Which would all be obviously false. For example, Apple will regularly work together with the FTC. The open source code that Apple uses comes from all kinds of places, you can bet there is some created by a government agency. And every government employee can get an Apple Id and get access to the App Store or iCloud servers.

Just figured out... The first post that I replied to state that Apple _might_ be misleading the public. You are stating, without the slightest evidence, as a plain fact that they are indeed misleading the public. You also are stating, without the slightest evidence, that their lawyers are not clever enough to produce a sufficiently misleading statement on their first attempt, but that they needed many iterations to do so.

In other words, without the slightest evidence you are claiming that Apple is lying and their lawyers are idiots. Or did I misinterpret what you said in any way?

I am working at a large public corporation with a legal department.

Every legal department will tell you that a statement that is technically correct but entirely misleading will give you not the slightest legal protection. More important for Apple, making a statement that is technically correct but entirely misleading would mean that the shit hits the fan even harder when things get out. And things get out.

Emphasis on "was". Up to about iPhone 3G.

There are two major changes nowadays. Change one is permanent full disk encryption. Change two is activation. You can only activate a wiped phone. When you buy a used phone, the seller could hand you their AppleId and password (which would be a stupid thing to do), so you wouldn't activate the phone yourself and would have whatever software is on the phone. But you would instead wipe the phone, activate it with your own AppleId and password, and whatever was on the phone (including whatever the NSA put on it) is gone. If you open a box that is supposed to contain a brand new iPhone and it doesn't require activation, then you know it's not new.

The actual claim that the Chinese make is that a new feature in iOS collects location data on the phone (which it does), and if the phone gets stolen or hacked, someone might see that data and that could have all kinds of consequences, worst case consequences for China's national security. So there was _no_ claim that Apple was involved or helping in any spying at all.

To a software developer it should be obvious that if Apple wanted to spy on you, the presence or absence of this feature wouldn't make the slightest difference whatsoever. If Apple can secretly send data that were openly collected on your phone, they could equally easily secretly send data that was secretly collected on your phone.

To a non-developer, it should be equally obvious that there are hundreds of features with the same national security implications, like word processors, spreadsheets, note-taking applications and so on and so on. Probably applications that are far more dangerous. I would expect a word processor to contain much juicier information than a location log.

You are claiming that Apple is making statements that while literally true, are misleading people to make them belief something that isn't true.

I would assume that Apple doesn't aim statements like this at paranoids. Fact is: Apple either acts in a way that a normal, non-paranoid person would expect from a statement like this and are speaking the truth, or they are not and they are lying, but it would be utterly pointless for Apple to make carefully crafted statements that are literally true but misleading.

So? Who says you can't have a second child after you sold the first one?

Actually, fixed term makes a lot more sense. Why should a book written by a 20 year old have on average sixty years more copyright than a book written by an 80 year old? And why should that change if the 20 year old is hit by a truck?

I enquired about that. Here's a situation where it "may harm your defence". Let's say you are a crime suspect. You say you have a witness you can give evidence that you were nowhere near the crime scene. What should happen is that you tell the police who your witness is, they question your witness, and either let you go because the witness convinces them you were not there, or the witness says your story is bullshit, or they decide not to believe your witness and investigate further. In the last two cases this will then come up in your court case.

But let's say you refuse to say who the witness is. The police has no chance to check if the witness says the truth or not because they don't know who the witness is. And in your court case you suddenly present the witness. In that case, the judge can throw that witness out because the police had no chance to investigate.

So you do have the right to remain silence, and it doesn't harm your defense if you remain silent all the time including the court case. It _can_ harm your defense if you remain silent but only until you appear in court.

And that is exactly nonsense. You can only go to jail if they can prove that you have the password and don't turn it over.

Wait a second... That's not my experience at all. If a car with a license plate matching your license plate is caught speeding, you will get a letter asking you whether you were driving the car. If you say "yes" you can accept a low (ish) fixed penalty and points without going to court. If you say "no" or "can't remember" or insist on going to court they start investigating. The matter will end up with the driver in court, there will be a higher fine plus court cost, but there will not be more points.

But seriously, you can't remember who is driving your car? I mean before you let anyone drive your car, you have to make sure that they have a valid driving license, and that they have insurance, so please tell me how can you forget who was driving? Or are you saying you were so drunk that you can't remember driving?

It would be incriminating in rare cases. For example, if the police don't know for sure that it is _your_ computer involved in a crime, then providing a password would prove that it's your computer, and it would be incriminating. That's why for this law to apply in the UK, the police must already have evidence that you have the password.

If you have burglars who are caught by logging into facebook at a victim's home computer and not logging out before they are leaving, what can you expect?

There's one phone that just throws away the encryption keys, which are never stored anywhere than on two locations on the hard drive (in encrypted form), so only these two locations need to be wiped. That phone also has the ability to access a small amount of flash memory directly without the firmware interfering, to make sure that no invisible copies of those keys are created. Well, it's not Android...

Obviously Foxconn has no other customers than Apple. Reminds me of the headlines last year "300 workers threaten suicide at Apple factory" (because they were in fear of losing their jobs due to dropping X-box sales).