Why Apple Defends Encryption

TidBits.com ^ | January 20, 2016 -- 19:53 GMT | by Rich Mogull

[Swordmaker]

The red form which must be turned in to the IRS can be downloaded, but if you print it it is not acceptable to the IRS. The form sent to the IRS must be scannable, which the printed form isn't for some reason. There is a penalty for sending in a downloaded and printed form.

You can pick that up from any IRS office. If I recall correctly, you can submit it online as well.

[Darth Reardon]

What if we allow the government to restrict the use of hard encryption of such sophistication that it cannot possibly be broken...

Then we have allowed a bunch of lawyers to create a law about a subject that they simply do not understand.

[CodeToad]

“I defend Apple’s encryption and hope they will prevail.”

Same here. Their stance has been a good one.

[Vermont Lt]

I used to work at a bank.

I loved telling cops and FBI agents to come back with a warrant. 90% of the time we never heard from them again.

I guess they hate paperwork as much as we did.

[vette6387]

“I defend Apple’s encryption and hope they will prevail.
Same here. Their stance has been a good one.”

That’s only one of the reasons we’ve been an “Apple Famly” since the first Mac Plus came out. They are tools that work, and work reliably. Plus you don’t have to be tethered to the bastards at Microsoft. Oh, we have a PC around because we have one real estate program that isn’t available for the Mac and we’ve been too lazy to set up Parallels on one of our Macs. PC’s are like old British cars, you need to have two of them just to make sure you can drive somewhere when you need to. I was Purchasing Mgr at a well-know Silicon Valley company some years ago. When I arrived, one of their major problems was with their IT department. They were PC-based and they were unable to keep their network operating reliably. The advice I got from another company was to “ buy the best PC’s I could get, and replace them all every three years.”

[SunkenCiv]

There are very damned few smart phone shoppers who do the “V8 juice” head slap and say, “I need a phone with a backdoor, so it can be easily hacked!”

[ThunderSleeps]

Apple near the forefront in the fight for privacy? - ANDROID PING!
Android Ping! If you want on or off the Android Ping List, Freepmail me.

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My take. The author makes some good points about Apple being uniquely positioned for this fight, and why other companies are not.

[dayglored]

I wish that Microsoft's business model was such that it would support the kind of privacy defense that Apple is doing. Unfortunately, the very strong argument made in the article shows this is clearly impossible.

Simple case: Business employee with a Windows PC on a Windows domain under AD, in an office with a dozen departments managed by AD group policies. Suppose Windows permitted a per-user encryption policy like Apple's. It would not be permitted by the company -- what, the company IT can't decrypt what an employee is doing? So next step up, does the company own the keys? That won't work either. The business model for the primary products is completely different.

Maybe if Microsoft manages to do something substantive in the mobile market, that will change. Until then, it's essentially irrelevant for Windows.

Apple is leading the charge for a very good reason. They can.