you're either severely underestimating how easy it is to insert a backdoor or overestimating how competent apple's code review practices are. remember that time you could bypass the root password prompt by putting in nothing?
Thousands of developers over a decade have touched code going into iOS & Mac OS and so far have a pretty good track record on internal espionage and back doors.
> remember that time you could bypass the root password
Pretty dumb mistake, but willing to put money on them that it won't happen again. I think you severely underestimate just how competent Apple (and Google, Facebook, or Microsoft) are at their job given the enormous complexity of the problems they solve.
Maybe. Or maybe they have an impeccable track record on not getting caught (at least publicly). It's essentially impossible to differentiate the two.
This sounds like "guilty until proven innocent" logic - maybe we should drown people to prove they're not witches. I'm all for a healthy dose of skepticism, but there's a point it passes into fantasy.
This is not guilty until proven innocent, this is just the way most businesses operate.
This is true only if we were to ignore the following:
organised crime; politicians; all secret services, both domestic and foreign; corporate espionage; opportunity getting the better of people, especially problem gamblers and drug addicts
I'm pretty sure the Chinese government would be capable of planting two or three sleepers in Apple's software division if they decided to.
I'm not interested in conjecture. Like I said, the stuff of movies.
The valley is a pretty incestuous place and people with specific skills are pretty small in number. It doesn’t seem wacky that someone with nation state budget wouldn’t have a network of influence to get someone hired somewhere.
People do it for their friends all of the time.
To that end, I’m amazed it took that long for the FBI to take down the network in the article. The more people who are read in to criminal activity, the risk exponentially increases, as anybody who has been on either end of investigative leverage can tell you. I’m stunned one person in the early days of this scam, particularly when it started involving colorful people, didn’t flip as a bargaining tool for other things they were into.
As tomnipotent said, it’d make a cool movie.
Whatever their plans are, there is some number N of employees who could subvert those plans. It is legitimate to wonder how big that number is, and to note that there is no way for anyone outside of Apple to know.