Apple is in a position to cut that stream without affecting its bottom line, so it does it and claims privacy as a core value.
I won't look a gift horse in the mouth, but I have no doubt that the tables could switch at any time.
Yes, Apple is doubling down on its competitive advantage here. But to claim it does not and never cared for privacy is just ignoring the facts and the history. It moved the industry forward.
I don't disagree with your argument though, of the modern mobile OSs Apple moved to towards the per-app model before everyone else. I just find it interesting when Apple or Android gets coverage/credit for a feature that has long existed but was forgotten or ignored.
But noone bought the phones so who cares?
The list of prior work that influenced Apple, or any tech company, is usually far too long to list.
Agreed, but that doesn't mean we should default to "Apple was the first" simply because we can't wrap our heads around the pre-iPhone days.
> You can set permissions that control how third-party applications on your BlackBerry device interact with the other applications on your device. For example, you ca control whether third-party applications can access data or the Internet, make calls, or use Bluetooth® connections.
https://www.t-mobile.com/support/public-files/images/legacy/...
https://www.theverge.com/2012/2/7/2782947/path-ios-app-user-...
Congresspeople sent letters to app developers as a result (not even Apple, ha). iOS 6 was then seeded to the public four months after that article.
But! It actually goes earlier than this. Apple started phasing out access to device identifiers used to track users across apps in iOS 5: https://techcrunch.com/2011/08/19/apple-ios-5-phasing-out-ud...
(again, none of this was marketed to anyone)
Apple does deserve credit for leading and influencing Android in this regard, but neither the concept nor the implementation is new.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39iKLwlUqBo
Jobs @ D8
People are quick to forget because back then everyone (including HN) was praising Google for everything under the sun.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corelocation/clloc...
EDIT: Oh, I see, if you are referring to the PR or marketing portion, I think it is certainly clear that Apple had a pro-privacy stance, but that did not make its way into the company's _consumer_ marketing:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120718122643/http://www.apple....
E.g. creating a company with a business model which benefits from taxing CO2 emissions (Tesla) is morally great. Whereas having a business model which benefits from cheap oil (VW) is less so. Product decisions (electric vs. fuel engines) have a large effect on your long-term financial interests.
There are bits in the law about management having a fiduciary duty to shareholders, but that mainly means that they aren't supposed to be stuffing their own pockets at the expense of investors. There's a wide birth for management to decide what kinds of profit are and are not worth it.
This change may even depress the stock price directly as disgusted owners sell (this harms the ability of current shareholders to earn a return, as the loss is now but the future revenues are discounted).
The market is as moral as its shareholders, which is far less than perfection but a lot better than zero.
The case in question is Dodge vs. Ford and rather than believe memes about it just read the darn wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
I'm all for pointing someone to the sources, but let's not instill the idea that consulting Wikipedia is doing substantially more diligent research than looking at memes.
That doesn't mean that making money is not important to these people; of course it is. But it's not the only factor.
Companies build a vision or image for how they behave and a lot of that is going to be driven by marketability.
For example Microsoft has taken a very pro-developer stance since Satya Nadella took over. Not just because it's directly profitable to be pro-developer, but because it helps their long term image, culture etc. This goes a long way to explaining a lot of their recent actions like helping Github be available in Iran again and open sourcing large parts of C# / .NET.
So the question becomes: are Apple being pro-privacy because it's a long term stance they want to take and make a basis for their company culture because it's something their customers really want. Or are they taking the stance simply because it doesn't impact their own profitability right now, but would drop it if there was an obvious potential income stream.
And thus is indirectly profitable.
> That's quite an extreme-end of capitalist way of looking at it.
It's only extreme if you can show that companies routinely take the moral stance even when it impacts their short- or long-term profitability. Is Microsoft good now despite its best interests, just because it decided to take a moral stance?
Of the three companies named:
- Google's user-facing services (search, email, app store, docs, ...) are blocked, but Google Ads (which are censored) and Android (which comes without any content that would require censorship) are still sold.
- Microsoft: I'm not aware of any of their products being unavailable. Windows is the dominant desktop operating system in China, and I'd be surprised if the app store wasn't censored. Bing search results are definitely censored (they tell you so at the bottom of the page).
