Thank you. Too many people ignore the fact that Apple could keep and manage escrow keys. Apple has taken a stand and refused to design software that way. Apple could sign firmware that could be loaded onto an encrypted phone to allow brute force attacks. Apple has taken a stand and refused to create or design such firmware. A judge could compel Apple to provide the signing key so the FBI for the FBI to create firmware to work the way they desire. No judge has made such a ruling to date.

I wanted to expound on the post above because I don't think most people realize how easily our security could be compromised. Sadly, most people would never know if Apple had decided to quietly compromise their stance. I say most because I know there are serious security researches who would like very much to prove Apple has done something nefarious. Those security researchers cannot know if Apple has handed over its signing key, so even now, we are taking the word of Apple spokespeople that our security is intact.

Until we have open source hardware and open source software, we cannot and will not know our security is intact. Racing against that is a desire by the public and law enforcement to protect us from harm. Will both happen? If they do, which will happen first?

It is my hope that we will see open source software and hardware that protect our security in my lifetime. After my time, I hope that the world will find a way to prevent public harm with information access, while not compromising personal security.

Only, in this case it isn't one side denying it to another, it is one side not wanting to be forced to provide it to the other.

This is particularly interesting because the SCOTUS ruled that a baker could not be forced to provide a cake that included something against the religious principles held by the baker. Conflicting with that is the current legal requirement on this employer to provide employees with health care including something against the religious principles held by the employer.

Simply put, the question to be settled is what exactly are the situations where you must actively do something that conflicts with your beliefs.

I expected a few people to object on /. but percentage of objectors here concerns me. I believe there are some reasonable objections, like normalizing the idea of tracking apps, but your post is one of the very few that seem to understand how the system is designed to protect privacy. Further I'm concerned by TFA itself because it means the message is either being mostly lost or people are so entrenched in their distrust that logic and proof are useless. What do you do when you have a way to protect privacy and save lives and people just refuse to participate? Is it even a surmountable problem?

I never would have guessed three months ago that I'd be looking to convince people that Apple and Google are protecting my privacy.

I like spending time with friends and family. Shopping together, however, is not on the list of things that bring me joy. Lets spend 5 minutes getting the thing I want ordered online and the rest of the hour we would have spent doing it in person we can instead use to do something we enjoy together. Some days I get food delivered to the house or office. The time we would have spent driving, waiting then driving back is instead spent on things we enjoy more.

Having options, paying for them, is a way to maximize the good parts and minimize the bad parts of your life. I congratulate you if you don't have any time constraints where you wish you had more time for those things you prioritize. Most of us, however, do. Saying the rest of us should be more like you is kinda offensive though.

Me. I am neither paid nor ignorant. What Google Photos does for me is a trade I am happy to make.

I can export all the data Google has on me. That's important to me because I care about getting out what I put in. That's why the behavior of Google toward its services doesn't worry me. They sell the opportunity to market to me in ways advertisers think might appeal to me. Fair enough, I want advertisements that are tailor made to show me what I might want. Sure, I see crap that doesn't appeal, but less of that than I would with advertisements randomly sent to the general world. Admittedly, I get those too sometimes. I'm fine with that. Nothing forces me to spend money, but if I do choose to, then I spend my money on those things that most appeal to my personality. Nothing is evil about that. If they could influence me to do things I would regret, then I'd reject their influence. I don't believe advertising has that degree of power over me. I'm nearly always happy with the choices I make on spending my money.

Mostly, people upset by the trade they make with "free" services are those without the the strength of character to resist the lure of advertisements going against their own benefit.

I like this answer. The words "practical" and "standard" are underrepresented in these comments, but that's the most practical standard I think I've seen suggested.

When I saw this article pop up, I thought perhaps there would be a discussion about competing standards and how practical each was. I understand the philosophical question that isn't fully resolvable, but I was thinking of ways that you could get consistent answers and was disappointed not to see more posts along that line.

