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Tim Cook Defends Apple's Approach To Security: 'Encryption is Inherently Great' (businessinsider.com)
Apple CEO Tim Cook has once again defended his company's hardline approach to security. At Utah Tech Tour event while taking questions from the audience, Cook said, (via BusinessInsider):"This is one of the biggest issues that we face. Encryption is what makes the public safe. As you know, there are people kept alive because the grid is up. If our grid goes down, if there was a grid attack, the public's safety is at risk" -- hence the need for encryption to protect it. "You can imagine defence systems need encryption, because there are a few bad actors in the world who might like to attack those. [...] Some people have tried to make it out to be bad," the chief executive told the audience at the Utah question-and-answer session. "Encryption is inherently great, and we would not be a safe society without it. So this is an area that is very, very important for us... as you can tell from our actions earlier this year, we throw all of ourselves into this." he added. "We're very much standing on principle here."
Encryption is insanely great.
FTFY, Tim.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Says the guy using encryption to visit Slalshdot so s/he can badmouth encryption.
Encryptions is for criminals. Ordinary people don't need military grade encryption to protect themselves. It's primarily used to hide illicit activities from the police and serves no legitimate purpose.
so true! illicit behavior like logging in to my toddler's Disney Junior account, or transferring money between my bank account and the electric company.
I'm no fan of Apple in general but on this point, no matter what their true motivations, the point is correct. Encryption *is* great, and required for today's society to operate securely. As Bruce Schneier said, we can either have security for everyone, or for none. The math just doesn't allow back doors that only work for "the good guys" (and there's no one definition of who those are, so it's a doubly-flawed premise.)
We've had Yahoo creditials stolen, NSA hacks stolen, Blackberry is near bankrupt over its backdoors. The argument FOR backdoors have crumbled, so is it really necessary at this point to defend encryption?
If everyone had backdoored as the NSA/CIA chiefs wanted, then Russian+Chinese hackers would own everything at this point, and not just NSA hacks. They'd demonstrated by their incompetence the need for strong encryption, everywhere for everything.
Is anyone suggesting for example, that voting machines should be backdoored? That to me is the big risk now, an election with electronic voting machines susceptible to domestic and foreign bad actors.
Privacy is great too, but we are making a lot of money from yours so we will just ignore that one.
"In conclusion, machines are bad, and people who rely on them are completely fucking stupid!" said the guy, typing on his computer, from the air-conditioned serenity of his parents' basement.
When asked if he could grow or produce his own food, purify his own water, and provide basic security and comfort for himself if his power and other modern comforts were turned off, he scoffed, "of course I could. I've seen The Martian, I think I could figure out how to grow a damn Cheeto plant."
Oh irony, you are so ironic.
Okay, I'll bite. How do you make "official exceptions" that CANNOT be used by the "bad guys"? Seriously curious here.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Judges decide who is allowed to legally look at things.
Which is irrelevant to my question, since my question is more about who is going to be able to ILLEGALLY use the backdoor.
Or are you one of those people who think that the government can invent a flawed encryption scheme that is literally impossible for someone else to abuse?
Note, by the by, that your solution can be implemented by skipping the backdoor and making all encryption illegal. After all, the Judges can keep the government from abusing the openly available data about everything that happens anywhere in the world, right? And no criminal would DARE to look at all that freely available information - it's against the law to do so after all, and we all know that criminals are intensely law-abiding, right?
So, when are you planning on publishing YOUR banking information, credit card numbers, etc to the world? After all, the judges will keep that from being abused.....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
You know what's even greater than encryption?
Not collecting personal data in the first place.
If Apple didn't gather massive amounts of information about their suckers - I mean, "customers" - they wouldn't need to worry about encryption and they wouldn't need to worry about safe-guarding the information.
Oh, please! I assume by your Apple-Bashing that you are a Fandroid?
NO one using Google's OS has ANY right to trash talk ANYONE about Data-Mining and "gathering", PERIOD.
Er what? Apple doesn't want to be the one that law enforcement has to go to every time they need another phone to be cracked. How many times in how many jurisdictions a day would that be? Also that would apply to any country not just the US. I wouldn't want to be that custodian.
That's certainly a factor; but I know from being an Apple aficionado since 1976 that they just don't like the gummint much. Perhaps it comes from having their R&D labs raided by the FBI way back when, when it was rumored that Woz and John Draper (a/k/a Captain Crunch) were working on a digital "Blue Box" peripheral for the Apple 1...
Rumor has it that some stuff was confiscated. But I've never gotten Woz to confirm (or deny) the story. But after a few minutes of Google-fu, it looks like this may actually be the real story after all....
And where does your water come from? Did you dig your own well and install a hand pump in order to get the water out of it? Do you have your own purification system that you can power yourself, or a massive supply of purification tablets?
Because if you didn't, you are relying exclusively on the grid to stay alive as well. See: Post-Katrina New Orleans.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
That's some seriously misplaced logic.
Pretty sure iPhones aren't considered part of 'the grid' except maybe in the minds of Apple fanatics. Pretty sure iPhones depend on the grid-not quite the same thing as being part of the grid.. If you rely on public transit, that doesn't make you a bus driver.
The entire point of the 5th Amendment is that the government cannot compel action from you needed to incriminate yourself. That right should, indeed, be absolute without exception always and forever.
A warrant means the 4th Amendment is satisfied. The government can do what they like with that piece of paper
xceptions must always be possible in any reasonable system
BS. A reasonable system protects me from the government absolutely, requiring the government to work around that as best they can. There's no "except" in the Bill of Rights, aside from the warrant exception in the 4th. We keep punching unconstitutional holes in it because we're scared, or, rather, because tyrants leverage the fear of the people to incrementally strip their rights. You're helping them do that. Right now. You should be ashamed.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Cluecheck:
With any phone, you're constantly sending your daily movements back to the phone company so that they know what cell to route your incoming calls and text messages to, and to provide mandatory E911 data to the government. Every move you make is tracked, beamed to AT&T, Verizon, Sprint or T-Mobile (and onward to the government), without your "consent" merely by turning the phone on.
And no, even if you inspect the entire source, compile it yourself on a compiler which you've similarly audited, then side-load it onto a rooted phone on which you also have access to the firmware's source and inspected that as well; it is not at all possible to configure an Android phone that doesn't send ANYTHING to the phone company and government. Not, anyway, unless you never power the thing on. At all.
Apple may or may not be saints in this matter. But anyone and everyone who owns a phone, including myself and almost certainly including you, has already made a deal with the devil. So cry me a bloody river about Siri's location-aware suggestions.
Imagine all the people...