Apple Caved
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In the West, we’re told our system is superior even if it fails to deliver any tangible progress, because we have free speech and privacy. Yet, while people in China flourish as our standard of living continues to egress, turns out the whole free speech argument was hollow all along. Irony, anyone?
You're mixing correlation and causation. It's not irony, it's fallacious thinking. Both may be poor approaches. You're also only comparing two countries out of all of them. This is just a ridiculous comment.
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You're mixing correlation and causation. It's not irony, it's fallacious thinking. Both may be poor approaches. You're also only comparing two countries out of all of them. This is just a ridiculous comment.
I'm not mixing anything up. You just wrote meaningless word salad. This is just a ridiculous comment.
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Apple has three realistic options:
- Submit to the UK's demands and grant them a backdoor to encrypted backups.
- Disable encrypted backups in the UK.
- Leave the UK market entirely.
They went with #2, which is probably the least user-hostile option available.
From 1500GMT on Friday, any Apple user in the UK attempting to turn it on has been met with an error message.
Existing users' access will be disabled at a later date.
I am very interested in seeing what the UX around this will be. Ideally, they should give users direct notice well in advance, so they have time to plan a migration or mitigation. Of course, Apple makes it basically impossible to perform a full backup through any mechanism except iCloud, so......one more example of how vendor lock-in is inherently a security and privacy risk.
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What if you ask if you can borrow their phone and password for an hour? They have nothing to hide?
they would never do that. -
Here in the UK, many typical phone users already assume that their data is shared anyway. Every person that i spoke to about this today asked why I think it's a problem as they have nothing to hide. A worrying position.
Ask them why they don't keep their toilet in their living room.
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@Strawberry Governments and corporations are powerless to E2EE employed by the users themselves, such as GPG/GnuPG/PGP. What could/will UK gov do against GPG and similar tools, especially those which are open-source and freely available?
I'm rooting for British people to defy their government and create their own pair of public and private keys using GPG/PGP or similar suite (preferably open-source, because they can be easily forked, adapted to easier UX/UI to any end-user, etc), sharing their public keys with each other so they can send enciphered messages, rendering useless such anti-E2EE British law.
British people don't even know what signal is, and if they do, they will name it a terrorist tool
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In the West, we’re told our system is superior even if it fails to deliver any tangible progress, because we have free speech and privacy. Yet, while people in China flourish as our standard of living continues to egress, turns out the whole free speech argument was hollow all along. Irony, anyone?
I guarantee the politicians who desperately wanted an end to e2e definitely learned from the communists of the east.
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I guarantee the politicians who desperately wanted an end to e2e definitely learned from the communists of the east.
Sees something a capitalist regime does under capitalism, start talking about communism.
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Ask them why they don't keep their toilet in their living room.
Because it would stink. I get your point but there are better ways if demonstrating it.
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Sees something a capitalist regime does under capitalism, start talking about communism.
Well, the type of policies like that typically come from one of 2 types of people: communists and fascists.
As much as I hate capitalism, I hate communism even more.
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they would never do that.
That's the point isn't it?
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This is frightening.
They do not have the ability to just remove e2e back-ups in the UK alone and walk away from this, that's not how the law is written as I understand it.
The snooper's charter gives the UK government the RIGHT to DEMAND access to encryption keys of any user GLOBALLY. The law is that they can force the cooperation of Apple to decrypt the account of an American user, of a German user, of a Russian user, of a South African user, of a Brazilian user, of a Japanese user who have never stepped foot in the UK.
So they're claiming that this protects their users, that they haven't complied but the only way to avoid complying with these secret gag orders for compromising encryption GLOBALLY at the demand of the UK government is to remove themselves entirely from the jurisdiction of the UK. Is to remove all executives and technical personnel from UK soil, to not hire such people who live in or are citizens of the UK as technical personnel as they could be gag ordered and compelled to cooperate. To basically entirely pull out of any presence but maybe storefronts in the UK and take steps to prevent the arrest and pressuring of their executives and key technical people with access from being subject to UK coercion.
