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Apple hires one of the developers behind Signal

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Re: Apple hires one of the developers behind Signal

#91
post #5

I'm starting to think Apple has found its first viable post-Jobs narrative.

This is all a waste and show off as far as I'm concerned until they go open on everything. With this move, they will also waste very valuable developer's (crypto experience ain't cheap) skills.

I agree with you that there is no privacy protection one can rely against the highest level state actor threats without open tools for privacy.

BUT Apple appears to be effective at keeping the contents of smartphones out of the hands of police and prosecutors and out of the courts. If you can't distinguish between those levels of protection, you are allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good.

Re: Apple hires one of the developers behind Signal

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that this has been Tim Cook's narrative for a while, While part of it may be PR, I also believe that these are Tim Cook's values shining through. Having an orientation that gets you jailed or killed in some countries, makes you value individual freedom and privacy. It's great to see this new Apple.

Have you heard of Ernst Röhm the Nazi general who was openly gay during his tenure? Apparently his homosexuality and the resulting stigmatization didn't stop him from espousing horrendous values and ideals. Someone's sexual orientation has no weight on the values system that he/she would subscribe to and thus shouldn't be taken into consideration in any serious discussion about the topic.

  > I found a cat that does not like milk.
  >
  > Therefore, if I see a cat, I can draw no inference
  > about the probability that they like milk.
This is not correct. It is correct to say that having found a cat that does not like milk, we know that cats do not necessarily like milk. That is valuable and relevant.

But nevertheless, we can still have some confidence that, absent other indicators, cats like milk.

p.s. Here’s another example closer to home of a “cat that did not like milk:” Roy Cohn, who carried out anti-homosexual witch hunts, and later died of AIDS.

Edit: Adding link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Cohn

Re: Apple hires one of the developers behind Signal

#93
post #87

Oh, they hired a developer behind Signal. No offense to Mr. Jacobs, I'm sure he is an excellent developer. But I saw the headline and assumed they had grabbed Moxie.

Everyone who has ever known, or known of Moxie, thought the same :D I think we'd all love to see him be CCO (Chief Cryptography Officer) or something similar for Apple. Not to diminish his work at Whisper Systems, but talent like his should be reaching the 100 of millions of customers that Apple has reach to. Moxie, I know you hop on hacker news every so often - if you read this - would you go work for Apple? Or are…

I for one hope that his efforts aren't wasted within one narrow ecosystem.

Re: Apple hires one of the developers behind Signal

#94
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does his orientation have to be included when we discuss his ideals and motivations?

Why not? He said himself that this gave him a deeper understanding of the struggles of minority groups: Being gay has given me a deeper understanding of what it means to be in the minority and provided a window into the challenges that people in other minority groups deal with every day. Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-10-30/tim-cook-s... I think it is relevant to the discussion, because I believe…

And on top of that, he probably understands the tactics the FBI used against civil rights leaders in the 60s and before (and even after).

Re: Apple hires one of the developers behind Signal

#95
post #87

Oh, they hired a developer behind Signal. No offense to Mr. Jacobs, I'm sure he is an excellent developer. But I saw the headline and assumed they had grabbed Moxie.

Everyone who has ever known, or known of Moxie, thought the same :D I think we'd all love to see him be CCO (Chief Cryptography Officer) or something similar for Apple. Not to diminish his work at Whisper Systems, but talent like his should be reaching the 100 of millions of customers that Apple has reach to. Moxie, I know you hop on hacker news every so often - if you read this - would you go work for Apple? Or are…

I'd honestly prefer he remains independent of Apple.

I have no desire to purchase Apple products and them picking him up would probably be a loss to Signal which I actually use.

Re: Apple hires one of the developers behind Signal

#96
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone who has ever known, or known of Moxie, thought the same :D I think we'd all love to see him be CCO (Chief Cryptography Officer) or something similar for Apple. Not to diminish his work at Whisper Systems, but talent like his should be reaching the 100 of millions of customers that Apple has reach to. Moxie, I know you hop on hacker news every so often - if you read this - would you go work for Apple? Or are…

I for one hope that his efforts aren't wasted within one narrow ecosystem.

Exactly. Writing a user of Signal on Android, Apple is the last place I want him to be!

Re: Apple hires one of the developers behind Signal

#97
post #87

Oh, they hired a developer behind Signal. No offense to Mr. Jacobs, I'm sure he is an excellent developer. But I saw the headline and assumed they had grabbed Moxie.

Everyone who has ever known, or known of Moxie, thought the same :D I think we'd all love to see him be CCO (Chief Cryptography Officer) or something similar for Apple. Not to diminish his work at Whisper Systems, but talent like his should be reaching the 100 of millions of customers that Apple has reach to. Moxie, I know you hop on hacker news every so often - if you read this - would you go work for Apple? Or are…

I think we'd all love to see him be CCO (Chief Cryptography Officer) or something similar for Apple.

I assumed that were referring to Moxie and my initial thought was that it would represent a sad loss of autonomy for him.

Re: Apple hires one of the developers behind Signal

#98

This article seems more than a little silly. They blew up a single tweet into an article about Apple's corporate strategy in relation to the FBI. What next? Are they going to dig through Apple employees' trash, looking for variations in the number of credit card offers? "Apple Employees Load up on Credit" "Investigators have uncovered a 10% uptick in the number of accepted credit card offers from key Apple employees.…

I know you joke about looking at credit card info, but it reminded me of this story[1] where fraud researchers at a credit card company (ab)used their access to credit card transactions of their customers in order to mine the data and perform fundamental research about various companies' retail performance.

They then used this information to trade on the companies just before earning release, and made a lot of money. They were eventually caught by the SEC because their trading was deemed suspicious, i.e. their options bets always seemed to work out.

1. http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-01-23/capital-one...

Re: Apple hires one of the developers behind Signal

#99

Does anybody see through these PR plays? They've unlocked many phones in the past for the government, they're protecting their technology and using the moral issue to look good at a time when they're still majorly losing their way. To me this looks like governmental appeasement. Shutting down Snowden and other's methods of private communications is a fantastic gift to the government who doesn't want more of that type…

>They've unlocked many phones in the past for the government I do not really see why this is always brought up. Ofcourse they unlocked phones in the past, they had a master password, they could not legally refuse to do it. There was no legal way for them to resist such actions by the government Do you understand the difference between the security model today, and previous versions of the iPhone? Further I do believe…

Things of all kinds went wrong after Steve left us. They've lost their way.

Re: Apple hires one of the developers behind Signal

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They've unlocked many phones in the past for the government I do not really see why this is always brought up. Ofcourse they unlocked phones in the past, they had a master password, they could not legally refuse to do it. There was no legal way for them to resist such actions by the government Do you understand the difference between the security model today, and previous versions of the iPhone? Further I do believe…

Things of all kinds went wrong after Steve left us. They've lost their way.

In what way?

You preferred the less secure work with the government in all things Apple? that is what Steve Jobs Apple was...

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