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Comment by zepto | Hacker News Reader

How is this the top comment?

We can see that it is clearly nothing to do with 'revenge' or 'retaliation'. The evidence clearly contradicts that.

Apple makes strong promises around security and Touch ID in particular. This is clearly designed to maintain the integrity of that system.

It's certainly a terrible failure mode - the error message should explain what the problem is.

But imputing these bizarre motives just reveals bias on the part of the commenters.

The alternative would be at some point a headline like "compromised Touch ID sends fingerprints to bad actor".

[this was obviously going to be downvoted, but for the record nobody has either made an argument for, or provided evidence for the 'revenge' motivation, while the 'poorly implemented security policy' explanation is clearly supported by the evidence.]

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> The alternative would be at some point a headline like "compromised Touch ID sends fingerprints to bad actor".

There would be no such headline. Before update to iOS 9, the affected phones functioned normally, but with disabled Touch ID.

And if you have to know why people come up with theories like that - either Apple didn't think what happens to users who already had this hardware replaced or they thought about that. Maybe those who accuse them of malice simply overestimated their competence - after all, they make big claims about high quality, attention to detail and whatnot.

Not to mention that the first part of this comment makes sense and probably expresses well how people feel about this screwup.

> Before update to iOS 9, the affected phones functioned normally, but with disabled Touch ID.

This is irrelevant. The problem is that those affected phones could still have had compromised fingerprint sensors.

Apple did the right thing in protecting people from this, but did communicate about it poorly.

The only malice in this situation is on the part of the people accusing apple of being motivated by 'revenge'.

> This is irrelevant. The problem is that those affected phones could still have had compromised fingerprint sensors.

... which wouldn't be used after the phone determines it's an aftermarket part. Equally well the attacker may have installed a malicious piece of brick inside.

> Apple did the right thing in protecting people from this

Sure, they protected users from using phone with replaced home button and disabled fingerprint scanner by bricking the phone completely.

Hard to tell in what proportions malice and/or stupidity were involved in this case, but either way it wasn't "doing the right thing".

Stop saying they bricked the phone. It's untrue. The phone is producing an error message and the problem can be rectified by visiting an Apple Store.

Maybe something has changed after this article, I'm not going to make such claims anymore without verification.

However, you have to understand that when I posted this, I knew about cases (including TFA) when the problem had indeed been "rectified" by visiting a store (sorry, couldn't resist ;)) but no case when the device had actually been fixed and data recovered, whether this is technically possible or not.

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