We're being digitally invaded and the hoi polloi, usually so hot to beat someone with a stick, are quite pleased with everything. It's shocking. Can we get back to American ass-kicking mode and fuck these authoritarian rubes? A war is on, brother.
If Trump weren't such a sensitive idiot, he could rally everyone behind him with this. He's been way too caught up in the closeness of the election and the few complaints about the popular vote or the suggestions that he might not have won without interference. I've never seen such a sore loser from someone who won an election before, and it's hurting Americans and American sovereignty at the behest of foreigners.
It's pathetic, especially coming from someone like him and all of his winners rhetoric. Hopefully when he sits down with some of the adults in DC he'll take a real hard look at reality and recognize this.
As long as business can set up their super-PACs to influence elections can we really object to a foreign government doing the same?
Are you fucking serious? Citizens can influence their own government and own elections all they want, it's an inalienable birthright of their citizenship. It's the very basis of government as enshrined in the Constitution.
Foreign governments leveraging their power to change government policy and elections isn't influence, or someone's opinion, it's espionage and can be punished by deportation or death. How many foreign leaders can you name that came out and said something like "I prefer x candidate over y candidate"? None, because none of them are as fucking stupid as so many people partaking in these discussions are.
What you're suggesting is that not only is it not illegal or unlawful, but that it also cannot be illegal or unlawful. It's total nonsense. What you're asking is akin to asking "why can't Russia just run a Russian as a candidate for POTUS, and then influence the election to get him elected?"
Are you retarded or what? You think all the Cozy Bear Douchey Bear APT talk that's been going on for almost a year is made up? You think it's okay for an insider to hack someone else's email? Do you think CrowdStrike is not only fabricating evidence of malicious programs, but also fabricating evidence of their fabricated evidence's origin? Do you believe that CrowdStrike is a partisan organization with future-telling powers who knew that Trump would display willful ignorance of anything they reported on and use it as part of their anti-Trump agenda?
Those are all things you have to believe in order to believe in some of the dumb shit you just said. No evidence of a break in??????????????? God damn. You are an unbelievable idiot.
Not sure I'd call it shear incompetence or shear malice with the track record Microsoft has had. It's more like all thrusters forward, batten-down-the-hatches, damn the torpedoes incompetence guided strictly by the Microsoft corporate philosophy.
If being on a "to disappear" list means you get to live in a mansion in the English countryside practically free of worry, then it's no wonder so many people are desperately trying to get on it.
Not them, but I can oblige. Here is clear and recent poof of NASA faking space images of Jupiter, taken from NASA's own website site
and on the same website site, you can see that the "faked" June 30th photo is credited as being taken May 19. No wonder the photos look the same, they were taken during the same time period.
It's not a problem at all. What "truth" is there in Hulk Hogan's private affairs with people he knows inside of private places?
Thank god Gawker is gone, it was a trash paparazzi publication which provided almost no benefit to anyone, profiting off of bullying other people. Good riddance and go fuck yourself, Denton, along with any "journalist" who thinks this is an assault on freedom of speech. Privacy does exist.
If you really have a problem with it, I suggest you send me a video of your sex life so that I can try to make millions of dollars off of publicly humiliating you with it. Thanks in advance.
This is patently false on many new Jeeps, and probably false on most new cars. What car manufactured in the last 10 years doesn't have remote door unlocks? How many of those don't have an option for remote starting? Jeep even has an app for remote starting. Seriously, inserting a key into the door to unlock it? That's 1990s technology.
Jeep Grand Cherokees have "smart key" like you describe which will allow for unlocking the door based on proximity alone, all you need is to have a key within x distance and place your hand on the doorhandle as if you were about to open it in order for it to unlock. If thieves are reproducing or reprogramming key fobs somewhere then whether the door is locked or not is irrelevant.
One of the links talks about thieves who enter unlocked cars and attach a laptop to an interior electronics port, which they then use to start the car, which is the only indication that locking it may be helpful. I would have to guess that they reproduce a new key somehow after it has been stolen.
The CrowdStrike blog makes it pretty clear that they think it's not just a lone individual and that it's an group with enough resources, time, and organization to suggest that it's backed by a nation-state.
Seriously, what the fuck? In what universe is it broken reasoning to think that a government might attempt to spy on another government, particularly the USA and Russia? I don't even understand what you're trying to argue here.
