quote:

Originally posted by joel9507:
Thought exercise. **************

Interesting thought exercise.

We're all aware that, even as private citizens who ostensibly have the right to free association, we're not allowed to discriminate against Certain Protected Classes. E.g.: You cannot refuse to sell something to Certain Minorities, People Of Color, People Of Certain Ethnicities, People Holding Certain Religious Beliefs, People With Certain Sexual Proclivities or Gender Beliefs, etc., "just because."

All of this in the name of 5th and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

Yet the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution clearly affirms the "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects..."

So how is it private individuals are constrained by the U.S. Constitution in the one instance, but not protected by it in the other?

Seems a little uneven, no?

quote:

Originally posted by Hildur:


What about people who root their phone and install some verison of Linux that's open source?

I use CalyxOS on a Google Pixel. No Google apps here. The only thing I've really lost is some apps can't use notifications because they rely on Play Store.

quote:

Originally posted by ensigmatic:

quote:

Originally posted by joel9507:
Thought exercise. **************

Interesting thought exercise.

We're all aware that, even as private citizens who ostensibly have the right to free association, we're not allowed to discriminate against Certain Protected Classes. E.g.: You cannot refuse to sell something to Certain Minorities, People Of Color, People Of Certain Ethnicities, People Holding Certain Religious Beliefs, People With Certain Sexual Proclivities or Gender Beliefs, etc., "just because."

All of this in the name of 5th and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

Yet the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution clearly affirms the "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects..."

So how is it private individuals are constrained by the U.S. Constitution in the one instance, but not protected by it in the other?

Seems a little uneven, no?

Not a lawyer, but I've been told by more than one that you can't sign away your rights. However, I suspect the term "unreasonable" in the 4th Amendment would be the get-out-of-jail-free card for Apple and other big tech. If you've voluntarily bought their luxury product (not a necessity like housing) and agreed to their terms including the search, how is that unreasonable? You have recourse against it, just ditch Apple. Nobody is holding a gun to anybody's head while they search.

quote:

Originally posted by jaaron11:
... I suspect the term "unreasonable" in the 4th Amendment would be the get-out-of-jail-free card for Apple and other big tech. If you've voluntarily bought their luxury product (not a necessity like housing) ...

Ah, but this is going to be imposed upon customers who bought the products not knowing Apple would someday do this. Are they now to do away with the products for which they paid good money, almost certainly at a loss, to avoid it?

As for the phones being a "luxury": Since the government is giving them away for free to "indigent" people, are they really still a "luxury?"

What about if you're out and about and truly need to make a phone call? Just try to find a pay phone these days. Luxury?

On the flip side: Do people really need cakes? Do specific people really need to buy specific homes, shop at specific stores, or dine at specific restaurants?

The idea that one voluntarily agrees to anything in a EULA is specious at best. It gives the impression that one is entering an agreement where there is actually a choice. In reality, a EULA is a Hobson's choice, where you are given a "take it or leave it" option between accepting everything the company includes, or having no access to the device or service at all. In an age where access to the internet, the services that that connectivity conveys, and the devices to provide access, the idea that one can choose to be offline because he or she refuses a part of a EULA is not realistic.

Connectivity, and the devices that provide it, should more accurately be considered a utility now. For example, I cannot register my kids for school without going to a website to do so. There is not another mechanism anymore. "But," you may argue, "you can just go down to the library." True, and I suppose I don't really need water to my home. I can get water down at the city building and shower at the YMCA, but we still consider water/sewer to be a utility, with equal access to all. I can get access to city water without relinquishing my rights, and I should be able to access the internet while maintaining all of my rights.

ensigmatic is correct in that changing the rules mid game is wrong. A software update shouldn't change the rules that were in place when you purchased a device. But then again, we live in an age where the government can indefinitely appropriate private housing and allow people to live in it for free -takings clause be damned. I wouldn't put a lot of hope in anybody's rights being respected, either by private companies or by the government.

From EULA:

CONTRACT CHANGES

Apple reserves the right at any time to modify this Agreement and to add new or additional terms or conditions on your use of the Services. Such modifications and additional terms and conditions will be effective immediately and incorporated into this Agreement. Your continued use of the Services will be deemed acceptance thereof.

quote:

Originally posted by Pipe Smoker:
The advent of the Tim Cook era marked the beginning of Apple’s long descent.

.

The stock price says different…

quote:

Originally posted by Patriot:
From EULA:

CONTRACT CHANGES

Apple reserves the right at any time to modify this Agreement and to add new or additional terms or conditions on your use of the Services. Such modifications and additional terms and conditions will be effective immediately and incorporated into this Agreement. Your continued use of the Services will be deemed acceptance thereof.