- Amazon isn't selling much that could run afoul of censorship, except possibly books (remember when Amazon used to be an online bookstore?) but in China their market is mostly targeted at the niche of high-end imported goods. (Note the country-of-origin indicators on https://www.amazon.cn/ )
I was telling my friends who moved from China and kept their iPhones, to just buy a new one... just in case...
These are just changes to the app catalog, what reason do we have to believe that a bunch of brain training apps being dropped or withdrawn is evidence of censorship? Has any of this been verified with the App publishers?
The only way to do better than Apple is a full FOSS stack, and that comes with different challenges and is more of a hassle to maintain.
Well, the GP has a quite damming list showing that it doesn't. It's only empty marketing.
It's enough to make you never trust them again.
Also if the spyware is installed in firmware at the factory, how is Linux going to help you?
Zyxel, Asus, and other manufacturers of networking devices (with backdoors of course) are also there.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/hacke...
Devices like this are used by the government and military contractors as well, and as you can see such vulnerabilities are trivial to detect so you can't count on the opposition finding out about it and using it. This one was picked up days after the firmware release. The smoking gun would be government and military admins secretly being advised by the CIA to close these security loopholes, so the government is protected but everyone else isn't. IMHO that would get Snowdened almost immediately. There's no way they'd keep a lid on that, there would just be too many people involved.
As with a lot of this conspiracy theory stuff, it only makes sense if you don't think about it too much. Once you actually start thinking through the consequences and practicalities, it doesn't hold together.
Understatement of the year. Secret account is exactly what people call "a backdoor".
I learned about it from wikileaks. Eg https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/cms/space_2359301.html
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3184435/wikileaks-documents-...
This is like someone claiming it will rain next week and when asked how they know, they say they can prove it rained last week. That’s irrelevant. Yes I know they have firmware attacks. Where does the claim they are putting it on machines in the factory come from? How many times do I need to ask the same question?
>"NightSkies 1.2" a "beacon/loader/implant tool" for the Apple iPhone. Noteworthy is that NightSkies had reached 1.2 by 2008, and is expressly designed to be physically installed onto factory fresh iPhones. i.e the CIA has been infecting the iPhone supply chain of its targets since at least 2008.
By supply chain, when they say mail orders and other shipments, they just mean between the vendor and the customer. In this case the use of "supply chain" could be miss-understood, this is a post-factory attack which would be carried out in transit, probably at a US border.
We have seen that done before to shipments of devices such as computers and network gear that have been intercepted and hacked before delivery to a suspect, or a target organisation or country.
I don't think this can be reasonably construed as evidence for Apple conniving with the CIA. In fact I still don't think that would make any sense from a CIA perspective. The factories aren't even in the US. Apple employees aren't background checked or sworn agents, they're a potential security risk. Why involve them if you don't need to?
But breaking almost all software by default just because some incompetent users keep choosing to install malware is not a great strategy.
You're making excuses for the lack of security innovation on Linux workstations. They've fallen behind.
I am the sysadmin and owner of my machine, not Apple or some other organization. They have no business telling me what software I can and can't run, or what files that software can access.
You can't publish any software you want on the App Store.
> Beginning in macOS 10.14.5, software signed with a new Developer ID certificate and all new or updated kernel extensions must be notarized to run. Beginning in macOS 10.15, all software built after June 1, 2019, and distributed with Developer ID must be notarized
So, no. You need Apple's approval to be able to create software that can actually be ran by end-users even if you do not distribute using the App Store.
Second, notarisation is not an "approval". It is a malware scan.
The only thing that requires notarisation, which, again, is not "approval", is kernel extensions.
There are solutions that are intended to force the sandboxing by opening a new Xserver for every application, e.g. Firejail [0], but that comes with another set of interoperability problems.
Wayland was supposed to address some of these concerns, but it will only do so for applications that natively talk wayland protocol, not the ones that connect through x-protocol via xwayland
So you might be interested in Qubes OS, which provides a very strong isolation through virtualization.
