For the OEMs, they take a snapshot of the Android development tree at some stable point, and then they put in a hell of a lot of work to productize it for a given specific platform. And then they don't touch it, ever again. Each new phone is a new port, and each update to the OS on a phone would also be a new port.
Maintaining version updates on an ongoing basis is not possible with this development model, and having Google do the productization is not desirable to the carriers (who want a branded experience and a captive application store portal), nor Google (which is temperamentally incapable of productization, and does not want to assume update liability for Android phone, in the first place).
The carriers are the major beneficiaries, since if you what to add 0.0.1 to your version number (I still can not understand that desire, but people also buy Corvettes, and they buy German cars with interference engines where if the timing belt/chain breaks, it utter destroys the entire engine... so go figure), that thousandths of an increment inversion number means you will be re-upping your contract for another 2 years (effectively, 18 months).
So the carriers have no incentive to distribute updates, the manufacturers have no incentive to change their process, since the majority of their sales are through carriers, and the carriers aren't going to take a consignment of last years phones. And Google isn't involved in the productization, because the OEMs don't want the code specific to their device showing up in the Android tree before it's released (which would disclose product plans) or frankly showing up at all (which would allow a competitor to use the same chips in their device, and not pay the development costs that the original OEM had to pay, allowing them to undercut their pricing for exactly the same product).
Google: Good money spent to no effect OEMS: Good money after bad, aiding competitors Carriers: Good money after bad, update error liability, inability to lock you into a new contract to get you +0.0.1 fix
How again is this ignorant? It seems to be highly educated on the economics of the situation to me...
Who else things that these names and addresses are actually U.S. government employee data that came from the OPM hack a while ago, and they are publishing it as "These are ISIS people!" as a "*Psych*! Gotcha!"???
There are, in fact others, some of which I'm prohibited from sharing with you...
Bullshit.
Here are some I'm allowed to share, but was too lazy to write out last time.
Your employee confidentiality agreement.
The confidentiality agreement that I had to sign with Apple to get access to the confidentiality agreement disclosing a project code name.
The confidentiality agreement that I signed to get the code name so that they could give me another confidentiality agreement that used the codename in the wording of the agreement.
That subsequent agreement.
Doctor/patient privilege.
HIPAA agreements with data providers.
Juvenile court records, which are de facto sealed, and so not require a court order to seal them.
Seconded. This particular case has dubious merits, but!
I don't see anything particularly wrong with the FBI using the power of a subpoena or warrant or whatever the correct legal term is here. The source code already exists. The signing keys already exist. Apple has to be able to release updates to its devices somehow.
TRW Makes nuclear weapons for the U.S. Air Force. The plans for these weapons exist. The weapons exist.,, The nuclear materials exist. TRW has to be able to deliver updates to its devices to the Air Force somehow.
If the FBI uses the power of a subpoena or warrant or whatever the correct legal term is here, TRW should be required to arm their agents with nuclear weapons.
What the Government is demanding is not just for Apple to blow up the safe, they are requesting a permanent opening be made in ALL safes for their convenience.
No, they're not. They're not requesting Apple flash the modified firmware to all iPhones. They're requesting Apple flash the modified firmware to phones they have a warrant for, issued with probable cause.
And then they can remove that image from the phone by jailbreaking it once it is unlocked, and subsequently flash it to other phones.
Giving them a permanent opening to access the contents of all iPhones.
They CAN, however, compel the safe maker to give them the specs on the safe, so that they may better try to crack it. Which is the FBI's point here. If you refuse to have your expert engineers help us, then hand over all the source code so we can make the modification ourselves.
All of Apples source code -- which by the way, is just speculation by the person they are talking to in the article, because they've failed to close the previous quote properly, and failed to attribute next paragraph properly -- won't help them at all.
What they want -- and they cited the Lavabit case, in requesting it -- is Apple's signing keys.
This *STILL* will not help them, however, since the tards apparently don't *GET* that putting the device in hardware DFU mode will have them overwriting the entire flash contents, whereas putting it in software DFU mode will work, -- BUT THEY HAVE TO UNLOCK THE PHONE FIRST.
