I have the contrary opinion that the threat of your emails being hacked or exposed does at least one good thing:
It forces people to think a bit more carefully about the things they say/write (and read) over email, and makes people communicate a bit more formally in that medium. When someone starts relying (or incorrectly believing) that email contents are totally secure and private, you get in trouble and start writing/saying things you really shouldn't.
Well, the govt/FBI has just said in their brief that should Apple consider the design/coding and signing of a new iOS too burdensome, it just so happens the govt would be happy to take that off their hands.
"...For the reasons discussed above, the FBI cannot itself modify the software on Farook’s iPhone without access to the source code and Apple’s private electronic signature. The government did not seek to compel Apple to turn those over because it believed such a request would be less palatable to Apple. If Apple would prefer that course, however, that may provide an alternative that requires less labor by Apple programmers."
If that's not asking for the private key, it sure is saying that they would not object if it happened to fall into their laps.
Yeah, I clearly don't know the case. And I suppose I didn't read all the footnotes properly, which you did, hm?
Like the one where the govt brief says:
"...For the reasons discussed above, the FBI cannot itself modify the software on Farook’s iPhone without access to the source code and Apple’s private electronic signature. The government did not seek to compel Apple to turn those over because it believed such a request would be less palatable to Apple. If Apple would prefer that course, however, that may provide an alternative that requires less labor by Apple programmers."
I'm sure they mention that just as a harmless possibility, right? Just going to drop that tidbit in there for no reason, suggesting that Apple turn over everything including the keys as just a silly idea?
If you read the sequence of briefs from Apple (and the Assistant US Attorney) since the middle of February (when Apple brought on former Solicitor General Ted Olson, heavy firepower), the gap in legal analysis and writing capabilities is painfully obvious.
In the previous govt brief (all of the briefs history on this site as well), it is outright embarrassing how the govt's legal team (or maybe summer intern) has sunk to having to accuse Apple of marketing tactics, unpatriotic behavior, and reductio ad absurdum examples to support its position. Honestly, if I were the judge, I'd be calling the govt into chambers to rebuke them for such shoddy arguments and telling them to put more skilled people on the task, given the importance.
For those who didn't read the previous Apple one or this one (which are both quite similar), in reply to the govt Apple cleanly and convincingly dissects each of the govt's arguments point by point, and an outsider reading this for the first time would be easily convinced about the merits.
-----------
By the way, I add a few points here for other commenters/readers so that some baseline facts are easily available. Just for your reference, the reason the encryption keys are so important / secret is that:
-- All recent Apple iPhones have built-in encryption-dedicated processing hardware
-- This hardware has firmware burned-in with Apple public encryption keys that validate that any code has come directly from Apple without modification, on startup
-- This key validation structure is designed to ensure that only code signed by Apple's private key can run on the phone
-- Every iPhone has the same public keys burned on it, because that's how public keys work.
So if Apple is forced to give its private keys to the FBI (assuming the remote likelihood they even knew what to do with it), the FBI would have the ability to encrypt and sign software for any of these iPhones. The idea (legal argument-wise or technically) that "this is about one phone" is laughable.
Forcing someone to disclose encryption keys would be a huge violation of the First Amendment. If there is anything that qualifies as speech and knowledge, it is an encryption key / industry trade secret. Then on top of this, there is the question of whether the people at Apple who are in charge of the encryption keys (yes, individuals) would even voluntarily turn it over if given such a blatantly unconstitutional order.
It is amazing to even try to conceive that the ham-handed FBI, with politically appointed leaders (aka morons who have no idea about building hardware/software and who are trained and incentivized to kick doors down, not pick locks) would be remotely qualified to even understand the ramifications of creating/modifying source code, signing it, and pushing it to carefully designed hardware. Much less qualified to execute on that task with a few government programmers, when it took an organization of 100s of people years to develop what is now the iPhone hardware+software encryption infrastructure.
Just for your reference, the reason the encryption keys are so important / secret is that:
-- All recent (>4 year) Apple hardware has built-in encryption-dedicated processing hardware
-- This hardware has firmware burned-in with Apple public encryption keys that validate that any code has come directly from Apple without modification, on startup
-- This key validation structure is designed to ensure that only code signed by Apple's private key can run on the phone
-- Every iPhone has the same public keys burned on it, because that's how public keys work.
