[HN Gopher] Apple says it'll remove iMessage and FaceTime in UK ...
___________________________________________________________________
Apple says it'll remove iMessage and FaceTime in UK rather than
break encryption
Author : samwillis
Score : 1297 points
Date : 2023-07-20 13:41 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (9to5mac.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (9to5mac.com)
| UnixSchizoid wrote:
| As a heavy Linux and foss user, I use iOS because I know it's
| secure and has more specialized builds for my device.
| skdotdan wrote:
| Aren't iMessage and FaceTime irrelevant outside from the US? I
| don't know a single non-American person who uses them.
| philjohn wrote:
| Nope. Plenty of people use iMessage in the UK, facetime as
| well.
| grammers wrote:
| UK is like US, but worse. It seems they only left the EU to push
| for maximum surveillance, and no one is going to stop them.
| teamonkey wrote:
| "But what can you do, eh?" should be the motto embossed in gold
| letters on the front of the blue passports.
| RandomWorker wrote:
| I mean, remove it, and replace it with RCS-Rich Communication
| Services I hope? Generally this could be a good thing.
| ben_w wrote:
| Makes me glad that I left the UK.
|
| I wonder what happens when all the Conservative Party MPs
| discover that this sort of legislation means even more of their
| internal party conversations -- currently on WhatsApp but who
| knows what they'll use next -- get leaked?
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Nothing. They know, they don't care. It's simple as that.
| Politicians will flail, but the inner-circle won't even shrug.
|
| The Conservative party is in a nose-dive which will continue to
| be until the next couple of generations kick the bucket.
|
| Those who are in the their 60's want the UK to be just like it
| was before EU.
|
| Those who are in their 40's, 50's accept that brexit was a
| eff'up, many are in denial that it was a bad decision.
|
| The motto is now "we must just get on with it" which is
| accepted upon them. They have the lifestyle, let the younger
| suffer.
|
| I'm 34.. no idea what am I suppose to do.
| throwingtoofar wrote:
| First they came for protests, now they want to tackle encryption.
|
| I don't think they like the ability of people to share unofficial
| information and organize themselves in huge numbers.[0]
|
| People were sharing anti-propaganda propaganda stickers on
| telegram too.[1] (2:40 the bus is covered in them, also saw a vid
| where an entire police car was covered in them.)
|
| [0]. https://onevsp.com/watch/gqymHfesRd5sWJj
|
| [1]. https://onevsp.com/watch/3skDbBtB8sGwboa
| chasil wrote:
| They should beta test on everyone in the House of Commons. Today.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Nobody in the UK uses iMessage. Not sure about Facetime but
| it's definitely not anything anyone relies on.
|
| This is a meaningless threat.
| bdavbdav wrote:
| There aren't many other widely used easily accessible
| services with as good video call quality as FaceTime in the
| UK. WhatsApp VC is trash.
| meepmorp wrote:
| They all use WhatsApp
| bdavbdav wrote:
| Not for calls / VC - the quality is trash compared to
| FaceTime
| paxys wrote:
| The same Apple that lets the CCP operate its entire App Store in
| China?
|
| It's easy to criticize a government when you know there will be
| no retaliation. To judge a company's true stance on such issues
| see how they behave when there's a prospect of real financial
| loss.
| kergonath wrote:
| In the end the choice is simple: follow local laws or drop
| features or devices.
|
| The calculation is going to be different in each country, but
| there is no hypocrisy here.
|
| The Chinese government messing with Chinese servers affect the
| Chinese market, which makes a lot of money so there is a strong
| incentive to remain in it. The UK backdooring FaceTime
| compromises it for the rest of the world and would actually put
| Apple in jeopardy in other jurisdictions with stronger privacy
| and data protection laws, for a comparatively minor market.
| It'd be more significant if the issue was with the EU or the US
| (both scenarios can realistically happen in the next few years,
| unfortunately). All they are saying is that they will comply if
| the regulations are put in place. Also, the British government
| is known for making noises along these lines before quietly
| dropping the whole project when it turns out that it's actually
| not that simple. Different countries will lead to different
| risk assessments.
|
| So yeah, there is no inconsistency, it's just a matter of how
| you stay on the clear side of the law.
|
| > It's easy to criticize a government when you know there will
| be no retaliation. To judge a company's true stance on such
| issues see how they behave when there's a prospect of real
| financial loss.
|
| A company is not sentient, it does not have a stance. Its
| policies have no value except when they are decided and
| enforced by people. It's dangerous to talk of corporations in
| terms of ideology, because these things can change and often
| cash trumps good intentions. In the end all that matters is how
| much the company and our interests align. The best way to have
| a company behave over the long term is if it makes sense for it
| to do so from a business point of view.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Companies are made up of people, who absolutely have stances.
| zarzavat wrote:
| The UK and China are not comparable. China is the worlds most
| populous country (for now). The UK has a population of under
| 70m. China is a totalitarian regime where even an imperfect
| freedom is preferable to no freedom at all. The UK is a
| democratic country which _should_ be upholding the right to
| privacy.
|
| If Apple weakens crypto for the UK, it affects people in other
| countries as well. iMessage is not exactly popular in the UK,
| so it is disproportionately used for transatlantic
| communication compared to WhatsApp. If Apple complies with the
| law, they are violating the privacy of users in the US as well.
| ninth_ant wrote:
| > The UK and China are not comparable. China is the worlds
| most populous country (for now). The UK has a population of
| under 70m.
|
| You say they are not comparable, and then compare them in a
| way that backs up the point you're trying to argue against.
| It _is_ two-faced of Apple to give China a pass here,
| undoubtably in large part due to the massive loss of sales
| were they not to comply and be removed by the Chinese regime.
|
| > China is a totalitarian regime where even an imperfect
| freedom is preferable to no freedom at all.
|
| If the Chinese gov't has the keys to unlock "private"
| conversations, how is this "imperfect freedom" in any way
| different from WeChat or other state-sanctioned messaging
| systems?
|
| > The UK is a democratic country which should be upholding
| the right to privacy.
|
| I mean sure, but Chinese people should have the same rights
| of privacy as anyone else. It's not suddenly less-bad because
| their government is totalitarian.
|
| > If Apple weakens crypto for the UK, it affects people in
| other countries as well. iMessage is not exactly popular in
| the UK, so it is disproportionately used for transatlantic
| communication compared to WhatsApp. If Apple complies with
| the law, they are violating the privacy of users in the US as
| well.
|
| How is this any different than what Apple currently does when
| an iMessage user outside China messages someone inside China?
| My understanding is that it acts precisely as you describe,
| but I could be wrong. And likewise, from what I understand
| iMessage is likewise unpopular in China so cross-country
| communications would potentially be a major source of
| iMessage activity as well? ( I don't see any statistics on
| this)
| jdiez17 wrote:
| >> The UK is a democratic country which should be upholding
| the right to privacy. > >I mean sure, but Chinese people
| should have the same rights of privacy as anyone else. It's
| not suddenly less-bad because their government is
| totalitarian.
|
| The extent to which Chinese people oppose the government
| being able to read anyone's conversations is quite
| different vs. the UK. Unfortunately, it's not likely that
| this or the Chinese government's behaviour will change any
| time soon. But in the UK it is an active political question
| that is still undecided.
|
| And as you said, the size of the market -> how much money
| they get probably has an influence on Apple's decision to
| operate in China, even with all the caveats. But it's also
| not the only factor. If it was, Apple wouldn't consider
| blocking iMessage/etc for UK customers.
| bpicolo wrote:
| Just an interesting note I learned recently - it's estimated
| that India's population overtook China's this year (within
| the last couple of months)
| abigail95 wrote:
| No, the UK is a democratic country that is voting to reduce
| privacy.
|
| A massive company in a foreign country affecting the laws of
| your own is anti-democratic.
|
| Democracy doesn't mean privacy.
| guy98238710 wrote:
| > UK is a democratic country
|
| Democracy is a bit more than just rule of the majority (or
| sub-majority due to the peculiarities of the UK voting
| system).
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > China is the worlds most populous country (for now).
|
| nit: they arent. India is.
| [deleted]
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| There is no such thing as a company's true stance. This is a
| fiction to make it easy to criticize.
| gretch wrote:
| You don't think there's a prospect of financial loss? They
| literally just said they would pull their products.
|
| Ecosystem features like those are huge contributors to platform
| retention. And if the cynic in you doesn't believe that, just
| ask yourself why they burn the money to keep staffing
| development and maintenance teams for iMessage and FaceTime -
| they aren't doing it out of kindness right?
| GoofballJones wrote:
| They said they would pull two services and not all their
| products. I know you didn't say "all products", but was just
| clarifying.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > Ecosystem features like those are huge contributors to
| platform retention
|
| In the UK, Facetime maybe. But iMessage isn't used to the
| level as it is in US. I can't imagine Apple's UK share would
| take a significant hit due to no iMessage when everyone
| already uses cross-platform Whatsapp.
| jmull wrote:
| This kind of black and white thinking is defeatist.
|
| China: already a lost cause (before iPhones and messaging
| existed, in fact).
|
| The UK: a leading western nation.
|
| Let's _try_ to have western countries not be like China? The UK
| could be a domino... if it falls the authoritarians in other
| western countries may be emboldened to follow.
| jamesk_au wrote:
| Can anyone find a link to Apple's nine-page submission document?
|
| All reports of this seem to refer back to the same BBC article,
| which purports to quote from Apple's submission, but doesn't link
| to it.
| theironhammer wrote:
| Doesn't the UK sound more and more like some third world
| dictatorship?
| balls187 wrote:
| Calling BS in CSAM as the reason. Clearly it's their government
| wanting to have easier ability to spy on it's citizens.
| submeta wrote:
| An interesting narative, but there are alternative perspectives
| to consider as well. It's not necessarily a matter of whether or
| not the UK needs Apple to break their encryption. In fact, they
| may not need to do so at all. Companies like certain Israel-based
| firms specialize in selling a myriad of cyber tools, often at
| quite reasonable prices, that can potentially bypass the need for
| direct encryption breaking.
|
| It often feels like these public back-and-forths could be
| theatrical performances, designed to shape public perception more
| than anything else. State-level actors generally operate with a
| much wider set of tools and resources at their disposal than what
| is commonly understood. The fact that the UK is a member of the
| Five Eyes intelligence alliance is also noteworthy here. This
| alliance allows for expansive information and resource sharing.
| The reach and depth of these resources can often surpass the need
| for individual corporate cooperation.
|
| It's essential to look beyond surface narratives and remember the
| complexity of global surveillance practices and cyber strategies.
| Yes, a company's commitment to privacy is admirable and crucial,
| but it's equally important to stay aware of the many other
| methods that state actors have at their disposal for obtaining
| information.
|
| Edit: Fixed typo
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| This isn't about targeted attacks, though. This is about a
| blanket bill to monitor everyone's communications.
|
| The tools you mention still generally require either physical
| access to the device, or are in some way targeted. You'll
| likely never be able to stop these, but a blanket communication
| encryption ban both serves an entirely different purpose and
| can much more easily be stopped.
| edandersen wrote:
| Are iMessage and Facetime disabled in China?
| jasonlotito wrote:
| My understanding is that Messages and Facetime are still E2E
| encrypted in China. However, if you back things up in iCloud,
| China does have the keys to decrypt that. The difference is the
| UK wants to violate E2E encryption in Messages/FT.
|
| I could be wrong about the current state, but I need to see
| evidence first.
| tinza123 wrote:
| No they are not. I talk to my family often on Facetime
| jessepasley wrote:
| No. iMessage and Facetime use end-to-end encryption in China,
| probably among only a few apps allowed to do so.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| Thats really weird, kinda like how Steam existed for so long
| in China.
| gruez wrote:
| Steam has e2e?
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| No, but it was a massive unregulated catalog of games. It
| would be like hosting American Netflix in China.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| It has horrible slanderous counter-revolutionary and
| despicably immoral anti-chinese content.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Keys are managed by the government.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| iCloud Keys are managed by a Chinese company, so in
| practice, yes. iPhone E2E stuff like iMessage, by
| definition, does not have keys that anyone else (including
| the government) possess.
|
| Though it hardly matters when ~90% of iPhone users likely
| have iCloud Backup on. In which case their messages will be
| backed up to the cloud to where the government could get
| keys.
| pretext-1 wrote:
| Source? IIRC Apple was hosting data from Chinese citizens
| in China to comply with regulation but still keeping
| encryption keys outside of China.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| They gave it over. Apple does not care about privacy the
| way it has trained American consumer to think it does.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Well, to be fair, the alternative is to simply leave
| China entirely. Considering how much malware and spyware
| the average Chinese phone has... Better a compromised
| iPhone than some of those things.
| [deleted]
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| iMessage and FaceTime are available in China, but it hardly
| matters because most communication in China happens over
| WeChat. If all the important stuff is happening over the
| heavily monitored app, leaving a few scragglers is not a big
| deal. Especially because, it's not like a criminal gang is
| going to have the money to arm every member with an iPhone with
| China's wages (and the ones that do are likely white-collar and
| detectable elsewhere), and it's also not like Apple is allowed
| to actively advertise or even discuss themselves as being "more
| secure than WeChat."
|
| EDIT: Also, ~80%-90% of iPhone users in the country likely have
| iCloud Backup on. iCloud Backup is not E2E-encrypted in China,
| and is hosted by a Chinese company instead of Apple. If you
| want full E2E, you need to use iMessage and hope everyone in
| the party doesn't have iCloud Backup on... and that's a pretty
| niche threat now.
| Miraste wrote:
| iCloud backup is not E2E encrypted anywhere by default,
| although it does now have the option to turn it on in non-
| China countries.
| inopinatus wrote:
| Kinda apropos, I've used international data roaming in mainland
| China and was (initially) astonished to find it totally
| bypassed the GFW and I could run IPsec and SSH unencumbered,
| none of the unabashed MITM fuckery I saw from using strong
| crypto over Chinese hotel wifi for more than a couple of
| seconds. That was a few years ago, I don't know where their
| interception regime is at today, but it was a reminder that
| propaganda begins at home.
| pshirshov wrote:
| LTE and 5G standards allow end-to-end encryption of the
| roaming traffic. So, it's by design. If your operator chooses
| to enable e2e (and usually they do), there would be just two
| options: block your traffic entirely or let it pass as it is.
| wmf wrote:
| What's the end in this case?
| pshirshov wrote:
| The user and the operator.
| tgv wrote:
| Yeah, that's a bit of a double standard.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| iMessage is pretty pointless with backdoors
| kstrauser wrote:
| Which backdoors does it have?
| LoganDark wrote:
| this is a backdoor that they're refusing to put into it,
| because it _would_ make iMessage pointless
| kstrauser wrote:
| Huh, interesting. I interpreted OP as "Messages is
| pointless today, as it already has backdoors". I hadn't
| even considered your reading of it until you pointed it
| out.
| dainiusse wrote:
| How does apple work in russia then?
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| It just ignores this part of local legislation, like everyone
| else. The government tries to pressure companies to provide
| encryption keys, but this is unfeasible as it doesn't have big
| enough leverage, especially now, when hostile international
| relations shield foreign companies from legal threats. So the
| only thing they can do is an internet block, but most users do
| have some kind of vpn installed already to circumvent such
| obstacles. It also weakens government negotiations position,
| because one you use the nuclear option, there is no more ways
| to threaten the company.
| xwdv wrote:
| Why does UK do this to themselves? Insisting on companies to take
| part in human rights violations is pure evil.
| theironhammer wrote:
| Because the UK is now a third world country.
| xeromal wrote:
| "fOr The chiLDrEN"
| stainablesteel wrote:
| so the government that arrested people for jokes, knocks on
| people's doors over mean tweets, and politically ousts people for
| having the wrong opinion now wants to destroy privacy for the
| 84th time in 10 years
|
| wew, its just one big firework waiting to blow. glad i've got the
| spectator seats
| aldousd666 wrote:
| Go apple!
| honeybadger1 wrote:
| Good
| jacooper wrote:
| The same company who showed all governments that mass local photo
| scanning is possible, now wants to counter security legislation?
|
| The damage done by apple with their previous plans for CSAM
| scanning is huge, and apple will be partially responsible for all
| the upcoming anti privacy / encryption laws.
| etempleton wrote:
| The UK keeps trying to throw their weight around only to find out
| they aren't that big. The CMA with Xbox and now this. They aren't
| large enough for Apple and Microsoft to make massive changes just
| to accommodate a relatively small market.
| Aachen wrote:
| Inversely, is the UK so much worse off for not having a few
| games in their market? Neither is so big it can go without the
| other, not only the UK.
| gretch wrote:
| Individually no, but in aggregate... A few games here,
| iMessage, Facetime, Whatsapp maybe, some other internet
| products, etc
|
| Does it boast something else to make up for the loss of these
| things? Trading something for nothing always feels kinda bad.
| And if the trade is "We stood up for the right thing with
| respect to Cloud Gaming monopolization", you constituents
| might be kinda pissed after a while.
|
| You know the old adage "Bread and Circus". Well you gotta
| make sure the circus is running well.
| Aachen wrote:
| Maybe it does boast something else. I am genuinely unsure
| whether being able (after a judge orders it) to unlock
| encryption, similar to a front door, is a bad thing. I
| don't like it, it stinks, I'd hate to experiment with
| things like this and so I'd vote against it, but is it
| going to end up worse for the greater good? Can't we still
| just use proper/steganographic encryption when an
| authoritarian regime gains power, and until then is it
| better? I can't say that beyond reasonable doubt. That
| safer society can be argued to be a boast that makes up for
| it (I'm not saying it definitely is. I'm unsure. Very
| unsure).
|
| And for the other, anti-monopolistic market authorities,
| the "boast" is a level playing field.
| dmvdoug wrote:
| The point isn't that it has judicial safeguards. Everyone
| thinks judicial safeguards are a good thing. The point
| is, once you weaken encryption to enable the bypass even
| through judicial safeguards, you weaken encryption for
| everybody and bypasses will be made, with absolute
| certainty, without judicial safeguards. If you enable
| encryption to be overcome through legitimate means, it
| will be overcome through illegitimate means. Which means
| encryption is effectively dead.
| blibble wrote:
| in reality another large company will enter the void where
| apple was with the correct regulatory approval and take the
| entire market
| zymhan wrote:
| The market is far less lucrative without the network
| effects of iMessage and WhatsApp
| nonethewiser wrote:
| The question is this: is the law good in principle?
|
| Meaning is the law good regardless of what Apple decides to
| do? Or is it only good if it forces Apple to break
| encryption?
|
| I think the answer is obvious. Its not a principled law.
| Its just a threat. They wouldn't rather lose access to
| facetime and iMessages than have access to them but
| encrypted. Thats just crippling themselves.
| [deleted]
| ben_w wrote:
| The UK has been discovering and forgetting that lesson
| repeatedly since at least the Suez crisis if not earlier.
| acuozzo wrote:
| > The UK keeps trying to throw their weight around only to find
| out they aren't that big.
|
| Their (former) empire is a part of their cultural identity.
| It's going to take a few more generations to shed the
| expectations of what was.
|
| The days of two washed-up subjects of the crown taking
| Kafiristan all on their lonesome are dead and gone.
| r00fus wrote:
| I think it'll die in this generation itself.
|
| The UK with Brexit are starting to find out very quickly how
| insignificant their nation is and how easy it is to route
| around the oversized egos of their so-called leaders.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| British citizen here. I didn't vote for Brexit. But would
| you mind perhaps not insulting my country?
| urbandw311er wrote:
| While I'm glad the rather embarrassing empire thing is on the
| wane I really don't see how that is relevant here.
|
| The UK isn't trying to tell anybody what they can do in any
| other country. It's just laying down the law for what happens
| within its own borders which it's entirely within its rights
| to do.
|
| Equally why you would think an American company could or
| should tell the British government what to do is surely
| itself an example of empiricism is it not?
| lcfcjs wrote:
| [dead]
| pelasaco wrote:
| Talk the talk, walk the walk. Lets see, talk is cheap. Specially
| if Europe follows the trend.
| jboydyhacker wrote:
| Why not a similarly brave stance in China? In China Apple claims
| it "obeys all local laws" except in the UK it wants to be
| courageous? I guess it's a brave state unless the $$$ are good.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| Perhaps the UK government is tractable and may adjust itself to
| the will of the people, unlike, say, the PRC.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Isn't the UK market a lot smaller than the Chinese market?
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Guess the UK market is just too weak to matter?
| bostonsre wrote:
| Yea, pretty interesting point.. seems like either the uk market
| isn't big enough for them to implement a solution or they don't
| care about the market and they care about people in the uk but
| they don't care about people in China.
| detourdog wrote:
| They may hold the UK to different cultural standards than
| china.
|
| China is tricky and I'm sure after Hong Kong Apple changed
| their calculus.
| csydas wrote:
| in advance I agree with a more cynical point as well, but I
| think we need to consider that there's equally plausible and
| more positive potential reasons
|
| - if there is success in the UK, relevant persons at Apple
| can make a more compelling argument to push back on China and
| other governments a lot more
|
| - perhaps apple is still pushing hard on china and using the
| UK as an example that they're willing to drop a long time
| strong market over the anti-encryption legislation
|
| I'm not saying either is the case, but there are benign or
| even positive reads on why apple is more aggressive with the
| UK
| madeofpalk wrote:
| It's not _super_ interesting. Apple 's reliance on China in
| many ways, and thus hypocrisy, is reasonably well known.
|
| "At least" companies can put up a fight in the UK (or US, see
| Apple in the San Bernardino case) and they have a reasonable
| chance they can lobby to block the efforts.
| kevincox wrote:
| Apple isn't foolish enough to believe that China will fold, it
| is obvious that if Apple refuses and iPhone will be banned.
|
| However there is a great chance that if they threaten to pull
| out of the UK that the law won't pass. Even if it does it is
| good marketing. Who knows what will actually happen if the law
| comes into effect. The UK market definitely isn't small, for
| all we know they may back down. Or maybe their reputation is
| more valuable.
| cmiles74 wrote:
| Apple claims that messages sent with their Messages application
| are end-to-end encrypted, even in China, and that they have
| made no concessions to government of China.
|
| But... Everyone in China has their iCloud backups stored in
| China and Apple holds the keys to these backups. While Apple
| cannot read E2E encrypted Messages content, they do upload an
| unencrypted (but encrypted with keys they control) backup of
| all of the phones Messages data.
|
| It seems likely China can ask Apple for a backup of a citizen's
| phone and Apple will comply with that request. Or they have
| access to these data centers.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/25/apple-moves-icloud-encrypt...
| layer8 wrote:
| An iPhone doesn't force you to you iCloud backups (or iCloud
| at all). Or does it in China?
| cmiles74 wrote:
| That is a good point. It's also possible that Apple has
| made some kind of concession but has found a weasel-y way
| to do it that let's them feel like they can claim no
| concessions have been made.
|
| Maybe the difference is that Apple feels they may be able
| to talk the UK out of this idea.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| One thing I don't get: how does a government think they can ban
| encryption? criminals can always encrypt their communication if
| they want to. How could they even be detected?
| mrlonglong wrote:
| The UK govt are a total shitshow right now but we'll put that
| right at the next elections. Hang in there, chaps.
| obituary_latte wrote:
| Stuff like this is why I'm an Apple fanboy. I'm happy to pay a
| premium and be locked into their walled garden for some things if
| it means supporting a company that has the power to shift policy
| in favor of human rights (privacy in this case).
| amelius wrote:
| > Stuff like this is why I'm an Apple fanboy.
|
| A fanboy without iMessage and FaceTime ...
