The Constitution protects EVERYONE, not just "good people", but EVERYONE from unreasonable search and seizure.
It also allows EVERYONE to refuse to answer on the grounds that they might incriminate themselves.
Your argument is absolutely, totally wrong.
The owner of the phone agrees with the search. If you are suspected of a crime, the police needs a warrant to search your home and your phone. If you left evidence at your workplace or on your workphone, they don't need evidence. They only need permission of your employer. Actually, I believe they don't even need that, because a search without permission or warrant only means any evidence against your employer cannot be used against them, but evidence against _you_ can be used. (If you threw a bloody knife that you used to kill your wife into your neighbour's garden, and the police searches that garden without a warrant and without permission of the owner, that search isn't violating _your_ rights so the bloody knife can be used as evidence against you. )
The person who doesn't want the evidence to be found is dead. Shot dead. Totally deserved, after killing over a dozen people. His rights cannot be violated anymore. The search for evidence on that phone is totally reasonable. Even without the permission of the owner, the police would have got a warrant. The right against self incrimination doesn't protect you. The police has the right to see the evidence, you have no right to hide it. Giving the police the passcode is only self incrimination if the police didn't actually know that the phone was yours, and having the passcode proves that it is indeed yours.
So your reasoning is totally, absolutely wrong. The reason why Apple shouldn't have to help the police is _that it isn't their phone_. Apple has no evidence in its hands. They are not involved in the crime in any way. It's like an FBI agent who needs to get to the court ordering you to drive him there in your car. And then politicians claiming that you support terrorists by telling the FBI agent to call a taxi.
The owner gave the FBI the permission to search the phone. The owner should have had the passcode then, but they don't. Tough luck. Should have looked better after the phones they own.
Let's assume they could push an update just to that phone that lets the FBI in. Let's also assume that they drop their objections and do just this. Do you really think it'll be "just this one phone"? Do you think that other governments won't demand Apple let them into people's phones? Do you think Apple's update won't fall into a hacker group's hands who will use it to find exploits to get into any iPhone?
Here's what Apple could do: They find the one engineer in the company who has the necessary know-how. That engineer quits in disgust and is hired back at twice the daily rate of a mediocre lawyer (say 2 x $1200). Now obviously you'd have to be extremely careful writing this software: The engineer has to be absolutely isolated from any network, and the software must be absolutely bug free because otherwise that phone could be shot. A few iPhone 5c's used as guinea pigs get bricked. All in all Apple presents a bill of $200,000.
Then Apple deletes absolutely permanently all the software that was created for this purpose, because they obviously fear that it could fall into the wrong hands.
The FBI comes with the next phone: "This one should be a lot cheaper since you've written the software". "The software is gone. And that engineer is on holiday. If you want him to come back, he'll want twice the rate. ".
Replacing broken glass/digitizer will not cause the error. What causes the error is the touch id sensor or sensor cable. Unfortunately with the way the button is designed on the phone it is very easy to break the button or the cable while replacing the screen. The is especially true if the screen is cracked badly of the frame is a little bent. The prying required to get the phone open in these cases can lead to a broken touch id button.
I think what really happens is that the sensor is not really fixable (due to the pairing problem), but it doesn't break often, so to repair it Apple replaces the whole inside of your phone but only charges some reasonable amount. So Apple loses money on that repair, but it's rare. However, if some third party breaks the sensor, or you break it yourself through some bodged repair, Apple isn't willing to carry that cost.
In the UK, out-of-warranty-"repair" for any iPhone 6,6+,6s,6s+ is £236 to £256 (that's replacing the iPhone with a refurbished one), so that's the worst that happens.
Just adding that the platform-dependent units used by mach_absolute_time are tiny. Nanoseconds on some systems, based on the processor or motherboard clock speed on others. GCD use 64 bit nanoseconds, NSDate uses double precision seconds since some reference date which is _not_ 1970; I think 2001 or something like that. Very easy to use with microsecond resolution for the next +/- 200 years.
That's the clever thing about the story; nobody will be willing to check it.
