For money and to keep some other player from that money. I don’t think this is a particularly difficult thing to understand, you just need nuclear-grade powers of rationalization and greed.
But how would not selling iPhones in China, on principle, help anyone?
The perfect world where Apple tells China what to do doesn't exist. Ok. We know that.
Now what? Bail? Why? Stick around and play by the rules and play the game and maybe someday make 1% positive difference? Seems like the lesser of two evils to me.
I recognize that rape, robbery, assault and murder are sadly inevitable parts of human life, but I refuse to participate in, aid, or abett it. The inevitability of wrong-doing is not license to be a doer.
So it’s not the lesser of two evils, it’s just participation in evil for profit.
Do you pay taxes to a country that has a violent military presence in the Middle East (or any other conflict area)? Or to a local police department that has any history of unnecessary force to police non-violent crimes?
Most of us do. We don't have much of a choice. We could choose to earn so little that we don't have to pay much or anything in taxes or move elsewhere but, well, we want to live better that or live in a specific area.
This isn’t even good whataboutism, it’s downright lazy. Apple is a giant corporation that avoids taxes, not a citizen with few or no choices. This is a business maximizing profit, by choice, in another market.
Just because someone is going to get screwed either way, doesn't mean it's OK to be the one screwing them. Apple claims that they care about the privacy of their users, but this demonstrates that they don't care at all.
No it doesn't. It demonstrates that Apple respects the laws of the country it operates in. Apple has no moral responsibility to force its privacy views on other countries, and it has no power to do so anyway.
Furthermore, Apple has a responsibility to respect the choices of other people. If China had a democratically elected government that choose to intercept all communication crossing its borders, I think Apple would have a moral obligation to either respect that or not do business there. The present government is in power partly because the previous government was so bad that the peasants preferred the Communists, so you could even argue that the present government is there by the will of the people, in some limited sense. We can't just force other people to have our standard.
We can’t force anything, but profiting from it is another story which contains a moral dimension regardless of your ideological stance. There is no legal responsibility, but morals are sticky. For what it’s worth though, I appreciate your demonstration of the rationalization I mentioned in my first comment.
Yes, it does. Apple has the option to not do business there. They can simply walk away. And by walking away, they are allowing other people to hold onto their own beliefs, while not encouraging them.
> Furthermore, Apple has a responsibility to respect the choices of other people. If China had a democratically elected government that choose to intercept all communication crossing its borders, I think Apple would have a moral obligation to either respect that or not do business there. The present government is in power partly because the previous government was so bad that the peasants preferred the Communists, so you could even argue that the present government is there by the will of the people, in some limited sense. We can't just force other people to have our standard.
I don't really disagree with this, but I'm not sure what it has to do with what I posted. Not doing business with a group of people because you disagree with how they want that business done is completely unrelated to "forcing other people to have our standard".
I am not sure how you can know that. I am actually sure Apple would have lost some market but not much and there could have been stuff they could do to let it happen rather than now just giving up everything to any authoritarian government.
Maybe Apple could have gained some respect and then market share if they would have stood firm. With this new management, Apple has become just focused on business (income) not what they were known to be passionate about.
As I understand it, Google actually had been cooperating with China's censorship requests, but didn't like it, and Google made the decision themselves[1] to relocate offices [ED: web search was moved but Google maintains offices in mainland China] to Hong Kong rather than continue self-censorship.
Yes, but google still has other business in china (android, selling ads to Chinese customers). They sacrificed their web search business, but not everything else.
I apologize for my misleading statements. From my amateur reading of the coverage at the time, I had no idea of this; I appreciate the additional information.
> Maybe Apple could have gained some respect and then market share if they would have stood firm.
The Chinese government doesn't play that respect game. Apple's stock holders also would never allow Apple to exit China without a huge hit (~50%) in their valuation. It isn't hard to see that Apple is stuck in China whether they are passionate about it or not.
We don't know whether APPL shareholders would be interested in Apple exiting Mainland China. Apple needs to act in the shareholders' interest, but I don't think it necessarily has to act to maximize profits. Also, Apple could have a shareholder vote on the matter; perhaps the majority of shareholders prefer that Apple maintain its reputation for privacy over its profits. Perhaps exiting Mainland China would not affect Apple's profits much--given that I couldn't walk into the Beijing Apple Store without being accosted by sellers of presumably illegally imported iPhones from Hong Kong to avoid the 25% luxury tax, perhaps Apple's China profits would simply morph into Apple's HK or Singapore profits. Perhaps Apple leaving China would make them that much more desirable--the ultimate luxury item is the one you can't get.
