11 ms·

The NSA Reportedly Has Total Access To The Apple iPhone

342 points by larubbio 13y ago

presty 13y ago
welp http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57614604-94/president-obama-says-he-cant-use-iphone-for-security-reasons/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57614604-94/president-obama... now we know why
marveller 13y ago
Humm... I was going to buy the new iPhone, this changed my mind. Maybe I should just get a feature phone instead.
- electic 13y ago
  All the phones are exploited. I doubt it matters.
  - supergauntlet 13y ago
    Really any phone is exploited. When you've got a baseband with direct hardware access that the carrier can connect to there isn't really anything short of fully open hardware that is gonna save you.
    - auctiontheory 13y ago
      If (as claimed) the NSA has hacked the major BIOS/firmware as well as encryption, is there such as thing as "fully open hardware" and would it help?
      - zachrose 13y ago
        To my knowledge no, there is not. If there was, it would also require approval from the network operator. And if you believe that the network operators are aligned with the intelligence community anyways, you would never expect that approval to happen.
  - swampboy 13y ago
    Perhaps, but with a feature phone there's much less for the eavesdroppers to see.
    - marveller 13y ago
      Yes, hence the feature phone :), no GPS, no email, no browsing records, etc.
  - parag_c_mehta 13y ago
    True but phones with highest market share are more susceptible to the phones with least market share.
- dubcanada 13y ago
  And you think others are better? iPhone is probably one of the more "private" ones.
- wyager 13y ago
  All cell phone OSs are compromised to some degree. If Apple's claims about their crypto were auditable, I would say that iOS is the best from a security standpoint.
- melling 13y ago
  There's always "that guy" who makes this comment. We should start giving out "StackOverFlow style badges". The sad fact is that it doesn't matter how secure your phone is because there's a weaker link in your security chain. You...
- alan_cx 13y ago
  Oh just buy whatever you want, for whatever reasons you used to make up to justify an overpriced trinket which people think boosts their social standing because it pretty, and overpriced. Just know its not secure and act accordingly. Use it to build up a nice pure profile. When you want to rob banks, build your nuke, or whatever, dont use it. Or, have lots of trying to bait the spies. Call it art or something. Look up lots of terror stuff, like you are writing a book. Back, I dunno, 1000 years ago, when I first heard the oh so mad notion of echelon, I added an invisible signature to my email containing every naughty key word I could think of. Idea being to some how annoy the spooks. Yeah, childish and pointless, but it amused me. Hmmm, maybe half a year of banging my head against a brick wall has had an effect after all.
zebra 13y ago
Spiegel source: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-the-nsa-spies-on-smartphones-including-the-blackberry-a-921161.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-the-nsa-spies-...
- caycep 13y ago
  Hm, now I'm paranoid re the little "special teams" that article mentions that intercepts the mail package and plugs in whatever doodad the NSA has into the phone, and then sends it along to the customer...my new iPhone had a fingerprint smudge on the screen plastic protector packaging that I otherwise attributed to some overworked Foxconn employee but now I have half a mind it was some NSA agent after 1 too many pizzas....
- ehrtt 13y ago
  ..and Jacob Appelbaum's actual talk on all of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0w36GAyZIA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0w36GAyZIA
caycep 13y ago
The slide is dated in 2007 - i.e. either iOS 1.0 or some pre-release beta. Who knows what it does now with iOS 7? Also, its unclear what's needed - does one of those other ridiculous govt alphabet soup programs act as a trojan, or does Tom Cruise has to dangle from my ceiling with laser beams to plug in some wingding to do this?
- auctiontheory 13y ago
  IIRC Tom Cruise didn't have the laser beams - he was avoiding the laser beams. So the responsibility to set up a defense perimeter with laser beams is yours.
  - zachrose 13y ago
    The GP is grammatically and textually correct. The lasers belonged to the ceiling.
xacaxulu 13y ago
My TracFone is safe :-)
- superuser2 13y ago
  False. http://www.cellebrite.com/mobile-forensics http://www.cellebrite.com/mobile-forensics
wyager 13y ago
This is from a very old version of iOS (2007). We don't know if this is still true. Regardless, I can say for a fact that there are exploits for all cell phone platforms. iOS exploits are by far the hardest to find. An iOS remote execution 0day will easily fetch $250k. I've seen one go for $600k. For an Android remote exec 0day, you're looking at closer to $50k. Even if the NSA doesn't have these on hand, they can certainly purchase them.
- JumpCrisscross 13y ago
  Why isn't Apple (or some other consumer group) in that market buying up the 0days? I want to see the price of 0days that compromise any longitudinal user information above $10 million. Idea: 0day markets are legalised [1]. Regulators require companies keep the average price of their 0days above a threshold or attach a warning to their product and marketing materials. This aligns the security interests of consumers with companies while incentivising companies and researchers to build secure products. [1] A license to the 0day (but not the 0day itself) would be freely traded for a duration after which the company would have the option to (a) buy it at some price or (b) release it to the public, retaining full liability for any consequences (last holder of the license gets a percentage cut of any fines or legal awards).
  - caycep 13y ago
    Apple being Apple, they wouldn't tell you. But I'm sure someone in there is thinking it. They did hire Geohot after his jailbreak...
    - yapcguy 13y ago
      Doesn't matter if any of this is true or not, it's the perception that counts. I'm quite interested to see what, if anything, Tim Cook will do or say to reassure the faithful. "Apple is erasing discussions on this topic at their support forum, right now the whole forum is shut down for a complete cleanup." http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/161398/nsa-worked-on-iphone-spyware-to-remotely-monitor-users-leaked-documents-show#post_2451690 http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/161398/nsa-worked-on-iphone...
allochthon 13y ago
Honestly, I don't really care. The NSA can read whatever they want of mine. I've heard the arguments about how you should care, even if you don't have anything to hide. And I find them persuasive on one level and simultaneously unengaging on another. By contrast, the parallels to fascist Italy and Nazi Germany and living in a turnkey fascist state are most unpersuasive. The one argument against what I've written that has been made that I think is worthy of highlighting is that there are people around the world who are risking their lives under totalitarian regimes. People's smug responses and ad hominem detract from this important point, which could be helpful to others outside of HN in better understanding the issue. Your downvotes will not persuade me or anyone else with my views. They do demonstrate that some are committed partisans on this issue. I appreciate some of the clear, unemotional arguments that have been made, however.
- blake8086 13y ago
  Hey, can you post your email username/password here so we can all read your mail?
  - allochthon 13y ago
    I worry about random people on the Internet having access to my information about 1000 times more than I do the NSA.
    - PavlovsCat 13y ago
      a.) the way the NSA seems to foster security flaws to use them, instead of helping fix them, they are also helping "random people" get access to your data. A backdoor put there by the NSA can be used by anyone else, in theory. b.) what you personally do not worry about is not relevant, your arguments why nobody else should worry either are. You are not a journalist or activist, so you don't care. It's like saying it's okay that certain food contents are not labelled for the benefit of those having allergies against them, or that kids should be used as bio fuel, because you don't have an allergy or kids.
    - MWil 13y ago
samstave 13y ago