Perhaps you draw a straight line from one extreme point on the coastline to greatest distance opposite point, then expand that by putting points at a determined distance nearest the intersection of water and land at GMT. You'd still be able to alter the answer by varying the distance between points, but it'd give reasonably consistent answers. You could then say the western border of the US coastline of X km at a resolution of 1km. You could get a completely different number by switching to a resolution of 1m or 1cm, but the usefulness of the number for comparisons would be similar to how we weigh things. Sure, it's impossible to know how much a 1cm^2 of water weighs exactly due to quantum and gravity fluctuation, but you can get consistent answers if you define the environment and measurement scale.

Saying "nobody knows exactly" may be technically accurate for all measurements, but that's philosophy when what most people need is a practical answer for the purpose of doing work. I suspect I'm more inclined to an engineering perspective than a philosophical one, but that's what you need if you're estimating how much concrete you'll need for a coastline road.

I started to post this as AC to avoid getting dinged for expressing the unpopular opinion. I only decided to bother because somebody ought to say some things that I haven't seen said already. After previewing it, I decided I should put my name on it, even if it's unpopular.

Or take control of your hardware and software to ensure it does exactly what you want, the way you want. Not that I disagree with using an OS that facilitates making sure your computer does what you want. I've used open source for my primary home OSs for nearly two decades for exactly that reason. Periodically, I use a closed source OS for a while, mostly to ensure I deeply understand how it works.

I own my computer. That means I can choose to control it. At the moment, it is running Windows 10 and it does what I want. In any instance where it doesn't do it, or doesn't do it the way I want, there are two possibilities: Either I fix it, or admit that I am too lazy to fix it. I'm rarely too lazy, but if I am, I acknowledge that's on me, not some company I buy hardware or software from.

This perspective has led me to rather enjoy working with Windows 10. Certainly Microsoft has made a multitude of decisions that I disagree with, but that's nothing new. If MS needs to push more people into using Edge in order to gather the necessary data for building better systems, it won't force me to do anything, but it might be a benefit to their ecosystem. In the long run, I think that benefits me too.

I ain't even mad.

The city was able to make a deal to give a very attractive benefit to it's residents and businesses, a benefit which stopped making sense when they started exceeding their capacity. Now they're having to respond to an emergency situation and doing it thoughtfully. It's only making a big news splash because it has the right buzzwords for clickbait. If this were a city with cheap water responding to a sudden surge in bottled water companies, it'd be the same basic situation, but zero clickbait interest.

With Apple more than almost any other company, and with phones more than almost any other product, "you put yourself into the manufacturer's hands." Apple has been clear from the start that they don't really care what customers want, so long as they can get more iPhone sales.

Customers wanted physical keyboards, to be able to add Apps from anywhere, free ring tones and the ability to record your own, standard chargers, and being able to plug in audio devices with a universal jack. Guess what? Apple does their best to make those things either impossible or very, very difficult. They don't seem to think it would sell more phones to do what customers want. Their profits tend to make me think they're right.

How is it even a little surprising that Apple would behave in this manner?! This is completely predictable and typical of the company. The reason they apologized was obviously to prevent it from becoming a big enough news story that the average iPhone buyer might notice.

And guess what? Most people who get frustrated with their slowing phone won't get the battery fixed because they won't know it's even an option. They'll buy another iPhone and Apple knows that. The few who actually know about it and take advantage of the offer will think Apple's doing something really good for them.

What should Apple have done? Exactly what they did. It's the best way to get money and that's exactly what they're accomplishing.

Maybe your brain was clouded by alcohol or THC or whatever and this reply finds you a little more sober. If so, please put a post-it note on your computer that you must never, ever, support the fourth amendment online unless sober. If you weren't intoxicated, then you should go back and read the links I provided in the first post. You obviously missed the point of my comments. You're arguing on the same side I am, but doing it so badly that you're hurting our cause.

