Apple's "Warrant Canary" Has Died 236
HughPickens.com writes When Apple published its first Transparency Report on government activity in late 2013, the document contained an important footnote that stated: "Apple has never received an order under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. We would expect to challenge such an order if served on us." Now Jeff John Roberts writes at Gigaom that Apple's warrant canary has disappeared. A review of the company's last two Transparency Reports, covering the second half of 2013 and the first six months of 2014, shows that the "canary" language is no longer there suggesting that Apple is now part of FISA or PRISM proceedings.
Warrant canaries are a tool used by companies and publishers to signify to their users that, so far, they have not been subject to a given type of law enforcement request such as a secret subpoena. If the canary disappears, then it is likely the situation has changed — and the company has been subject to such request. This may also give some insight into Apple's recent decision to rework its latest encryption in a way that makes it almost impossible for the company to turn over data from most iPhones or iPads to police.
Warrant canaries are a tool used by companies and publishers to signify to their users that, so far, they have not been subject to a given type of law enforcement request such as a secret subpoena. If the canary disappears, then it is likely the situation has changed — and the company has been subject to such request. This may also give some insight into Apple's recent decision to rework its latest encryption in a way that makes it almost impossible for the company to turn over data from most iPhones or iPads to police.
A change in the law? (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's an interesting follow up from Ars
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po... [arstechnica.com]
Not completely gone (Score:5, Interesting)
What's missing is a specific reference to Section 215, suggesting that a limited Section 215 order has been served on Apple.
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The language is very specific. Maybe they didn't get a request for bulk data, maybe they just had to provide a back door into everything so that law enforcement could serve itself. Then again, maybe not, we have no way of knowing, which makes all American company's claims that they resist the government worthless.
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Exactly. Or, maybe they received a bulk of requests, each for a specific piece of data.
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From the Ars story on the article: Apparently there's some newish law that would keep them from commenting specifically on Section 215 - If they want to do aggregate disclosure they have to group it with disclosures under another law. (Section 702 - which we know they have received orders under, since it was in the Snowden files.) (They also have the option of doing non-aggregate disclosures, but they couldn't do it immediately.)
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well cook already made a public canary announcement or a lie, about them not being able to read your mail while at the same time it's obvious for anyone that they can change your apple credentials with or without your consent(giving access to your mail).
Re:Not completely gone (Score:4, Informative)
well cook already made a public canary announcement or a lie, about them not being able to read your mail while at the same time it's obvious for anyone that they can change your apple credentials with or without your consent(giving access to your mail).
Except the only source for the "not being able to read your mail" is the summary of a slashdot article, which managed to incorrectly quote the article that it summarized. And the source of the statement is openly available (a 1 hour interview with Tim Cook) and he clearly doesn't say anything like what you claim.
impossibilium nulla obligatio (Score:3)
The cost of complying with requests for this sort of data is not zero, and may in fact be considerable. The Agencies may do it at their own cost, but you can bet they really want the cost out of their own budgets and into someone else's.
If a company really has no way to deliver the information, impossibilium nulla obligatio (no legal obligation to do the impossible), they have no compliance costs.
Wouldn't it be amusing (Score:2)
An interesting thing that Snowden has show us is that there is a vast sprawling web of people extending deep into private enterprise that have access to "secret" information. Imagine someone with a few of those photos, they can make serious dollars - it's not as if they are compromising their values of national security and they are already workin
How many warrant canaries are allowed? (Score:3)
One warrant canary conveys 1 bit of data. How many are allowed? Has anyone gotten away with using more than one?
Coincidence? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's interesting that this story hits Slashdot the same day as the story about Apple double-pinky swearing that they'll never, unh-uh, not ever unlock your iPhone for law enforcement any more.
I don't believe a fucking word. They'd throw a baby off a bridge for a $2 bump in their stock price. It's the same with any corporation, but they're closed ecosystem just means there's no way to protect yourself.
All this "canary" bullshit begs the question why, if Apple really cared one little bit about their customers, don't they just come out and say what they have to say. Apple may be one of a very small handful of corporations that actually could stand up to the surveillance regime. As far as I'm concerned, tacit complicity is worse than loud complicity. Especially when your selling yourself as someone who can be trusted with peoples' mobile payments and personal information and when you pretend you "Think Different". Remember the famous 1984 Apple ad? They are now part of the problem.
Not Coincidence, it's the point (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple double-pinky swearing that they'll never, unh-uh, not ever unlock your iPhone
That's not what they said - they said the've altered it so they CANNOT unlock your iPhone, even if they want to.
Given how the technology works, that is a quite reasonable assertion. iOS devices have had full device encryption for some time, without that key you have nothing.
