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What Apple Can Learn From BlackBerry Not To Do (informationweek.com)
dkatana writes: There is no shortage of news about the fight between Apple and the Justice Department to unlock the iPhone of a suspect in the San Bernardino, Calif., terrorist case. Apple can take a page from the fight BlackBerry had back in 2010 with some governments in the Middle East and Asia. At that time -- afraid to lose a lucrative business -- RIM [gave] in and allowed those governments to access its secure BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) service. The rest is history. If Apple complies with the Justice Department request, according to Craig Federighi, senior VP of software engineering at Apple, "[This software -- which law enforcement has conceded it wants to apply to many iPhones --] would become a weakness that hackers and criminals could use to wreak havoc on the privacy and personal safety of us all."
The reason Blackberry went under has absolutely nothing to do with it opening up the platform to the government. It had everything to do with the instability of their server infrastructure.
I get the fact that you guys don't want Apple to open up its platform to the government, but this story is downright dishonest.
If you want to do away with the government then go live on an oil rig. Until then, the government will always have more power than you would like. That's life.
As a 600 pound gorilla it thought it could dictate where the market should got and got a painful lesson by customers that decided that touch-screen smartphones was what they wanted in their pockets
Blackberry withered on the vine because they refused to accept and embrace change. They refused to adopt the Android OS, insisting on their proprietary OS years after the market had moved on. If Blackberry had embraced Android from the get-go they would be the Samsung of the cell phone world today.
They failed to realize that their previous market of corporate issued communication devices was no longer the only de facto market. People had a choice and spending a small fortune on a device that couldn't play angry birds vs a much cheaper device that could was a no-brainer.
Just another company that thought they could corner the market through their proprietary bit. Their moves with opening up their platforms to third party governments only very narrow use cases. /supports Apple's crypto fight
If the situation is as described in a recent statement attributed to Tim Cook, then this is a completely fake issue. In summary, that quote said it would only take a few man-months to produce the software that the FBI wants. If so, then it is barely conceivable the FBI lacks the resources to have created it already, and it is dead certain that the NSA (and foreign counterparts) already have it.
So why the charade? Evidently to make suckers (AKA you and me) think that there is still some privacy out here where the peasants live.
Also, perhaps because they've decided it's politically expedient to make Apple look bad with this juicy and loaded situation.
Creating the software is only half the battle -- they also need the signing keys so they can get the software onto the device.
Not really.
I worked at BB during all this.
BB got done in because iPhone was hot and shiny, but the feature set was laughable. It didn't even have copy paste!
BB got done in because they thought that an extensive feature set was all people care about, when it turns out people would rather have a device that does a few things really well than a whole bunch of things half-assedly.
Unfortunately, Apple is good at convincing the first set of users to say the first generation product is great even though it's shit (first Gen iPad was shit too, didn't even have a camera). Then Apple fixes most of the screwups in the next generation model (copy and paste was added to OS 3) and because first gen Apple users said their shit product was actually great (because they bought it as a fashion/lifestyle statement, they pretty much have to) the users that buy for features come out of the woodwork.
It was this second generation of product that was really the issue. BB employees were right to laugh at the first gen iPhone, it was a total piece of crap. Problem is, Apple isn't dumb and they fixed the major issues. BB didn't see that coming, and should have.
Thing is, anybody who pays attention (as you rightly state BB should have) would know that this is Apple's M.O. For years, ever since the return of Jobs, whenever Apple would introduce a new product line, the first generation was lacking in one way or another. Each subsequent generation would be iteratively improved and polished to eventually become a pretty good product. Every single Mac line and every iDevice followed this pattern. So no, BB employees were not right to laugh at the first gen iPhone, because if they thought an iPhone 5 years down the road would have exactly the same quality and feature set, and therefore was all they would have to compete against, they were fools.
That is PR spin. The FBI, hackers, criminals, etc do NOT need Apple to create the software. All are perfectly capable of tampering with binaries as people have been doing for decades. The ONLY thing that stops such efforts is that the firmware is expecting the software to be digitally signed. The only thing the FBI really needs from Apple is to sign the FBI's tampered iOS binaries. That's it.
No, that's downright the problem itself. Apple gets either forced to make a statement they don't want to make (e.g. creating the new binary), or they are forced to sign a statement someone else makes and thus declare it their own statement. That's simply unconstitutional. And that's why the Fourth Amendment comes into play.
Legally, code is (protected) speech. And the Freedom of Speech means that you are also allowed to keep silent if you don't want to speak.