The pricing between HK and Beijing is much reduced these days, definitely a lot more than it was when the first Apple stores opened (you can compare prices between apple.com/cn and apple.com/hk if you don't believe me). The days of the yellow cows are mostly over, and have been on decline for a few years now (they no longer hang out at the Sanlitun Apple store as of 2016, for example).
I don't think ANY company can afford to leave China these days. Google only got away with it because they weren't making much on search in China.
China was happy to ban Facebook and Google. Google's market share in China plummeted from 37% to 2% over 4 years, and is still falling there.
The evidence certainly seems to suggest that China's government is willing to ban foreign tech companies for the benefit of the ruling party. Is there any evidence the Chinese government would hesitate to ban Apple if Apple undermined their authority?
I think there's a moral case for Apple refusing to serve China, but I think they would have to face the likely consequence that China would simply kick them out of the country.
So is literally every tech company working in China.
> The Chinese state relies upon private enterprise to implement social credit and extend its tentacular reach. Top-tier concerns like Alibaba’s Alipay, Tencent, Baidu, the mobility-on-demand service Didi Chuxing, and the massively popular dating site Baihe either contribute significant elements of the system’s architecture or incorporate its rulings into their services.
I'm not at all arguing Apple is right to do this (in a moral sense. Certainly it's right in a purely financial sense); just that it's one small part of a much broader issue.
(EDIT: removed gratuitous complaint about clickbait headline; you guys have convinced me I was wrong. As long as I'm here, though, I really do recommend reading the Atlantic link above; it does a good job showing the context in which this is happening)
True. (And you're right that it contradicts Apple's privacy stance outside of China, which justifies examining their stance here a little more closely; my swipe at the Apple-mention-as-clickbait may have been a bit of a knee-jerk. Apologies for that.)
But I would be shocked if the other major players (Facebook, Google, etc) aren't also participating in this; it seems to be the price of entry if they want to continue doing business there.
Most people missed it, but Apple has already started started giving in to authorities, in China, the U.S., and probably elsewhere, too. I think that's newsworthy on its own given their "strong privacy stance".
The China thing is related to this "move towards helping authorities", too. They're all connected. I don't know what or who convinced Tim Cook to give in and stop defending his customers' privacy against governments (at least compared to what was originally promised), but it's pretty clear that's what's happening here. I think we should expect more such moves from Apple in the future.
As for "but everyone's doing it" - come on, haven't we moved on from accepting such weak excuses? I thought Apple was a leader in the industry, paving the way for positive progress. Apple's mantra is "we challenge the status quo" and "we think different". Not "I guess we'll do whatever everyone else is doing."
If they keep this up, the answer to Simon Sinek's "WHY does Apple exist?" may soon become "We exist only to make money and nothing else", rather than inspire anyone.
That first link does not even demonstrate what the article title claims. Apple offered assistance in the same way it always has, providing iCloud access logs, IP's, etc. They did not help the FBI unlock the phone.
The other errors they have had lately on the other hand do seem malicious, but I suspect either serious fuckups on engineer side, or people being paid/blackmailed by intelligence agencies to introduce backdoors.
> haven't we moved on from accepting such weak excuses?
Perhaps I worded that poorly. I had hoped that saying "I am not at all arguing that Apple is right to do this" made clear that I didn't intend that as an "excuse"; rather as "context".
BlackBerry had the same problem when nefarious characters ranging from street drug dealers to CEOs relied on PIN messaging that provided secure communication with no individual user accountability.
Nextel had the same issue when direct connect exploded and the police discovered it wasn’t tappable.
> removed gratuitous complaint about clickbait headline; you guys have convinced me I was wrong
This has to be an HN first. Any story of actual significance has folks screaming about clickbait like it’s surprising that publications try to get people to read them.
That is why I long for iOS Time Capsule. The cloud is increasing a single point of area for government intervention. Especially for certain places in the world.
That's a particularly strong result given the Chinese smartphone market contracted by 4% in 2017 and has been weak for years.
For China's whole smartphone market, 2015 saw 2% growth, 2016 was 11% growth, 2017 was negative 4%. It's likely their market has reached saturation. 2017 should have seen a big jump in sales due to a replacement cycle, given the near zero growth in 2015. Most of the domestic Chinese brands will die off soon, leaving three or so dominant players to go up against Samsung and Apple.
