Apple Warns Indian Opposition Leaders of State-Sponsored iPhone Attacks (techcrunch.com) 29
Apple has warned over a half dozen Indian lawmakers from Prime Minister Narendra Modi's main opposition of their iPhones being targets of state-sponsored attacks, these people said Tuesday, in a remarkable turn of events just months before the general elections in the South Asian nation. From a report: Rahul Gandhi, Indian opposition leader, said in a media briefing Tuesday that his team had received the said alert from Apple. Shashi Tharoor, a key figure from the Congress party; Akhilesh Yadav, the head of the Samajwadi Party; Mahua Moitra, a national representative from the All India Trinamool Congress; Priyanka Chaturvedi of Shiv Sena, a party with notable influence in Maharashtra reported that they too had been notified by Apple regarding a potential security attack on their iPhones. Asaduddin Owaisi, the leader of the All-India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM); Raghav Chadha from AAP, originating from an anti-corruption crusade a decade prior and later securing a political foothold in the national capital region; Sitaram Yechury, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of India; alongside Congress spokesperson Pawan Khera were also impacted, they said. Journalists Siddharth Varadarajan and Sriram Karri, along with Observer Research Foundation (ORF) India President Samir Saran shared that they had been served with identical warnings from Apple.
Good start, Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Now do China
Democracies the world over are fighting speech (Score:4, Insightful)
A democratic form of government is no guarantee that people will be allowed to speak freely. Citizens have to constantly apply pressure to those in power to keep them from corrupting the process. All forms of government are "natural monopolies", they have no competition. In a democracy you can at least force a change in management, so they are the best among all the bad forms from which to choose.
Read The Westminster Declaration [westminste...ration.org], which outlines the case for online freedom of speech in a very compelling way.
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In a democracy you can at least force a change in management, so they are the best among all the bad forms from which to choose.
There are countless "democracies" where the ruling party fixes the vote. They hold elections and everything.
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Yes and as your quotation marks suggest they are not real democracies so what's your point?
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Which then stop becoming "representative" democracies that represent the people (as opposed to "representative democracies" where there are nominally representatives chosen, perhaps not by the people).
There are many dictatorships that indeed start democratically. The snag is that they then grab the power and hang onto it. They may even proclaim their love of democracy, while secretly bemoaning that you can't rely on the unreliable people. Part of the downside of democracy is that sometimes the "wrong" pe
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In Canada and the U.S., for example, they use "first-past-the-post" as a way to weaken democratic choice and restrict us to 2 or maximally 3 parties to choose from. It makes governmental capture a lot easier for the corporations and the super-wealthy.
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Just because you get a vote doesn't mean it counts. North Korea is a democracy, Iran and Turkey are as well, it doesn't really matter though. Voting works much better if you can hold someone local accountable.
Re:Democracies the world over are fighting speech (Score:4, Insightful)
"Free" and "fair" are modifiers that always accompany the concept of voting in an actual democracy, without those two points there is no democracy. The right to vote, alone, is not sufficient to define a democracy. If you consider North Korea, Iran and Turkey to be democratic then you've fallen for their Big-Lie deception.
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I'm not saying they are "free" democracies. I'm just saying that semantically they are democracies and they claim to have free and fair elections.
The difference between a true democracy with free speech (and as a result fair and free elections) and a sham democracy is a method of defending that free speech (generally speaking, by force). And as I said, that only works if you have someone locally you can go after. Having a far and away government somewhere in an ivory tower isn't fair in the form of election
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A democratic form of government is no guarantee that people will be allowed to speak freely.
True. Democracies are only mob rule. See what our founding fathers thought about them. That's why we have the Electoral College system and a lot of representative processes and other stuff standing between our lawmaking and the groups who can scream the loudest.
Free speech (and other rights) are protected by our Constitution and Bill of Rights.
The problem is "people in power" in the 1st place (Score:3)
And that's because the job is boring. Go look up Elizabeth Warren's YouTube channel sometime.
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So as usual you are full of it because Warren gets elected repeatedly. So obviously your first statement is counter factual.
Arguably what have the boring administrators accomplished? Have any long term policy objectives been really and truly moved to the achieved column in the last 30 years? How about the last fifty?
Right - the boring administrators and their bureaucracy are utter and hopeless failures. Whose ONLY achievement has been managing to coast on post war good will, prosperity, and strategic milit
How about hackers? (Score:2, Interesting)
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The obvious solution (Score:3)
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All of those politicians should immediately change to Android phones.
I assume you forgot the Sarcasm tag.
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That would only have applied to the second sentence. I was dead serious about the first one.
Riiight.
That's because Android has such a stellar track record of keeping User Info safe!
Oh, wait. . .
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No, that's because the security hole is in iPhones, not Android. It's only a bandaid, but it's one the politicians should be able to understand.
Quit being deliberately obtuse!
Everyone with a pulse knows the comparative Security and Privacy history between iOS and Android.
And in case you've been in a coma for the past 15 years, that history does not favor Android. At all. . .
I'm surprised Apple warned them (Score:2)
This is the first time I can remember that Apple execs haven't metaphorically dropped to their knees and started sucking whenever a dictator snapped his fingers.
Based on past performance, I'd have expected them to turn over anything Modi didn't already have tied up with a pretty bow.
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At a guess it's because they are learning a valuable lesson in China right now.
Google refused to fix (or some other f word) up the Play Store to Chinese specifications and pulled out.
Apple didn't refuse, presumably thinking they were going to have it easy in China without Google around.
But now China is test-flying banning iPhones for government use (some agencies are doing it, some aren't, so the government can kind of sort of truthfully say they haven't banned them) which will give them time to sort out wh
Re: I'm surprised Apple warned them (Score:2)
Simple.
The US would like Modi gone, so they apply pressure through Apple