More than that, Apple to date has been handing over information which they actually had in their possession... iCloud data and so forth... in response to valid warrants and subpoenas. It was specifically the FBI's abuse of the all writs act, demanding that they rebuild iOS in order to introduce a security-crippling backdoor, to which Apple objected; not cooperation with law enforcement in general.
With their current overreach, and the public spectacle they decided to make out of it, they not only cut themselves off from any information that would have been on the phones themselves in the future; they've pretty much assured that anyone using an iPhone as part of a nefarious endeavor will make sure not to upload anything to iCloud going forward. I seem to recall a fable about killing the goose that lays golden eggs.
There's a solution for that though: Make a comprehensive psychiatric review and analysis of the offender's recidivism probabilities part of the sentencing process, as well as a prerequisite for release. Include psychiatric and re-socialization treatment as mandatory part of the institutionalized rehabilitation program and any probation or parole. Personally, I think that really should be how ALL crimes are handled. Our penal program is too focused on simple-minded revenge, with perhaps a minor in deterrence; where it should be solely about public safety and rehabilitation.
Said psychiatric evaluations would keep the actual pedophile locked up so long as he poss any kind of threat; while letting the drunk nitwit off with a minor bout of community service or, if doing stupid drunk things is a pattern of behavior, mandated rehab, but no sex-offender record.
> Registries are an attempt at trying to let them out of > prison, knowing people can better themselves, while > still acknowledging a certain risk.
We already have systems to accomplish that goal: probation and parole. Putting someone on a lifetime sex-offender list, restricting where they may live, and forcing them to announce their presence, goes far above and beyond. If someone is still a significant recidivism hazard, he should continue to be monitored my the probation or parole system. The lifetime of shaming goes seriously against the spirit of "you do the crime you do the crime".
For that matter, I wouldn't be at all opposed to sealing the official criminal records of offenders after they've completes their sentence and probation/parole and are judged not to be a recidivism risk. The problem is, what's being asked for here is for third-parties to be mandated to "forget". It resembles the memory holes from 1984 way too much for any kind of comfort. That's the sort of power that no government should have.
That 38% is a rather misleading number. You imply that, therefore, 62% are on the side of the FBI. But the very article you cite shows only a 51% commitment to the FBI's argument; leaving plenty of people as yet undecided. And the more clueful the population segment, the more the numbers shift toward Apple, ending at 47% FBI, 43% Apple, 10% undecided. And Apple's barely had a chance to begin to make its case; where the TLAs have been bludgeoning the population with "FEAR THE TERRORISTS!!!" for a decade and a half.
Berkeley, the town, is as hardcore liberal as ever. Berkeley, the University, transitioned some years ago to overachiever central. Everyone over at Cal is too busy studying and working hard to get their science, engineering, business, and law degrees to have time for SJW-ism. UCSC has taken up the kookiness mantle lately. But they get less press because they don't have the historical notoriety of Berkeley.
For any but the Nexus devices, it would have to to be the OEMs, since they have the ability to modify and customize Android from its "vanilla" codebase. Google can't take responsibility for code... and especially not hardware and firmware... they do not fully own or control, after all.
And yeah, Google's response to this issue has been rather milquetoast. There was a time when their reply wrt/ the three-letter-agencies was: "Fuck these guys... the US has to be better than this.". I do miss the "Don't be evil" Google.
No good. Google is on Apple's side here. So Android's out. Microsoft sided with the FBI though. So maybe Arizonans can all switch to windows phone. Then again, it seems that Gates is now trying to backpedal and say he was misinterpreted. So maybe no windows phones after all. Perhaps Arizona can step back a decade and bring back Blackberry. They're pretty happy to roll over and put in backdoors for governments to spy on their citizens.
I disagree. Regardless of the presence or lack of a moral compass, a corporation is a fairly simple beast, with fairly basic and understandable motivations. As you mention, they want money. They either want my money directly from selling me stuff (Apple, Amazon, etc.); or indirectly by advertising at me, where I presumably buy some of the stuff that's advertised and some of that revenue gets passed back up to the company showing the advertising (Google, Facebook, etc.). At the end of the day, there's nothing particularly nefarious in either motivation or application. *I* have the power to choose what companies; products I buy, what company's advertisements I view or block, and so on.