So if Apple is forced to give its private keys to the FBI (assuming the remote likelihood they even knew what to do with it), the FBI would have the ability to encrypt and sign software for any of these iPhones. The idea (legal argument-wise or technically) that "this is about one phone" is laughable.
Forcing someone to disclose encryption keys would be a huge violation of the First Amendment. If there is anything that qualifies as speech and knowledge, it is an encryption key / secret. Then on top of this, there is the question of whether the people at Apple who are in charge of the encryption keys (yes, individuals) would even voluntarily turn it over if given such a blatantly unconstitutional order.
I'm sure that even people within the FBI laugh at the notion that they could develop such code without fucking it up, deploy it, and maintain the secrecy of the keys and source code from outsiders.
And final note by the way, this legal filing was written so poorly as to be a joke. It reads like a summer intern wrote the brief after being dictated it by the paralegal to the Assistant US Attorney dashing out of a meeting.
There are many valid reasons in spoken English to have the month come first. Think about when you talk to someone about an upcoming appointment / meeting you want to set. It makes a great deal of sense to mention the month first, because that is some of the greatest uncertainty in the statement. If you say, "March 20th" you quickly know that you're speaking about a date coming up soon, versus if you say "the 20th of March", you leave out the month in suspense until the very end.
By the way, this way of speaking is so ingrained in American vs. British English that probably you think it's right regardless of whether it makes practical sense. And you probably think of it rarely, come to that. If there's something to criticize, you might as well start with the ridiculous decimal comma used in Europe number notation first.
From a technical point of view, it also can make sense when coding user interfaces, for example. Take a calendar choice user interface. If you were to have a sequential drop down (this is now a bit outdated of course) where the user selects the day number first. Then, when the next drop down box comes to the month, the selection of the next month could completely reset the number of days that you should be able to choose from. Doesn't make sense, and in fact Qantas used to have this method of choosing dates until they realized it was completely stupid.
Of course, for coding dates for all other purposes, it completely makes sense to use large-->smaller-->smallest. But spoken and written English doesn't have to mirror coding unnecessarily.
By the way, the Declaration of Independence was signed "July 4, 1776". I think we'll be keeping that, thanks.
Here's what the real issue is: the amount of effort spy/law enforcement agencies want or have to spend to be able to detect and solve crimes. And the fact that now the pendulum is swinging to where they have to get back to spending real time and effort to solve and prevent crimes.
For the last couple of decades, law enforcement / intelligence agencies have had the benefit of all this data and metadata simplifying their detection and solving of crimes. They were able to use all this technology to their advantage because they had access to everyone's communications, and everyone was putting more and more of their communications online or using centralized tools that the FBI could listen to.
As a result of that, the FBI got used to that capability, and thought that being able to solve a crime with only 2 guys tapping a phone should be the norm. Instead of say, having to put 5 guys undercover, inside a crime organization, or have more law enforcement officers on the corners of streets. When was the last time you saw a policeman "walking his beat"? Not any more.
And now the pendulum has swung the other way. Now that people have the tools to safeguard their communications, the FBI is finding that the levels of staffing or intelligence resources are not matching the capability of individuals to counter it.
Yet the FBI is not helpless. They did solve crimes before wiretaps and modern technology. Do you remember that? They are just unhappy that their outdated tools now are making them expend more effort to gather similar information that would help them solve crimes. It just has to be more manual.
No one said things would stay the same forever. And none of their arguments are highly principled -- they just want crime prevention and solving to be easier and cheaper. They have not said that they would never have foiled crime without technology. If that were true, why are there even field agents? Technology doesn't make it impossible, just like it wasn't impossible before the cell phone. It is totally within reason for people to adopt technology that makes some things easier to do their job, and other things harder for others to do their job - that's what technology is all about.
You should be careful to distinguish that anti-competitive behavior (at least in the US) is the creation of barriers to entry by those in the market already. For example, punishing price discounting by incumbent companies to keep new entrants from gaining market share.
Use of punishing price discounts by new entrants is not anti-competitive, it is actually more competitive.
Not that politicians don't misuse it just the same of course...
Wow, congratulations on uninformed wild guessing, and especially when the question has been answered in a formal brief before the court.