Those articles are a dime a dozen (Apple losing in China, Why the iPhone will fail in Japan, Apple going nowhere in India, ... etc) -- I have not seen one that was not proven wrong at the subsequent Apple quarterly results.
China is overt with it's threats of blocking businesses if denied data. One can imagine the covert agreements between Apple and Western governments being the perfect storm - Apple positions itself as privacy focused -> customers are more willing to store sensitive information with Apple -> Apple provides access to government agencies without notifying users under covert agreements
So does this entity get my data if I text, email, imessage, etc., a Chinese national? Hmm...between google monetizing my every data point to the encroachment of foreign governments on my data there really isn't a phone that is well designed, fast, useful, but also safe and secure with my data.
Similarly, do they get access to my data if I travel to China and connect to Apple servers from there? Does that trigger a 'replicate to China' job because I'm now a user in China?
China requires Chinese user data to be stored on servers physically located in China, and foreign entities are required to take on local partners for operations within China. I don't think either of those stipulations will come as a galloping shock to anyone here, and taken together they fully explain the reason for this change.
The question I'm then moved to ask is this: who cares, so long as the data is e2e encrypted?
This article explains that there's a new stipulation in the Terms of Service permitting Apple (and their new partner which will operate this datacenter) to view, share, and disclose your data as they see fit.
This is about compliance, yes, but we can't ignore the political implications of this change.
I would be surprised/mortified if Apple didn't hold the keys.
Otherwise iCloud Keychain which houses credentials for non-Apple sites would be exposed. I can't imagine the likes of Facebook, Google, Amazon etc just sitting back and allowing Apple to compromise their sites in the name of Chinese expansion.
It would surely amount to the biggest security compromise in history if this was the case.
In my iCloud Keychain is the credentials for EVERY website that I have basically ever signed it into. It has credentials for internet banking, work email and VPN, AWS and Google Cloud etc. Just for me it is over 250 websites. It even stores SSH keypairs.
If the Chinese government had the ability to access those for all Chinese iCloud users (and roaming tourists ?) that would a seriously big deal.
That’s not how iCloud Keychain works. It’s a transfer method for data encrypted by keys only your circle has. You control who is added not Apple. Read the white paper
In theory you control who is added to an iMessage too, but Apple’s closed source software is what does the controlling. Enter a government wiretap, and boom.
Yes. In the iCloud Keychain model, the key client (written by Apple, “operated” without review by you) is free to add additional keys to your account that you will use to encrypt messages to you.
I was addressing the "closed source software" aspect, because some level is trust is required in the server for key distribution regardless of source availability.
The whole reason they did this in the first place was to not have control over the data, they definitely don’t have the keys. The Chinese police/government contact Guizhou, not Apple, when they want anything.
This comes back to my initial question: if data is encrypted by my key before it ever leaves my device, as Apple has repeatedly claimed, why should it matter to me?
China can have all the encrypted blobs of my data they want. I have to assume that unencrypted information has always been available to the CCP on request, even more readily than it is to US law enforcement.
> The question I'm then moved to ask is this: who cares [...]
Many care because Apple's motives and principles wrt privacy are often used as a reason to choose them. That they haven't stated publicly that they are complying but disagree (like they have in other instances) makes many wonder whether Apple is honest about their motives and principles. I understand the critical among us know it's all about the money, but others do want to know why Apple publicly states its beliefs in one case and not the other (again, not about compliance, just about public disagreement).
foreign entities are required to take on local partners for operations within China
This is not completely correct. Legally you can operate at least a joint venture (JV), a limited company (有限公司), or a representative or branch office for a foreign company (分公司 or 代理公司). When operating a limited company, they may be Wholly Foreign Owned Enterprises (WFOE, known as a "woofie"), also categorized as "foreign invested" (外资).
This is a good article, but the author goofs here:
> “Apple says the handover is due to new regulations that cloud servers must be operated by local corporation. But this is unconvincing. China’s Cybersecurity Law, which was implemented on June 1 2017, does demand that user information and data collected in mainland China be stored within the border. But it does not require that the data center be operated by a local corporation.”
It’s common knowledge that the more authoritarian the country, the bigger the disconnect between the law and the truth-on-the-ground. I think it’s very likely that a party organ spoke to Apple and made it plain that “hand it over, or you’re out”. Which still has plenty of troubling implications, but criticism focused on Apple going beyond the letter of the law is disingenuous: the letter of the law is nothing in China.
