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Comment by bandushrew | Hacker News Reader

" iCloud allows Apple to install and run code directly on your device remotely."

I dont understand this? so far as I am aware, apple has always been able to install and run code directly on your device remotely.

what am I missing?

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Features - iCloud is just an extension of the stuff that was on iOS already. Previously you had preinstalled apps as part of the rom that could run in the background etc, and you had apps that you could download that ran sandboxed and had to have an icon, etc. iCloud allows direct access to the filesystem remotely. iCloud also now has routing support to assign you to different Apple servers, etc. All of these features would make it trivial for the NSA to put their own special server in at the iCloud data centers and redirect specific people onto it without them knowing.

So while it would have been theoretically possible for the NSA to do it before iCloud, iCloud makes it actually practical to do it without subverting the whole iOS team.

I am sorry, I dont think that makes much sense.

Apple has had remote access to the file system forever - an early use of it was to remove apps that had certain kinds of legal issues from the phones of those who had purchased it.

iCloud is simply remote file storage, and not all applications use it anyway - if the NSA wants access to my phone, achieving access to my iCloud account is a pretty poor second best.

Providing an XML feed that lists banned apps does not equate to remote file system access.

That they let spies run arbitrary code on your phone too.

We don't know that, we also don't know whether Google or Microsoft or any of the other phone or phone OS vendors 'let' the NSA do any of this. Even if the NSA had inside help, it may have been via individual Apple (Google, MS, etc) employees without Apple's knowledge, or ex-Apple engineers contracted by the NSA. In fact the later would be a much more useful approach for the NSA since it would minimize the number of people who knew it was going on and could therefore leak about it or interfere with the capability.

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