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| I don't think the OP lives in the UK :)
| seydor wrote:
| An $3T company can literally buy governmnets
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Unless it's the human rights of those working at apple assembly
| lines.
| efitz wrote:
| Apple, while imperfect, is the only large tech company with
| anything like a principle when it comes to user privacy.
| Meta/IG would sell literally any piece of information about you
| they can get their hands on and monetize.
| aembleton wrote:
| I'd have thought it'd be more profitable to sell access to
| you based on criteria rather than outright selling your data.
| If they sell your data then anyone can buy it and use it
| whereas only they can sell your attention.
| Keats wrote:
| Unless it's China in which case they will not care about it!
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Yep in that case let's just close down the company because
| every country will want some privacy breaking rules imposed
| on you
| judge2020 wrote:
| China had all the bargaining power, in that non-compliance
| meant no more iPhones, and Apple going out of business. Apple
| wasn't ready to move production entirely to India or another
| country.
| justapassenger wrote:
| Google, Meta (Oculus) are banned in China and still produce
| their HW there.
|
| It was about getting a slice of hugely lucrative pie of
| customer market.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Or America, as we have seen with PRISM.
|
| Basically, it's as usual a financial calculation of what PR
| can brings vs what you can lose in the market.
|
| And fanboys believe it's because they are the good guys.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| If they did it for China, it will be the same of UK. The
| cat's out of the bag on this one.
|
| They will probably comply with some backdoor in partnership
| with Five-Eyes NSA & GCHQ. This is just PR posturing to build
| consumer trust.
|
| Same with their venture into CSAM in the west. China could
| ask Apple for the ML be applied to scan for political
| dissidents.
|
| It's a slippery slope and the frog gets boiled every year.
| Gorbzel wrote:
| It's very strange because like OP, huge fanboy. Early on it
| felt wrong to also burden Cupertino with being a cultural
| leader, but somewhere around $1.0T+ market cap, that has
| evolved.
|
| Vaguely remember a charity used to have a thing where they'd
| auction off a dinner with Steve, then later Tim. Given time
| with a leader who has literally revolutionized supply chain
| in CN and a CEO who made Apple his own following the most
| notable CEO ever, going after various gotcha points would
| feel like a wasted opportunity. But think I'd have to ask why
| a company designed in California of the 1960s and 1970s
| doesn't have line in the sand policies when dealing with a
| genocidal government and perpetual backdoors in software and
| politics, but will take a move like this. Would hope for
| something more than a canned answer.
| catboybotnet wrote:
| Capital. Once you grow to a certain point, politics and
| ideas are only good for marketing. Companies will happily
| work with banana republics and dictators if it outweighs
| the losses from paying your PR team a little more for a few
| months. Companies are not your friend, as in the end they
| only care about your money.
| bmitc wrote:
| They also have the power to redefine what a text message is.
| They don't care about people like you think they do. They're a
| company who makes decisions to make money.
| ryaneager wrote:
| They will only continue to do so while it remains profitable,
| at some point they will give in. They are a capitalist company,
| profits are their only concern.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| How much would it affect Apple's profit by not having
| iMessage in the UK?
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Have you been seeing all the videos of women not dating men
| if they get a green text bubble! :)
| scarface_74 wrote:
| We don't need more British people mating with their fancy
| tea and accents anyway /s.
| geniium wrote:
| I came here just to say this, thanks @obituary_latte for
| putting this nicely.
| jonplackett wrote:
| Tell that to china
| pjmlp wrote:
| Except they are quite selective regarding the countries.
| eltoto wrote:
| The way I put it, is Apple's business is selling high added
| value products (i.e. luxury, overpriced whatever you want),
| while most of the other big tech companies have you and your
| data as their main product. I'm fine paying for the luxury and
| privacy that comes with it
| hospitalJail wrote:
| This is marketing though.
|
| PRISM for the US, giving personal data to China, and Russia
| are examples of them not respecting privacy.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> Stuff like this is why I'm an Apple fanboy. I'm happy to pay
| a premium and be locked into their walled garden_
|
| @dang Is there any way I can counter-argument this statement
| without it getting flagged? If so, please let me know how.
|
| Because so far I have failed and I don't know what rule I broke
| by countering this statement.
| gigel82 wrote:
| It's usually brigading by other Apple fanboys. Their master
| can do no evil. You could see this alot during the local
| device scanning controversy, but anytime you try to point out
| obvious facts (like Apple building the largest Ad empire for
| example, while virtue signaling about Meta's ads on their
| platform) you get downvoted and flagged.
| [deleted]
| lolinder wrote:
| Flags aren't for rule breaking, they just mean enough people
| found your comment inflammatory or otherwise objectionable
| enough to hit the "flag" button.
|
| If you have a link to the flagged comment, I can probably
| help you understand why HN users would have flagged it. This
| comment is getting downvotes because complaining about
| downvotes and flags always does.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| What's objectional or inflammatory about my opinion here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36800745
| brasic wrote:
| It doesn't show as flagged for me. Time heals all wounds,
| if your comment is not objectionable it will usually be
| vouched for eventually. Which is one of the reasons it's
| a rule here that you don't complain about voting. Such
| comments also rarely age like wine :)
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Well it was flagged in the beginning, it's not like I
| imagined it.
|
| IMHO people should be allowed to complain otherwise how
| can we spot deficiencies and injustices and improve?
| lolinder wrote:
| You can complain, you'll just get a small karma hit for
| it. It's inevitable because it's off topic, but karma on
| HN is more or less meaningless anyway.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Sounds like their PR works. I bet that's the exact "feeling"
| they're aiming for.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Yea, and even if it is actionable and "real" - they're .. i
| think, correct me if i'm wrong, by law a for-profit company.
| Meaning none of this is noble, this is just aligned with our
| interests because they believe that to be the most profitable
| image for them currently.
|
| Which is all well a good _for now_ , but profit directions
| can change, and i suspect it's easier to change a direction
| guided by profit than a direction guided by morals. Ie i
| suspect their current "good direction" is less stable than
| some would suggest.
| runjake wrote:
| I used to think like this about Google, back in the "Don't Be
| Evil" days.
|
| I end up living day by day, knowing that nothing is permanent.
| Right now, I'm with Apple, acutely aware that someday, this
| will change -- probably when some snake finally manages to slip
| through similar legislation in the US and it becomes profitably
| unattractive for Apple to maintain it's privacy stance.
|
| Apple's privacy stance is a marketing thing, after all.
| ElectronBadger wrote:
| Seems that the UK market is not big enough. In China Apple had
| no problems with ceding control of their local servers to the
| Chinese government [1]. Not to mention of using forced labor
| (mostly Uyghurs, against which China is committing acts of
| genocide [2]). So, Apple and human rights my ass!
|
| 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-
| ce...
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| I don't think it has anything to do with the market size,
| which after the Brexit fiasco and the pandemic has shrunk
| considerably, but it has the most to do with the UK labelling
| itself as a democracy while behaving like a dictatorship when
| it comes to surveillance and other "think of the children"
| laws.
|
| I would say Apple is pointing out the hypocrisy.
| simonh wrote:
| None of those investigations showed that parts supplied to
| Apple came from Xinjiang. Only that one of their suppliers
| operates a plant there. These suppliers are huge
| conglomerates with plants all over China. Apple is one of a
| tiny handful of companies that actually audit their supply
| chain, but they only audit the chain that actually supplies
| them.
|
| From now on though any kind of audit in China is going to be
| almost impossible. They've started arresting researchers who
| perform due diligence reports for revealing 'state secrets'.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Pretty sure it's just section 75 that Apple / Meta take offense
| to.
|
| (1) OFCOM may require a provider of a regulated service to pay
| a fee in respect of a charging year which is a fee-paying year.
|
| (2) Where OFCOM require a provider of a regulated service to
| pay a fee in respect of a charging year, the fee is to be equal
| to the amount produced by a computation--
|
| (a) made by reference to--
|
| (i) the provider's qualifying worldwide revenue for the
| qualifying period relating to that charging year, and
|
| (ii) any other factors that OFCOM consider appropriate, and
|
| (b) made in the manner that OFCOM consider appropriate.
|
| https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/51870/documents/367...
| Doches wrote:
| In fairness, Meta has said the same thing re: WhatsApp, so
| while Apple deserves _some_ credit here for sticking to their
| principles, they're not exactly leading the pack. Which brings
| home the point that if _Meta_ isn't onboard with your privacy-
| obliterating proposal then you know you've really lost the
| plot...
| starttoaster wrote:
| Didn't Facebook (now Meta) buy WhatsApp, and it was
| originally its own thing? I guess you can say Meta kept
| WhatsApp operational, but I don't necessarily consider it a
| privacy win for Meta to just buy up some privacy-centric
| technologies with their billions.
| Roark66 wrote:
| Is WhatsApp still requiring access to your phone's address
| book before it allows you to use it? It did last time I tried
| it. There is no chance in hell I'm giving it all the phone
| numbers, emails and names of people that trusted me by giving
| me their details. At the time I set up a virtual android
| environment (samsung called it knox) just to setup WhatsApp
| in a way it couldn't access my phone's address book. It is
| extremely unethical on Meta's side to continue with this
| requirement. So I'm dubious every te they're presented as
| champions of privacy protection.
| [deleted]
| BbzzbB wrote:
| It's kinda the point of WhatsApp tho, phone features using
| your phone number and phone book but over the internet.
| callalex wrote:
| The Phone app on my iPhone manages to do all of those
| things without uploading my contacts list/social graph to
| anybody else's servers though.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > There is no chance in hell I'm giving it all the phone
| numbers, emails and names of people that trusted me by
| giving me their details.
|
| The sad thing is that all their details and yours are
| already known to Meta.
|
| The dozen of us who behave like you will keep trying
| though.
| gavinsyancey wrote:
| I currently have WhatsApp installed without access to my
| address book (on Android). It doesn't _require_ it, but it
| makes it harder to use and locks out some features. Among
| other things, you can 't start a new group / direct
| message, but you can participate / reply if someone else
| messages you first.
| bilkow wrote:
| I use an app called "Open In WhatsApp" which lets you
| paste / write a phone number and it will open a
| conversation with that number (by using android intents).
| You can also share contacts from the Phone app to this
| App, so you don't have to copy/paste manually.
|
| https://github.com/SubhamTyagi/openinwa (I recommend
| downloading from f-droid)
| paulmd wrote:
| If only there were a strong, centralized app store that
| could perform app review and prevent applications from
| degrading user experience beyond the extent actually
| necessary without that permission.
|
| Good thing the EU just outlawed that model and forced
| everyone to support "third party app stores" that are
| thinly-veiled shells for Facebook/Google/etc to bypass
| that review process.
|
| the "I wanna sideload" crowd are nothing more than allies
| of convenience for FB and others. Facebook was already
| experimenting with getting users to manually sideload the
| full-telemetry build and now they can just say "oops not
| supported on safari, install the native app".
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/facebook-and-
| google-...
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| I recently _had_ to install whatsapp. No asking for
| contacts at all. The web app (via a qr code) is ok, and i
| run that in a vm set up just for wa. I don 't let friends
| and fam know i have it...I prefer keeping out of dramas,
| 'news', and memes. I did check that i do not appear as 'x
| is online' on anyone's phone (but only checked with the
| person i needed to wa with). The app isn't bad, tbf. It's
| just not for me.
| aqme28 wrote:
| Interesting. I was going to say that many people use WhatsApp
| anyways, so if both of them go down that might actually lead
| to some pushback against these regulations.
| wredue wrote:
| I keep writing and deleting responses. I am completely
| baffled. Speechless, really.
|
| You cannot actually believe that meta gives a single solitary
| fuck about privacy?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| This isn't Reddit, please make higher quality comments.
|
| I think the GP is likely aligned with you anyways.
| slg wrote:
| For me at least, it is the opposite. It is not that I think
| Facebook is principled, it is that I don't think Apple is
| particularly principled. They care about money. Unlike many
| of their competitors, they are not fundamentally an ad-tech
| company which means your personal data has much lower value
| to them. This has caused them to build their brand around
| privacy because that is something their competitors have
| difficulty doing due to their business models. Apple's pro-
| privacy stance is just as much a capitalistic position as a
| principled one.
| make3 wrote:
| didn't eta just move to make WhatsApp not end to end
| encrypted?
|
| Meta was also in the biggest mass surveillance & influence
| scandal of all times for a private not too long ago, please
| don't forget
| curiousllama wrote:
| Opposite, actually. They said they're making Messenger and
| Instagram Direct e2ee.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> didn 't eta just move to make WhatsApp not end to end
| encrypted?_
|
| If so I missed the memo (that isn't unlikely, I'm not
| saying you are wrong!). Any references/links for that? A
| quick search doesn't turn up much, but Google isn't what it
| used to be...
| viraptor wrote:
| I'm not even sure anyone apart from Signal is really sticking
| to any principles. This system would be annoying to
| implement, costly to legally manage, and introduce some ops
| overhead and security exposure. There's way more incentives
| for WA and iMessage here to oppose it than just protecting
| their users. But only one is a cool talking point.
| hbn wrote:
| If anything that's a bolder move considering everyone uses
| Whatsapp there and barely anyone uses iMessage
| iainmerrick wrote:
| Both are very popular in the UK.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| WhatsApp is used by 78% of the users in the UK, and
| iMessage is used by 25%.
|
| https://www.statista.com/forecasts/997945/most-used-
| messenge... (non-free link)
| vxNsr wrote:
| But who is that 25%? iPhone users have money. I'm sure
| there is some significant overlap between iMessage and
| WhatsApp users (I know I and everyone I know use(s)
| both). But if you threaten politicians with losing their
| blue bubbles they're gonna fall in line.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| > But if you threaten politicians with losing their blue
| bubbles they're gonna fall in line.
|
| This is not a thing outside the United States, and I
| doubt that most British politicians are even aware of
| 'blue bubbles'.
|
| For example, the recent controversy regarding the release
| of Covid-related government communications was centred on
| WhatsApp, with no reference to other platforms like
| iMessage.
|
| https://news.sky.com/story/politicians-are-drawn-to-
| whatsapp...
| XajniN wrote:
| No one in Europe cares about the blue bubbles.
|
| I prefer iMessage over the other messengers, but I still
| haven't met anyone who cares. A lot of people don't even
| know why the bubbles are sometimes green.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Yet, the EU have their panties in a knot about having it
| be interoperable...
| thejohnconway wrote:
| 25% of the entire population is a pretty popular
| application! Not "hardly anyone". Also, I'd like to know
| the volume of messages shared, I have WhatsApp, but
| wouldn't miss it it it disappeared. iMessage disappearing
| would be very inconvenient.
| Reason077 wrote:
| I'm surprised it's even 25% in the UK, and I wonder how
| that's measured. Maybe the 25% includes things like
| "opening the iMessage app to read SMS messages sent by
| two-factor authentication services" etc.
| thejohnconway wrote:
| I'm not surprised, SMSing people is still common, and
| sliding from that to iMessage is totally frictionless for
| iPhone users. With iOS market share being around 50%, I'm
| surprised (skeptical even!) that it's not closer to 50%.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| I've noticed that too and it is super annoying having
| family in the UK that will only communicate via Whatsapp.
| Is this because cell providers outside the US charge for
| SMS? Even the ones who have iPhones end up using it because
| it is too much of a pain to use separate messaging apps.
| dtech wrote:
| SMS is cheap now but wasn't universally when Whatsapp
| gained critical mass.
|
| Nowadays it's mostly about convenience and features
| compared to SMS, and iPhone has a much smaller marker
| share in Europe so iMessage isn't a thing.
| meling wrote:
| I beg to differ. iMessage is definitely quite common in
| Europe as well.
| dtech wrote:
| iPhone has like a 33% market share so I wouldn't call it
| common if you can't reach 2 out of 3 people on it at
| least.
|
| In contrast, in many European countries Whatsapp has 90%+
| penetration [1]. Even where it's relatively unused it's
| more common than iMessage.
|
| [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1311229/whatsapp-
| usage-m...
| rejectfinite wrote:
| The opposite is more annoying...
|
| Whatsapp works on PC, Mac, Android and iOS
|
| iMessage only works on Apple devices.
| ghaff wrote:
| The price of built-in text messaging whether SMS or
| iMessage (or a combination of the two) largely went to
| zero for most people in the US texting especially other
| people in the US by the time other apps gained traction.
| And services like appointment reminders and verification
| codes pretty much all use SMS in the US--whatever its
| potential security vulnerabilities.
|
| So I use 2 or 3 other apps for mostly a few international
| people I know but basically everyone I know just defaults
| to SMS/iMessage.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It is mostly because international SMS and MMS is not
| free. People in the UK travel more to other countries,
| and communicate more with people in other countries.
|
| Not to mention MMS is vastly inferior to WhatsApp and
| iMessage for sharing media and other information.
| Larrikin wrote:
| It's because SMS is simply inferior to Whatsapp,
| Messenger, Instagram, Line, kakaotalk, Snapchat, Signal,
| etc unless you own an iPhone. All of them are cross
| platform and aren't intentionally broken for people who
| don't have or use iMessage. I personally avoid giving out
| my phone number as much as possible as all the other
| platforms have much better tools for communication,
| blocking, media, etc.
| withinboredom wrote:
| To add to that, I can use the WhatsApp desktop app at
| work. Can't do that with iMessage.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Why not? I do.
|
| Non Apple work machine?
| withinboredom wrote:
| Of course, it's Linux.
| Larrikin wrote:
| Signing into your personal accounts on a work machine is
| a terrible idea, as it opens up your personal accounts to
| search if there is a lawsuit (against you or against the
| company). That's assuming it's not already strictly
| forbidden by the company rules to prevent you from
| sending yourself confidential data.
|
| Also outside of programmers, IT, and designers, you
| rarely get a choice in the company issued laptop. It
| never makes sense for a company to issue more expensive
| Apple computers instead of ThinkPads or Dell computers.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > Signing into your personal accounts on a work machine
| is a terrible idea, as it opens up your personal accounts
| to search if there is a lawsuit
|
| The machine is mine and I do work on it. Thanks for the
| concern but I'm not worried about getting sued. I'm sure
| it's happened here previously, but it's not like the US.
|
| > Also outside of programmers, IT, and designers, you
| rarely get a choice in the company issued laptop. It
| never makes sense for a company to issue more expensive
| Apple computers instead of ThinkPads or Dell computers.
|
| I'm not one of those professionals and I can get my job
| done quicker on a Mac. My employer doesn't dictate how I
| get things done and paid for the machine I want. I think
| this is a good thing.
|
| Any job that requires a crappy trackpad isn't a job worth
| having.
| vxNsr wrote:
| Anyone working on a trackpad all day probably isn't doing
| serious work ;) see we can all make unkind
| generalizations.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Touche.
|
| Just seeing those laptops is frustrating. What is the
| point of the trackpad if you have to use a mouse?
| vxNsr wrote:
| When you need to travel between workstations I work
| docked all day, once in a while I need to be mobile, but
| it's much easier to work on one machine vs two.
| kingrazor wrote:
| I've never really understood what people mean by this.
| For me, iMessage is indistinguishable from SMS, except
| for the color of the messages, and the fact that I can
| use iMessage over WiFi.
| crottypeter wrote:
| Group messages.
|
| If I send an SMS message to a group of people, they all
| see a message from me. They don't know who else got it.
| And if they reply, they reply only to me. Is your
| experience different?
|
| WhatsApp (and I think iMessage) allow me to create a
| group with a name/purpose and send messages to the group
| and receive replies to the whole group.
|
| (P.S. I went from dumb-phones to Android and have limited
| exposure to iMessage's feature-set).
| wtallis wrote:
| > If I send an SMS message to a group of people, they all
| see a message from me. They don't know who else got it.
| And if they reply, they reply only to me. Is your
| experience different?
|
| Does MMS not exist in your country?
| crottypeter wrote:
| It does, but is priced uncompetitively compared to mobile
| data.
| vel0city wrote:
| I imagine your experience of sending a message to
| multiple people and it not making a "group message" was
| your older dumb phones weren't switching to MMS, it was
| keeping it as pure SMS. In the SMS world, there is one
| recipient. In MMS, it's like an email, you can list a lot
| (100+ in some cases) of receipts and they can all see the
| list.
| crottypeter wrote:
| Just checked my provider's pricing ( in the UK) MMS are
| capped at 300kB and cost 30p (0.39 USD) per message.
|
| That kind of pricing made WhatsApp an infinitely
| preferable alternative.
|
| Phones automatically switching to MMS would be
| catastrophic.
|
| Data (WhatsApp) is essentially free in comparison. PS10
| (13 USD) per month gets you 20GB: which doesn't care how
| many messages/recipients/photos you send.
| kingrazor wrote:
| That used to be my experience years ago, but now whether
| I use android or iphone, I see the whole group.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Being able to use it without a mobile network seems
| pretty distinguishable. As well as not being subject to
| international charges.
|
| And then of course the vastly higher fidelity of pictures
| and video sent via iMessage.
| kingrazor wrote:
| It's easy for me to forget how different my circumstances
| are from most other people. I'm far more likely to be in
| a place where I have no WiFi than a place where I have no
| cell service. And I don't personally know anyone outside
| the US, so I don't send international messages. I guess
| I've never paid enough attention to the fidelity of
| pictures I'm sent or am sending over SMS to notice a
| quality difference.
| vel0city wrote:
| Using it over WiFi is big feature alone for a lot of
| people who are often in spaces with good WiFi but poor
| cellular reception. Some carriers support SMS over WiFi
| in the same way they do "WiFi calling" which can
| alleviate that.
|
| The other major feature I see for other messengers over
| SMS/MMS is _much_ larger attachment sizes. It can be
| challenging sending an MMS with attachments >1MB.
| Meanwhile, I can send a 100MB file/video or an 8MB photo
| over Signal. WhatsApp allows for 16MB attachments.
| Sending a quick video in-line with the chat thread in MMS
| is miserable and gives an incredibly trash quality video
| while most other chat apps you can stick a decent quality
| 30 seconds or so video without any issue. Photos sent
| over MMS are usually junk while one could get a decent
| 4x6+ print off an 8MB photo.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| To be clear sms sucks on iPhones also. iMessage is also
| better then sms though.