So here is a complete anecdotal suspicion: I have had the iPhone since the first day of release. I have gone through 16 physical devices over that period (due to me breaking them a lot and going through several employers where I had never purchased my own phone since (well before) it was released). I am currently, for the first time in a long time, on my own personal device; an iPhone 4. I upgraded it to iOS7 when it was available. The device is a slow POS and I want to stab my eyes out when I use it.... However; there is a behavior that I have only personally noticed recently: (Please tell me if you see the same thing) Whenever I transition between literally ANY screen, I see a quick BLINK of the screen - in the same anim that you would see when you take a screenshot. So I am wondering "Is my phone taking a screen cap of EVERY switch/transition I make? WHY" Now, I know that iOS does do screen caps of things so that when you are switching in various ways that it already has a cache of the last state of that screen in order to thumbnail the previous view... BUT I understood this to be limited to certain circumstances. Currently I am noticing it on pretty much ANY transition. Even if this is the actual, "Normal", my suspicion is that this fact can be used to entirely rebuild an entire session of activity for a user through their entire interactions. Even if you just grab these screens which are used at a system level - a great deal could be inferred from just these workflow screen caps.
- sneak 13y ago
  I think they're on to you. Quick, hide the evidence.
- jbergstroem 13y ago
  Complete bogus - but lets play: If you were the NSA; why would you even hint to the user that you were taking screenshots? Its not like the blink animation is tucked away from software control.
  - samstave 13y ago
    That wasnt my point: irrespective of any "nefarious interest" in said screen shots; IS the iOS device actually capturing every single screen change via a screenshot? As I understood it - there were certain apps that were captured in the past. This was so that when the app loaded it had the previous state shown as quickly as possible, and it would then refresh. My point was I am noticing this flashing screen cap anim on literally EVERY screen change... this does not make sense to me and I am wondering why the device does this. Finally, I surmise that if it actually IS doing these caps, that if one COULD get access to them one could then build a pretty clear session history. Again, I said it was a simple suspicion. I have no idea if this is actually happening; but the device seems to be revealing the caps happening... but I am not so sure.
jaseemabid 13y ago
Ok! Isn't this obvious?
roin 13y ago
Not only is the slide from 2008, but it also says it requires "close access methods" and "remote installation will be pursued for a future release." In other words, they need physical access to your device. If we think that the NSA can't compromise a device after gaining physical access, well then I think we should be scared about the competence of the NSA. I don't have the patience to watch Appelbaum's hour long talk, but unless he has something far more impressive than these documents then he's just another activist who will willfully mislead in order to advance his cause.
- lawnchair_larry 13y ago
  I would say this is one of the least impressive things mentioned in that talk.
- serf 13y ago
  Yeah.. close access methods.. Hope you didn't have that phone shipped to you, because apparently the NSA is cool with slicing open your new package before conveniently reshipping it.
- kevinchen 13y ago
  "physical access", or "we'll run a jailbreak tool and set the 'hidden' property of the Cydia app to true"
- brudgers 13y ago
  Close access includes the assembly line, and that would be the preferred option for an intelligence organ seeking access to a consumer device - it scales well. Given the logistics of the electronics industry, there are many potential vectors to introduce the exploit unilaterally, though working cooperatively with Korean or Taiwanese agencies is possible given shared interests and those country's roles in component manufacturing. Of course with their own chip design arm, going directly through Apple is a more obvious choice.
- xorbyte 13y ago
  Much of Jacob's presentation echoes many of the articles he (and others) had published in Der Spiegel earlier that day, going into a little more into the technical aspects (to the extent they are known and/or can be inferred.) While you may skip out the talk, at least look over the articles. While Jacob's style may rub you wrong, the issues are there regardless, and impatience is hardly a justifiable excuse. On another note, if you are aware of Jacob misleading on any matter, it would be nice pointing that out directly. He is an activist that has done everything from helping with on-the-ground infrastructure deployments in war-torn areas, working on and advocating for Tor, speaking in front of the EU council… Casting doubt on his integrity without highlighting relevant facts is a way of distracting from the actual issues under discussion.
notastartup 13y ago
I wonder if they are doing this with Android devices too. Anyways, it's not of concern to me as I ditched my smartphone for an old school motorolla flip phone.
neilkelty 13y ago
Couldn't this be accomplished simply by creating apps that deal with contacts, photos, camera, etc. and then having users download and accept the permissions themselves. For example, imagine that any one of the contact or calendar management apps where you "Allow xxxxx to access your contacts" was produced by the NSA under the guise of an innovative startup.
- kevinchen 13y ago
  Not quite: for example, iOS doesn't allow apps to access the SMS database. In light of recent leaks, it's still pretty obvious: think a repackaging of OTA jailbreaks (like jailbreakme from the iPhone OS 3 era) plus Foxacid. You could make jailbreakme not display a dialog or install Cydia, and the user wouldn't notice anything except their phone got warm for awhile and has a newly opened port for SSH.
rdtsc 13y ago
Ha, I wonder what this will do to acceptance of Apple products inside DoD's (well govt in general). Many agencies and military branches love them some new cool toys and have been pushing for their inclusion. Now revealing that Apple security can so seemingly easily be compromised, will they still allow or advise use of Apple products on government's own networks?
- Phlarp 13y ago
  I thought the largest take away from all these leaks was that various branches of government, even within the military and intelligence communities, routinely deploy solutions that are known to be insecure?
  - rdtsc 13y ago
    Well they do try to (at least on the surface) to protect their own sensitive information. NSA's other mission (besides spying) is and advising govt agencies and military on keeping their data safe. Now this involves a lot of red tape security certifications, hardening 'scripts', monitoring, auditing and so on. They legitimately do not want sensitive information leaking. Projects employ air gaps with CDs being burnt and that is how data is transferred some times.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
ChrisAntaki 13y ago
"Is the iPhone taking secret pictures of FaceTime users?" (2011) http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20051758-17.html# http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20051758-17.html#! > One person said that her boyfriend saw a picture of himself at work displayed in FaceTime, even though he has never used the service in the office.
cdooh 13y ago
At least we know why Obama still uses a blackberry
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- dsl 13y ago
  Obama only uses a blackberry for show when he is in public. The Whitehouse Communications Office is responsible for maintaining communications with the rest of the government, business and political contacts, and his family. In the event the president needs to take a call, an aide will direct him to a secure tent they setup nearby that is shielded against eavesdropping and electronic surveillance (see http://www.theage.com.au/world/barack-obamas-portable-secrecy-tent-some-assembly-required-20131111-2xb0l.html http://www.theage.com.au/world/barack-obamas-portable-secrec...). If it is a conversation where they do not expect sensitive topics to be discussed, they might give him a Sectera Edge that is routed over an encrypted satellite link back to the Whitehouse switchboard where the actual call is connected.