All this "canary" bullshit begs the question why, if Apple really cared one little bit about their customers, don't they just come out and say what they have to say.
That just shows a misunderstanding of what companies are legally ALLOWED to say. Once you get the order you CANNOT talk about it, thus the device of the canary.
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I think the GP has a point. Of Apple defied the order what would happen? Tim Cook in handcuffs? There would be hipster riots up and down the country, not to mention investors and friends of the government getting very upset as their stock price crashed.
It would be risky but if they really stand by their principals like they say they do...
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I think the GP has a point. Of Apple defied the order what would happen? Tim Cook in handcuffs? There would be hipster riots up and down the country, not to mention investors and friends of the government getting very upset as their stock price crashed.
Tim Cook in handcuffs? Maybe. You as an unknown Slashdot poster can of course easily demand heroics on his part. It's a lot harder if your name is Tim Cook. Complaints about the stock price crashing? Well, that would be directly due to Cook's actions, so he'd probably lose his job about it.
But more importantly, it is easy for you to ask him to act illegally. I suppose he doesn't want to do anything illegal. For example, unlike a Samsung CEO who gets convicted and pardoned, I wouldn't expect any convictio
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How would providing data to the USA government raise their stock prices? If anything, it would lower them.
You don't really have to trust Apple to do the right thing here. If - as you say - they are only motivated by profit, then look at what is more profitable for them. Their business model doesn't depend on access to their customers' personal data and habits. Google, on the other hand, makes use of
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Maybe you don't get the full picture. They cooperate with the US gov't, and the gov't looks the other way when they try to claim that 80% of their profits come from outside the US when it's tax time. Apple has so many sweetheart deals with the US gov that it's not funny, mostly in the area of non-compliance with tax code or outright tax evasion.
This increases the bottom line and that increases stock p
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Well, there is a very high potential benefit to having a CEO who is a pathological liar. So high, in fact, that it would be incredible if someone rose to that position without being a pathological liar. And didn't Steve Jobs se
See Apple's privacy site for details (Score:5, Informative)
Of course there will be plenty of cynism here but I think it is in general a good & commendable effort for transparency. Interesting is the section on government information request:
National Security Orders from the U.S. government.
A tiny percentage of our millions of accounts is affected by national security-related requests. In the first six months of 2014, we received 250 or fewer of these requests. Though we would like to be more specific, by law this is the most precise information we are currently allowed to disclose.
No warrant canary required, it is here in the open.
So what could be the kind of thing asked taken into account the other the other privacy information on the site?
Re:See Apple's privacy site for details (Score:5, Informative)
Re: See Apple's privacy site for details (Score:2)
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Fair enough, but is it a problem? Any company could get secret requests for 0-250 accounts.
I'm not a company, and I'm not even in the USA, and I tell you, I also got secret requests for 0 to 250 accounts.
They should increase the number of 'canaries' (Score:3)
Instead of providing just one global canary.... more canaries, so the identity of which canaries were withdrawn, could be used to help ascertain the nature of the request(s) received.
They should also provide each user their own 'custom' canary.
For example: an option to receive every month, every quarter, every week, or every day, a personalized canary statement that "Apple has never received an order under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act which included information related to your account records. We would expect to challenge such an order if served on us."
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Unfortunately that's entirely impossible in the current situation. The canaries that are currently use, or used recently, have to be very carefully constructed to avoid removing it breaching the laws regarding the secrecy of the orders. Apple's view, at least until recently, was that disclosing that they hadn't received any, for anyone, was generic enough as to not breach secrecy. Doing it for individual users would be about as legally sound as ph
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Why not? Upsetting fanatics is a great pastime.
"Privacy" and "unbreakable" are different things (Score:2)
Really. When the NSA is able to dissect an iPhone to read out the encryption key right from the chip or can brute-force their way in with huge efforts this is still useless for mass surveillance. You can expect to be able to buy a consumer product that is secure against this kind of effort about as much as you can expect to buy a consumer car that is secure against an attack with nukes.
But this does not mean that this kind of encryption doesn't help with guarding your privacy. Very much as a car not being s
Re:There is no "almost impossible" (Score:5, Interesting)
It either can or can't be done. Almost impossible means it still can be done.
Encryption is ALWAYS breakable by brute force. Question is how long does it take? Seconds? Hours? Months? Years? Decades? This is usually determined by key sizes. The longer the key, the longer it takes to brute force. (generally)
Re:There is no "almost impossible" (Score:5, Funny)
It either can or can't be done. Almost impossible means it still can be done.