Yeah, it was so hard to diggest, the valley (M$) ate it and it came back to tell the tale.
Seriously, i know - free trade horray- and all that. But our politicians see WeeChat rise and shine- while all we got for opening our markets are outstanding taxes. (Not).
Not the best example of european "tech industry". Nokia failed horribly and pretty much went bankrupt and got bought up by MSFT.
Also, I wouldn't call nokia as part of the "internet industry".
Compared to the US and China, europe has performed rather poorly. Europe has hundreds of millions of more people than the US and yet lags far behind the US.
Where is europe's facebook, google, microsoft, amazon, netflix, etc? At least china has their baidu, alibaba, tencent, etc.
The most prominent tech company in europe is SAP and they are more of a software/database/etc company than an internet company.
Europe has to get its act together and get in the game.
1) Nokia is more than just their phone division. Might want to do a bit of research. That said their phone division is killing it right now.
2) Spotify, Soundcloud, Skype, Shazam, Deliveroo, King, Rovio etc. And there are hundreds of second tier internet sites looking at this list from 2013:
Soundcloud went bankrupt in real terms. Spotify is actively attempting to go bankrupt, given the extreme rate of red ink burn and their failure to produce a sustainable business (they're going to end up getting acquired, the licensing business will never produce profit margins).
Skype was sold off to two different US technology giants.
ARM was swallowed up by Japan.
King was eaten by a US company. As was Mojang.
These are all smaller success stories however. They're equivalent to fourth tier US successes, far below the second tier US companies like Adobe, Cisco, Texas Instruments, Airbnb, Priceline.com, Uber, etc.
The parent comment was correct. Europe nearly entirely missed the Internet/Web software business, the mobile software business, the cloud business, and now they're being left far behind in artificial intelligence (save for a few bright spots, such as in Britain, none of which has yielded commercial outcomes of large consequence).
Germany is almost single handedly keeping Europe competitive in the robotics field. And the largest tech company in Europe for the last decade, has been SAP.
Look at this list and compare it to companies like King and Soundcloud:
There's a double standard because the US and China have different standards. Apple has defended the rights of its users when it can. If Apple received a U.S. Supreme Court order to hand over user data, Apple would follow that order, even if Apple disagreed or felt it was unethical. Same for China. Apple's alternative is to leave China, a la Google. One can argue that leaving is the ethical choice. One can not argue effectively against a "double standard".
As for me, I'm happy that Apple will at least transparently defend user rights to the greatest of their ability in China, which would not be the case with Xiaomi or another local company that would fall over backwards to please the government.
The double standard is what they publicly state they believe in. You're talking about whether they have to comply or not with a US-based hypothetical. But they clearly published on their website what they believed in with regards to the US requests. Can you link the same for the Chinese policy?
> I'm happy that Apple will at least transparently defend user rights to the greatest of their ability in China
Why do you believe it is transparent? Can you link to something showing they "transparently defend user rights to the greatest of their ability in China"? Otherwise in the absence of being able to provide this transparent proof, will you admit it is not transparent?
Of course it does. I am unsure what that has to do with making your opinion clear, especially if you've shown yourself to be willing to make that opinion clear in other circumstances.
It’s because the apple-vs-fbi standoff is a calculated move by a collaboration between the US federal government and US companies to restore public faith in US products and services following Snowden’s revelations (including photos) that alerted non-US organizations that any hardware or services they receive from the US may well be backdoored or co-opted for US military or economic advantage.
It’s a false dichotomy. The government is helping Apple PR, following their fuck up that spilled the beans that they’re all spying together.
Big companies operate at the mercy of the government, in the US and China both. “state owned” is irrelevant when all the phones are tapped, as they are in the United States now.
Good point. Tie the whole china issue to LGBT rights and you might get some response. Of course, gay marriage is more noble thing than 1000 things more important.
Apple still sold in the US whilst the Trump administration withdrew from Paris climate accord. They also still sell in the Phillipines whilst Duarte is on his cleansing spree.
So apart from defending Apple's employees (DACA, LGBT etc) they don't really get let politics get in the way of business.
My take. This is a big win for Guizhou, one of China's poorest provinces. It is also a big win for Southwest China in general, which is developing rapidly as Chengdu and Kunming gain direct flights to Europe and Australia, and integrate road, rail and pipeline links to Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, and beyond.