RyanZAG 13y ago
Aren't we missing a critical point here?? > "The initial release of DROPOUTJEEP will focus on installing the implant via closed access methods." [2007] OK, we knew this much already. I remember seeing a number of stories on how law enforcement can pull data off an iPhone, etc. Not really much new here. > "A remote installation capability will be pursued for a future release" Here is the interesting bit. You don't put this in a document unless you have a good plan on how to do it. Obviously with iOS devices having ports closed and being behind NAT, the NSA can't exploit them remotely. However, the NSA is pretty clear that it will have the capability in the future. Note the date on this - 2007. Since 2007, what has changed? iCloud allows Apple to install and run code directly on your device remotely. Is there any doubt that the NSA would request Apple give them full access to iCloud? So the real issue here is what that last little line hints at: the NSA was looking to get remote access rights to all iPhones back in 2007 and with the knowledge now that they will happily backdoor AT&T/Google/Microsoft to retrieve data, is there any doubt they are now using iCloud to gain remote access to all iPhones? I'm sure NSA/Google does the same with Google Play Services.
- bandushrew 13y ago
  " iCloud allows Apple to install and run code directly on your device remotely." I dont understand this? so far as I am aware, apple has always been able to install and run code directly on your device remotely. what am I missing?
  - lsb 13y ago
    That they let spies run arbitrary code on your phone too.
    - simonh 13y ago
      We don't know that, we also don't know whether Google or Microsoft or any of the other phone or phone OS vendors 'let' the NSA do any of this. Even if the NSA had inside help, it may have been via individual Apple (Google, MS, etc) employees without Apple's knowledge, or ex-Apple engineers contracted by the NSA. In fact the later would be a much more useful approach for the NSA since it would minimize the number of people who knew it was going on and could therefore leak about it or interfere with the capability.
andr 13y ago
I really see this working remotely, as long as you have control over a cell phone tower or you use a phony portable base station, both of which are within the NSA's reach. The thing is phone baseband software (which is reused on different phone models and controls the phone's I/O including GSM, USB, etc.) has hardly ever been under attack. When the iPhone arrived with its new security model, baseband bugs became one of the major ways to jailbreak a phone. Those bugs have been fixed one by one, but they were mostly on the USB side - the GSM side has been impractical to attack. A carefully crafted GSM packet could in 2008 and probably could now cause a buffer overflow in the baseband and gain access. An interesting presentation on the topic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQqv0v14KKY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQqv0v14KKY
f_salmon 13y ago
I have an iPhone. And when I read that the US government tracks mobile phone movements all over the world (generating a ton of other information about people), I turned it off permanently (flight mode) and use it only as a PDA. Turns out, landline phones combined with email is more than one needs. If I wouldn't have stopped using the "mobile call feature", my iPhone would have gone straight to ebay, right now.
rlx0x 13y ago
Now the talk he gave was interesting, laying out some known and some new facts about the surveillance and automated attack capabilities of the NSA, particularity interesting is the targeting of infrastructure and their traffic injection systems. And he is right to make the point, that its particularly despicable that they actively sabotage infrastructure security, something everyone on this planet has to suffer from. But.. I don't even know where to begin, its not only that we need to convince a large portion of the US population that living in a dystopian total surveillance state is actually not something to thrive for, we can't even begin to discuss those issues in any meaningful way when people have not the slightest clue whats really going on, even if leaks like this occur that outline frightening and utterly insane surveillance and attack capabilities nobody is going to explain it to them (not that anyone cares anyways). The NSA developed and deployed a global system that enables them to do DPI on the whole internet traffic, analyze that traffic, inject traffic, attack every system through countless vulnerabilities and backdoors and all of that automated, not only against their “targets” but also against any infrastructure they are interested in. They have secret laws, can force companies to work with them, force backdoors and not only are the US companies not allowed to talk about those things, they are legally bound to publicly lie about it. So yeah they can hack every iPhone on this planet, and turn it into a silent listening device, among many many many other things, is that really what we should be talking about?
- andreyf 13y ago
  > force backdoors unlikely > they are legally bound to publicly lie about it source?
  - StavrosK 13y ago
    http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/09/nsa-sabotage-dead-mans-switch http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/09/nsa-sabota...
    - andreyf 13y ago
      Can you be a little more specific? Also, re: that article, is there any evidence that there are exploits placed by NSA or GHCQ that could be used by other adversaries? I hear this claim a lot, but haven't seen any evidence...
aruggirello 13y ago
All Your iPhones Are Belong To Us. Surrender to your iNSA overlords, while you're still alive.
forgottenpaswrd 13y ago
"one question has been paramount for privacy advocates: How do we, as a society, balance the need for security against the rights to privacy and freedom? " I hear this fallacy question again an again. It implies that giving total power to gobertment is "security". It is not. Giving total control to Stalin meant hundred of millions of Russians got murdered in terror, giving total power to Hitler or Mussolini from democracies meant the total destruction of Germany and Italy with millions dead.
- hershel 13y ago
  Stalin is a bad example. By forcing industrialization on the ussr, he has increased average life span of the population by something like 15 years ( measures in 1958) and enabled the ussr to defend itself against the Germany which saved countless lives, and increased living standards, education, female equality greatly. In his case, and the case of Chinese communism, it somewhat debatable whether a strong government is preferable.
  - blub 13y ago
    Uh, Stalin is responsible for more suffering than possibly anyone in recent history. He probably killed more russian people than the german soldiers. His policies screwed up a significant part of the world for decades.
    - Theodores 13y ago
      He also gave Communism a bad name, and, by proxy, Socialism. These systems of government did not have all of the answers, however we now have free market economics everywhere with anything vaguely socialist being absolutely taboo. We have not a lot of diversity in government, government is nowadays about managing a country rather than anything ideological. Some diversity is better even if other systems are not how one would want to live.
      - tspiteri 13y ago
        with anything vaguely socialist being absolutely taboo This is not true, at least not in Europe. Most countries have some form of universal health care, and there are benefits for people who do not work, etc. That is more than vaguely socialist, and is definitely not taboo.
wslh 13y ago
I am waiting for a real GNU phone. The original free software spirit is not there yet.
- CervezaPorFavor 13y ago
  Since explots can be done through hardware, firmware and software, how is a GNU phone better (genuine question)?
  - wslh 13y ago
    You can take into account initiatives like OpenCores: http://opencores.org/ http://opencores.org/ Vulnerabilities exists anywhere for sure but the community (whatever it means) should create a defense against those threads.
JunkDNA 13y ago
