Law enforcement versus Silicon Valley's idle problem children Tensions have been building for a while on the back of revelations from NSA contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden but 2015 marked the outbreak of full-on hostilities between tech firms in Silicon Valley and Western governments. Law enforcement and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic lined up to repeatedly …
That neither one will back down to the governments of the world over providing backdoor access, and they will share information of the secret talks and arm twisting happening to each behind closed doors. The only way the governments can make this happen is by getting one of them to fold. If they both stand strong, it is unlikely that any country would essentially outlaw both iPhone and Android, which together account for about 98% of the world market.
Apple and Google are acting as they are because they see there current actions as benefitting their business. After Snowdon they saw a widespread unease over the amount of data Governments were accessing and decided that they would be seen in a positive light if they enabled encryption that had no potential for a "back door". I'm sure if public opinion swung (e.g. major terrorist attack in US where use of encrypted communications using apple/google/etc products could be shown to have had role in plannin etc - especially if it played into a presidential election where one side wanted to portray the other as being supported by "the enemy within") then can easily see them nuancing there positions.
"I'm sure if public opinion swung (e.g. major terrorist attack in US where use of encrypted communications using apple/google products"
FFS!
Don't go giving them ideas for the next false flag attack, so they can push their agenda through yet more Hegelian dialect.
Good luck to anyone wanting to hack into my car, the most advanced piece of technology in it is the automatic transmission... I've even stripped out the AM radio and just use a speaker/microphone with a 4-pin 3.5mm connector and plug it into my phone.
I have no idea why no one in the auto industry hasn't stepped back and thought "Do we -really- need to cram yet another entertainment system onto the thing?"
If the quality of driving in my neighborhood is any indication, either we need autonomous cars with fantastic entertainment systems to keep the meat puppets distracted from touching any of the driving parts, or we need fewer distractions, so that the meat puppets concentrate on the road and the driving tasks at hand.
My current vehicle lacks cup holders, because its builders felt that the proper activity to be undertaken in a car was driving, and that if one wanted to consume beverages, one could always stop at a cafe.
on the "we need to have back doors into encryption" thing...
the lazy gendarme bastids need to get back to their roots with boots on the ground infiltrating those organizations they fear... using satellites to observe really messed them up when they stopped putting undercover agents in place in the organizations they suspected... now they're fighting to try to get back to that but they're still not looking at the whole picture... you don't need to break encryption if you have infiltrated the organizations sufficiently... get off your lazy arses and go ""make friends"" with them! get on their ""good side""... climb the ladder of rank... be on the inside and know what is going on before anything gets transmitted anywhere... quit being stupid and allowing technology to do your jobs for you... Dread Pirate Roberts was found by (relatively) old fashioned work gathering data and sifting through it... it probably wouldn't have taken so long if his right hand man had actually been an undercover agent...
that is all...
Because nobody wants to to spend the money on the kit.
I regularly get asked "what are the chances of it happening to us?" or I get told "nobody would bother hacking into our stuff, we're not interesting enough!".
I'm not a liar so I explain that the chances aren't high but in having crappier kit you increase the chances of being found to have vulnerabilities through the use of Shodan etc.
Also, the very fact you are uninteresting is a great reason to want to hack in. Low key targets are surely less likely to act aggressively in the fall out than a high profile target.
I know people are going to down vote me here since im blaming the kit and the youngsters amongst us actually believe its the config not the kit that matters...but ask yourself this...would you rather be sitting behind a proper hardware firewall <insert brand you worship> or something like a netgear DG834 P.O.S. ??
One costs a lot of money one can be picked up at PC World / Maplin for less than £30. You get what you pay for in the security world.
Got no budget? You get no security.
Yes, even those of you that have your Active Directory and your GPOs. You guys are even more vulnerable. That dumbass CEO you secretly gave admin rights to and permission to open anyones mailbox...hes the one link that renders your whole setup worthless.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
