India Targets Apple Over Its Phone Hacking Notifications (washingtonpost.com) 100
In October, Apple issued notifications warning over a half dozen India lawmakers of their iPhones being targets of state-sponsored attacks. According to a new report from the Washington Post, the Modi government responded by criticizing Apple's security and demanding explanations to mitigate political impact (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). From the report: Officials from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) publicly questioned whether the Silicon Valley company's internal threat algorithms were faulty and announced an investigation into the security of Apple devices. In private, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, senior Modi administration officials called Apple's India representatives to demand that the company help soften the political impact of the warnings. They also summoned an Apple security expert from outside the country to a meeting in New Delhi, where government representatives pressed the Apple official to come up with alternative explanations for the warnings to users, the people said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. "They were really angry," one of those people said.
The visiting Apple official stood by the company's warnings. But the intensity of the Indian government effort to discredit and strong-arm Apple disturbed executives at the company's headquarters, in Cupertino, Calif., and illustrated how even Silicon Valley's most powerful tech companies can face pressure from the increasingly assertive leadership of the world's most populous country -- and one of the most critical technology markets of the coming decade. The recent episode also exemplified the dangers facing government critics in India and the lengths to which the Modi administration will go to deflect suspicions that it has engaged in hacking against its perceived enemies, according to digital rights groups, industry workers and Indian journalists. Many of the more than 20 people who received Apple's warnings at the end of October have been publicly critical of Modi or his longtime ally, Gautam Adani, an Indian energy and infrastructure tycoon. They included a firebrand politician from West Bengal state, a Communist leader from southern India and a New Delhi-based spokesman for the nation's largest opposition party. [...] Gopal Krishna Agarwal, a national spokesman for the BJP, said any evidence of hacking should be presented to the Indian government for investigation.
The Modi government has never confirmed or denied using spyware, and it has refused to cooperate with a committee appointed by India's Supreme Court to investigate whether it had. But two years ago, the Forbidden Stories journalism consortium, which included The Post, found that phones belonging to Indian journalists and political figures were infected with Pegasus, which grants attackers access to a device's encrypted messages, camera and microphone. In recent weeks, The Post, in collaboration with Amnesty, found fresh cases of infections among Indian journalists. Additional work by The Post and New York security firm iVerify found that opposition politicians had been targeted, adding to the evidence suggesting the Indian government's use of powerful surveillance tools. In addition, Amnesty showed The Post evidence it found in June that suggested a Pegasus customer was preparing to hack people in India. Amnesty asked that the evidence not be detailed to avoid teaching Pegasus users how to cover their tracks. "These findings show that spyware abuse continues unabated in India," said Donncha O Cearbhaill, head of Amnesty International's Security Lab. "Journalists, activists and opposition politicians in India can neither protect themselves against being targeted by highly invasive spyware nor expect meaningful accountability."
The visiting Apple official stood by the company's warnings. But the intensity of the Indian government effort to discredit and strong-arm Apple disturbed executives at the company's headquarters, in Cupertino, Calif., and illustrated how even Silicon Valley's most powerful tech companies can face pressure from the increasingly assertive leadership of the world's most populous country -- and one of the most critical technology markets of the coming decade. The recent episode also exemplified the dangers facing government critics in India and the lengths to which the Modi administration will go to deflect suspicions that it has engaged in hacking against its perceived enemies, according to digital rights groups, industry workers and Indian journalists. Many of the more than 20 people who received Apple's warnings at the end of October have been publicly critical of Modi or his longtime ally, Gautam Adani, an Indian energy and infrastructure tycoon. They included a firebrand politician from West Bengal state, a Communist leader from southern India and a New Delhi-based spokesman for the nation's largest opposition party. [...] Gopal Krishna Agarwal, a national spokesman for the BJP, said any evidence of hacking should be presented to the Indian government for investigation.
The Modi government has never confirmed or denied using spyware, and it has refused to cooperate with a committee appointed by India's Supreme Court to investigate whether it had. But two years ago, the Forbidden Stories journalism consortium, which included The Post, found that phones belonging to Indian journalists and political figures were infected with Pegasus, which grants attackers access to a device's encrypted messages, camera and microphone. In recent weeks, The Post, in collaboration with Amnesty, found fresh cases of infections among Indian journalists. Additional work by The Post and New York security firm iVerify found that opposition politicians had been targeted, adding to the evidence suggesting the Indian government's use of powerful surveillance tools. In addition, Amnesty showed The Post evidence it found in June that suggested a Pegasus customer was preparing to hack people in India. Amnesty asked that the evidence not be detailed to avoid teaching Pegasus users how to cover their tracks. "These findings show that spyware abuse continues unabated in India," said Donncha O Cearbhaill, head of Amnesty International's Security Lab. "Journalists, activists and opposition politicians in India can neither protect themselves against being targeted by highly invasive spyware nor expect meaningful accountability."