Politically, as a nation China certainly has the right to self-governance and storing user data inside the country is not an unreasonable request.
The Hong Kong Free Press is probably well meaning - we'd all like more freedom and less government rules - but also may be more holistically perceived as a group with an axe to grind as Hong Kong is being forced to adapt to Chinese rule, journalism is under pressure the world over and Hong Kong's GDP was recently surpassed by Shenzhen, which three decades ago was a fishing village.
All of this cloud data will eventually be funneled into your social credit score ("Sesame Credit"). This is already happening. Chinese individuals are being ostracized from personal and professional relations because of their score.
China invented whuffie, but in the most dystopian and fascist way possible.
--
Edit with citations as requested. (I'm not asserting that this social pressure is universal or even common yet.)
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/age-of-social-credit/
She explained how to boost my score. “They will check what kind of friends you have,” she said. “If your friends are all high-score people, it’s good for you. If you have some bad-credit people as friends, it’s not nice.”
[1] https://theconversation.com/chinas-social-credit-system-puts...
“Since last December, the National Development and Reform Commission and Central Bank of China began to approve pilot plans to integrate big data with the Social Credit System. As one of China’s first pilot provinces, Guizhou province was selected to showcase a government-led experiment of a big data-empowered Social Credit System.”
Australia, for example now lowers your credit score if you pay bills late. But it doesn't (yet?) penalize you for who you associate with.
>Chinese individuals are being ostracized from personal and professional relations because of their score.
Citation needed. I live in China, and not a single person I know takes the Zhima Credit score even remotely seriously. It's treated like a joke, or at worst like one's astrological sign. Many older people I've met don't even know about it. Chinese people aren't stupid, they're not going to let some easily gamed virtual points influence their decisions.
Ditto (live in China, never heard of it being applied). Anyway, in the US you would have opaque bank and private industry credit agencies which are basically performing the same function. I believe the government priorities (political security, social stability, reduced corruption) are potentially a better starting point than private sector priorities (profit), even if (as is inevitable) they screw up the infosec side and people's data is easily accessible on the black market through thousands of government employees.
I've added citations to my parent comment. It's being rolled out further in Guizhou. I think it's a novel way to combat corruption, but the potential for overall social control is chilling. "Sorry, Mobike does not rent to dissidents."
What about US users who message with somebody in China? We just get caught up too? Yeah I realize we are all already screwed as far as privacy goes but giving personal messages to the Chinese government is another matter.
Could happen unknowingly when you send an iMessage to, say, a gmail address, which unlike a phone number offers no clue where the user is.
Well, at least with a GMail address you are safe, because there are no GMail servers in Mainland China, because Google doesn't operate in Mainland China. But your point stands for other, more cooperative, mail services.
The article gives a good reason to use open source technologies rather than proprietary "clouds" that do whatever they want with your data. Of course, Chinese government can try to ban Jabber/OTR but they won't be able to read the encrypted messages.
I really don't know how much of affect on privacy that this will have in practice. If iMessage is end to end encrypted and is FaceTime, will the Chinese government be able to see anything that they can't already see?
What's actually stored on iCloud by iOS that's sensitive besides those two things that people couldn't store in other places? App backups?
I'm assuming that the Chinese government already has access to everything that goes over any cellular network in China.
> “If you understand and agree, Apple and GCBD have the right to access your data stored on its servers. This includes permission sharing, exchange, and disclosure of all user data (including content) according to the application of the law.”
> In other words, once the agreement is signed, GCBD — a company solely owned by the state — would get a key that can access all iCloud user data in China, legally.
What user data will this decrypt? Are iMessage and FaceTime still safe?
117 comments
[ 163 ms ] story [ 2403 ms ] threadWhy is Apple submitting to all the demands of the Chinese government?
The perfect world where Apple tells China what to do doesn't exist. Ok. We know that.
Now what? Bail? Why? Stick around and play by the rules and play the game and maybe someday make 1% positive difference? Seems like the lesser of two evils to me.
So it’s not the lesser of two evils, it’s just participation in evil for profit.
Most of us do. We don't have much of a choice. We could choose to earn so little that we don't have to pay much or anything in taxes or move elsewhere but, well, we want to live better that or live in a specific area.