I know this headline generates traffic by being about the iPhone, but this is a minor point. The big message from Jacob's talk and the original articles in Der Spiegel is that the NSA can intercept anything. Period. Full stop. People have suspected such far reaching capabilities for some time. This talk and the articles demonstrate that it exists. I'm personally a little uncomfortable with this kind of disclosure. On one hand, the NSA exists for the express purpose of spying. That is their job. You can not like that the NSA is a spy organization and we can debate whether we should conduct spy operations as a society, but I'm not sure what exposing their methods in this level of detail does for advancing that debate. Did people expect them to be a spy organization that was incompetent? A group that makes crappy and obvious listening devices stamped with "Designed by the NSA in Maryland"? On the other hand, the cases of potential abuses and dragnet surveillance capturing everything indiscriminately are extremely worrying. I don't know how a free society can do all this spying in support of legitimate foreign policy goals and at the same time not grow into an out of control, unaccountable organization ripe for abuse.
- enkephalin 13y ago
  > Did people expect them to be a spy organization that was incompetent? i'm guessing most people thought that spying of US agencies was an activity that was carried out abroad, and aimed at real threats.
  - JunkDNA 13y ago
    Indeed. But nothing in these slides suggests that this stuff wasn't used that way. In contrast to PRISM a lot of the techniques Jacob presented seem like they would only be useful for targeted work. The crucial question of where those targets are located and how many there actually are is left open. That is what makes me uncomfortable about this sort of presentation. I'm concerned that it does real harm to legitimate intelligence programs by conflating them with unrelated mass internet surveillance programs.
    - enkephalin 13y ago
      > But nothing in these slides suggests that this stuff wasn't used that way. that's true of course. but i'm afraid that the revelations of the past months have almost turned "jumping to conclusions" into a legitimate response to this kind of information.
jokoon 13y ago
One thing is true: whatever your phone is, the more complex, the more features, the more risks there are. I really don't see the advantages of having a handsized computer, really. The performance/battery/usability/cost compromises are not really making it worth it. Most people do a lot of text messaging, usual smartphones are not designed for it. Old school, classic cellphone do it pretty well. Why would you need the internet while you're outside, in the cold, in the train, while not sitting ? You only need an iPhone for very unnecessary, unplanned, rich things. For example, you need to locate something, like the nearest restaurant, or coffee place, in a town you know nothing about. The data transfer and costs to make a web search on such a low-powered device, will be ridiculous if you compare it to just asking somebody. You're in a coffee place, you're arguing about something, and you want to know who's right, so you want to search it on the web. Why not just enable the wifi, and why not carry your 13 inch notebook ? You want to read your emails. Even if you receive email, what's the real difference with text messaging ? Emails are for long message on which you can attach big files. Email is a very old protocol, and it wasn't really thought to work hand in hand with text messaging. You want to read a digital document. If you're in for a long, comfortable read, use an ebook device, use the small screen of a classic cellphone, or just plan ahead and print it. Smartphones are all-in one, expensive, software and hardware quirky solutions which are just not that much awesome. Computers are not entirely secure. A smartphone will create new technical challenges, but also many other risks, especially if you have a homogenous device like the iPhone. Engineers should start to create protocols and software which are already designed for smaller devices, not create smaller powerful computers: laptops and desktops are already at the limit of tiny. Apple created a market of an attractive, dreamy device, which sold, and the market followed, but the truth is, there is much more to do on the embedded software design.
- unethical_ban 13y ago
  "You know all those things you like having in a smartphone? You could do without them, you know." I agree with your point that more software = more surface area, but your examples of alternatives aren't very viable for most people, in my opinion.
- aaronem 13y ago
  I made much the same arguments before I bought my first smartphone. Turns out they're a lot more useful than you notice when you're only looking for reasons to dislike the whole concept. For an example from my own experience, I used to do a lot of contract IT work, both freelance and as part of a firm, often visiting several clients over the course of a day. Originally I'd keep track of everything in an old-fashioned spiral-bound pocket notebook, but dead trees are hard to grep, especially remotely, and at the rate at which I filled notebooks it got to be a real pain having to copy and distill everything worth keeping track of from the old one to the new one. I had an old-fashioned candybar phone, too, which worked well enough for phone calls and text messages, and if I had to, I could use it to talk a client through power-cycling a server and other similarly simple procedures, which was at least a little better than having to go out and do it myself, or back to the office where I could remote into the client's PDU. So I bought an iPhone. Thus, with a modicum of effort, I gained a shared, always up-to-date calendar, providing both an agenda of upcoming events and a searchable record of what I'd done and when; an always-connected email client, providing both an easy means of keeping in touch while on the road and, again, a searchable record of past communications; a shared, collated, searchable collection of notes concerning every relevant detail of my various clients' operations; a shared, &c., collection of contact information for all my various clients and industry contacts; and, last but not least, an always-connected administrative terminal with which to remotely solve even relatively subtle and complex problems, as and when necessary, for clients who had urgent needs and for whom I could not fit an in-person emergency visit into my schedule. No doubt all of this makes it sound as though I was a preposterously busy person, and for several years that's exactly what I was. My smartphone enabled me to streamline my efforts in a fashion which I had hardly imagined possible before I first laid hands on the means of so doing, to the extent that it made me able to get more work done, with less effort, than I had been able to accomplish before. If there is any purpose at all behind our species' longstanding habit of building interesting trinkets and gewgaws, "more work with less effort" is certainly the very soul of that purpose. I do, though, like your "only frivolous people with frivolous purposes would ever have a smartphone" argument, though. I think that's the most sensible thing anyone has said in this whole thread. Certainly it is in no way redolent of, for example, someone who bravely defies his ignorance in order to declaim at length on a subject of which he has absolutely no relevant experience whatsoever.
skc 13y ago
They cynic in me assumes that even tech savvy people would much rather rationalize away NSA access to their Apple products than give them up. The easiest rebuttal is simply that every smartphone is equally at risk. A last resort will be to simply say "meh, don't care" That's how good/sticky Apple products are
Create 13y ago
We begin therefore where they are determined not to end, with the question whether any form of democratic self-government, anywhere, is consistent with the kind of massive, pervasive, surveillance into which the Unites States government has led not only us but the world. This should not actually be a complicated inquiry. http://snowdenandthefuture.info/events.html http://snowdenandthefuture.info/events.html http://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-thought-requires-free-media http://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-t...
snowwrestler 13y ago
Is there more to the evidence for this than the slide? Because the slide says that the product is "In development." Just because capabilities are described in present tense on a slide does not mean that they are in fact available.