Encryption is ALWAYS breakable by brute force. Question is how long does it take? Seconds? Hours? Months? Years? Decades? This is usually determined by key sizes. The longer the key, the longer it takes to brute force. (generally)
Decades?
Wow.
You must live pretty damn far away from a big city or something.
Takes me like fifteen minutes to buy a $5 wrench. Tops.
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And that's why I use throwaway / random passwords...authorize once, throwaway if it needs to reauthenticate. I can't give them what I don't know. ;-)
Re:There is no "almost impossible" (Score:5, Insightful)
You underestimate the stupidity of your adversary. And their sadism.
Or, in other words, just 'cause you can't confess doesn't mean the torture ends.
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Careful there. A lot of people trying to make an example created a martyr.
Re:There is no "almost impossible" (Score:5, Insightful)
Takes me like fifteen minutes to buy a $5 wrench. Tops.
That requires:
a) you know who to hit with it
b) the person you decide to hit with it knows the password
So if you shoot a "terr'ist" and retreive his encrypted smart phone... what are you going to do exactly with a wrench?
Re:There is no "almost impossible" (Score:5, Funny)
Tighten a loose bolt! I can always use a good wrench.
It's five dollars well spent, in my opinion.
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Re:There is no "almost impossible" (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Police seize iPhone
2. Police arrest owner.
3. Police tell owner to unlock the phone.
4. Owner refuses.
5. Police grab finger, press to button/fingerprint reader.
6. Phone is unlocked.
What encryption?
Re:There is no "almost impossible" (Score:5, Insightful)
Another reason why biometry is great to establish identity but poor for authentication.
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Ok, ok. But it's usually enough outside the world of 24.
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There is however a big difference between a world in which they can get all that data secretly behind the scenes, and one in which they have to overtly threaten/force people to hand it over in person.
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Thankfully, there is no way for this to actually work unless you were tranquilized as well. TouchID requires the finger to be very steady when touching the sensor and I don't see it being particularly feasible to force your finger to be steady unless you were drugged.
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Re:There is no "almost impossible" (Score:4, Informative)
There are two things you as a soon-to-be defendant can do:
1) Power down your phone if you believe you are about to be detained. On power-up, the device requires your passcode to unlock. TouchID doesn’t work after reboot until the passcode is entered once. You can do this without unlocking the device by holding the power & home button for 10 seconds.
2) Either before arrest while you can still surreptitiously access your phone or after when they’re trying to get your finger on the screen, use the wrong finger (one you haven’t enrolled in TouchID) or move your finger enough to smudge and get a bad read. You only get five attempts before the phone stops accepting TouchID, and you need to provide your passphrase again. If successful, the screen will say, “Touch ID does not recognize your fingerprint,” so it’s detectable to someone who knows what they’re doing, but also confirmation to you that it worked. As far as I know, there’s no timeout to this status. You will not be able to use TouchID until the passcode is entered.
Either way, TouchID is disabled and they need to get your passcode out of you. Assuming you’re still in ordinary LEO territory, a $5 wrench isn’t going to work out when it comes to admissibility. If you’re already in TLA non-citizen territory, you’re done for anyways. Your call if “making it easier on yourself” is a good play or not...
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I literally don't know the password to my phone. I know of it, and how to type it in, but even at gunpoint / threat of contempt, I couldn't tell you what it is.
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That $5 wrench doesn't do anything in making entity A decrypt something that only entity B knows the key for.
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The reference cartoon is http://xkcd.com/538/
Re:There is no "almost impossible" (Score:5, Informative)
Encryption is ALWAYS breakable by brute force. Question is how long does it take? Seconds? Hours? Months? Years? Decades? This is usually determined by key sizes. The longer the key, the longer it takes to brute force. (generally)
Um, not quite, one time pads are provably impossible to break by brute force since the message can be decoded into any message of the right length.
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Well, on the other hand, OTPs are the wet dream of our law enforcement.
"And here we have the decoded text, it clearly tells us that he's behind every crime committed in the past 20 years, at least that's what it decrypts to..."
Re:There is no "almost impossible" (Score:5, Informative)
No. You don't know what you're talking about. See, OTPs use a random 'key' the same length as the data you're encrypting. It doesn't matter if there are known fields in the data, because matching those sections tells you nothing about any other section.
OTPs have a trivial proof that they provide perfect encryption as long as the key is never reused. They're just horribly impractical for everyday use.
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If the key is perfectly random, the plaintext won't be retrievable from the ciphertext, since for any candidate plaintext that you could construct, t
Re:There is no "almost impossible" (Score:4, Insightful)
No, one time pads cannot be broken. The key and the message have the same length. You xor the key and the message to encrypt, xor again to decrypt. Since the attacker knows neither the key nor the plain text, he cannot break it even if he is an immortal whose only objective is breaking the crypto.