> A Wayland compositor usually spawns only one Xwayland instance. This is because many X11 applications assume they can communicate with other X11 applications through the X server, and this requires a shared X server instance. This also means that Xwayland does not protect nor isolate X11 clients from each other, unless the Wayland compositor specifically chooses to break the X11 client intercommunications by spawning application specific Xwayland instances. X11 clients are naturally isolated from Wayland clients.
I use QubesOS, but it comes with its own set of problems as well.
That includes any systems you might have SSHed into with X forwarding enabled, as it automatically extends the trust there. Yes, your ssh client might try to enable X SECURITY extension (which clamps acesss to just the current window), but it is disabled by default or bypassed anyway by the users as that extension is known to crash quite a few programs.
Both are a product of their time when the prevailing approach was to trust the programs you run.
Which data is picked by the US government, and no warrant is required. Apple provided data on 30,000+ users to the US government without a warrant in 2019, per their own transparency report.
If they received money for the program, they are indeed "selling user data to [the] US government".
Nitpicking about whether they made a profit has no bearing on the statement “Apple selling user data to US government”.
Before macOS Big Sur / Catalina, many of these application firewalls - Lulu, Little Snitch, HandsOff, TripMode, RadioSilence etc. - all used their own kernel extensions to effectively monitor and block any processes from connecting to the internet.
Firewalls are system security softwares. And naturally Apple would prefer to oversee and have this in-built in their OS. Apple also wants to discourage kernel extensions on macOS (they have some good reasons - a poorly designed kernel extension can make the OS unstable; but mostly its about feature control with Apple).
So they informed all such firewall app developers that their individual kernel extensions will no longer be allowed, and Apple had instead created an OS API specifically for their use case. (They described the features it would have and invited them to give their feedback). And so all application firewalls were forced to update their apps and use this OS API.
But this API had an undisclosed, in-built list of Apple approved applications that no firewall was allowed to block. Someone created that list. Someone added that list in the system, and coded the API to specifically give them special privileges to bypass any application firewalls.
Bugs are accidental. Backdoors like these are intentional.
(You can however take exception to the usage of "Backdoor" here - perhaps from Apple's perspective it was a good design decision as many of these services go wacko, and sometimes even freeze your system, when they aren't allowed to do what they are coded to, like do some operation over the internet. I've often seen CPU spikes and slowdowns when you block some of these services.)
> It’s worth noting that Big Sur and its predecessors are built to assume that they can talk to Apple at any time, but when we don’t allow it, a few unwanted side effects pop up. For example, the keyboard sometimes takes longer to wake up from sleep mode. Or, in certain situations, the Mullvad app takes longer to detect that the computer is online.
- https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2020/11/16/big-no-big-sur-mullva...
(Ofcourse, as a developer, I can sympathize with the Apple developers - when you design a product to use the internet, you don't really think hard about all kinds of use cases where internet access is deliberately denied).
Why wouldn't you, though? That seems like a pretty big oversight. Lazy at best, negligent at worst. Not everyone in the world has constant internet access, and it seems ridiculous to design an _operating system_ with that assumption. I like to take an eBook reader to the park, for example. Prior to owning that device, I took a laptop when learning a new programming language. If that laptop had been running BigSur, I'd see all these same issues based on Apple's un-thought-out "design decisions".
Without spending a lot of time sshd has allowLists (AllowGroups) and match directives
Sudo also has per group config
As a user on any operating system what you can and can’t do is controlled by a list
Perhaps the issue is the list isn’t user controlled ?
Perhaps the issue falls into the “I own and control my device” vs “we sell you a safe, foot gun safe, easy to use device (in their opinion)”
Back doors are typically not disclosed to the user, and can't be turned off. So for example an automatic software update mechanism isn't a back door, as the user is aware of it and can typically turn it off if they are concerned about security.
An undisclosed mechanism that allows Apple apps to circumvent firewalls does very much fit the description of a back door.
Intent doesn't matter with regards to back doors. Most back doors are not made with malicious intent, or at least the vendors usually claim that they only had good intentions for the back door. (Eg. see the recent reports where a router manufacturer had a secret password that they claimed was only used for software updates)
The danger about back doors is that malicious software can use the back doors to circumvent the security measures, just like Patrick Wardle demonstrated that it was possible to use Apple's content filter exclusion to circumvent firewalls.
