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Comment by rincebrain | Hacker News Reader

None of those articles are inconsistent with the claim that Apple cares about security, though?

"We can be legally compelled to give up data we have" and "we thought letting people have custom kernel modules was a bigger threat" are not particularly incompatible with "we design things so we don't have keys to your data we can be compelled to give up" and valuing people's security. (I am not a fan of the latter, to be clear, but there are reasonable reasons you could argue for it.)

But yes, I would probably, at the moment, bet that if the NSA can sign a custom iOS build on consumer hardware, Apple doesn't know about how, both because that's a very hard secret to keep, and because you'd see a massive uptick in people avoiding Apple devices in governments that might be of interest to US intelligence if even a rumor of that got out.

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> None of those articles are inconsistent with the claim that Apple cares about security, though?

You are moving the goalpost.

> "We can be legally compelled to give up data we have" and "we thought letting people have custom kernel modules was a bigger threat" are not particularly incompatible with "we design things so we don't have keys to your data we can be compelled to give up" and valuing people's security. (I am not a fan of the latter, to be clear, but there are reasonable reasons you could argue for it.)

They do have the signing keys your iPhone will gladly accept to circumvent encryption, which is the argument.

> You are moving the goalpost.

I'm not the one moving the goalpost; my argument was that Apple's incentives are not in favor of them permitting even the appearance that they might allow that kind of compromise, your argument with that wall of articles appeared to be that Apple has a history of making decisions inconsistent with that, which I disputed. If that wasn't your intended argument, you might wish to be more explicit than a wall of links and "As if Apple users would care...".

> They do have the signing keys your iPhone will gladly accept to circumvent encryption, which is the argument.

Yes, and my argument is that the plumbing for either multiple release signing keys, one of which is never seen in the wild, or to avoid a second "iOS 13.1.5" or whatever with different build information showing up in various telemetry that would leak this existing, is very difficult to have built without far too many people who would spread rumors about it coming about, and even that rumor would be a problem.

So the most plausible thing, to me, would be that if such a capability exists, it's a "nuclear option" for whoever holds it to only use in a circumstance where it's so important they don't mind potentially never being able to use it again, whether that's because it's an exploit chain that will be fixed or because it's been coerced out of the target company and they will probably be compelled to fix it if it gets out.

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