From the article:

> While it seems pretty obvious that Apple could in theory substitute keys and thus enable eavesdropping, in practice it may require substantial changes to Apple's code.

> Any way you slice it, it's a risky operation.

This is really really poor. A government is not going to give anything about that it might be risky. That's for Apply to handle. Further, the author of the article pretends that the key server is a black box that's not entirely understood and therefore it is safe because it won't be changed. Strange assumptions based upon guesses.

There's various ways to make it possible to comply with a government request. Just send a modified version of the software to the device, change the keyserver, etc. Anyway, the government is not going to care much about how you do it.

As a company you get some leeway with following rules but eventually there will be a fine big enough to make you comply. That's just what I noticed from customs across various countries.

> There's various ways to make it possible to comply with a government request.

The much more interesting question: how many ways are there to make sure, in advance, that you are unable to do so?

It's a good point, but Macs also are iMessage clients and are arguably less locked-down than iPhones. (I could be wrong, but not sure you can say Apple has root on Macs the way they do on iPhones.) It would be suspicious to the intended recipient if a forged message appeared one way on an iPhone, but differently on a Mac (or didn't show at all).

I am not sure about this type of security argument generally. It says, with all the guns out there who cares about knives? Well, maybe lots of people still care about them. And they still hurt when you find yourself on the wrong end of one.

>> Apple controls iPhones. They have root access, you don't.

>> It's like speculating about the owners of an Internet café implementing a TLS MITM attack in their own network's router

This is also just another speculation. We can't know because it's closed source.

It's just a comment quote.

BUT what closed source project doesn't have Root?

Sure you can have encryption on client side BUT once again they have root to the encryption even.

So not really speculation as much as philosophy

Google, too, actually and it has even acted on it in the past to remove some apps/malware. Same for Microsoft remotely uninstalling Tor from Windows machines.

Microsoft does not give a shit about Tor. There are, however, botnets that install Tor, and anti-malware software that will try to remove those botnets.

What is the source for "Microsoft remotely uninstalling Tor from Windows machines"? Is this regarding: Microsoft Malware Protection Center removing the Sefnit malware