On the other hand, it has been reported that the problem isn't setting the time to Midnight Jan 1st 1970. The problem is setting that time for example in the USA, because in the USA you set the time to some hours _earlier_ in UTC. And these reports say that the problem fixes itself when the time goes into positive time UTC (in Los Angeles you might have to wait nine hours). And _I_ am not going to check if this is true.
Or some idiot drives into a lake or down a jogging trail because he or she is just TOO STUPID to understand that they're not driving on a road anymore.
I once was told by my SatNav to drive into a lake. There is a lake, an island in the lake with a major tourist attraction, a ferry, and the road goes straight to the like so you can drive onto the ferry (and you need to have some good reason to do so because car traffic is normally not allowed on that island).
I actually drove past the car park 150m away from the lake before I spotted the end of the road. In the dark you could easily drive into the lake without being a complete idiot (a bit stupid and careless, but not a complete idiot).
For YEARS, I've hoped for GPS software that had three features:
4. Find a petrol station along my way with the smallest possible detour. TomTom finds the nearest, but that might be two miles away which means four miles detour. But 20 miles further there might be one just along the way.
5. Find the "cheapest" route, taking into account wear on the car, fuel, and my time.
I have seen a sign once, in England, that said "Narrow road in one mile" and below it: "Lorry drivers: Your GPS is wrong". And indeed, after a mile I came to a bit that was tight for my car and impassable for any lorries. Plus impossible to turn, so all lorries stuck there would have to reverse quite a distance.
If I sell Iphones and want to steal data, I write & install and app that does it for me. Simple, no hw needed.
If I want to extract from a stolen/bricked Iphone, I rip out the flash memory and read it directly using electronic circuits. No apple sw in my way then.
You think you're smart. Anyone with an iPhone will set their Apple ID and password, and the process of doing this wipes out any software that you may have installed. The exception is phones sold to enterprises, where the process will wipe any software you may have installed and put the phone under the control of the enterprise. Very visibly.
To decode the flash memory, you need to crack per-file 256 bit encryption. So even if you cracked uncrackable 256 bit encryption, you would then have _one_ file.
And you're right: the purpose of a trial and conviction is to act as a deterrent.
He'll get a trial in the UK with the purpose of convicting him for jumping jail for six years. Hasn't got a chance there, just a little bit too much evidence. Then he'll get a trial in Sweden with the purpose of finding out if he raped or sexually assaulted a woman or not. Nobody knows how this will end.
I'd suggest that the UK court didn't properly weigh the risk to Assange of being extradited to Sweden. The circumstances were suspicious and his fears not unfounded.
They properly did. Extradition to Sweden will be a done deal. After he spends some time in a UK jail for jumping bail.
He would probably got a slap on the wrist in the case in Sweden. Instead he voluntarily stayed in his own Ecuadorian jail for six years, is now in trouble in the UK, and any court in Sweden will be much less let him get away with a less severe punishment.
Apple could pull the rug out from under Google anytime by making any other search engine the iOS default.
It has been leaked that Google pays $1bn for the privilege. What hasn't been quite liked is whether that was total up to some date, or per year, or whatever.
What could kill Google would be a search engine that isn't catered to advertisers but to letting people find what they are looking for.
Because that's not what what they are doing. They are taking their Euros and keeping it Euros. They are taking their Yen and keeping it in Yen. Their dollars, they keep in dollars. To convert anything to dollars they would have to pay 40% in taxes to the US government in addition to any taxes they paid to the local governments.
No, you can have dollar accounts in Europe or Japan. They can take Euros from an account with a bank in Germany and put it into a dollar account at the same bank. They just can't transfer the money to the USA (and you can have a Euro account with a bank in the USA, so Apple could transfer money without exchanging).
You uncover a key flaw in Cook's reasoning; if they're not bringing those foreign dollars home, then they've no reason to convert them to dollars, and this isn't money they're losing at all. It is just the imaginary "if we brought it home" ticker in his office that is showing a reduced high score.