Modhi's gotta go (Score:4, Informative)
That man is leading India straight to fascism and religious extremism.
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Leading?
Indias been there for some years already. People are just starting to take notice, thats the difference.
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that's exactly what they want you to think!
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Oil company executives and major shareholders, I'd say.
They're the people trying to turn our planet into a desert.
Re:Modhi's gotta go (Score:5, Funny)
I got close once, I applied for a Social Security number (way back in the 90s, before all this was computerized and cross-ref'd) for my Monitor Lizard (varanus rudicollis spp.) mostly to see if I could.
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The CCP's working with them.
Re:Modhi's gotta go (Score:4, Insightful)
Looks like we can add India to the likes of Turkey and Hungary on the list of countries who's governments are rigging the system to hold onto power.
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Erdogan, Head Bozo of Turkey, once told the king of Jordan that democracy was like a bus and he would eventually get off it. Taking over the bus and driving into the ditch is the way he's doing it.
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And what's even sadder: all those countries had or were on the way to Democracy!
That should be a warning that having a working free government is no guarantee against fascists taking over.
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Of either stripe.
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There's only one stripe of dictatorship.
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OP said fascism, not dictatorship. The left really hates to admit one entire form of fascism exists, but they're both equally bad. In fact, the leftist version is alive and well and thriving in the west. In fact, it controls practically everything.
Re:Modhi's gotta go (Score:5, Insightful)
No. There is no "version" of fascism on the left. So, no, it does not control "practically everything" and never has because it does not exist and never has. Fascism is what you get when the right goes off the rails into authoritarianism. When that happens on the left, you get communism, not fascism. And, outside of some small groups of remaining hippies living out in the woods, we've never had communism here and never will. That is because, unlike the right which is all-to-happy to support its lunatic extreme and embrace the fascism, the mainstream left at least has the good sense to be wary of and embarrassed by its fringe loonies and tries to suppress, or at least marginalize and ignore, its own crazies.
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When it happens on the authoritarian left, the result is, for all practical purposes, indistinguishable from fascism aside from the symbology used. E.g. USSR under Stalin was very fascist (including racism and targeting of ethnic minorities), and for all the talk about socialism, they made high school education require tuition; the wealth disparity and social stratification was bad enough that well-off apparatchiks, prominent cultural figures, and even some scientists and engineers could afford domestic mai
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Of either stripe.
Erm... there isn't an "either" stripe of fascism.
It's a well defined system of government based on far right principles of ultra-nationalism, ultra-traditionalism (in particular with gender roles, sexual orientation, race, religion, et al), single party governance and direct action (Violence is not just seen as acceptable to enforce Fascism, in many cases it's the first course of action).
When I think of the two party western governments around the world, there's only really one side who even seems cap
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Left wing fascism exists. Even if you try to redefine it away.
Re: Modhi's gotta go (Score:2)
There is no left wing Fascism. There is Communism, which is the same or worse for the common citizen, but is not a kind of Fascism.
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Then what do you call the ideology that's far-left, authoritarian, but not necessarily communist? I'll leave you with a quote by a wise man who lived through left wing fascism a century ago:
“In Italy, fascists come in two categories: fascists and anti-fascists.” -- Ennio Flaiano
Re: Modhi's gotta go (Score:3)
Both forms of government MURDER PEOPLE TO STAY IN POWER. That means that regardless of what word you use to describe it people are still dying because of both of them.
Maybe we could focus on that for longer than 45 seconds? Maybe?
Or have we really been reduced to two literal political football teams?
Politics and life are not zero sum games, when one side "loses" it doesn't mean the other side is "winning". We're in a burning house and people are very busy arguing over what color the flames are rather than t
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But there should be A WORD to describe the left wing version, or you cannot object when people apply the word against the left.
It's the same reason the woke have decided to redefine the word from something everyone can do to now only something white people can do. It's straight out of Orwell's 1984.
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In that second paragraph, I thought I typed the word "racism" but I didn't. Whoops.
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Extreme left or extreme right suffer from the same thing - authoritarianism.
The main characteristics are use of state apparatus to enforce their political views, and intolerance of any opposing view, which typically involves describing opposing views as extremists that must be eliminated by any means possible.
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But what's the word for *left* *wing* authoritarianism? Why isn't there one?
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But what's the word for *left* *wing* authoritarianism?
Communism, of course.
