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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

#681

Post by yibg »

qwezxcrty wrote: post #643
hot_gril wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems nobody uses iMessage in China. The stats I can find don't even list it. Maybe they're ok with leaving it as a way for visitors to talk to people at home.

Chinese do use iMessage, although not necessarily deliberately. SMS is very commonly used in China and when a iPhone user want to message to another, the default is to use iMessage instead of SMS. So I did have tens of native Chinese contacts, including my computer illiterate parents, using iMessage back when I was in China and using an iPhone. Also, SMS cost a fee in China for the most popular mobile subscriptions,…

Chinese don’t use iMessage with each other much, at least these days. It’s all wechat.

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

#682

Post by makeitdouble »

SllX wrote: post #660
makeitdouble wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That only works if you have a government willing to limit government power. Otherwise the letter of the constitution will be preserved while everyone in power do basically whatever they want.

That’s true of every conceivable government. Political office is ultimately a position of power and so those who have it seek to maintain and expand it, but I think we roughly have the right mix of institutions serving the right functional roles, but the powers given to Congress could use a textual update, and a right to privacy more clearly spelled out to account for technological and international diplomacy changes…

> I think we roughly have the right mix of institutions serving the right functional roles

This is also an opinion commonly shared among people living in a country. Otherwise you either have a dictatorial state preventing people from leaving/reacting (keeping them dirt poor being an option for that), or the people rioting in the streets for months until something breaks.

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

#683

Post by 1letterunixname »

Torys are intent on policing and micromanaging citizens by violating their private lives and their values to cherrypick who to judge, shame, and prosecute as part of a greater vision of self-righteous, "moral" "conservatism" in the spirit of Iran's morality police.

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

#684

Post by 1letterunixname »

hot_gril wrote: post #404
wonderwonder wrote: post #78

This is a scam by the UK government, they don't care about child abuse, they are going to look into all sorts of communications to leverage people. If they cared about child abuse they would have shut down the open child prostitution rings running rampant. They openly let it continue because they are afraid of being branded racist since the gangs running them are minorities. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telford_ch…

"Think of the children" is always the reason rights (good or bad) get taken away.

"We must scan all of your personal devices and personal moments for illegal terrorist, cannibal, pedophile, and unapproved political content to safeguard our children against this vague, unrelenting menace. If we happen to stumble upon other content that could be automatically construed by AI to be criminal evidence, we will refer it to the proper prosecution service automatically. The net result is society will be safe. If you committed no crime, then you have nothing to fear. If you disagree with this, then a crime can always be located." - How I imagine this being pitched

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

#685

Post by lern_too_spel »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #58
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.

As far as "We have never heard of PRISM", that could be true. When you receive a national security letter it isn't like they give you detailed info about the specific operation and why you are receiving it. It's more along the lines of "you're going to do this pursuant to US code section..."

While it's correct that they had never heard of PRISM, PRISM has nothing to do with NSLs. It ingests data from FISA Section 702 requests.

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

#686

Post by lern_too_spel »

realusername wrote: post #83
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That could be true? IIRC, PRISM was less about direct access, and more about abusing every potential method of gaining information. For example, imagine a Login page that said, "Password incorrect," versus "User does not exist." If you have "User does not exist," you could use that to figure out whether a given email address has an account with a service. That could be useful information to PRISM when looking for a t…

> That could be true? IIRC, PRISM was less about direct access, and more about abusing every potential method of gaining information. Direct access to the data was mentioned in the Guardian and other newspapers

It was not mentioned in the leaked documents that the Guardian published. Instead, it said that the data came "directly from" the tech companies (who responded to wiretap requests on specific accounts). Greenwald couldn't be bothered to understand what the documents said and hallucinated the phrase "direct access" like a low capacity language model, but we on HN are functionally literate.

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

#687

Post by vel0city »

crottypeter wrote: post #670
vel0city wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine your experience of sending a message to multiple people and it not making a "group message" was your older dumb phones weren't switching to MMS, it was keeping it as pure SMS. In the SMS world, there is one recipient. In MMS, it's like an email, you can list a lot (100+ in some cases) of receipts and they can all see the list.

Just checked my provider's pricing ( in the UK) MMS are capped at 300kB and cost 30p (0.39 USD) per message. That kind of pricing made WhatsApp an infinitely preferable alternative. Phones automatically switching to MMS would be catastrophic. Data (WhatsApp) is essentially free in comparison. £10 (13 USD) per month gets you 20GB: which doesn't care how many messages/recipients/photos you send.

Dang, that's some highway robbery pricing right there.

Here in the US its common to have at least 1MB MMS max size. Back in the day 300-600KB was often the max size, but that's definitely changed over the years. Maybe its just splitting it up and re-assembling it behind the scenes, I'm not sure.

I can't speak for all history, but from about 2004 or so in the US MMS and SMS were often bundled and billed the same, especially for networks which had rolled out 3G/EV-DO. Having a plan with 500 messages usually meant 500 combined SMS and MMS message.

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

#688

Post by guy98238710 »

urbandw311er wrote: post #677
LightBug1 wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about as simple as going for a walk with a friend and having a conversation ... without anyone listening in. That's how my phone should feel.

But it’s never been that way in the UK. If you were suspected of planning a murder/bombing/atrocity/etc they could bug your phone even 50 years ago. And personally I’m quite glad about that!

Back then phones were as personal as a public phone booth. The way phones are used today resembles cybernetic enhancement more than tool use. That's where the concern for privacy comes from. There's a bell curve to technology adoption and some people have hard time processing this, but things are generally moving in the direction of increasing cyberization. Government messing with privacy can have two effects: (1) halting the cyberization by ruining public trust in the technology once for all or (2) planting seeds of an unimaginably totalitarian society before most people realize where this is going.

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

#689

Post by tsunamifury »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #635
tsunamifury wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They gave it over. Apple does not care about privacy the way it has trained American consumer to think it does.

Well, to be fair, the alternative is to simply leave China entirely. Considering how much malware and spyware the average Chinese phone has... Better a compromised iPhone than some of those things.

This is… such a bad train of thought.

If you don’t know apple turned over private text messages of congressional officials and NYTimes reporters WITHOUT protest or question to the Trump Administration. And before you say otherwise Google and Microsoft both did not.

They do not care about privacy, it’s all marketing.

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

#690

Post by steve_taylor »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #655
ashton314 wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like this vein of argument: assume that it is good that the government be able to snoop on your text messages. Why not in-person conversations as well? OK, let's make it so everything you say gets recorded. Eesh.

> Assume that it is good that the government be able to snoop on your text messages. Why not in-person conversations as well? Playing devil's advocate: in most US states, the FBI can in fact plant someone with a wire to record a private conversation. They don't have the resources to record all in-person conversations, but maybe they would if they could.

AI makes it a lot more feasible.
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