Seriously, it's like every time I try to work on the arguments to protect the fourth amendment's purpose; the idiots unite to make it look bad. Practically every reply is a comment supposedly in favor of protecting strong cryptography, but actually helping the case of people who want to break it or outlaw it. I can't help but wonder if all the idiots with stupid arguments are actually secretly fighting to weaken encryption.

It's like being an advocate of first amendment lately. It's hard to get anyone to care about protecting freedom because all the Nazis are screaming that they're on our side.

How does that work exactly? Which business would halt all activities in the US rather than submit to the hypothetical law? And don't kid yourself that it'd move their taxes out of reach either, because with that kind of political atmosphere, seizing local assets is a no brainer. Look at what the EU is doing with Ireland right now and you can assume based on our recent history that the US will be even more aggressive.

I'm giving you the benefit of a doubt; assuming you're considering the hypothetical argument, rather than being stupid enough to think you're arguing against someone desirous of the situation I described. Your response could have made that clearer.

Okay, this is an argument I haven't considered. I think what most people mean by "won't work" is that with the existing tools and suggested methods, there would be nothing stopping someone who wished to use cryptographically secure tools on top of, or beyond the consumer level system. (See http://www.phantomcode.com/com...)

What you suggest is that we would mandate all encryption without government access illegal. Banks and large corporations would get a registration for their crypto/certificates and then just add software to their servers to log/transmit the unencrypted data at government requirement. Other encryption, like iPhone system level encryption, could still be legal (see http://www.phantomcode.com/com...) with access available to government requirement and, otherwise, with no discernible change to the security to the average voter.

Then the government could snoop on streams of data and servers and have just cause to arrest anyone using encryption that isn't authorized and accessible. The result would be that most data streams would be monitored by programs essentially looking for data streams that aren't authorized. It'd be tricky to kill off all the non-US certificates, but a MITM with certs issued by someone like Symantec or Google could do effectively the same thing.

I think this is the ultimate goal of the great firewall of China. They haven't been successful. Yet. I'm not confident they won't be mostly successful in the long run though. I'm not confident the US won't get to the same place eventually.

The government is for the people, by the people and of the people, so this must be a thing the people want. I propose we mandate that anyone selling a mobile phone in the US must have the option to toggle on an opt-in option for "make my data available to the government if they want it."

There. Now law abiding citizens with nothing to hide and who don't care about privacy can have what they want and the rest of us can quit hearing ignorant law enforcement officials whine about it.

I'm kind of with you. For most of my working life, I've needed to use Windows there. Almost all that time, I've used some Unix variant (usually Linux) at home.

I've loved and hated both Windows and Linux depending on what nuisance "feature" I was having to work around. I've had problems with both, and also with the BSD variants, AIX, SCO, and even Xenix. All that I ask of an OS really is that it does the basics without too much trouble and that it gets out of my way.

Windows 10 gets in my way a bit, but most of the time it's fine, better than its predecessors and not much worse than Ubuntu. It's not as good for that as many of the *nix variants, but it goes a long way toward the "just works" principle most of the time.

Can I run the software I want? Yes. Does it support the programming languages I use? Yes. Does it support my preferred shell? No, at least not well. Not until recently. I like bash. I'm good with DOS, functionally literate with PowerShell (not great,) but I missed bash when working with Windows and the dozens of tools like sed, nl, wc, awk and similar whenever I was in Windows. There are so many little things that I want to do from time to time which were just a pain to do in Windows, so much so that usually I have to put time into importing some poor substitute versions of the tools I missed. Finally, Windows gives me the tools that make daily work easier in a way that is actually supported. I can't help but be ecstatic about that.

I see the holy war of Unix/Linux/BSD vs Apple/Microsoft still makes tolerance of the "enemy" a crime. Be that as it may, I'm happy that the OS that I'm forced to use on a daily basis finally has the tools that make my life easier.