That they haven't done that means all users globally are still at risk. This may be a big PR stunt to convince people they haven't caved when in fact they have in secret and will hand over data of global users to the UK which shares it via eyes agreements with the US, with France, Australia, etc. This has the added benefit of allowing the UK to keep such access secret by acting annoyed with Apple but not actually pressing any case. If they try and actually prosecute or pressure Apple that's a sign that they haven't cooperated globally, if they only offer angry words to the press IMO that's a sign that in secret they've given access globally and only informed UK users that their cloud data isn't protected.
They’re not handing over keys though. They’re just not offering ADP in that region anymore(?) I doubt they would be allowed to hand out keys (which they do not hold) to another government that would compromise American businesses, agencies, etc. The US was already noticing the dangers in this demand and I’m hoping that this was an attempt at a compromise. I guess we’ll never know though, since this included a gag order as well
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BBC News - Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row BBC
"In a statement Apple said it was "gravely disappointed" that the security feature would no longer be available to British customers."
kinda horrible to read all these "this big tech company is a rebel and my best friend" comments.
apple allowed this for the usa before many times. this time it had to be publicly announced, cause the orange sleeper agent told them to undermine the uk gov in order to allign the MEGA endeavour.
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They’re not handing over keys though. They’re just not offering ADP in that region anymore(?) I doubt they would be allowed to hand out keys (which they do not hold) to another government that would compromise American businesses, agencies, etc. The US was already noticing the dangers in this demand and I’m hoping that this was an attempt at a compromise. I guess we’ll never know though, since this included a gag order as well
Still good to keep in mind: not your keys, not your data.
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BBC News - Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row BBC
"In a statement Apple said it was "gravely disappointed" that the security feature would no longer be available to British customers."
In the process of self hosting everything anyways. This just sped things up for me
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@Strawberry Governments and corporations are powerless to E2EE employed by the users themselves, such as GPG/GnuPG/PGP. What could/will UK gov do against GPG and similar tools, especially those which are open-source and freely available?
I'm rooting for British people to defy their government and create their own pair of public and private keys using GPG/PGP or similar suite (preferably open-source, because they can be easily forked, adapted to easier UX/UI to any end-user, etc), sharing their public keys with each other so they can send enciphered messages, rendering useless such anti-E2EE British law.
When the corporation controls the hardware and the OS it can easily break any encryption running there. Just include key loggers, break RNG entropy, extract keys from memory, or just capture any data before they are encrypted. Or just let the governments into the OS so they can do all that.
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Here in the UK, many typical phone users already assume that their data is shared anyway. Every person that i spoke to about this today asked why I think it's a problem as they have nothing to hide. A worrying position.
"If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to say"
-Edward Snowden -
This is frightening.
They do not have the ability to just remove e2e back-ups in the UK alone and walk away from this, that's not how the law is written as I understand it.
The snooper's charter gives the UK government the RIGHT to DEMAND access to encryption keys of any user GLOBALLY. The law is that they can force the cooperation of Apple to decrypt the account of an American user, of a German user, of a Russian user, of a South African user, of a Brazilian user, of a Japanese user who have never stepped foot in the UK.
So they're claiming that this protects their users, that they haven't complied but the only way to avoid complying with these secret gag orders for compromising encryption GLOBALLY at the demand of the UK government is to remove themselves entirely from the jurisdiction of the UK. Is to remove all executives and technical personnel from UK soil, to not hire such people who live in or are citizens of the UK as technical personnel as they could be gag ordered and compelled to cooperate. To basically entirely pull out of any presence but maybe storefronts in the UK and take steps to prevent the arrest and pressuring of their executives and key technical people with access from being subject to UK coercion.
That they haven't done that means all users globally are still at risk. This may be a big PR stunt to convince people they haven't caved when in fact they have in secret and will hand over data of global users to the UK which shares it via eyes agreements with the US, with France, Australia, etc. This has the added benefit of allowing the UK to keep such access secret by acting annoyed with Apple but not actually pressing any case. If they try and actually prosecute or pressure Apple that's a sign that they haven't cooperated globally, if they only offer angry words to the press IMO that's a sign that in secret they've given access globally and only informed UK users that their cloud data isn't protected.
Pretty sure Apple has a few lawyers
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"If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to say"
-Edward SnowdenWasn't it something more similar to "saying that you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying that you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say"?
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BBC News - Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row BBC
"In a statement Apple said it was "gravely disappointed" that the security feature would no longer be available to British customers."
Apple can claim that they never built backdoor. But talk is cheap without showing the code for people to audit.
