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Comment by sarcasticfish | Hacker News Reader

Could someone that understands more than a third of what was written explain what's going on?

One part of the UK government is trying to force Apple to introduce back doors in cloud data encryption. The back doors are intended for UK government access to user data. This undermines the whole feature. Meanwhile, other parts of the UK government have been encouraging at-risk people to use the same feature, including to hide information from hostile foreign governments. The UK government as a whole has apparently realized that this is embarrassing and taken down the advice.

Surely Apple's lawyers can use this information in court - the fact that the government itself is relying on, and recommending, citizens and (presumably) intelligence assets to use Apple's encryption technology abroad makes it VERY clear that outlawing said technology will systematically weaken ALL UK information infrastructure and make it 110% easier for foreign powers to exploit and sabotage the UK as whole.

edit: removed political quip since, as evidenced by sub-comments, it too easily derails from the primary discussion point, excuse-moi.

Apple is not planning to fight for the UK citizens over encryption.

It's a job for the democracy and voters.

Well, the rumor is that Apple has secretly appealed the order (which is officially secret) to whatever secret tribunal reviews such secret orders to create secret features giving secret government investigations access to various people's secrets. The Court of the Star Chamber, I think it's called.

Which is at least Apple doing something vaguely like fighting. But, yeah, UK citizens might want to think hard about doing something about the situation themselves. For one thing, Apple will probably lose. And the US government isn't going to have Apple's back against the UK, either.

Apple may be fighting for the UK citizens. We don't know, we're not allowed to know and Apple isn't allowed to tell us https://www.theverge.com/news/623977/apple-uk-encryption-ord...

If you think Reform are likely to be in favour of anything other than the most authoritarian implantation of whatever law enforcement suggests they want, I don’t think you’ve been paying attention to who Reform are.

> Do we really need Reform in power for common sense to flourish in the UK to any degree?!

No. You've mistaken demagoguery for common sense I'm afraid. That's one of their favourite tricks though, so you could be forgiven for the mistake.

Reminds me of this sketch from A bit of Fry and Laurie:

Hugh: And by demagoguery you mean ...?

Stephen: I mean demagoguery, I mean highly-charged oratory, persuasive whipping up rhetoric…

Transcript: https://abitoffryandlaurie.co.uk/sketches/language_conversat...

Video: https://youtu.be/3MWpHQQ-wQg

Notice which side wins out.

It was not removed out of embarrassment, it's just wrong advice. The government can't tell people use this feature, because the feature no longer exists for them to use.

Uk Govt wanted Apple to give them backdoor keys to all accounts. Not even just UK accounts, all accounts. Apple said no and said they will remove encryption from iCloud for UK users. Apple then sued UK govt to try and get the whole thing stopped so that they dont need to remove the encryption from UK. But some parts of the govt were telling other parts to use some of the encryption features.

As I understand it (which might be incorrect), they don't want to tell people "use Apple encryption" anymore and e silently removed that advice from their websites. Probably due to the fact that they didn't get their Backdoor access to user data, so now they want people to just now encrypt stuff

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