No corporation has the authority to TAKE my money under threat of force or prison. No corporation has the authority to send its agents into my home against my will, or to arrest or detain me. Corporations didn't come up with the TSA, violating my person and exposing me to backscatter x-rays. Corporations did not come up with the no-fly list, the PATRIOT act, Echelon, TIPS, Collateral Murder, drone strikes against wedding parties, and the NSA spying that Snowden revealed. The most insidious thing that people are complaining about tech companies these days is the way they correlate disparate data, which one has otherwise already made public in some way, in order to build a better advertising profile. Fairly innocuous stuff, that.
There's a world of difference between handing over information that you have in your profession upon receipt of a warrant or subpoena and being conscripted to actively do the government's dirty work for them. They're asking for Apple to build them a custom OS that does not presently exist. That goes far beyond "reasonable search and seizure." We're talking press gangs and forced labor here. And I believe we've fought a couple of wars and have an amendment on that issue.
"Cheese eating surrender monkeys" was a one-off joke about an uneducated *Scottish* character's opinion of France when he was forced into the position of substitute French teacher. It was an obvious over-the-top exaggeration of the thousand year long cross-channel rivalry and, to my recollection, was not repeated on the show.
And let's not forget that the laws are not set up the way they are by accident. Those "loopholes" were bought and paid for with bribes (Sorry... lobbying and gifts) to the the politicians who wrote the tax code. Here in the US, it was outfits like Halliburton, Exxon, Bechtel, and Arthur Andersen (Sorry... Accenture). In France, it's probably the likes of EADS (Airbus), Credit Agricole, GDF, and Dassault.
The only reason they're all so butthurt over the tax strategy of Apple and Google and other tech companies, is that somebody in those companies realized one day that, once passed and on the books; the law applies to *everybody*, not just to the ones who paid for them. Tech as not "paid their dues" by greasing the palms of the right politicians; that's all.
My bad. When I typed "not going to be able to get a job good enough to support yourself" I meant to include "in the Bay Area". And yeah, it would be very Very hard to support support yourself on a primary school teacher's salary here. It's mostly because of housing prices which, through a combination of a booming economy plus a level of NIMBY-ism you would not believe preventing construction of adequate new housing; has sent the price to buy or rent through the roof.
In fairness, usually it's management that won't pay for the software licenses to upgrade, or won't prioritize and pay for the development time to use new package versions, or won't pay for new hardware until the old stuff is at death's door. Mostly, the IT and Ops people know how important it is to stay on top of the curve. It's obstructionist MBA types who cause the problems.
Even if it's not in the employment agreement, California is an at-will state. You can be fired for not sounding cheerful enough when you greet your CEO in the elevator, if he so desires and is that petty.
Hell, I don't even bad-mouth my ex-employers in public, and there's one for which I still maintain a seething hatred. It's just unprofessional to do so; and, barring whistleblowing of illegal activities, pretty much always out-of-line and will always work out badly.
Also, if you major in english literature, and have no better marketable skill, you're probably not going to be able to get a job good enough to support yourself unless you go all the way to PhD. and score a professorship at Cal or Stanford.
Did you even bother to read the article I linked to? Continental went through the trouble of developing and certifying a FADEC piston engine for GA aircraft. But when they tried to sell it, no one could buy because the GA piloting community were under the illusion that they could manage the engine better than the computer.
The certification costs in GA really are absurd. But a big problem holding advancement back are is also an outright resistance to advancement by fuddy old sticks-in-the-mud who think they know better than the engineers who build the equipment and refuse to drag *themselves* out of the '50s.
"Dag gummit... mah pappy mixed his fuel by 'imself. Mah gran-pappy mixed his fuel by 'imself. I don' need no new-fangled eeee-lec-tronic FADEC telling ME how to mix MY fuel."
If the issue with these handlebar-less segway-like-objects were people losing their balance and falling off and hurting themselves, or trying to do tricks and hurting themselves, I'd agree with you. In that case, it'd be no different than a skateboard or rollerblades, really. And yeah, people should know their limits and not try stunts without adequate precautions or eat magnets and so on. And we should not try to legislate away stupidity.
But this is not a case of user-clumsiness or stupidity. These things are bursting into flames during routine charging of their batteries when not in use. That makes them a defective product, and IMO crosses the line into the realm of regulation being appropriate.
And unless you have, in fact, committed whatever crime the cop is stopping you for; you should be compensated for your time and the cop should be punished for the false accusation.
And there's a big difference between handing over over information that is in your possession (And for which, you should be compensated for any time you spend gathering said information; and should they not prevail in the case, whichever lawyer filed for that bit of discovery should be sanctioned.), and being impressed into service to actively do work that you don't want to accept. We actually fought a little war against the English in no small part on the latter issue.
No one should be compelled to work against their will or for free.