So if Apple hands this over, the FBI gets two things:
(1) The ability to build images that include an FBI SSL key and/or forced proxy with a trusted FBI SSL key, so that they can MITM any iPhone on which they install this distribution. Assuming the iPhone in question gets backed up, they'll swear at their phone, reenter their iCloud password or restore from backup, and then get everything back -- and happily continue on, using the now back-doored iPhone.
(2) The ability to sign spyware as if it came from the App store, through the normal Apple Approval process, and install it onto suspects iPhones. This include screen captures, key loggers, phone call taps (which they could tap instead at the phone company, with a warrant, or just ask the NSA to provide), SMS/MMS message taps (which they could tap instead at the phone company, with a warrant, or just ask the NSA to provide), and anything else they wanted, including access to banking details and other information stored on the device, and nominally encrypted.
Above all else, it's pretty clear: The FBI should not be given these signing keys. No one but Apple should have these signing keys, and, so far, they appear to be earning that trust.
Remember, the government can now do stuff and order you not to talk about it. It's very easy to envision them going to a tech and saying "open that wiring closet" knowing that if anyone hears about it, he's going to Leavenworth.
Cite?
I only know of two forms of gag orders under US law [national security letter] / [court order]
So which one of those are you talking about, or are you referring to another that the public hasn't been made aware of?
There are also:
Patent secrecy orders under 37 CFR 5.2: "When notified by the chief officer of a defense agency that publication or disclosure of the invention by the granting of a patent would be detrimental to the national security, an order that the invention be kept secret will be issued by the Commissioner for Patents". The compensations provisions under the law pretty much suck, too.
Suspicious activity reports, under Housing and Community Development Act of 1992 / Annunzio-Wylie Anti-Money Laundering Act, Pub.L. 102–550, 1517(b), 106 Stat. 4060.
18 U.S.C. 2705(b) -- The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 / Stored Communications Act; this is where all the security "canaries" in the disclosure reports from companies tend to originate.
18 U.S.C. 3123(d)(2) -- The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986; this is what prevents disclosure of pen registers.
California Electronic Communications Privacy Act -- gag orders on all cases concerning electronic search warrants.
There are, in fact others, some of which I'm prohibited from sharing with you...
Exactly. If they wanted to, they could raise the price of gasoline to the point where the externalized costs (i.e. pollution) are taken into account.
Yeah. They could do the same thing for labor, too, to the point where the externalized costs (i.e. health care, pension, fair treatment of labor, etc.) are taken into account.
Like the United States does.
And then it would cost the same to manufacture in China as it does in the U.S., instead of being vastly cheaper in China.
Earlier jailbreaks, including the "game over" jailbreak used by redsn0w, were based on the fact that it was a Samsung chip with a known firmware bootloader flaw. When it was checking the cryptographic signature on the boot loader that would load the rest of the OS, you could buffer overflow the cryptographic check itself, and cause the execution of arbitrary code.
BTW: To do this, you *STILL* had to overwrite the bootloader itself in Flash. And the way that NAND flash works is you reset a block to all 1's (and it has to be the entire block), and then write 0's out where you don't want 1's. So all you have to do is put a TEA sum and the 10 count in the bootloader block, and even with the hardware DFU mode, you've screwed the ability to do an untethered jailbreak, unless they wrote an entire new bootloader. Not that this iPhone model has that flaw in the first place.
The FBI's request relies on there being some as yet undisclosed security flaw which would enable Apple to load the software into memory on the iPhone and execute it from there. Your claim of impossibility relies on there being no security flaw (currently undisclosed, or even currently *unknown*) that would enable such.
The current Jailbreaks for that model and later are *tethered* jailbreaks. This means that the iPone must be *unlocked*.
Earlier jailbreaks, including the "game over" jailbreak used by redsn0w, were based on the fact that it was a Samsung chip with a known firmware bootloader flaw. When it was checking the cryptographic signature on the boot loader that would load the rest of the OS, you could buffer overflow the cryptographic check itself, and cause the execution of arbitrary code.
