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What Apple Can Learn From BlackBerry Not To Do (informationweek.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the learn-from-the-past dept.

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."

4 of 150 comments (clear)

  1. What nonsense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. BB got done by its refusal to adapt by Dorianny · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:BB got done by its refusal to adapt by BitZtream · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It wasn't touch screens so much as phones that weren't ridiculously over priced calculators.

      BlackBerry devices have been technically inferior from a CPU/RAM/OS perspective since the iPhone was released. They were only cool before hand because no one had email, so the shitty ass crap that BlackBerry pushed was awesome because the alternative was no email (or windows mobile, which was effectively the same :)

      When the iPhone came out with a real browser and email client, the only chance BlackBerry had was to make a REAL smart phone, not that crap that had less power and resolution than a TI graphing calculator.

      Then Android landed ... and then there wasn't just one awesome smartphone on the market, there were hundreds ... (awesome compared to the BB devices if nothing else) ...

      And they kept on with that shitty device that didn't get real email, got some fucked up version of a text email that they created ... wasn't even just the text portion of the message, some mangled version they created from html. And web browsing ... seriously. iOS has a full browser. Android has a full browser. BB had ... a text based browser?

      It wasn't the touch screen ... lots of people wanted a physical keyboard and would have been fine with a smaller touch screen ... but they did want their fucking email and web pages to look like email and web pages, and for page refreshes to not be so slow they were visible draws.

      The BB devices were just pieces of shit, and even at the end of their falling apart, they were still far inferior to the competition.

      --
      Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
  3. Re:Delusions of privacy by hawguy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.