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A Message to Our Customers

apple.com

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Re: A Message to Our Customers

#521
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One way around that is for Apple to make it extremely costly for courts to issue many of such orders, because after all Apple are free to charge whatever they like for doing this service.

I think US govt would be kinda ok with that idea if Apple didn't park their profit overseas to avoid paying tax...

What are you talking about? Why should should apple have to contribute anything to the safety or wellbeing of the peasant American society? /sarcasm

Re: A Message to Our Customers

#522
post #2

Huge props to Apple - here's hoping against hope that Google, Facebook, and Amazon get behind this. One thing I was wondering is how Apple is even able to create a backdoor. It is explained toward the end: "The government would have us remove security features and add new capabilities to the operating system, allowing a passcode to be input electronically. This would make it easier to unlock an iPhone by “brute force…

Google worked with the NSA and Facebook not only worked with the NSA, but now has ties to China and the Chinese government (which have the most advanced spying and censoring Internet technology around).

So, I'm doubtful.

Re: A Message to Our Customers

#523
post #42

I'm really impressed that Apple is standing up to the government and protecting its users' rights. I've never really considered the iPhone worth the premium price tag, but policies like this have changed my mind. Could someone answer a question I have though? The government wants Apple to create this backdoor and tailor it to the specific device, so presumably it will have a line that goes if (!deviceID.equals("san_b…

Of course apple could do this. If hn wasn't such a nauseating circlejerk people here would have realized this earlier in the comments instead of banging on about muh encryption.

This has nothing to do with the security of apple devices and everything to do with apple putting its.concerns over the US government's

Re: A Message to Our Customers

#524
post #418

Instead of FBI paying apple engineers to hack a phone, why don't they ask their kids !? It would probably save millions of dollars.

Whats on the phone that isn't already on at least one cloud server and on NSA spy servers and telco records? That's the real question that everyone is carefully avoiding.

I mean, you could break into my android phone at enormous effort to use my phone to access my gmail app, but isn't it easier to just ask google, and I'm sure the telco and NSA are already logging everything anyway?

You could break into my phone to use my phone to use my facebook app to look at my uploaded pictures, but isn't it a million times easier to just contact facebook to access my facebook account?

In this new era of dumb terminals, its like a FBI agent demanding access to the terminal settings screen of a vintage VT102 in order to track terrorists or whatever. Or a demand to know my modem init string. It demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of the entire ecosystem from top to bottom.

The purpose of all this drama is to avoid discussion of the insecurity of cloud services.

It might be that apple people use the cloud a lot less than us android people. I'd be interested and surprised to learn that.

Re: A Message to Our Customers

#526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Negative. You need the passcode.

If you lose the PIN on an iPhone you need to do a wipe and restore it from backup. You had better hope you remembered the backup password. You can't make a backup of a locked phone either. The backup is probably easier to attack if you have it, since it doesn't have hardware imposed timeouts on password guesses. It may not be current however.

I'm not sure the backup would be much help even if you could break into it, I believe it's encrypted with the same method used to protect the keychain and is tied to the victim's Apple ID. I attempted to help a coworker restore their device with my Mac and couldn't because my iTunes was using a different Apple ID than the device and the device's backup.

Re: A Message to Our Customers

#528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Negative. You need the passcode.

There is no way to recover a phone if you lose the passcode?

Not that I know of. Like others have said you can pull a backup (but the machine backing up had to have been trusted prior or you're SOL) and then restore the phone.

Nothing's bulletproof but the iPhone is the most trustworthy IMHO.

Re: A Message to Our Customers

#529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way to recover a phone if you lose the passcode?

If you have access to the iTunes account you can do a physical backup with iTunes and then erase and restore that backup. It won't be pin protected.

How would one connect the phone to iTunes to do this? You must enter the PIN on the phone to connect to iTunes iirc.

Re: A Message to Our Customers

#530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way to recover a phone if you lose the passcode?

I believe this is to deter theft.

I've locked out my galaxy s6 using the wrong password and it just wiped and reinstalled by itself. Then allowed me to restored everything that was on cloud backup.
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