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Apple says it'll remove iMessage and FaceTime in UK rather than break encryption

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Re: Apple says it'll remove iMessage and FaceTime in UK rather than break encryption

#591

Post by detourdog »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #40

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.

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.

Re: Apple says it'll remove iMessage and FaceTime in UK rather than break encryption

#592

Post by xenospn »

b59831 wrote: post #515
vbo wrote: post #419

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 batt…

[flagged]

Can you point to a comment that said that, or are you simply projecting?

Re: Apple says it'll remove iMessage and FaceTime in UK rather than break encryption

#593

Post by madeofpalk »

bostonsre wrote: post #536
jboydyhacker wrote: post #514

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.

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.

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.

Re: Apple says it'll remove iMessage and FaceTime in UK rather than break encryption

#594

Post by seanmcdirmid »

jboydyhacker wrote: post #514

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.

Isn't the UK market a lot smaller than the Chinese market?

Re: Apple says it'll remove iMessage and FaceTime in UK rather than break encryption

#595

Post by cmiles74 »

layer8 wrote: post #583
cmiles74 wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

An iPhone doesn’t force you to you iCloud backups (or iCloud at all). Or does it in China?

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.

Re: Apple says it'll remove iMessage and FaceTime in UK rather than break encryption

#596

Post by seanmcdirmid »

larrysalibra wrote: post #555
nomel wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facetime is disabled in China, and on any phones purchased in China. iMessage worked, last I went there.

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 rea…

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.

Re: Apple says it'll remove iMessage and FaceTime in UK rather than break encryption

#597

Post by epcoa »

smoldesu wrote: post #576
epcoa wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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?

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

Re: Apple says it'll remove iMessage and FaceTime in UK rather than break encryption

#598

Post by lanstin »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #501
vbo wrote: post #419

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 batt…

> 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?

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.

Re: Apple says it'll remove iMessage and FaceTime in UK rather than break encryption

#599

Post by [deleted] »

nonethewiser wrote: post #541
gretch wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

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]

Re: Apple says it'll remove iMessage and FaceTime in UK rather than break encryption

#600

Post by adra »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #494
vbo wrote: post #419

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 batt…

> 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.

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?

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