My two cents: half closed is pretty much the same thing as fully closed from a trust perspective, and apple’s incentives are much less in conflict with user privacy than google’s.
I highly recommend an ad blocking VPN so rest of the apps hitting G ad network are blocked as well.
A privacy oriented VPN providers explicit goal is to give you some privacy, and you pay them for it.
Sure, a VPN can turn on you, but then they bite the hand that feeds them. Also, it would contradict what they explicitly say, completely unlike the situation with Google.
A Debian developer might also try to bring a backdoored package to your machine. Is therefore trusting Debian and trusting Apple the same? They are not, as Debians structure is transparent, the developers carry individual responsibility not just towards the Debian project, but towards every body that can see it, i.e. the whole world.
The theoretical possibility of multiple things being equally bad is irrelevant as long as other significant aspects are ignored.
I use Adblock VPN on iOS - it also has a dns proxy.
They have a build on the web; I compiled my own off of their source, though, so can't vouch for that.
Is there any other option?
It can leave connection open which prevents many cellular radio technologies from falling into lower power state.
Really depends on how optimized the cell modem is and how often keepalive packets are being sent by the VPN. Honestly, I haven't seen too much of a battery hit on ipsec VPN on the iphone SE. However, my older android phones used to get shredded on OpenVPN.
EDIT: If anyone's asking, I use the algo.sh script to deploy ipsec vpn on digitalocean (has option to enable adblocking too) https://github.com/trailofbits/algo.
It's designed to not use persistent connections, keepalives may have to be enabled in case of nat traversals though (to enable incoming packets).
How is Apple entirely closed?
Apple even stripped most of iOS related code for their MacOS open source drops. E.g they only recently started to release XNU source with code for iOS.
But as far as Android.... https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on...
You can use Firefox as your default browser on Android but are limited to a bastardized version on iOS. You can run an OpenStreetMap app as your default map on Android, but you have no choice on iOS. You can build your own apps and run them indefinitely on Android, but you have to pay a $99 yearly fee (on top of the Mac tax) or rebuild every 7 days on iOS.
I don't recommend iOS to anybody. People who think it is more secure don't understand defense in depth, and people who think it is more private don't understand that Pixel and Android One builds actually collect less information by default (before opting in on any of the dialogs).
If that's not it, report it. Every app I use works with microG, and any minor issues I had earlier were being resolved pretty quickly.
Source, please?
500 million is the number of devices which potentially had access to an app store containing apps that had malware. It's not the number actually infected. I mean, come on.
[1] https://www.cyberscoop.com/android-malware-china-huawei-zte-...
From the article: "XcodeGhost potentially affects more than 500 million iOS users, primarily because messaging app WeChat is very popular in China and the Asia-Pacific region." After that article was published, Angry Birds 2 was also discovered to be infected.
Did you notice how I compared to Google and Amazon app stores? Those are the devices that HN readers would buy (those Chinese app store phones are not available for sale in the US), and they have vastly more users than the iTunes App Store yet in total infected devices can't come anywhere close to the toxic hellstew that is the App Store.
> Compare to Google and Amazon, which run static and dynamic analysis of apps uploaded to their stores and allow third party security research on their stores, enabling both earlier detection of malware and faster takedown of all apps that share the same malware.
You're assuming that Apple doesn't do this?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.macrumors.com/2015/09/20/xc... shows 500 million infected from 50 apps.
> You're assuming that Apple doesn't do this?
No need to assume. https://researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com/2015/09/more-det... not only shows that there were thousands more apps affected by Xcodeghost than originally reported (and thus, more infected users than the approximately 500 million estimate from the earlier link based on the original 50 apps), but also that Apple was still taking down affected apps days later, waiting for third parties to report them. This despite that Xcodeghost represents a single malware that can be detected with a binary grep. That Apple didn't have the infrastructure to deal with even that demonstrates how woefully inadequate their app management infrastructure is for dealing with malware.
Where does the link say this? As far as I know Apple has all the information needed to make this decision themselves. As you said, a binary grep, coupled with many of Apple's static/dynamic analysis tools should be enough to find this issue.
"Starting September 18, Apple began to remove some iOS apps infected by XcodeGhost from its App Store.... As of this writing, on Monday, September 21, we notice that there are still some previously known infected iOS apps available in App Store."
> As you said, a binary grep, coupled with many of Apple's static/dynamic analysis tools should be enough to find this issue.
As I said, it should be so simple if Apple had set up the basic infrastructure for this. Since it had not, Xcodeghost remained on the App Store long after it was initially discovered, allowing researchers to find thousands more affected apps. Compare to Google's Play Store which not only performs static analysis but also crash analysis, battery usage analysis, and dynamic analysis through running the apps in cloud VMs (something Amazon did at launch).
To see proprietary and incredibly locked-down devices such as iPhones advocated for so strongly seems so weird. As if openness and security are at odds or something.
https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2015/07/2...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/9to5mac.com/2014/08/29/seeing-t...
> … or rebuild every 7 days on iOS.