Furthermore, Apple has a responsibility to respect the choices of other people. If China had a democratically elected government that choose to intercept all communication crossing its borders, I think Apple would have a moral obligation to either respect that or not do business there. The present government is in power partly because the previous government was so bad that the peasants preferred the Communists, so you could even argue that the present government is there by the will of the people, in some limited sense. We can't just force other people to have our standard.
> Furthermore, Apple has a responsibility to respect the choices of other people. If China had a democratically elected government that choose to intercept all communication crossing its borders, I think Apple would have a moral obligation to either respect that or not do business there. The present government is in power partly because the previous government was so bad that the peasants preferred the Communists, so you could even argue that the present government is there by the will of the people, in some limited sense. We can't just force other people to have our standard.
I don't really disagree with this, but I'm not sure what it has to do with what I posted. Not doing business with a group of people because you disagree with how they want that business done is completely unrelated to "forcing other people to have our standard".
Yes.
> Why is Apple submitting to all the demands of the Chinese government?
China is Apple's second or first largest market, depending on the quarter.
I am not sure how you can know that. I am actually sure Apple would have lost some market but not much and there could have been stuff they could do to let it happen rather than now just giving up everything to any authoritarian government.
Maybe Apple could have gained some respect and then market share if they would have stood firm. With this new management, Apple has become just focused on business (income) not what they were known to be passionate about.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/042915/why-f...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China
Also twitter and Snapchat.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/mar/23/google-ch...
They have Android phones but no Google services on them. They do sell ads there but to companies targeting Chinese people outside of China.
That's very different than banning a famous, physical product.
The Chinese government doesn't play that respect game. Apple's stock holders also would never allow Apple to exit China without a huge hit (~50%) in their valuation. It isn't hard to see that Apple is stuck in China whether they are passionate about it or not.
I don't think ANY company can afford to leave China these days. Google only got away with it because they weren't making much on search in China.
The evidence certainly seems to suggest that China's government is willing to ban foreign tech companies for the benefit of the ruling party. Is there any evidence the Chinese government would hesitate to ban Apple if Apple undermined their authority?
I think there's a moral case for Apple refusing to serve China, but I think they would have to face the likely consequence that China would simply kick them out of the country.
Money, and continued market dominance.
> The Chinese state relies upon private enterprise to implement social credit and extend its tentacular reach. Top-tier concerns like Alibaba’s Alipay, Tencent, Baidu, the mobility-on-demand service Didi Chuxing, and the massively popular dating site Baihe either contribute significant elements of the system’s architecture or incorporate its rulings into their services.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/china...
I'm not at all arguing Apple is right to do this (in a moral sense. Certainly it's right in a purely financial sense); just that it's one small part of a much broader issue.
(EDIT: removed gratuitous complaint about clickbait headline; you guys have convinced me I was wrong. As long as I'm here, though, I really do recommend reading the Atlantic link above; it does a good job showing the context in which this is happening)
But I would be shocked if the other major players (Facebook, Google, etc) aren't also participating in this; it seems to be the price of entry if they want to continue doing business there.
Check out Operation Aurora.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/china/china-welcome
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-amazon-cloud/amazon...
https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/08/apple-fbi-unlock-texas-s...
And I believe their recent moves to weaken iOS security are related to this.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/oops-apple-has-seriously-weaken...
The China thing is related to this "move towards helping authorities", too. They're all connected. I don't know what or who convinced Tim Cook to give in and stop defending his customers' privacy against governments (at least compared to what was originally promised), but it's pretty clear that's what's happening here. I think we should expect more such moves from Apple in the future.
https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2018/01/16/icloud-i...
As for "but everyone's doing it" - come on, haven't we moved on from accepting such weak excuses? I thought Apple was a leader in the industry, paving the way for positive progress. Apple's mantra is "we challenge the status quo" and "we think different". Not "I guess we'll do whatever everyone else is doing."
If they keep this up, the answer to Simon Sinek's "WHY does Apple exist?" may soon become "We exist only to make money and nothing else", rather than inspire anyone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVnN4S52F3k
Many large tech companies are having to retrofit their systems to deal with the privacy laws of the EU.
Germany also is in a league of its own in terms of its privacy laws.
Either way I don’t think much of it matters because I think the intelligence community probably has ways even around the privacy laws.
The other errors they have had lately on the other hand do seem malicious, but I suspect either serious fuckups on engineer side, or people being paid/blackmailed by intelligence agencies to introduce backdoors.
FaceTime is mediated by a central service, iMessage is moving to cloud services, iCloud backup is focused on, while iTunes sync is deemphasized.
