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.

Comments

Secrets

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Blow my mind

[PCM2]

Hmm. It's almost as if when a company asks to to sign a confidentiality agreement, they fuckin mean it, and for good reason.

Re:Why bother, Apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

This is why we can't have nice things

[TexasDiaz]

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.

Re:This is why we can't have nice things

[tlhIngan]

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.

I think you're understating the seriousness. I think companies everywhere are re-evaluating their interns. After all, Apple is well known to have security down pat - defense in depth, layered security, and that's just the physical side (you have secure rooms within secure rooms...).

And Apple had a breach. Every company is probably looking over their security and their interns because if it happened at Apple, there's no telling it couldn't happen to them. Even worse, if you interned at Apple, you may find yourself at the end of the distrust stick - if you leaked out Apple's stuff, who's to say you won't leak out our stuff?

Heck, if Apple finds out which intern did it, they're pretty much out of the tech industry. No company will want to touch someone who deliberately leaks their company's secrets. Get branded as someone who violates NDA, become an untouchable. And Apple doesn't even need to press heavy charges - given the age of the code, the damage will likely be minimal, so even if Apple asked for a token $1, the fact that the person violated NDAs is the far greater punishment.

Re:Why bother, Apple?

[mark-t]

Theft deprives another of a tangible good.

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.