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No, short of communism. Any leftist today will claim not to be communist. Yet Antifa, a violent extremist, terrorist group can only define itself as opposed to fascism.
Re: Modhi's gotta go (Score:2)
That made me curious. Do you know where I can find more info about that? And please don't tell me to DDG it. "Left wing fascism" is not on Wikipedia and the first results in the search engine are the Wikipedia article and pages that lift from it.
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That's kind of my point. No such word exists for fascism. They speak about such things so little, and right wing extremism so much, they don't even have a word, short of actual communism.
But left wing authoritarianism, as an equivalent to right wing fascism, is obviously a thing. The only vague approximation we have is "anti-fascist," a word that, if you adopt it to describe yourself, usually makes you a left wing fascist, like Antifa.
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The correct term for this is "left-wing authoritarianism" or "authoritarian socialism" (or in the most extreme cases, totalitarian). Fascism is by definition a right-wing ideology; totalitarianism is a necessary prerequisite for it but not a sufficient one. The fundamental difference is ideological - one sells the notion of utopia where everyone is ultimately equal, the other an utopia in which those "deserving" (usually defined in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, or nationality) lord over those who are
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I think we need a new multi-dimensional system for evaluating governments. One axis for internal repression (death squads, murdering opponents etc), one axis for genocidal tendencies (pick a group of your own people to demonize and execute), then economic destruction (kleptocracy and/or nationalization), and finally warlike behavior (claiming parts of other countries belong to you and/or invading them). No need to care whether they are left wing or right wing b*st*rds.
Perhaps this could be converted into a
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More important than the type of government I feel is that the country have belief in the rule of law. That is, no one is above the law, not even presidents, prime ministers, or kings. And to have a rule of law you need to hold the government in check. And to keep the government in check, you need to have checks and balances built-in. This is where many successful democracies win, because they have checks and balances, where no one part of the government can subvert the system.
So what the proto-dictators
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probably so, but this story is incredibly fishy. have you seen the actual notifications and checked the info on the alleged hacking?
why on earth would they explicitly state "state-sponsored" several times in a vague warning that someone "might be targeted"? even if they knew that fact (which is dubious at best) the wording is just asinine, unless it was specifically chosen for the effect (for whatever reason?).
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Well, you sound conspiratorial. Maybe it was state sponsored. That sounds likely.
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i do not doubt state sponsored hacking is a thing. every government in the world does it to the extent it can. e.g., i live in democratic western spain. ever heard about pegasus? well, i would expect no less from india's elite.
then again i do doubt a company yelling "state-sponsored hacking" out of the blue very much. at least some evidence would be nice.
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They have done so a couple of times since then. All turned out to be actual attacks.
This time it send out warnings to various members of the opposition and critical media in India. The Indian government immediately says there is no state-sponsored attack. IOW the one state that would be likely to sponsor such an attack. I smell a red herring.
Ohh, and https://techcrunc [techcrunch.com]
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what i don't get is, even with the assumption that an intrusion is "state-sponsored" (lets just go with that) it seems to me a really, really bad idea to say so in the notification. a simple generic warning is more than enough. including that information doesn't really help the victim but just increases the risk of something bad happening to the victim (depending on how they react, retaliation, etc) and it poses a huge risk to get at odds with ... well, a state organization with which you already have probl
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"your phone has been compromised". have you ever seen a virus warning? it's a no-brainer, really,
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how do you think Pakistan got invented? (Score:1)
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Yeah, Islam was born in and expanded more through military expansion than any other major religion, and boy does that continue to show. Everywhere Islam exists, violence is normal and hatred is taught.
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now you're being funny. is the "crusades" a concept to you? do you really not know why there are christians all over the world?
the whole american continent is the result of military christian expansion, paid for with christian slavery from all over africa.
all monotheistic religions stem from the same root and are equivalent with only circumstantial differences in this regard.
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None of this is relevant.
The crusades were an effort to take back the holy lands from the Muslims who took it by force, earlier.
And that other stuff was secular expansion, not religious.
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i see you want to cling to the circumstantial differences. that's cool, but makes discussion moot, indeed irrelevant.
then again, a crusade is a "religious war" by definition. the pope didn't "own" jerusalem to "take it back".
as for "the other stuff" .... so you claim that it was secular expansion ... have you cheked the religious diversity there in demographics charts and maps? is that why the constitutions of california, colorado, florida, georgia, illinois, iowa, kansas, kentucky, louisiana, maine, massac
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OK you can say ridiculous stuff all you want, secular expansion doesn't become religious just because the people are mostly one religion.