Makes my point. EULAs should just say:

You agree to whatever we want, which may change from time to time.

quote:

Originally posted by Patriot:
The stock price says different…

And Apple Silicon has greatly enhanced Mac sales and put a large dent into PC Laptop sales.

Does this look familiar?

quote:

We know some people have misunderstandings, and more than a few are worried about the implications, but we will continue to explain and detail the features so people understand what we’ve built.

Full story: In internal memo, Apple addresses concerns around new Photo scanning features, doubles down on the need to protect children

"They're objecting because they simply don't understand. We'll just keep explaining and re-explaining it until they see it our way."

Typical leftist, control-freak attitude

We understand. We understand all too well. That's why we're objecting.

enigmatic, did you read the comments from that article you posted on 9to5mac?

You could say that 9to5mac is normally an Apple friendly crowd, but when the sermon pisses off the choir, you have a problem.

quote:

Originally posted by sigcrazy7:
enigmatic, did you read the comments from that article you posted on 9to5mac?

Yeah, I saw them.

quote:

Originally posted by sigcrazy7:
You could say that 9to5mac is normally an Apple friendly crowd, but when the sermon pisses off the choir, you have a problem.

A bunch of hand-waving and muttering, I expect. I doubt many (any?) of them will be leaving Apple over it.

As an aside: As I was waking up this morning I remembered my wife's old Lenovo Android tablet and got to wondering if it still worked, or if the battery had become so depleted it would no longer take a charge. Lo and behold: It still had 50% battery after sitting on a shelf for four years.

Second surprise like that in about as many days. First my old watch, now my wife's old tablet.

Updated it to Android 6, Marshmallow! Whoo hoo! Only six versions out-of-date

Android UI looks a little odd after four years on iOS...

. o O WiFi Analyzer. I missed having that.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: ensigmatic,

I didn't realize this, but I just realized Apple's going to include this scanning software in MacOS X Monterey as well! Have they lost their ever lovin' minds?

Yeah, Apple is so outta here in the ensigmatic household.

quote:

Originally posted by ensigmatic:
I didn't realize this, but I just realized Apple's going to include this scanning software in MacOS X Monterey as well! Have they lost their ever lovin' minds?

Yeah, Apple is so outta here in the ensigmatic household.

I was wondering if Apple would even admit that "little tidbit" for macOS. My Apple loving wife has joined your camp ensigmatic. She's not wholesale dumping her Apple products but won't buy new ones. (iPhone and iPad replacements are in her near future)

quote:

Originally posted by Bytes:

quote:

Originally posted by ensigmatic:
I didn't realize this, but I just realized Apple's going to include this scanning software in MacOS X Monterey as well! Have they lost their ever lovin' minds?

Yeah, Apple is so outta here in the ensigmatic household.

I was wondering if Apple would even admit that "little tidbit" for macOS. My Apple loving wife has joined your camp ensigmatic. She's not wholesale dumping her Apple products but won't buy new ones. (iPhone and iPad replacements are in her near future)

I'm not wholesale dumping our Apple stuff, either, but I'm dumping all Apple services, incl. my Apple Card and Apple Pay. My Apple Watch is turned off and sitting in a drawer. There'll be no new Apple product purchases, and the current stuff will be replaced with something else as needed--if not sooner.

We were this >< close to buying the first of two Mac Mini's before Apple announced this.

I'm still LMFAO that Apple would actually install this crap on Mac OS X. Wow.

Oh ohhh... Apple may have been caught with their collective hand in the cookie jar again. Looks like some (much?) of the code to support their CSAM scanner may already be in iOS as far back as 14.3:

[P] AppleNeuralHash2ONNX: Reverse-Engineered Apple NeuralHash, in ONNX and Python

Developer claims to have reverse-engineered Apple’s CSAM detection

For a developer to have reverse-engineered it, it had to have already been in the device.

Oops?

The All-Seeing "i": Apple Just Declared War On Your Privacy

Authored by Edward Snowden via Continuing Ed,

By now you've probably heard that Apple plans to push a new and uniquely intrusive surveillance system out to many of the more than one billion iPhones it has sold, which all run the behemoth's proprietary, take-it-or-leave-it software. This new offensive is tentatively slated to begin with the launch of iOS 15⁠—almost certainly in mid-September⁠—with the devices of its US user-base designated as the initial targets. We’re told that other countries will be spared, but not for long.

You might have noticed that I haven’t mentioned which problem it is that Apple is purporting to solve. Why? Because it doesn’t matter.