Apple explicitly and on the record before the court has submitted that you cannot simply "just disable" some features to get this operating system request to work. In Apple's latest motion before the court, filed today Feb 26:
"...The compromised operating system that the government demands would require significant resources and effort to develop. Although it is difficult to estimate, because it has never been done before, the design, creation, validation, and deployment of the software likely would necessitate six to ten Apple engineers and employees dedicating a very substantial portion of their time for a minimum of two weeks, and likely as many as four weeks. Members of the team would include engineers from Apple’s core operating system group, a quality assurance engineer, a project manager, and either a document writer or a tool writer..."
"...The first step in the process would be for Apple to design and create an operating system that can accomplish what the government wants. No such operating system currently exists with this combination of features. Moreover, Apple cannot simply remove a few lines of code from existing operating systems. Rather, Apple will need to design and implement untested functionality in order to allow the capability to enter passcodes into the device electronically in the manner that the government describes..."
When you see something like this, you know that the Product development group has taken a back seat to the commercial / sales groups at a company.
No self-respecting product designer / owner at a company would allow such a fundamental, first impression of the product to be tainted by advertising as they designed the thing. What product manager would say, during the design process, "wouldn't it be great if we could show ads all over the home screen of people's phones!"
No. Only after the filter had been applied by the marketing / sales department and commercial officers to say, "well, we need to raise more revenue to make our shitty product line seem good" would the product team reluctantly agree to allow ads to make their way into this.
1. Several commentators elsewhere have noted that "blood minerals", like "blood diamonds", are not the root cause of the problem of violence and slavery in such countries. Social and governmental upheaval and disorder are the root issue, that will not be solved just by banning these commodities. Take away blood minerals, and the people of the regions affected by these problems will still have conflicts, just around some other valuable materials. The commodities for phones merely serve as the current vehicle for the conflict to be manifested. Much as college students want that to be the quick fix, by boycotting one thing, that will not solve the problem.
2. The second point is that frequently the best thing that can be done to control and regulate the impacts of a commodity / mining / illicit trading / etc is that the sourcing of it is more concentrated, responsible in fewer entities or companies, who can be clearly identified. Apple in this regard has done more as the responsible party for sourcing hundreds of millions of iPhones and documenting their environmental / social impact than any other small phone maker. In fact, I might suggest that the more you incentivize small, local shops to make their own special version of a phone, the more opportunity there is for exploitation and inconsistency from your humanitarian vision.
There are lots of downsides to the commodities and technologies needed to supply our gadgets, but given that demand is not going to be the level to be pulled here, I don't buy that this movement will solve them.
According to online stats, maybe up to 10,000 athletes attend the Olympic Games. I wonder how many will be held up at gun point and robbed if any are silly enough to venture outside their sanitized zones of the city?
I'm sure there'll be some interesting heaadlines out of this Olympics, for sure...
Complex violations of the law require more proof and investigation than simple everyday offenses.
The case against any executives from the responsible company would involve proving that they were negligent, violated some codes, transmitted false information, etc. etc. etc. Duh. Do you even know what specific offenses they would be charged under? I'm guessing not.
The protesters climbed on a building that wasn't theirs. Even I can figure out what laws that violates.
The execs probably will eventually be charged. It just takes more time, but the wheels of justice do turn.
Maybe he is just posturing as a public figure has a need to do, but those statements are ridiculous.
The correct statement is "if they had been silly enough to use unencrypted methods to communicate, we might have found out the plot beforehand and stopped it."
It is a ridiculous thing to imply that "if they had not had access to encrypted methods to communicate, we would have figured out the any number of other ways they would have communicated it, and stopped it."
Ok, maybe this will be overstating it a bit for effect, but here goes:
In a sense, Google as an organization is a bit more conflicted in its mission, because its mission is/was to make the world's information free and available. Along the way it came up with services that customers liked, and they found that customers also benefitted from not being hacked, so they have some good security along with those services. But from the start it's mission wasn't the front line of being a secure service.
Apple is different. It designs and puts devices in people's hands which they come to regard as personal, inviolable, and private modes of communicating, and keeping information to themselves.
Merely from a practical view, I would say that Google should support Apple, just because in the future, if this case falls, they may find themselves in the same position of having to help the government over and over with increasingly mandatory tasks...