It's possible that there are other explanations to what happened, but the DNC servers were compromised multiple times over the span of at least a year. It's not even plausible to argue that it's the work of a lone Romanian hacker. Like I said, the one thing that is almost certainly not true here is that this guy is Romanian, and it's even less likely that the first attack by an apparently separate organization is also Romanian.
The big picture here is that wholly unsurprising political espionage occurred and multiple signs point to it having Russian involvement. It's bordering on delusional to believe that a native Russian-speaking Romanian who claims only to be Romanian is the cause of it all.
I do use np++ a lot for note taking, but I don't like to have to disable the function autocomplete feature every time I want to take general notes.
The session saving feature does make it nicer for taking general notes, though. Not having to save a document before you close is kind of awesome.
Highly agree and slightly disagree. I use sublime text 2 like this, partly because it had some multi-cursor and other text editing stuff that I thought was neat, including the autocomplete junk. It's not that important, but I like it. I would definitely shut it off if I weren't used to it, or if it completed things without me noticing more often. I do love most of those little features like autocomplete and matching brackets and the minimap.
Highly agree because the major, major reason I like it is that I can just open up tabs and close the whole thing without having to save, or organize, or whatever. I make a new project, give it a general topic, and then have tabs of notes with the tab getting an auto-title from the first line. Because the main difficulty for me with taking notes like this is with organizing them, this setup is almost perfect for me. I just never have to worry about it other than not deleting my projects folder. The sessions are all in plaintext, too, in what looks like json, so if you encounter an error or need to grep it or something you can do that.
I also installed some emacs-style keybinds. I'm sure something like np++ would be just as good, I just happened to start doing this with sublime.
The motivation primarily seems to be fame-seeking.
You might think so, except for how he doesn't even present any kind of nom de hacker to the world. If you seek attention, do you really name yourself as someone else 2.0?
While it may be conjecture, his original blog post is pretty clearly written by a native Russian speaker to anyone capable of making conjectures based off of it. The chances of him actually being Romanian are very, very small.
When anything like this can be clearly pin-pointed to China and Russia, then you can bet it was staged as such.
"If there's ever evidence of Russian hacking, it must have been fabricated"
Whatever, guy. Anyone who looked at his blog can tell that whoever wrote it is a native Russian speaker. Not only that, but he stole someone else's nickname?
The only thing clearly fabricated here is the idea that he's Romanian, which he almost certainly is not. It's about as clear as you either having language difficulties of your own or clearly lacking any technical knowledge. The post you're replying to was not speaking of internet proxies or compromised machines, but of people or groups of people. The people are not known at all, they've just used the same style and techniques.
I suggest you read to CrowdStrike blog post about it because it explains pretty thoroughly why they believe it to be a nation-state actor. Considering the likelihood of a nation-state actor acting for the benefit of the Russian Federation without any ties to Russia itself are basically zero, it's idiotic to suggest anything else.
As far as I can tell the only thing even suggesting that this might be a singular hacker is how jealous he was about CrowdStrike calling him or them out on having inferior skill to the other already established DNC hack which he ended up exposing when his was caught, but that would be true of a group as well.
As far as I know, you can only install Chrome extensions in Vivaldi by typing in the internal extensions page address, enabling developer mode and then manually downloading and adding each extension.
Then it was a very recent change.
This is not a recent change. The Chrome Store is just a webpage which you can visit, and which treats Vivaldi as if it were Chrome for everything I've tried. You go to it, click on an extension, and it shows the overview for it, including an "Add to Chrome" button. It's been this way since at least November, 5 months ago.
All the government is asking is for Apple to help assist it bypass the encryption on its own phone. In other words, this isn't a privacy issue like it's being made out to be. This is a company refusing to help an owner bypass a lost password on their own device, even though the circumstances are extraordinary.
I just posted this somewhere else, but what is the difference?
A permission slip from the owners (San Bernardino County) is as good as permission slip from the government (signed search warrant).
It might even be less important knowing that its the owners are requesting it. Why should the owners of a phone be required to be given a newly special-crafted firmware so that they can brute-force their way into their own device? It's their own goddamn device, they already have had all the access to it that anybody could hope for.
that said that apple shouldn't be forced to create a backdoor to add to a phone, but they should be required to unlock any existing phones
I hope this detail was just lost in your paraphrasing, but Apple has been ordered to create a backdoor to add to an existing phone, which basically makes this statement nonsense.