By tossing in a flippant remark, you undermine the legitimacy of the other arguments. I don’t think a reasonable person would conclude that you actually believe the above statement to be true. This type of rhetoric, in which reality is knowingly distorted to make a point, may be less effective than you consider it to be.
For a user who doesn't have the foggiest idea about technology, to whom the whole thing is "magic," why isn't this rational? Do you closely examine the safety of chemicals in all of your cleaning products, household items, clothes, your car, and the devices in your home? For most people, probably no more than in a cursory sense, as it's not normally one's area of expertise.
We have to "outsource" many aspects of daily life to experts.
Paying for their email service - I use Fastmail.
You've effectively outsourced your email security to Fastmail. How is that any different?
"Do you closely examine the safety of chemicals.."
No, but they need to list the ingredients, get it certified by authorities, and labs can freely test for the ingredients without the company's input. Software is just not the same as chemicals.
True, trusting FastMail is no different than trusting Apple. I didnt mean to say that FastMail was magically more secure. Just that they have no incentive to sell me out. I could've used any company for this. Just trying to not put all eggs in one basket. It is certainly a better choice than Google which creepily builds a profile of me to make money.
Everyday users experience massive troubles with security issues, and incur painful losses, at the hands of criminals and black hats! I have no awareness of a major corporation “going rogue” and deliberately harming their users, ever.
The incentive structure is the opposite: companies generally try to help their customers.
That’s not to say they don’t fuck up, particularly when the incentive structure gets “skewed.”
To see that there is actually an inverse correlation between personal control of software and security, just observe the crypto currency space.
The losses suffered by users from bugs, security failures, and hacking are comically large.
English is not my first language, and I was ambiguous in what I wrote. By "Apple could go rogue", I meant that Apple could change their policies on user privacy and muck around with making money of user data. True that it is bad PR, and reversal of their current state, but what if there is a leadership change and the new ones think it is a goldmine waiting to be opened? After all, we have seen Apple do exact things they said they wont. Big iPhones, mini ipad, give up on user privacy to the government in China...
"The incentive structure is the opposite: companies generally try to help their customers."
I think that's a bit too abstract. Companies try to help customers as long as it is in their business interest.
What do I wish would exist? A hardware company in the class of Apple that stays with hardware, and a company like RedHat that builds mobile Linux OS with a GNU app store, where users can buy apps from the developers straight and install it themselves. That way no one is in complete control. Phones are pretty powerful these days to start using the features we have developed for laptops..
I see this as an opportunity that Mozilla has, and I'd submit an "idea" to them but I don't know how. Google got big by making ads suck less - they were the first that delivered non-intrusive ads that actually worked (and were personalized too, to boot - without being intrusive!)
I wonder if there isn't a serious market for flipping the paradigm on its head. The marketers do need to deliver relevant messages to relevant persons... but I think they don't need to collect lots of personal data about you. What if someone trustworthy would flip the paradigm on its head? Say that you tell Firefox your interests, and, besides being a browser, it becomes a sort of "local ad exchange" too - when you visit "New Yorker", it says "I can display here an add about cars, or one about sleep pills, or one about cruises etc.". Instead of profiling the user - send extensive ad profiles to the browser, and let the browser pick locally based on user profile & preferences. It would be wasteful in that you potentially send a lot of ad metadata to a single browser... but, theoretically, all that metadata can be cached. And, I dunno, maybe it's not really that much metadata, afterall? It's a rough idea, but I feel it's one worth exploring that could provide genuine benefits both for (non-shady) marketers & for end-users.
To add to that, "private mode" would actually do what people expect it to do - keep them anonymous on the web, and not leak sensitive/ embarrassing information about themselves.
That is, design all hardware and software in-house, and use formal methods (theorem proving, program analysis and model checking) to verify everything. Furthermore, adopt a Qubes-like architecture where external untrusted applications can be run in an isolated way.
Good idea for the separate browsers too, I never considered that. I would just throw a vpn you trust (or roll your own) in that list, along with uBlock Origin and uMatrix.
Honestly, I cant possibly trust Apple to always do the right thing. A corner stone of digital privacy and security is being in control of your systems and data which Apple takes away from its customers. When I buy and use Apple products - I have to have faith in Apple to do nothing wrong with my data or send me a malicious update that compromises my system. It is all closed source and you only get occasional white papers explaining technology in abstract terms about their intentions. There is no independent person(s) that can vouch for Apple's integrity in building the systems the way they claim so.
That said, based on current status quo, I'd rather warily trust Apple with some of my personal data like GPS location, browsing history, Notes etc than Google or Facebook given the latter have a business motive to sell me out.
So when my friends or relatives ask me what phone/computer I think they should buy, I opinionatedly recommend iPhone + GnuLinux for the tech savvy and iPhone and Mac for the non tech savvy. I also give them a mini 5 minute lecture about
* Not allowing Location access to all the apps they download - Why would a calculator app need your location "Even while not using the app"?,
* Paying for their email service - I use Fastmail. ,
* Enabling tracking prevention in their browser to prevent tracking cookies,
* Using separate browser for FaceBook, Amazon and others while using FireFox only for personal/sensitive browsing needs.