Wrong or painfully naive. Politics has to deal with realities. If the net wasn't engineered to be resistant to censorship, we probably wouldn't even be talking accross borders right now.
People need to hold the UK government responsible for its crimes against humanity. Until the AUMF and similiar policies across the Wetsern hemisphere which resulted in the utterly reprehensible "War on Terror", are rescinded and the crimes committed under their enactment fully prosecuted, the authoritarianism will continue.
Remember, people, these are WAR CRIMINALS driving these policies forward. To expect this class of individuals to adhere to democratic, western values, is naive in the extreme.
The same people who have no problem with genociding a million people in the middle east enemy-state-de-jour are not going to give one fig of care to the local human rights violations that they are also getting away with.
The West has a war criminal problem. Until we solve that we cannot do a damn thing about our human rights problem.
> Otherwise, please make sure you de-Apple, de-Google, and de-American Stack yourself when you have time, clarity, and focus to do it. Start today.
I don't understand the core of this advice. So if you're in the UK and do all the above, can you suddenly get similar E2EE cloud storage from a different provider without a UK government-mandated backdoor?
It seems like the real solution is de-UK'ing, a wise move for a number of reasons. Move to the continent, to Ireland, or the US (or Australia for that classic British expat experience), but leave the sinking ship. Ideally the time to leave was when the passport was still in the EU, but now is better than never.
Of the major consumer tech companies, isn't Apple still the leader in terms of privacy? (yes, that's a low bar)
And, it's just ADP being affected by the UK mandates? What % of users bother enabling ADP? I probably should, but haven't bothered (am I being foolish?).
> You need to start that because, as we recently learned, at some point in the very near future Apple is withdrawing its Advanced Data Protection (ADP) feature from the UK altogether as a result of the Home Office TCN through the Investigatory Powers Act.
So, a UK-only advice, and it strangely assumes that any other service in UK wouldn’t be bound by the same laws.
Just to clarify, she's advocating people stop using Apple, quite literally the only big tech company with a slightly better focus on privacy compared to all the others and with a reputation for saying no to the latest authoritarian power grab by the UK government?
Ok, I was going to ask, but taking "yes, that one" seriously I suppose confirms the author is the actress Heather Burns best known for playing the best friend role in a string of successful romantic comedies.
The very Wikipedia page you link explains in great detail why, although we can never know for sure, it's actually unlikely that he committed suicide, and more likely that his death was an accident.
The suicide story will probably never go away, because it's too good a story. It fits so neatly into popular culture.
IMHO Apple is actually being honest here. They cannot legally operate in the UK without providing a back door, so they are dropping the claim of ADP in the UK. This is letting the user know what's up, and might also help inspire a backlash against these laws. Apple needs to make it clear that they are being forced by UK law to degrade service.
Corporations can't really resist governments unless they're not operating in a given government's jurisdiction and therefore have nothing to lose. They can take things to court, but in lieu of a verdict or an injunction they have to comply with the law or they can be fined, have assets frozen, be de-banked or banned from processing payments, etc.
I'm sure there's services out there that will secretly comply and still claim to be secure.
There's also a lot of companies that will simply abandon security features like ADP or never develop them. Apple is going to the trouble of disabling it only for UK people not everyone, instead of just deprecating it. The latter would be less expensive and expose them to less legal risk.
If you really want security in the UK now you have to roll your own and do the encryption yourself. Honestly that's always the best security, since you can never be 100% sure a closed cloud or software vendor isn't messing with you.
> Corporations can't really resist governments unless they're not operating in a given government's jurisdiction and therefore have nothing to lose. They can take things to court, but in lieu of a verdict or an injunction they have to comply with the law or they can be fined, have assets frozen, be de-banked or banned from processing payments, etc.
It is also maybe a good thing? Corporations should not be stewards of our rights, we do not want to be governed by tech-barons.