342 points by larubbio 13y ago

welp http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57614604-94/president-obama-says-he-cant-use-iphone-for-security-reasons/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57614604-94/president-obama... now we know why

marveller 13y ago

Humm... I was going to buy the new iPhone, this changed my mind. Maybe I should just get a feature phone instead.

electic 13y ago
All the phones are exploited. I doubt it matters.
- supergauntlet 13y ago
  Really any phone is exploited. When you've got a baseband with direct hardware access that the carrier can connect to there isn't really anything short of fully open hardware that is gonna save you.
  - auctiontheory 13y ago
    If (as claimed) the NSA has hacked the major BIOS/firmware as well as encryption, is there such as thing as "fully open hardware" and would it help?
    - zachrose 13y ago
      To my knowledge no, there is not. If there was, it would also require approval from the network operator. And if you believe that the network operators are aligned with the intelligence community anyways, you would never expect that approval to happen.
- swampboy 13y ago
  Perhaps, but with a feature phone there's much less for the eavesdroppers to see.
  - marveller 13y ago
    Yes, hence the feature phone :), no GPS, no email, no browsing records, etc.
- parag_c_mehta 13y ago
  True but phones with highest market share are more susceptible to the phones with least market share.
dubcanada 13y ago
And you think others are better? iPhone is probably one of the more "private" ones.
wyager 13y ago
All cell phone OSs are compromised to some degree. If Apple's claims about their crypto were auditable, I would say that iOS is the best from a security standpoint.
melling 13y ago
There's always "that guy" who makes this comment. We should start giving out "StackOverFlow style badges". The sad fact is that it doesn't matter how secure your phone is because there's a weaker link in your security chain. You...
alan_cx 13y ago
Oh just buy whatever you want, for whatever reasons you used to make up to justify an overpriced trinket which people think boosts their social standing because it pretty, and overpriced. Just know its not secure and act accordingly. Use it to build up a nice pure profile. When you want to rob banks, build your nuke, or whatever, dont use it. Or, have lots of trying to bait the spies. Call it art or something. Look up lots of terror stuff, like you are writing a book. Back, I dunno, 1000 years ago, when I first heard the oh so mad notion of echelon, I added an invisible signature to my email containing every naughty key word I could think of. Idea being to some how annoy the spooks. Yeah, childish and pointless, but it amused me. Hmmm, maybe half a year of banging my head against a brick wall has had an effect after all.

zebra 13y ago

Spiegel source: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-the-nsa-spies-on-smartphones-including-the-blackberry-a-921161.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-the-nsa-spies-...

caycep 13y ago
Hm, now I'm paranoid re the little "special teams" that article mentions that intercepts the mail package and plugs in whatever doodad the NSA has into the phone, and then sends it along to the customer...my new iPhone had a fingerprint smudge on the screen plastic protector packaging that I otherwise attributed to some overworked Foxconn employee but now I have half a mind it was some NSA agent after 1 too many pizzas....
ehrtt 13y ago
..and Jacob Appelbaum's actual talk on all of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0w36GAyZIA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0w36GAyZIA

caycep 13y ago

The slide is dated in 2007 - i.e. either iOS 1.0 or some pre-release beta. Who knows what it does now with iOS 7? Also, its unclear what's needed - does one of those other ridiculous govt alphabet soup programs act as a trojan, or does Tom Cruise has to dangle from my ceiling with laser beams to plug in some wingding to do this?

auctiontheory 13y ago
IIRC Tom Cruise didn't have the laser beams - he was avoiding the laser beams. So the responsibility to set up a defense perimeter with laser beams is yours.
- zachrose 13y ago
  The GP is grammatically and textually correct. The lasers belonged to the ceiling.

xacaxulu 13y ago

My TracFone is safe :-)

superuser2 13y ago
False. http://www.cellebrite.com/mobile-forensics http://www.cellebrite.com/mobile-forensics

wyager 13y ago

This is from a very old version of iOS (2007). We don't know if this is still true. Regardless, I can say for a fact that there are exploits for all cell phone platforms. iOS exploits are by far the hardest to find. An iOS remote execution 0day will easily fetch $250k. I've seen one go for $600k. For an Android remote exec 0day, you're looking at closer to $50k. Even if the NSA doesn't have these on hand, they can certainly purchase them.

JumpCrisscross 13y ago
Why isn't Apple (or some other consumer group) in that market buying up the 0days? I want to see the price of 0days that compromise any longitudinal user information above $10 million. Idea: 0day markets are legalised [1]. Regulators require companies keep the average price of their 0days above a threshold or attach a warning to their product and marketing materials. This aligns the security interests of consumers with companies while incentivising companies and researchers to build secure products. [1] A license to the 0day (but not the 0day itself) would be freely traded for a duration after which the company would have the option to (a) buy it at some price or (b) release it to the public, retaining full liability for any consequences (last holder of the license gets a percentage cut of any fines or legal awards).
- caycep 13y ago
  Apple being Apple, they wouldn't tell you. But I'm sure someone in there is thinking it. They did hire Geohot after his jailbreak...
  - yapcguy 13y ago
    Doesn't matter if any of this is true or not, it's the perception that counts. I'm quite interested to see what, if anything, Tim Cook will do or say to reassure the faithful. "Apple is erasing discussions on this topic at their support forum, right now the whole forum is shut down for a complete cleanup." http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/161398/nsa-worked-on-iphone-spyware-to-remotely-monitor-users-leaked-documents-show#post_2451690 http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/161398/nsa-worked-on-iphone...

allochthon 13y ago

Honestly, I don't really care. The NSA can read whatever they want of mine. I've heard the arguments about how you should care, even if you don't have anything to hide. And I find them persuasive on one level and simultaneously unengaging on another. By contrast, the parallels to fascist Italy and Nazi Germany and living in a turnkey fascist state are most unpersuasive. The one argument against what I've written that has been made that I think is worthy of highlighting is that there are people around the world who are risking their lives under totalitarian regimes. People's smug responses and ad hominem detract from this important point, which could be helpful to others outside of HN in better understanding the issue. Your downvotes will not persuade me or anyone else with my views. They do demonstrate that some are committed partisans on this issue. I appreciate some of the clear, unemotional arguments that have been made, however.

