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McAfee Says He Lied About iPhone Hacking Method To Get Public Attention
blottsie writes: McAfee, who founded of one of the first companies to offer antivirus software, claimed on CNN and Russia Today, as well as in a Business Insider column, that he could bypass the advanced encryption protecting the phone without Apple's help. But he lied in these interviews, he said in an interview with the Daily Dot, to "get a shitload of public attention."
He is trying to get attention by being honest? That's brand new it seems.
Ayup. The only thing noteworthy about the earlier press was the fact that he was being taken seriously, despite pulling stunts along these lines for years. The guy wants the spotlight and yearns to be seen as relevant. That time is long-since past, if it was ever here at all.
It's John McAfee. Okay, so maybe it was believable; but if you're honestly surprised by the follow-up, you haven't been paying attention. This is a guy who posted a video on Youtube where he talked about banging underaged girls and smoked a bunch of meth.
McAfee isn't out to defraud people; he's just out to be a loud caricature. I'm sure some day he'll say something serious in a sensational and ridiculous way; I'm equally sure he'll keep saying things that sound serious and then turn out to be just noise, because that's what he does now. He doesn't get attention because people believe him; he gets attention because he's interposed himself into a situation and drawn attention to himself, and we all recognize the act. You *can* play off that act honestly, but it's not a requirement.
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Mc-Afee not MAC-A-fee
The big difference between him and most politicians is that he's willing to admit when he's lying. Someone like a Trump or a Clinton would just say that they were just being "misunderstood", or that the media "took them out of context".
Therefore, a change to iOS is capable of altering the 10-strikes rule on their devices, and that's what the FBI is asking Apple to do.
Yes. Except one thing.
Loading a recovery image requires putting the device in *Recovery Mode*, and that's a hardware DFU mode whereby you talk to a small piece of firmware whose only job is to overwrite the Flash contents.
It doesn't load shit into RAM and run it in order to overwrite the flash contents while preserving data: it's a *RECOVERY* mode, not an *UPDATE* mode. It's what you do as a last resort, assuming you backed your crap up to the iCloud, because if you didn't, that shit is *gone*.
To do an *UPDATE* without overwriting the user data portion of the flash contents, you talk to the *ptpd*, which implements the DFU protocol at a higher level, in user space. How do you do that? Well, first, you have to make the ptpd willing to talk to you (or iTunes). How you you do that?
You UNLOCK the frigging phone.
So to load the image that the FBI wants Apple to write for them, and then to load, you'd have to unlock the phone to enable you to unlock the phone.
Cluebat here. Knock knock knock... is that you, head? Yeah, there's two DFU implementations in the iPhone. What? You didn't know that? Well now you do. Yeah. Yeah. We can write the image you want us to write, and then we can load it onto the iPhone, but to do that, it will wipe out the very data you seek. What? No, we can't make monkeys fly out our ass... I think you are confusing us with Jim Carrey in that movie "Bruce Almighty".
People really do not understand technology... especially technology designed to prevent exactly the type of thing the FBI wants done.