My question is a side one. Apple has described that for every secure enclave in its iPhones (region of the core processing chips), they inscribe a unique ID -- completely unknown and irretrievable by Apple or its suppliers -- that serves as a private key during encryption operations. This way you cannot unlock an iPhone's contents without the correct passphrase/passkey and the phone's unique ID in your possession.
How does a chip manufacturer inscribe a unique code into every chip? As I understand it, chips are produced by successive masks (film) with the circuit pattern layered on each mask.
Is one of the masks getting printed with the unique set of codes? Are the masks printed and changed with every wafer, after the unique codes are changed and discarded? Seems like a very intense way of having to put a unique code on each chip.
Or, if you remember film cameras from like the 80s/90s, where they could burn a date into the corner of the negative, do IC making masks have the ability to dynamically burn a changing code during exposure of the wafer??
Thanks for any knowledge you can offer on this point!
My question is a side one. Apple has described that for every secure enclave in its iPhones (region of the core processing chips), they inscribe a unique ID -- completely unknown and irretrievable by Apple or its suppliers -- that serves as a private key during encryption operations. This way you cannot unlock an iPhone's contents without the correct passphrase/passkey and the phone's unique ID in your possession.
How does a chip manufacturer inscribe a unique code into every chip? As I understand it, chips are produced by successive masks (film) with the circuit pattern layered on each mask.
Is one of the masks getting printed with the unique set of codes? Are the masks printed and changed with every wafer, after the unique codes are changed and discarded? Seems like a very intense way of having to put a unique code on each chip.
Or, if you remember film cameras from like the 80s/90s, where they could burn a date into the corner of the negative, do IC making masks have the ability to dynamically burn a changing code during exposure of the wafer??
Thanks for any knowledge you can offer on this point!
Just so that the debate here is a little more well-informed:
The government is not asking that Apple give out the user's password, or decrypt the phone, both of which they cannot just do (i.e. are incapable of performing). The request is that Apple produce a piece of iOS software or boot image (as I understand it), that would:
1) Disable the auto-erase feature
2) Allow the FBI to brute force submit password guesses to the phone, and
3) Disable or reduce the increasing-delay-between-guesses feature of the passcode lock.
I would be curious to know whether for this iPhone 5c (with iOS 9) this is even possible for Apple to do.
You can see why Apple wanted to get very far away from the business of being in a position to be asked constantly by law enforcement to help decrypt its phones, just for the sheer volume of requests that will be coming if they do....
This is a lot of hype that the airline is using to get some publicity, and the idea is interesting, but will not take flight (hah). Taxiing is such a minimal part of the fuel burn, and of low relative cost, that the added complexity, not to mention certification hurdles, extra weight, etc. etc. of a new airworthy component will not be worth it.
You are carrying something with hydrogen (not a huge deal, but extra hurdles), heavy, and interacting with existing aircraft systems.I know of no example (or cannot easily think of one) where a fuel cell is currently certificated as an aircraft operating component (which I believe it would have to be, as described).
Richard Branson wanted to try something similar a decade ago for Virgin Atlantic, with a biofuel powered robotic mini-tugs that would clamp on to the wheels and tow aircraft to the runway. Even that idea went nowhere -- much less something that has to be a part of the airplane and fly. Funny how all the ideas get forgotten and tried again.
The real story here is not about some medical device or a failed test.
The story, and reason we take pleasure in this downfall is because a charismatic, supposed prodigy, Stanford-privileged, everyone-wants-to-believe-in-successful-woman CEO, who was able to convince funders based on flashy visions and compelling talk, has been found out to have nothing behind the emperor's clothes. And that so many people who are purportedly expert at evaluating technology got collectively duped/brainwashed into believing a whole bunch of fluff based on no more than a TED talk-level technology pitch.
While others who are working on real demonstrable technology, and do not get the benefit of celebrity status, Silicon Valley connections, get passed over for grants / VC money / recognition because they're not connected or privileged in the same way.
Stop believing so much in the vision and hype. Ask for and act on real results more.
Would this pass muster under challenge regarding the interstate commerce clause? Can New York restrict what phones are allowed for a manufacturer in a different state to sell in its state, based on these reasons?