When the CPUs were revised, this *known flaw* in Samsung's verified boot code path in the mask programmed ROM was fixed, which is what necessitated tethered jailbreaks. It was not worth the cost of spinning the chip earlier, given that some phones would have the untethered jailbreak vulnerability, and others would not.
--
I have repeatedly stated that it was "within the realm of possibility" and used "if possible"; I have *NEVER* stated "impossible*, only implied it.
And when challenged to find and disclose such bugs, should they exist, to the FBI, I side with Apple: Fuck. Off.
BTW... if you don't think that, for example, Amazon, would be perfectly happy to load other people's eBooks on the Kindle, and then make them look not as nicely formatted as the ones you buy from Amazon, if that meant selling a Kindle, and enabling future Amazon sales as a result -- think again.
And don't think that B&N wouldn't do exactly the same thing to a Nook: it's more important to them that your library be portable *to* a Nook, than it is that they themselves might accident have book sales that were displayed on a Kindle instead of a Nook.
Where Amazon and B&N agree however, is this: Apple is better at presentation graphics than either of them, and so they might not be able to sell their readers any more. The readers (at present, thanks to DRM) are all about having a loss leader that then results in future book sales (which they might or might not get anyway, if they were DRM free), but the DRM means that once you commit to a vendor, you commit to their ecosystem. It's about customer lock-in.
Their worst nightmare may well be people buying books from them, and deciding to read them on their iPad (which they can do with Apps from both companies anyway), and then having to compete on book price, which is a race to lower margins, if someone decides to hold a price war.
Apple isn't the danger -- it's not like Apple gives discounts on most things anyway -- it's that Amazon and B&N are afraid of each other for that reason.
It's a mess which was (somewhat) on its way to being fixed until this case was raised.
If theres DRM on ebooks then blame the publishers for it being on there, not amazon, borders, barnes and noble etc. Trying to make it sound like the other stores are screwing disabled people is WEAK.
The problem is that the other distributors failed to band together with each other in order to assert collective bargaining against DRM in eBooks in the first place.
As long as there was one distribution channel where it was possible for them to distribute the book with DRM, any distribution channel that decided that it would not distribute DRM'ed eBooks, got screwed by not being able to distribute ANY eBooks: the publishers could force DRM on the one because the others would not stand with them against DRM.
If, on the other hand, there was a strong economic interest that the publishers had to "play ball", then the distributors could dictate terms to the publishers.
Terms like "No DRM!".
This whole thing blew up in the first place because the publishers realized that this is what was coming down the road, and were fearful of it. The other distributors became fearful of it at the same time, mostly because the publishers told them that it would threaten their margins on the audio books. Instant firestorm controversy. Boom!
Apple did this for a reason. It's not the reason people are claiming.
The problem is that the text to speech that's disabled by the DRM on eBooks means that blind people can't read eBooks. Or of they get an audio book for an eBook, it always comes a lot later, and at a much higher price, if at all.
There's no reason for this, but in order to get the DRM removed, they kind of need to be able to cut the same kind of deal with the eBook publishers that they cut with the music labels to get the DRM the hell off of music.
What this is about is that Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and the now-defunct Borders, make a large amount of money on the margins on the audio books. Mostly on the backs of people who listen to them while they drive or exercise -- or on the backs of the disabled.
Can't they just pull out the hard drive and brute force it?
How much time have you got, because you are talking a 256 bit AES key that uses a UUID in the processor and a GID for the device model and a PIN from the user to generate there... You can fake the GID, but good luck on that whole UUID thing... you left that behind when you pulled the flash chip out of the device that had the processor the UUID lives in.
Therefore, a change to iOS is capable of altering the 10-strikes rule on their devices, and that's what the FBI is asking Apple to do.
Yes. Except one thing.
Loading a recovery image requires putting the device in *Recovery Mode*, and that's a hardware DFU mode whereby you talk to a small piece of firmware whose only job is to overwrite the Flash contents.
It doesn't load shit into RAM and run it in order to overwrite the flash contents while preserving data: it's a *RECOVERY* mode, not an *UPDATE* mode. It's what you do as a last resort, assuming you backed your crap up to the iCloud, because if you didn't, that shit is *gone*.