And the Crusades were not how Christianity expanded, it was an attempt to RE-take the holy lands. This is what I referred to in my OP. All major religions expanded largely via military expansion, but none so entirely and early on as Islam.
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Say what? It was Constantine in the 300s who justified, and used, Christianity to wage war. Islam didn't even come into existence until three hundred years later.
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In the 300s. That's the definition of not "EARLY ON." In its formative years, for three centuries, Christianity was not about military conquest, quite the opposite.
Religions like Islam, which spread from the start purely via military conquest, pick up those ideological traits. I've been hearing Islamists recently excusing the actions of October 9th and ?Hamas' broader desire to finish the Holocaust by saying things like "well, it's ok, Islam began in the fires of military expansion." And they're very mu
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A "land grab" of land THEY originally held, so yea, more of like retaking lands forcibly taken by an invader.
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So Europeans taking non-European land that they orignally owned? Ok. Non-Europeans stole non-European lands from Europeans who then went to re-take the stolen land and keep it stolen, only instead of land stolen by non-Europeans it is not land stolen by Europeans. Wow, that is confusing. And very Euro-centric.
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You mean Europeans "taking back" lands that didn't belong to them? No, it wasn't their land. They just claimed it as their own, they didn't even want Jews to have it. And they would not have done the crusades if there wasn't any profit to it (the true religion they adhered to).
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I literally don't care one iota. My OP was about how each religion was founded, its roots. Not about the Crusades many centuries later.
Re: how do you think Pakistan got invented? (Score:2)
I could say the same about Christianity.
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And you'd be lying, just like you already made several very silly false equivalencies so far. I'm an atheist, but I can see when things are different because I'm not afraid to look at context.
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Hardly. The history of christianity is a history of violent conquest and forced conversion.
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What ignorant baloney. Majority of the world's Muslims live in democracies. And Muslim-majority countries have a lower homicide rate [wikipedia.org] than Christian-majority ones.
Take your ignorant bigotry elsewhere.
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What in whoever-the-fuck's name does that have to do with anything we were discussing?
I'm willing to bet none of it's even true. Where is this huge democracy jam packed full of Muslims? LOL.
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Indonesia is the largest primarily Muslim country, which is a constitutional republic.
Pakistan is second, and is nominally democratic (though more-so in the past).
India is third, with almost as many muslims as the population of Pakistan, though it is declining in democracy.
On the other hand, America is also declining in democracy...
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Indonesia pays lip service to democracy and republicanism (Not the US kind, I mean the actual dictionary definition.). But it still inflicts nearly full-on sharia law on millions of its people. Even where sharia has been purged from its criminal law, they still have religions courts that do have authority on civil and commercial matters. They certianly have made progress on advancing out of theocracy towards democracy. But they've not made it yet.
You forgot Malasya, by the way, whose citizens are basica
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And yes, the US is also regressing in the same manner.
I don't see it. Aside from the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which only really changes things in several southern states, I don't see religious people making any real progress compared to what Islamist are doing everywhere, and what Hindus are getting in India. And frankly, if Democrats would stop milking the issue to win elections and just pass a federal law, we'd have solved it by now.
In Africa, Christianity is accomplishing far, far more.
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> Aside from the overturning of Roe v. Wade
Well, since you used that example... You might have missed it in the outrage; but the SCOTUS* slipped up and didn't properly coordinate their talking points when they inflicted that particular bit of theocratic medievalism on us. Specifically, they let it slip out that Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell are next on their chopping block. [nytimes.com] Maybe they'll fail at it. But they succeeded when they targetted 50% of the population with Dobbs. Overturning Griswold wo
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Aside from the overturning of Roe v. Wade
Well, since you used that example... You might have missed it in the outrage; but the SCOTUS* slipped up and didn't properly coordinate their talking points when they inflicted that particular bit of theocratic medievalism on us. Specifically, they let it slip out that Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell are next on their chopping block. [nytimes.com]
From your link:
"In the majority opinion written by Justice Samuel A. Alito, the court said that nothing in its decision “should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”
Why are you claiming the entire conservative side of the court, which literally just disagreed that their reason could be used that way, in fact DO think it can and should be used that way? Why would they say such a thing if they were interested in making such an attack?
This one is just not remotel
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Yes. They did put up a seemingly less malevolent front at first. But like I said; they slipped up and didn't properly coordinate their talking points. Scroll down a bit in the link though, and you see where they reveal their real plot and intentions:
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I seriously can't see it. All the stuff you quoted there was Thomas, not the majority opinion. "Failed to coordinate?" No, they directly disagreed.
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Neither are democratic.