The problem here lies clearly in UK's laws and government and they cannot be fixed by Apple. The West in general is in this crumbling state, where we take corrupt bastards chewing off our rights for a law of nature, instead of getting furious. France is the only western country where people dare to really protest.
De-appling is easy. I just don't have anything from them. Apart from the work laptop, but that is a problem for my employer, not me.
De-googling however is extremely hard. I have been slowly chipping away at it, but there are things I just have no decent option to (such as Waze and Android Auto).
Android itself is another problem. I have high hopes for a Graphene device.
It's unfortunate that gross government overreach and corporate cooperation with it is what it takes for people to even recognize the concept of data privacy and data ownership is a thing, much less that they should do something about it and that their data is and never was "safe" in the cloud, no matter which corporate overlords walled garden you called home. Apple has never been an exception to this rule.
85 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 81.1 ms ] threadSo nu, it makes no sense to blame Apple here.
Remember, people, these are WAR CRIMINALS driving these policies forward. To expect this class of individuals to adhere to democratic, western values, is naive in the extreme.
The same people who have no problem with genociding a million people in the middle east enemy-state-de-jour are not going to give one fig of care to the local human rights violations that they are also getting away with.
The West has a war criminal problem. Until we solve that we cannot do a damn thing about our human rights problem.
> Otherwise, please make sure you de-Apple, de-Google, and de-American Stack yourself when you have time, clarity, and focus to do it. Start today.
I don't understand the core of this advice. So if you're in the UK and do all the above, can you suddenly get similar E2EE cloud storage from a different provider without a UK government-mandated backdoor?
And, it's just ADP being affected by the UK mandates? What % of users bother enabling ADP? I probably should, but haven't bothered (am I being foolish?).
So, a UK-only advice, and it strangely assumes that any other service in UK wouldn’t be bound by the same laws.
Ok, I was going to ask, but taking "yes, that one" seriously I suppose confirms the author is the actress Heather Burns best known for playing the best friend role in a string of successful romantic comedies.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0122688/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heather_Burns
Kind of weird to be reading some blog post about tech privacy from such a well known actress.
Am I missing something?
? Who is this person?
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that margin-right is causing some of the content to move too far to the right and gets hidden in `.entry-content`
> Header image by me: Alan Turing memorial, Manchester, where he reminds you why keeping data private can be a matter of life and death.
The image shows a close up of a statue of Alan Turing, his hand holding an apple.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Death
The suicide story will probably never go away, because it's too good a story. It fits so neatly into popular culture.
Corporations can't really resist governments unless they're not operating in a given government's jurisdiction and therefore have nothing to lose. They can take things to court, but in lieu of a verdict or an injunction they have to comply with the law or they can be fined, have assets frozen, be de-banked or banned from processing payments, etc.
I'm sure there's services out there that will secretly comply and still claim to be secure.
There's also a lot of companies that will simply abandon security features like ADP or never develop them. Apple is going to the trouble of disabling it only for UK people not everyone, instead of just deprecating it. The latter would be less expensive and expose them to less legal risk.
If you really want security in the UK now you have to roll your own and do the encryption yourself. Honestly that's always the best security, since you can never be 100% sure a closed cloud or software vendor isn't messing with you.
It is also maybe a good thing? Corporations should not be stewards of our rights, we do not want to be governed by tech-barons.
The problem here lies clearly in UK's laws and government and they cannot be fixed by Apple. The West in general is in this crumbling state, where we take corrupt bastards chewing off our rights for a law of nature, instead of getting furious. France is the only western country where people dare to really protest.
De-googling however is extremely hard. I have been slowly chipping away at it, but there are things I just have no decent option to (such as Waze and Android Auto).
Android itself is another problem. I have high hopes for a Graphene device.
Extremely interesting.
Always have been.
It's unfortunate that gross government overreach and corporate cooperation with it is what it takes for people to even recognize the concept of data privacy and data ownership is a thing, much less that they should do something about it and that their data is and never was "safe" in the cloud, no matter which corporate overlords walled garden you called home. Apple has never been an exception to this rule.