The point is that Apple reports all revenue and profits in their quarterly statements, and the stock market reacts to them. If a company sold most of their stuff in the UK, and revenue went from 1 billion pound to 1.05 billion pound, that would be a nice result, but if the revenue translated to US$ goes down from 1.5bn US$ to 1.45bn US$ because of the exchange rate then it looks bad.
And that's what counts on the stock market. Not where the money is.
Rape requires a lack of consent. Just because you're a condescending shitface who doesn't believe children can make up their own minds doesn't mean that sex with them is automatically rape. Yes, the law defines it as such, but the law gets a lot wrong. When it comes to sex, it gets most things wrong.
Just because you are (I don't really know, and I wouldn't want to know), doesn't mean that children can give consent to having sex.
Oddly I had to look up if adultery where a crime in my state because I didn't know. Apparently it's a misdemeanor and can be used to deny a no fault divorce which would allow you to seek alimony. Massachusetts adultery is a felony and you could serve up to four years in prison.
WTF. And bloody Americans tell everyone, whether they want to listen or not, that they live in the freest country in the world.
Admittedly adultery would carry severe risk of damage to certain body parts for me, but the state wouldn't give a damn about it. Exactly as it should be.
theodp, what you write is pure polemic. So Apple "dismissed a call for diversity". Here's the actual text of the rejected proposal at the last shareholder meeting:
"Shareholders request that the Board of Directors adopt an accelerated recruitment policy requiring Apple Inc. (the âoeCompanyâ) to increase the diversity of senior management and its board of directors, two bodies that presently fails to adequately represent diversity (particularly Hispanic, African-American, Native-American and other people of color)."
So Apple is supposed to create new senior management or board positions or fire existing senior management or board members, in order to hire "people of color" (strange enough, an expression that you wouldn't dare using in the UK).
That is what all the small companies have to pay here in good old Europe. Therefore, big companies should too.
What a bloody idiot. You say small companies have to pay 30% of their revenue in tax? UK Corporation tax rate in 2015 is 20% _of profit_, not on bloody revenue. If you don't know what you are talking about, shut up. Or do you really not know the difference between revenue and profit?
And Apple isn't the "world's largest company." But the attempted demonstration using Aramco was a total failure. Hyundai would be a much better example, with about 70 times the market capitalization of Apple.
And you just won the price for being the Internet's greatest dummy.
When you take Apple's market caps in US Dollar, and Hyundai's market caps in South Korean Won, then Hyundai's number is 70 times higher. However, one US dollar is worth about 1,200 Won. So when converted to US Dollars, Apple's market caps is about 18 times higher.
My practice: I don't pull code from the Internet. I find out - often based on code samples - how it works, and then I implement it myself. Because the point isn't to copy the solution, but to learn how it is done. So I am grateful to the person who posted a solution, but based on that solution I write my own, and then I know how it works.
In other places, the whole case was reported substantially different. First it must be said that a company will have the right to find out whether the phone calls you make at work are for business or private, but not to find out the contents of the private messages. On the other hand it should be obvious that a company can examine your work related phone calls.
It seems the company was unhappy with his performance and noticed that he made a lot of phone calls during work time. They asked him about it, and he claimed that these phone calls were all work related and not private. So they had the right to examine these calls, because they were all work related (so he said).
When they were done, he was confronted with 48 pages of transcripts of calls in eight days, all private, and was fired. That was 48 pages. That's a lot of time spent not working.
Fuck it. Apple and Google should just accept market share loss and tell NY to go fuck itself. Maybe then the locals would complain and and fight to have the bill abolished. Just accept the fact that money is a casualty of this war (for privacy) and that it's all part of the deal.
Not necessary. Stop selling in New York, and what do you think how fast a black market for iPhones and popular Google phones will appear. Apple would just build a warehouse in Boston, and everyone would either travel there to buy their phone directly, or people would buy ten phones for $700 each and sell them for $800 or $900 in New York.
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The Constitution protects EVERYONE, not just "good people", but EVERYONE from unreasonable search and seizure.
It also allows EVERYONE to refuse to answer on the grounds that they might incriminate themselves.
Your argument is absolutely, totally wrong.