Or, rather, Apple has been ordered to implement a potential backdoor which does not exist yet.
If Apple breaks the encryption, there is no way that it will be just for this one phone and that's it.
Just this once, I swear!
If Apple rolled over on this, they'd probably be fighting the same fight a couple of years from now when they got a judicial writ requiring them to have the same kind of firmware backdoor on the iPhone 12 that used to exist on the iPhone 5c
Also Apple uses Child slave labor in China and to do this they hand over _whatever_ China asks for - they do not take a stand for humanity where it really can lead to serious consequences.
So what? You think Apple should roll over to everything government's authoritarian tendencies because they've done it in China?
If apple has the capacity to help in doing this they should or be held in contempt of court.
If Apple has the capacity. What does that mean? Apple does not have access to the phone right now, they have the capability to create access to it by making custom firmware and installing it on the device.
What about phones that don't have this kind of firmware backdoor? I mean, they certainly have the capacity to manufacture phones with potential firmware backdoors, as should be obvious by the existence of this one. Is that part of Apple's capacity to help? Would creating phones that are completely cryptographically secure be eschewing their duty to help the government execute search warrants?
I would recommend the judge jail the CEO in contempt.
Absolutely ridiculous. For filing an appeal???????? You're nuts.
What the FBI is asking is not to install a backdoor or whatever on every iPhone sold by Apple.
They kind of are. They (and the court) have said that Apple is obligated to help them access a locked and encrypted iPhone for which there is currently no access. The access to this is through means of a firmware backdoor, which the FBI and the court have said that Apple must create and implement.
It's not asking them to do it to every iPhone now, but it might be asking them to do this in the future. If Apple is required to help the FBI access this phone, does this mean they can or cannot create a securely locked-down iPhone in the future for which there is no possibility of a firmware backdoor? That is unclear.
what the FBI is asking for is, from a technical standpoint, reasonable
From a technical standpoint only, yes, and only then in very specific cases. Apple might be able to, without having to unlock the phone via passcode, install new firmware on the phone which has zero restrictions on number of attempts or penalties (such as auto-wipe) for incorrect attempts. Purely from a technical standpoint, that is something which appears to be factually correct. What is also factually correct is this capability is something which must be created -- Apple does not already possess a zero-penalty iphone firmware and would need to create it.
How content are you with a corporation being legally required to create a new means of access to a previously inaccessible device? Here it might make sense to some people, seeing as it was a terrorist's phone which was actually owned by San Bernardino County, but what if it was someone whose guilt was not so apparent?
What if another shooting happens next year, and Apple is legally obliged (via judicial writ) to create a new means of access for one of its newer iPhones,which does not have the same firmware "backdoor" already in place? Would Apple have to come up with some new means of access? Would Apple feel pressured to only have weak passcodes with weak firmware in place which could easily be subverted when the court ordered them to? Does this mean it would be illegal for them to manufacture phones with secure firmware and access restrictions which they would be unable to circumvent, no matter how much the court demands it?
Lots of people think that should be the case, and a lot of others will say "well, this isn't that case, we'll get to that when we get there", but as far as I can tell Apple should absolutely be pushing back on this. If they don't push back, then they are either forced or coerced into cooperation. With no pushback, the government will simply continue taking whatever it can get. And what it can get has been unbelievably huge: you can find an almost infinite amount of video clips of Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA, telling any videocamera which will film him that "we need access to x,y,z, because without giving us access to x,y,z, you will cause another 9/11 to happen." Everybody has been buying it for 15 years and giving up everything they have, even when it is obviously untrue.
I agree with much of what else you posted, but I don't understand this line of reasoning:
so far, the only things that have changed are that Apple stopped agreeing to help,
If you think Apple shouldn't be forced to do this, how can the above be any justification for it? It doesn't matter what Apple's stance on this is so much as that they are not forced to comply and have chosen not to comply. Their prior stance on it doesn't really matter except in the case where their prior stance was a legal obligation, and even then, it shouldn't matter: they have every right to appeal.
There are a bunch of people out there flabbergasted by their refusal and open letter while simultaneously saying "we should have a conversation about this", but that's precisely what will happen because of the open letter and subsequent court hearings of the appeal. I'm REALLY glad Apple is standing up to this, even if it turns out to be wrong.