I imagine this bill would fail for a number of reasons, before and after legislative passage...
After seeing peoples' replies below, I did a little math.
SoCal residential uses about 244 billion cf gas each year (ref and ref ) and let's assume that is what this inventory is used for. 244 billion cf gas = 20.2 billion pounds (using 12.076 cf per pound of standard gas ref).
So according to the article, 150 million pounds have been leaked, or 0.7% of the above annual usage.
If the rate of 110,000 pounds per hour continues for 2 months, making some assumptions from the article, then 158 million pounds more will leak, or another 0.8% of the stockpile.
Why can't anyone put it in terms like this for people to better visualize the issue...
Slashdot Mirror
I have the contrary opinion that the threat of your emails being hacked or exposed does at least one good thing:
It forces people to think a bit more carefully about the things they say/write (and read) over email, and makes people communicate a bit more formally in that medium. When someone starts relying (or incorrectly believing) that email contents are totally secure and private, you get in trouble and start writing/saying things you really shouldn't.
If that's not asking for the private key, it sure is saying that they would not object if it happened to fall into their laps.
Like the one where the govt brief says:
I'm sure they mention that just as a harmless possibility, right? Just going to drop that tidbit in there for no reason, suggesting that Apple turn over everything including the keys as just a silly idea?
If you read the sequence of briefs from Apple (and the Assistant US Attorney) since the middle of February (when Apple brought on former Solicitor General Ted Olson, heavy firepower), the gap in legal analysis and writing capabilities is painfully obvious.
In the previous govt brief (all of the briefs history on this site as well), it is outright embarrassing how the govt's legal team (or maybe summer intern) has sunk to having to accuse Apple of marketing tactics, unpatriotic behavior, and reductio ad absurdum examples to support its position. Honestly, if I were the judge, I'd be calling the govt into chambers to rebuke them for such shoddy arguments and telling them to put more skilled people on the task, given the importance.
For those who didn't read the previous Apple one or this one (which are both quite similar), in reply to the govt Apple cleanly and convincingly dissects each of the govt's arguments point by point, and an outsider reading this for the first time would be easily convinced about the merits.
-----------
By the way, I add a few points here for other commenters/readers so that some baseline facts are easily available. Just for your reference, the reason the encryption keys are so important / secret is that:
-- All recent Apple iPhones have built-in encryption-dedicated processing hardware
-- This hardware has firmware burned-in with Apple public encryption keys that validate that any code has come directly from Apple without modification, on startup
-- This key validation structure is designed to ensure that only code signed by Apple's private key can run on the phone
-- Every iPhone has the same public keys burned on it, because that's how public keys work.
So if Apple is forced to give its private keys to the FBI (assuming the remote likelihood they even knew what to do with it), the FBI would have the ability to encrypt and sign software for any of these iPhones. The idea (legal argument-wise or technically) that "this is about one phone" is laughable.
Forcing someone to disclose encryption keys would be a huge violation of the First Amendment. If there is anything that qualifies as speech and knowledge, it is an encryption key / industry trade secret. Then on top of this, there is the question of whether the people at Apple who are in charge of the encryption keys (yes, individuals) would even voluntarily turn it over if given such a blatantly unconstitutional order.
It is amazing to even try to conceive that the ham-handed FBI, with politically appointed leaders (aka morons who have no idea about building hardware/software and who are trained and incentivized to kick doors down, not pick locks) would be remotely qualified to even understand the ramifications of creating/modifying source code, signing it, and pushing it to carefully designed hardware. Much less qualified to execute on that task with a few government programmers, when it took an organization of 100s of people years to develop what is now the iPhone hardware+software encryption infrastructure.
Just for your reference, the reason the encryption keys are so important / secret is that:
-- All recent (>4 year) Apple hardware has built-in encryption-dedicated processing hardware
-- This hardware has firmware burned-in with Apple public encryption keys that validate that any code has come directly from Apple without modification, on startup
-- This key validation structure is designed to ensure that only code signed by Apple's private key can run on the phone
-- Every iPhone has the same public keys burned on it, because that's how public keys work.
So if Apple is forced to give its private keys to the FBI (assuming the remote likelihood they even knew what to do with it), the FBI would have the ability to encrypt and sign software for any of these iPhones. The idea (legal argument-wise or technically) that "this is about one phone" is laughable.