blake8086 13y ago
Hey, can you post your email username/password here so we can all read your mail?
- allochthon 13y ago
  I worry about random people on the Internet having access to my information about 1000 times more than I do the NSA.
  - PavlovsCat 13y ago
    a.) the way the NSA seems to foster security flaws to use them, instead of helping fix them, they are also helping "random people" get access to your data. A backdoor put there by the NSA can be used by anyone else, in theory. b.) what you personally do not worry about is not relevant, your arguments why nobody else should worry either are. You are not a journalist or activist, so you don't care. It's like saying it's okay that certain food contents are not labelled for the benefit of those having allergies against them, or that kids should be used as bio fuel, because you don't have an allergy or kids.
  - MWil 13y ago

samstave 13y ago

So here is a complete anecdotal suspicion: I have had the iPhone since the first day of release. I have gone through 16 physical devices over that period (due to me breaking them a lot and going through several employers where I had never purchased my own phone since (well before) it was released). I am currently, for the first time in a long time, on my own personal device; an iPhone 4. I upgraded it to iOS7 when it was available. The device is a slow POS and I want to stab my eyes out when I use it.... However; there is a behavior that I have only personally noticed recently: (Please tell me if you see the same thing) Whenever I transition between literally ANY screen, I see a quick BLINK of the screen - in the same anim that you would see when you take a screenshot. So I am wondering "Is my phone taking a screen cap of EVERY switch/transition I make? WHY" Now, I know that iOS does do screen caps of things so that when you are switching in various ways that it already has a cache of the last state of that screen in order to thumbnail the previous view... BUT I understood this to be limited to certain circumstances. Currently I am noticing it on pretty much ANY transition. Even if this is the actual, "Normal", my suspicion is that this fact can be used to entirely rebuild an entire session of activity for a user through their entire interactions. Even if you just grab these screens which are used at a system level - a great deal could be inferred from just these workflow screen caps.

sneak 13y ago
I think they're on to you. Quick, hide the evidence.
jbergstroem 13y ago
Complete bogus - but lets play: If you were the NSA; why would you even hint to the user that you were taking screenshots? Its not like the blink animation is tucked away from software control.
- samstave 13y ago
  That wasnt my point: irrespective of any "nefarious interest" in said screen shots; IS the iOS device actually capturing every single screen change via a screenshot? As I understood it - there were certain apps that were captured in the past. This was so that when the app loaded it had the previous state shown as quickly as possible, and it would then refresh. My point was I am noticing this flashing screen cap anim on literally EVERY screen change... this does not make sense to me and I am wondering why the device does this. Finally, I surmise that if it actually IS doing these caps, that if one COULD get access to them one could then build a pretty clear session history. Again, I said it was a simple suspicion. I have no idea if this is actually happening; but the device seems to be revealing the caps happening... but I am not so sure.

jaseemabid 13y ago

Ok! Isn't this obvious?

roin 13y ago

Not only is the slide from 2008, but it also says it requires "close access methods" and "remote installation will be pursued for a future release." In other words, they need physical access to your device. If we think that the NSA can't compromise a device after gaining physical access, well then I think we should be scared about the competence of the NSA. I don't have the patience to watch Appelbaum's hour long talk, but unless he has something far more impressive than these documents then he's just another activist who will willfully mislead in order to advance his cause.

lawnchair_larry 13y ago
I would say this is one of the least impressive things mentioned in that talk.
serf 13y ago
Yeah.. close access methods.. Hope you didn't have that phone shipped to you, because apparently the NSA is cool with slicing open your new package before conveniently reshipping it.
kevinchen 13y ago
"physical access", or "we'll run a jailbreak tool and set the 'hidden' property of the Cydia app to true"
brudgers 13y ago
Close access includes the assembly line, and that would be the preferred option for an intelligence organ seeking access to a consumer device - it scales well. Given the logistics of the electronics industry, there are many potential vectors to introduce the exploit unilaterally, though working cooperatively with Korean or Taiwanese agencies is possible given shared interests and those country's roles in component manufacturing. Of course with their own chip design arm, going directly through Apple is a more obvious choice.
xorbyte 13y ago
Much of Jacob's presentation echoes many of the articles he (and others) had published in Der Spiegel earlier that day, going into a little more into the technical aspects (to the extent they are known and/or can be inferred.) While you may skip out the talk, at least look over the articles. While Jacob's style may rub you wrong, the issues are there regardless, and impatience is hardly a justifiable excuse. On another note, if you are aware of Jacob misleading on any matter, it would be nice pointing that out directly. He is an activist that has done everything from helping with on-the-ground infrastructure deployments in war-torn areas, working on and advocating for Tor, speaking in front of the EU council… Casting doubt on his integrity without highlighting relevant facts is a way of distracting from the actual issues under discussion.

notastartup 13y ago

I wonder if they are doing this with Android devices too. Anyways, it's not of concern to me as I ditched my smartphone for an old school motorolla flip phone.

neilkelty 13y ago

Couldn't this be accomplished simply by creating apps that deal with contacts, photos, camera, etc. and then having users download and accept the permissions themselves. For example, imagine that any one of the contact or calendar management apps where you "Allow xxxxx to access your contacts" was produced by the NSA under the guise of an innovative startup.

kevinchen 13y ago
Not quite: for example, iOS doesn't allow apps to access the SMS database. In light of recent leaks, it's still pretty obvious: think a repackaging of OTA jailbreaks (like jailbreakme from the iPhone OS 3 era) plus Foxacid. You could make jailbreakme not display a dialog or install Cydia, and the user wouldn't notice anything except their phone got warm for awhile and has a newly opened port for SSH.

rdtsc 13y ago

Ha, I wonder what this will do to acceptance of Apple products inside DoD's (well govt in general). Many agencies and military branches love them some new cool toys and have been pushing for their inclusion. Now revealing that Apple security can so seemingly easily be compromised, will they still allow or advise use of Apple products on government's own networks?

Phlarp 13y ago
I thought the largest take away from all these leaks was that various branches of government, even within the military and intelligence communities, routinely deploy solutions that are known to be insecure?
- rdtsc 13y ago
  Well they do try to (at least on the surface) to protect their own sensitive information. NSA's other mission (besides spying) is and advising govt agencies and military on keeping their data safe. Now this involves a lot of red tape security certifications, hardening 'scripts', monitoring, auditing and so on. They legitimately do not want sensitive information leaking. Projects employ air gaps with CDs being burnt and that is how data is transferred some times.

deleted 13y ago

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ChrisAntaki 13y ago

"Is the iPhone taking secret pictures of FaceTime users?" (2011) http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20051758-17.html# http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20051758-17.html#! > One person said that her boyfriend saw a picture of himself at work displayed in FaceTime, even though he has never used the service in the office.

cdooh 13y ago

At least we know why Obama still uses a blackberry

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
dsl 13y ago
Obama only uses a blackberry for show when he is in public. The Whitehouse Communications Office is responsible for maintaining communications with the rest of the government, business and political contacts, and his family. In the event the president needs to take a call, an aide will direct him to a secure tent they setup nearby that is shielded against eavesdropping and electronic surveillance (see http://www.theage.com.au/world/barack-obamas-portable-secrecy-tent-some-assembly-required-20131111-2xb0l.html http://www.theage.com.au/world/barack-obamas-portable-secrec...). If it is a conversation where they do not expect sensitive topics to be discussed, they might give him a Sectera Edge that is routed over an encrypted satellite link back to the Whitehouse switchboard where the actual call is connected.