There are lots of vague deductions, but the Constitution is perfectly clear: it ensures the right of people to be secure in their persons, homes, papers, and effects. It is reasonable to suggest that transmitting data over the internet, trusting in its care to someone else, relieves one of that security, but it is not reasonable whatsoever to suggest that the person or entity you are entrusting it to does not also have the right to be secure in their papers and effects.
Ultimately it doesn't really matter how we define "privacy" culturally, because there is basically no definition under which you could argue that the data on your smartphone is not part of one of those four categories. It only begins to get interesting when you reach the point where someone has encrypted data, is served a valid warrant, and refuses to decrypt it.
They already likely have the meta data and all history of calls/tests to/from that number. Isn't that enough?
And probably more, judging by the reports of "accidental" or "automated" collection of data, which they do not include as surveillance. To answer your question, though, no, that is not enough, because that is nominally illegal.
Provided the iPhone is San Bernardino's county property, the privacy issue is nullified. Apple should stop playing the wrong game here and give the FBI what it asks for in this particular case, given everyone knows Apple's security is an illusion anyway.
This isn't about the San Bernardino shooter's privacy, it's about other iPhone customers' privacy (and by extension, all citizens who would like to be secure in their pap-- use encryption)
To crack a 4 digit password by brute force attack you simply need to have the delay between attempts set to 0 and the code wiping the data on the iPhone being neutralized.
Which is why Apple made prevented this from happening on their device through firmware, while simultaneously requiring that to be signed by Apple.
The security is just something you get because someone cannot try 30 million combinations in minutes on your iPhone because he has to wait a few seconds between each trial and is limited in the number of trials before cracking the iPhone becomes useless due to data deletion.
Kind of at odds with what you said earlier, don't you think? Let's take a look again:
Apple's security is an illusion anyway
It's hardly an illusion if it would take literal years to brute force, and only then if you didn't enable the option to auto-wipe your phone after x number of unsuccessful attempts. How is that illusory at all?
Slashdot Mirror
We're being digitally invaded and the hoi polloi, usually so hot to beat someone with a stick, are quite pleased with everything. It's shocking. Can we get back to American ass-kicking mode and fuck these authoritarian rubes? A war is on, brother.
If Trump weren't such a sensitive idiot, he could rally everyone behind him with this. He's been way too caught up in the closeness of the election and the few complaints about the popular vote or the suggestions that he might not have won without interference. I've never seen such a sore loser from someone who won an election before, and it's hurting Americans and American sovereignty at the behest of foreigners.
It's pathetic, especially coming from someone like him and all of his winners rhetoric. Hopefully when he sits down with some of the adults in DC he'll take a real hard look at reality and recognize this.
As long as business can set up their super-PACs to influence elections can we really object to a foreign government doing the same?
Are you fucking serious? Citizens can influence their own government and own elections all they want, it's an inalienable birthright of their citizenship. It's the very basis of government as enshrined in the Constitution.
Foreign governments leveraging their power to change government policy and elections isn't influence, or someone's opinion, it's espionage and can be punished by deportation or death. How many foreign leaders can you name that came out and said something like "I prefer x candidate over y candidate"? None, because none of them are as fucking stupid as so many people partaking in these discussions are.
What you're suggesting is that not only is it not illegal or unlawful, but that it also cannot be illegal or unlawful. It's total nonsense. What you're asking is akin to asking "why can't Russia just run a Russian as a candidate for POTUS, and then influence the election to get him elected?"
No evidence of a break in
Are you retarded or what? You think all the Cozy Bear Douchey Bear APT talk that's been going on for almost a year is made up? You think it's okay for an insider to hack someone else's email? Do you think CrowdStrike is not only fabricating evidence of malicious programs, but also fabricating evidence of their fabricated evidence's origin? Do you believe that CrowdStrike is a partisan organization with future-telling powers who knew that Trump would display willful ignorance of anything they reported on and use it as part of their anti-Trump agenda?
Those are all things you have to believe in order to believe in some of the dumb shit you just said. No evidence of a break in??????????????? God damn. You are an unbelievable idiot.
Not sure I'd call it shear incompetence or shear malice with the track record Microsoft has had. It's more like all thrusters forward, batten-down-the-hatches, damn the torpedoes incompetence guided strictly by the Microsoft corporate philosophy.
