FBI backs down against Apple: Feds may be able to crack killer's iPhone without iGiant's help The FBI has come to a sudden and surprising all-stop in its legal war with Apple. Rather than compel the Cupertino giant to help it unlock an iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino killers, the Feds say they may be able to break into the handset without the company's assistance after all. In a filing [PDF] submitted …
"That can't be. They changed the iCloud password, then for the phone to sync the password has to be entered again from the phone. Can't change the iCloud password back and make the iPhone happy."
Are you sure? If the iCloud account's password is changed back to the original password, the one the phone itself is synced against, how will it be able to tell the difference?
I suspect this is how the government intended to punish Apple all along if they did not cooperate and the populace was not enthused by the FBI's argument.
The break in could be a lie even. It does not matter. Apple for the moment has lost the loose loose proposition set up for them. It is a warning that others reputations will also be tarnished if they follow Apple's lead. So in a way it is precedent.
Apple for the moment has lost the loose loose proposition set up for them.
1. Learn to spell "lose".
2. Learn to spell "lose".
3. Lose-lose is hyphenated.
4. The public, especially Apple's demographic, will remember that Apple stood up to the FBI, and that the FBI backed down. They're not going to remember or care that the FBI broke into the phone some other way. People who will remember that have already been skeptical of any promise of end-to-end security (from Apple or others). Apple has lost nothing here.
Your lose -> loose dysfunction is not dyslexic, just old-fashioned ignorance.
As somebody who learned English as an adult (which arguably gives me a perspective free from an unconscious bias inherent to native speakers), I would assert that this is a consequence of bad language design.
The prevalence of homophones, the ambuguity of grammar, the plethora of slang words and local dialects ... it almost feels like BASIC from the time gone by.
As somebody who learned English as an adult (which arguably gives me a perspective free from an unconscious bias inherent to native speakers), I would assert that this is a consequence of bad language design.
I'd agree that the English language is riddled with inconsistencies and unnecessary complication. However, given the mongrel origins of English the notion that any element of "design" was involved is a bit wide of the mark!
I'd agree that the English language is riddled with inconsistencies and unnecessary complication. However, given the mongrel origins of English the notion that any element of "design" was involved is a bit wide of the mark!
All languages started like this, but many have managed to shed at least some of their no longer necessary baggage. Personally, I find the fact that English is still in pretty much in the same state of disarray it was at the time of Dr. Samuel Johnson to be nothing short of miraculous.
Personally, I find the fact that English is still in pretty much in the same state of disarray it was at the time of Dr. Samuel Johnson to be nothing short of miraculous.
Perhaps if there had remained a single, dominant English-speaking country, in the same way as there has been with French or German, say, then there would have been an opportunity to rationalise the language. However in the case of English, who's going to do the designing? There's no country that accounts for anything like a majority of English speakers, no English-language equivalent of the Académie Française, and 67 sovereign countries using English as an official language.In fact it can be argued that it's this lack of centralised control that's made English such a flexible and adaptable language and facilitated its spread.
Perhaps if there had remained a single, dominant English-speaking country, in the same way as there has been with French or German, say, then there would have been an opportunity to rationalise the language.
Given the omnishambles that was the German spelling reform and the current storm in France over the dropping of the circumflex, I am more than a little sceptical that this would work.
The fact is that most attempts to prescribe language use fail miserably and its absence possibly one of the reasons for English's success.
Perhaps you're right. Who knows?
However in English, LOSE means to mislay or not win. Whereas LOOSE means not tight or free.
The problem here is not a matter of syntax or regional variation or even dyslexia, It is more to do with the near-universal use of spell checking software that suffices for most purposes but falls down spectacularly when a specific word is mistakenly used but is nevertheless, still a real word.
If the spell-checker doesn't red-line the error, and people being either too lazy or dumb to actually scan what they have written, it gives birth to the immensely irritating and rapidly growing juxtaposition of the LOSE-LOOSE words, to the point where the lesser focused mind (or eye) can no longer discern the difference between the TWO-TOO-TO (Introducing a sister confusion) and so begins using both without understanding WHICH is WITCH. (SORRY) Hobby-Horse is competing with High-Horse here.
As the old saying goes,
"If I wanted to get to there I wouldn't start from here."
The English language is what it is. Yes it can be confusing, inconsistent and illogical, but it can also be flexible, adaptable and in many cases concise.
If you can take a look at the multi-language instruction sheets that come with electrical goods and so on. The English version is usually a lot shorter than the others.
@Credas
To quote (I believe) James Nicoll:
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
Great thanks to you the grammar police from a dyslexic without the time to have a second person read all my posts ahead of time. Ride that high horse!
In other words: make the Mexicans spell and make them pay for it
Any dyslexic worth their salt knows how important it is to take the time and to use the relevant tools to reduce errors. The problem with your incomprehensible gibberish was not that it was poorly spelt but that it was incomprehensible: no combination of lose/loose lose/loose could ever make sense in the context.
Trying to pass off your ignorance as a medical condition is shameful.
>Great thanks to you the grammar police from a dyslexic without the time to have a second person read all my posts ahead of time. Ride that high horse!
Feel sorry for you about grammar, mine is terrible in all 4 languages I master "at a native level", sort of, well, ok, maybe only spoken ... however, I agree with the other comment@rds, that is, Apple have lost nothing.
At least now, you will remember lose, loose, and lose-lose for the rest of your life ;-) and we all had a good laugh as well, so it is a win-win for all!
"STFU and get back on topic or go back to slashdot, you fucking wankers."
Grammar Nazis is a bit strong; I think grammar council officials is nearer the mark.
