Time to start de-Appling
heatherburns.tech
heatherburns.tech
If Apple had supported open iCloud alternatives for backup and other services from day one, it woudn't even be a discussion now. The UK probably wouldn't have thought of the idea of mandating against E2E encryption because it would be self evident it would actually just churn people to alternatives where they have less leverage and visibility. But Apple couldn't resist bricking up the walled garden and now it's hostile to both them and their users, and to be honest, everyone on the planet since it is obvious that once this happens in the UK it will be silly for every government everywhere not to follow suit.
I'm sure someone in a board meeting saw something about GrapheneOS and LineageOS and Cyanogen and feels like if they de-open Android, some (or most) of those users will move to vanilla Android, and that will lead to profits.
I'm not saying that they're right about this; I think ultimately very few (if any) people actually know how to run businesses and it's all about giving an appearance of maximizing profitability, and as long as it leads to a potential short term stock boost then these executives get their huge bonuses and they can just blame the next guy when things break.
This isn't really theoretical; look at how Jack Welch took one of the most respected companies in the world, more or less integrated ponzinomics to temporarily bump the stock prices, and 20+ years later GE is kind of a joke and isn't even on the S&P500 anymore.
Posting this from my lineage phone.
That said, there might be stuff that's actually using open source Android for profit. For example, the Nook Glowlight Plus, which runs a modded version of Android, doesn't appear to have any direct or even indirect references to Android anywhere (and I had to contribute a bit to the discourse to even get the rooting to work [1]). I have no ideas about the inner dealings of Barnes and Noble, but it wouldn't surprise me if they're running a completely forked version of FOSS Android and aren't paying a dime to Google for it.
I suspect these are the things that Google is trying to crack down on.
[1] https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=360563&pa...
The phone was the end of open computing, the tech companies obtained an iron grip on the platform, this time with fully accepted total monitoring and data collection down to everything you say, hear, everywhere you go, and with smartwatch biosensors, everything you feel. The only thing left is to get smart glasses and they will know everything you see. Smell they can probably interpolate.
It happened over a decade ago, and that might as well be 100 years ago in modern attention spans. All the governments have to do is pay the companies money, or simply force-legislate, or threaten under the table for all that info, and for permanent forever access to active tracking and monitoring.
AI provides all the analysis they need to watch the firehose. It's all there.
At this point it doesn't matter if an alternative comes. It'll be such the minority, that the social graph will fill all the holes. And they can simply track your IMEI regardless from the towers, listen in with other nearby microphones/phones. There is no escape.
All that remains is for the key to be turned for worse-than-1984 authoritarianism. It's right there, ready for the AI-empowered 50% of consumption controlled, 90% of stocks owned oligarchy to use.
Surveillance on the internet is challenging to avoid, but internet surveillance and tracking doesn't extend to (outside-of-browser) local compute.
Tech bros helped Israel genocide Gaza. Tech bros are pro-authoritarianism.
I think the UK is ultimately going to roll back this law. I don’t think this means that iCloud E2E is hostile to Apple or its users. I think Apple is going to win.
The war isn’t won by telling people to use GPG https://moxie.org/2015/02/24/gpg-and-me.html
Would you mind explaining? I don't see how that's evidence.
Those corporations are part of the problem, not the solution.
As failure modes go, not great, but I'd say strictly less bad for the average user than losing photos you didn't plan to delete
Local, doesn't need encryption since there's no middle in E2E that you need protection against, and simple.
Grandma can setup ~/.zshrc `alias bak=cd ~/phonephotos && adb pull ...` to make it even simpler.
I can't say the same for the smaller services.
I don't have any grandmothers still alive but would certainly suggest iCloud for all family members.
(But, FWIW, I copy down everything from iCloud annually and store on a portable 1TB drive to have my own cloud-backup.)
Yeah, back then Apples iCloud might have been the best suggestion.
If you are trying to extrapolate from the past - which is a good thing in general - do not go back ONLY 14 years from now, but try a bigger time span, too.
I was born in Germany. When I extrapolate from the past on ANYTHING, I at least always start in the year 1933.
No, not a good idea if you expect that within your lifespan some entity might be able to be forced to tell a regime where you are hiding right now.
Taking control of your own data is shitloads of work, I and understand people do not have time it, and have other priorities.
I am just making my point here on how to better extrapolate and project from the past towards the future.
That's not a physical law, but just the result of the current technological landscape.
Tangent, a friend and I started using Delta Chat with a chatmail relay and it's incredibly friendly to get started, and hides the fact GPG tech is being used from the user; one can export a bundle of the key data as needed and easily copy the key profile to a second device over local wifi (I was impressed at how smooth it was).
Not that I've kept track, but Delta Chat's UX is probably the first easy, no-nonsense implementation of using GPG tech as a foundation but keeping it away from the user experience I've encountered (and liked). It has it's pain points but I mean it just works and my buddy and I chat all day over it using a public relay.
Powerful people don't think this way. They think they can leverage the authoritarian regime to their own advantage. They're biased to ignore risks and seek out opportunities. That's what got them to their position of success!
This myth that capitalist perpetuate that the rich are not the government is the best lie out there.
The rich are the government. They are the national interests, countries' industries' is their property.
Look at how Bill Gates relationship with government changes by the year and by the subject for a great example.
The government is the ORGANIZED rich. It's not "everything Bill says goes".
You and me tho, the rest of us millions? We trust strangers that market themselves well, vote and then, just hope they do good by us.
Some are, many/most aren't.
For some rich guys whole point of being rich is to be maximally independent.
Some billionaires are all kinds of weird flavor of Anarcho Capitalist (completely anti government), libertarian (small government), objectivist (suspicious of government and against overbearing regulations and mob control).
Not all, but many. I think there is an important distinction between independent minded successful people and crapitalists, the ones who collude with the government and enforce their fortunes via regulatory capture.