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Almost like Christianity. Continual wars in Europe, sometimes just princes out to get each other, other times it's Catholics versus Protestants. Then the crusades, several of them, a good way to get the bored noble sons out of the house and off somewhere else.
I know you want to target Islam as the violent religion, but most religions have violent adherent who cite their religion as their cause for war. Even Buddhists. Islam isn't even a step up in violence. We had Christian terrorists before Muslim terr
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I literally said that already, but it doesn't change the fact that Christianity started with hundreds of years of persecution by the authorities, whilst Islam started as a means of conquest.
And of course there were Christian terrorists before Muslim terrorists, it's a much older religion.
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Thousands of years? So, Muslims are secretly Time Lords or something?
Of all the countries, why not the US... (Score:2)
What is so ironic is that this is after Apple moves a lot of production to Indian soil.
It might be better for the company just to move it back to the US. At least being on friendly turf means that at most, some rep in Congress waggles a middle finger, but because Apple is a big company, there won't be any real action against Apple, pretty much ever that would affect the company.
Re:Of all the countries, why not the US... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's surprising that Apple made this mistake. You would think that operating in China for so long would have taught them how to handle things like this.
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Apple can afford to move production again, and they think they can win against the Indian government in a way they can't win against China, because India has at least notional democracy and China doesn't.
It will be interesting to see if they are right, and if not, where they move production next.
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India is a democracy. It's better for Apple's long term future in the country that they don't participate in political spying. BJP won't have power forever.
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The more Apple's eggs go in India's basket, the more pull India will have over them. Modhi is probably testing how far he can pull them, if he's really asked Apple to help with "mitigating the political impact".
The correct response would be: "We aren't interested in Indian politics, and we're tightening our belts and bringing manufacturing back to the US."
Realistically we know there won't be any belt-tightening at Apple. They're headed more for an appearance on My 500-Pound Life. These are the morbidly rich
Re: Of all the countries, why not the US... (Score:2)
Apple can't have its devices made in US soil because they want slave-like cheap labor to keep their high profit margins. The only way to have so cheap workers en masse in US would be employing immigrants. There's a rather intense anti-imigratory sentiment in the US, so... no Apple devices will ever be made in US soil.
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The funny thing is that if Apple did make devices in the US, with a as much of a US based supply chain as possible, they could charge extra for the "Made in USA" item. Especially as countries start to go into a global cold war with each other, and moving production domestically makes sense as a way to reduce the chances of backdoors and espionage points, as well as better domestic control of what goes into a device.
Ultimately, I can see Apple adding a master key for phones sold in India, or perhaps phones
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Current assembly lines run tight schedules; shipping components adds significant lead time and risk. Another option is to automate the production lines extensively, which targets the labor cost but doesn't fix the component supply issue. The Chips Act may help, but for now, lead time from suppliers is going to be a challenge and a risk.
There's one big problem with Mexico though, it has nowhere near the population of China and India. It's unclear if Mexico even has large enough population centers (outside of
Re: Of all the countries, why not the US... (Score:2)
Now I feel stupid...
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With robotic advances, where an iPhone can be made from stuff on a tape to the actual device packaged and ready to go, all automatically, an iPhone factory could be located anywhere where there is enough tech talent to keep the robots maintained, and enough logistical support to keep the parts coming into the loading bays, while finished stuff exits out.
Once this gets done, locating a factory will be pretty much 100% politics as opposed to actual skillsets in the area.
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India is a protectionist state. If you want to sell in India (with 1.5B potential customers) then you must manufacture in India. Therefore Apple will manufacture in India.
The politics that goes along with that is just part of the cost of having an extra 1.5B potential customers. The EU wants USB-C, India wants to spy on the opposition party... it is all the same to a multinational corporation -it is just cost of doing business. Resist where you can, pay where you must.
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Better to describe it as 'Assembled in India' since most of the key components aren't manufactured there, and the profits will be paid in 'software license fees' to some Apple subsidiary in a Caribbean tax haven.
But if you're manufacturing a product with a large input of human labor countries like India, Vietnam, and Thailand are less than half the price of doing the same work in the good old U.S..of A. And, they don't (yet) have all the intellectual property protection issues that production in China invo
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Evan Apple doesn't say that, Einstein.
Of course they were angry (Score:3)
"They were really angry," one of those people said.
People don't like it when their corruption and crimes are exposed to the public light. That they then asked Apple for a way to " soften the political impact of the warnings" shows their guilt. The Modi government was caught red-handed and is desperate to find an excuse to deflect blame.
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Ding ding ding! Modi's bitch ass just got caught red-handed hacking opposition and journalists.
Canary (Score:4, Funny)
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