Tag Archives: apple

Apple vs. the FBI

February 22, 2016 Sean Dague 1 Comment

I’m becoming increasingly frustrated about the reporting around Apple vs. the FBI, which is largely this narrative:

FBI: “You have to fly”

Apple: “Flying is something we’ve never done before, and doesn’t really seem reasonable”

FBI: “No, we asked you to jump 70 times before, we can see that you can jump. So all you have to do is not land.”

Apple: “Flying and jumping are fundamentally different things.”

Politicians: “Isn’t there a compromise, couldn’t you just hover for a few minutes?”

The FBI wants a custom version of iOS developed and deployed onto this phone which removes the 10 pin retry limit, removes the delay between pins, and allowa the pins to be sent over an electronic interface directly (not via the touch screen). This would allow the FBI to brute force password crack the phone (all Hollywood style). They have said that it’s ok for this version of iOS to be linked to this specific device.

The problem: there doesn’t exist any version of iOS out there that will do this. It doesn’t exist for a reason, because iOS was designed and engineered with security in mind. Building a version of iOS such a thing existing anywhere exposes users, given the data breaches that exist that let things get out into the real world. How do you really bind it to a single device? How do you ensure that if extracted that couldn’t be tweaked to work on other devices? These are pretty hard engineering and security challenges, especially considering all the side channels that exist. The 10 pin limit was that protection point before, and as can be seen, a reasonably secure one.

It’s also frustrating that the reporting of the anti FBI side is just privacy, because it’s not. What about the safety of diplomats abroad, or undercover law enforcement. Better security makes us all safer.

Disclaimer: I am in general not an Apple fan. I hate their stance on interoperability and standards (which is basically to never play well with others). However they are making a stand here that’s critically important as technology becomes more and more of an extension of ourselves.

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Economist on Labor in China

February 4, 2012 Sean Dague Leave a comment

Via Mike Daisey’s blog I was led to the following bit by the Economist:

Anyway, that’s one angle: sweatshops are awful, but working a tiny rice farm is clearly worse, judging by the workers’ own preferences. However, the stance one takes on this depends on the question one is asking. An article on hardships in the garment industry in New York in 1909 might have elicited the response that things couldn’t be too bad since people were still immigrating from eastern Europe by the millions to take these jobs. Clearly they were better off working in a sweatshop in Manhattan than leading a miserable existence of poverty and repression in a shtetl in Poland. But at the same time, these workers were angry enough at the conditions they were subjected to that they staged the massive shirtwaist strike that year. Needless to say, that kind of politically free labour organisation is much harder to conduct in China because the state bans the formation of independent unions not controlled by the Communist Party. There’s a sequence in Mr Daisey’s piece where he describes seeing Foxconn’s perfectly open blacklist of employees who are to be immediately fired and not accepted at other factories because they are “troublemakers”; Mr Daisey notes that in a fascist dictatorship, you don’t have to resort to euphemisms the way management does in democracies. And that, too, rings true from my talks with underground Vietnamese labour activists. It’s hard to say how big the discount is on the manufacturing price of an iPhone due to the Chinese state’s ability to repress the formation of labour unions, but it’s not zero.

And I think that really hits an important point. Manufacturing in a totalitarian state means that there is an extra pressure against wage increase because labor organizing is a punishable crime.

There is some other great stuff in the article as well, so you should read the whole thing.

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Everything is hand made

January 11, 2012 Sean Dague 2 Comments

Update (3/22/2012): This American Life has pulled the episode because Mike Daisey’s story contained a lot of fabrications. The facts of FoxConn weren’t fabricated, but a lot of his personal stories and encounters were. Any statement that starts with “I have seen” is probably suspect and untrue. This original post is left below, because it was a point in time writing based on the impact the episode had on me.

How often do we wish more things were hand made. Oh we talk about that all the time, don’t we. “I wish it was like the old days. I wish things had that human touch.”

But that’s not true. There are more hand made things now then there have ever been in the history of the world.

Everything is hand made. I know, I have been there, I have seen the workers laying in parts thinner than a human hair, one after another, after another.

Everything is hand made.

This American Life has an incredible show this past week, an adaptation of Mike Daisey’s “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” for the radio. It’s the story of his trip to Shenzhen, to find the origin of his iPhone.

The story is amazing. The story telling is amazing. And the questions it raises about what it means to be a part of the global economy, are interesting and thought provoking.

If you’ve ever owned anything that has “Made in China” stamped on it, you should listen to Mr Daisey and The Apple Factory.

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Exciting times in mobile

September 27, 2008 Sean Dague Leave a comment

Android has finally arrived. The comparisons to the iPhone are everywhere, and rightly so, as this is going to be a very interesting show down between Google + Open and Apple + one of the best design teams in the world. I tend to place my best on Open, but if anyone can compete against it, it’s the people that convinced the world that devices with non replaceable batteries are good investments.

It’s also interesting that the dramatic challenge in getting everyone excited by mobile wasn’t really a bump up in technology. 90% of what the iPhone can do today would be doable on your random flip phone from verizon, except the carriers block you from doing it. Carriers:

block your access to the gps on the phone. Every phone has had a gps for the last few years due to e911 requirements.
make it difficult to deploy apps to the phone, as they want a cut of every one.
make it impossible to really provide free apps on phones (by the previous point)

A good instance of this is the fact that I’ve got google maps on my Sprint flip phone. Google wrote the app, and it does all the close searching for things like the iPhone does. It can’t tell me where I am, because sprint blocked the gps. But, when it comes to finding a restraunt in a strange city, it works quite well.

What Apple and Google have really been working on is getting the carriers out of the way so that mobile devices can really become a more primary platform for consumers. They basically forced AT&T, T-Mobile, and hopefully soon Sprint, to break down their walls against letting consumers really do things on the mobile networks. This is exciting. I’m eagerly hoping that Sprint (who is part of the Android alliance) puts an Android phone out by the end of the year, because I’m going to snap it up immediately. I’ve already got the Android SDK installed, and am going to start puttering around with applications that I’d love to be on my phone.