| eyko wrote:
| To be fair a slightly better comparison would be MMS, but
| even then it doesn't compare. It's simply because data is
| cheap, the app is free, and the rich media features that
| came before iMessage/RCS existed (voice, photos/video,
| attachments, group chats, voip/video calling, etc), and
| because it's multiplatform (ios to android usage is near
| 50/50 or 60/40 depending on the country)
| viraptor wrote:
| SMS was historically expensive and today is still worse
| with regards to features. (Also international texts as
| others mentioned) And once you have to choose a specific
| system, why would you use one that's limited to just part
| of the market? If you want to use a communicator to talk
| to people, you may as well go with one that's accessible
| to everyone.
| dagmx wrote:
| Has Meta threatened to boycott? I know Signal has, and now
| Apple. However my searches for Meta/WhatsApp seem to show
| that there's been contention over their introduction of E2E
| but they haven't actually threatened to pull out over it.
|
| That said, I'd be very happy to see that they did threaten a
| boycott as well.
| nani8ot wrote:
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/09/whatsapp
| -...
|
| Meta:
|
| > Some countries have chosen to block it [WhatsApp]: that's
| the reality of shipping a secure product. We've recently
| been blocked in Iran, for example. But we've never seen a
| liberal democracy do that.
|
| They said they won't comply. UK would have to simply block
| WhatsApp.
| dagmx wrote:
| Thanks. Hopefully they continue to stick to their guns.
| nashashmi wrote:
| In Saudi Arabia and other places, Whatsapp is not encrypted.
| Otherwise those services would be banned.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| Incorrect. WhatsApp is encrypted in all countries.
| Sunhold wrote:
| This is pure speculation. WhatsApp is banned in some
| authoritarian countries such as China and UAE. It probably
| remains unbanned in others simply because it is so
| important for business.
| nashashmi wrote:
| https://saudi.works/does-whatsapp-work-in-saudi-arabia/
|
| I had to look it up.
| frankfrank13 wrote:
| I think Meta _needs_ WhatsApp to be their loss-leader (not
| really, but you know) when it comes to security. They always
| get to say "oh but WhatsApp is E2E!! We do care about
| security!"
| gruez wrote:
| Messenger also has e2e, but it's opt in.
| the_duke wrote:
| The ironic thing is that WhatsApp very heavily pushes users
| into Google account backups, which are unencrypted, giving
| government agencies all the access they want.
|
| I remember some talk about those getting encrypted, don't k
| ow if that has happened yet.
| bjord wrote:
| it happened in 2021, and some form of encryption for
| whatsapp icloud backups has apparently been available
| since 2016
|
| https://www.tomsguide.com/news/whatsapp-encrypted-backups
| pmontra wrote:
| They seems to be end to end encrypted now. It asked me a
| password to encrypt the backup with. It's a recent
| feature and you must trust a closed source app. No idea
| of I can download the backup from Google drive with a web
| browser and decrypt it with some common decryption
| program.
| ancientworldnow wrote:
| You can encrypt the Google drive backup actually. It's
| just a toggle switch on the backup menu setting to enable
| it.
| fennecfoxy wrote:
| I mean Apple didn't give two stones about security until it
| became a marketing/selling point as a counterpoint to the
| big G.
| zikduruqe wrote:
| It's called market shift.
|
| Automative manufactures didn't give a rats ass about fuel
| economy until customers wanted it.
| codetrotter wrote:
| > Apple didn't give two stones about security until it
| became a marketing/selling point as a counterpoint to the
| big G
|
| That's not true. Apple was position itself as being
| better at security than Microsoft long before Google was
| selling devices to people.
|
| For example:
|
| https://youtu.be/VuqZ8AqmLPY
| i_am_jl wrote:
| Apple _sold_ itself as having better security.
|
| It's debatable whether or not that was true, and even if
| you believed it it was up for another debate whether that
| security was by design or because Apple's vanishingly
| small share of the PC market made it uneconomical to
| write malware targeting OSX.
|
| This isn't to say that Microsoft was doing security
| properly back then either, they weren't.
| elishah wrote:
| True, but security and privacy are different things. At
| most, one could say that security is necessary-but-not-
| sufficient for privacy.
|
| Google is generally excellent at security, but that
| doesn't change the fact that they're a nightmare for
| privacy.
| lwhi wrote:
| Hmm, might want to reconsider that [1]
|
| [1]https://www.theregister.com/2017/11/28/root_access_byp
| ass_ma....
| asmor wrote:
| security isn't privacy, and technology isn't a public
| policy alignment
| lwhi wrote:
| I was responding to a comment directly mentioning
| 'security'
| idiotsecant wrote:
| >Apple didn't give two stones about security until it
| became a marketing/selling point
|
| I don't much care. Companies don't have ethics, they have
| fiscal goals. If Apples fiscal goals happen to line up
| with my own goals, so much the better.
|
| I would tend to trust a company who is doing something to
| selfishly support the bottom line way easier than I would
| trust a company who claims to be doing it for the common
| good of all humanity.
|
| Google famously started off trying to not be evil and
| also be a profitable company simultaneously. It didn't
| work out great in that one of those goals became
| _slightly_ more important than the other.
| zirgs wrote:
| Also multiple celebrities had their nudes stolen from
| their iCloud.
| [deleted]
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| True, but to be fair leading the pack was first Element, with
| Session, Threema, Viber and Signal.
| glimshe wrote:
| In even more fairness, Meta has literally skipped the EU for
| Threads instead of increasing privacy. In their case, it's
| just a careful balance of virtue signaling, it had no qualms
| about pushing their spyware to hundreds of millions of
| people, violating basic human rights in the process.
|
| Check Article 12:
|
| https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-
| huma...
| Joeri wrote:
| And in even more fairness, privacy was not the reason
| Threads didn't launch in the EU. It is in violation of the
| digital markers act, not GDPR. The leveraging of market
| power in one platform to boost another platform is what is
| at fault, and seeing the meteoric rise of Threads on the
| back of Instagram's popularity the stratagem worked.
| hanspeter wrote:
| Meta already have Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp in
| compliance with EU legislation.
|
| Threads is not an attempt to push spyware on users, that
| would be incompliant in the EU. (And what is this spyware
| you believe is in Threads?) More likely they know exactly
| how much work it entails to be compliant and they decided
| to initially skip the EU market to speed up their launch.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Your comment would have been stronger if you left out the
| piece re: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
| because it's an eye roller. Article 12 is:
|
| > No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with
| his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks
| upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to
| the protection of the law against such interference or
| attacks.
|
| I'm no fan of Meta or their privacy violations, but saying
| that _voluntarily_ downloading an app (which by the way
| does clearly outline their privacy practices) is equivalent
| to having my humans rights violated just really waters down
| what "human rights" should mean.
| glimshe wrote:
| I think that the problem is that Meta has normalized this
| violation so it doesn't feel like a big deal. It feels
| watered down even for someone like you who appears to be
| very aware of the problem.
|
| It's like exploited workers and people living in quasi-
| slavery, many of them don't understand their rights and
| "voluntarily" waive them. My parents didn't really
| understand the implications of "voluntarily" accepting
| Meta's privacy statement - once I explained it to them,
| they were in complete horror.
| [deleted]
| rlpb wrote:
| Arguably it's not the voluntary downloading of an app
| that's the problem; it's the mandatory government
| imposition of privacy interference across all apps.
| indymike wrote:
| >> No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference
| with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to
| attacks upon his honour and reputation
|
| If I cannot attack the honor and reputation of a person,
| and by extension, artificial person like a corporation,
| what good is freedom of speech? How can I call someone
| out for being a scammer, or for doing horrible things?
| How does one seek public redress of a grievance against a
| company, or an agent of the government? Does arbitrary
| apply to timing, or the circumstance? Who is the arbiter
| of arbitrary? This is not a human right. It is a nice
| tool for a tyrannical government to strip away rights
| from people. Oh, you've violated Mr. Arresting Officer by
| accusing him of falsely arresting you. Now you get to
| deal with the false arrest and a human rights crime.
| Likewise, Ms. Bought a Mansion with Public Money can no
| longer be accused because she has a human right to not
| have to trifle with public accountability.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| >attacks upon his honour and reputation
|
| Yikes, seems like this is built to keep people from
| saying things about powerful people that they don't like.
| schnuri wrote:
| It's just that there was a time in Europe (about 80 years
| ago) when among other cruel things, the honor and
| reputation of a lot of people were actively destroyed for
| arbitrary reasons.
| [deleted]
| callalex wrote:
| Can you clarify what you are talking about?
| garyNeedsa wrote:
| [dead]
| asmor wrote:
| > voluntarily downloading an app
|
| that's all true until an app becomes the only way to
| interact with certain groups of people. i certainly
| wouldn't call my usage of Discord voluntary. it doesn't
| actually matter how often i read their privacy policy and
| shake my head. either I break off contact with a large
| part of the internet that's important to me or I
| begrudgingly agree "voluntarily" to their terms and
| conditions.
| rjsw wrote:
| I have a mobile phone SIM which only provides customer
| support over WhatsApp.
| dmbche wrote:
| May I ask, what compels you to use discord if it's not
| voluntary? It's absolutely impossible to use keybase or
| signal?
| asmor wrote:
| Have you ever actually tried to convince a non-technical
| friend or family member to use a different platform for
| communicating? Now try that with 10 people at the same
| time. The only reason Discord ever became successful is
| the huge vacuum of good UX that existed before it. A
| fragmentation of Skype, Steam, XFire, Teamspeak, Vent and
| Mumble. Jabber if you were playing certain MMOs. Signal
| and Keybase aren't even close either. Matrix is a little
| better, but still far off, and they have the Mastodon
| problem where explaining federation turns off normal
| peoples brains.
|
| And aside from that, a lot of software communities are on
| Discord now. People are gating download links behind it,
| use their threading feature for support and put their
| knowledge base in channels. And not just small
| communities and developers. ASUS has made their main
| communication channel Discord too.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| > Have you ever actually tried to convince a non-
| technical friend or family member to use a different
| platform for communicating
|
| How many non technical people have heard of Discord?
| dmbche wrote:
| I understand! It's just that I never had to download
| Discord for anything.
|
| I agree it's difficult. I've had success showing keybase
| to people because of how barebones simple it is - but
| it's not a solution for everything of course.
| bloqs wrote:
| You clearly dont have many friends or relatives that you
| actually interact with
| [deleted]
| dmbche wrote:
| I sure wonder how anyone interacted with friends and
| family before discord eh?
| 1shooner wrote:
| This isn't compulsory, it's just personally beneficial.
| There are plenty of beneficial contexts you need to opt
| into, and include some cost or compromise.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Someone is forcing you to use Discord? An app that I
| personally have never used?
| Loquebantur wrote:
| People miss the forest for the trees here. Democratic
| society needs a way for people to communicate freely.
| Those ways are dying out fast.
|
| In modern life, people don't discuss politics in
| townhalls, pubs, or whatever anymore. Online
| communication is by now far too siloed and supervised to
| the point of being unusable. Media are one-way streets,
| pushing the agenda of billionaires.
|
| But you _need_ to be able to have controversial
| discussions about "heavy" topics without fear of being
| ostracised. You _need_ to have a back-channel to give
| feedback to "higher ups". Etc.pp.
|
| A society where the individual is degraded to a mere
| drone (even if only loosely via framing) controlled by
| the "hive mind", without any recourse to voice
| constructive criticism is a lot of things, but certainly
| no democracy. There looms a dystopia on our doorstep.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| To be honest, I think you've got at least part of it
| backwards.
|
| > But you need to be able to have controversial
| discussions about "heavy" topics without fear of being
| ostracised.
|
| Uh, why? People should have freedom of speech, but it
| feels like a lot of people want freedom from _the
| consequences_ of the their speech. If anything, I think a
| lot of our current social disharmony is a direct result
| of the _extremely recent_ development of people being
| able to mouth offline with very little social
| constraints.
|
| Mike Tyson probably said it best: "Social media made
| y'all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and
| not getting punched in the face for it."
| alfonsodev wrote:
| Not even that, if I'm not mistaken Facebook imported
| contacts from users agenda and then allow third part apps
| to access the information, so even if you didn't have a
| Facebook, you data was leaked.
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-data-leak-contact-
| impor...
| hiatus wrote:
| So what you're really complaining about is that other
| people will not follow your choices. If your relations
| have such a hard line that a single app is "the only way
| to interact with certain groups of people", they are the
| ones to blame, not the maker of the app.
| throwmeback wrote:
| I'm afraid life (at least mine) is way more complicated
| than that.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| I don't think it's because of not wanting to preserve
| privacy I think it's because it takes a shit ton of time to
| comply with all the orders the EU has pinned on them.
| schnuri wrote:
| It takes a shit ton of time if to weasel around the GDPR
| if your business model is to collect as much personal
| data as possible.
| krschultz wrote:
| Threads is already GDPR compliant, that's not the only
| regulation the EU has made that covers these kinds of
| apps.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| EU DMA and I don't think it really has to do with privacy
| at all.
| j45 wrote:
| WhatsApp was a little late to the encryption party
| brasic wrote:
| What do you mean? WhatsApp rolled out E2E encryption
| between 2014 and 2016.
|
| It's by far the largest messaging service that is e2e
| encrypted by default. I think it's more than fair to call
| it ahead of the curve for a service of its size.
|
| https://www.wired.com/2014/11/whatsapp-encrypted-messaging/
| https://blog.whatsapp.com/end-to-end-encryption
| RektBoy wrote:
| Ridiculous stuff like this is why I'm cringing everytime any
| apple fanboi appears. Are you dense? Apple and all other major
| companies are cooperating with FBI/NSA/CIA all the freakin'
| time.
|
| These things they throw up is actually smart play from these
| global police agencies, so sheeps like you feel safe. (Android
| is the same thing)
| croes wrote:
| Yeah sure,
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-pr...
| justapassenger wrote:
| You must love Meta then, who refused to compromise to enter
| China (and boy, they tried). While Apple happily shares data
| with Chinese government to make billions.
| ehsankia wrote:
| Similarly, Bing is happy to run in China while Google pulled
| out of there.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| You mean how Facebook wouldn't "compromise" when it was
| outright banned?
| lawn wrote:
| If they would have compromised they wouldn't have been
| banned.
|
| So, yes?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/042915/wh
| y-f...
|
| China never asked them to compromise. They were banned in
| 2009.
| lawn wrote:
| And you know for a fact that they never communicated with
| Facebook and just banned them out of the blue?
|
| Or is this just speculation (fitting considering the
| source)?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Seeing that every non Chinese social media company was
| banned and that Zuckerberg later tried to get back into
| China
|
| > In 2018, Facebook attempted to set up a $30 million
| subsidiary in Hangzhou to incubate startups and give
| advice to local businesses. Permission to run the startup
| was quickly withdrawn
|
| Do you really think that Facebook is out of China for any
| moral reason?
| justapassenger wrote:
| Zuckerberg was courting China hard around 2015-ish, to
| allow them to operate. He learnt mandarin, spoke at
| Tsinghua University in Beijing, met Xi, etc.
|
| Of course, we don't know real reasons why they didn't open
| there, but end result is that Apple shares data with China
| and Meta doesn't.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| > has the power to shift policy in favor of human rights
|
| Except for right to repair...
|
| And software freedom...
| blitz_skull wrote:
| Those are not human rights. Privacy, on the other hand, is.
| tomefaire wrote:
| I think I'd prefer to have both privacy and control over
| devices I own.
| danShumway wrote:
| I'll push back on this. I think that Right to Modify[0] is
| a human right. I think that software freedom and user
| agency (especially where it relates to vendor lock-in) is
| closely related to human rights, in the sense that it can
| directly impact people's ability to express those rights.
|
| To say that right to repair in specific isn't a human right
| because the actual human right is
| agency/ownership/modification/whatever, is a bit like
| saying that encryption isn't a human right because the
| actual right is privacy and encryption is just a way to
| maintain privacy.
|
| The end result is still that people aren't able to exercise
| rights. I would argue very strongly that having a degree of
| autonomy over the devices/objects that you own is an
| intrinsic right.
|
| And if you look back at the history of Open Source
| software, you'll find that conversations about Libre/Free
| software have been regularly grounded in discussions of
| human rights from the start; from rights to ownership, to
| modification, to communication.
|
| [0]: https://anewdigitalmanifesto.com/#right-to-modify
| 13of40 wrote:
| The right to repair is a direct extension of "banging the
| rocks together" - i.e. toolmaking, the main thing that
| defines us as humans. How can that not be a human right?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the main thing that defines us as humans. How can that
| not be a human right?_
|
| Plenty of animals use tools [1]. And this isn't how we
| define human rights. Bipedalism is quintessentially
| human, that doesn't make tunnels a crime against
| humanity.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_non-
| humans
| 13of40 wrote:
| I'm fine giving the animals the right to repair as well.
| robin_reala wrote:
| Specifically, it's Article 12 of the Universal Declaration
| of Human Rights: https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-
| declaration-of-huma...
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > Stuff like this is why I'm an Apple fanboy.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choice-supportive_bias
|
| _the tendency to retroactively ascribe positive attributes to
| an option one has selected and /or to demote the forgone
| options. It is part of cognitive science, and is a distinct
| cognitive bias that occurs once a decision is made. For
| example, if a person chooses option A instead of option B, they
| are likely to ignore or downplay the faults of option A while
| amplifying or ascribing new negative faults to option B.
| Conversely, they are also likely to notice and amplify the
| advantages of option A and not notice or de-emphasize those of
| option B_
| nashashmi wrote:
| Actions like this is why I used to trust Google. Fighting
| government overreach should have been a critical part of
| technology and data.
|
| But it seems Google was more political in its relationships
| than idealistic. And now the entire sector is compromised.
|
| Apple will be one day compromised too. In some crevice of some
| unknown government office is a person working on a ten-year
| initiative to get access to inaccessible information in the
| tech sector. AT&T was compromised this way. Microsoft was
| compromised this way. Google was compromised.
|
| What is to say Apple won't be compromised??
| hospitalJail wrote:
| They are already compromised. They give data to the US
| government, China, and Russia.
|
| OP is repeating marketing.
| dainiusse wrote:
| This
| JPws_Prntr_Fngr wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
|
| Apple is a participant in the NSA's PRISM mass surveillance
| program. They've been compromised for a long time. I doubt
| any decent sized corporation isn't.
| nashashmi wrote:
| I am going to give them the benefit of doubt in the case of
| PRISM. It is not clear whether PRISM is the result of
| forced/voluntary participation, or the result of
| vulnerabilities found in their systems. Because of the
| diagrams in the PRISM powerpoint mentioning some of the
| integration is "coming soon", I feel it is definitely not
| legally coerced, otherwise everyone would participate at
| once. Also due to the integration having varying limits
| from service to service tells me this not given to NSA on a
| silver platter. Lastly, the outright denial of these
| companies further tells me that they are unaware.
|
| PRISM is the result of vulnerabilities found and purchased
| from hackers. And integrated together in a project
| codenamed PRISM. Each source has different levels of
| information sharing. And with Dropbox being a less
| integrated and more primitive resource for search, I know
| the entire PRISM program was a gum and shoestring project.
| JPws_Prntr_Fngr wrote:
| It is _possible_ that their involvement in PRISM is
| involuntary. However, as a member of the "screeching
| voices of the minority" [0], I will _not_ extend them the
| benefit of the doubt.
|
| [0] https://9to5mac.com/2021/08/06/apple-internal-memo-
| icloud-ph...
| leptons wrote:
| Exactly this. When some government makes a big public
| proposal to invade privacy, Apple will speak up with
| bravado. But they won't say a word in all the other cases
| when a government demands to invade privacy when those
| demands are made in secret.
| cmitsakis wrote:
| The fact that there are companies that have the power to shift
| public policy is the problem. Because they use that power for
| their interests that don't align with our interests.
| blitz_skull wrote:
| [flagged]
| jmclnx wrote:
| I hope they really do this. All too often Companies will say
| this then when the law is passed they back down. Why,
| stockholders.
|
| Has Apple really removed iMessage and FaceTime anywere else ?
| Are these available with 100% full encryption in China ? If so
| then they are just blowing wind :(
| kotaKat wrote:
| FaceTime was banned in the UAE up until ~2021 when it
| suddenly started working again for non-UAE phones[1]. For the
| longest time iOS/macOS has had feature and region flags at a
| lower hardware level that could dictate system policy for
| things like FaceTime as well as the camera shutter sound
| required in Korea/Japan.
|
| [1] https://apnews.com/article/dubai-middle-east-united-arab-
| emi...
| epcoa wrote:
| > Are these available with 100% full encryption in China ? If
| so then they are just blowing wind :(
|
| Talk less, read more.
| jmclnx wrote:
| Well here is something for you to read, if you are a
| Chinese Citizen living in China, then these messages can be
| seen by the Government because iCloud data must be stored
| in China.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/cskufy/imessage_encry
| p...
| isykt wrote:
| Can a Chinese person not use iMessage without iCloud?
| This is possible in the US. In fact, it's the default.
| epcoa wrote:
| Yeah, ok, try harder than a Reddit thread where
| supposedly authoritative commenters can't even spell
| encrypt.
|
| The idiot pmendes is wrong (if he was correct then no one
| knowledgeable on the subject would classify that system
| as E2EE - something more to read about). The encryption
| keys are not managed in iCloud which you can read
| yourself:
|
| https://support.apple.com/guide/security/how-imessage-
| sends-...
|
| https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/messages/#:~:
| tex....
|
| iCloud backup is an opt in feature - you use it full well
| knowing it effectively damages the affordance of E2E
| regardless of locale if ADP is not available.
|
| "Read more" did not mean social media.
| philsnow wrote:
| > The idiot pmendes is wrong (if he was correct then no
| one knowledgeable on the subject would classify that
| system as E2EE
|
| What exactly is pmendes wrong about? Are you referring to
| this comment:
|
| > In iMessage the message contents are in fact end to end
| encripted. Each device encripts the message using the
| recipient keys and then sends the message. The problem is
| that iCloud manages the keys by itself so you have no way
| of knowing who is the exact owner of the key. Addionaly,
| on group chats, they don't even need to be a man in the
| middle. They can just add their key to the list of
| encription keys for that chat, and receive a copy of each
| message.
|
| What's wrong there, aside from spelling? The nit I would
| pick is that in "iCloud manages the keys", I would change
| "iCloud" to "Apple" or "Apple's IDS".
|
| How, specifically, does iCloud backup damage the
| affordance of E2E? This doesn't make any sense.
|
| If you have somebody's GPG public key, you can encrypt a
| file to that public key and then put up the encrypted
| file on a public FTP site [0], whence they can download
| and decrypt it. iMessage does nearly exactly that, except
| that 1) Apple's identity service effectively solved the
| key distribution problem, 2) the messages are, even
| though already encrypted, themselves also transmitted by
| encrypted channels to Apple's servers during transit.