Not every rich person is obsessed with controlling the world and other people.
Many just want to live their own lives, and want as little as possible interaction with the government.
I'm talking about the super rich.
Thr super rich have to be the government to be super rich and the little capitalists just ride the wakes made by the big guys.
These ideologies you mention are just political stances made by the rich in order to promote their measures amongst the poor.
Objectivism was made by Ayn Rand and it was promoted so much because it defended capitalism. They disseminate these ideas in order to promote their stances.
Libertarianism and ancapism are inconsistent because it pretends that large capitalists wouldnt immediately organize themselves into another large state power. A state is necessary to not have all out war between the powerful.
Ask any political science major and they dont take these ideas at face value because these ideologies cant exist as such.
They are more like life style politics than real political frameworks.
I suspect the reason they are even espoused is because they represent an immediate weakening of government regulation that can increase profits. The capitalists want people to think it can exist so they can have more power.
But a true libertarian or ancap reality is a pipe dream. Its true purpose is to create less oversight and thus more profits. Your average Joe, like you or me, has about 0 benefit from this.
Can we have an “AI” post a reminder of this every time someone mentions secret world governments?
Do you really think you control the government? That it is democratic?
You think the OS vendor is unable to snoop on data written to 3rd party clouds from their devices?
Did they even really try?
As far as iCloud "alternatives" go... Android doesn't offer ANY legitimate syncing infrastructure to compete with iCloud, open or not.
The point is to sync application data between native apps running on different (and even different kinds of) devices. PIM-style data (calendar, contacts, notes, bookmarks, and so forth) probably comes first for most people. Apple has also added useful stuff like Wi-Fi passwords and E-mail account configurations.
And then developers can create their own entries in the iCloud data store for their own apps. This is hugely useful.
I'm not aware of any similar facility that comes with Android, but I'd be happy to hear about it if there is.
Regardless, though, if it's not built into the OS, developers can't rely on it being present on a majority of users' phones.
Those are two different markets
If you have to install it, though, developers can't count on it being available to all or even most users.
Apple created a product, not just the iPhone but a whole ecosystem that’s supposed to help the user feel secure. There’s isn’t the only product out there and as long as they’re not preventing new competitors, everyone needs to back off.
Everyone who is not a public service is just "making a product", but when your product is actually half of all endpoints for digital services and communication and you insist on not handing control to the users, then you effectively control half the infrastructure.
Oh well that’s not new. Apple has operated in China, Saudi Arabia, and Russia.
So the idea that they would be hesitant to dip their feet into complying with less savory governments is… laughable.
The current political landscape really isn’t new whatsoever. It might even be less authoritarianism overall than when Apple started in the 80’s.
The gatekeepers.
Why does Apple need to do extra work and increase support? The average user really doesn't care and choices just make it more complicated.
> The UK probably wouldn't have thought of the idea of
The UK has lost the plot long ago. It's been drama after drama.
This shouldn’t be surprising. Political competitive advantage is even taught in business schools, as Michael E. Porter explains in Competitive Strategy.
The only way to counter it is through competition: support companies that offer substitute services and stop playing into Google’s and Apple’s hands by calling for more regulations.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/30/how-google-and-amazon-bankro...
[2] https://www.iccr.org/resolutions/lobbying-expenditures-discl...
Citizens will regain their right to e2ee privacy, they will not have to deal with voting for mediocre politicians to lead them. Instead, Tim Cook will be their new leader, and every morning over the mandatory installation of HomePods in each home, citizens will be greeted with an ecstatic "Good morning!" to get them energized for the day ahead.
Voting will be done via iPhones, where FaceID will verify the eligibility of the voter before the vote has been submitted.
2. Note that the consulting firms already managed to get the legislation they most cared about – creation of the LLP as a kind of entity – despite not having any candidates
3. If the government is too associated with a big consultancy then (a) they may be pressured out of giving them contracts (not good for McKinsey!) and (b) failures by that consultancy will be highlighted more than usual in the news (also not good!)
4. I mean plenty of people would go through the consultancy meat-grinder before becoming politicians. If you are training juniors to think similarly then that may carry over after they leave.
* 2009-2017 8 years in US Navy, including deployment to Afghanistan
Not that much McKinsey imo
Mitt Romney had a lot more years at BCG (22 years), including being VP + co-founder of Bain Capital.
you just don't hear about which candidates are theirs
However, they don't ask questions, so one layer of money laundering is completely fine. Nobody asks where the funding for Farage's various projects comes from, for example.
Only Apple shareholders will be eligible for voting. Citizen services like Medical Insurance, etc will be subject to performance review. A poor score will have you relinquished and deported.
> Header image by me: Alan Turing memorial, Manchester, where he reminds you why keeping data private can be a matter of life and death.
The image shows a close up of a statue of Alan Turing, his hand holding an apple.
The suicide story will probably never go away, because it's too good a story. It fits so neatly into popular culture.
How would he have put himself quietly to bed if he had gotten a fatal dose of cyanide in the spare room where the electroplating was taking place? Wouldn't there be very fast respiratory distress?
It is not outside the realm of possibility that he became confused and in pain, decided to lie down to sleep it off, then died in his sleep. My own father in law suffered a significant blow to the head and, despite knowing all the signs of a concussion and what to do about them, got up and slept it off- the very last thing one should do. He was simply too confused to do anything else.
His story had a happier ending than Alan's, but it goes to show that the accidental death theory isn't implausible.
It may or may not lead to a coma, but I surely wouldn't let someone sleep one off immediately following the injury if I can help it.
> Otherwise, please make sure you de-Apple, de-Google, and de-American Stack yourself when you have time, clarity, and focus to do it. Start today.