The owner of the phone agrees with the search. If you are suspected of a crime, the police needs a warrant to search your home and your phone. If you left evidence at your workplace or on your workphone, they don't need evidence. They only need permission of your employer. Actually, I believe they don't even need that, because a search without permission or warrant only means any evidence against your employer cannot be used against them, but evidence against _you_ can be used. (If you threw a bloody knife that you used to kill your wife into your neighbour's garden, and the police searches that garden without a warrant and without permission of the owner, that search isn't violating _your_ rights so the bloody knife can be used as evidence against you. )
The person who doesn't want the evidence to be found is dead. Shot dead. Totally deserved, after killing over a dozen people. His rights cannot be violated anymore. The search for evidence on that phone is totally reasonable. Even without the permission of the owner, the police would have got a warrant. The right against self incrimination doesn't protect you. The police has the right to see the evidence, you have no right to hide it. Giving the police the passcode is only self incrimination if the police didn't actually know that the phone was yours, and having the passcode proves that it is indeed yours.
So your reasoning is totally, absolutely wrong. The reason why Apple shouldn't have to help the police is _that it isn't their phone_. Apple has no evidence in its hands. They are not involved in the crime in any way. It's like an FBI agent who needs to get to the court ordering you to drive him there in your car. And then politicians claiming that you support terrorists by telling the FBI agent to call a taxi.
The owner gave the FBI the permission to search the phone. The owner should have had the passcode then, but they don't. Tough luck. Should have looked better after the phones they own.
Let's assume they could push an update just to that phone that lets the FBI in. Let's also assume that they drop their objections and do just this. Do you really think it'll be "just this one phone"? Do you think that other governments won't demand Apple let them into people's phones? Do you think Apple's update won't fall into a hacker group's hands who will use it to find exploits to get into any iPhone?
Here's what Apple could do: They find the one engineer in the company who has the necessary know-how. That engineer quits in disgust and is hired back at twice the daily rate of a mediocre lawyer (say 2 x $1200). Now obviously you'd have to be extremely careful writing this software: The engineer has to be absolutely isolated from any network, and the software must be absolutely bug free because otherwise that phone could be shot. A few iPhone 5c's used as guinea pigs get bricked. All in all Apple presents a bill of $200,000.
Then Apple deletes absolutely permanently all the software that was created for this purpose, because they obviously fear that it could fall into the wrong hands.
The FBI comes with the next phone: "This one should be a lot cheaper since you've written the software". "The software is gone. And that engineer is on holiday. If you want him to come back, he'll want twice the rate. ".
Replacing broken glass/digitizer will not cause the error. What causes the error is the touch id sensor or sensor cable. Unfortunately with the way the button is designed on the phone it is very easy to break the button or the cable while replacing the screen. The is especially true if the screen is cracked badly of the frame is a little bent. The prying required to get the phone open in these cases can lead to a broken touch id button.
I think what really happens is that the sensor is not really fixable (due to the pairing problem), but it doesn't break often, so to repair it Apple replaces the whole inside of your phone but only charges some reasonable amount. So Apple loses money on that repair, but it's rare. However, if some third party breaks the sensor, or you break it yourself through some bodged repair, Apple isn't willing to carry that cost.
In the UK, out-of-warranty-"repair" for any iPhone 6,6+,6s,6s+ is £236 to £256 (that's replacing the iPhone with a refurbished one), so that's the worst that happens.
Just adding that the platform-dependent units used by mach_absolute_time are tiny. Nanoseconds on some systems, based on the processor or motherboard clock speed on others. GCD use 64 bit nanoseconds, NSDate uses double precision seconds since some reference date which is _not_ 1970; I think 2001 or something like that. Very easy to use with microsecond resolution for the next +/- 200 years.
Its also bullshit on iOS 9.2.1.
That's the clever thing about the story; nobody will be willing to check it.
On the other hand, it has been reported that the problem isn't setting the time to Midnight Jan 1st 1970. The problem is setting that time for example in the USA, because in the USA you set the time to some hours _earlier_ in UTC. And these reports say that the problem fixes itself when the time goes into positive time UTC (in Los Angeles you might have to wait nine hours). And _I_ am not going to check if this is true.
