Boycott Apple?

No, don't file this under "Politics", as that would violate the TOS. File it under "ROFL".
 
Donald Trump wants us to boycott Apple "until they give that security number" to the Feds. Donald obviously has no clue about how encryption works, or the potential damage to both Apple and its consumers if the company is coerced into providing a backdoor into iPhones.
 
In case this is making no sense to you, it's about the iPhone of that nutbag who shot up a clinic in California. Investigators want to see what's on his phone, but can't get past the password. Apple designed it so that after 10 failed attempts everything on the phone gets automatically deleted. A good design, IMO. Apple would be nuts to cave on this. They're not Google, after all.

John McAfee has offered to hack the phone:
 
http://www.techinsider.io...-on-its-product-2016-2

Apparently, Google supports Apple.
http://www.macworld.com/a...mp;utm_campaign=buffer

Not me. I sent them a message asking them to stand strong.
People who are willing to trade freedom for security will have neither.
 
J

sharke
John McAfee has offered to hack the phone:
 
http://www.techinsider.io...-on-its-product-2016-2

Hacking is illegal. If the code isn't signed by Apple it is an illegal hack of their product.
 
I'm shopping for two iPhone 6s phones tomorrow, one plus. Both 128gb.
 
J

michaelhanson
Aren't there already a bunch of folks here that are boycotting Apple, iStuff and anything related to it? Just saying. 😄

 YES

bitflipper
Apple designed it so that after 10 failed attempts everything on the phone gets automatically deleted. A good design, IMO. 

Since when is it impossible to get at data except through the OS? 
 
I tend to think this is more about people being lazy than anything else. Or maybe it is a ruse - if Apple wins all the idiots might think their data is safe and not do any basic due diligence.
 
Or maybe they just can't figure out how to get the stupid phone open. 

As any techy knows, the password is only the lock on a door.  You can just bypass it and remove the disc which, I'm sure, they will have little trouble reading.

sharke
It's pretty amazing what data recovery experts can do with a drive. As far as I know, they used to be able to recover data from a floppy overwritten with zeros by moving the head a tiny bit off track. Not sure you can do that with modern hard drives but who knows what tricks they have up their sleeves these days. 

It is not that the data cannot be recovered from storage, but that the data stored is itself encrypted. Depending on the strength of that encryption, recovery is more or less useless. In fact the best way to wipe a drive is to encrypt it in the first place and then delete the passcode. That defeats all of the legendary methods of examining magnetic media with electron microscopy etc. 

michaelhanson
Aren't there already a bunch of folks here that are boycotting Apple, iStuff and anything related to it? Just saying. 😄

Present! 

sharke
John McAfee has offered to hack the phone:
 
http://www.techinsider.io...-on-its-product-2016-2

 
I thought that was funny ... and pretty much says it all about the government and their highly over paid folks that do not know what they are doing ... heck, look at the Senate and House of Representatives! While I can see it being justified on one side, I can also see the other side, and a group (or two) taking advantage of the technologies for their own goals and means ... and this is another side of these companies that will be coming up sooner or later ... and the government, btw, can prevent business licenses if they do not cooperate ... so in the end, the loser will be Apple and many of us, that are afraid that all of a sudden will have our phones hacked left and right ... like they are not already being done, anyway!
 
The whole thing is scary ... but it shows the 20th century perfectly ... what is gold for one, is poop for another and vice versa! And Apple and everyone else, will have to come to grips with it. Just like we do!
 

ampfixer
The iPhone has a bug right now that causes a users phone to become "bricked". Apple has told those people affected that they are out of luck. Why should the government do any better than paid customers.
 

Avoiding the bug is pretty simple. Just don't set the date to before May 1970. Resetting the date has to be done on the phone itself and can't be done remotely. Compared to buffer overflow exploits in web browsers, Flash and Acrobat, the bug in Word that meant even if macros were switched off in preferences Word could be told to switch macros on and run them automatically by a macro in a malicious Word document or web file, this is a very minor bug.

Apple are working an iOS update to fix the bug.

ampfixer
I guess they don't want to push this issue into court. However this goes, the winner will set a legal precedent about access to personal information. It's obvious that technology is moving faster then the law and there will only be more of these cases in the future.

It's already in court, that's the problem.

Any encryption system becomes useless as soon as a back-door gets into the wild. The UK government's having one of its sporadic "encryption available to the public is evil - peadophilia! Terrorists! Only the guilty have anything to hide!" fits at the moment as well. Seems to happen about once per government since 1994. What usually happens is the civil servants, banks, Microsoft, Apple, Sagepay and various other companies go and have a quiet chat with the politicians to point out that any ban on secure encryption means no more internet banking, no more buying stuff online, no more computerised BACS system, no more SSH or VPNs so companies no longer able to communicate internally securely across the internet, no more international instant stock trading etc.

Then ask if the minister is quite sure they're brave enough to want to make the courageous decision to take the UK back to the 1970s.

The history of hacking shows that once its known that there's a back door possible, even if it requires using a version of the OS that in theory only the manufacturer has access to, the bad guys will put a huge amount of effort into getting hold of it or reverse-engineering it.

Meanwhile, those who really want to send short messages not only encrypt them but use stenographic techniques to make it near impossible to detect there's a message to decrypt in the first place. Is that normal noise and jpeg artifacts in that low-quality image or a message encrypted using some encryption algorithm or other?

And single use one-time pads, such as the ones used to encrypt secure information between the UK and US governments are still uncrackable for all real-world intents and purposes, so outlawing digital encryption gets them nowhere when it comes to bad guys determined their messages will not be read by anyone they're not intended for. A combination of one-time pads and stenography and you have an almost undefeatable encryption system, unless the cryptologists get very, very lucky indeed.

What is particularly interesting is that the FBI could dismantle the phone and probably pull all the 0s and 1s off the SSD. What that gives them is the encrypted data. So I guess one thing that the FBI is confirming by this action is that modern encryption methods are still for all intents and purposes secure even when the computing facilities of the FBI, GCHQ, CIA or major universities are available.

Unless it's all a double-bluff of course, or maybe it's a triple bluff.... No doubt the conspiracy theorists will be making up all kinds of complicated stuff.....