I don't understand the core of this advice. So if you're in the UK and do all the above, can you suddenly get similar E2EE cloud storage from a different provider without a UK government-mandated backdoor?
https://www.catribunal.org.uk/cases/16897724-consumers-assoc... (hearing in 9 days)
Technically this can even be correct. You can build and operate a good, secure solution for yourself if you have time and skill to build. Could make sense for a company handling sensitive data. Would hardly make sense for most individuals who are not professional SREs / SWEs. (To check how it feels, an engineer can try to sew themself a pair of pants to wear daily, or do something similarly mundane in what they are not skilled.)
A solution that can reliably work for non-experts is very important.
> 4chan, rejecting their assertions on jurisdiction is certainly an option.
4chan can tell UK regulators to take hike because 4chan has no business presence in the UK. Any service that does want to serve UK users and is successful in doing so, will eventually find itself in UK regulators' crosshairs. For services that are based outside UK, they'd just stop serving UK users because that's the easiest way to handle it. Which is completely fine with UK regulators, in fact, that's exactly what they want - so that nobody would be able to provide privacy to UK subjects.
If you're in England and have to keep things secured (including from government eyes), i have no idea how you can do. They soon will be allowed to put a camera in your small room and watch you take a dump.
i've had to show people that they have to plug in their HDMI cable into their GPU instead of the motherboard, that they have to manually set the Hz in windows settings. how to install basic drivers.
so many more easy examples we IT-workers or nerds just take for granted. taking this to the extreme, my grandma asked me if i could search recipes online for her, because [insert your favorite search service] seemed too complicated.
So next to these examples, setting up syncthing with a VPN is next to impossible :( and even if they manage to set it up, good luck when you run into issues after a couple of months.
# Decrypt openssl enc -d -aes-256-cbc -in secret.enc -out secret.txt
Wow that was hard.
And, for 99.9% of people who know how to do that, they'd still be too lazy to do it properly (hint: where do you keep secret.txt exactly? What happens if your dog eats it?) and will use some third-party solution instead.
Reminds me of using Ansible Vault and preciously encrypting every secret (so we can say that repos doesn't contain any secrets), then just putting ~/.vault_pass in plaintext on every Ansible controller to be taken by anyone with access to the servers.
If you use something like SOPS or just check age secrets into a git repository next to source code, you need an authentication story for the whole repository. Having authentication for the secrets will do nothing if the attacker can change the source code that decrypts and uses them.
That story can simply be “we trust GitHub” like most projects. Encrypting secrets with age will keep them confidential even if the project is Open Source, and anyone wanting to replace them will have to make a PR even if they can generate a new valid age file.
Hidden. Encrypted. And the passphrase is: at 5,21 which is the 5th line on page 21 of your favorite book. Which you have more than one copy of, because you like it that much. And you need copies to lend. Or you have the PDF from Gutenberg.org?
And 5/21 might be the birthday of your first child, or your wedding day, or whatever?
It might be a favorite quote, like "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Augmented by the above date if needed?
> And 5/21 might be the birthday of your first child, or your wedding day, or whatever?
How sure are you that you'd remember all that scheme for 20 years? How about 50 years? Some documents may be relevant for a very long time. What about if you need more than one key? What about if you need to give access to one document to specific set of persons?
Once you consider all the scenarios that can happen through a lifetime, you start to understand why managing all those complexities correctly is not trivial. And that's why people pay third parties to do it for them. It's not because encrypting a bag of bytes is hard. It's because of all the things that surround it.
Yeah, it's one of those things that you'll forget in N years. That's exactly what prompted "where do you keep secret.txt" question.
It's the same for documents, as for secrets, which I have to transfer from one medium to another, I have to check that I remember secrets and passphrases. And places. As I already said, that's life.
HP-L170 (A monitor I bought) QW4HD-DQCRG-HM64M-6GJRK-8K83T (Windows XP key) 10396-9 (My enrollment number for board exam)
I remember a bunch of long-ago-abandoned phone numbers as well.
Where I live, memorizing a 25 char alphanumeric is not average. It's not more, either.
But the relative ease does not merely apply to users, but to the barrier of entry for alt products as well.
Consider that the current paradigm is contingent on the "blind trust" users have held in tech for a long time. It's possible that a new kind of app will thrive in a different paradigm.
For example, is there any reason we couldn't have a simple "message wrapper" which only sends encrypted payloads via SMS or Email and decrypts on the fly in a secure sandbox? Easy for the user and hard to regulate.
There are hundreds of millions of people who have memorized megabytes of baseball statistics, pop song lyrics, celebrity relationship trivia, vehicle model data, sitcom character biographies, comic book plots, makeup shades, travel routes, mixed drink recipes, MtG card modifiers, etc.
At a certain point, one has to realize that pulling the "normie card" is not a viable excuse, given the wide array of knowledge that humans routinely pack into their brains.
Now explain how my mum can select that in settings of her phone, thx.
Not all of those companies will loudly object in the way Apple does.
This assumes that Apple has loudly objected to every government request for backdoor access and also that they have never acquiesced to any of those requests.
i thought this a joke, lol
Never trust US services, 3-letter agencies are endlessly greedy to fill your profile with another tens of thousands of data points. As do all advertisers all around the globe. As do (with various success) all other governments and private companies who have something to gain, HDD storage has never been cheaper and all personal data are worth gold and beyond.
Or if you have to use them, use your own encryption with strength to not be broken for next few hundreds of years, to stand a chance. That is, if you actually have something to hide, but I have never met a person who really doesn't :)
edit: This is apparently currently not working for Apple and MS builds.
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/blob/main/reprod...
Not that there aren't other reasons to be skeptical of American companies' right, but it's just so easy to fall into nationalistic prattle instead of fixing the real problem.
Right. This, right now, is 100% a UK problem. De-Americanising your tech stack isn't going to fix the political issues domestically. Hence Apple pulling ADP out, they made the choice of not complying with the UK and not offering the service instead of compromising the service for everyone else in the world.