They can make a show of switching CEOs from the overtly evil, thieving, manipulative bastard to the jumping, chair throwing, comical rage-monkey, to the mostly low-key new guy who thinks women should STFU and accept that it's their karma to be underpaid vs. men in the same job. It's still the house that Gates built and a leopard doesn't change its spots.
Reading those is genuinely scary. And there's something even more alarming than the nitwitted stand on encryption itself. Nearly all the candidates talk about how they will "make Apple do this" or "have Silicon Valley do that". Their opinions that they should have the power to conscript anyone they damn well please into doing their dirty work for them is the genuinely offensive and frightening. The abuses of the NSA are bad enough. But at least that was an entirely government operation. Forcing uninvolved third parties to unwillingly aid them on spying on the citizens... that's some seriously east-German Stasi level thuggery.
Yeah. It's kind of sad, especially considering that only a few years ago the Google response to this sort of thing was: "Fuck these guys... The US has to be better than this." Not exactly eloquent, but nicely unequivocal.
Not just Apple, but Cisco, Juniper, F5, Riverbed, and the like are all completely screwed if this goes through. Apple, ultimately, is just a consumer products company. But this ruling would completely destroy any and all trust in much of the internet's vital infrastructure. Cisco took bad enough of a hit when it was discovered that the US government was intercepting shipments of their hardware and adding the backdoor themselves. If this ruling against Apple is allowed to stand, what international customer would buy *ANT* kit from a US-based company?
That's not actually true. The current default is a 6-digit numeric passcode, 4-digits on older models. But you have the option of setting a longer passcode and to include alphanumerics and special characters. In ye olden days, that option used to be hidden. But by the time of the iPhone in question, the 5c, I'm pretty sure it was available in the standard settings app.
If you want to make complex passcodes mandatory... say if you're managing them for a business... Apple offers a free tool: Apple Configurator. With it, you can create a device profile that will enforce password complexity, minimum length, aging, and history. You can even drop the maximum number of failed unlock attempts before the iPhone wipes itself down to only two tries. There're various other settings and restrictions you can enforce for convenience, security, or simply to be a BOFH.
Note also, you don't have to be an enterprise customer or utilize any other MDM tools to get and use the configurator. It's free to anyone who wants it.
Slashdot Mirror
More than that, Apple to date has been handing over information which they actually had in their possession... iCloud data and so forth... in response to valid warrants and subpoenas. It was specifically the FBI's abuse of the all writs act, demanding that they rebuild iOS in order to introduce a security-crippling backdoor, to which Apple objected; not cooperation with law enforcement in general.
With their current overreach, and the public spectacle they decided to make out of it, they not only cut themselves off from any information that would have been on the phones themselves in the future; they've pretty much assured that anyone using an iPhone as part of a nefarious endeavor will make sure not to upload anything to iCloud going forward. I seem to recall a fable about killing the goose that lays golden eggs.
There's a solution for that though: Make a comprehensive psychiatric review and analysis of the offender's recidivism probabilities part of the sentencing process, as well as a prerequisite for release. Include psychiatric and re-socialization treatment as mandatory part of the institutionalized rehabilitation program and any probation or parole. Personally, I think that really should be how ALL crimes are handled. Our penal program is too focused on simple-minded revenge, with perhaps a minor in deterrence; where it should be solely about public safety and rehabilitation.
Said psychiatric evaluations would keep the actual pedophile locked up so long as he poss any kind of threat; while letting the drunk nitwit off with a minor bout of community service or, if doing stupid drunk things is a pattern of behavior, mandated rehab, but no sex-offender record.
> Registries are an attempt at trying to let them out of
> prison, knowing people can better themselves, while
> still acknowledging a certain risk.
We already have systems to accomplish that goal: probation and parole. Putting someone on a lifetime sex-offender list, restricting where they may live, and forcing them to announce their presence, goes far above and beyond. If someone is still a significant recidivism hazard, he should continue to be monitored my the probation or parole system. The lifetime of shaming goes seriously against the spirit of "you do the crime you do the crime".
For that matter, I wouldn't be at all opposed to sealing the official criminal records of offenders after they've completes their sentence and probation/parole and are judged not to be a recidivism risk. The problem is, what's being asked for here is for third-parties to be mandated to "forget". It resembles the memory holes from 1984 way too much for any kind of comfort. That's the sort of power that no government should have.