Then why isn't it used everywhere? Because the key needs to be as big as the message, and the key is good for only a single use. That means you cannot send a new key encrypted with the one time pad (well, you can, but it won't help you). Any clever tricks you're thinking would make the crypto weaker.
Re:There is no "almost impossible" (Score:5, Informative)
The annual amount of energy that our sun emits is about 1.21*10^34 Joule. Dividing this with the per bit-change energy, we could provide power for our ideal computer to perform 2.74*10^56 bit changes. This is just about enough to have a 187-bit counter go through all its states. This does not include the energy needed for the computations to test each key (our counter state in this case) for correctness.
A 256 bit counter would require ~400.000.000.000.000.000.000 stars like our sun just to represent in the counter of our ideal computer.
Or, to say it in the words of Bruce Schneier:
"...brute force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space".
Note: I am not talking about potential attacks against the algorithms here, etc. only pointing out that encryption is definitely not ALWAYS breakable by brute force.
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How would a quantum computer change the equations?
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It would flip a coin...
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It would flip a coin...
Maybe it should just ask the cat.
Re:There is no "almost impossible" (Score:4, Funny)
It would flip a coin...
Maybe it should just ask the cat.
You could, but there's an even chance it's dead :)
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I believe that there are theoretical designs for computers (using reversible computation) that can compute without using any energy in computation. What I'm not sure about is that there's anyway to retrieve the results of the computation. (I've also got no idea of the speed of the computation. It might depend on random motions for all I can remember.)
Whatever, that's merely a theoretical quibble about your point. But then your point itself was a theoretical quibble.
The real weakness of 256 bit keys is p
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This is one of the most informative and insightful comments I've ever read on slashdot. thanks!
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It is an excerpt from Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier [schneier.com].
The full section is available on Schneier's personal blog [schneier.com].
Re:There is no (Score:2)
The running process and modules are looked at to ensure different drop/inject methods will get around any antivirus products found.
With your average consumer OS and devices, seconds after you enter your pw
Its like the 1950's and been given Western encryption hardware. The code works and the message will not be broken as sent.
Its just that using TEMPEST every plaintext keystroke in and print out is readable near the
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Won't last. Someone will forget his passcode about 8 seconds after the iOS 8 goes public. Then comes the flood of unhappy customers locked out of their unbreakably encrypted phones. "Sorry, we can't help you" won't be accepted as an answer.
There will either be a back door or a user revolt.
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That's not the problem. You can always restore the phone from a backup or set it up as new phone. "Unbreakable encrypted" is not the same as "bricked".
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Won't last. Someone will forget his passcode about 8 seconds after the iOS 8 goes public. Then comes the flood of unhappy customers locked out of their unbreakably encrypted phones. "Sorry, we can't help you" won't be accepted as an answer.
That's the answer they already had to accept. The guy in the Apple Store _never_ could get your passcode. Apple in Cupertino _could_ get your passcode by brute forcing at a rate of one passcode every 80 milliseconds. They would do that if the police hands over a phone together with a search warrant, but not because a customer is too stupid.
(MacOS X uses a clever trick to reduce the number of cases: You turn on full disk encryption. At some point you will have to enter your password for the very first tim
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There won't be and never has been a user revolt due to this because Apple has NEVER ever helped users recover from a forgotten security code to an iPhone/iPad. Nothing is changing in this regard.
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Three words: one time pad.
Brute force THIS.
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Good luck cracking that with brute force.
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Encryption is ALWAYS breakable by brute force. Question is how long does it take? Seconds? Hours? Months? Years? Decades? This is usually determined by key sizes. The longer the key, the longer it takes to brute force. (generally)
256 bit = physically impossible, unless some hugely unexpected mathematical breakthrough happens. Plus each file in the file system has its own 256 bit key and needs to be decrypted individually.
So that's the kind of situation where an honest statement says "almost impossible" although it is of course possible that the first of about 100,000 billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion possible guesses might be right. And that's the situation where idiots say "it's almost possible, the
There is one impossible (Score:2)
If by brute force you mean a wrench , this is true. If by brute force you mean going over all possible key , this is false. One Time pad actually are not reversible by brute force, since essentially you do not know the key length , youa re going thru building by brute force *all* possible string of byte of a specific length which will contain all the text of the world of that length. OTP of unknown length are not breakable by force.
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Well, with the exception of a random, message-length one-time pad. Technically even that can be brute-forced, but even then you have no way of telling which result is the original message.