Having read thousands upon thousands of remarks on this growing scandal, it has become clear to me that many understand it doesn't matter, but few if any have been willing to actually say it. Speaking candidly, if that’s still allowed, that’s the way it always goes when someone of institutional significance launches a campaign to defend an indefensible intrusion into our private spaces. They make a mad dash to the supposed high ground, from which they speak in low, solemn tones about their moral mission before fervently invoking the dread spectre of the Four Horsemen of the Infopocalypse, warning that only a dubious amulet—or suspicious software update—can save us from the most threatening members of our species.

Suddenly, everybody with a principled objection is forced to preface their concern with apologetic throat-clearing and the establishment of bonafides: I lost a friend when the towers came down, however... As a parent, I understand this is a real problem, but...

As a parent, I’m here to tell you that sometimes it doesn’t matter why the man in the handsome suit is doing something. What matters are the consequences.

Apple’s new system, regardless of how anyone tries to justify it, will permanently redefine what belongs to you, and what belongs to them.

How?

The task Apple intends its new surveillance system to perform—preventing their cloud systems from being used to store digital contraband, in this case unlawful images uploaded by their customers—is traditionally performed by searching their systems. While it’s still problematic for anybody to search through a billion people’s private files, the fact that they can only see the files you gave them is a crucial limitation.

Now, however, that’s all set to change. Under the new design, your phone will now perform these searches on Apple’s behalf before your photos have even reached their iCloud servers, and—yada, yada, yada—if enough "forbidden content" is discovered, law-enforcement will be notified.

I intentionally wave away the technical and procedural details of Apple’s system here, some of which are quite clever, because they, like our man in the handsome suit, merely distract from the most pressing fact—the fact that, in just a few weeks, Apple plans to erase the boundary dividing which devices work for you, and which devices work for them.

Why is this so important? Once the precedent has been set that it is fit and proper for even a "pro-privacy" company like Apple to make products that betray their users and owners, Apple itself will lose all control over how that precedent is applied. ​​​​​​As soon as the public first came to learn of the “spyPhone” plan, experts began investigating its technical weaknesses, and the many ways it could be abused, primarily within the parameters of Apple’s design. Although these valiant vulnerability-research efforts have produced compelling evidence that the system is seriously flawed, they also seriously miss the point: Apple gets to decide whether or not their phones will monitor their owners’ infractions for the government, but it's the government that gets to decide on what constitutes an infraction... and how to handle it.

For its part, Apple says their system, in its initial, v1.0 design, has a narrow focus: it only scrutinizes photos intended to be uploaded to iCloud (although for 85% of its customers, that means EVERY photo), and it does not scrutinize them beyond a simple comparison against a database of specific examples of previously-identified child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

If you’re an enterprising pedophile with a basement full of CSAM-tainted iPhones, Apple welcomes you to entirely exempt yourself from these scans by simply flipping the “Disable iCloud Photos” switch, a bypass which reveals that this system was never designed to protect children, as they would have you believe, but rather to protect their brand. As long as you keep that material off their servers, and so keep Apple out of the headlines, Apple doesn’t care.

So what happens when, in a few years at the latest, a politician points that out, and—in order to protect the children—bills are passed in the legislature to prohibit this "Disable" bypass, effectively compelling Apple to scan photos that aren’t backed up to iCloud? What happens when a party in India demands they start scanning for memes associated with a separatist movement? What happens when the UK demands they scan for a library of terrorist imagery? How long do we have left before the iPhone in your pocket begins quietly filing reports about encountering “extremist” political material, or about your presence at a "civil disturbance"? Or simply about your iPhone's possession of a video clip that contains, or maybe-or-maybe-not contains, a blurry image of a passer-by who resembles, according to an algorithm, "a person of interest"?

If Apple demonstrates the capability and willingness to continuously, remotely search every phone for evidence of one particular type of crime, these are questions for which they will have no answer. And yet an answer will come—and it will come from the worst lawmakers of the worst governments.

This is not a slippery slope. It’s a cliff.

One particular frustration for me is that I know some people at Apple, and I even like some people at Apple—bright, principled people who should know better. Actually, who do know better. Every security expert in the world is screaming themselves hoarse now, imploring Apple to stop, even those experts who in more normal circumstances reliably argue in favor of censorship. Even some survivors of child exploitation are against it. And yet, as the OG designer Galileo once said, it moves.

Faced with a blistering torrent of global condemnation, Apple has responded not by addressing any concerns or making any changes, or, more sensibly, by just scrapping the plan altogether, but by deploying their man-in-the-handsome-suit software chief, who resembles the well-moisturized villain from a movie about Wall Street, to give quotes to, yes, the Wall Street Journal about how sorry the company is for the "confusion" it has caused, but how the public shouldn't worry: Apple “feel[s] very good about what they’re doing.”