|
| [0] Well, I wouldn't do this if I were at all concerned
| about the contents because it doesn't allow for forward
| secrecy.
| epcoa wrote:
| > What's wrong there, aside from spelling?
|
| If you're going to classify every critical fact as a
| "nit" then nothing is ever wrong.
|
| IDS vs iCloud is far more than a nit. They're completely
| different services. iCloud is run by a 3rd party in
| China, this is well publicized, whereas IDS is not. So
| that's like not a minor detail.
|
| iMessage does not depend on iCloud. You don't need an
| iCloud account. These are unrelated.
|
| Contact key verification is a more recent addition, and
| again not dependent on iCloud.
|
| > How, specifically, does iCloud backup damage the
| affordance of E2E?
|
| Just saying, you can sync your data to whatever encrypted
| or unencrypted service you want if you choose to. This
| may diminish the value to the end user of E2EE but it is
| unrelated. I'm not the one that brought up iCloud first.
| Take that up with the original commenter.
| [deleted]
| decentsafety wrote:
| I was looking around to see what china has access to
| after seeing this post... However, people mention their
| messages can only be visible if icloud backups are
| enabled? Seems risky to trust either way.
| epcoa wrote:
| People should read actual documentation and expert or
| academic writing rather than a bunch of terminally online
| nerds on Reddit. I've seen nothing credible that the E2E
| for iMessage and FaceTime isn't as advertised. If you
| backup to the cloud you're electing to disclose your data
| outside the boundaries of encryption.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > People should read actual documentation
|
| Then they should read the leaked government documents
| from around the world that contradict what Apple says
| themselves. Failing that, they should _at least_ be able
| to read the actual code to corroborate its security, but
| that 's not an option either.
| epcoa wrote:
| > Then they should read the leaked government documents
| from around the world that contradict what Apple says
| themselves.
|
| On what specifically?
|
| > they should at least be able to read the actual code to
| corroborate its security, but that's not an option
| either.
|
| Why does that matter? You're already trusting Apple
| hardware. Public access to source code doesn't make
| security systems safer. I'm not sure what a journalist or
| even 99% of webshits on this forum would do with trying
| to audit crypto.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > On what specifically?
|
| For starters, PRISM and XKeyscore. Both are damning
| indictments of the state of surveillance a _decade ago_ ,
| and are so damaging that pretty much every FAANG company
| denies knowledge of their existence. PRISM was about the
| outreach the US government has with domestic companies,
| and XKeyscore showed _just how far_ those connections
| could be abused.
|
| Simply the fact that these leaked documents exist and
| Apple denying them is a contradiction. Everything else is
| speculation, but my brain can imagine a lot happening
| over those past 9 years.
|
| > Why does that matter?
|
| Accountability purposes.
|
| > You're already trusting Apple hardware.
|
| Ideally I don't do that either. I'm not a fan of closed
| firmware interfaces and if possible, I'd like to audit
| the code for those as well.
|
| > Public access to source code doesn't make security
| systems safer.
|
| The majority of networked servers online today beg to
| differ. Over time the industry actually found that it's
| much safer to use an open and transparent OS than it is
| to trust a black-box with UB that may-or-may-not be
| fixed.
|
| > I'm not sure what a journalist or even 99% of webshits
| on this forum would do with trying to audit crypto.
|
| This speaks to a lack of either experience or
| imagination, I can't tell which.
| epcoa wrote:
| > For starters, PRISM and XKeyscore. Both are damning
| indictments of the state of surveillance a decade ago,
| and are so damaging that pretty much every FAANG company
| denies knowledge of their existence.
|
| Where's this denial by Apple? Or is your argument that
| because Apple doesn't admit colluding with the NSA they
| must be doing it. Well that is not falsifiable and what
| evidence are you speaking to of Apple specifically
| colluding with the NSA.
|
| > I'd like to audit the code for those as well.
|
| Firmware is not hardware. That would still not address
| the hardware issue.
|
| > The majority of networked servers online today beg to
| differ. Over time the industry actually found that it's
| much safer to use an open and transparent OS than it is
| to trust a black-box with UB that may-or-may-not be
| fixed.
|
| Yes, the neckbeards chant since CatB. There are extremely
| few people not putting their trust in blackboxes.
| Slapping linux on a box doesn't magically make it
| transparent - nor does linux have a security record you
| want to brag about.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > Where's this denial by Apple?
|
| https://www.apple.com/apples-commitment-to-customer-
| privacy/
|
| > Well that is not falsifiable and what evidence are you
| speaking to of Apple specifically colluding with the NSA.
|
| Wow. What a conspicuous coincidence that all of the
| exonerating evidence is behind closed-doors and marked
| "trust us"!
|
| > That would still not address the hardware issue.
|
| Is there a hardware issue?
| epcoa wrote:
| That's from a decade ago. Verb tense matters. Apple
| _denied_ knowledge of PRISM before the leak, I don 't see
| where they are denying it since. In any event, you may
| not believe it, and it's not the craziest thing to be
| suspicious, but you also unfortunately don't seem to have
| any counter.
|
| > What a conspicuous coincidence that all of the
| exonerating evidence.
|
| What exonerating evidence? How does one generally
| exonerate themselves that they don't know something or
| were never privy to it.
|
| And I'm no fan of Apple (I'm also not a fan of baseless
| conspiracy theories), and the flip side of this is what
| benefit would it be to the NSA to disclose a program to a
| multinational company of >100k employees if they didn't
| have to.
|
| You're trying to make it sound like there is a smoking
| gun that Apple has been lying about their NSA
| involvement, moreover insinuating in ways that don't seem
| to serve the best interests of the NSA - and I might even
| believe you - but so far you have put up nothing but
| innuendo.
|
| > Is there a hardware issue?
|
| Ok, so you audit your firmware. Why do you trust the
| hardware you're going to run this audited firmware on?
| You have thus far proven my point about general public
| access to source code.
|
| The bottom line is that for the threat model faced by
| most developed nation citizens, Apple's privacy value
| proposition is pretty good. If you're up against a large
| nation-state that is willing to spend some resources
| you're fucked - and auditing your firmware isn't going to
| change that.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13516780
| garyNeedsa wrote:
| [dead]
| GoToRO wrote:
| You are just giving your secrets to a company you can't change
| instead of a goverment you can elect.
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| Ok, I give my secrets to a non-privacy focused company. I
| still cannot change that company.
| [deleted]
| can16358p wrote:
| Except that those "elected" governments are already just
| storefronts of big corps anyway.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| The company doesn't have a hundred thousand armed officers
| with the ability to arrest / kill me for anything they can
| claim they found. Government comes equipped with legal
| violence, the company comes equipped with targeted ads
| tarxvf wrote:
| And the company can give your data to the government with
| no recourse available to you and no warrant required from
| the government.
| tifik wrote:
| If they choose to sure, but I dont see what incentive
| they would have. After all, the post is about a company
| removing products from a market rather than being subject
| to a law that would allow the gov to force them to do so.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > but I dont see what incentive they would have.
|
| They are frequently subpoenaed for information, and turn
| over that data more often than not:
| https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/us.html
| tifik wrote:
| Yeah, because they are asked to/legally required. I was
| questioning incentives to hand over information on their
| own accord, just because they can.
| smoldesu wrote:
| All of these are their own accord. That's even what OP's
| article is about - if Apple is legally required to break
| their encryption in the EU, _then_ they will discontinue
| their product.
|
| Let's not pretend this is a privacy-motivated decision.
| Where Apple _doesn 't_ have negotiating power (eg. China)
| they have been forced to compromise user safety and
| privacy[0]. We live in a post XKeyscore world, pretending
| like this _doesn 't_ also happen in America or the UK is
| a bedtime story for helpless capitalists.
|
| [0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208351
|
| edit: s/EU/UK
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Huh? Isn't this story about the possibility of the UK
| government legally requiring Apple to do something?
| algas wrote:
| Which is a good reason to avoid giving your data to
| either one in the first place. If I don't have a choice
| though, I'll take the company over the government any
| day.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Difficulty: "Any day" meaning 1917 in Russia or 1933 in
| Germany.
|
| (Edit: for my next trick, I will read the post more
| carefully before replying)
| detourdog wrote:
| I don't understand this comment the Tsar and the Nazi's
| were both governments.
|
| Another good example is the Dutch housing all the data in
| an building that was used to track down and kill the
| right people.
|
| The data existing is the problem. The ideal situation is
| that there is no data.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| D'oh, you're right, I misread the GP. Finish coffee
| first, then post.
| detourdog wrote:
| I had to double check everything to make sure it wasn't
| me.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > The company doesn't have a hundred thousand armed
| officers with the ability to arrest / kill me
|
| ask Foxconn employees if that's true or not.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| It's true, they merely have enough cash on hand to fund a
| small army, enough legal power to crush you in court with
| anything you attempt.
|
| Make no mistake: if Apple needed to get someone killed,
| they would. They're not some miraculous pinnacles of good
| in a sea of evil. It's just that they merely need to flex
| the law at you to destroy your life forever. Apple is no
| different, they'll hire the Pinkertons and break your
| fingers should they find the need to. Carnegie Steel did
| it, Apple's not above it either.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| >Make no mistake: if Apple needed to get someone killed,
| they would.
|
| Ok, I'll play along. Suppose Tim Cook wakes up tomorrow
| and decides for some reason he wants me dead. How exactly
| does he do it?
| onetokeoverthe wrote:
| [dead]
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > How exactly does he do it?
|
| Just imagine this: Tim Cook travel expenses amount to an
| half a million dollar per year.
|
| travel expenses only.
|
| A professional hit man costs between 1/100th and 1/33th
| of that.
|
| Tim has to simply give up on a pair of new shoes that
| year.
| jrockway wrote:
| Are you saying that the internal accounting controls at
| Apple are so lax that Tim Cook can pay contractors off
| the books out of his own travel expenses?
|
| I also imagine the post-arrest interview of the $5000
| hitman going like this:
|
| "You're charged with Murder 1, which is a capital offense
| in this state. Are you ready to die for $5000?"
|
| "Tim Cook made me do it."
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Yes, misuse and misappropriation of funds is such an
| uncommon event for fortune 500 companies. Especially the
| CEO, they have to justify every little expense!
|
| In what wonder world are you living?
| Brusco_RF wrote:
| I am confused. Are you arguing that this is a thing that
| happens? If so, I'd like to see any shred of evidence
| whatsoever.
|
| On the other hand, we know that governments do this sort
| of thing all the time.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > I am confused. Are you arguing that this is a thing
| that happens?
|
| they simply have better tools than hitmen, but, for
| example
|
| https://www.businessinsider.in/policy/news/former-ceo-of-
| ama...
|
| https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/clearly-lasik-
| co-f...
|
| > we know that governments do this sort of thing all the
| time.
|
| they also have better tools than hiring hitmen
|
| contract killing is a fraction of all the homicides
|
| OP asked how the multi billionaire CEO of a trillion
| dollars company could kill someone
|
| He could simply hire an hitman, it would cost him peanuts
|
| If the victim is also using one of the products the
| company makes, they would also be in possession of all
| the information an hitman would need to complete his
| task, no investigation would be necessary
| fastball wrote:
| Where do you find a hitman for $5k?
| nashashmi wrote:
| Depends on your crime. If you outed his human rights
| overlook, then he will send you on a vacation to the
| place with the Human rights violation. And somehow you
| will get in trouble with the mob there because for some
| reason they don't like you for threatening their jobs.
|
| If you don't take his vacation offer, he will invite you
| to a party on his dime. If you don't attend, he will use
| your location data, make it seem like you were in the
| wrong place at the wrong time. And depending on the
| severity and nature of your crime, the outcome will be
| just low ball enough to make it seem like apple needs to
| do something bigger than focus on human rights, like
| making better devices for your security.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Do you live in China? If so, they probably just send a
| Foxconn employee or PRC representitive with some sort of
| firearm.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| You lack creativity. You have multiple billions available
| for that. Where do you want your remains to disappear ?
| Hell, even sharks with lasers isn't far fetched with that
| amount of money.
|
| But all playfulness aside:
|
| * Pay professional hitmen. * Pay a hobo enough to go beat
| you up in your home. * Pay enough people enough money to
| kill you pretty much anywhere.
|
| What are they going to do, plead in front of a judge that
| sees 90% of his murder cases unsolved or solved through
| guilty pleas that Tim Cook gave them a wad of cash when
| all they saw was a subordinate of a subordinate of a
| subordinate ? There's nothing fancy about it. Especially
| with an economy that drives people to drastic measures: a
| huge wad of cash that you're guaranteed to keep is enough
| for most people.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| > * Pay professional hitmen
|
| You mean, pay an undercover cop who is advertising
| himself as a professional hitman?
|
| > * Pay a hobo enough to go beat you up in your home.
|
| He'll pay the hobo, and hobo will run off with the money
|
| > all they saw was a subordinate of a subordinate of a
| subordinate
|
| This is even more crazy than the earlier suggestions. You
| think there is going to be a chain of subordinates at
| apple who will all go along with a murder conspiracy? Try
| arranging a surprise party with five people, see how well
| people can keep a secret.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| "My favorite multinational trillion dollar worth
| conglomerate that has a history of not caring about human
| rights when it comes to the production of their devices
| surely would never do that!"
|
| You're naive. Less than 100 years ago the Pinkertons were
| still murdering workers and nothing happened to them.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| I would assume he brainwashes a male model to kill you.
|
| Sorry for the Zoolander reference. I couldn't help it
| JPws_Prntr_Fngr wrote:
| But why male models?
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Hiring a hitman to do it?
|
| There are plenty of unhinged people in this world who do
| illegal shit for enough money. Do you think some Ex-
| Wagner mercenary would pass up that offer?
| locustous wrote:
| SOP is to have a team "suicide" you.
| JPws_Prntr_Fngr wrote:
| It doesn't even have to be good. It can be a "robbery"
| where you get professional-grade double-tapped on your
| front lawn but nothing's taken, or a "suicide" where you
| hang yourself from a tree whilst simultaneously
| shotgunning yourself in the chest. The news will just
| parrot the local cops' PR statement.
| williamdclt wrote:
| The company can't send me in jail if they don't like what I'm
| trying to keep secret
| JohnFen wrote:
| Sure they can. History is full of examples of powerful
| corporations doing things like putting people in jail,
| commanding armies, etc.
| JPws_Prntr_Fngr wrote:
| Downvoters: instead of reflexively downvoting, why not
| try reading? Here is some recent history:
|
| Blood for Bananas: United Fruit's Central American Empire
| [0] The lawyer who took on Chevron - and now marks his
| 600th day under house arrest [1] (Debatable) Business
| Plot, aka Wall St Putsch [2]
|
| [0] https://history.wsu.edu/rci/sample-research-project/
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-
| news/2021/mar/28/chevron-lawy... [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| Companies can't put you in a box at gunpoint if you break one
| of their rules.
| throwbadubadu wrote:
| Sure thing, goes quick, and never changes, and works
| everywhere :)
|
| The power a government has over you is likely also
| potentially the same as a company?
|
| And lastly it is wrong, if the apps do E2E right (but I have
| no clue about that) you don't give them a secret at all?
|
| You also cannot change one company, but you can change
| companies usually better than governments ;)
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| WTF? I can buy a phone from another company if I disagree
| with Apple's approach, or use no phone at all. Try doing that
| with your government sometime and see how it goes for you.
|
| Nobody worries about the _government_ giving customer data to
| _Apple_ , do they? Why do you suppose that might be?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| How many people are going to make encryption their top
| priority when voting?
|
| And besides, private corporations don't have a "monopoly on
| violence", the government does
| mrangle wrote:
| Ignoring the client side scanning ability that is built into
| the OS, which raises other suspicions.
|
| It takes a lot of unearned trust to to assume that there isn't
| classified surveillance occurring.
|
| If it is, public virtue signalling about not breaking
| encryption is theater. As the surveillance occurs prior to
| encryption.
| elishah wrote:
| > Ignoring the client side scanning ability that is built
| into the OS
|
| Which client side scanning would that be?
| sp332 wrote:
| https://www.wired.com/story/apple-photo-scanning-csam-
| commun... This scandal about scanning your end-to-end
| encrypted photos on one of the ends, kinda defeating the
| purpose and reducing everyone's privacy. It lead directly
| to the legislation that Apple is coming out against today,
| which I would call ironic but is very predictable. How dare
| governments require us to do this thing we already planned
| to do.
| elishah wrote:
| That CSAM detection method was something that apple
| published a whitepaper about to get feedback. The
| feedback was strongly negative, so they never implemented
| it.
|
| I would hope that the grandparent was not referring to
| this thing that never existed as "the client side
| scanning ability that is built into the OS."
| ghusto wrote:
| > a company that has the power to shift policy in favor of
| human rights
|
| Well you're _technically_ right; they do indeed have that
| power. However, it sounds like you're suggesting they are using
| that power _to_ shift policy in favor of human rights (emphasis
| is of importance).
|
| Whilst I can't prove that their intention has nothing to do
| with human rights, it's only in the same way that I can't prove
| the last U.S. invasion of Iraq wasn't about protecting the
| world from weapons of mass destruction.
|
| It is patently obvious to me that this is a business decision
| fuelled by the drive to keep profits up, that just happens to
| coincide with happily with a PR friendly action. It's great
| that they're doing this, but it's just a coincidence that it
| aligns with what we want.
| pphysch wrote:
| > but it's just a coincidence that it aligns with what we
| want.
|
| I agree with your comment, but I think it is naive to assume
| that Apple does PR by happenstance. Effective
| marketing/messaging is the _bedrock_ of their business
| strategy.
|
| So yes they probably did this primarily for raw profit/power
| reasons, but the positive PR is a close secondary.
| leptons wrote:
| It's not happenstance. They planned this action. But, "A
| broken clock is right twice a day" applies here.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| iMessage and FaceTime are large parts of the Apple Ecosystem
| lock-in. What obvious profit motive (separate from PR) would
| removing them provide?
| ghusto wrote:
| It doesn't have to deal with compliance issues, which are
| not only getting more complicated, but also increasing in
| number.
|
| "Sorry guv, I don't have the keys for that, so I'm not
| responsible for what went on as I couldn't have known".
|
| Though the biggest money maker is the idea itself. Many
| believe that Apple is "on their side", and these kinds of
| plays re-enforce that. The moment it's more profitable to
| sell you out than "stand up for privacy", they'll do it.
| [deleted]
| baruchel wrote:
| From a security point of view, there is no difference between
| being able to access your data and actually doing it. You may
| picture such or such company as better than another one (and
| maybe it is, though I strongly doubt it) if you want, but
| behaving yourself as if that company really cares about your
| privacy is extremely naive.
|
| I would rather suggest firmly believing whatever company you
| chose is spying you (be it true or not), and adjusting what you
| can accordingly (settings, apps, usage, etc.).
| sneak wrote:
| Headline: Exclusive: Apple dropped plan for encrypting backups
| after FBI complained - sources
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...
|
| Even with the new iCloud e2ee, which is not on by default, if
| you enable it, Apple and FBI/DHS/et al can still read all your
| messages (unless each and everyone you iMessage with also
| enables it), because iCloud still escrows iMessage sync keys in
| non-e2ee iCloud Backups, breaking the e2ee in iMessage.
|
| For 99.99%+ of iMessages, they ARE NOT E2EE and can be read at
| any time by Apple and provided to the state without a warrant.
| This is _by design_. HT202303 explains this, because for some
| reason Apple doesn 't like to publicly lie.
|
| This article is brand marketing, nothing more. It worked on
| you.
|
| Apple has the ability to ship private devices. They don't
| because they choose not to fight city hall.
| obituary_latte wrote:
| Thanks for the reply. So am I misunderstanding their data
| security overview page?[0]
|
| >For additional privacy and security, 14 data categories --
| including Health and passwords in iCloud Keychain -- are end-
| to-end encrypted. Apple doesn't have the encryption keys for
| these categories, and we can't help you recover this data if
| you lose access to your account. The table below includes a
| list of data categories that are always protected by end-to-
| end encryption.
|
| The table includes Messages in iCloud with the caveat that
| the key is stored in iCloud backups if enabled, but the e2e
| key is still private, no?
|
| [0]https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303
| sneak wrote:
| iCloud Backups are enabled by default, and the Messages in
| iCloud key is in the non-e2ee iCloud Backup.
|
| That means the iMessages being synced are encrypted to an
| endpoint key which is held by both the endpoint and the
| middle transit service (iCloud/iCloud Backup). That's end-
| to-middle-and-end encrypted, i.e. not end to end encrypted.
|
| Even if you turn on iCloud Backup e2ee (it's an option now)
| then your iMessages to everyone who hasn't (99.9%+ of
| people) aren't e2ee because the other end of the
| conversation is backing up their endpoint sync key.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> Stuff like this is why I'm an Apple fanboy. I'm happy to pay
| a premium and be locked into their walled garden_
|
| Such statements rarely end up ageing like wine in the long run.
| Why would you be so happy about being owned by some big
| corporation just because it's your favorite big corporation?
|
| Self preservation has taught me not to trust any big
| corporation, regardless of how good their PR is.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Apple has been around for a pretty long time as far as tech
| companies go. I have grievances with them, but mostly they do
| a better than average job on privacy.
| amelius wrote:
| > mostly they do a better than average job on privacy
|
| which is really a low bar.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> Apple has been around for a pretty long time as far as
| tech companies go._
|
| So have 100 year old car companies, and I'm old enough to
| remember many people saying the same things about their
| favorite car brand in the past ("I'm only buying X brand
| because they make quality stuff and they never broke my
| trust") and I also know they changed their opinion recently
| after a couple of decades.
|
| And changing car brands is way easier than changing
| smartphone ecosystems, should one of the two players decide
| to screw you.
|
| My point is people should not be fanboys of any
| corporation. History has proven they can always turn
| against their customer, even if Apple so far hasn't done
| it, but there's time, company management and culture can,
| and will always change with time, and with constant
| shareholder pressure for infinite growth there's plenty of
| opportunities in the future for the tides to turn, mark my
| words.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| It's not that hard to pivot ecosystems. Unless you have
| extremely high-end devices and an extremely low end car,
| you can almost always move from Apple to another
| ecosystem for a lot less than changing cars (assuming
| you're buying new devices and a new car OR used devices
| and a used car). You can even make the move gradually
| over months or years.
| pjerem wrote:
| > And changing car brands is way easier than changing
| smartphone ecosystems, should one of the two players
| decide to screw you.
|
| In what world ?
|
| I have switched from iOS to Android and vice versa
| multiple times while still driving the same car.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> I have switched from iOS to Android and vice versa
| multiple times while still driving the same car._
|
| Did your app purchases form the Google Play Store
| automatically transfer to your Apple App store, and did
| your photos off your Google drive transfer to your
| iCloud, or vice-versa?
|
| Read my comment again, I ware referring to the ecosystems
| not being interchangeable, not the phones themselves.
|
| The incompatible ecosystems is the tie-in that keeps
| people tied to their respective walled gardens, not the
| physical HW phone brick itself which is interchangeable.
| Once people invested enough money in one ecosystem,
| they're less likely to switch to the competition as all
| their data and purchases are trapped.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| Not sure why you got downvoted, it's purposely hard to
| switch ecosystems, I'm in the middle of switching from
| android to IOS, but still have over a decade of data in
| gmail, google photos, and google drive. And I waited
| until my wife was willing/ready to switch because it's
| harder to share across ecosystems. Fortunately we don't
| own many apps (mostly things with external subscriptions
| like news, streaming media, etc) so purchasing
| replacement apps wasn't painful.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| > still have over a decade of data in gmail, google
| photos, and google drive
|
| And apps are available for iOS that let you access all of
| them. If you install Google Drive on the iPhone, your
| drive shows up along side iCloud in the Files app and
| open/save file dialoga
| Johnny555 wrote:
| Yes that's what I'm doing for now, but I left android
| because I didn't like sharing so much data with google,
| now I'm still sharing that data with google, and now
| apple too.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Google Drive to iCloud Drive:
|
| Do just the opposite of this
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36803905
|
| I'm sure there are ways to migrate your email.
| Thunderbird?