That 38% is a rather misleading number. You imply that, therefore, 62% are on the side of the FBI. But the very article you cite shows only a 51% commitment to the FBI's argument; leaving plenty of people as yet undecided. And the more clueful the population segment, the more the numbers shift toward Apple, ending at 47% FBI, 43% Apple, 10% undecided. And Apple's barely had a chance to begin to make its case; where the TLAs have been bludgeoning the population with "FEAR THE TERRORISTS!!!" for a decade and a half.
Berkeley, the town, is as hardcore liberal as ever. Berkeley, the University, transitioned some years ago to overachiever central. Everyone over at Cal is too busy studying and working hard to get their science, engineering, business, and law degrees to have time for SJW-ism. UCSC has taken up the kookiness mantle lately. But they get less press because they don't have the historical notoriety of Berkeley.
For any but the Nexus devices, it would have to to be the OEMs, since they have the ability to modify and customize Android from its "vanilla" codebase. Google can't take responsibility for code... and especially not hardware and firmware... they do not fully own or control, after all.
And yeah, Google's response to this issue has been rather milquetoast. There was a time when their reply wrt/ the three-letter-agencies was: "Fuck these guys... the US has to be better than this.". I do miss the "Don't be evil" Google.
No good. Google is on Apple's side here. So Android's out. Microsoft sided with the FBI though. So maybe Arizonans can all switch to windows phone. Then again, it seems that Gates is now trying to backpedal and say he was misinterpreted. So maybe no windows phones after all. Perhaps Arizona can step back a decade and bring back Blackberry. They're pretty happy to roll over and put in backdoors for governments to spy on their citizens.
I disagree. Regardless of the presence or lack of a moral compass, a corporation is a fairly simple beast, with fairly basic and understandable motivations. As you mention, they want money. They either want my money directly from selling me stuff (Apple, Amazon, etc.); or indirectly by advertising at me, where I presumably buy some of the stuff that's advertised and some of that revenue gets passed back up to the company showing the advertising (Google, Facebook, etc.). At the end of the day, there's nothing particularly nefarious in either motivation or application. *I* have the power to choose what companies; products I buy, what company's advertisements I view or block, and so on.
No corporation has the authority to TAKE my money under threat of force or prison. No corporation has the authority to send its agents into my home against my will, or to arrest or detain me. Corporations didn't come up with the TSA, violating my person and exposing me to backscatter x-rays. Corporations did not come up with the no-fly list, the PATRIOT act, Echelon, TIPS, Collateral Murder, drone strikes against wedding parties, and the NSA spying that Snowden revealed. The most insidious thing that people are complaining about tech companies these days is the way they correlate disparate data, which one has otherwise already made public in some way, in order to build a better advertising profile. Fairly innocuous stuff, that.
It will be very amusing to see who in Arizona anonymous hits first; and what dirty laundry will be aired out.
There's a world of difference between handing over information that you have in your profession upon receipt of a warrant or subpoena and being conscripted to actively do the government's dirty work for them. They're asking for Apple to build them a custom OS that does not presently exist. That goes far beyond "reasonable search and seizure." We're talking press gangs and forced labor here. And I believe we've fought a couple of wars and have an amendment on that issue.
"Cheese eating surrender monkeys" was a one-off joke about an uneducated *Scottish* character's opinion of France when he was forced into the position of substitute French teacher. It was an obvious over-the-top exaggeration of the thousand year long cross-channel rivalry and, to my recollection, was not repeated on the show.
And let's not forget that the laws are not set up the way they are by accident. Those "loopholes" were bought and paid for with bribes (Sorry... lobbying and gifts) to the the politicians who wrote the tax code. Here in the US, it was outfits like Halliburton, Exxon, Bechtel, and Arthur Andersen (Sorry... Accenture). In France, it's probably the likes of EADS (Airbus), Credit Agricole, GDF, and Dassault.
The only reason they're all so butthurt over the tax strategy of Apple and Google and other tech companies, is that somebody in those companies realized one day that, once passed and on the books; the law applies to *everybody*, not just to the ones who paid for them. Tech as not "paid their dues" by greasing the palms of the right politicians; that's all.
My bad. When I typed "not going to be able to get a job good enough to support yourself" I meant to include "in the Bay Area". And yeah, it would be very Very hard to support support yourself on a primary school teacher's salary here. It's mostly because of housing prices which, through a combination of a booming economy plus a level of NIMBY-ism you would not believe preventing construction of adequate new housing; has sent the price to buy or rent through the roof.
In fairness, usually it's management that won't pay for the software licenses to upgrade, or won't prioritize and pay for the development time to use new package versions, or won't pay for new hardware until the old stuff is at death's door. Mostly, the IT and Ops people know how important it is to stay on top of the curve. It's obstructionist MBA types who cause the problems.