To do an *UPDATE* without overwriting the user data portion of the flash contents, you talk to the *ptpd*, which implements the DFU protocol at a higher level, in user space. How do you do that? Well, first, you have to make the ptpd willing to talk to you (or iTunes). How you you do that?
You UNLOCK the frigging phone.
So to load the image that the FBI wants Apple to write for them, and then to load, you'd have to unlock the phone to enable you to unlock the phone.
Cluebat here. Knock knock knock... is that you, head? Yeah, there's two DFU implementations in the iPhone. What? You didn't know that? Well now you do. Yeah. Yeah. We can write the image you want us to write, and then we can load it onto the iPhone, but to do that, it will wipe out the very data you seek. What? No, we can't make monkeys fly out our ass... I think you are confusing us with Jim Carrey in that movie "Bruce Almighty".
People really do not understand technology... especially technology designed to prevent exactly the type of thing the FBI wants done.
You mean like the ones we use to shoot down planes, because they have avionics systems too?
Oh wait. We're not on "Scorpion" or "Mutant X" or "The Flash", and we're not "Agent's of S.H.I.E.L.D."... we know that it takes a nuclear weapon or a massive amount of equipment, like at the Rocky Mountain Weapons Test Facility, because of the inverse square law...
Germany and France arguing... what could possibly go wrong? It's not like there's any historical precedent or anything... where, you know, Germany was in the wrong in the past...
Slashdot Mirror
Are going to start WW3.
And this is a damn shame! Has no one any pride left in their work in this country?!? It should be AMERICAN hackers who start WW3! GO USA!
"thanks to [ignorant] OEMs and carriers"
That's an incorrect position.
For the OEMs, they take a snapshot of the Android development tree at some stable point, and then they put in a hell of a lot of work to productize it for a given specific platform. And then they don't touch it, ever again. Each new phone is a new port, and each update to the OS on a phone would also be a new port.
Maintaining version updates on an ongoing basis is not possible with this development model, and having Google do the productization is not desirable to the carriers (who want a branded experience and a captive application store portal), nor Google (which is temperamentally incapable of productization, and does not want to assume update liability for Android phone, in the first place).
The carriers are the major beneficiaries, since if you what to add 0.0.1 to your version number (I still can not understand that desire, but people also buy Corvettes, and they buy German cars with interference engines where if the timing belt/chain breaks, it utter destroys the entire engine ... so go figure), that thousandths of an increment inversion number means you will be re-upping your contract for another 2 years (effectively, 18 months).
So the carriers have no incentive to distribute updates, the manufacturers have no incentive to change their process, since the majority of their sales are through carriers, and the carriers aren't going to take a consignment of last years phones. And Google isn't involved in the productization, because the OEMs don't want the code specific to their device showing up in the Android tree before it's released (which would disclose product plans) or frankly showing up at all (which would allow a competitor to use the same chips in their device, and not pay the development costs that the original OEM had to pay, allowing them to undercut their pricing for exactly the same product).
Google: Good money spent to no effect
OEMS: Good money after bad, aiding competitors
Carriers: Good money after bad, update error liability, inability to lock you into a new contract to get you +0.0.1 fix
How again is this ignorant? It seems to be highly educated on the economics of the situation to me...
Who else things that these names and addresses are actually U.S. government employee data that came from the OPM hack a while ago, and they are publishing it as "These are ISIS people!" as a "*Psych*! Gotcha!"???
Left out a biggie:
Clergy/parishioner Confessional
There are, in fact others, some of which I'm prohibited from sharing with you...
Bullshit.
Here are some I'm allowed to share, but was too lazy to write out last time.
Your employee confidentiality agreement.
The confidentiality agreement that I had to sign with Apple to get access to the confidentiality agreement disclosing a project code name.
The confidentiality agreement that I signed to get the code name so that they could give me another confidentiality agreement that used the codename in the wording of the agreement.
That subsequent agreement.
Doctor/patient privilege.
HIPAA agreements with data providers.
Juvenile court records, which are de facto sealed, and so not require a court order to seal them.
Lawyer/client privilege.
etc..