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> Not sure why you got downvoted_
|
| Fanboys don't like you pointing out the hard to swallow
| truth pills. They expect comments to validate their
| lifestyle choice, not contradict them. Any contraction is
| a direct offense to them.
|
| _> I'm in the middle of switching from android to IOS_
|
| At least for you it's easy, because all google apps exist
| for iOS, but switching away from iOS is absolutely
| impossible as there is no iCloud or iMessage for Android,
| so all your data remains hostage with Apple if you try to
| move.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| > At least for you it's easy, because all google apps
| exist for iOS, but switching away from iOS is absolutely
| impossible as there is no iCloud
|
| 1. Download Google Drive for iOS
|
| 2. Go to the Files App
|
| 3. Select all in your iCloud Drive
|
| 4. Copy
|
| 5. Go to your Google Drive in the Files app
|
| 6. Paste
|
| Just like you would copy files from one drive to another.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| This is why, every where I can, I _only_ use a company 's
| web app and not their installable app. The few apps that
| I use _as_ apps, I buy for each platform. This is also
| why I avoid subs for most apps. Not paying a sub for both
| platforms for a calendar app.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| > Did your app purchases form the Google Play Store
| automatically transfer to your Apple App store, and did
| your photos off your Google drive transfer to your
| iCloud, or vice-versa?
|
| Which apps would those be that you have to buy on iOS and
| Android separately? Most non game apps are subscription
| based that work across platforms.
|
| My photos are already sync to Google Photos on my iPhone
| and if I had an Android device, I would just download the
| Google Photos app.
|
| Music _bought_ on iTunes has been DRM free since 2008 and
| Apple Music is available on Android.
|
| Apple, Google, Amazon and a few other platforms and most
| of the studios participate in MoviesAnywhere where you
| buy movies from one platform and it shows up as purchased
| on the other platforms
|
| What data is "trapped"?
| [deleted]
| vecinu wrote:
| I have seen some arguments that they don't care about your
| privacy and it's all right there in the privacy policy if
| you're willing to read it. A video on the subject [1]
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/r38Epj6ldKU
| amelius wrote:
| Corporations > Democracy
|
| What could go wrong?
| comechao wrote:
| I hope they do this, I would not trust my govt (Brazil) with
| this power. Judges would use it all the time.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| [dead]
| mihaaly wrote:
| I wonder why the UK legislators not preparing a new regulation
| mandating every keys to every door and safe having a bypass
| mechanism for government officials.
|
| Behind every door and every locked place there could be child
| pornography and illicit materials hidden!! Every house, every
| hotel safe are suspects!
|
| Criminal oversight, criminal oversight!
|
| (and if they think their reasoning for backdoors into online chat
| and conversation is mandated by this supid reasoning of theirs
| then it must be valid for all entrance doors of every home and
| buidlding and every locked spaces as well! Getting easy access to
| material without assistance or knowledge of the people involved.)
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Likely because they know they don't actually need a bypass
| mechanism to bypass most physical barriers.
| deadletters wrote:
| Wait until you hear about search warrants
| didntcheck wrote:
| If you could invade someone's house as easily and invisibly
| as digital surveillance, physical search warrants would be
| swiftly ignored by the police too
| gumballindie wrote:
| > every keys to every door
|
| Have you seen doors in the uk? Most are just there for design.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I'll play Devil's Advocate (because I enjoy throwing myself
| into the fray -- especially when arguing against a point I
| actually agree with).
|
| No one is mass-sharing their safe of child-porn worldwide with
| thousands of other child-porn voyeurs.
|
| The internet and its ubiquitous accessibility combined with
| digital image file formats has changed the landscape for those
| that would fight these heinous crimes.
|
| It is indeed a new and special case where a locked safe is not.
| sva_ wrote:
| > No one is mass-sharing their safe of child-porn worldwide
| with thousands of other child-porn voyeurs.
|
| I wouldn't call 1 on 1 chats mass sharing
| anigbrowl wrote:
| You can have multiple 1-on-1 chats, and CP collectors are
| pretty good at finding each other online. While I'm very
| much against this UK legislation, people in the tech sector
| do themselves no favors bY= minimizing/handwaving the CP
| problem.
| hellojesus wrote:
| Isn't that why we pay gov agents to hang out in the seedy
| parts of the web? If CP consumers are able to find each
| other with relative ease, I'm sure agents impersonating
| them can find them too. Then it's up to them to locate
| them, likely by exploiting an opsec failure along the
| way.
|
| I see no reason the give the gov eyes on everything when
| they have a perfectly valid route to investigations.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Yes, and I specifically said I don't support the UK
| legislation so I'm not sure what point you're trying to
| make.
| hellojesus wrote:
| My point was that minimizing the csam issue isn't that
| relevant to the terribleness of a proposed law. Csam will
| likely always exist, unfortunately. It's too hard to
| prevent; the punishments seem to be nondeterrents.
|
| We already have mountains of awful laws that are passed
| via appeal to csam emotion. I see no reason to pass
| another one under the appeal of csam reduction when we
| all know how it will really be used.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Again, I'm not arguing in favor of this law, quite the
| opposite. I don't require you to persuade me of an
| opinion I already hold.
| piva00 wrote:
| I'll also play Devil's advocate even though I'm a very
| vocal advocate for data privacy in real life.
|
| These government agents are people as well, and as people
| they'll suffer to wade through the dark corners of the
| web to locate a minuscule part of all the CP data
| available worldwide. These people will inevitably require
| mental care to deal with the trauma of looking at GiBs
| and GiBs of small kids being raped, that's not a cost we
| can handwave to "we employ government agents", there's
| not a limitless supply of people willing to do this job,
| and doing this job doesn't come for free, not for the
| individuals doing it neither for society (mental trauma
| care; staffing high enough to allow rotations and avoid
| burn out, or PTSD, etc.).
| chfalck wrote:
| I know LLMs aren't a magic bullet for everything, but
| this seems like exactly the kind of problem they could
| solve well as they become more cost effective.
| Dramatically shrink the pool of real people required to
| keep an eye on this, and sub in virtual agents adept at
| detecting CP patterns.
|
| Security back doors also carry the risk of having the
| opposite effect. We've seen many examples of powerful,
| nation state developed tools being leaked online.
|
| There may be a rise in scenarios where people (including
| children) have their personal devices breached and are
| extorted for the exact thing the security backdoors were
| created to prevent.
| olliej wrote:
| Stop focusing on CP/Abuse.
|
| Governments use CP/Abuse to pass legislation, which is
| immediately used for almost anything other than that. If
| a government did actually care about child welfare there
| are many things they could do that would actually help
| children.
|
| But this law to "protect children" is being passed by a
| government that is simultaneously cutting services that
| help children, and also trying to reduce/restrict sex ed
| that so that it is easier to abuse children, I'm going to
| say that "protecting children" is not their goal with
| this law.
|
| As I said elsewhere, any argument for "we need the
| ability to remotely access the content of a phone" (which
| is what the law is demanding: silent updates to remove
| encryption and anything else they "need") equally applies
| to having a government mandated cameras in every house.
| That would actually prevent child abuse. It would prevent
| domestic violence. If such was happening the police could
| intervene immediately. It would remove he said/she said
| from courts: you can simply play the video from the home.
|
| By the definition of "no encryption because protect-the-
| children", mandatory cameras in every room of every house
| is both acceptable, and also objectively superior to BS
| anti-encryption laws. You can't abuse or beat your family
| members in the first place if a camera is watching, but
| anyone moving CSAM around on the internet isn't going to
| have a problem getting an actual encrypted channel - all
| the law does is make your personal communication,
| banking, finances, etc insecure, criminals are safe. Of
| course even if someone does use a now insecure
| communication channel to share their child abuse it's
| moot: the cameras in their house would have already
| caught them.
|
| So why screw around with "make everyone (including
| children) unsafe to 'protect the children'" when there's
| a much more effective solution that would stop the abuse
| in the first place?
|
| Also, the UK already passed a bunch of "you don't get
| privacy" laws in order to "prevent terrorism", and they
| seem to be used primarily to catch people not picking up
| dog poop, not paying tv licensing fees, etc which sure as
| shit doesn't sound like it's terrorism related.
|
| In summary: if a law that would otherwise violate fairly
| basic rights is being pushed with clearly emotive
| justifications like "child abuse", "terrorism" you should
| assume you are being played.
|
| The police do not need more power. They do not need to
| violate everyone's rights. They need to do their jobs and
| do actual work with what they already have, and
| demonstrate basic competence before they get any more
| invasive tools. Recall the Ariana grande bombing in the
| UK? Multiple friends and family of the bomber had
| independently and _repeatedly_ reported them to the UK
| police. 9 /11: multiple US government agencies had all
| the information needed, but were too busy trying to
| compete with each other. In addition (tens of, if you
| look at the US) thousands rape kits that aren't even
| processed, and weirdly they keep finding serial killers
| and rapists when. they. just. do. their. job.
|
| Throwing away more of our privacy, when police already
| have huge amounts of information that they just can't be
| bothered to look at, is beyond stupid.
|
| Similarly, based on the track record of supporting and
| aiding child abusers, and cutting support for children,
| any claims a government makes saying something is to
| "protect children" is clearly false.
| prmoustache wrote:
| And how introducing backdoors would change that?
| hellojesus wrote:
| I'm not sure I subscribe to that. I've spent a lot of
| time or the web, and I've seen a lot of gore. So much so
| it doesn't phase me now, even after not visiting those
| sites for a decade. I haven't dealt with csam, but I
| imagine the impact is similar. You get desensitized to
| it. The difference: LE gets to put and end to it via
| their investigations. That is rewarding enough for people
| to stay, I assume.
|
| Plus even if you did dragnet everything, you'll still
| need a human in the loop to verify the findings, even if
| ml classifiers are used to find leads.
|
| Plus what about people that just encrypt their messages
| locally before sending them across a backdoored platform?
| The gov can't make encryption illegal. It's just math.
| Folks will steno it into memes or whatever is hot that
| gets shared to allow it to live in plain sight.
| [deleted]
| guy98238710 wrote:
| In order to distribute illegal material, you have to go
| public with it, i.e. contact strangers. One of those
| strangers is going to be a police agent or a snitch seeking
| favors from the police.
|
| Sure you could limit yourself to known contacts, but that
| wouldn't make you rich nor would it create self-sustaining
| network.
| olliej wrote:
| > No one is mass-sharing their safe ...
|
| They literally are though? Numerous cases of child abusers
| abusing their children and publishing the footage of it from
| their homes, not to mention the mass storage and hosting
| (hosting _may_ be less common now).
|
| People physically abuse their family and children at scale
| (domestic violence is not rare), a really good way to stop
| this would be to mandate cameras and microphones in
| everyone's houses.
|
| Don't worry though: to see/hear recordings from inside
| someone's house police will need a warrant.
| barney54 wrote:
| I was going to say that I know someone who went to jail for
| sharing pictures of under-age porn. It happens.
|
| (But Apple is in the right in this case.)
| osigurdson wrote:
| I suspect, as always, the bad guys would find ways around any
| such measures. Leaving, normal, law abiding, tax paying
| citizens with diminished rights and freedoms.
| eddieroger wrote:
| When privacy is outlawed, only outlaws have privacy.
| FormerBandmate wrote:
| That's called bolt cutters
| rfrey wrote:
| Given the possibility of invisible and essentially free
| screening of private conversations, the analogy is probably
| more "install cameras in every home that only the government
| can access". But we promise, they'll be turned off most of the
| time.
| imchillyb wrote:
| School boards already successfully do this with 'student
| laptops' also known as in-home monitoring devices that cannot
| be switched off.
| nilespotter wrote:
| Has there been a case where a school board activated such a
| device to spy on the parents? That would be absolutely
| mental.
| dmvdoug wrote:
| Well, one difference is that those laptops belong to the
| school. They don't put in-home monitoring devices on
| privately owned devices.
|
| That said, it's still creepy, I agree.
| RektBoy wrote:
| [flagged]
| philjohn wrote:
| Mr Narwhal Tusk disagrees https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-
| britain-security-idUKKBN1...
| kergonath wrote:
| That is... entirely divorced from reality.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| >any violence against attacker with a weapon...
|
| Is that yourself with a weapon, or the attacker?
| vidarh wrote:
| At least in England and Wales, unreasonable force can be used
| in self defense (Crime and Courts Act 2013) as long as it is
| not grossly disproportionate, and people are regularly let
| off for that, so you're wildly off base.
|
| This includes cases where people have killed unarmed
| intruders.
|
| What will typically get people in trouble is not self
| defense, but cases where the victim continues after an
| attacker is no longer a threat (is subdued or fleeing).
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Bad acid trip?
|
| Hope you feel better soon.
| cmiles74 wrote:
| Because it is very easy for them to break down the door, or
| smash a nearby window, or simply wait for someone to go in or
| out and demand entry.
| Eighth wrote:
| Anecdotally, I've heard the argument made that police can knock
| in doors for raids, and they should have the same power over
| technology.
| didntcheck wrote:
| The obvious counter is that raiding a house is a very public
| and relatively expensive action. There's a natural
| disincentive to it. OTOH digital surveillance is more akin to
| being a ghost who can float through a door without anyone
| ever knowing you're there, and teleport there and back
| instantly with no physical time or effort
|
| I think this is the big change people miss when it comes to
| police powers in the digital age. There's not been really
| been a _culture_ shift from the police nor the citizens about
| police powers, just a increase in quantity of ability that
| has turned into a difference in quality. For decades agents
| of the state have had the theoretical ability to surveil
| people, and the people were generally OK with it because of
| the assumption that "well they won't bother doing it to a
| random guy like me", which _was_ true, back when it required
| actual footwork, and even pulling up someone 's file was a
| physical task
|
| Assuming one does accept targeted surveillance in extreme
| cases, then I'm not sure how to solve this apart from the
| frustratingly "stupid" and probably unenforceable solution of
| requiring the police and intelligence agencies to be stuck on
| 90s tech. Theoretical legal sanctions against doing this
| appear to have no teeth, the only way to discourage
| surveillance abuse is to make each instance have a _non-
| circumventable_ operational cost
|
| So to use a concrete example: I actually like private CCTV in
| public spaces. I do feel safer knowing the police can use
| that footage if I'm a victim of crime. But I only accept it
| because most systems are just writing to a local device,
| meaning there's a cost to the police asking for it. Any
| scheme to automate access to these records over the internet,
| no matter how well-meaning and theoretically legally
| restricted they are, would inevitably be used to make those
| scenes from The Bourne Ultimatum seem quaint
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Dunno how I feel about that metaphor. To me the current
| situation isn't just saying "police have the power to kick in
| doors". It's more like "citizens are banned from building
| houses with doors that make it hard for police to enter".
| Spivak wrote:
| I think if you could build such a thing they would be
| banned on the same grounds.
| appletrotter wrote:
| It already exists. You can have a door with a steel core.
| It's not illegal.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/zcvwno/steel_r
| ein...
| gene91 wrote:
| Are the windows and walls of the said house also made of
| steel? In that video, why are the armed personnel so
| obsessed with entering through the door?
| filoleg wrote:
| Because real life isn't an action movie, and police would
| rather try to ram the door for a while and hope it
| budges, instead of instantly going for rappelling from
| the rooftop or for using a ladder. Especially given how
| relatively uncommon steel core doors in apartments are in
| practice.
| jstarfish wrote:
| One guy climbing through a shard-lined window is easy to
| mow down; the first cop that dies halfway through will
| block access to the rest. It also disarms the guy with
| the riot shield.
|
| Opening the door lets a group of them quickly file in at
| once to swarm the occupants.
| dathinab wrote:
| but you know
|
| - they still have to be physically there
|
| - one team can do only one raid at a time
|
| - people know if they did a raid
|
| - they needs a judge order and because the previous point you
| can counter sue if reasonable, at least theoretically
|
| - they can't impersonate you all around the globe including
| in countries outside of the UK just by raiding you
|
| - a raid is time wise also limited
|
| - police being able to raid doesn't prevent you from
| _guarding_ yourself against random criminals or agents of
| foreign hostile governments raiding you
|
| - you know when you are raided
|
| - you are still allowed to put steal doors in your home
|
| - I probably missed a bunch of points
|
| I.e. it's not the same, not at all.
|
| A more correct comparison would to state police can raid you,
| so they should be able to hack your device but only to
| retrieve information and being required to leaf a message
| behind (and even that comparison has issues).
| wonderwonder wrote:
| This is a scam by the UK government, they don't care about child
| abuse, they are going to look into all sorts of communications to
| leverage people. If they cared about child abuse they would have
| shut down the open child prostitution rings running rampant. They
| openly let it continue because they are afraid of being branded
| racist since the gangs running them are minorities.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telford_child_sexual_exploit...
| actionfromafar wrote:
| The Wikipedia article doesn't exactly support your claim.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Fair enough, how about this one
|
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/news.sky.com/story/amp/1-000-ch.
| ..,
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I agree with your broader message, UK really wants to
| dragnet data.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| The article seems to implicate the West Mercia Police.
|
| You extend that to the entire UK government.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| The police didn't investigate child sex crimes because the
| perpetrators were non-white and the police didn't want to be
| seen as racist. What about that is incorrect?
| TheBigSalad wrote:
| The implication that this local police force is the same
| "UK Government" pushing for encryption standards.
| hot_gril wrote:
| "Think of the children" is always the reason rights (good or
| bad) get taken away.
| Given_47 wrote:
| The ultimate trump card
| throw0101b wrote:
| For several decades now:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocaly
| p...
| 93po wrote:
| I think it's pretty ridiculous to think there aren't white
| people dealing in organized sexual abuse of children
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Who said there wasn't? I'm not saying only minorities do
| this, far from. I'm saying the police openly ignored it
| because they were minorities in this case. This is not some
| sort of accusation that only minorities abuse kids, only that
| the government that wants your data to protect kids is
| questionable at best in this area.
| 93po wrote:
| "the gangs running them are minorities" pretty strongly
| implies it's only minorities doing this
| stronglikedan wrote:
| It certainly doesn't imply that, strongly or other. It's
| referencing a specific trend, but not negating other
| possibilities at all. Context is important.
| [deleted]
| generalizations wrote:
| It's a reference to a specific news incident a few years
| ago.
|
| A gang, composed of minorities, was explicitly ignored by
| the police _because_ the police were afraid of being seen
| as racist for cracking down on them.
| throwawayadvsec wrote:
| [flagged]
| wonderwonder wrote:
| What? The police openly admitted after an investigation that
| this is the reason they let it continue for generations. I'm
| framing this in reference to the UK government claiming they
| need the information to prevent child trafficking while their
| track record indicates that even with data they ignored it
| for decades. Please save the hysteria and wild accusations
| for Twitter
|
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/news.sky.com/story/amp/1-000-ch.
| ..
| nxx788 wrote:
| Are there sources other then the police, who failed to act
| and have a vested interest in finding excuses?
|
| Because "the dog ate my homework" I mean "no, cause I
| didn't want to be racist" stretches credulity.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| The parent didn't exactly choose the perpetrators did he?
|
| https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/newcastle-grooming-
| scan...
| wonderwonder wrote:
| It was an independent investigation not performed by the
| police department. The link is in the article in my prior
| post.
|
| Direct link is below:
|
| https://www.iitcse.com/
| TuringNYC wrote:
| On every single message outside the walled garden, Apple should
| have a note on iMessage appear "Due to Regulations XYZ 2023, this
| message may not be secure and may be open to read by third
| parties"
| gumballindie wrote:
| This is just tories fabricating an issue so they can come with a
| solution during their campaign. They'll fix anything but their
| own corruption, excessive taxation and the dwindling quality of
| life. Perhaps they'll increase taxes a bit more to, paradoxically
| for a conservative party, keep the socialists of the uk happy.
| lencastre wrote:
| T'is the silly season.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| The goal of Mass surveillance is not to fight spies and
| pedophiles. The goal is to have a dossier on everyone.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| It doesn't really matter what the goal is, and you'll never
| conclusively be able to prove the goal anyway.
|
| What matters is the outcome, and indeed mass surveillance will
| lead to the dossier on everyone outcome, whether that was
| intended or not.
| qwezxcrty wrote:
| I'm curious if Apple is complying with Chinese censorship with
| iMessage. As far as I know, at least it was usable in China
| without VPN in 2015.
| hot_gril wrote:
| They're complying, in that China has not required them to alter
| iMessage in China. It's still E2EE. But iCloud backups aren't,
| and each country's respective government has access to those.
| bb101 wrote:
| The current conservative government is on its last legs before
| being banished for at least a decade. It appears they already
| have their eyes on the lucrative private sector and are willing
| to vandalise the UK with little thought to public protest.
| laputan_machine wrote:
| Labour are even more in favour of this than the tories are. Lib
| Dems, too. No mainstream party in the UK values your privacy.
| bb101 wrote:
| I can't help but think the other parties would put forward
| better policies that don't alienate the electorate nor
| swathes of international business. Some would say the current
| conservative cabinet are the low-grade remnants of the recent
| party turmoil, and their policies demonstrate this.
| Unfortunately for us, they really have nothing to lose over
| the next year.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| We have been able to bug phones, homes, offices, whatever,
| for years to keep the country safe. If enough people had a
| major issue with that they'd start a new political party and
| vote it in.
|
| Personally I quite like it. Evidence suggests there's quite a
| lot of people trying to blow us up and stuff.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| It's really astonishing that Joe Biden seems to be generally
| to the left of the Labour party leadership. By USA standards
| Biden is a centrist moderate. We had the good sense to eject
| the Mark Penn "must go right-wing" types from mainstream
| Democratic circles; why didn't Labour follow this path too?
| sanitycheck wrote:
| We have recently seen what happens when somebody even
| slightly left of centre gets anywhere near power in the UK.
|
| Our major parties are now squashed into the spectrum
| between the mean US Democrat and the mean US Republican,
| it's quite depressing.