Neither the message nor the messenger was a mistake. Apple dispatched its SVP-for-Software Ken doll to speak with the Journal not to protect the company's users, but to reassure the company's investors. His role was to create the false impression that this is not something that you, or anyone, should be upset about. And, collaterally, his role was to ensure this new "policy" would be associated with the face of an Apple executive other than CEO Tim Cook, just in case the roll-out, or the fall-out, results in a corporate beheading.

Why? Why is Apple risking so much for a CSAM-detection system that has been denounced as “dangerous” and "easily repurposed for surveillance and censorship" by the very computer scientists who've already put it to the test? What could be worth the decisive shattering of the foundational Apple idea that an iPhone belongs to the person who carries it, rather than to the company that made it?

Apple: "Designed in California, Assembled in China, Purchased by You, Owned by Us."

The one answer to these questions that the optimists keep coming back to is the likelihood that Apple is doing this as a prelude to finally switching over to “end-to-end” encryption for everything its customers store on iCloud—something Apple had previously intended to do before backtracking, in a dismaying display of cowardice, after the FBI secretly complained.

For the unfamiliar, what I’m describing here as end-to-end encryption is a somewhat complex concept, but briefly, it means that only the two endpoints sharing a file—say, two phones on opposite sides of the internet—are able to decrypt it. Even if the file were being stored and served from an iCloud server in Cupertino, as far as Apple (or any other middleman-in-a-handsome-suit) is concerned, that file is just an indecipherable blob of random garbage: the file only becomes a text message, a video, a photo, or whatever it is, when it is paired with a key that’s possessed only by you and by those with whom you choose to share it.

This is the goal of end-to-end encryption: drawing a new and ineradicable line in the digital sand dividing your data and their data. It allows you to trust a service provider to store your data without granting them any ability to understand it. This would mean that even Apple itself could no longer be expected to rummage through your iCloud account with its grabby little raccoon hands—and therefore could not be expected to hand it over to any government that can stamp a sheet of paper, which is precisely why the FBI (again: secretly) complained.

For Apple to realize this original vision would have represented a huge improvement in the privacy of our devices, effectively delivering the final word in a thirty year-long debate over establishing a new industry standard—and, by extension, the new global expectation that parties seeking access to data from a device must obtain it from that device, rather than turning the internet and its ecosystem into a spy machine.

Unfortunately, I am here to report that once again, the optimists are wrong: Apple’s proposal to make their phones inform on and betray their owners marks the dawn of a dark future, one to be written in the blood of the political opposition of a hundred countries that will exploit this system to the hilt. See, the day after this system goes live, it will no longer matter whether or not Apple ever enables end-to-end encryption, because our iPhones will be reporting their contents before our keys are even used.

I can’t think of any other company that has so proudly, and so publicly, distributed spyware to its own devices—and I can’t think of a threat more dangerous to a product’s security than the mischief of its own maker. There is no fundamental technological limit to how far the precedent Apple is establishing can be pushed, meaning the only restraint is Apple’s all-too-flexible company policy, something governments understand all too well.

I would say there should be a law, but I fear it would only make things worse.

We are bearing witness to the construction of an all-seeing-i—an Eye of Improvidence—under whose aegis every iPhone will search itself for whatever Apple wants, or for whatever Apple is directed to want. They are inventing a world in which every product you purchase owes its highest loyalty to someone other than its owner.

To put it bluntly, this is not an innovation but a tragedy, a disaster-in-the-making.

Or maybe I'm confused—or maybe I just think different.

https://www.zerohedge.com/tech...red-war-your-privacy

Thanks for posting that, chellim1. Sorry I missed it until now.

Say what you want about him, but Snowden nails this one on every point.

Damn it, I just bought an iPad Air

quote:

Originally posted by kx90:
Damn it, I just bought an iPad Air

Sorry about that, but the thread has been running since Aug. 7.

As an aside: Y'all may notice I've changed the thread title. An explanation follows.

In this thread, member Jupiter took issue with my original thread title: "Apple To Abandon Industry-Leading Privacy And Security." He felt "industry-leading" to be an inaccurate characterization.

I've been doing some research. Here's what I've found:

While it was true several years ago that the iOS platform was, arguably, more secure, Android and the Google Play Store since significantly upped their game. So what may have been true several years ago isn't necessarily true today.

While it's true that Apple has better privacy policies on paper, Android gives the user much better control over fine-tuning Android and the choices of apps one can use. Thus, while it's probably still true an out-of-the-box Android device is more invasive than an out-of-the-box Apple device, that Apple advantage may be mitigated by a user's judicious use of various Android settings and application selection.

Thus I concede member Jupiter's point.