Forcing someone to disclose encryption keys would be a huge violation of the First Amendment. If there is anything that qualifies as speech and knowledge, it is an encryption key / secret. Then on top of this, there is the question of whether the people at Apple who are in charge of the encryption keys (yes, individuals) would even voluntarily turn it over if given such a blatantly unconstitutional order.
I'm sure that even people within the FBI laugh at the notion that they could develop such code without fucking it up, deploy it, and maintain the secrecy of the keys and source code from outsiders.
And final note by the way, this legal filing was written so poorly as to be a joke. It reads like a summer intern wrote the brief after being dictated it by the paralegal to the Assistant US Attorney dashing out of a meeting.
Actually, no it's not, you silly Brit.
There are many valid reasons in spoken English to have the month come first. Think about when you talk to someone about an upcoming appointment / meeting you want to set. It makes a great deal of sense to mention the month first, because that is some of the greatest uncertainty in the statement. If you say, "March 20th" you quickly know that you're speaking about a date coming up soon, versus if you say "the 20th of March", you leave out the month in suspense until the very end.
By the way, this way of speaking is so ingrained in American vs. British English that probably you think it's right regardless of whether it makes practical sense. And you probably think of it rarely, come to that. If there's something to criticize, you might as well start with the ridiculous decimal comma used in Europe number notation first.
From a technical point of view, it also can make sense when coding user interfaces, for example. Take a calendar choice user interface. If you were to have a sequential drop down (this is now a bit outdated of course) where the user selects the day number first. Then, when the next drop down box comes to the month, the selection of the next month could completely reset the number of days that you should be able to choose from. Doesn't make sense, and in fact Qantas used to have this method of choosing dates until they realized it was completely stupid.
Of course, for coding dates for all other purposes, it completely makes sense to use large-->smaller-->smallest. But spoken and written English doesn't have to mirror coding unnecessarily.
By the way, the Declaration of Independence was signed "July 4, 1776". I think we'll be keeping that, thanks.
Here's what the real issue is: the amount of effort spy/law enforcement agencies want or have to spend to be able to detect and solve crimes. And the fact that now the pendulum is swinging to where they have to get back to spending real time and effort to solve and prevent crimes.
For the last couple of decades, law enforcement / intelligence agencies have had the benefit of all this data and metadata simplifying their detection and solving of crimes. They were able to use all this technology to their advantage because they had access to everyone's communications, and everyone was putting more and more of their communications online or using centralized tools that the FBI could listen to.
As a result of that, the FBI got used to that capability, and thought that being able to solve a crime with only 2 guys tapping a phone should be the norm. Instead of say, having to put 5 guys undercover, inside a crime organization, or have more law enforcement officers on the corners of streets. When was the last time you saw a policeman "walking his beat"? Not any more.
And now the pendulum has swung the other way. Now that people have the tools to safeguard their communications, the FBI is finding that the levels of staffing or intelligence resources are not matching the capability of individuals to counter it.
Yet the FBI is not helpless. They did solve crimes before wiretaps and modern technology. Do you remember that? They are just unhappy that their outdated tools now are making them expend more effort to gather similar information that would help them solve crimes. It just has to be more manual.
No one said things would stay the same forever. And none of their arguments are highly principled -- they just want crime prevention and solving to be easier and cheaper. They have not said that they would never have foiled crime without technology. If that were true, why are there even field agents? Technology doesn't make it impossible, just like it wasn't impossible before the cell phone. It is totally within reason for people to adopt technology that makes some things easier to do their job, and other things harder for others to do their job - that's what technology is all about.
You should be careful to distinguish that anti-competitive behavior (at least in the US) is the creation of barriers to entry by those in the market already. For example, punishing price discounting by incumbent companies to keep new entrants from gaining market share.
Use of punishing price discounts by new entrants is not anti-competitive, it is actually more competitive.
Not that politicians don't misuse it just the same of course...
Apple explicitly and on the record before the court has submitted that you cannot simply "just disable" some features to get this operating system request to work. In Apple's latest motion before the court, filed today Feb 26:
(from https://www.lawfareblog.com/ap...)
When you see something like this, you know that the Product development group has taken a back seat to the commercial / sales groups at a company.