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| Are you referring to Jeremy Corbyn? He was brought down
| by a dishonest campaign by the Jewish lobby.
| sanitycheck wrote:
| It started well before the antisemitism nonsense, MPs in
| his own party were openly discussing a challenge before
| the results were even in for the 2015 leadership
| election.
| [deleted]
| shipscode wrote:
| You've gotta be in a wild echo chamber if you consider
| Biden centrist moderate.
| nxx788 wrote:
| Right? He's _clearly_ center right. Sanders or Warren or
| AoC are centrist moderates. Or maybe center left.
|
| Kshama Sawant is a leftist. There are folks left of her.
|
| If you don't see Biden as centrist or even center right,
| you have a narrow view of the spectrum.
| [deleted]
| maakjaii wrote:
| Agreed, Sir Keith Starmer honestly seems like a relic from
| the Cold War
| stephen_g wrote:
| He's from the same Labour right faction of those as
| conservative as any Tory, just pretending to do
| conservatism in a nicer way. Just like Blair, who ended up
| doing more of Thather's plan to chip away at privatising
| bits of the NHS (through PFIs on hundreds of hospitals)
| than Thatcher managed. Not to mention the Iraq war...
| r00fus wrote:
| Correct - NewLab, just like the DLC (a subgroup of the
| Democrats) over in the US.
| Roark66 wrote:
| I wonder if the UK ever decides to have a written
| constitution. On one hand they've been doing fine without one
| for centuries. On the other if this law passes the parliament
| that's it. There is no "constitutional court" to strike it
| down. No "president" to "not sign it". Etc.
| zarzavat wrote:
| The UK does have a system of judicial review and various
| laws are classed as "constitutional" (such as the Human
| Rights Act) and have special protection.
|
| The UK courts are currently weak because the government
| threatens their independence. But the same thing is
| happening in other countries such as Israel, so it's not
| something that a written constitution can prevent.
| Ultimately the only thing that can guarantee judicial
| independence is for people to believe in it, and for people
| to take to the streets. Most British people just don't
| care, that is the problem.
| orangepurple wrote:
| [flagged]
| cjs_ac wrote:
| > There is no "constitutional court" to strike it down.
|
| The Supreme Court exists for this very purpose, although it
| is subject to Parliamentary Sovereignty[0].
|
| > No "president" to "not sign it".
|
| Bills do not become law until given Royal Assent by the
| King. The King may refuse to give Royal Assent to any bill,
| although this has not been done since 1708.[1]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Court_of_the_Unit
| ed_Ki...
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_assent#United_Kingdom
| daveoc64 wrote:
| The problem with relying on a written consititution is that
| it can easily be changed.
|
| The USA is in a position where it seems to be perpetually
| stuck in a 50/50 split of the elected government, so it's
| not possible for major constitutional reform to be passed
| by one party.
|
| On the other hand, the current government in the UK has a
| majority of 80 MPs - if there was a written constitution,
| it's likely they could simply pass a law to re-write it.
| hayd wrote:
| In the US you need a super majority (of legislators or
| states) to amend the constitution. You'd have to do
| something like that. But the UK government system isn't
| really set up like this, there aren't the checks-and-
| balances of the US. (It's just civil servants
| undemocratically dragging their feet/slowing down
| processes they disagree with... which is not democratic.)
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| You should be more like us Americans and give it up of your
| own volition to any private company who gives you a moment of
| free entertainment.
| ksaj wrote:
| Every generation has its PGP / Clipper Chip / etc battle.
| Eventually we'll lose. But hopefully we're not ready to give up
| yet.
|
| I read today that the younger generation grew up with and is so
| used to surveillance they don't care. It's just a thing. But old
| codgers like me most definitely care.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| They should just publicly publish all the messages from
| politicians' accounts.
|
| If they want to see our messages we should be able to see theirs,
| fair is fair.
| nextmove wrote:
| Strange that you got downvoted for stating that people should
| have power to hold politicians accountable.
|
| Look at the top comment and see how illogical it is:
|
| > I'm happy to pay a premium and be locked into their walled
| garden for some things if it means supporting a company that
| has the power to shift policy in favor of human rights (privacy
| in this case).
|
| Morons like this actually believe taking away human rights and
| privacy will make them safer. News flash, the danger are people
| in power that can't be held accountable. Lastly, be skeptical
| of anything Apple says as they work together with governments
| to take away your privacy. Psychopaths will say anything to get
| you to trust them.
| LoganDark wrote:
| "it _would_ ", not "it _will_ ". this submission's title is
| misleading and should be corrected to match the article
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Potentially going against the grain of HN opinion:
|
| It strikes me as odd that people are now suddenly condemning the
| UK gov for trying to maintain its ability to keep its people
| safe, particularly when spying is not an unusual or a new power
| per se.
|
| The UK government has had the means and the right to spy on its
| citizens for hundreds of years, via phone taps, espionage, bugs,
| steaming open letters and all sorts.
|
| It's served us very well as a country and has also saved many
| lives - just look at the stats on thwarted terror offences using
| intercepts as evidence. We are a democracy and if enough people
| didn't want the government to hold these powers there exists the
| means to achieve that via electing a new government.
|
| An American company is now threatening to stop selling some of
| its products in the UK if the government refuses to let it sell
| products that weaken their ability to police the nation.
|
| In the context of what's important to the country perhaps we
| should choose security over the profits of Apple's shareholders.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| China is too big for Apple to respond this way.
| petercammeraat wrote:
| Privacy is a fundamental human right!
| deadletters wrote:
| Reported
| SpaghettiCthulu wrote:
| Why?
| deadletters wrote:
| I'm jk sorry for confuse :P
| asah wrote:
| Sure, but what exactly is "privacy" ? That's the debate.
|
| No sane person believes that there aren't really nasty,
| organized criminals in the world, and no sane person believes
| that said criminals have a right to absolute privacy, including
| e.g. (the moral equivalent of) search warrants.
|
| I grew up in a time/place where organized crime was rampant,
| and if you looked at the wrong person you could be killed. It
| was time of racism-by-default, thievery-by-default, a lack of
| investment in R&D, science or infrastructure, and the opposite
| of a meritocracy. It was an "invasion" of their privacy that
| ended that era, and now we can comfortably watch Scorcese
| movies about it over an internet those people would never have
| invented or invested in.
| duped wrote:
| > No sane person believes that there aren't really nasty,
| organized criminals in the world, and no sane person believes
| that said criminals have a right to absolute privacy,
| including e.g. (the moral equivalent of) search warrants.
|
| That's just a strawman.
|
| Plenty of sane people believe that the threat of criminals
| doesn't outweigh the threat to individual liberty posed by
| the state. Additionally, plenty of sane people wouldn't
| support a ban on locks and safes because it makes it harder
| to search criminals.
|
| I'm pretty sure I have my sanity in check, and I don't think
| there's any reason for the government to require private
| enterprise to break encryption to ease prosecution. It should
| be hard or impossible for governments to spy on their
| citizens.
| f6v wrote:
| Not in a society.
| Sharlin wrote:
| There are no rights in the first place without a society. The
| entire concept of "a right" is meaningless if it isn't in the
| context of a social contract.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| Interesting viewpoint.
|
| Care to elaborate on your thinking? Genuinely interested.
| f6v wrote:
| The parent post defined "human rights" as something from
| holy scriptures. What I can see from being part of highly
| functional societies is that they require me to give up a
| big part of my privacy. Like, I can't get salary without
| bank account. Which I can't get without submitting a whole
| lot of personal information to the bank. There're many
| essential services which you can't access anonymously. At a
| very least "privacy" isn't a binary category. There could
| be more privacy or less privacy, but not 100%.
|
| One more example: some societies will require you to
| disclose any relation to politically exposed persons. Which
| is beneficial to society, but I can't withhold even if I
| wanted.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| Very valid points, which I agree with.
|
| As the famous saying goes: There are no solutions, only
| trade-offs.
|
| Privacy is a trade-off.
| Aachen wrote:
| See article 8, European Convention on Human Rights, is
| literally about privacy. UK is a signatory last I checked
|
| (Russia was finally kicked out after continuing what they
| started in 2014, but their pledge was a joke anyway, or
| wishful thinking at best).
| barnabee wrote:
| Not only is privacy a fundamental right within a society but
| it is fundamentally necessary to the advancement, and thus
| long term survival, of any society.
| defrost wrote:
| To be honest that sounds like both an idealised slogan and
| a sophism empty of logic.
|
| Can you expand upon _how_ the advancements in western
| society since (say) WWII have been _neccesarily_ dependant
| upon privacy?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _how the advancements in western society since (say)
| WWII have been neccesarily dependant upon privacy?_
|
| Alan Turing. Hell, Tim Cook, a gay man who grew up in
| Alabama. Neither would have survived childhood with their
| personalities intact had their governments had the access
| No. 10 Downing demands.
|
| Privacy preserves society's margins. The margins, by
| definition, are where change--growth--is nurtured.
| smoldesu wrote:
| 1. You cannot compare Cook to Turing with a straight
| face, even in terms of their sexuality situation.
|
| 2. Privacy is about as personal of a fight to Cook as
| shareholder obligations are, and only one of them gets
| him removed if he neglects it.
|
| 3. It's pretty fucking stupid to suggest the UK would do
| the same thing to Turing today if they had the data. You
| may recall that there are now laws in both the UK and,
| yes, Alabama since 2009, that render this a hate crime
| and deter it _properly_. It 's the lamest possible excuse
| to support corporate power.
|
| Ultimately Tim Cook will say whatever gets investors
| horny. If you're dumb enough to factor his sexuality in
| to your trust quotient, you deserve to be XKeyscored.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _cannot compare Cook to Turing with a straight face_
|
| A series of examples isn't necessarily a comparison and
| is certainly not an equation.
|
| > _stupid to suggest the UK would do the same thing to
| Turing today_
|
| Re-read the comment. Nobody suggested as much.
| f6v wrote:
| This is what's called "anecdotal evidence".
| defrost wrote:
| To be clear, I'm in favour of privacy.
|
| However your examples don't demonstrate how the many
| advances in western society _depend_ upon privacy nor do
| they prove that it would not have advanced _without_
| privacy.
|
| Alan Turing, for example, was open about his sexuality
| (an issue that bit him when a robbery took place long
| after his work at Bletchley).
|
| Even had he been somehow taken out of the picture pre
| WWII it remains true that Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki
| and Henryk Zygalski would still have cracked the Enigma
| cipher, built the prototype Bombe's and passed that
| knowledge to the likes of Tommy Flowers and William
| Thomas Tutte.
|
| Turing proved a result applicable to the third part of
| Hilbert's second problem, the Entscheidungsproblem.
|
| He was very nearly beaten to that as a first by Kurt
| Godel who provided an answer to the first two parts of
| Hilbert's second while indicating an approach to the
| third part.
|
| Turing _was_ beaten to the goal by Alonzo Church who
| demonstrated the halting problem for lambda calculus is
| not effectively calculable.
|
| Later, in 1939 J. Barkley Rosser highlighted the
| essential equivalence of "effective method" defined by
| Godel, Church, and Turing.
|
| So, uhh, yes - it would be nice to see some notion of
| _proof_ come to in to play here.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| No discovery depends solely on one person. The example
| illustrates the mechanics in the last line.
|
| Fringe elements are analogous to a society's surface.
| They, by definition, interact with novel elements and
| ideas at a higher rate than population.
|
| Internal interactions exchange information. That
| distributes information (physical and intellectual). It
| also increases entropy and thus homogeneity. Conductivity
| (the term of art is _legibility_ [1]) and complexity are
| at odds with one another.
|
| _Ceteris paribus_ , internal homogeneity shouldn't
| change the surface. But humans have agency. Homogeneity
| precedes conformity which drives more homogeneity.
| Furthermore, less diversity means fewer novel
| opportunities/interactions between the fringe and the
| unknown.
|
| Privacy preserves a diversity of fringes which drives
| social complexity. A society without privacy is simpler,
| and thus less capable of innovation, than one with it.
| (There is obviously an upper bound to this phenomenon. A
| perfectly opaque system is static. But humans, as social
| creatures, resist isolation more naturally than
| conformity.)
|
| [1] https://publications.aston.ac.uk/id/eprint/27204/1/Li
| nked_da...
| barnabee wrote:
| Advancements depend on the ability to change and often
| break the rules and to protest injustice.
|
| With no privacy there's no civil disobedience and no
| advancement.
|
| Without privacy there's no resistance to Putin's regime,
| or to prohibition (of abortion, homosexuality, alcohol,
| drugs, ...).
|
| Privacy is _essential_.
| 93po wrote:
| As long as humans remain irrational and tribalism exists,
| privacy is essential to anyone that isn't the most
| boring, vanilla, cookie person that has any amount of
| non-mainstream ideas or beliefs or qualities.
| smolder wrote:
| I think, in theory, a society with much less privacy
| could work, as long as there is information symmetry, not
| a panopticon controlled by a few. We're not building an
| open society, though. The asymmetry is the point.
|
| If we ignore the open society angle and assume
| surveillance would be one sided:
|
| Competition is needed for healthy capitalist economies.
| Competition doesn't work well with great power
| imbalances. To the extent entrenched business could
| leverage the government, as they do, powers of
| surveillance could be used to stifle competition. That
| leads to stagnation.
|
| Democracy, even in a limited form, doesn't work when
| everyone is under surveillance by a powerful minority. I
| don't think I need to elaborate since there's been plenty
| of writing on that.
|
| Also, people don't want to make civic contributions to a
| society that treats them like cows with a criminal bent.
| There's not much argument against being a hedonic leech
| in a society that benefits from your labor but resents
| your autonomy.
|
| I haven't answered your question exactly, but it's a bit
| difficult when framed that way. I still think it's pretty
| clear that the massive power imbalance that comes with
| dragnet surveillance can catalyze corruption, stagnation,
| and malaise, thus impeding progress.
| f6v wrote:
| Something you can prove?
| mihaaly wrote:
| Privacy cannot be defined in solitary situations. : )
|
| The only place where privacy has meaning is in the company of
| other people. Including society as a kind of group of people.
| f6v wrote:
| > Privacy cannot be defined in solitary situations. : )
|
| Here lies the paradox.
| blitz_skull wrote:
| Wrong. Society is just a social construct, but your right to
| independent thought and agency, which is powered by privacy,
| are fundamental to the human experience.
| f6v wrote:
| Having rights is a social construct. Unless you believe in
| divine order of things. But I suspect there's nothing in
| physical reality that requires any rights to be granted to
| anyone.
| Spivak wrote:
| The religious far outnumber the not so I think your
| "unless" is really the norm. Talking only the various
| Jesus fanclubs you have a literal divine right to privacy
| in confession and it's sinful to reveal another's
| secrets. The Adam and Eve creation myth establishes
| privacy when God created clothes.
|
| The very concept natural rights is basically divine
| rights but without explicitly mentioning a god.
| barbazoo wrote:
| No one is taking away anyone's right to independent
| thought, at least for now. Patent was talking about privacy
| though, I'm not sure our species has a fundamental right to
| it, how did you arrive at that conclusion?
| thefurdrake wrote:
| It's a bit difficult to grasp the reasoning behind humans
| not having the fundamental right to privacy. It seems
| like the right to privacy/private communication with
| other sentient creatures is corollary to the right to
| independent thought, since humans are fundamentally
| social creatures with an inbuilt need to communicate.
|
| I'm a bit curious how you arrived at the conclusion that
| you're "not sure our species has a fundamental right to
| [privacy]". That seems like the absurd claim requiring
| actual support here, seeing as how privacy is the norm,
| not the other way around.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > I'm a bit curious how you arrived at the conclusion
| that you're "not sure our species has a fundamental right
| to [privacy]". That seems like the absurd claim requiring
| actual support here, seeing as how privacy is the norm,
| not the other way around.
|
| I didn't claim anything, I said I wasn't sure. Our
| species is much much older than the concept of privacy.
| Back when we were still sitting in trees there was no
| privacy. We decided that that was a thing quite a bit
| later. Now in the year 2023 I _would_ say many of us see
| privacy as a fundamental human right though obviously and
| a privilege to defend.
| neop1x wrote:
| Secrecy of correspondence
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_of_correspondence
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I am proud of Apple for doing this. I give the same praise to
| Signal for making the same decision.
|
| Breaking encryption via backdoors is like a gift to organized
| crime.
|
| Privacy is also crucially important if you want to maintain free
| societies long term. Same comment for free speech for public
| discourse.
| artk42 wrote:
| Back to SMS (c)
| artk42 wrote:
| In the meantime, it might seem very counterintuitive, but it is
| very evolutional and GOOD regulation! It will force custodial
| monopolies companies like Meta and Apple, either go away OR
| provide programmability for users to incorporate their own
| encryption layers with possibility to control your own keys
| yourself.
| guy98238710 wrote:
| Someone should bring up lawyer and doctor privilege as an
| argument. Phones are intimately personal devices that people take
| to their homes and use for a lot of very private stuff. Phones
| cannot fulfill their job as a personal device and be a police
| snitch at the same time just like lawyers cannot advise their
| clients and inform the police at the same time. There needs to be
| a personal computer privilege.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| How about as simple as going for a walk with a friend and
| having a conversation ... without anyone listening in.
|
| That's how my phone should feel.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| But it's never been that way in the UK. If you were suspected
| of planning a murder/bombing/atrocity/etc they could bug your
| phone even 50 years ago. And personally I'm quite glad about
| that!
| mouzogu wrote:
| i simply prefer not to believe anything that any government or
| any trillion dollar company says about encryption and privacy.
|
| Apple:
|
| > "We have never heard of PRISM", "We do not provide any
| government agency with direct access to our servers"
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20130609061546/https://www.culto...
|
| ..some things are just not discussed on public forums.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| As far as "We have never heard of PRISM", that could be true.
| When you receive a national security letter it isn't like they
| give you detailed info about the specific operation and why you
| are receiving it. It's more along the lines of "you're going to
| do this pursuant to US code section..."
| bradly wrote:
| Even internally at Apple is it common to work on projects
| that you do not know the name or details of. I was disclosed
| and worked on multiple projects that my own team members were
| not aware of.
| TheBigSalad wrote:
| Why?
| bradly wrote:
| Why what?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| It might not be cited on any given NSL, but saying they've
| never heard of it when it's received ample news coverage is
| disingenuous.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| What's more, a National Security Letter is not necessarily
| addressed to the company's executives and lawyers. A National
| Security Letter could be send to somebody lower in the
| organization, closer to the targeted data (for instance a
| sysadmin) with a clause threatening them with prison time if
| they tell anybody, even their boss or company lawyers about
| it.
|
| They can essentially conscript anybody in the company to work
| as a spy using (probably bullshit but still intimidating)
| legal threats to keep them quiet.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| I didn't consider that, but it aligns with my experience as
| well. From a C-Level perspective that is probably desirable
| as they don't want to get involved with that sort of thing
| in the first place.
| [deleted]
| owenmarshall wrote:
| Is there any evidence that low-level people _have_ been
| targeted, or is this just speculation around what could
| happen?
|
| Yes, "evidence for a secret program" is a bit tricky to
| produce, but the one I know of - Doe v. Ashcroft - the
| president of the company was compelled to produce data. I'd
| be very surprised if this wasn't the universal approach.
| lolinder wrote:
| This sounds scary, but unlikely. Do you have a source that
| this tactic is used and effective?
|
| My immediate reaction to such a letter would be to contact
| the company legal department regardless of whether the
| letter said not to, simply because I'd assume unless given
| _very_ good evidence (and originating from a .gov domain
| isn 't good enough) that it was a scam.
|
| Edit: According to the EFF you can talk to an attorney
| about an NSL.
|
| https://www.eff.org/issues/national-security-letters/faq#24
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| I would not suggest taking legal advice from the EFF. You
| might as well contact the sovereign citizen movement at
| that point.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Letters can be intercepted, letters have tracking, letters
| of this magnitude will require certification, and at the
| very least will require a courier. All of that assumes the
| letter can be delivered, and also assumes that the
| recipient believes that the letter is authentic. If I sent
| you an authentic looking NSA letter, would you just do what
| you're told? Fat chance...
|
| An email/phone call to a legal department is much less work
| and provides all the same protections.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| We now know that PRISM was (is?) the NSA internal source
| designation for data acquired through FISA warrants executed by
| the FBI.
|
| So actually Apple was being honest. They had not heard of
| PRISM, because that term was only used inside the NSA. And they
| were not allowing direct government access to their servers,
| they were responding to FISA warrants.
| mrtksn wrote:
| While technically true, it's also a complete BS. It's in the
| same vain as Torrent websites are not hosting copyrighted
| content - technically true but complete BS.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| But they are actually _not_ hosting it.
|
| If we are being pedantic, one can claim that all data, can
| be very well anything because there is always a "one-time
| pad" transforming all communication into something
| malicious.
|
| If the law is not precise, then it is on the government to
| improve it.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| I agree. If we stated that torrent sites are hosting it
| then what other systems are implicated? eg: DNS itself
| provides a pointer to the torrent sites which then have a
| pointer to the data.
| ralfd wrote:
| Prism also involved an NSA program that was done without the
| knowledge of the tech companies. They inserted a splitter on
| the fiber lines leaving data centers to copy all the traffic.
| detourdog wrote:
| Does anybody remember one December where Apple shut down all
| the developer systems. It had the feel to me at the time that
| it was a hack by it's suddenness.
|
| I have always associated that period with the discovery of
| Prism. I would love to hear if anybody knows what I'm talking
| about.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| That _could_ be true? IIRC, PRISM was less about direct access,
| and more about abusing every potential method of gaining
| information.
|
| For example, imagine a Login page that said, "Password
| incorrect," versus "User does not exist." If you have "User
| does not exist," you could use that to figure out whether a
| given email address has an account with a service. That could
| be useful information to PRISM when looking for a target to
| subpoena or monitor. (This is also why it's now best practice
| to just say "Login incorrect" or something vague that doesn't
| say whether the username, or the password, was wrong.)
|
| Though, I could be wrong, I'd love more info.
| realusername wrote:
| > That could be true? IIRC, PRISM was less about direct
| access, and more about abusing every potential method of
| gaining information.
|
| Direct access to the data was mentioned in the Guardian and
| other newspapers
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Newspapers often get details wrong.
| realusername wrote:
| They got that from the leaked documents though
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| And mega-corporations often lie.
| prettyStandard wrote:
| More info?
|
| It goes further than just the error message. I think the
| original exploit was based on how quickly Unix would fail to
| login. (Bad user failed faster than bad password) and that
| allowed you to enumerate the user names.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| Apple has perfected their virtue signaling game and all the
| simps love it.
|
| I don't really mind it either anymore, a lot of people have
| this hero worship fetish and they can't help painting
| everything in black and white, even though they're all just
| different shades of gray.
|
| Apple is definitively brighter on that scale then Google or
| Meta, but they're all corrupt multinational corporations that
| will do everything they can get away with to increase their
| bottom line.
| GoofballJones wrote:
| You knowing this, by the tone of your writing, what do YOU do
| about it? What computer are you working on right now? Are you
| sure every component on it is legit? I take it you're using
| some for of Linux because they're not "corrupt" (well,
| depending on what distro as even that is a big debate).
|
| Or do you live and operate like RMS?
| dang wrote:
| Can you please not post in the flamewar style? We're trying
| for something else here, and you can make your substantive
| points without any of that.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| whartung wrote:
| Will Apple still support SMS? Will users be notified that they're
| "suddenly" dropped down to a less secure channel or will the
| simply have to pay attention to the text color and actually know
| what they mean?
| marcellus23 wrote:
| The Messages app doesn't just rely on text color, it also shows
| the text "iMessage" or "Text Message" whenever the mode of
| conversation shifts.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I assume just green text boxes instead of blue ones.
| ryandrake wrote:
| They could also add support for RCS if they didn't feel like
| punishing their non-iMessage iPhone users by falling back to
| SMS.
| lsh123 wrote:
| The interesting thing is that the government can have access to
| your conversations today. They just need to get judge order and
| search your phone (end-to-end encryption doesn't help if you
| don't delete messages). Same things as knocking on the door with
| a judge order. But the government doesn't want to deal with
| judges. They want _unlimited_ access 24 /7. That's the key
| difference and this is why this is bad for all the citizens.
| huntertwo wrote:
| Why do the British still think they have power to do dumb stuff
| like this? Their economy is floundering, their consumer market is
| small, and their government is a joke.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 70M is small, but not that small. Larger than any US state,
| larger than most countries in the EU.
|
| It's also anglophone, which to anglophone companies (Apple
| still is, to a significant degree), means that its 70M are
| worth a bit more than the absolute number suggests.
| fredley wrote:
| In a word, populists. This is part of a stance of being 'tough
| on crime'. Whether or not the bill succeeds or fails isn't
| really important, what's important is that they can trumpet how
| tough on crime they are. If it fails it's not their fault, it's
| the opposition and how they care more about criminals' rights
| than your/childrens' safety etc. etc.
|
| As to why the public themselves go for it, the media landscape
| in the UK is in a pretty bad way at the moment. An enormous
| amount of power is still wielded by the traditional press -
| specifically the power to set the national conversation.
| IshKebab wrote:
| The UK is still the 6th biggest market in the world. Enough
| potential profit that most companies will be happy to follow
| slightly ridiculous laws.
|
| The only reason Apple are saying this is because it's good PR
| and nobody in the UK uses iMessage anyway, so they won't lose
| any money.
|
| Wake me up when WhatsApp say the same...