Perhaps I worded that poorly. I had hoped that saying "I am not at all arguing that Apple is right to do this" made clear that I didn't intend that as an "excuse"; rather as "context".
Nextel had the same issue when direct connect exploded and the police discovered it wasn’t tappable.
Every vendor folds.
This has to be an HN first. Any story of actual significance has folks screaming about clickbait like it’s surprising that publications try to get people to read them.
WSJ: "Why the iPhone Is Losing Out to Chinese Devices in Asia"
Google link: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Why%20the%20iPho...
[1]https://qz.com/1195908/apple-q1-2018-record-breaking-earning...
For China's whole smartphone market, 2015 saw 2% growth, 2016 was 11% growth, 2017 was negative 4%. It's likely their market has reached saturation. 2017 should have seen a big jump in sales due to a replacement cycle, given the near zero growth in 2015. Most of the domestic Chinese brands will die off soon, leaving three or so dominant players to go up against Samsung and Apple.
The question I'm then moved to ask is this: who cares, so long as the data is e2e encrypted?
This is about compliance, yes, but we can't ignore the political implications of this change.
Otherwise iCloud Keychain which houses credentials for non-Apple sites would be exposed. I can't imagine the likes of Facebook, Google, Amazon etc just sitting back and allowing Apple to compromise their sites in the name of Chinese expansion.
It would surely amount to the biggest security compromise in history if this was the case.
In my iCloud Keychain is the credentials for EVERY website that I have basically ever signed it into. It has credentials for internet banking, work email and VPN, AWS and Google Cloud etc. Just for me it is over 250 websites. It even stores SSH keypairs.
If the Chinese government had the ability to access those for all Chinese iCloud users (and roaming tourists ?) that would a seriously big deal.
I was addressing the "closed source software" aspect, because some level is trust is required in the server for key distribution regardless of source availability.
You can manage and operate a data centre without needing the keys to the HSM.
China can have all the encrypted blobs of my data they want. I have to assume that unencrypted information has always been available to the CCP on request, even more readily than it is to US law enforcement.
Many care because Apple's motives and principles wrt privacy are often used as a reason to choose them. That they haven't stated publicly that they are complying but disagree (like they have in other instances) makes many wonder whether Apple is honest about their motives and principles. I understand the critical among us know it's all about the money, but others do want to know why Apple publicly states its beliefs in one case and not the other (again, not about compliance, just about public disagreement).
This is not completely correct. Legally you can operate at least a joint venture (JV), a limited company (有限公司), or a representative or branch office for a foreign company (分公司 or 代理公司). When operating a limited company, they may be Wholly Foreign Owned Enterprises (WFOE, known as a "woofie"), also categorized as "foreign invested" (外资).
> “Apple says the handover is due to new regulations that cloud servers must be operated by local corporation. But this is unconvincing. China’s Cybersecurity Law, which was implemented on June 1 2017, does demand that user information and data collected in mainland China be stored within the border. But it does not require that the data center be operated by a local corporation.”
It’s common knowledge that the more authoritarian the country, the bigger the disconnect between the law and the truth-on-the-ground. I think it’s very likely that a party organ spoke to Apple and made it plain that “hand it over, or you’re out”. Which still has plenty of troubling implications, but criticism focused on Apple going beyond the letter of the law is disingenuous: the letter of the law is nothing in China.
Seriously, i know - free trade horray- and all that. But our politicians see WeeChat rise and shine- while all we got for opening our markets are outstanding taxes. (Not).
Also, I wouldn't call nokia as part of the "internet industry".
Compared to the US and China, europe has performed rather poorly. Europe has hundreds of millions of more people than the US and yet lags far behind the US.
Where is europe's facebook, google, microsoft, amazon, netflix, etc? At least china has their baidu, alibaba, tencent, etc.
The most prominent tech company in europe is SAP and they are more of a software/database/etc company than an internet company.
Europe has to get its act together and get in the game.
2) Spotify, Soundcloud, Skype, Shazam, Deliveroo, King, Rovio etc. And there are hundreds of second tier internet sites looking at this list from 2013:
http://tech.eu/features/186/ignorance-is-remiss/
Skype was sold off to two different US technology giants.
ARM was swallowed up by Japan.
King was eaten by a US company. As was Mojang.
These are all smaller success stories however. They're equivalent to fourth tier US successes, far below the second tier US companies like Adobe, Cisco, Texas Instruments, Airbnb, Priceline.com, Uber, etc.