If being on a "to disappear" list means you get to live in a mansion in the English countryside practically free of worry, then it's no wonder so many people are desperately trying to get on it.
Not them, but I can oblige. Here is clear and recent poof of NASA faking space images of Jupiter, taken from NASA's own website site
and on the same website site, you can see that the "faked" June 30th photo is credited as being taken May 19. No wonder the photos look the same, they were taken during the same time period.
It's not a problem at all. What "truth" is there in Hulk Hogan's private affairs with people he knows inside of private places?
Thank god Gawker is gone, it was a trash paparazzi publication which provided almost no benefit to anyone, profiting off of bullying other people. Good riddance and go fuck yourself, Denton, along with any "journalist" who thinks this is an assault on freedom of speech. Privacy does exist.
If you really have a problem with it, I suggest you send me a video of your sex life so that I can try to make millions of dollars off of publicly humiliating you with it. Thanks in advance.
This is patently false on many new Jeeps, and probably false on most new cars. What car manufactured in the last 10 years doesn't have remote door unlocks? How many of those don't have an option for remote starting? Jeep even has an app for remote starting. Seriously, inserting a key into the door to unlock it? That's 1990s technology.
Jeep Grand Cherokees have "smart key" like you describe which will allow for unlocking the door based on proximity alone, all you need is to have a key within x distance and place your hand on the doorhandle as if you were about to open it in order for it to unlock. If thieves are reproducing or reprogramming key fobs somewhere then whether the door is locked or not is irrelevant.
One of the links talks about thieves who enter unlocked cars and attach a laptop to an interior electronics port, which they then use to start the car, which is the only indication that locking it may be helpful. I would have to guess that they reproduce a new key somehow after it has been stolen.
You clearly have no clue what Maine is.
Broken reasoning? My reasoning?
The CrowdStrike blog makes it pretty clear that they think it's not just a lone individual and that it's an group with enough resources, time, and organization to suggest that it's backed by a nation-state.
Seriously, what the fuck? In what universe is it broken reasoning to think that a government might attempt to spy on another government, particularly the USA and Russia? I don't even understand what you're trying to argue here.
It's possible that there are other explanations to what happened, but the DNC servers were compromised multiple times over the span of at least a year. It's not even plausible to argue that it's the work of a lone Romanian hacker. Like I said, the one thing that is almost certainly not true here is that this guy is Romanian, and it's even less likely that the first attack by an apparently separate organization is also Romanian.
The big picture here is that wholly unsurprising political espionage occurred and multiple signs point to it having Russian involvement. It's bordering on delusional to believe that a native Russian-speaking Romanian who claims only to be Romanian is the cause of it all.
I do use np++ a lot for note taking, but I don't like to have to disable the function autocomplete feature every time I want to take general notes.
The session saving feature does make it nicer for taking general notes, though. Not having to save a document before you close is kind of awesome.
Highly agree and slightly disagree. I use sublime text 2 like this, partly because it had some multi-cursor and other text editing stuff that I thought was neat, including the autocomplete junk. It's not that important, but I like it. I would definitely shut it off if I weren't used to it, or if it completed things without me noticing more often. I do love most of those little features like autocomplete and matching brackets and the minimap.
Highly agree because the major, major reason I like it is that I can just open up tabs and close the whole thing without having to save, or organize, or whatever. I make a new project, give it a general topic, and then have tabs of notes with the tab getting an auto-title from the first line. Because the main difficulty for me with taking notes like this is with organizing them, this setup is almost perfect for me. I just never have to worry about it other than not deleting my projects folder. The sessions are all in plaintext, too, in what looks like json, so if you encounter an error or need to grep it or something you can do that.
I also installed some emacs-style keybinds. I'm sure something like np++ would be just as good, I just happened to start doing this with sublime.
The motivation primarily seems to be fame-seeking.
You might think so, except for how he doesn't even present any kind of nom de hacker to the world. If you seek attention, do you really name yourself as someone else 2.0?
While it may be conjecture, his original blog post is pretty clearly written by a native Russian speaker to anyone capable of making conjectures based off of it. The chances of him actually being Romanian are very, very small.
When anything like this can be clearly pin-pointed to China and Russia, then you can bet it was staged as such.
