I’ve received this question in my inbox in the last day or so:
Dear IT Nerd. It sounds like Apple has really got themselves into quite a mess here with these undocumented function calls that have been discovered. But I haven’t noticed you offering an opinion as to whether this is much ado about nothing or there is actually an issue here. Could you do so now?
Thank you.
Thanks for the question.
My opinion is this. Apple has handled this badly. Assuming these are legitimate debugging tools, which is plausible as Apple has been known to not document everything that iOS or OS X is capable of, then their denial that these are “backdoors” are kind of a PR miss as nobody believes them. That’s because it all seems hastily thrown together to explain these “backdoors.” That leads to the impression that Apple has something to hide or is working with the NSA or some similar organization. Having said all that, it does seem extremely weird that Apple has a function that allows someone to completely bypass the device encryption. And they have a packet sniffer that is running on iOS devices that is not a developer tool. That really needs to be explained by Apple in a clear and transparent manner as possible. In this age of Edward Snowden, the failure by Apple to come completely clean on this make them look very, very bad. So, to sum it up, I’m not really buying what they’re saying. At least, not without more of an explanation from them.
Another thing to consider, I fully expect BlackBerry to have some sort of ad campaign that targets this fiasco. It will likely say something along the lines of “You can’t trust Apple when it comes to security. The only smartphone vendor that you can trust with security is BlackBerry.” Seeing as Apple is making a push for the enterprise, they need to make this go away to have any credibility in that space.
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This entry was posted on July 24, 2014 at 8:25 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple, Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Hey IT Nerd! Do You Believe Apple When It Comes To Those Backdoors?
I’ve received this question in my inbox in the last day or so:
Dear IT Nerd. It sounds like Apple has really got themselves into quite a mess here with these undocumented function calls that have been discovered. But I haven’t noticed you offering an opinion as to whether this is much ado about nothing or there is actually an issue here. Could you do so now?
Thank you.
Thanks for the question.
My opinion is this. Apple has handled this badly. Assuming these are legitimate debugging tools, which is plausible as Apple has been known to not document everything that iOS or OS X is capable of, then their denial that these are “backdoors” are kind of a PR miss as nobody believes them. That’s because it all seems hastily thrown together to explain these “backdoors.” That leads to the impression that Apple has something to hide or is working with the NSA or some similar organization. Having said all that, it does seem extremely weird that Apple has a function that allows someone to completely bypass the device encryption. And they have a packet sniffer that is running on iOS devices that is not a developer tool. That really needs to be explained by Apple in a clear and transparent manner as possible. In this age of Edward Snowden, the failure by Apple to come completely clean on this make them look very, very bad. So, to sum it up, I’m not really buying what they’re saying. At least, not without more of an explanation from them.
Another thing to consider, I fully expect BlackBerry to have some sort of ad campaign that targets this fiasco. It will likely say something along the lines of “You can’t trust Apple when it comes to security. The only smartphone vendor that you can trust with security is BlackBerry.” Seeing as Apple is making a push for the enterprise, they need to make this go away to have any credibility in that space.
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This entry was posted on July 24, 2014 at 8:25 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple, Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.