RyanZAG 13y ago

Aren't we missing a critical point here?? > "The initial release of DROPOUTJEEP will focus on installing the implant via closed access methods." [2007] OK, we knew this much already. I remember seeing a number of stories on how law enforcement can pull data off an iPhone, etc. Not really much new here. > "A remote installation capability will be pursued for a future release" Here is the interesting bit. You don't put this in a document unless you have a good plan on how to do it. Obviously with iOS devices having ports closed and being behind NAT, the NSA can't exploit them remotely. However, the NSA is pretty clear that it will have the capability in the future. Note the date on this - 2007. Since 2007, what has changed? iCloud allows Apple to install and run code directly on your device remotely. Is there any doubt that the NSA would request Apple give them full access to iCloud? So the real issue here is what that last little line hints at: the NSA was looking to get remote access rights to all iPhones back in 2007 and with the knowledge now that they will happily backdoor AT&T/Google/Microsoft to retrieve data, is there any doubt they are now using iCloud to gain remote access to all iPhones? I'm sure NSA/Google does the same with Google Play Services.

bandushrew 13y ago
" iCloud allows Apple to install and run code directly on your device remotely." I dont understand this? so far as I am aware, apple has always been able to install and run code directly on your device remotely. what am I missing?
- lsb 13y ago
  That they let spies run arbitrary code on your phone too.
  - simonh 13y ago
    We don't know that, we also don't know whether Google or Microsoft or any of the other phone or phone OS vendors 'let' the NSA do any of this. Even if the NSA had inside help, it may have been via individual Apple (Google, MS, etc) employees without Apple's knowledge, or ex-Apple engineers contracted by the NSA. In fact the later would be a much more useful approach for the NSA since it would minimize the number of people who knew it was going on and could therefore leak about it or interfere with the capability.

andr 13y ago

I really see this working remotely, as long as you have control over a cell phone tower or you use a phony portable base station, both of which are within the NSA's reach. The thing is phone baseband software (which is reused on different phone models and controls the phone's I/O including GSM, USB, etc.) has hardly ever been under attack. When the iPhone arrived with its new security model, baseband bugs became one of the major ways to jailbreak a phone. Those bugs have been fixed one by one, but they were mostly on the USB side - the GSM side has been impractical to attack. A carefully crafted GSM packet could in 2008 and probably could now cause a buffer overflow in the baseband and gain access. An interesting presentation on the topic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQqv0v14KKY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQqv0v14KKY

f_salmon 13y ago

I have an iPhone. And when I read that the US government tracks mobile phone movements all over the world (generating a ton of other information about people), I turned it off permanently (flight mode) and use it only as a PDA. Turns out, landline phones combined with email is more than one needs. If I wouldn't have stopped using the "mobile call feature", my iPhone would have gone straight to ebay, right now.

rlx0x 13y ago

Now the talk he gave was interesting, laying out some known and some new facts about the surveillance and automated attack capabilities of the NSA, particularity interesting is the targeting of infrastructure and their traffic injection systems. And he is right to make the point, that its particularly despicable that they actively sabotage infrastructure security, something everyone on this planet has to suffer from. But.. I don't even know where to begin, its not only that we need to convince a large portion of the US population that living in a dystopian total surveillance state is actually not something to thrive for, we can't even begin to discuss those issues in any meaningful way when people have not the slightest clue whats really going on, even if leaks like this occur that outline frightening and utterly insane surveillance and attack capabilities nobody is going to explain it to them (not that anyone cares anyways). The NSA developed and deployed a global system that enables them to do DPI on the whole internet traffic, analyze that traffic, inject traffic, attack every system through countless vulnerabilities and backdoors and all of that automated, not only against their “targets” but also against any infrastructure they are interested in. They have secret laws, can force companies to work with them, force backdoors and not only are the US companies not allowed to talk about those things, they are legally bound to publicly lie about it. So yeah they can hack every iPhone on this planet, and turn it into a silent listening device, among many many many other things, is that really what we should be talking about?

andreyf 13y ago
> force backdoors unlikely > they are legally bound to publicly lie about it source?
- StavrosK 13y ago
  http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/09/nsa-sabotage-dead-mans-switch http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/09/nsa-sabota...
  - andreyf 13y ago
    Can you be a little more specific? Also, re: that article, is there any evidence that there are exploits placed by NSA or GHCQ that could be used by other adversaries? I hear this claim a lot, but haven't seen any evidence...

aruggirello 13y ago

All Your iPhones Are Belong To Us. Surrender to your iNSA overlords, while you're still alive.

forgottenpaswrd 13y ago

"one question has been paramount for privacy advocates: How do we, as a society, balance the need for security against the rights to privacy and freedom? " I hear this fallacy question again an again. It implies that giving total power to gobertment is "security". It is not. Giving total control to Stalin meant hundred of millions of Russians got murdered in terror, giving total power to Hitler or Mussolini from democracies meant the total destruction of Germany and Italy with millions dead.

hershel 13y ago
Stalin is a bad example. By forcing industrialization on the ussr, he has increased average life span of the population by something like 15 years ( measures in 1958) and enabled the ussr to defend itself against the Germany which saved countless lives, and increased living standards, education, female equality greatly. In his case, and the case of Chinese communism, it somewhat debatable whether a strong government is preferable.
- blub 13y ago
  Uh, Stalin is responsible for more suffering than possibly anyone in recent history. He probably killed more russian people than the german soldiers. His policies screwed up a significant part of the world for decades.
  - Theodores 13y ago
    He also gave Communism a bad name, and, by proxy, Socialism. These systems of government did not have all of the answers, however we now have free market economics everywhere with anything vaguely socialist being absolutely taboo. We have not a lot of diversity in government, government is nowadays about managing a country rather than anything ideological. Some diversity is better even if other systems are not how one would want to live.
    - tspiteri 13y ago
      with anything vaguely socialist being absolutely taboo This is not true, at least not in Europe. Most countries have some form of universal health care, and there are benefits for people who do not work, etc. That is more than vaguely socialist, and is definitely not taboo.

wslh 13y ago

I am waiting for a real GNU phone. The original free software spirit is not there yet.

CervezaPorFavor 13y ago
Since explots can be done through hardware, firmware and software, how is a GNU phone better (genuine question)?
- wslh 13y ago
  You can take into account initiatives like OpenCores: http://opencores.org/ http://opencores.org/ Vulnerabilities exists anywhere for sure but the community (whatever it means) should create a defense against those threads.