"If there's ever evidence of Russian hacking, it must have been fabricated"
Whatever, guy. Anyone who looked at his blog can tell that whoever wrote it is a native Russian speaker. Not only that, but he stole someone else's nickname?
The only thing clearly fabricated here is the idea that he's Romanian, which he almost certainly is not. It's about as clear as you either having language difficulties of your own or clearly lacking any technical knowledge. The post you're replying to was not speaking of internet proxies or compromised machines, but of people or groups of people. The people are not known at all, they've just used the same style and techniques.
I suggest you read to CrowdStrike blog post about it because it explains pretty thoroughly why they believe it to be a nation-state actor. Considering the likelihood of a nation-state actor acting for the benefit of the Russian Federation without any ties to Russia itself are basically zero, it's idiotic to suggest anything else.
As far as I can tell the only thing even suggesting that this might be a singular hacker is how jealous he was about CrowdStrike calling him or them out on having inferior skill to the other already established DNC hack which he ended up exposing when his was caught, but that would be true of a group as well.
You should see how many associates of your grandparents are dead. What were they up to that was so dangerous?
As far as I know, you can only install Chrome extensions in Vivaldi by typing in the internal extensions page address, enabling developer mode and then manually downloading and adding each extension.
Then it was a very recent change.
This is not a recent change. The Chrome Store is just a webpage which you can visit, and which treats Vivaldi as if it were Chrome for everything I've tried. You go to it, click on an extension, and it shows the overview for it, including an "Add to Chrome" button. It's been this way since at least November, 5 months ago.
All the government is asking is for Apple to help assist it bypass the encryption on its own phone. In other words, this isn't a privacy issue like it's being made out to be. This is a company refusing to help an owner bypass a lost password on their own device, even though the circumstances are extraordinary.
I just posted this somewhere else, but what is the difference?
A permission slip from the owners (San Bernardino County) is as good as permission slip from the government (signed search warrant).
It might even be less important knowing that its the owners are requesting it. Why should the owners of a phone be required to be given a newly special-crafted firmware so that they can brute-force their way into their own device? It's their own goddamn device, they already have had all the access to it that anybody could hope for.
that said that apple shouldn't be forced to create a backdoor to add to a phone, but they should be required to unlock any existing phones
I hope this detail was just lost in your paraphrasing, but Apple has been ordered to create a backdoor to add to an existing phone, which basically makes this statement nonsense.
Or, rather, Apple has been ordered to implement a potential backdoor which does not exist yet.
What does it matter?
A permission slip from the owners (San Bernardino County) is as good as permission slip from the government (signed search warrant).
If Apple breaks the encryption, there is no way that it will be just for this one phone and that's it.
Just this once, I swear!
If Apple rolled over on this, they'd probably be fighting the same fight a couple of years from now when they got a judicial writ requiring them to have the same kind of firmware backdoor on the iPhone 12 that used to exist on the iPhone 5c
Also Apple uses Child slave labor in China and to do this they hand over _whatever_ China asks for - they do not take a stand for humanity where it really can lead to serious consequences.
So what? You think Apple should roll over to everything government's authoritarian tendencies because they've done it in China?
If apple has the capacity to help in doing this they should or be held in contempt of court.
If Apple has the capacity. What does that mean? Apple does not have access to the phone right now, they have the capability to create access to it by making custom firmware and installing it on the device.
What about phones that don't have this kind of firmware backdoor? I mean, they certainly have the capacity to manufacture phones with potential firmware backdoors, as should be obvious by the existence of this one. Is that part of Apple's capacity to help? Would creating phones that are completely cryptographically secure be eschewing their duty to help the government execute search warrants?
I would recommend the judge jail the CEO in contempt.
Absolutely ridiculous. For filing an appeal???????? You're nuts.
What the FBI is asking is not to install a backdoor or whatever on every iPhone sold by Apple.
They kind of are. They (and the court) have said that Apple is obligated to help them access a locked and encrypted iPhone for which there is currently no access. The access to this is through means of a firmware backdoor, which the FBI and the court have said that Apple must create and implement.
