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Most "alarmist" articles have two points you cannot really ignore, not if you don't want to end up living in interesting times one day. 1) Even plain access lo
by WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
Most "alarmist" articles have two points you cannot really ignore, not if you don't want to end up living in interesting times one day.
1) Even plain access logs — basically what a HTTP request, or a TCP connection can tell you — is a lot. Gather those for a couple of days, and you have a good map of the user. More so if you have an ID of machine and the actual executable hash.
2) "But we are the good guys" is a non-defense. Good guys can turn bad, they can be coerced by the bad guys, and
3) since the requests fly out in plain text, there is an unknown number of questionably-aligned guys in between capable of sniff your data. You only need one bad enough guy to get into serious trouble if that's what they want.
This is not alarmist. It's just common sense. The same common sense that you use to avoid certain neighborhoods at certain times of night.
- sasaf5 6y ago@2) + good guys can be hacked.
- sebastien_b 6y agoOr, simply assume that there really are no “good guys”.
- amelius 6y agoEspecially where money is involved.
- boogies 6y agoIMO especially when stock holders wanting a monetary return on investment are involved. I give my money to the FSF every month, because they provide value to me, but not because I expect them to surreptitiously extract it from others and give it to me as cash dividends.
- sebastien_b 6y agoI think that's one of the big problems with public companies, especially those that have "regular people" as their main money maker (the "consumers") - invariably, the company's needs (duty) to make money for their real customers (the shareholders) will take precedence over what would be "the best thing" for consumers. I wish we could do away with the whole "public company" thing - just imagine how much better Facebook, Google, and countless other companies (yes, Apple too) would be if they were private, and more accountable to their users.
- smabie 6y agoprivate companies are still accountable to their shareholders. But I do think that the very public number of share price encourages slightly different behavior than a private, illiquid, and probably out of date number
- stjohnswarts 6y agoYeah not sure what the poster is trying to say here. Both distinctions almost invevitably result in doing anything that is legal to maximize profits (and oftentimes illegal or gray at best). However I haven't seen anyone propose a decent alternative to corporation status for such large entities. The other option is state owned and that is almost always an utter failure. Even China allows their "state owned" businesses a lot of leeway to account for the ups and downs of capitalism and market forces.
- tsimionescu 6y agoPrivately owned companies are not accountable to their users, they are accountable to their owners, just like publically traded ones. It's just that they have fewer owners, and you sometimes get owners with really nice ideas. Other times, you get even more tyrannical owners. Instead, what would be really nice is imagining how those companies would fare as worker-owned companies. Especially with these big internet behemoths, where the entire families of all the workers are users, the standard of user care would easily sky-rocket.
- kzrdude 6y agoThere is no executable hash in the request, so I don't understand why you bring it up
- xvector 6y agoDeveloper certificate IDs are almost a 1:1 match with which app you’re running.
- WesolyKubeczek 6y agoThere are also notarization requests, and those transmit more than enough information about your executable.
- Clubber 6y ago>"But we are the good guys" Also, this is what every bad guy believed him or herself to be throughout the history of humanity.
- tshaddox 6y ago> "But we are the good guys" is a non-defense. Good guys can turn bad, they can be coerced by the bad guys, That’s true, but not very useful, since if Apple turns bad or is coerced by the bad guys, they could just issue an OS update that begins doing new bad things anyway.
- bzbz 6y agoBut they can’t retroactively gain data. So it’s not the same. Besides, security is something you apply in layers.
- danShumway 6y agoA couple of problems: - This give Apple access to data right now. If they turn evil in the future, they have access to data from the past, which gives them more leverage. - The security industry (overall) pays attention to Apple updates. If Apple turned evil in the future by issuing an OS update, someone might notice it happening. But if they start organizing this data and handing it off to the government, they don't need to change anything public or issue an update. They can do it all serverside without anybody noticing. - One of the ways we tell whether a company is trending evil is that we pay attention to how its willingness to invade people's privacy evolves over time. This is a more subtle point. Imagine that I was administering your phone. There's trust involved in that kind of relationship; if I turned evil, I could install some tracking software or viruses and violate your privacy. So imagine that one day you find out I have installed tracking software on your phone, but when you ask me about it, I say, "it doesn't matter whether or not the tracking software is installed on the phone. If you trust me not to invade your privacy, then you might as well trust me not to look at the data the software is collecting. As long as you trust me, it makes no difference what I install on your phone, since you can trust me not to use that software to violate your privacy." You probably wouldn't be satisfied by that excuse. In reality, seeing that I am now the type of person who is willing to install tracking software on your phone should give a suspicion that I have either already turned evil or that I am on my way to turning evil. So similarly with Apple, it's true that trusting Apple means putting them in a position where they could start collecting people's private data. The fact that we have now seen them start collecting private data means that we should be more suspicious that Apple either is already evil, or at least that it is more willing now to play with evil ideas than it used to be.
- clankyclanker 6y agoIf you have #1 and the ability to collect #3, then you’re already an intermediary between the user and Apple. At that point, what’s to prevent you from providing unacceptably slow service for the certs of those apps you don’t like and soft-locking the user out of particular apps on their own device?
- pushrax 6y agoThe fact that this slows down devices boils down to a rushed or simply incompetent implementation. It's sensible to require waiting for a certificate check the first time an app is launched, but after that, the cache validity should be indefinite, and updates should occur asynchronously in batches. The timeout settings were also excessive. Can't forget the blatant lack of encryption. They either forgot or thought it would be too much effort to set up.
- WesolyKubeczek 6y agoWhen you have a good broadband, it gets so easy to assume that internets grow on them trees, latency is negligible, and servers are fast and always up.
- angry_octet 6y agoYes it is ridiculous that an internet query is in the path of starting a local app for the first time in X hours. If it has to be done, it could be done in a daily batch for all apps when the connection is idle, and on install. Using bloom filters to check for recent invalidations would be even better.
- WesolyKubeczek 6y agoHow many false positives are possible with bloom filters? In the described use case, you don’t want even one.
- sneak 6y ago