UK citizens need to direct their attention inwards against their own government.
It is not 90% American politics.
For the reasons unknown BBC is *massively* promoting and platforming far right in the last few times (airtime, framing of the events, promoting party lines as facts, etc).
So Trump in the BBC might be considered beneficial to the far right. This would explain it.
Do you not think every other govenrment in the world is currently eyeing this up and figuring out how to do the same thing?
Disagree. Australia and also likely Canada have identical these laws. And once the capability is in place, its likely that the US can all writs access to the same tool. Apple is unique in that it has a semi legal canary, in choosing to withdraw the services instead of complying.
You cant trust any tech company that remains located in the 5 eyes nations.
I am not aware of good alternatives, but worst case you can run up a VPS with Owncloud or something.
How do you figure that? If you're worried about your privacy in the UK, keeping your data in a Five Eyes country cloud provider is a very bad idea, arguably even worse than keeping it in a UK cloud provider where it becomes a domestic legal matter where you at least get a day in court, not a foreign intelligence matter where you don't. And the US is a pretty bad place for anyone's data given a) its lack of robust privacy laws (and large commercial data-trafficking ecosystem) and b) the National Security Letter system.
While there is no perfect country, somewhere like Germany or the Netherlands seems a much better bet.
Even if you monitor downloads, every VPN, every ISP..... can't I copy paste the source code?
Isn't SFTP already E2EE? They're not going to come down on SFTP....right? I really hope not...
If you're making money in the UK, they have a lot of legal authority over you.
If you're based in the UK, they have a lot of legal authority over you.
If you're neither of those things, they might complain, but the actual consequences are close to nil.
And they're not banning the tools (this is arguable, but they "can't" logically, as you point out). They're banning businesses from providing the tools.
Most of my homelab is self-hosted (Cloudflare and Tailscale stop me short of saying it's 100%, plus an Oracle VPS for a Minecraft server if you count the WHOLE stack I guess)...and you tell yourself its 'better to own your own data' or whatever your personal mantra is, but it's bizarre to see this play out
It’s easy to make Apple budge because they have money ties to the Uk.
This works less well for unsavory websites not complying with UK law. See https://prestonbyrne.com/2025/10/16/the-ofcom-files/
I don't know why everything must be digital. If you don't put it on a computer, it's almost as if it doesn't exist. If you do this often enough, it is almost as if you don't exist.
The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil. Actually he was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into the speak-write which was of course impossible for his present purpose. He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:
April 4th, 1984.
I believe the Palm T2 and T3 had bluetooth so would be interesting if you could connect the two to keep contacts and appointments off your smartphone. I'm seeing Handspring Treo 650's for under $100 as well.
They are just going for service providers that make E2EE easy for users - clearly betting on the fact that people they want to surveil would be too lazy/incompetent to use a custom solution providing strong E2EE encryption. And they may be right - most iphone users would keep using the same services even with the knowledge that the data is now widely open - and eventually of course will be breached and available to every kind of criminal, as it happened many times already with other massive data warehouses.
But I believe even is the UK you still can encrypt your own backup and upload it, e.g., to rsync.net and nobody would be able to stop you. Just most people won't.
What we have in effect today (ban of E2EE, chat control) was laughably impossible to conceive just five years ago.
ttyl
And, it's just ADP being affected by the UK mandates? What % of users bother enabling ADP? I probably should, but haven't bothered (am I being foolish?).
So, a UK-only advice, and it strangely assumes that any other service in UK wouldn’t be bound by the same laws.
Do you know of a good piece of software or tool that lets a layperson interface with any cloud storage provider?
not exactly for a "layperson", to be honest, but easy enough for someone familiar with a command line
https://thblegal.com/news/can-i-be-prosecuted-for-failing-to...
https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/in-edicola/articoli/2025/01...
etc.
I didn't say it solves every problem, just that it's the only way to have proper end-to-end encryption.
Combine that with steganography (Enter real_password, and test.csv is a list of bank accounts, enter fake_password, and test.csv is a list of apple store locations, enter random_password, and it decodes junk). Maybe combine that with multiple layers of passwords (one ring to rule them all, except certain files).
Obviously, you'd want to steganographize the decoder ring as well.
So what?
> it strangely assumes that any other service in UK wouldn’t be bound by the same laws.
From the linked article:
> I’m not going to tell you where to move your stuff other than to say that if you’re moving it from one big tech company to another, you’re just being daft. Likewise, if you’re moving your stuff to a non-e2ee service, don’t bother. If you need an e2ee service try Proton. They have a Black Friday sale on.
The title felt like there was a greater issue with Apple specifically. There wasn't. There was a greater issue with the new UK laws and cloud storage systems. I think people deserved a clarification before getting wound up about it before reading the article.
> But I will say that the shutdown of ADP is Apple being on the right side of the geopolitical fight, as inconvenient as that may be to you and me.
It is, if you care about the issues the author evidently cares about, "time to start de-Appling". I am a satisfied ongoing customer of Apple and I didn't find this headline to be the least bit inflammatory. It is, at worst, minor clickbait—but it's not really bait at all, since the contents of the article match the headline.
That could be one of them, some of them or all of them, but it's not really a law that automatically applies to all of them.
Singling out Apple in the article's title sends the wrong message here. The author should have gone with something along the lines of "UK residents should stop using E2EE cloud services". Current title implies there might be a safe E2EE service in the UK. Heck, they even claim that in the article: "If you need an e2ee service try Proton" as if Proton is exempt from getting a notice from the UK. It's not.
I don't think that's true. I think plenty of UK citizens do want better privacy rights and data protection, as evidenced by the very large petition against national ID cards for example.
It doesn't win the vote because it's not the most important factor when it comes to voting, because there are bigger issues people care about more.
