This article seems more than a little silly. They blew up a single tweet into an article about Apple's corporate strategy in relation to the FBI.<p>What next? Are they going to dig through Apple employees' trash, looking for variations in the number of credit card offers?<p>"Apple Employees Load up on Credit"<p>"Investigators have uncovered a 10% uptick in the number of accepted credit card offers from key Apple employees. Speculation about Apple's poor recent performance seems validated by their own employees obtaining as much cheap credit as they can get before the inevitable catastrophe approaches. Leading VCs interviewed had this to say: 'We always recommend to our partners that they obtain credit during times of prosperity, so that they don't need to unnecessarily dilute their shares by raising money in a downturn. If you're profitable but don't need the money, it's a great time to at least seek a line of credit from your bank.'<p>Apple representatives declined to comment on this article, possibly wishing to delay the bad news until the next shareholder meeting.<p>Next up: Microsoft reallocates its purchases of employee free soda to 20% Coke / 80% Pepsi. But what are the impacts on its cloud computing business?"
Oh, they hired <i>a</i> developer behind Signal. No offense to Mr. Jacobs, I'm sure he is an excellent developer. But I saw the headline and assumed they had grabbed Moxie.
I think this move shows that Apple is serious about security. They previously assessed the risk of a government ordered backdoor low and the potential for bugs in the Secure Enclave higher, and hence made the trade off the allow signed updates.
The CoreOS (<a href="https://coreos.com/" rel="nofollow">https://coreos.com/</a>) security team, or just the core OS security team? If the former, I'm curious what Apple's involvement with that project is.
Does anybody see through these PR plays? They've unlocked many phones in the past for the government, they're protecting their technology and using the moral issue to look good at a time when they're still majorly losing their way. To me this looks like governmental appeasement. Shutting down Snowden and other's methods of private communications is a fantastic gift to the government who doesn't want more of that type of scrutiny and people talking about the NSA badly, there's already enough thinking they're a major problem. What perfect a guise to get it done under another companies name that also happens to be having a great PR week on the back of data they gave up or are going to give up anyway, they always knew that. I wish more people would think for themselves or at least consider why the script might not be reality. They hired him! What happened is a formerly non corporate secure, private form of communication is now... who knows what. Maybe the government just figured out how to deal with the next Lavabit and not deal with more backlash. Nobody trusts them right now, everybody seems to love this Apple letter PR play.
Conjecture: Isn't Apple's private signing key already a "master key to turn 100 million locks"?<p>I.e. the key they use to sign software updates. With that key, someone could create malware and sign it... Apple creating the malware just saves them a step. Ergo the "target on that piece" is already pretty high value, yet Apple is able to keep it secret / prepared for contingencies (like rotating the key..)<p>Thoughts?
Good for Apple. Maybe he can help critique Apple's security methodology. It will be interesting to hear what he works on and how he finds Apple's security systems.
I can understand how people want to put puzzle pieces together, but this is completely idiotic.<p>Whatever remaining security holes there are with secure enclave, they have nothing to do with a software chat app.<p>This is entirely coincidental and has nothing to do with anything.<p>TechCrunch should be ashamed of itself (again) for being such a douchebag.<p>Edit: I'm not saying Apple hiring the guy is stupid. I'm responding to the hattery from the article itself.<p>As a hire, it makes sense. But trying to decide that it means "Apple is now serious about security" is just a bunch of horseshit on both ends.
>Apple Hires Developer Behind Signal, Edward Snowden’s Favorite Secure Chat App<p>A "secure" chat app that depends on Google Play Services (spyware) and is only available through the Play Store (rather than F-Droid, an open source software repository for Android) and maintained by an author who refuses to integrate fixes to either of these problems upstream.<p>For those wondering if Google Play Services really is spyware: one of the purposes is to backdoor your phone for Google so they can _silently_ update any of their apps on your phone. It has access to _every_ Android permission and can (and does) grant any permission to any app silently. It also monitors your location and reports it to Google, along with brief voice snippets for "OK Google", as well as a list of all apps installed on your phone, and more. It's definitely an awful thing to have on your phone if you're privacy conscious.