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Comment by Hasz | Hacker News Reader

A non-trivial reason I bought a fairly closed device (macbook) was that Tim Cook, at least publicly, told the FBI to get bent when asked to create a backdoor. Exactly what I want to see, a fight in court.

I would hope to see Apple pull out of the UK market over this, and certainly to stop selling Apple devices to the UK government and to remove the UK government entities from Apple services.

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They dont really need to pull out, instead on every single piece of marketing material where they talk about anything remotely close to things affected by this they mention that unfortunately they cant give it to UK users due to the governments desire to erode privacy protection, and really hammer home how bad it is.

I love this. Apple aren't going to pull out of a market. They aren't pulling out of China for example.

oh, I know, but I wish they would. You can see what this looks like when someone like CMMG refuses to sell to specific law enforcement agencies based on local law.

Apple of yesteryear is not the Apple of today.

Think different.

Don't be Evil.

Works better. Plays better

Where did that all go? Same place as the Christmas bonus and empathy above middle management.

I really don't understand this. That's how you make your security decisions? Based on something you've read about Tim Cook in the news? But no third party audit, no open source code, no decentralization, zero self-hosted infrastructure? You put all your data in a black box that someone else controls fully, but hey, at least they took the FBI to court once? And on top of that considering this is Apple, well known for dazzling people with superficial first-impressions, into making bad long-term choices?

Word. The comment you replied to also gave me a thought.

Tim's public displays for privacy would be a perfect cover story for a gagged backdoored device.

Not likely the case in 2015 Apple nor probably even now, but perhaps a technique for the future or elsewhere to watch out for.

> Not likely the case in 2015 Apple nor probably even now

I disagree, I think it's 100% Apple to do that.

I sent an RFP to all the hardware makers, but no one was willing to cough up a third party audit, let me audit their flashing process, crack open the IME, let me review the chain of custody for every chip, and opensource the bootloader for my n=1 order quantity.

Could I flash coreboot/libreboot, (mostly) disable IME, get opensource firmware for every peripheral, and get a chain of custody for every part from boule to finished part? perhaps, but this is not realistic for most people.

You're making a long list of assumptions that are not true. Incremental, improved privacy offered by apple over something like Windows is a significant improvement for most people.

Going to court is the pretty good "put up or shut up", idk what else you are expecting here.

There are multiple vendors which ship devices with IME disabled and instructions for flashing coreboot (or they ship with it pre-installed). And Apple is much closer to Windows than it is to a GOS phone and self-hosted infra. The options are there for the people who actually care.

This happened 18 months ago, you can stop hoping.

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