It's not asking them to do it to every iPhone now, but it might be asking them to do this in the future. If Apple is required to help the FBI access this phone, does this mean they can or cannot create a securely locked-down iPhone in the future for which there is no possibility of a firmware backdoor? That is unclear.
what the FBI is asking for is, from a technical standpoint, reasonable
From a technical standpoint only, yes, and only then in very specific cases. Apple might be able to, without having to unlock the phone via passcode, install new firmware on the phone which has zero restrictions on number of attempts or penalties (such as auto-wipe) for incorrect attempts. Purely from a technical standpoint, that is something which appears to be factually correct. What is also factually correct is this capability is something which must be created -- Apple does not already possess a zero-penalty iphone firmware and would need to create it.
How content are you with a corporation being legally required to create a new means of access to a previously inaccessible device? Here it might make sense to some people, seeing as it was a terrorist's phone which was actually owned by San Bernardino County, but what if it was someone whose guilt was not so apparent?
What if another shooting happens next year, and Apple is legally obliged (via judicial writ) to create a new means of access for one of its newer iPhones,which does not have the same firmware "backdoor" already in place? Would Apple have to come up with some new means of access? Would Apple feel pressured to only have weak passcodes with weak firmware in place which could easily be subverted when the court ordered them to? Does this mean it would be illegal for them to manufacture phones with secure firmware and access restrictions which they would be unable to circumvent, no matter how much the court demands it?
Lots of people think that should be the case, and a lot of others will say "well, this isn't that case, we'll get to that when we get there", but as far as I can tell Apple should absolutely be pushing back on this. If they don't push back, then they are either forced or coerced into cooperation. With no pushback, the government will simply continue taking whatever it can get. And what it can get has been unbelievably huge: you can find an almost infinite amount of video clips of Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA, telling any videocamera which will film him that "we need access to x,y,z, because without giving us access to x,y,z, you will cause another 9/11 to happen." Everybody has been buying it for 15 years and giving up everything they have, even when it is obviously untrue.
I agree with much of what else you posted, but I don't understand this line of reasoning:
so far, the only things that have changed are that Apple stopped agreeing to help,
If you think Apple shouldn't be forced to do this, how can the above be any justification for it? It doesn't matter what Apple's stance on this is so much as that they are not forced to comply and have chosen not to comply. Their prior stance on it doesn't really matter except in the case where their prior stance was a legal obligation, and even then, it shouldn't matter: they have every right to appeal.
There are a bunch of people out there flabbergasted by their refusal and open letter while simultaneously saying "we should have a conversation about this", but that's precisely what will happen because of the open letter and subsequent court hearings of the appeal. I'm REALLY glad Apple is standing up to this, even if it turns out to be wrong.
There are lots of vague deductions, but the Constitution is perfectly clear: it ensures the right of people to be secure in their persons, homes, papers, and effects. It is reasonable to suggest that transmitting data over the internet, trusting in its care to someone else, relieves one of that security, but it is not reasonable whatsoever to suggest that the person or entity you are entrusting it to does not also have the right to be secure in their papers and effects.
Ultimately it doesn't really matter how we define "privacy" culturally, because there is basically no definition under which you could argue that the data on your smartphone is not part of one of those four categories. It only begins to get interesting when you reach the point where someone has encrypted data, is served a valid warrant, and refuses to decrypt it.
They already likely have the meta data and all history of calls/tests to/from that number. Isn't that enough?
And probably more, judging by the reports of "accidental" or "automated" collection of data, which they do not include as surveillance. To answer your question, though, no, that is not enough, because that is nominally illegal.
Provided the iPhone is San Bernardino's county property, the privacy issue is nullified. Apple should stop playing the wrong game here and give the FBI what it asks for in this particular case, given everyone knows Apple's security is an illusion anyway.
This isn't about the San Bernardino shooter's privacy, it's about other iPhone customers' privacy (and by extension, all citizens who would like to be secure in their pap-- use encryption)
To crack a 4 digit password by brute force attack you simply need to have the delay between attempts set to 0 and the code wiping the data on the iPhone being neutralized.
Which is why Apple made prevented this from happening on their device through firmware, while simultaneously requiring that to be signed by Apple.
The security is just something you get because someone cannot try 30 million combinations in minutes on your iPhone because he has to wait a few seconds between each trial and is limited in the number of trials before cracking the iPhone becomes useless due to data deletion.
Kind of at odds with what you said earlier, don't you think? Let's take a look again:
Apple's security is an illusion anyway
It's hardly an illusion if it would take literal years to brute force, and only then if you didn't enable the option to auto-wipe your phone after x number of unsuccessful attempts. How is that illusory at all?