JunkDNA 13y ago

I know this headline generates traffic by being about the iPhone, but this is a minor point. The big message from Jacob's talk and the original articles in Der Spiegel is that the NSA can intercept anything. Period. Full stop. People have suspected such far reaching capabilities for some time. This talk and the articles demonstrate that it exists. I'm personally a little uncomfortable with this kind of disclosure. On one hand, the NSA exists for the express purpose of spying. That is their job. You can not like that the NSA is a spy organization and we can debate whether we should conduct spy operations as a society, but I'm not sure what exposing their methods in this level of detail does for advancing that debate. Did people expect them to be a spy organization that was incompetent? A group that makes crappy and obvious listening devices stamped with "Designed by the NSA in Maryland"? On the other hand, the cases of potential abuses and dragnet surveillance capturing everything indiscriminately are extremely worrying. I don't know how a free society can do all this spying in support of legitimate foreign policy goals and at the same time not grow into an out of control, unaccountable organization ripe for abuse.

enkephalin 13y ago
> Did people expect them to be a spy organization that was incompetent? i'm guessing most people thought that spying of US agencies was an activity that was carried out abroad, and aimed at real threats.
- JunkDNA 13y ago
  Indeed. But nothing in these slides suggests that this stuff wasn't used that way. In contrast to PRISM a lot of the techniques Jacob presented seem like they would only be useful for targeted work. The crucial question of where those targets are located and how many there actually are is left open. That is what makes me uncomfortable about this sort of presentation. I'm concerned that it does real harm to legitimate intelligence programs by conflating them with unrelated mass internet surveillance programs.
  - enkephalin 13y ago
    > But nothing in these slides suggests that this stuff wasn't used that way. that's true of course. but i'm afraid that the revelations of the past months have almost turned "jumping to conclusions" into a legitimate response to this kind of information.

jokoon 13y ago

One thing is true: whatever your phone is, the more complex, the more features, the more risks there are. I really don't see the advantages of having a handsized computer, really. The performance/battery/usability/cost compromises are not really making it worth it. Most people do a lot of text messaging, usual smartphones are not designed for it. Old school, classic cellphone do it pretty well. Why would you need the internet while you're outside, in the cold, in the train, while not sitting ? You only need an iPhone for very unnecessary, unplanned, rich things. For example, you need to locate something, like the nearest restaurant, or coffee place, in a town you know nothing about. The data transfer and costs to make a web search on such a low-powered device, will be ridiculous if you compare it to just asking somebody. You're in a coffee place, you're arguing about something, and you want to know who's right, so you want to search it on the web. Why not just enable the wifi, and why not carry your 13 inch notebook ? You want to read your emails. Even if you receive email, what's the real difference with text messaging ? Emails are for long message on which you can attach big files. Email is a very old protocol, and it wasn't really thought to work hand in hand with text messaging. You want to read a digital document. If you're in for a long, comfortable read, use an ebook device, use the small screen of a classic cellphone, or just plan ahead and print it. Smartphones are all-in one, expensive, software and hardware quirky solutions which are just not that much awesome. Computers are not entirely secure. A smartphone will create new technical challenges, but also many other risks, especially if you have a homogenous device like the iPhone. Engineers should start to create protocols and software which are already designed for smaller devices, not create smaller powerful computers: laptops and desktops are already at the limit of tiny. Apple created a market of an attractive, dreamy device, which sold, and the market followed, but the truth is, there is much more to do on the embedded software design.

unethical_ban 13y ago
"You know all those things you like having in a smartphone? You could do without them, you know." I agree with your point that more software = more surface area, but your examples of alternatives aren't very viable for most people, in my opinion.
aaronem 13y ago
I made much the same arguments before I bought my first smartphone. Turns out they're a lot more useful than you notice when you're only looking for reasons to dislike the whole concept. For an example from my own experience, I used to do a lot of contract IT work, both freelance and as part of a firm, often visiting several clients over the course of a day. Originally I'd keep track of everything in an old-fashioned spiral-bound pocket notebook, but dead trees are hard to grep, especially remotely, and at the rate at which I filled notebooks it got to be a real pain having to copy and distill everything worth keeping track of from the old one to the new one. I had an old-fashioned candybar phone, too, which worked well enough for phone calls and text messages, and if I had to, I could use it to talk a client through power-cycling a server and other similarly simple procedures, which was at least a little better than having to go out and do it myself, or back to the office where I could remote into the client's PDU. So I bought an iPhone. Thus, with a modicum of effort, I gained a shared, always up-to-date calendar, providing both an agenda of upcoming events and a searchable record of what I'd done and when; an always-connected email client, providing both an easy means of keeping in touch while on the road and, again, a searchable record of past communications; a shared, collated, searchable collection of notes concerning every relevant detail of my various clients' operations; a shared, &c., collection of contact information for all my various clients and industry contacts; and, last but not least, an always-connected administrative terminal with which to remotely solve even relatively subtle and complex problems, as and when necessary, for clients who had urgent needs and for whom I could not fit an in-person emergency visit into my schedule. No doubt all of this makes it sound as though I was a preposterously busy person, and for several years that's exactly what I was. My smartphone enabled me to streamline my efforts in a fashion which I had hardly imagined possible before I first laid hands on the means of so doing, to the extent that it made me able to get more work done, with less effort, than I had been able to accomplish before. If there is any purpose at all behind our species' longstanding habit of building interesting trinkets and gewgaws, "more work with less effort" is certainly the very soul of that purpose. I do, though, like your "only frivolous people with frivolous purposes would ever have a smartphone" argument, though. I think that's the most sensible thing anyone has said in this whole thread. Certainly it is in no way redolent of, for example, someone who bravely defies his ignorance in order to declaim at length on a subject of which he has absolutely no relevant experience whatsoever.

skc 13y ago

They cynic in me assumes that even tech savvy people would much rather rationalize away NSA access to their Apple products than give them up. The easiest rebuttal is simply that every smartphone is equally at risk. A last resort will be to simply say "meh, don't care" That's how good/sticky Apple products are

Create 13y ago

We begin therefore where they are determined not to end, with the question whether any form of democratic self-government, anywhere, is consistent with the kind of massive, pervasive, surveillance into which the Unites States government has led not only us but the world. This should not actually be a complicated inquiry. http://snowdenandthefuture.info/events.html http://snowdenandthefuture.info/events.html http://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-thought-requires-free-media http://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-t...

snowwrestler 13y ago

Is there more to the evidence for this than the slide? Because the slide says that the product is "In development." Just because capabilities are described in present tense on a slide does not mean that they are in fact available.