From TFA:
“The FBI cannot itself modify the software on Farook’s iPhone without access to the source code and Apple’s private electronic signature.
They can't do it with it, either, without wiping the damn phone, so what's their point again?
But this story is about vilifying individually controlled encryption in general, to make it look like only criminals need it.
To be fair: The FBI *is* claiming "we need it"...
Seconded. This particular case has dubious merits, but!
I don't see anything particularly wrong with the FBI using the power of a subpoena or warrant or whatever the correct legal term is here. The source code already exists. The signing keys already exist. Apple has to be able to release updates to its devices somehow.
TRW Makes nuclear weapons for the U.S. Air Force. The plans for these weapons exist. The weapons exist.,, The nuclear materials exist. TRW has to be able to deliver updates to its devices to the Air Force somehow.
If the FBI uses the power of a subpoena or warrant or whatever the correct legal term is here, TRW should be required to arm their agents with nuclear weapons.
What the Government is demanding is not just for Apple to blow up the safe, they are requesting a permanent opening be made in ALL safes for their convenience.
No, they're not. They're not requesting Apple flash the modified firmware to all iPhones. They're requesting Apple flash the modified firmware to phones they have a warrant for, issued with probable cause.
And then they can remove that image from the phone by jailbreaking it once it is unlocked, and subsequently flash it to other phones.
Giving them a permanent opening to access the contents of all iPhones.
They CAN, however, compel the safe maker to give them the specs on the safe, so that they may better try to crack it. Which is the FBI's point here. If you refuse to have your expert engineers help us, then hand over all the source code so we can make the modification ourselves.
All of Apples source code -- which by the way, is just speculation by the person they are talking to in the article, because they've failed to close the previous quote properly, and failed to attribute next paragraph properly -- won't help them at all.
What they want -- and they cited the Lavabit case, in requesting it -- is Apple's signing keys.
This *STILL* will not help them, however, since the tards apparently don't *GET* that putting the device in hardware DFU mode will have them overwriting the entire flash contents, whereas putting it in software DFU mode will work, -- BUT THEY HAVE TO UNLOCK THE PHONE FIRST.
So if Apple hands this over, the FBI gets two things:
(1) The ability to build images that include an FBI SSL key and/or forced proxy with a trusted FBI SSL key, so that they can MITM any iPhone on which they install this distribution. Assuming the iPhone in question gets backed up, they'll swear at their phone, reenter their iCloud password or restore from backup, and then get everything back -- and happily continue on, using the now back-doored iPhone.
(2) The ability to sign spyware as if it came from the App store, through the normal Apple Approval process, and install it onto suspects iPhones. This include screen captures, key loggers, phone call taps (which they could tap instead at the phone company, with a warrant, or just ask the NSA to provide), SMS/MMS message taps (which they could tap instead at the phone company, with a warrant, or just ask the NSA to provide), and anything else they wanted, including access to banking details and other information stored on the device, and nominally encrypted.
Above all else, it's pretty clear: The FBI should not be given these signing keys. No one but Apple should have these signing keys, and, so far, they appear to be earning that trust.
Remember, the government can now do stuff and order you not to talk about it. It's very easy to envision them going to a tech and saying "open that wiring closet" knowing that if anyone hears about it, he's going to Leavenworth.
Cite?
I only know of two forms of gag orders under US law [national security letter] / [court order]
So which one of those are you talking about, or are you referring to another that the public hasn't been made aware of?
There are also:
Patent secrecy orders under 37 CFR 5.2: "When notified by the chief officer of a defense agency that publication or disclosure of the invention by the granting of a patent would be detrimental to the national security, an order that the invention be kept secret will be issued by the Commissioner for Patents". The compensations provisions under the law pretty much suck, too.
Suspicious activity reports, under Housing and Community Development Act of 1992 / Annunzio-Wylie Anti-Money Laundering Act, Pub.L. 102–550, 1517(b), 106 Stat. 4060.
18 U.S.C. 2705(b) -- The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 / Stored Communications Act; this is where all the security "canaries" in the disclosure reports from companies tend to originate.