Many people are somewhat despondent, due to economic decline, ever-increasing pressures and poor prospects for so many people. There's no choice of party which simultaneously supports privacy rights at the same time as other things most UK citizens appear to care about more, which can also survive the intense tactical voting pressure under the FPTP voting system. Consider that most people who voted Labour in the "landslide" last election appear to have done it tactically to "get the Tories out".
So issues like privacy which aren't at the top of people's concerns, end up not having much influence over voting decisions.
The Lib Dems and Greens are the nearest to that, imho. Of the major parties, they seem the most aligned with privacy rights in their DNA, as far as I can tell.
Reform are getting some political benefit from talking up privacy at the moment, and they stand a real chance of winning next time. But I doubt very much if Reform would ever implement real privacy rights. I think it's just opportunistic dodgy politician talk in their case, and that real privacy isn't in their DNA at all, because they don't believe in universality of human rights. They are openly eager to remove the Human Rights Act and strip many people of those rights, after all. Strong online privacy also clashes with one of their core missions, to find and deport vastly more people than before; privacy clashes with that both on grounds of investigative capabilities, and on grounds of principles and rights. I could imagine Reform trying to offer strong privacy only for approved citizens, alongside mandatory reporting on other users, but the contradictions in that are too much.
This implies there's a vote for and against it, but is there? I didn't see any party or serious political movement raise this as an important issue. Why? Because they assume it won't bring them any additional votes, because their potential voters don't care. If they don't care, they get what they get.
> So issues like privacy which aren't at the top of people's concerns
So, you are agreeing with me. If you say "sure, I'd like some privacy, maybe, but I don't care enough about this to bother to tell my rep that I'm even interested in this" - then you are "ok with that" as I said.
Not for long
I suspect it's because whilst other services would be affected we only know about Apple currently and, thanks to iOS and Mac, a large percentage of the population will be using Apple by default for the services impacted. Only Google (Android) and Microsoft (Windows) really overlap in that regard.
So American companies are complying UK laws, and the conclusion is that UK citizens should "de-American"...?
Am I reading it wrong?
One of the most shocking things about Europe when I have visited is what your average European (or Brit, since I guess they don't call themselves European anymore) thinks the US is like (even ignoring politics, just basic standard of living stuff). They've never been and probably will never be able to visit so all they know is what they've been told. When they do visit, they return with a much poorer opinion of how their country is doing. That's why the "I was lied to..." clickbait is so common in European made US travel videos now.
Years ago when I was still giving Android a chance I found that things like banking apps refused to work if I loaded a custom ROM or IIRC even if I enabled superuser access on the stock ROM. Those things are probably even more tightly controlled now, so de-Googled Android doesn’t seem worth trying again.
Too bad other truly OSS mobile options are in their infancy, heck I couldn’t even get all the drivers configured stably on a work provided laptop with Linux support supposedly validated by the manufacturer. It could be years before we get good OSS phone and tablet software, if it ever comes at all.
As for other uses of your data, and what they "send back home", there you might be right about the differences between Apple and Google, but I would again not put faith in either.
(Crazy rats nest of CSS rules, I assume this is a wordpress/wordpress template thing.)
Then there's the websites that have a menubar or other UI floating on top of the content it takes you to (this is far more common, and incredibly frustrating as I'm usually using either a toc or a search function and unable to see the content I'm looking for at all)
margin-right: -34.0740%;So nu, it makes no sense to blame Apple here.
> But I will say that the shutdown of ADP is Apple being on the right side of the geopolitical fight, as inconvenient as that may be to you and me.
Author doesn’t. Not sure who you are disagreeing with.
I don't think there's any blaming of Apple going on here. This is about dealing with the practical realities of the circumstances for people in the UK.
If I get up in the morning and say "time to get out of the house" I am not blaming my house for anything; I am simply articulating that I want or need to be somewhere else, for whatever reason.
When you say "time to de-CocaCola" while all soda products are susceptible to a certain health hazard, you can't say "Obviously, CocaCola isn't being blamed here".
The analog of your example would be "time to get out of the cloud" for the article.
Which no doubt stems from more practical usage, like "de-worming". That does not imply that there is blame to go around. You are not blaming the worm — you just want rid of it because it is not something that is working for you.
Same (but different) in Denmark where politicians vote to give themselves more money[1], snoop on everything[2], violate our constitution unpunished[3], delete evidence of corruption[4], open the borders[5], etc. etc. etc. I used to care - a lot - I really did. But I'm done.
[1]https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/politik/ny-aftale-politikeres-loen... [2]https://www.justitsministeriet.dk/pressemeddelelse/i-dag-tra... [3]https://www.information.dk/indland/2020/12/jurister-ja-grund... [4]https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/politik/politisk-flertal-presser-m... [5]https://integrationsbarometer.dk/tal-og-analyser/INTEGRATION...
Personally I do not think its just the UK and Denmark, its pretty much everywhere.
That came across in your first comment.
Also, picking on non-native English speakers for using a name that is identical to the very old, commonly accepted name for the entire UK in their own language is beyond pedantic.
The current ruling party in the US has given its voters exactly what they think they wanted, and it's a fucking disaster.
No matter who you vote for you get Hillary Clinton's governance, though. She's become very complimentary about Trump's foreign policy.
This, to me, is a fucking disaster.
Utterly tedious.
You have no opinion on the removal of the legislature as a branch of government, and concentration of all that power into an office held by one man?
You have no opinion on the country turning into a 'papers please, comrade' state for anyone who looks brown?
Your life isn't impacted when flights are cancelled because ATC stops getting paid?
You don't, or don't know anyone working for the federal government? You don't know anyone on EBT? Anyone who has ever done schedule 1 drugs? Your life isn't impacted when billion-dollar frauds escape prison and restitution, setting an example and roadmap for others to follow? Or when tax rates and benefits get adjusted up or down? Or when a complete quack gets put in charge of the country's healthcare and infectious disease control?