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Does this not count?
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/09/whatsapp-.
| ..
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Well done, Apple ... I live in the UK and am happy to make the
| sacrifice.
|
| The UK government can stick their agenda right up their big fat,
| corrupt, dystopian ...
| supernova87a wrote:
| How is it supposed to work, if the UK laws were implemented?
|
| Only phones activated in the UK or with UK set as the activating
| country have to follow the rule? Only if there's a SIM card? What
| about iPods or MacBooks? What if you bring a US phone to the UK,
| does it have to magically detect and suddenly allow backdoors?
|
| If you leave the UK with your UK phone, is it allowed to be
| encrypted then, or the UK wants the ability no matter where you
| go?
| cmiles74 wrote:
| My understanding is that there will be a new authority, Ofcom,
| that will regulate the community of messaging application
| vendors. One of there powers will be to enforce the scanning of
| messages for CSAM or terrorism related content and Ofcom can
| force them to use an "accredited" service to scan for the
| illegal content.
|
| I suspect the scanning of this content will be handled solely
| by accredited services, these likely will have close
| communication with one or more government entities who supply
| information on what content is or is not illegal. At this point
| there isn't really end-to-end encryption anymore: every message
| will be submitted to one (or more) accredited services. Even if
| it's encrypted, each message now has the government's blessed
| service as a recipient.
|
| It's important to remember that we're talking about text
| messages as well as images, a system that compares only hashes
| will not be sufficient. The bit about terrorism related
| information is also worrisome as we know the list of what is
| and isn't terrorism related is a very political debate.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/06/uk-osb-csam-scanning/
| dancemethis wrote:
| Apple is ready to pay a bit to keep pretending they have
| encryption. Must mean the money they get in the back from their
| user data is much bigger.
| InsomniacL wrote:
| I'm not against breaking e2ee when the right protections are in
| place.
|
| 1, Court signed order 2, Public Disclosure during prosecution or
| within X time of the court order being signed (including when no
| wrongdoing found) 3, Some sort of test to ensure it's not misused
| (imminent threat to life, serious crime like murder/child kidnap
| or something)
|
| The idea that a judge can order a cavity search to find
| information leading to the location of a suspected murdered/dying
| child but not to read a message between the suspected murders
| phones seems ludicrous.
|
| It appears at least in some of the US/UK, a judge can order you
| to give information including your phone password and if you
| don't, you become a criminal for that.
|
| I'm just suggesting the question should be around where do we
| draw the line on privacy vs protection and what safeguards do we
| put in place.
|
| I.E on a scale of speeding ticket to terrorist attack.
| kstrauser wrote:
| E2EE is a true/false label. Either it is, or it ain't.
|
| It is not mathematically possible to selectively break E2EE. If
| it's broken, it's not E2EE.
| [deleted]
| hot_gril wrote:
| There are stronger and weaker forms of it, though. Apple
| holds the keys to the identity (public key) exchange in
| iMessage. You're still trusting Apple not to mitm your
| conversations, but at least they wouldn't be able to do this
| retroactively. Other E2EE messaging apps at least have a way
| to verify each others' pubkeys, but it's not required and
| very few people do it.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Apple previously announced their "iMessage Contact Key
| Verification"
| (https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/12/apple-advances-
| user-s...). Rumors are that it's coming in iOS 16.6 which
| may drop any time now.
| hot_gril wrote:
| That's cool. The article mentions a more common attack I
| forgot about, someone managing to add a new device to
| someone's account and get messages on there.
| chakintosh wrote:
| Easy decision considering Apple gains little to no money from
| them.
| wrboyce wrote:
| What? How did you arrive at this conclusion?! Apple enjoy a
| good market share in the UK. Over 50% of the market according
| to my cursory search.
| gtvwill wrote:
| Lol fat lies, apple pumping propagandato try maintain an image
| within the market.
|
| They still operate in aus. Therefore they can legally be
| backdoor'ed, and almost certainly have been but are legally
| required to not notify their users or make note of it internally.
| Couple with some 5 eyes legislation and you got cross borders no
| warrant monitoring.
|
| This grandstanding by Apple is nothing more than propaganda for
| the plebs. Go read country laws. Apple toes the line like
| everyone else. Your a suckered if you think otherwise.
| mrweasel wrote:
| There was an interview with the CEO of Signal and some UK
| conservative politician[1]. It's a pretty infuriating interview,
| as both parties try to debate two complete separate issues.
| Meredith Whittaker of Signal, rightfully tries to debate the
| issues with breaking encryption and it's ramification, but the
| politician has that sorted. See they don't want to break the
| encryption, they want the apps to pick up the messages BEFORE
| encryption and side channel them to some government agency, at
| least that's my understanding. They want on device access to the
| message, which the app have, they just also want that information
| searched, indexed and filtered and sent to the police.
|
| It's sad that these politicians don't see the problem... Well
| either don't see or understand, or they full well understand and
| that's the point, they're just doing a poor job of explaining
| why.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E--bVV_eQR0
| bhelkey wrote:
| Honestly, Meredith Whittaker came across very poorly. She made
| one point well, that one can't make a safe backdoor. However,
| she essentially refused to answer any further topics once the
| conservative politician said they wouldn't require a backdoor
| in encrypted messaging services.
|
| Signal, Whatsapp, and iMessage threatening to leave the UK over
| this bill indicates to me that the bill is unreasonable.
| However, Meredith Whittaker did a very poor job of
| demonstrating that during this debate.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| The problem is, there's not really a good way to debate "If
| you have nothing to hide, there shouldn't be a problem." The
| person pushing for surveillance is going to argue in bad
| faith that _they 're_ the good guys, and why are you stopping
| them from catching the bad guys? And there's no counter
| argument to that because it's very hard to find specific
| examples of where authoritarian governments overreach and go
| hard on innocent civilians. I reckon when that happens, they
| manage it keep it very quiet, since they are authoritarian.
|
| On top of all of that, who wants to defend child
| pornographers? I can see why a person wouldn't even try to
| engage in that back and forth. There's just no way you come
| out on top, because basically your side of the argument would
| have to come down to "Everyone has something to hide, and we
| should recognize and protect that." It just doesn't _sound_
| good.
| javajosh wrote:
| Anyone wishing to control a network of computers must choose
| either the tube or the box. That is, either you break the tubes
| and intercept traffic between opaque boxes, or you break into
| the boxes and leave the tubes opaque. If you assume opaque
| boxes then by arguing for opaque tubes Meredith Whittaker is
| arguing for _full abdication of control_ of the network.
| Politicians don 't like that. Some don't like it because in
| good faith they see their role as that of a protector, a threat
| detector. Some don't like it because in bad faith they know
| this is giving up a significant chunk of power. (And in reality
| every political leader falls on a spectrum between these two).
|
| In practice, I think we'll waver between losing control of the
| box and gaining it back, as it sinks in that, truly, no
| backdoor can be reserved for some and not for others. I think
| the only viable solution is to break the tube: make it illegal
| to send encrypted messages over the wire. Period. Then we could
| keep the box inviolable, opaque, and secure. But it can no
| longer communicate secretly to others. In practice this will
| mean more "sneaker net" movement of illicit and/or secret data,
| and probably leaps and bounds in steganography. It would also
| end the internet as we know it, especially any and all
| e-commerce. But hey, that's a small price to pay for
| eliminating CSAM, right?
| [deleted]
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| There's a lot of good reasons to hate Apple, but when they're
| right they're right, and I definitely appreciate that they're
| willing to stand up for something like this, even if it is in
| their best interest.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| This is marketing.
|
| PRISM in the US is proof they don't really care. China and
| Russia also have data collection on iphones.
| hot_gril wrote:
| I think Apple truly cares about iMessage in particular
| maintaining E2EE. iCloud backup, for those who use it, is a
| different story.
| jdiez17 wrote:
| E2EE iCloud backup is generally available since January
| this year. I have been using it since then with 0 issues.
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303
| hot_gril wrote:
| Yeah but I'm not sure if that's going to be available in
| China.
| graypegg wrote:
| I do like how Apple has backed themselves into a consumer-
| protecting hole here. I'm sure they would love to have access to
| that much conversational data themselves, of which no other
| company has access to.
|
| If Siri ever improves too significantly I'll get nervous.
| konschubert wrote:
| Companies like money. You can't eat data, you need a machine
| that can turn it into money.
|
| Facebook uses user data to target ads. Apple doesn't do this,
| so they don't need the data.
|
| If Siri gets better, it's because Apple have switched it to a
| better LLM, not because Apple started sucking up magic data
| dust.
|
| I'm pretty sure that Siri can already read your messages,
| that's the point, it's a speech interface that runs in your
| phone.
| graypegg wrote:
| Conversational data between human beings is exactly the sort
| of tokens you'd want to train a massive in-house LLM on. Then
| you could have embeddings for the local stuff on-device, and
| still call it "private" models.
|
| The magic data dust is only useful if they can use all of it
| though. I just see some incentive there that I can't imagine
| them ignoring in a couple years.
| detourdog wrote:
| Siri's real trick is being able to answer anything without
| knowing who is asking or the context.
| cguess wrote:
| The difference is that they make money on hardware and the app
| stores, not on advertising (they have a small ad product but
| it's probably closer to a rounding error).
| noisem4ker wrote:
| Since Apple does not disclose how much money they make from
| advertising specifically, conflating it into their "services"
| business, we have to guess a bit:
|
| "In 2021, Apple generated 3.7 billion U.S. dollars with its
| global advertising business." [1]
|
| "Apple's services business, which includes advertising and
| subscription revenues, grew 24% year over year last quarter
| to a record $19.5 billion" "It's likely that a large share of
| this category's growth comes from advertising" [2]
|
| "Apple ad business could reach $6B by 2025, with $4.1B from
| Search Ads" [3]
|
| For reference, 2023 Q2 revenue from "services" amounted to
| 20.9B USD, while hardware product sales amounted to 73.9B
| USD. [4]
|
| We're thus talking about ~4%, not exactly a rounding error.
|
| [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1330127/apple-ad-
| revenue...
|
| [2] https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/apple-ad-
| revenue...
|
| [3] https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/06/15/apple-ad-
| business...
|
| [4] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/FY23_Q2_Consolidated_
| Fin...
| detourdog wrote:
| Like all the PC companies of the 70's. When Apple was
| launched software was mostly free.
| detourdog wrote:
| I don't think so. There are people in the world that don't want
| to pry into other's lives. Collecting un-needed data on people
| is Nixonian.
|
| I think Apple managed to understand and attract those types of
| customers. I find a generational disconnect between the 70's
| computer users and the user in the 00's.
| graypegg wrote:
| I don't think it's possible for a company as big as Apple to
| act solely on principle. We're just lucky the profit motive
| aligned with consumer privacy for once.
|
| Untainted (without ML-generated content) human communication
| is becoming more and more scarce. It's only a matter of time
| before they take advantage of that.
|
| They'll forbid any app using ML generated content from
| providing iMessage extensions, or possibly it'll receive a
| warning mark in iMessage when sent. Could also work with
| content pasted from those apps. Some sort of "provenance
| check". They'll pitch it as a consumer privacy thing, I
| promise.
|
| That'll also be the same update where E2E encryption falls
| off the the marketing.
|
| There is very much a motivation to access massive amounts of
| user data, especially when you control the OS that would be
| the gate keeper to that data, as well as how the "choice" is
| presented to the end user.
| detourdog wrote:
| _I don't think it's possible for a company as big as Apple
| to act solely on principle._
|
| I agree but think that Apple is the exception that proves
| the rule. Its origin story is as good as any Shakespeare.
|
| The second act of Apple started small and focused and re-
| built itself while keeping the Wall Street mind set at a
| distance. I think your sentiment misses the fact that Apple
| doesn't really need Wall Street. Their stock can do
| whatever it wants the lower it goes the more they can buy.
| Why would Apple lower their standards?
|
| On their conference calls they always talk about reaching
| cash neutrality as their goal. I never really understand
| what that looks like
|
| _Untainted (without ML-generated content) human
| communication is becoming more and more scarce. It's only a
| matter of time before they take advantage of that._
|
| I'm not sure if I understand this comment. Apple's size
| relative to other nation's GDP enables them to hire real
| humans at an amazing scale. This different than a company
| that doesn't have a culture of support built-in already.
| They also have the advantage that many countries would
| partner with them to raise their own GDP.
|
| I think their approach is to grow the AI to help the
| existing workforce scale. Get more work done using fewer
| live bodies.
|
| _They 'll forbid any app using ML generated content from
| providing iMessage extensions, or possibly it'll receive a
| warning mark in iMessage when sent. Could also work with
| content pasted from those apps. Some sort of "provenance
| check". They'll pitch it as a consumer privacy thing, I
| promise._
|
| I hope so that is why I'm Apple customer. I also think you
| are misreading the times. Apple is about to hand over a lot
| of authority to the customers.
|
| _There is very much a motivation to access massive amounts
| of user data, especially when you control the OS that would
| be the gate keeper to that data, as well as how the
| "choice" is presented to the end user._
|
| Don't project your ambitions on others.
|
| I do believe that Apple's ability to maintain their
| performance is mystifying and wonder how long it will last.
| darkclouds wrote:
| I dont think they realise the hacking I've seen on computers is
| at the HW level.
|
| Take this PC, a fairly new dell, all patched with the bios et al,
| and certain websites (dailymail, youtube and reddit) with adverts
| deliver something that disables the dell mouse.
|
| Only option is to reboot the pc but I have to take the mouse out
| of the usb and plug it back otherwise the dell usb mouse still
| wont work after a reboot.
|
| So I love their hubris, but I dont think they see some of the
| hacking that goes on because its at the hw level.
| cj wrote:
| > Apple previously withdrew plans for its own CSAM-scanning
| feature for iCloud Photos, following pushback from customers and
| human rights groups. Apple's solution was more privacy-preserving
| than what is now proposed by the UK government.
|
| Preface: I don't have an opinion on one side or the other.
|
| Question: what were the arguments lobbied against apple that
| caused them to withdraw? Also, is CSAM the motivating factor for
| UK or do they want backdoor for more general national security
| surveillance (or whatever you want to call it)?
| can16358p wrote:
| Of course it's just about surveillance. CSAM is just an excuse
| that is a sensitive topic so it's easier to justify which masks
| their actual intentions.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > Also, is CSAM the motivating factor for UK or do they want
| backdoor for more general national security surveillance
|
| Baroness Beeban Kidron has been lobbying for stringent anti-
| CSAM measures in tech for years [0]. She's lead a major
| pressure campaign in the US, Canada, and the UK for years [1].
| Her charity 5Rights and WeProtect both have been able to back
| Labour and the Tories so she's able to lobby across the aisles.
|
| It doesn't hurt that the publishing company her parents founded
| (Pluto Press) has a strong niche in the political space.
|
| The Molly Russell suicide also played a role [2], which she
| leveraged to highlight the need for restrictive anti-CSAM
| measures, especially as it became a top tabloid story in the
| UK.
|
| [0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeban_Kidron
|
| [1] - https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/14/british-
| baroness-on...
|
| [2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/01/business/instagram-
| suicid...
| tacticalturtle wrote:
| I know I'm from a different culture - but I don't understand
| how the UK still has the House of Lords in 2023.
|
| It just doesn't seem aligned with the principles of a
| republic or democracy to have unelected lifetime members who
| are able to draft legislation.
| pxeger1 wrote:
| I, broadly, think the House of Lords is a good thing in
| principle. Having a board of experts who can trounce things
| like the Illegal Migration Bill's potential for human
| rights abuse is a good thing.
|
| FYI, the House of Lords can't reject the same bill more
| than three times, and can't reject a bill that calls an
| election, so its undemocraticness isn't as bad as you might
| assume.
|
| There are many issues with it but I don't think many of
| them are much worse than those that already exist with the
| House of Commons. (Lobbying: exists in both. Unelectedness:
| the first past the post system is pretty bad here too.
| Ability of unelected people to introduce bills: private
| members' bills exist too).
|
| All of these are problems I'd like solved but I wouldn't
| support removing the House of Lords.
| wpietri wrote:
| The British people broadly agree with you: https://en.wikip
| edia.org/wiki/Reform_of_the_House_of_Lords#O...
| blibble wrote:
| it's fine because it's subordinate to the commons in every
| way
|
| it acts as a brake for controversial legislation, which is
| generally a good thing
| detourdog wrote:
| I think it was a preemptive attempt by Apple to avoid the
| current situation. They looked at the what was supported by 4th
| Amendment and designed a technical system that was the best
| compromise of no access and the ability to search for known
| images.
|
| They would rather have maintained the status quo but thought
| they had hit on something that would work. Since they didn't
| need to do anything pulling the software was an easy fix to the
| controversy. The governments are the ones that are pushing this
| so let them take the heat.
|
| Apple has a working solution and they can just wait and see
| what happens and react accordingly.
| tiltowait wrote:
| One common argument was that bad state actors would get non-
| CSAM, but still "undesirable" (as defined by the state),
| material into the database and use it to target dissidents,
| badthink, etc.
|
| (Personally, I think this was an overblown risk, since the plan
| was for the images to first be reviewed by Apple before being
| sent to the authorities. Presumably if an Apple
| employee/contractor saw a photo of, say, Tank Man, they
| wouldn't pass it on. But it's reasonable to be concerned.)
| detourdog wrote:
| I agree. That was just an argument using Apple's CSAM
| implementation as a vector for a bad state actor. The same
| misuse could be facilitate any number of ways.
|
| I have come to the conclusion that part of corporate combat
| involves apparent grassroots outrage.
|
| If a system without a wide open backdoor is proven effective
| it becomes more difficult to argue for a bigger backdoor.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Apple's solution was to run every photo through a perceptual
| hash algorithm with a neural network inside of it and then
| compare that against a list of known hashes. This is actually
| not materially different from the system that every image host
| has used for a while now. The main difference was that they
| were going to use a bunch of cryptography to ensure that...
|
| - Images could be scanned only after a threshold number of
| illegal images had been flagged
|
| - Law enforcement agencies could not use the system to flag
| non-CSAM images
|
| Part of the way they achieve the former - and what makes the
| system unworkable - is that it's client-sided.
|
| To be clear, every service already scans for CSAM. But the
| naive way of doing this - comparing SHA-2 message digests - can
| be trivially manipulated into producing false negatives. Just
| flip a bit in the image and it becomes a new image. Perceptual
| hash algorithms instead use notions of image similarity to
| protect against this, but it also introduces the possibility of
| false positives - i.e. images that look innocuous but match
| against CSAM and get you flagged. This is not merely a problem
| to be solved, but a consequence of such systems being
| differentiable, which is necessary for them to actually work.
|
| For remote scans, you can at least keep the perceptual hash
| algorithm secret and avoid leaking information about what
| images do and don't get flagged. This will frustrate attempts
| at adversarial training. However, when you put the perceptual
| hash on everyone's phone, it can be extracted, and people who
| don't like the idea of running a spying dragnet will
| deliberately break the hash just to tell you to fuck off. So
| people were making tools that would modify one image to look
| like another, which could be used to either hide CSAM or,
| worse, making cat pictures that get your iCloud flagged.
|
| There's also a bit of moral insult involved with having your
| phone do things that aren't in your benefit, even if this
| ostensibly were to keep the feds from demanding explicit
| backdoors[0]. This system is laughably easy to defeat if you're
| jailbroken - just turn the daemon off. Hence why Apple made no
| attempt to integrate it into macOS where users have root
| access[1].
|
| Law enforcement would never firewall their capabilities to
| "just CSAM." That's not how the law works. You can't sue your
| drug dealer for not giving you the weed you paid for, and for
| similar reasons, law enforcement is never going to only wiretap
| pedophiles and not drug dealers. There's a few exceptions to
| this[2], but generally, you should assume that if you're about
| to give the feds the legal capability to spy, it will be used
| for every crime down to and potentially including routine
| traffic stops.
|
| Apple's bulwark against that was to have the system only scan
| for images that were flagged by multiple independent child
| protection agencies. However, this isn't a guarantee; the
| western world routinely collaborates in very not independent
| ways. There's no guarantee that, say, Europe's pedo-fighters
| wouldn't have had their arms twisted by their countries'
| intelligence apparatus, operating in concert with the American
| CIA who was arm-twisting NCMEC. Apple promised they'd be
| reviewing all reports before forwarding them to law
| enforcement, but in this situation there's nothing preventing
| them from having their arms twisted here, too[3].