18 U.S.C. 3123(d)(2) -- The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986; this is what prevents disclosure of pen registers.
California Electronic Communications Privacy Act -- gag orders on all cases concerning electronic search warrants.
There are, in fact others, some of which I'm prohibited from sharing with you...
Exactly. If they wanted to, they could raise the price of gasoline to the point where the externalized costs (i.e. pollution) are taken into account.
Yeah. They could do the same thing for labor, too, to the point where the externalized costs (i.e. health care, pension, fair treatment of labor, etc.) are taken into account.
Like the United States does.
And then it would cost the same to manufacture in China as it does in the U.S., instead of being vastly cheaper in China.
His big pickup carries solar cells to construction sites, you insensitive clod!
Earlier jailbreaks, including the "game over" jailbreak used by redsn0w, were based on the fact that it was a Samsung chip with a known firmware bootloader flaw. When it was checking the cryptographic signature on the boot loader that would load the rest of the OS, you could buffer overflow the cryptographic check itself, and cause the execution of arbitrary code.
BTW: To do this, you *STILL* had to overwrite the bootloader itself in Flash. And the way that NAND flash works is you reset a block to all 1's (and it has to be the entire block), and then write 0's out where you don't want 1's. So all you have to do is put a TEA sum and the 10 count in the bootloader block, and even with the hardware DFU mode, you've screwed the ability to do an untethered jailbreak, unless they wrote an entire new bootloader. Not that this iPhone model has that flaw in the first place.
The FBI's request relies on there being some as yet undisclosed security flaw which would enable Apple to load the software into memory on the iPhone and execute it from there. Your claim of impossibility relies on there being no security flaw (currently undisclosed, or even currently *unknown*) that would enable such.
The current Jailbreaks for that model and later are *tethered* jailbreaks. This means that the iPone must be *unlocked*.
Earlier jailbreaks, including the "game over" jailbreak used by redsn0w, were based on the fact that it was a Samsung chip with a known firmware bootloader flaw. When it was checking the cryptographic signature on the boot loader that would load the rest of the OS, you could buffer overflow the cryptographic check itself, and cause the execution of arbitrary code.
When the CPUs were revised, this *known flaw* in Samsung's verified boot code path in the mask programmed ROM was fixed, which is what necessitated tethered jailbreaks. It was not worth the cost of spinning the chip earlier, given that some phones would have the untethered jailbreak vulnerability, and others would not.
--
I have repeatedly stated that it was "within the realm of possibility" and used "if possible"; I have *NEVER* stated "impossible*, only implied it.
And when challenged to find and disclose such bugs, should they exist, to the FBI, I side with Apple: Fuck. Off.
Does anyone actually install a JRE any more?
Yeah, I didn't think it was very many.
OK of those who have one installed, you you allow it to run as a browser plugin?
Yeah, I didn't think so.
BTW... if you don't think that, for example, Amazon, would be perfectly happy to load other people's eBooks on the Kindle, and then make them look not as nicely formatted as the ones you buy from Amazon, if that meant selling a Kindle, and enabling future Amazon sales as a result -- think again.
And don't think that B&N wouldn't do exactly the same thing to a Nook: it's more important to them that your library be portable *to* a Nook, than it is that they themselves might accident have book sales that were displayed on a Kindle instead of a Nook.
Where Amazon and B&N agree however, is this: Apple is better at presentation graphics than either of them, and so they might not be able to sell their readers any more. The readers (at present, thanks to DRM) are all about having a loss leader that then results in future book sales (which they might or might not get anyway, if they were DRM free), but the DRM means that once you commit to a vendor, you commit to their ecosystem. It's about customer lock-in.
Their worst nightmare may well be people buying books from them, and deciding to read them on their iPad (which they can do with Apps from both companies anyway), and then having to compete on book price, which is a race to lower margins, if someone decides to hold a price war.
Apple isn't the danger -- it's not like Apple gives discounts on most things anyway -- it's that Amazon and B&N are afraid of each other for that reason.
It's a mess which was (somewhat) on its way to being fixed until this case was raised.