You aren't at all affected by any decade-long wars that the country's entangled in? You don't use any foreign imports? Or domestic products that rely on foreign imports?
You don't derive any value from living in a country that mostly follows the rule of law?
You must be incredibly privileged to not be affected by any of this.
---
Society is a series of jenga towers. No particular brick is load-bearing.
No, they don't:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45854441
Sixth paragraph: "But I will say that the shutdown of ADP is Apple being on the right side of the geopolitical fight, as inconvenient as that may be to you and me."
Corporations can't really resist governments unless they're not operating in a given government's jurisdiction and therefore have nothing to lose. They can take things to court, but in lieu of a verdict or an injunction they have to comply with the law or they can be fined, have assets frozen, be de-banked or banned from processing payments, etc.
I'm sure there's services out there that will secretly comply and still claim to be secure.
There's also a lot of companies that will simply abandon security features like ADP or never develop them. Apple is going to the trouble of disabling it only for UK people not everyone, instead of just deprecating it. The latter would be less expensive and expose them to less legal risk.
If you really want security in the UK now you have to roll your own and do the encryption yourself. Honestly that's always the best security, since you can never be 100% sure a closed cloud or software vendor isn't messing with you.
It is also maybe a good thing? Corporations should not be stewards of our rights, we do not want to be governed by tech-barons.
The problem here lies clearly in UK's laws and government and they cannot be fixed by Apple. The West in general is in this crumbling state, where we take corrupt bastards chewing off our rights for a law of nature, instead of getting furious. France is the only western country where people dare to really protest.
That’s not to say they’re bad. They do an important thing. But they have a limited sphere. You wouldn’t expect the police to make a laptop or a church to direct air traffic either.
Ok, I was going to ask, but taking "yes, that one" seriously I suppose confirms the author is the actress Heather Burns best known for playing the best friend role in a string of successful romantic comedies.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0122688/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heather_Burns
Kind of weird to be reading some blog post about tech privacy from such a well known actress.
Am I missing something?
A joke? A fun tagline? A little zing for under the heading?
I probably have seen movies with her in it, but I have no recollection of her as an actor. I did recognize her husband as Samir from Office Space, though I couldn't tell you his name.
https://heatherburns.tech/about/
If you scroll down you’ll see an image of the author.
To clarify, by "technical limitations" here you don't mean "it's not possible with our current technology", you mean "Apple purposely blocks this".
> 13.1 a set of technical restrictions and practices that prevent users of iOS from storing certain key file types (known as “Restricted Files”) on any cloud storage service other than its own iCloud and thus ensuring that users have no choice but to use iCloud (a complete monopolist in respect of these Restricted Files) if they wish to meet all their cloud storage and/or back up needs, in particular in order to conduct a complete back-up of the device (“the Restricted File Conduct”); and/or
> 13.2 an unfair choice architecture, which individually and cumulatively steer iOS Users towards using and purchasing iCloud rather than other cloud storage services, and/or limit their effective choice, and/or exclude or disadvantage rivals or would- be rivals ( “the Choice Architecture Conduct ”). See further paragraphs 6 to 9 and 97 to 132 of the CPCF.
https://www.catribunal.org.uk/cases/16897724-consumers-assoc... (via summary of ruling of the chair)
> 30. By sequestering Restricted Files, and denying all other cloud providers access to them, Apple prevents rival cloud platforms from offering a full-service cloud solution that can compete effectively against iCloud. The cloud products that rivals can offer are, by virtue of Apple’s restraints, fundamentally diminished because they can only host Accessible Files. Users who want to back up all of their files—including the basic Restricted Files needed to restore their device at replacement—have but one option in the marketplace: iCloud.
> 31. There is no technological or security justification for Apple mandating the use of iCloud for Restricted Files. Apple draws this distinction only to curtail competition and advantage its iCloud product over rival cloud platforms.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/68303306/felix-gamboa-v... (via document 1 the complaint)
They are, and most time this allows them to abuse you. But what do you think happens once you that gateway is blown open, isn't your front door next?
> There are multitudes of online storage providers outside of the UK's reach and jurisdiction
What I said above means that once you normalize the situation that providers have to open the gate to your yard whenever the state comes knocking, the state will just come knocking directly at your door. In other words I'm not sure the state will stop in its pursuit of access to your data when it can just incriminate trying to evade the law by storing it out of reach.
Yes this is the way policing should work, if they think you have done something they knock on your door rather than go to Apple and Google and compromise the entire population all at once through the convenience of their monopolies. Bonus points if a judge needs to grant them the privilege of knocking on your door too.
How exactly would they come after you if your data is "outside of the UK's reach and jurisdiction"? They went after the gatekeepers because they wanted a one stop shop for accessing people's data. They will look to take the same easy road in the future and there's nothing easier then framing any attempts to keep data out of UK's reach as a crime. They get your data or get you for not providing the data.
The law will be "stupid", tech savvy people will find ways around it. But it's enough to throw a or a noose around as many people as possible and tighten as time goes by. Authoritarianism 101.
By suspecting you of a crime first, then they can establish access to your device through legal due process and access the data on your device or imprison you for not facilitating it. Same thing they do with computer passwords and whatnot.
My friend, suspecting you of a crime is the easiest thing to do. Just putting your data outside of UK jurisdiction makes you suspicious. Ever tried going into the US and refusing to unlock your phone if asked at the border because "you have rights"?
> through legal due process
"Legal due process" is literally just what the law says. In this case a backdoor is the legal due process. The UK government took aim at Apple and Google because they wanted a one stop shop for their data access needs, and didn't want to bother going after you "the criminal" individually. If Apple and Google didn't exist and everyone starting backing up their data in some far away, untouchable jurisdiction (should you trust one) you think the UK government wouldn't tighten the noose around individuals the same way? Most governments are going in this direction anyway.