No self-respecting product designer / owner at a company would allow such a fundamental, first impression of the product to be tainted by advertising as they designed the thing. What product manager would say, during the design process, "wouldn't it be great if we could show ads all over the home screen of people's phones!"
No. Only after the filter had been applied by the marketing / sales department and commercial officers to say, "well, we need to raise more revenue to make our shitty product line seem good" would the product team reluctantly agree to allow ads to make their way into this.
All respect lost.
Two points:
1. Several commentators elsewhere have noted that "blood minerals", like "blood diamonds", are not the root cause of the problem of violence and slavery in such countries. Social and governmental upheaval and disorder are the root issue, that will not be solved just by banning these commodities. Take away blood minerals, and the people of the regions affected by these problems will still have conflicts, just around some other valuable materials. The commodities for phones merely serve as the current vehicle for the conflict to be manifested. Much as college students want that to be the quick fix, by boycotting one thing, that will not solve the problem.
2. The second point is that frequently the best thing that can be done to control and regulate the impacts of a commodity / mining / illicit trading / etc is that the sourcing of it is more concentrated, responsible in fewer entities or companies, who can be clearly identified. Apple in this regard has done more as the responsible party for sourcing hundreds of millions of iPhones and documenting their environmental / social impact than any other small phone maker. In fact, I might suggest that the more you incentivize small, local shops to make their own special version of a phone, the more opportunity there is for exploitation and inconsistency from your humanitarian vision.
There are lots of downsides to the commodities and technologies needed to supply our gadgets, but given that demand is not going to be the level to be pulled here, I don't buy that this movement will solve them.
On a different front:
According to online stats, maybe up to 10,000 athletes attend the Olympic Games. I wonder how many will be held up at gun point and robbed if any are silly enough to venture outside their sanitized zones of the city?
I'm sure there'll be some interesting heaadlines out of this Olympics, for sure...
Well, for fuck's sake, what do you expect?
Complex violations of the law require more proof and investigation than simple everyday offenses.
The case against any executives from the responsible company would involve proving that they were negligent, violated some codes, transmitted false information, etc. etc. etc. Duh. Do you even know what specific offenses they would be charged under? I'm guessing not.
The protesters climbed on a building that wasn't theirs. Even I can figure out what laws that violates.
The execs probably will eventually be charged. It just takes more time, but the wheels of justice do turn.
Maybe he is just posturing as a public figure has a need to do, but those statements are ridiculous.
The correct statement is "if they had been silly enough to use unencrypted methods to communicate, we might have found out the plot beforehand and stopped it."
It is a ridiculous thing to imply that "if they had not had access to encrypted methods to communicate, we would have figured out the any number of other ways they would have communicated it, and stopped it."
Ok, maybe this will be overstating it a bit for effect, but here goes:
In a sense, Google as an organization is a bit more conflicted in its mission, because its mission is/was to make the world's information free and available. Along the way it came up with services that customers liked, and they found that customers also benefitted from not being hacked, so they have some good security along with those services. But from the start it's mission wasn't the front line of being a secure service.
Apple is different. It designs and puts devices in people's hands which they come to regard as personal, inviolable, and private modes of communicating, and keeping information to themselves.
Merely from a practical view, I would say that Google should support Apple, just because in the future, if this case falls, they may find themselves in the same position of having to help the government over and over with increasingly mandatory tasks...
My question is a side one. Apple has described that for every secure enclave in its iPhones (region of the core processing chips), they inscribe a unique ID -- completely unknown and irretrievable by Apple or its suppliers -- that serves as a private key during encryption operations. This way you cannot unlock an iPhone's contents without the correct passphrase/passkey and the phone's unique ID in your possession.
How does a chip manufacturer inscribe a unique code into every chip? As I understand it, chips are produced by successive masks (film) with the circuit pattern layered on each mask.
Is one of the masks getting printed with the unique set of codes? Are the masks printed and changed with every wafer, after the unique codes are changed and discarded? Seems like a very intense way of having to put a unique code on each chip.
Or, if you remember film cameras from like the 80s/90s, where they could burn a date into the corner of the negative, do IC making masks have the ability to dynamically burn a changing code during exposure of the wafer??