Or some idiot drives into a lake or down a jogging trail because he or she is just TOO STUPID to understand that they're not driving on a road anymore.
I once was told by my SatNav to drive into a lake. There is a lake, an island in the lake with a major tourist attraction, a ferry, and the road goes straight to the like so you can drive onto the ferry (and you need to have some good reason to do so because car traffic is normally not allowed on that island).
I actually drove past the car park 150m away from the lake before I spotted the end of the road. In the dark you could easily drive into the lake without being a complete idiot (a bit stupid and careless, but not a complete idiot).
For YEARS, I've hoped for GPS software that had three features:
4. Find a petrol station along my way with the smallest possible detour. TomTom finds the nearest, but that might be two miles away which means four miles detour. But 20 miles further there might be one just along the way.
5. Find the "cheapest" route, taking into account wear on the car, fuel, and my time.
I have seen a sign once, in England, that said "Narrow road in one mile" and below it: "Lorry drivers: Your GPS is wrong". And indeed, after a mile I came to a bit that was tight for my car and impassable for any lorries. Plus impossible to turn, so all lorries stuck there would have to reverse quite a distance.
If I sell Iphones and want to steal data, I write & install and app that does it for me. Simple, no hw needed. If I want to extract from a stolen/bricked Iphone, I rip out the flash memory and read it directly using electronic circuits. No apple sw in my way then.
You think you're smart. Anyone with an iPhone will set their Apple ID and password, and the process of doing this wipes out any software that you may have installed. The exception is phones sold to enterprises, where the process will wipe any software you may have installed and put the phone under the control of the enterprise. Very visibly.
To decode the flash memory, you need to crack per-file 256 bit encryption. So even if you cracked uncrackable 256 bit encryption, you would then have _one_ file.
And you're right: the purpose of a trial and conviction is to act as a deterrent.
He'll get a trial in the UK with the purpose of convicting him for jumping jail for six years. Hasn't got a chance there, just a little bit too much evidence. Then he'll get a trial in Sweden with the purpose of finding out if he raped or sexually assaulted a woman or not. Nobody knows how this will end.
I'd suggest that the UK court didn't properly weigh the risk to Assange of being extradited to Sweden. The circumstances were suspicious and his fears not unfounded.
They properly did. Extradition to Sweden will be a done deal. After he spends some time in a UK jail for jumping bail.
He would probably got a slap on the wrist in the case in Sweden. Instead he voluntarily stayed in his own Ecuadorian jail for six years, is now in trouble in the UK, and any court in Sweden will be much less let him get away with a less severe punishment.
Apple could pull the rug out from under Google anytime by making any other search engine the iOS default.
It has been leaked that Google pays $1bn for the privilege. What hasn't been quite liked is whether that was total up to some date, or per year, or whatever.
What could kill Google would be a search engine that isn't catered to advertisers but to letting people find what they are looking for.
Because that's not what what they are doing. They are taking their Euros and keeping it Euros. They are taking their Yen and keeping it in Yen. Their dollars, they keep in dollars. To convert anything to dollars they would have to pay 40% in taxes to the US government in addition to any taxes they paid to the local governments.
No, you can have dollar accounts in Europe or Japan. They can take Euros from an account with a bank in Germany and put it into a dollar account at the same bank. They just can't transfer the money to the USA (and you can have a Euro account with a bank in the USA, so Apple could transfer money without exchanging).
Is there a reason that Apple doesn't do currency hedging, despite all the transactions/holdings in foreign currencies?
You can only hedge so much.
You uncover a key flaw in Cook's reasoning; if they're not bringing those foreign dollars home, then they've no reason to convert them to dollars, and this isn't money they're losing at all. It is just the imaginary "if we brought it home" ticker in his office that is showing a reduced high score.
The point is that Apple reports all revenue and profits in their quarterly statements, and the stock market reacts to them. If a company sold most of their stuff in the UK, and revenue went from 1 billion pound to 1.05 billion pound, that would be a nice result, but if the revenue translated to US$ goes down from 1.5bn US$ to 1.45bn US$ because of the exchange rate then it looks bad.