They're lying.
They can say whatever they like, it's another story they've got no credibility. It was quite obvious it was very much a deliberate action (just look at the naming, itself)
Due in no small part to HN. If it weren't for this community, the word would not have spread as far as it did to pressure them to make this change.
Thanks to all of you and everyone at HN who works hard to keep this place as awesome as it is.
Apple competitors Google and Microsoft which control the great majority of OS installs both for mobile and desktop don't even pretend to care about privacy. I have collected over the years reports about dozens of underhanded tactics they use to manipulate users into sharing data, when they're not downright forcing them to do it.
Currently Google is showing in the EU a modal pop-up asking users to accept to be tracked or fuck off to a labyrinth of "See more" and "Other options" which are obviously violating the GDPR. They got fined five times already for GDPR violations.
Microsoft have told their non-enterprise customers to bugger off and learn to live with telemetry. They're actively working around people blocking telemetry and they're being investigated for these practices.
How about a thank you that at least someone at Apple listens to their customers?
I do so because I am an Apple user - this is being typed on a mac mini. I also own other Apple hardwares.
I also advocated for Apple hardware within my family & friends to switch from Android to Apple quite successfully (I am the IT guy in my circle). I did so because I would like to believe their commitment to privacy they have publicly stated. (Tim Cook being Gay adds to that trust because he understands that privacy is not just about hiding secrets but protecting ourselves from political persecutions by those who do not like some part of our identity - whether it be regional, gender, political, cultural, religious, sexual etc.).
It doesn't mean I trust them blindly or completely or will allow them to screw my customer rights (like right to repair, and OWN my device). Would you?
And here are those contributions spelled out for you: Apple is the only company preventing Google from having the private information of all smartphone users on the planet on their servers.
Maybe not to you. It should be for Apple, if they actually care about their users / customers.
> Apple is the only company preventing Google from having the private information of all smartphone users ...
No, it isn't. There are other worthy contenders to both ios and Android, like Sailfish OS. (In fact, using a Sailfish OS mobile phone actually protects my data from both Apple and Google - it's a double win for me).
And unlike you, my idea of privacy isn't trusting one corporate over another, but ensuring that no corporate has access to my personal data itself in the first place - I absolutely do not want Apple to have access to any of my data. (And whether you like it or not, until Apple does precisely that, I will keep criticising it).
We just had this Szajer scandal, where a powerful outspoken homophobe was caught in an gay orgy.
The gay experience (shame, rejection and discrimination) also comes with increased chance of "co-morbid" personality defects, which may be more pronounced worh exceptional wealth and status.
Queer solidarity by gay men is not a given anymore.
Compromise in security and prviacy clearly has been deemed worth by someone at Apple before the stink was raised.
For most of us, the real world decision is to either work with a company which is actively working on undermining privacy or with one which is trying to improve things.
In the real world, Apple still gets to have their business and people work with them, but enough stink is raised to both externally and privately to get them to change their decision. Which they have evidently done here, so working as intended. Reputation damage is a thing if it involves conversations with other F100 companies.
This particular debacle is one of the reasons why $CurrentCorpo I am occasionally working with decided to skip Big Sur until much later in the lifecycle - not the only one, though.
I know many Apple's fan see this as a positive move.
But let's not ignore the pattern of privacy violations and user data collections due to deliberate design and the "apology" and "changes" that follow once CAUGHT. A few of these that immediately come to mind are:
- Apple selling user data to US government: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants...
- Apple iPhone 11 tracks user location even when location services are explicitly turned off by user (another BACKDOOR): https://www.silicon.co.uk/mobility/smartphones/apple-iphone-...
- Apple macOS tracks every app that you use: https://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-yours/
- Apple introduces BACKDOOR in its API to allow Apple apps to bypass application firewalls: https://www.patreon.com/posts/hooray-no-more-46179028
(For those who want to diss me for the above, realise that Apple's new found love for privacy doesn't mean shit without such public scrutiny and discussions. And if you want it to last, remain suspicious and VOCAL on any such possible violations.)