I once had the privilege - because I learned a lot from him - of working with a Cambridge double-first English graduate. He could not spell. For a lot of common words he could tell you their derivation, alternative forms in a number of other languages, and if he stopped to think, variant spellings. But as well as holding down a full time job he knocked out novels under more than one pseudonym, and when he was writing he put down words by their shape, which is how he recognised them.
If I came across loose-loose as above, I would realise immediately that it meant lose-lose because that's the only form that makes sense. Breaks for brakes is mildly irritating because the meaning is so different, but to a philologist loose and lose are joined at the hip, related to the German world los, Greek λύω, and from the Indo-European root leu- meaning to loosen, divide or separate.
I make the odd spelling mistake on posts and it rarely gets attention. But that may just be because nobody ever reads them.
DON'T try to defend the indefensible by blaming dyslexia: those of us with reading/learning disfluency learn to compensate for it. The rest of your post shows that you understand, read, and write English, but in this you made a mistake, and instead of taking the correction, try to win some whinging sympathy for yourself and hit back at the corrector. NOT COOL. AC because I hide my disability for professional purposes.
I too am dyslexic, you need to think of it as a gift rather than pain in the arse. Revel in the fact that your thought processes with language are different to others and that gives you an advantage in being able to solve problems a different way.
Don't make excuses for it, just get on and write what you want to write, and change the spelling from phonetic to standard english at the end of every paragraph (Well that's how I do it!). :-)
You watch, someone is going to pick this apart too, go ahead, I don't mind a bit. :-)
@Steve Knox,
"4. The public, especially Apple's demographic, will remember that Apple stood up to the FBI, and that the FBI backed down. They're not going to remember or care that the FBI broke into the phone some other way. People who will remember that have already been skeptical of any promise of end-to-end security (from Apple or others). Apple has lost nothing here."
Well, that's not actually happened yet. The court order is still in place, there's still plenty of lawyers burning the midnight oil (at vast expense) over the matter. And, whether we like it or not, the FBI still stand a good chance of winning.
But your right, withdrawal/continuance doesn't matter. Most people seem to firmly believe that governments (especially the US government) can get into anything they like anytime they want. The FBI withdrawing from that case won't do anything to quell that belief.
One thing I've never figured out is as follows. Apple have already complied with a warrant to grant access to the iCloud account involved in this case (and found the cupboard bare, but that's not relevant to this question). So why, philosophically speaking, in this age where Apple claim that your iCloud account is as private as one's own phone, are they entirely happy to bust some criminal's online account wide open but not his offline account?
That feels like a massive moral contradiction. They go to some lengths to get you to use an iCloud account, are then are quite happy to turn that all over to the FBI on receiving a warrant, yet draw a line on giving access to the phone itself when they themselves have already tried very hard to do that. Imagine if they ever made iCloud non-optional; that would make their current stance totally contradictory. That would almost certainly prompt legislative changes, and then Apple do lose, completely.
Meanwhile over in Android land where there are no sacred data cows at all (Google sees it all whether one likes it or not), one imagines that this situation would never arise. There's not much point in accessing an Android phone directly, Google have probably already got it all in their servers.
@ AC
1) the fbi/local cops reset the iCloud password to something they knew. So they could gain access.
2) the phone is owned by the government as is the iCloud account, the government consented to apple retrieving the iCloud data.
3) as the iCloud password was easily resettable by the authorities, it was trivial to get in for everyone, no need for special compromised IOS.
"And, whether we like it or not, the FBI still stand a good chance of winning."
Balderdash.
Let's say that the FBI win the case in the courts and 'Apple' (the company) is forced to create the new ios.
1. Who goes to jail if they don't do it?
2. If you answered #1 as being the CEO/CTO etc. then take into consideration that the techies who would do the actual writing could also decide not to do it (they could resign/go on strike or whatever)
3. If you got this far then perhaps you can explain who actually goes to jail and why.
They're kinda damned if they do, and damned if they don't. Help the FBI, they lose trust from their current customers and potential customers.
Stand their ground and the FBI seeks help elsewhere. If the FBI and their outside party succeed, that pretty much guarantees that a means of breaking iPhone encryption is out in the wild by second breakfast.
More likely it is an attempt to break the encryption on the phone while being able to imply 'in passing' that the iPhone is not as secure as it is made out to be by Apple, as a 3rd party has a working method that apparently Apple do not know.
If Apple knew the method they would have given it to the FBI quietly or it could be implied that they hid that too from the FBI which would bolster the 'UnAmerican' attacks on Apple.
The assumption is that it is the NSA but it may not be.
I am sure that the FBI has relationships with other similar orgs around the globe.
It could also be help from a hardware 3rd party that can directly access the hardware.
(Chip Manufacturers/fabs etc)
They will of course use a test version of the same model iPhone to test the technique and verify that it can work or at least does not destroy the original evidence if it should fail.
I need to get more Popcorn and keep watching the show for more twists & turns!!! :)
Maybe I missed something but I don't think it was ever the case that Apple said the phone could not be hacked into which was the pragmatic basis if not the ideological basic for them not providing something special for the FBI. Apple knew that the FBI didn't need what they were requesting from Apple. If you have the device itself odds are you can get at the data. The data of course may be encrypted but that is a different issue.
Actually, it kinda was concluded that short of physically de-capping chip and applying some deep magic and industrial hardware (or using a zero-day exploit - which by its very nature eludes any meaningful assumptions other than one or more might potentially exist) there was _no way_ to get to the data, unless Apple replaced the OS with a custom backdoored one.
If it turned out all you need to do is say "Siri, open settings" on the 'emergency call' dialer screen, a bunch of folks would be rather miffed...
I would guess that the FBI are already into the phone and have found useful evidence on it.
So, in order to use that evidence without disclosing their encryption-breaking capability they need to get their story straight about how they came by that evidence.
Disclosing their way in would result in it being closed.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
