man, iâll bet this news really confuses cory, who hates appleâs walled garden âdictatorship,â but loves encryption⌠what to do, what to do.
Gee its almost like Cory can acknowledge when Appleâs doing something right, in addition to doing things wrong.
H[quote=âDrew_G, post:3, topic:72086, full:trueâ]
Gee its almost like Cory can acknowledge when Appleâs doing something right, in addition to doing things wrong.
[/quote]
[citation needed]
âŚBesides, Xeni posted this.
Letâs be fair, currency conversions and decimal places confuse Cory. 
Also, big corporate interests telling government what to do is totally fine as long as you agree with them.
Itâs good when you and only you have the crypto keys to your stuff.
Itâs bad when the corporation has the crypto keys to your stuff.
itâs especially bad when the corporation has the crypto keys to your stuff and refuses to give the to you, the owner (aka the walled garden, aka a prison with flowers).
Cook and Apple just want to sell more phones. Theyâll never have to deal with terrorism or nation security threats, not even from terrorists who use their encrypted devices to communicate and coordinate activitiesâŚwhich has occurred.
[citation needed]
Also, the worst murderers are governments, both directly by wars and indirectly by various policies. Terrorists are piddly amateurs in comparison, unworthy of any degree of actual fear.
Welcome to Boing Boing, and thank you for joining just to share your expertise on this important matter.
With governments, you donât have much a choice (Kang vs Kodos, if any). With corporations you sometimes have some options, especially in global settings; you have more chance getting at least a few of your interests fought for, and a powerful ally, even if in just a single cause, can be quite better than nothing. And you can (sometimes) vote with your money. With a government the elections are once per blue moon and the choices are often disturbingly similar; with Cisco vs Juniper (vs Huawei vs some other third party vs homebrew) or Samsung vs LG vs Xiaomi vs others, the âelectionâ is every purchase time and the results arenât winner-takes-all but a direct contribution to a more proportional, less unbalanced system.
So the corporations are at least a little motivated, sometimes, to kick for your interests.
So, Iâd say this one cause is fine with me. Lesser evil, etc. But itâs case by case and watch them carefully.
Wow. So democracy is a lost cause, and your alternative for getting my voice heard is to buy expensive Apple gameboy-phones so that I can threaten to stop buying them at some point, thus ensuring that Tim Cook will act in my interests.
Supposing I donât have the money to âvoteâ?
You have a pretty fucked up definition of âfineâ.
You work with the planet you got, not with the planet you want.
Donât let the corporation know. Make them hope, make them target you, compete for you with other ones.
Youâve got a pretty fucked up definition of âworkâ too, if you think buying/not buying/pretending to think about buying luxury electronics counts.
What happens if you want something that no corporation would want? Like, proportional representation?
It counts in some cases, not in all.
Then you are on your own.
You can take a ride when your and their interests collide. Itâs foolish to think it can be done in all cases, about as foolish as refusing the chance when it happens.
Possibly a silly question, but could the government not just order these companies to add a backdoor, and then put a gag order on them, so they canât tell anyone? (which I imagine would incur a very lengthy âset an exampleâ prison sentence for anybody that leaked it, as well as substantial company fines). Itâs not as if theyâve not gagged companies before.
Of course, Iâm sure that if they wanted to get a gag order in the open, Apple could hire somebody thatâs willing to take the prison sentence, in return for a REALLY well paid job, when theyâre released - itâs not as if Apple are short of money, and any fine would be a drop in the ocean for them.
So youâre âtaking a ride,â while Iâm ârefusing the chance,â is that correct? You might need to define those terms too because from where Iâm sitting it looks like weâre both doing roughly the same thing: Fuck all, while our decisions are made for us.
You too, you know. You shouldnât fool yourself with some token bullshit about consumer activism.
Doesnât fit my observation.
With companies, I have no choice. If I donât like one aspect of the product they are selling me, I have to do without the product (or buy an inferior product from a different company) in order to make them feel that Iâm not happy.
Thatâs like saying, if you donât like your government, move elsewhere. This is why a large part of the âplutocratic electorateâ will just pick the better product and not the company they prefer politically.
I might cheer for a company that happens to support my interests in the same way that a thousand years ago, I would have cheered for a feudal lord who supported my interests. I still prefer democracy, to both feudalism and plutocracy.
Yes, which is why some companies (including Apple) use âwarrant canariesâ. They include a line in their annual reports saying âwe have never been secretly told by the government to do Xâ, and then if that line disappears one year you know that they have been made to do X. Itâs an open question whether this works, and in what countries, because of course the government may be able to order them to lie about that too, and companies may or may not have the will / resources / wherewithal to fight that legally.
They actually donât do this with encryption backdoors, though, because itâs not hard for the internet community to find out how products work and whether they use either explicit backdoors or cryptographic algorithms (like Dual_EC) that are suspected to have been compromised. And of course, with mature products, it would be obvious and suspicious if their security arrangements suddenly changed in an otherwise inexplicable way.
True that. Or you can hack the missing feature in yourself, if it is easy enough.
Itâs easier to buy a different suboptimal choice of the suboptimal offers than to leave oneâs social networks and other investments and relocate.
Did the former, considered the latter enough to have an idea about the sacrifices, doesnât compare.
Thatâs a good comparison.
If you can find some, let me know.
Not at all. We are Arguing On The Internet. It must be a highly efficient, high-impact thing to do, given its prevalence and the Rational Actors assumption of economic theories.