The parent comment was correct. Europe nearly entirely missed the Internet/Web software business, the mobile software business, the cloud business, and now they're being left far behind in artificial intelligence (save for a few bright spots, such as in Britain, none of which has yielded commercial outcomes of large consequence).
Germany is almost single handedly keeping Europe competitive in the robotics field. And the largest tech company in Europe for the last decade, has been SAP.
Look at this list and compare it to companies like King and Soundcloud:
Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Intel, Cisco, Adobe, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Oracle, Activision Blizzard, Salesforce, Priceline, nVidia, Dell, IBM, VMWare, Texas Instruments, Micron, Analog Devices, Applied Materials, HP Inc, HP Enterprise, Intuit, Uber, Airbnb, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, eBay, PayPal, Stripe, Square, Workday, Western Digital, Electronic Arts, Palantir, AMD, Autodesk, Lam Research, ServiceNow, WeWork, Lyft, Dropbox, Splunk, Marvell Technology, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Microchip Technology Inc, NetApp, Juniper, Seagate, Symantec, VeriSign, Slack, Grubhub
And that's ignoring dozens of other companies in the US tech sector with market caps between $2 billion and $20 billion.
"Nokia smartphones were #3 in the UK for the quarter and in the Top 5 in Russia, Vietnam and most Middle Eastern markets"
As for me, I'm happy that Apple will at least transparently defend user rights to the greatest of their ability in China, which would not be the case with Xiaomi or another local company that would fall over backwards to please the government.
> I'm happy that Apple will at least transparently defend user rights to the greatest of their ability in China
Why do you believe it is transparent? Can you link to something showing they "transparently defend user rights to the greatest of their ability in China"? Otherwise in the absence of being able to provide this transparent proof, will you admit it is not transparent?
It’s a false dichotomy. The government is helping Apple PR, following their fuck up that spilled the beans that they’re all spying together.
Big companies operate at the mercy of the government, in the US and China both. “state owned” is irrelevant when all the phones are tapped, as they are in the United States now.
So apart from defending Apple's employees (DACA, LGBT etc) they don't really get let politics get in the way of business.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/11/14/china-end-conversion-the...
https://www.economist.com/news/china/21731405-quack-treatmen...
Politically, as a nation China certainly has the right to self-governance and storing user data inside the country is not an unreasonable request.
The Hong Kong Free Press is probably well meaning - we'd all like more freedom and less government rules - but also may be more holistically perceived as a group with an axe to grind as Hong Kong is being forced to adapt to Chinese rule, journalism is under pressure the world over and Hong Kong's GDP was recently surpassed by Shenzhen, which three decades ago was a fishing village.
Things are changing. This is just a phase.
China invented whuffie, but in the most dystopian and fascist way possible.
-- Edit with citations as requested. (I'm not asserting that this social pressure is universal or even common yet.)
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/age-of-social-credit/ She explained how to boost my score. “They will check what kind of friends you have,” she said. “If your friends are all high-score people, it’s good for you. If you have some bad-credit people as friends, it’s not nice.”
[1] https://theconversation.com/chinas-social-credit-system-puts... “Since last December, the National Development and Reform Commission and Central Bank of China began to approve pilot plans to integrate big data with the Social Credit System. As one of China’s first pilot provinces, Guizhou province was selected to showcase a government-led experiment of a big data-empowered Social Credit System.”
Australia, for example now lowers your credit score if you pay bills late. But it doesn't (yet?) penalize you for who you associate with.
Citation needed. I live in China, and not a single person I know takes the Zhima Credit score even remotely seriously. It's treated like a joke, or at worst like one's astrological sign. Many older people I've met don't even know about it. Chinese people aren't stupid, they're not going to let some easily gamed virtual points influence their decisions.
Could happen unknowingly when you send an iMessage to, say, a gmail address, which unlike a phone number offers no clue where the user is.
Gmail addresses can be used as Apple IDs, which means the iMessage messages travel inside Apple’s iCloud services.
What's actually stored on iCloud by iOS that's sensitive besides those two things that people couldn't store in other places? App backups?
I'm assuming that the Chinese government already has access to everything that goes over any cellular network in China.
> In other words, once the agreement is signed, GCBD — a company solely owned by the state — would get a key that can access all iCloud user data in China, legally.
What user data will this decrypt? Are iMessage and FaceTime still safe?