Thanks for any knowledge you can offer on this point!
and... Enabling a party to defeat all the security measures that implement an encryption method is distinguishable from breaking the encryption, how?
My question is a side one. Apple has described that for every secure enclave in its iPhones (region of the core processing chips), they inscribe a unique ID -- completely unknown and irretrievable by Apple or its suppliers -- that serves as a private key during encryption operations. This way you cannot unlock an iPhone's contents without the correct passphrase/passkey and the phone's unique ID in your possession.
How does a chip manufacturer inscribe a unique code into every chip? As I understand it, chips are produced by successive masks (film) with the circuit pattern layered on each mask.
Is one of the masks getting printed with the unique set of codes? Are the masks printed and changed with every wafer, after the unique codes are changed and discarded? Seems like a very intense way of having to put a unique code on each chip.
Or, if you remember film cameras from like the 80s/90s, where they could burn a date into the corner of the negative, do IC making masks have the ability to dynamically burn a changing code during exposure of the wafer??
Thanks for any knowledge you can offer on this point!
Just so that the debate here is a little more well-informed:
The government is not asking that Apple give out the user's password, or decrypt the phone, both of which they cannot just do (i.e. are incapable of performing). The request is that Apple produce a piece of iOS software or boot image (as I understand it), that would:
1) Disable the auto-erase feature
2) Allow the FBI to brute force submit password guesses to the phone, and
3) Disable or reduce the increasing-delay-between-guesses feature of the passcode lock.
I would be curious to know whether for this iPhone 5c (with iOS 9) this is even possible for Apple to do.
You can see why Apple wanted to get very far away from the business of being in a position to be asked constantly by law enforcement to help decrypt its phones, just for the sheer volume of requests that will be coming if they do....
This is a lot of hype that the airline is using to get some publicity, and the idea is interesting, but will not take flight (hah). Taxiing is such a minimal part of the fuel burn, and of low relative cost, that the added complexity, not to mention certification hurdles, extra weight, etc. etc. of a new airworthy component will not be worth it.
You are carrying something with hydrogen (not a huge deal, but extra hurdles), heavy, and interacting with existing aircraft systems.I know of no example (or cannot easily think of one) where a fuel cell is currently certificated as an aircraft operating component (which I believe it would have to be, as described).
Richard Branson wanted to try something similar a decade ago for Virgin Atlantic, with a biofuel powered robotic mini-tugs that would clamp on to the wheels and tow aircraft to the runway. Even that idea went nowhere -- much less something that has to be a part of the airplane and fly. Funny how all the ideas get forgotten and tried again.
The real story here is not about some medical device or a failed test.
The story, and reason we take pleasure in this downfall is because a charismatic, supposed prodigy, Stanford-privileged, everyone-wants-to-believe-in-successful-woman CEO, who was able to convince funders based on flashy visions and compelling talk, has been found out to have nothing behind the emperor's clothes. And that so many people who are purportedly expert at evaluating technology got collectively duped/brainwashed into believing a whole bunch of fluff based on no more than a TED talk-level technology pitch.
While others who are working on real demonstrable technology, and do not get the benefit of celebrity status, Silicon Valley connections, get passed over for grants / VC money / recognition because they're not connected or privileged in the same way.
Stop believing so much in the vision and hype. Ask for and act on real results more.
Would this pass muster under challenge regarding the interstate commerce clause? Can New York restrict what phones are allowed for a manufacturer in a different state to sell in its state, based on these reasons?
I imagine this bill would fail for a number of reasons, before and after legislative passage...
I dearly hope so. For those who can barely tolerate the rest in steerage, imagine decades with your fellow man!
After seeing peoples' replies below, I did a little math. SoCal residential uses about 244 billion cf gas each year (ref and ref ) and let's assume that is what this inventory is used for. 244 billion cf gas = 20.2 billion pounds (using 12.076 cf per pound of standard gas ref).
So according to the article, 150 million pounds have been leaked, or 0.7% of the above annual usage.
If the rate of 110,000 pounds per hour continues for 2 months, making some assumptions from the article, then 158 million pounds more will leak, or another 0.8% of the stockpile.
Why can't anyone put it in terms like this for people to better visualize the issue...
Maybe this is a dumb question, but why in the world were they stockpiling that much gas to begin with?