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"Almost Impossible" can be made very precise. Indeed, modern cryptography is based on the understanding that certain algorithms are "almost impossible" to reverse. Cryptographers prove theorems with wording like "indistinguishable from random by any polynomial time algorithm" when they mean almost impossible. So, Apple may be quite correct in their statement.
My take on this is that Apple likely has received legal orders it can not disclose, and implementing real, strong security to protect user's data
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Don't tell a probability theorist what you think "almost" means.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... [wikipedia.org]
You don't understand security. At all. (Score:2)
It has nothing to do with perfection at any level and never has in the history of mankind, ever.
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Any encryption can be broken with enough processor power and time.
As explained elsewhere, there is encryption for which "enough processor power and time" doesn't exist in the universe. The limit is (total energy in the universe) divided by (smallest possible amount of energy to make any change, as dictated by quantum physics). That limit isn't anywhere close to 2^256.
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There is no try, only do
Ahh, Yoda's bathroom mantra...
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No. It's impossible to add 2+2 and get 5. It's almost impossible to convince a pedant they're wrong.
You are wrong about 2+2=5 being impossible. Any C++ programmer can accomplish that. :-)
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It's trivially easy to do that. All it takes is a redefinition of the value of numbers. Or have some fun with subclasses.
I know what you're trying to say, but you're dealing with people here who do math for fun. If anything I dare say that you should have someone coming up with at least five ways to prove you wrong before the sun goes up today over California.
Re:There is no (Score:2)
Your reply is an excellent confirmation of his second point, though ...
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I'm sure he does, but like everyone else, if he wants to see tits, he has to pay (am I am not talking about the people lending him the binoculars).
Obama is but a puppet (Score:5, Insightful)
The huge machinery behind the NSA / CIA / FBI and all those alphabet agencies wants total control, and it has the enthusiastic support of private companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, amongst others
Obama? That one is but a puppet
When the term of this puppet ends, by 2016 they will have another puppet installed. But of course, they will give us an "illusive election", whereby no matter who we vote for, it will be their puppet who will be installed inside the Casa Blanca!
Viva la Maquinaria !!
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"The huge machinery behind the NSA / CIA / FBI and all those alphabet agencies wants total control, and it has the enthusiastic support of private companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, amongst others"
While I admit that we have a de facto oligarchy here in the US I have to wonder that if the above were true then why have a warrant canary at all?
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Not really. At that point, money becomes pointless. Shortly thereafter, corporations (and highly-paid CxOs) become pointless.
You'd find within a year all the fast food workers replaced with an automated system that not only wouldn't get paid but would probably have a better track record than the underpaid overworked employees do know
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We do that now at fast food joints
Nope. McDonalds is for-profit. If their employees didn't earn their keep, they wouldn't be kept around.
if you raised the minimum wage to a living wage and quit letting the corps hand out "how to get government handout" videos to new employees? You'd find within a year all the fast food workers replaced with an automated system that not only wouldn't get paid but would probably have a better track record than the underpaid overworked employees do know when it comes to getting orders correct.
Nope. Firstly, McDonalds exists in all sorts of countries, including those with the highest minimum-wage rates in the world (Norway, the Netherlands, etc).
Secondly, if such automation is practical and within reach, why aren't they pursuing it already?
Way to connect those dots... (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple removed a sentence from their quarterly filings and obviously this is a sign of imminent fascist genocide.
Smart people are some of the stupidest people I've ever met.
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if he wants to see tits, he has to pay
No he doesn't all he would have to do would be to go sit in on a session of congress.
Better title (Score:3, Funny)
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Nope. Not for everything. Perhaps every phone conversation, but I don't necessary use my smart phone for talking. If I, for example, work in 1Password which encrypts the data while synching, the NSA can listen in on that conversation and presuming they haven't broken my password or the companies algorithms, that conversation is not understandable.
If it goes into the modem encrypted, having the keys to the modem isn't going to help all that much.
And you're an idiot if you're doing anything remotely illega
fortress on foundations of sand. (Score:2)
Every product sold that can be connected and used with a telco has to conform tech thats wide open to "Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_Law_Enforcement_Act
besides... (Score:2, Insightful)
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I'm not sure if you should be modded Funny or Insightful.
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"It can't be Apple - they download WESTERN music to your phone, without your permission"
Huh? U2 is not Western music - it isn't even Country..
The Other Stupid (Score:3)
They really think you're stupid.
No, the rest of us that understand encryption think you are.
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Because when it comes to security, "almost" is "not at all".
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A real warrant canary contains a date. You show that the canary is dead by not updating it at regular intervals.