A Chinese company controls the icloud data. That's a backdoor if I've ever heard of one.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208351

Related: what's the name for this tactic in debate? Where a dissenter insistently demand citations so that the conversation has to pause and then the dissenter nitpicks the citation instead of the argument, effectively derailing the conversation.

It's hard to see this account (jbang5) as anything but an internet troll who, if not literally on the payroll from the Chinese government, is still a useful idiot for their cause.

Yeah, it is an interesting tactic, but I've actually developed an effective counter to it.

What I usually do, to counter this trolling tactic, is to provide them with the source that they were asking for, and then I call them an idiot for not being aware of such an obvious fact.

Because, by definition, they are uninformed about the matter, as they didn't know about the source and had to ask for it. So I just make fun of them for not knowing about it, and rub it in their face when I provide the information that they asked for and didn't know about.

If you have to ask for sources on the matter, you are by definition "ignorant" on the matter.

The term is Sea Lioning, though that typically comes with a repetition of forced burden-of-proofs on the presenter.

Based off of this web comic: http://wondermark.com/c/2014-09-19-1062sea.png

Are you under the impression that China can't break encryption?

They don’t even need to- OP is massively mistaken. Apple gave China the encryption keys (and all other China-based iCloud infra) more than a year ago.

> Citation needed.

https://lmgtfy.com/?q=china+icloud+encryption+keys

You could also look at some of the other links already posted to this thread in response to similar queries from you and others, like this one (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21207931) and this one (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21208376).

Are you under the impression that China can break encryption? Not saying that it's 100% impossible, but that one certainly needs a citation.

Yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500

A link to a wikipedia article about the list of the worlds top supercomputers (the near majority of which are in China and presumably used by the CCP) doesn't mean that strong, well-applied crypto can be broken (I assume you're referring to brute force breaking). Mathematically, the computing power, energy and time necessary to break it are known in relation to all current computing power and, more importantly, methodology. Thus, taking just one of the Chinese supercomputers from the top500 list, the Tianhe-2, the calculation for that particular machine, working alone, to break just half the keyspace of AES 256 doesn't lend credibility to your claim:

Tianhe-2 Supercomputer @ 33.86 petaflops (quadrillion flops)

=33 860 000 000 000 000 keys per second (33.86 quadrilion)

3.386e16 * 31556952 seconds in a year 2255 possible keys

2^255 / 1.0685184e24

=1.0685184e24 keys per year (~1 septillion, 1 yottaflop)

=5.4183479e52 years

Needless to say, that's a long fucking time. Yes, cracking an access password would be much less time-consuming and so would finding and using non-brute force attack methods to guess or steal the key but for your basic claim that "Yes", China has cracked strong encryption, I just don't see where you get that idea from.