If theres DRM on ebooks then blame the publishers for it being on there, not amazon, borders, barnes and noble etc. Trying to make it sound like the other stores are screwing disabled people is WEAK.
The problem is that the other distributors failed to band together with each other in order to assert collective bargaining against DRM in eBooks in the first place.
As long as there was one distribution channel where it was possible for them to distribute the book with DRM, any distribution channel that decided that it would not distribute DRM'ed eBooks, got screwed by not being able to distribute ANY eBooks: the publishers could force DRM on the one because the others would not stand with them against DRM.
If, on the other hand, there was a strong economic interest that the publishers had to "play ball", then the distributors could dictate terms to the publishers.
Terms like "No DRM!".
This whole thing blew up in the first place because the publishers realized that this is what was coming down the road, and were fearful of it. The other distributors became fearful of it at the same time, mostly because the publishers told them that it would threaten their margins on the audio books. Instant firestorm controversy. Boom!
Apple did this for a reason. It's not the reason people are claiming.
The problem is that the text to speech that's disabled by the DRM on eBooks means that blind people can't read eBooks. Or of they get an audio book for an eBook, it always comes a lot later, and at a much higher price, if at all.
There's no reason for this, but in order to get the DRM removed, they kind of need to be able to cut the same kind of deal with the eBook publishers that they cut with the music labels to get the DRM the hell off of music.
What this is about is that Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and the now-defunct Borders, make a large amount of money on the margins on the audio books. Mostly on the backs of people who listen to them while they drive or exercise -- or on the backs of the disabled.
Who else thinks "Privacy Probe" is an oxymoron?
Can't they just pull out the hard drive and brute force it?
How much time have you got, because you are talking a 256 bit AES key that uses a UUID in the processor and a GID for the device model and a PIN from the user to generate there... You can fake the GID, but good luck on that whole UUID thing... you left that behind when you pulled the flash chip out of the device that had the processor the UUID lives in.
Therefore, a change to iOS is capable of altering the 10-strikes rule on their devices, and that's what the FBI is asking Apple to do.
Yes. Except one thing.
Loading a recovery image requires putting the device in *Recovery Mode*, and that's a hardware DFU mode whereby you talk to a small piece of firmware whose only job is to overwrite the Flash contents.
It doesn't load shit into RAM and run it in order to overwrite the flash contents while preserving data: it's a *RECOVERY* mode, not an *UPDATE* mode. It's what you do as a last resort, assuming you backed your crap up to the iCloud, because if you didn't, that shit is *gone*.
To do an *UPDATE* without overwriting the user data portion of the flash contents, you talk to the *ptpd*, which implements the DFU protocol at a higher level, in user space. How do you do that? Well, first, you have to make the ptpd willing to talk to you (or iTunes). How you you do that?
You UNLOCK the frigging phone.
So to load the image that the FBI wants Apple to write for them, and then to load, you'd have to unlock the phone to enable you to unlock the phone.
Cluebat here. Knock knock knock... is that you, head? Yeah, there's two DFU implementations in the iPhone. What? You didn't know that? Well now you do. Yeah. Yeah. We can write the image you want us to write, and then we can load it onto the iPhone, but to do that, it will wipe out the very data you seek. What? No, we can't make monkeys fly out our ass... I think you are confusing us with Jim Carrey in that movie "Bruce Almighty".
People really do not understand technology... especially technology designed to prevent exactly the type of thing the FBI wants done.
Germany marched on Paris in WW I, you insensitive clod.
It's why they constructed the Maginot Line in the 1930's: "Never Again".
EMP then.
You mean like the ones we use to shoot down planes, because they have avionics systems too?
Oh wait. We're not on "Scorpion" or "Mutant X" or "The Flash", and we're not "Agent's of S.H.I.E.L.D."... we know that it takes a nuclear weapon or a massive amount of equipment, like at the Rocky Mountain Weapons Test Facility, because of the inverse square law...
Germany and France arguing... what could possibly go wrong? It's not like there's any historical precedent or anything... where, you know, Germany was in the wrong in the past...
Good. Jammers are cheap. Drones are not.
Terrorists with jammers are also cheap, so I suppose you have a point.