The government showed its intentions with this move: have easy access to your data. They'll keep pursuing that goal no matter what, gatekeepers or not. They define the due process. In this particular case the problem isn't that Apple is a gatekeeper but that the government wants things they shouldn't (by my definition) have.
Not according to the UK, lately. The problem is still domestic. UK wants to exert this control over any service a UK citizens happens to use, whether they have a UK presence or not. Same with the ID/Age verification stuff.
Moving away from Apple and Google probably is something they should do, but it's not going to be a solution to the problem of the UK government's overreach.
UK citizens need to turn their attention inward against their government.
What the original poster does is completely misplace blame under the guise of "clever" writing - blame should be assigned squarely on the idiotic policies of the UK government.
I see Switzerland as a country that wants complete independence, but sees value in cooperating with other countries, and does so. UK seems like on the path to becoming an authoritarian hellscape and won't allow any other country to stop its degradation.
Thank you for your email.
The UK has a strong tradition of safeguarding privacy while ensuring that appropriate action can be taken against criminals, such as child sexual abusers and terrorists. I firmly believe that privacy and security are not mutually exclusive—we can and must have both.
The Investigatory Powers Act governs how and when data can be requested by law enforcement and other relevant agencies. It includes robust safeguards and independent oversight to protect privacy, ensuring that data is accessed only in exceptional cases and only when necessary and proportionate.
The suggestion that cybersecurity and access to data by law enforcement are at odds is false. It is possible for online platforms to have strong cybersecurity measures whilst also ensuring that criminal activities can be detected.
It should be noted that the Home Office cannot comment on operational security matters, including confirming or denying the existence of any notices it has issued. This has been the longstanding position of successive UK Governments for reasons of national security.
I support the responsible use of data and technology to drive economic growth, create new jobs, and empower individuals. It is essential that data is used safely and wisely, and that individuals remain in control of how their data is used.
Additionally, I welcome the Government’s transparency regarding how data is used, including on the algorithms that process this information. Several algorithms have already been published for public scrutiny, with more to follow—as resources allow—across multiple departments.
Thank you once again for contacting me about this important issue.
ah thats not quite true is it now?
From my POV, it's the commercial software that has fundamental usability issues due to misaligned incentives (not completely different either, but not as aligned as FOSS). They just have a better lobby and marketing budget. Chrome didn't become this ubiquitous on mobile by having to be downloaded from f-droid, but by making a deal that device manufacturers cannot refuse
It's unthinkable to setup a phone with whatsapp and fb here. When meta had a BGP problem, they (the older ones) asked me why there was "no internet"
Idk if it's just me but I do hate these suggestive questions. If you've got something to state, spit it out
It's the law that's the issue. Avoiding enforcement only works until people actually care to start enforcing. There's also enough examples in history of people taking matters into their own hands if they disagree with something, doubly so if there's a law against it or something else makes them feel righteous. If you do bad in the eyes of the public (or its prosecutor), good luck swimming against the tide
Remember, people, these are WAR CRIMINALS driving these policies forward. To expect this class of individuals to adhere to democratic, western values, is naive in the extreme.
The same people who have no problem with genociding a million people in the middle east enemy-state-de-jour are not going to give one fig of care to the local human rights violations that they are also getting away with.
The West has a war criminal problem. Until we solve that we cannot do a damn thing about our human rights problem.
Seems like it is time to de-Britain, rather than de-Apple.
Like buy cd's and blu-rays instead of digital/drm locked/streaming service shit. Be an owner again instead of a renter.
Their point is that physical media itself has a limited lifespan.
You need to continuously "refresh" it every 1 to 10 years, depending on the physical media you choose, or it's most likely corrupted. I've lost many HDD, SSD, SD cards, and about 50 "archival quality" DVD/CD to time, with all manufacturers having somewhere around 3x to 20x exaggerated claim of longevity. I'm guessing their numbers are based on some temperature/humidity controlled marketing BS, rather than anything resembling reality.
SD Cards are the saddest. I've seen many older members of my family shed tears when they pull out their SD cars they carefully stored in a drawer/safe, and they're junk. Charge drift be a harsh mistress.
The part I haven’t been able to crack is syncing the Documents folder on my iPhone. All the syncthing apps for iOS are abysmal because there’s no real background sync. You can add a SMB share in the Files app, but that doesn’t get you offline access.
Looking at the list, perhaps moving documents off iCloud Drive (to where? Dropbox? That isn’t E2E is it?) and Notes is enough.
Do I really care if my photos are E2E encrypted? Most of my photos are in Lightroom cloud so those are not anyway.
I don’t use reminders or Freeform or voice memos, and I couldn’t care less about safari bookmarks. If I move off Drive and Notes, I don’t really care about iCloud backup either.
Is this sufficient? My notes will go to Obsidian (except some disposable shared ones) but where do I move my documents if not on iCloud Drive? Is Dropbox any better?
Although this is just anecdata, I moved my senior parents from iCloud Photos to Immich recently and their response was something like:
"Wow, the new Photos program on the iPad looks nice!"
For them it works out fine, since their use-cases are checking out vacation photos by scrolling the timeline and also occasionally clicking on the "memories" from N years ago. Helps that the app icon is very similar, too.
It works transparently, and has clients for Mac/Windows as well as iOS/Android.
It's also open source, and "free" (IIRC there's a one time fee for the mobile client).
It’s basically cloud storage (works on local drives as well), but fully source encrypted.
How would we go about actually exerting political pressure in the other direction? Expanding rights and expanding freedoms outside one small corner, so that more people become aware of them and start exercising them.
``` @media screen and (min-width: 1200px) { .site-content .entry-content .wide-content, .alignwide, .alignfull { margin-right: -34.0740%; } } ```
that margin-right is causing some of the content to move too far to the right and gets hidden in `.entry-content`
It's not an article about advocacy so much as the pragmatics an upcoming data migration.
