do it because he and his elite crew of hax0rz will do it for free with no need to bother Apple or use that all-writs thing.
And this solves the problem, doesn't it? Give it McAfee, he will screw up and erase all the data on the phone, problem solved.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
He's refuting he said that he supports the FBI.
He has very slightly backed off, claims that people have misinterpreted his position:
(see the "update:" in this gizmodo article: http://gizmodo.com/bill-gates-... )
But here is Gates' actual quote from the Financial times article; what do you think-- was he misinterpreted?
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/3559...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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
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.
Close, but no.
He tried, and succeeded, in destroying his personal phones:
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016...
The couple took pains to physically destroy two personally owned cellphones, crushing them beyond the FBI's ability to recover information from them. They also removed a hard drive from their computer; it has not been found despite investigators diving for days for potential electronic evidence in a nearby lake.
Farook was not carrying his work iPhone during the attack. It was discovered after a subsequent search.
So, the question is: given that they went to great lengths to destroy the phones and hard drives that they used in planning the attack, why in the world would anybody think that this phone they didn't think were worth bothering to destroy would have anything on it?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com