Even if it's not in the employment agreement, California is an at-will state. You can be fired for not sounding cheerful enough when you greet your CEO in the elevator, if he so desires and is that petty.
Hell, I don't even bad-mouth my ex-employers in public, and there's one for which I still maintain a seething hatred. It's just unprofessional to do so; and, barring whistleblowing of illegal activities, pretty much always out-of-line and will always work out badly.
Also, if you major in english literature, and have no better marketable skill, you're probably not going to be able to get a job good enough to support yourself unless you go all the way to PhD. and score a professorship at Cal or Stanford.
Did you even bother to read the article I linked to? Continental went through the trouble of developing and certifying a FADEC piston engine for GA aircraft. But when they tried to sell it, no one could buy because the GA piloting community were under the illusion that they could manage the engine better than the computer.
The certification costs in GA really are absurd. But a big problem holding advancement back are is also an outright resistance to advancement by fuddy old sticks-in-the-mud who think they know better than the engineers who build the equipment and refuse to drag *themselves* out of the '50s.
"Dag gummit... mah pappy mixed his fuel by 'imself. Mah gran-pappy mixed his fuel by 'imself. I don' need no new-fangled eeee-lec-tronic FADEC telling ME how to mix MY fuel."
If the issue with these handlebar-less segway-like-objects were people losing their balance and falling off and hurting themselves, or trying to do tricks and hurting themselves, I'd agree with you. In that case, it'd be no different than a skateboard or rollerblades, really. And yeah, people should know their limits and not try stunts without adequate precautions or eat magnets and so on. And we should not try to legislate away stupidity.
But this is not a case of user-clumsiness or stupidity. These things are bursting into flames during routine charging of their batteries when not in use. That makes them a defective product, and IMO crosses the line into the realm of regulation being appropriate.
And unless you have, in fact, committed whatever crime the cop is stopping you for; you should be compensated for your time and the cop should be punished for the false accusation.
And there's a big difference between handing over over information that is in your possession (And for which, you should be compensated for any time you spend gathering said information; and should they not prevail in the case, whichever lawyer filed for that bit of discovery should be sanctioned.), and being impressed into service to actively do work that you don't want to accept. We actually fought a little war against the English in no small part on the latter issue.
No one should be compelled to work against their will or for free.
Same old Microsoft.
They can make a show of switching CEOs from the overtly evil, thieving, manipulative bastard to the jumping, chair throwing, comical rage-monkey, to the mostly low-key new guy who thinks women should STFU and accept that it's their karma to be underpaid vs. men in the same job. It's still the house that Gates built and a leopard doesn't change its spots.
Reading those is genuinely scary. And there's something even more alarming than the nitwitted stand on encryption itself. Nearly all the candidates talk about how they will "make Apple do this" or "have Silicon Valley do that". Their opinions that they should have the power to conscript anyone they damn well please into doing their dirty work for them is the genuinely offensive and frightening. The abuses of the NSA are bad enough. But at least that was an entirely government operation. Forcing uninvolved third parties to unwillingly aid them on spying on the citizens... that's some seriously east-German Stasi level thuggery.
Yeah. It's kind of sad, especially considering that only a few years ago the Google response to this sort of thing was: "Fuck these guys... The US has to be better than this." Not exactly eloquent, but nicely unequivocal.
Not just Apple, but Cisco, Juniper, F5, Riverbed, and the like are all completely screwed if this goes through. Apple, ultimately, is just a consumer products company. But this ruling would completely destroy any and all trust in much of the internet's vital infrastructure. Cisco took bad enough of a hit when it was discovered that the US government was intercepting shipments of their hardware and adding the backdoor themselves. If this ruling against Apple is allowed to stand, what international customer would buy *ANT* kit from a US-based company?
That's not actually true. The current default is a 6-digit numeric passcode, 4-digits on older models. But you have the option of setting a longer passcode and to include alphanumerics and special characters. In ye olden days, that option used to be hidden. But by the time of the iPhone in question, the 5c, I'm pretty sure it was available in the standard settings app.
If you want to make complex passcodes mandatory... say if you're managing them for a business... Apple offers a free tool: Apple Configurator. With it, you can create a device profile that will enforce password complexity, minimum length, aging, and history. You can even drop the maximum number of failed unlock attempts before the iPhone wipes itself down to only two tries. There're various other settings and restrictions you can enforce for convenience, security, or simply to be a BOFH.
Note also, you don't have to be an enterprise customer or utilize any other MDM tools to get and use the configurator. It's free to anyone who wants it.