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Apple Intern Reportedly Leaked iPhone Source Code (theverge.com)
Earlier this week, a portion of iOS source code was posted online to GitHub, and in an interesting twist, a new report from Motherboard reveals that the code was originally leaked by a former Apple intern. The Verge reports: According to Motherboard, the intern who stole the code took it and distributed it to a small group of five friends in the iOS jailbreaking community in order to help them with their ongoing efforts to circumvent Apple's locked down mobile operating system. The former employee apparently took "all sorts of Apple internal tools and whatnot," according to one of the individuals who had originally received the code, including additional source code that was apparently not included in the initial leak. The plan was originally to make sure that the code never left the initial circle of five friends, but apparently the code spread beyond the original group sometime last year. Eventually, the code was then posted in a Discord chat group, and was shared to Reddit roughly four months ago (although that post was apparently removed by a moderation bot automatically). But then, it was posted again to GitHub this week, which is when things snowballed to where they are now, with Apple ordering GitHub to remove the code.
The plan was originally to make sure that the code never left the initial circle of five friends, but apparently the code spread beyond the original group sometime last year.
5 people can keep a secret, if 4 of them are dead.
Hmm. It's almost as if when a company asks to to sign a confidentiality agreement, they fuckin mean it, and for good reason.
Breakfast served all day!
Are you fucking kidding me?
Let's say you're an artist that makes a popular webcomic. Someone got ahold of the entire corpus of years of your work, and posted it on their own site, making it available for anyone who wants it (regardless of whether they try to monetize it themselves).
So when you discover this, you're going to say "OH WELL, Looks like it's out there! I guess I'll just sit on my thumbs and accept it because I have no recourse!"
Fucking NOPE. Apple has invested billions in research and development in their source code.
I'm not sure who taught you to believe that you're entitled to other peoples' work for free without their consent, but where I come from that's called SLAVERY, you stupid fuck.
Apple is completely within their rights to pursue this as far as necessary, and to sue anyone who's been a part of it for everything they're worth, and have them locked up for YEARS.
That wasn't a "cute little mistake". IANAL but I will be shocked if this can't be prosecuted under corporate espionage laws.
This kind of bullshit enrages me (could you tell?), and no, you're not part of some "empowered" culture when you fucking steal from others. I hope they throw the book at this piece of shit.
That school is thought is all well and good (and I actually support the idea), but it's ONLY appropriate if the work is donated voluntarily, as is the case with open source projects.
Taking the work of others without consent is unacceptable.
According to Apple on this matter, "the security of our products does not depend on the secrecy of our source code".
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
And now this intern has ruined life for all other interns in the company - past, present, and future. I'm sure all of the current interns have gotten a "leak like this guy and we'll ruin you" speech by now, and I bet web crawlers are already trained on past employees and interns looking for a hint of anything similar. Future interns will have to sign away even more of their rights, be locked down even harder, and feel like a prisoner while they're working. Thanks, asshole, for ruining the intern experience for everyone.
When copyright returns to a sane length, THEN you can make this argument. Until then all IP is up for grabs. Copyrights are social bargains, and we have been getting the shaft on that for a good long while now.
Good-bye
So I take it that means you can't steal electricity, cable television, someone else's internet bandwidth, or any number of other things with no physical or tangible component?
A strict definition of theft may require that the person who has had something stolen has been deprived of something of value to them, but there's no requirement in the definition that the something necessarily be tangible, only that it has value.
And its value doesn't even need to be objective or monetary... it only needs to be valuable to the person who had lawful jurisdiction over whatever was stolen.
Consider copyright, for example, which is supposed to entail the exclusive right to control who may make copies of a work. Exclusive, by definition means that nobody else is doing it, so when someone makes an unauthorized copy, they are actually depriving the copyright holders of some measure of their exclusivity of control on the copying of that work. Whether one thinks that copyright holders should not have this amount of control is irrelevant.. it is the entire point of copyright, and because copyright is protected by law, the copyright holder is recognized as the lawful possessor of the exclusivity it entails. Once infringed, the copyright holder's exclusivity is dilluted, and is never as strong as it was before.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Won't someone think of the shareholders?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
He was just told to 'go make some copies' without further instructions, and proceeded to copy some random files onto a public-facing website. Not his fault he didn't understand.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
So I take it that means you can't steal electricity, cable television, someone else's internet bandwidth, or any number of other things with no physical or tangible component?
If you steal electricity a power plant has to make more, it's consumed just like the water from the tap. How is that not a physical, tangible resource? While the signal in a cable loop is passing through anyway, you're only listening in like turning on your radio. Unauthorized use of bandwidth is displacing other people's traffic, though I think this is more like identity theft / fraud where you trick an ISP into making virtual deliveries instead of physical deliveries from Amazon.
A strict definition of theft may require that the person who has had something stolen has been deprived of something of value to them, but there's no requirement in the definition that the something necessarily be tangible, only that it has value.
I think you've confused "strict" with "casual" because we do use it about anything of value that we've been deprived of or taken without permission, but "he stole my girlfriend" or "he stole a kiss" has never been a criminal offense. Unless he literally kidnapped her, but that still wouldn't be theft. And in these #metoo times maybe the latter will be soon, but anyway... Theft in a legal sense has always been about ownership and possession.
Consider copyright, for example, which is supposed to entail the exclusive right to control who may make copies of a work.
Yes so when you created a new right you also created a new crime violating that right - copyright infringement. Legally, it's not theft. And despite the newspeak, IPR is not property. But like all things of value we casually use words like that, same way we say "he stole the combination to my safe" even though it was more likely copied. But when you're trying to use that casual definition in a legal or moral debate you're only making a fool of yourself.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If you take something from someone else, that's stealing. Copyright infringement amounts to the taking of some of the exclusivity that the copyright holder otherwise had to control over who can make copies of the work, so the infringer is stealing that from the copyright holder. Full stop.
Now you can argue that one has no compunction against stealing when it might serve what they could argue is some greater and more important good, and suggest that there is no moral dilemma involved with theft in such a case, but as far as I can see, the people who insist that copyright infringement isn't theft are generally more interested in rationalizing why it might be morally okay to commit copyright infringement while simultaneously claiming to find stealing immoral are actually just unable to verbally express how stealing, as an action, might not necessarily be morally wrong at all, but instead it depends on the context in which it was done.
We can agree that murder, after all, is morally wrong, but there is nothing immoral about killing, by itself... it depends on the context in which it was done. Killing in self-defense, for example, is not generally seen as wrong, especially when use of such retaliative force was justified. Stealing, one could argue, is a similar amoral act, and the rightness or wrongness of it depends on what, exactly, is being stolen, and the context of the entire thing.
But all of this doesn't mean copyright infringement isn't stealing. And suggesting that it isn't probably only means that someone is trying to rationalize why it's morally acceptable to commit copyright infringement when they think stealing is wrong.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'