If Apple was transparent, I would be. But they are user-hostile and trust the federal government more than their customers. Apple is on-record[0] admitting that the US government requires them to their cover-up cooperation with surveillance. After decades of users demanding proper accountability from Apple, this is exactly what they warned would happen.
You have no right to demand that I take their side - Apple's disregard for privacy nauseates me. Everyone who sincerely trusted Apple to protect them against the fed is a lost cause. Go ask Apple to save you.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
That's a shoddy job of de-Googling, a thorough job would have seamless redirection to whatever current calendar service you use.
> I’m not going to tell you where to move your stuf
But that's the most important stuff!!! Don't leave poor users dry with an impractical advice that will lead them missing important meetings
I can move her entirely to the family server, but even I'm confused. There's too many Calendar servers with different features, and all with a generally terrible UI. Once I finally settle for one of the server options, I'd have to get her using whatever calendar agent is good on Android, but that's another 20+ options to look at.
Sometimes the bazaar is quite confusing and overwhelming.
? Who is this person?
I was using CloudMounter to do this, but the software was unfortunately a bit rough around the edges and didn't feel as reliable and seamless as the other options.
These days I have some hacked together tar + PGP scripts for encrypted backups, but still rely on iCloud + ADP for the rest.
De-googling however is extremely hard. I have been slowly chipping away at it, but there are things I just have no decent option to (such as Waze and Android Auto).
Android itself is another problem. I have high hopes for a Graphene device.
Perhaps the only thing I use directly is Recaptcha.
The bigger problem is doing both.
Once again: The only problem is avoiding both platforms.
DIY is pretty hard though even for the reasonably skilled. Even if you go full nextcloud or whatever - that’s not exactly risk free either
Extremely interesting.
the international monetary fund has every state in debt. some third-world countries become subordinate to it, when they're not able to pay the interest payments.
as for the MPs, theyre ok. not as stupid as most think. they are very self-interested and not in the business of 'rocking the boat'. strongly prefer managed decline than any risk taking that could result in things going sideways.
its easy to critique but truthfully the UK is structurally in a dead end (well ok, maybe not... but it does feel that way). but things could be a lot worse, and many don't appreciate that reality. having clean tap water and paved roads is pretty damn good for a country held up by fintech and scraps of last century's industry.
people calling for reforms have no idea what they're in for. Thankfully Reform was deployed together with Nigel Farage, God bless him, rolled in to do narrative control and provide a safe and controlled sponge for dissent. That guy is a 'fixer' for UK political radicalism - every time the crowd starts to have funny ideas, he magically appears and slowly but surely everyone goes back to their £32k/year jobs. I think he's 'retired' from politics thrice now.
truthfully, nobody does politics better than the Brits. but then again, they invented this game to begin with!
I'm sure the Romans would have had something to say about that.
turning a name into a verb is common these days
Always have been.
It's unfortunate that gross government overreach and corporate cooperation with it is what it takes for people to even recognize the concept of data privacy and data ownership is a thing, much less that they should do something about it and that their data is and never was "safe" in the cloud, no matter which corporate overlords walled garden you called home. Apple has never been an exception to this rule.
And the most popular choice -- the USA -- is off the table for the majority of Brits, I think, who cannot comprehend The Other Foolishness. (Mind you, the ones it encourages... I hope they follow their hearts)
(I have given it some consideration myself.)
Generally speaking, though, it's not a route Brits take in huge numbers, for legacy reasons. Though plenty investigated their potential for citizenship.
its entering another country that suddenly becomes a real problem, and ofcourse, if you're in the UK, the only country worth moving to at that point is the US with (as I understand) quite stringent immigration restrictions.
in reality, if the US were to open their doors to the UK, holy moly - this entire country would turn into Ukraine overnight, with nobody but pensioners left. which actually isn't in either governments interest: obviously not the UK, but infact, the UK presents a source of cheap labour for the US: read any hackernews thread concerning tech wages in the UK, the comments are hysterical/diabolical ("you make HOW much!?" - "A fast food worker makes more..." - etc.)
so, the current state of affairs is probably a good business arrangement for both parties involved, and aren't gonna change any time soon.
I don't even know where to begin with this remarkably dreadful take.
There are about 50 other countries I would love to move to, before ever considering the US.
That's the message. It's high time. We can what-about-argume about what's E2EE and what Apple "pinky promises" isn't used or sold but the reality is that anything seated in the US may as well be a publicly open http for the right buyer (be it the US government, Saudi Arabia, Israel or whatever...)
Especially if you're in charge of customer data, you can't "just" setup something on a EU server if the corp is based in the US, those days are over now. You need to do the legwork.
Brexit was the tipping point.
> What about that second TCN?
> On the 1st of October, the Home Office issued a second TCN against Apple for the same as before, but only for _British citizens’_ data. World-leading!
> Those who follow my work know that this phrase made me spew a double barrel of Glaswegian swearing. British citizens’ data, as opposed to British users’ data? The dividing line here is not e.g. being located in the UK or having registered an account here, but what it says on your passport? How is Apple going to know that, much less roll it out? (/s)
> Did Apple just publicly state that they’re going to be removing a security layer and adding a nationality check layer?
> We don’t know.
> We don’t know because as with the first TCN, that information only became available in the public domain due to someone leaking it to the media. That’s all there is to know. Everything else is confidential and NCND. There is nothing else to say because nothing else is known. If someone who did know something was sitting across from me right now, and they told me, they would be committing a crime.
Does that mean my non-UK citizen friends who are resident in the UK now have better privacy rights than UK citizens in the UK? Does it mean it's better to remain only a resident, than to attempt to obtain citizenship in the long run?
What next, become stone masons? nah, that's too corporate, pick berries instead ;)
Come on, what happened to moderation, discipline and planning? How about use what you need, hedge your risks (mix providers, products), be more proactive than reactive to demands for consumption?