|
| [0] For the record, there was no evidence that Apple was using
| this system to enable iCloud end-to-end encryption. They'd
| already turned that off because of a UX problem: too many
| people were permanently locking themselves out of their own
| data and Apple couldn't break into it for them.
|
| [1] Root access on macOS is complicated by the fact that SIP
| and boot security exists. They could at least theoretically
| have made the kernel refuse to terminate the CSAM scanner
| process at all, but that would be a speed bump at best. Users
| absolutely can turn off SIP or boot modified kernels on Macs
| that would remove whatever protection Apple added to the CSAM
| scanner. And Apple currently has no interest in locking owners
| out of macOS like they did with iOS.
|
| [2] The NSA actually does try to keep their spying tools to
| themselves, because they have to fight nation-states, not
| criminals. Even then, they'll still slip hints under the door
| and tell the FBI they can only use them if they can make up a
| story that doesn't expose how the NSA's spying apparatus works.
|
| [3] National Security Letters are one hell of a drug.
|
| Apple could _also_ have their arm twisted to add backdoors, but
| they 've already shown that they'll yell loudly if that
| happens. Furthermore, the existence of software signatures
| means that such a backdoor would generate irrefutable paper
| trails, which is the sort of thing that intelligence agencies
| hate. It's much easier for them to just quietly extend an
| existing quasi-backdoor than to create an explicit one that
| loudly screams "DO NOT USE YOUR PHONE TO DO CRIMES"
| philjohn wrote:
| Most don't use the naive way to scan for images, NCMEC
| distributes hashes as PhotoDNA which is a perceptual, not a
| cryptographic, hash, which is tolerant to some level of
| changes.
| gigel82 wrote:
| Apple's "solution" was the technical equivalent of Microsoft
| having Windows Defender scanning every single file on a user
| computer and attaching a "hash" / tag to it. Then downloading a
| database of "forbidden hashes" from an unspecified government
| authority.
|
| Their initial plan was to only compare against the database
| when you upload to iCloud (in the comparison, OneDrive) and
| notify the authorities, but of course once the infrastructure
| for local scanning was in place, extending it to other
| "scenarios" was just a small update away (I'm sure RIAA/MPAA
| would love to hear about your old mp3 folder you kept moving
| over from pc to pc over the years).
| vorpalhex wrote:
| The fear was that Apple would be coerced to add in non-CSAM
| hashes to the hit list, much as Apple is now compromised fully
| in China.
|
| Thus any undesirable material - a campaign poster, a meme, a
| video leak of classified info - would be yanked from customer
| devices and trigger this automated reporting flow.
|
| Apple already gives the Chinese government access to iCloud
| data for Chinese citizens. Being bullied into searching for eg
| anti-Xi material is a small jump.
|
| The other concern is that the hashes themselves are prone to
| false positives. This is true of the source hashes and concerns
| in the algorithm. The National Center for Missing & Exploited
| Children data has been known to match on pictures of tricycles
| and monkeys (clearly not CSAM). Do now we are in a world of
| pushing automated child abuse charges against people because a
| faulty algorithm.
|
| The whole thing is just prone to abuse.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| Oh iMessage and FaceTime are not available in China I was not
| aware of that.
| moistoreos wrote:
| I am reminded of a conversation on Security Now where Steve
| Gibson recommended that each website that has traffic inside the
| UK to have a red banner at the top of the page to sentiment of
| something like, "The UK Government is forcibly watching traffic
| on this website."
|
| Watch how quickly that turns the conversation around.
|
| This argument lawmakers have here is entirely built upon the
| straw man. I understand the deep yearning to protect children but
| all this won't make the criminals stop using the tools that are
| currently legal. They will continue to use them. Making them
| "illegal" won't make them stop using them because they can still
| be acquired.
| carabiner wrote:
| Nothingburger because everyone in the UK and Europe uses
| Whatsapp.
| bnt wrote:
| Good, more companies need to fight back crazy UK demands.
| Blocking MS<>Activision deal, because they think they are a
| global superpower.
| InsomniacL wrote:
| Why shouldn't the deal be blocked?
|
| Whatever services MS want from Activision they can purchase on
| an ongoing basis without blocking others like Sony just to
| block the competition.
|
| Who wants Call of Duty to go xbox only like Halo?
|
| Microsoft is a platform provider, the content creators that use
| their platform should be free to publish to any platform.
| Otherwise Microsoft bump the prices and say take it or leave it
| but you can't get it anywhere else.
| theironhammer wrote:
| Because patches to military software could be "delayed". What
| operating system does military hardware run on?
| hyperhopper wrote:
| The MS Activision deal should be blocked, it's awful for the
| people
| nani8ot wrote:
| Blocking the MS-ABK deal isn't about being a global superpower,
| but about MS and ABK doing business in UK. It's the same with
| EU, Netherlands, Japan and US.
| vbo wrote:
| I feel we've been collectively losing the battle to keep our
| conversations private. The anti-encryption laws are likely
| vocally opposed only by a minority, while the majority believes
| they had no privacy to begin with and governments can read your
| messages at a whim. And perhaps that's true to some extent. But
| since most people believe the battle is lost, moreso that this
| has always been the status quo, then any battle on the subject is
| lost before it has a chance to begin. We have capitulated on
| privacy, because it's a vague concept and we don't equate it with
| freedom, or perhaps our sense of being free is so ingrained in
| modern societies that we see no risk to it being lost lest
| something drastic and immediate takes it away, when in fact the
| very system designed to protect our freedoms (led by people that
| look like us, think like us and enjoy these freedoms as much as
| we do) is malfunctioning and slowly erodes rights that previous
| generations enjoyed. We're not collectively trying to harm our
| freedoms and yet here we are.
|
| And shortsightedness on the side of lawmakers is baffling. Nobody
| takes responsibility for vision, we just go along with
| implementing solutions without considering broader impact or
| history. If the government has all your correspondence and the
| government falls into the wrong hands, you're toast, assuming you
| do not align with the leadership. We're writing that possibility
| off, but someone gets to brag that they've written legislation to
| stop the bad guys -- and maybe they did, but the cost was our
| collective freedom.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > [...] any battle on the subject is lost before it has a
| chance to begin
|
| "The most common way people give up their power is by thinking
| they don't have any." -- Alice Walker
| dralley wrote:
| >I feel we've been collectively losing the battle to keep our
| conversations private.
|
| A big part of the issue is that the nature of the conversations
| has changed. Mail and Telephones were _never_ at any point
| perfectly private. The idea of having complete privacy in such
| conversations is actually rather new.
|
| The difference is that those communication mediums now
| represent nearly all communication, rather than a small
| fraction of it, and that the effort to meaningfully break that
| privacy has dropped _significantly_ over what it would have
| required to surveil millions of people in the 1950s. It doesn
| 't require an East-German-esque security state anymore.
| jonhohle wrote:
| Great! Long distance communication has finally caught up with
| fundamental rights!
|
| Had those rights been respected all along instead of
| exploited by perverted, power-obsessed authorities because of
| how easy it was, it wouldn't be such a shock to lose the
| ability again. At least in the US where a right to privacy is
| a constitutional guarantee, I would hope that Apple and
| others would defiantly continue to offer encrypted services
| despite government threats. It would seem like the Human
| Rights Act guarantees the same right, though I don't know if
| it has any higher precedence than any other act parliament.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| > I feel we've been collectively losing the battle to keep our
| conversations private.
|
| The USA is still doing pretty good but the UK and the EU are
| staunchly anti privacy. They're pretty good on consumer privacy
| but don't believe that privacy from the government should
| exist.
| adra wrote:
| This feels pretty opposite to me. I mean sure UK is pretty
| privacy hostile in practice (CCTVs everywhere), but what does
| the US have for companies surveillance of people? How much of
| that data is legal for governments to buy? Maybe the US gov
| isn't spying on citizens, but how many 5-eyes partners are
| definitely sending data to them in proxy (by careful
| surveillance design)?
|
| I guess my question boils down to what specifically does the
| US do right that the UK and Europe does worse?
| nwsm wrote:
| Is TFA not a good enough example?
| makeitdouble wrote:
| It's more complicated than that.
|
| First, the TFA is about Apple, not the US. The US gov.
| also attempted to get backdoors from Apple (only to give
| up and go for the standard security vulnerabilities
| instead of getting a clean entry point)
|
| Then cloud data stored on Apple servers is still open
| game, and Apple syncs message on iCloud by default.
| There's very little incitive for the US gov to burn
| political will on this issue when it won't matter for 99%
| of people using the devices. Except the UK gov doesn't
| get that privilege as the data is on US servers, not UK
| ones.
| SllX wrote:
| Have a Constitution that limits government power.
|
| That said, it has become apparent to me that we need to
| impose _further_ limitations because apparently the
| whitelist /blacklist approach we have thus far is
| insufficient and the Anti-Federalists were much more
| correct in the long run.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| That only works if you have a government willing to limit
| government power. Otherwise the letter of the
| constitution will be preserved while everyone in power do
| basically whatever they want.
| SllX wrote:
| That's true of every conceivable government. Political
| office is ultimately a position of power and so those who
| have it seek to maintain and expand it, but I think we
| roughly have the right mix of institutions serving the
| right functional roles, but the powers given to Congress
| could use a textual update, and a right to privacy more
| clearly spelled out to account for technological and
| international diplomacy changes that have occurred since
| 1789.
| jen20 wrote:
| The fact that almost every US telecoms provider is selling
| your location - and there is no restriction on law
| enforcement buying it - means that things are not exactly
| rosy in the US either.
| lozenge wrote:
| Has Snowden been forgotten so quickly?
| b59831 wrote:
| Look at the comments on this site whenever speech is brought
| up.
|
| "I'm all for free speech BUT that person said lets go brandon,
| that's hate spreech... "
|
| Privacy is given away for political flag waving.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| If the definition of free speech doesnt feel over inclusive
| then its not free speech.
| eli wrote:
| Cmon who is saying that?
|
| Plenty of people believe in limits to free speech but very
| very few would draw the line there.
| xenospn wrote:
| Can you point to a comment that said that, or are you simply
| projecting?
| wilg wrote:
| Wait, do you think there are people who think "Let's Go
| Brandon" is anything but a hilarious conservative self-own?
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Yeah. Literally everyone who says it unironically. So the
| original usage.
| wilg wrote:
| I thought of this immediately but was too lazy to edit so
| this is what I deserve
| crackercrews wrote:
| How is this a self-own?
| gloryjulio wrote:
| It's just hilarious from the outsiders' view. It's just a
| bunch ppl want to insult but don't want to say the exact
| words.
| flangola7 wrote:
| Bad faith questions don't get entertained. Shoo.
| jen20 wrote:
| Because it makes people look like pathetic muppets. If
| you mean "Fuck Joe Biden", say "Fuck Joe Biden", don't
| clutch your damn pearls about it.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| They did say that, but the media translated it to 'let's
| go Brandon' as a self own, so it's many levels deep :)
| Izkata wrote:
| Yep, it immediately turned into a meme. Memes aren't
| always logical, and probably mostly aren't logical.
| jonhohle wrote:
| When the majority uses vulgarities, how does not using
| vulgarity make one a muppet? I'd also consider the
| Muppets rather avant-garde for their time, so maybe you
| mean it as a complement as in Gonzo, Fozzy, or Beaker (or
| any other pathetic Muppet).
| crackercrews wrote:
| Interesting take. I understood conservatives to use it
| because it is also taking a shot at the so-called MSM,
| who dubiously created the phrase. I never knew people
| though conservatives were being muppets by using it.
| [deleted]
| _djo_ wrote:
| The 'MSM' (what a dated phrase) didn't create it, it was
| just a single reporter at a NASCAR race who either
| misheard it or bowdlerised it for the live TV audience.
| lynx23 wrote:
| To me, there is one big argument for privacy: You never know
| what your govewrnment will change into in the next few years.
| This basic argument for encryption is often raised in
| combination with countries which we already consider non-free.
| But, frankly, I have finally learned the true meaning of this
| message during COVID times. I would never have expected society
| deteriorating into this fear/hate driven, media induced
| witchhunt. Since that experience, I basically expect _anything_
| frm the government, which makes the argument for being able to
| encrypt communication even stronger for me.
| sbarre wrote:
| Yes, this is something a lot of people don't think about:
|
| What is acceptable (even legal) today may not be tomorrow, or
| in X years (10, 15, or more)..
|
| If we allow all our private conversations and messages to be
| permanently archived (and you know they will be, disk space
| is effectively infinite), who is to say that wouldn't be used
| against us in the future when laws, or even social standards,
| have drastically changed?
| t-writescode wrote:
| And we literally have examples, right now, of Facebook
| handing over private messages between people talking about
| abortion and then those were used to convict someone.
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=facebook+police+abortion
|
| It's the first like 4 links right now
| Toenex wrote:
| Absolutely. Another concern I have is the demonstrable
| incompetence of the UK government. If they have my data,
| which will only ever paint a partial picture of what I do,
| who knows what conclusions they may draw. I don't want to
| spend hours talking to nice policemen because my GPS data
| shows me regularly in the same park as some known terrorist
| just because they've never heard of a park run.
| throwaway914 wrote:
| You can demonstrate this to folks with a very recent change
| in government: Abortion and LGBT rights.
|
| How much do you want to bet states like Texas or Florida
| will use government surveillance to prosecute folks seeking
| medical care?
|
| I give it a month before we hear about someone being
| charged with some form of conspiracy to leave the state
| before their poor kids are taken. "Exhibit A will show the
| defendants intent to move their children across state
| lines..."
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > The anti-encryption laws are likely vocally opposed only by a
| minority, while the majority believes they had no privacy to
| begin with and governments can read your messages at a whim
|
| Traditionally, couldn't they with texts? And with all the major
| social media players?
|
| Isn't stuff like Signal they can't track relatively new and
| getting outlawed in many places?
| inhumantsar wrote:
| BlackBerry's BBM was E2E encrypted with no backdoors much
| like Signal is today.
|
| Tho as I understand it, Signal's security is more robust.
| vbo wrote:
| They could and they did, the problem is they're now
| attempting to get the same access to encrypted communications
| by outlawing privacy, essentially saying they need to get rid
| of your freedom to speak privately for our greater good.
| jonhohle wrote:
| In terms of human history, easily eavesdroppable
| communication is relatively new, mass eavesdroppable
| communication even more. I'd like to believe we're reverting
| back to the mean - similar privacy to in person conversation
| but now over long distant.
| lanstin wrote:
| I used PGP Phone with my dad, which means it was pre-Dec
| 1999. The crypto battle is kind of orthogonal to general
| privacy concerns. Stuff like being allowed to sell location
| data from your phone is not related to building back-doors
| into encryption. The argument against crypto backdoors is
| pretty simple: bad guys can get good crypto, and backdoors
| invariably end up providing access to bad actors, via hacking
| or secret leaking or corruption.
| Loquebantur wrote:
| It's not just about encryption and privacy. That's missing
| the forest for the trees.
|
| For a democracy to function, people need to be able to have
| free and candid discussions about any topic without the fear
| of being ostracised, persecuted or whatever. Only that way
| can ideas be exchanged and people get a hunch of what others
| think about stuff of relevance. Only that way can people
| partake in sensible democratic decision-making. Framed
| opinions pushed onto you by one-way media are no substitute.
| That's dictatorship in disguise.
|
| "Classic" ways of public communication, like town halls,
| pubs, marketplaces or whatnot, cannot fill that role any
| longer. But online, places like Twitter, Reddit and some chat
| services that closed the gap now get killed off, too. This
| dystopia cannot be let come to pass.
| badrabbit wrote:
| > The anti-encryption laws are likely vocally opposed only by a
| minority
|
| I'd like you to back up that claim because from what I had seen
| about surveillance and terrorism most people supported it(even
| the patriot act had popular support in the polls). Only people
| smart enough to know about encryption oppose this. Most people
| who don't understand tech pretty much assume the government is
| already looking at messages. Long before snowden, illegal phone
| tapping was a public secret people were fine with so long as
| the government doesn't abuse that access. Even before
| computers, they had secret rooms where they opened to read
| people's letters without a warrant. Not one major political
| candidate that I can recall since 9/11 has mentioned expiring
| the patriot act or investingating the NSA and recommending
| criminal charges in their campaign, nor does it get brought up
| in their town halls.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Anti encryption? Not sure most people support that
| specifically.
|
| But generally speaking, I dont think you've emphasized it
| strongly enough. People arent just supportive of trading
| privacy and freedom for the promise of safety. They are
| literally begging for it.
| schoen wrote:
| I think you parsed the comment you're replying to backwards.
| Like you, the previous commenter suggested that opposition to
| surveillance is uncommon.
| cmiles74 wrote:
| An insidious part of this discussion is this idea that these
| laws do not interfere with encryption. IMHO, it's a dishonest
| stance to take but when debated, the first thing defenders of
| this legislation say is that this "does nothing to break
| encryption" or "Privacy and security are not mutually exclusive
| -- we need both, and we can have both and that is what this
| amendment delivers."
|
| In this plan messages are sent to a third party for analysis.
| Sure the messages sent to the third party are encrypted but
| your privacy is entirely violated.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/06/uk-osb-csam-scanning/
| hiatus wrote:
| It's crazy that we allow this at all. The government can't
| observe clandestine conversations that occur in person, does
| that mean they can mandate us to carry a government recording
| device? That people don't equally balk at requests to encumber
| encryption is baffling.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Should it be legal to have a private conversation along a
| windy beach?
|
| Government: "Allowing it might be as dangerous as a gun!"
| ashton314 wrote:
| I like this vein of argument: assume that it is _good_ that
| the government be able to snoop on your text messages. Why
| not in-person conversations as well? OK, let 's make it so
| everything you say gets recorded. Eesh.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I don't believe encryption should have intentional
| backdoors, but more because of the technical impossibility
| of doing this without introducing security risk. Your
| analogy doesn't really work, because what governments are
| arguing they should be able to do is break encryption and
| snoop only when given a warrant. They can snoop on in-
| person conversations when they get a warrant and the
| general public doesn't oppose that, even though they would
| not want to carry 24/7 recording devices that snooped on
| every conversation even in the absence of probable cause to
| be suspected of a criminal conspiracy.
| garfieldnate wrote:
| Couldn't they still use their original strategies for
| spying if they had a warrant? Just get the phone and
| install a secret microphone inside, or inside a house or
| a car. This can be done with cameras, too, though the
| text on a phone might be hard to read.
| datalus wrote:
| Yeah... the crux is should electronic conversations be
| afforded the same rights, and by extension are they assumed
| rights for all communication? Where to draw the line? It's
| definitely murky.
| jjav wrote:
| > Where to draw the line? It's definitely murky.
|
| It shouldn't be murky at all. For all of the history of
| humanity, privacy has been the default state. I could
| talk to people face to face (what used to be the only
| way) and it was by default private. I could keep written
| notes and records and they were by default private.
|
| There were special-case mechanisms to violate that
| privacy (e.g. search warrants, targeted spying) but by
| their nature they target specific people and, at least
| most of the time, go through a process with some checks
| and balances. I don't have any objection to this type of
| spying. If someone is suspected of a serious crime, it's
| reasonable for society to have a way to approve planting
| some surveillance bugs on them and them only.
|
| It's only now that nearly all communication is over third
| party systems that government suddenly feel it's ok to
| spy on _everyone_ and _all the time_. It 's clearly not
| ok, nothing murky about that.
| itronitron wrote:
| By analogy, what if I have multiple pairs of tin cans,
| where each pair of tin cans is connected by a string, and
| sell those pairs of cans to people so that they can have
| private conversations at a distance from one another.
|
| If I provide privately owned physical infrastructure for
| protecting those strings and facilitating the routing of
| the strings am I obligated to make that available to the
| government for eavesdropping?
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > Assume that it is good that the government be able to
| snoop on your text messages. Why not in-person
| conversations as well?
|
| Playing devil's advocate: in most US states, the FBI can in
| fact plant someone with a wire to record a private
| conversation. They don't have the resources to record _all_
| in-person conversations, but maybe they would if they
| could.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| They feel they have nothing to hide. I find the "nothing to
| hide" argument baffling, as when they say this, I immediately
| ask them to tell me about their last sexual encounter, in
| graphic detail. After all, they've nothing to hide.
|
| For some reason, they never do, and they usually get rather
| upset with me.
| [deleted]
| jckahn wrote:
| Or simply ask for their bank account info and passwords.
| Surely there's nothing to hide with that!
| yankput wrote:
| Hm, I wonder what they do in China.
|
| In China they are running their own infrastructure on servers
| owned by party-affiliated businesses. I wonder how strong their
| encryption is over there?
|
| China blocks many services with strong encryption but it doesn't
| block iMessage.
| draw_down wrote:
| [dead]
| nomel wrote:
| Facetime is disabled in China, and on any phones purchased in
| China.
|
| iMessage worked, last I went there.
| larrysalibra wrote:
| Only Facetime _Audio_ calls are disabled. Normal Facetime
| calls with video work fine with mainland china purchased
| iphones....so you have to call people using those phones with
| video even if you just want to talk to them and not see them.
| It 's kind of silly because it's really unclear what actual
| problem this solves for anyone including the government.
| Perhaps the goal is to just make enough friction so that no
| one really uses it.
|
| IIRC it's something to do with needing a license for audio-
| only telecommunications services. But I also might be
| entirely wrong about that.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Pretty sure that is related to competition with China
| Telecom. When I was working in China, it was the same:
| voice only calls had to be made via our phone and charged
| according to China telecom rates, while video calls could
| be made for free.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Seems nobody uses iMessage in China. The stats I can find don't
| even list it. Maybe they're ok with leaving it as a way for
| visitors to talk to people at home.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| So the CCP is just content to leave this encrypted form of
| communication controlled by an American company while
| simultaneously locking down every other avenue of electronic
| communication? Because "no one uses it?" If no one uses it
| why not block it then?
|
| I mean, I hope so. Im not convinced though.
| hot_gril wrote:
| People do use it, just not Chinese nationals, so blocking
| it would only inconvenience visitors. Or because Apple has
| some special kind of leverage. Can only speculate.
| qwezxcrty wrote:
| Chinese do use iMessage, although not necessarily
| deliberately. SMS is very commonly used in China and when a
| iPhone user want to message to another, the default is to use
| iMessage instead of SMS. So I did have tens of native Chinese
| contacts, including my computer illiterate parents, using
| iMessage back when I was in China and using an iPhone. Also,
| SMS cost a fee in China for the most popular mobile
| subscriptions, while iMessage is almost free.
|
| So it is a good question why CCP didn't block iMessage,
| despite we know that SMS is heavily censored and monitored
| (see Jin Dun Gong Cheng ).
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