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> so I trust their stewardship more than most other companies (including Garmin, who recently fell victim to a ransomware attack) I'm not sure I follow. AFAIK
by lloeki 6y ago
> so I trust their stewardship more than most other companies (including Garmin, who recently fell victim to a ransomware attack)
I'm not sure I follow. AFAIK Garmin refused to pay, preemptively shuttered every single area of their operation possibly connected, even those not directly tied to the attack, to assess the fallout, and took the time to restore whatever was affected from backups. It looks like they did the right thing, and thinking anyone is impervious to a ransomware attack (which has nothing to do with privacy) is ludicrous.
Meanwhile I could use my Garmin watch in complete autarky while their service was down. And this service is entirely opt-in, off by default, and I could just pull the .fit files via standard USB mass storage to process myself or upload to, a third party, like Strava. Interestingly enough, you don’t even need a smartphone even if you want to use Garmin’s cloud.
Amusingly with 12-15 days of battery on average I did not even need to even recharge my ForeRunner 735XT during the whole downtime.
I’m not getting any wearable that doesn’t cross that baseline.
- mshroyer 6y agoRegarding the ransomware attack, my point is that Garmin's security design was weak enough to allow it to happen. We were all, apparently, simply lucky that the variant of ransomware used didn't happen to exfiltrate all our health data. Garmin is notorious for their software issues, and Apple is probably much better than Garmin at securing their production environments. But more importantly, because Apple end-to-end encrypts users' health data, nobody would be able to access any of it even if they were successfully attacked. I agree it's nice that Garmin wearables can mostly keep working independently even if Garmin Connect is down.
- lloeki 6y ago> Apple is probably much better than Garmin at securing their production environments Oops https://samcurry.net/hacking-apple/ https://samcurry.net/hacking-apple/