And that's what counts on the stock market. Not where the money is.
Rape requires a lack of consent. Just because you're a condescending shitface who doesn't believe children can make up their own minds doesn't mean that sex with them is automatically rape. Yes, the law defines it as such, but the law gets a lot wrong. When it comes to sex, it gets most things wrong.
Just because you are (I don't really know, and I wouldn't want to know), doesn't mean that children can give consent to having sex.
Oddly I had to look up if adultery where a crime in my state because I didn't know. Apparently it's a misdemeanor and can be used to deny a no fault divorce which would allow you to seek alimony. Massachusetts adultery is a felony and you could serve up to four years in prison.
WTF. And bloody Americans tell everyone, whether they want to listen or not, that they live in the freest country in the world.
Admittedly adultery would carry severe risk of damage to certain body parts for me, but the state wouldn't give a damn about it. Exactly as it should be.
theodp, what you write is pure polemic. So Apple "dismissed a call for diversity". Here's the actual text of the rejected proposal at the last shareholder meeting:
"Shareholders request that the Board of Directors adopt an accelerated recruitment policy requiring Apple Inc. (the âoeCompanyâ) to increase the diversity of senior management and its board of directors, two bodies that presently fails to adequately represent diversity (particularly Hispanic, African-American, Native-American and other people of color)."
So Apple is supposed to create new senior management or board positions or fire existing senior management or board members, in order to hire "people of color" (strange enough, an expression that you wouldn't dare using in the UK).
That is what all the small companies have to pay here in good old Europe. Therefore, big companies should too.
What a bloody idiot. You say small companies have to pay 30% of their revenue in tax? UK Corporation tax rate in 2015 is 20% _of profit_, not on bloody revenue. If you don't know what you are talking about, shut up. Or do you really not know the difference between revenue and profit?
An honest company would pay 30% of its revenue as tax.
30% of its revenue as tax? What are you smoking?
As an example, Walmart makes $480bn revenue per year, with $34bn profit. How on earth would Walmart be able to pay 30% = $144bn in tax?
And Apple isn't the "world's largest company." But the attempted demonstration using Aramco was a total failure. Hyundai would be a much better example, with about 70 times the market capitalization of Apple.
And you just won the price for being the Internet's greatest dummy.
When you take Apple's market caps in US Dollar, and Hyundai's market caps in South Korean Won, then Hyundai's number is 70 times higher. However, one US dollar is worth about 1,200 Won. So when converted to US Dollars, Apple's market caps is about 18 times higher.
My practice: I don't pull code from the Internet. I find out - often based on code samples - how it works, and then I implement it myself. Because the point isn't to copy the solution, but to learn how it is done. So I am grateful to the person who posted a solution, but based on that solution I write my own, and then I know how it works.
In other places, the whole case was reported substantially different. First it must be said that a company will have the right to find out whether the phone calls you make at work are for business or private, but not to find out the contents of the private messages. On the other hand it should be obvious that a company can examine your work related phone calls.
It seems the company was unhappy with his performance and noticed that he made a lot of phone calls during work time. They asked him about it, and he claimed that these phone calls were all work related and not private. So they had the right to examine these calls, because they were all work related (so he said).
When they were done, he was confronted with 48 pages of transcripts of calls in eight days, all private, and was fired. That was 48 pages. That's a lot of time spent not working.
Fuck it. Apple and Google should just accept market share loss and tell NY to go fuck itself. Maybe then the locals would complain and and fight to have the bill abolished. Just accept the fact that money is a casualty of this war (for privacy) and that it's all part of the deal.
Not necessary. Stop selling in New York, and what do you think how fast a black market for iPhones and popular Google phones will appear. Apple would just build a warehouse in Boston, and everyone would either travel there to buy their phone directly, or people would buy ten phones for $700 each and sell them for $800 or $900 in New York.
Apple can easily read the contents of any iPhone, iPod or iPad. The user just has to enter their passcode.