Facebook cancels its all-spying, secret "research" program, Apple cancels Facebook's developer account

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/30/beware-the-leopard-2.html

3 Likes

Almost as if they are working for the NSA.

9 Likes

So much for my future career as a prognosticator. Very interesting indeed.

I cannot wait for more info about how this plays out for both corporate monstrosities.

giphy

5 Likes

What I Want: A Thunderdome-esque final battle between Facebook and Apple.
What I’ll Get: A drawn-out series of long lawsuits that will most likely be settled behind closed doors.

7 Likes

Gathering data for “national security” was why Harold Finch invented Facebook in the first place.

5 Likes

Starting work on the MyCompany Screw You Over Royally App. Nothing secret, right?

3 Likes

Two things: one all Facebook’s denials are about framing and whether this relates to Onavo, not whether or not they violated the dev agreement because holy cow did they ever violate that sucker.

Second: Is there a number anywhere for how many people actually installed this thing? 100? 1000? 10,000? Am I the only kid at the party who doesn’t have it installed?

4 Likes

I’d just like to point out that this headline reads like Apple cancelled their account BECAUSE they cancelled the program, suggesting they colluded on the program. Just something to think about.

4 Likes

Move fast and break things, including agreements.

4 Likes

Apple didn’t just cancel the developer certificate that was being abused, they cancelled ALL of Facebook’s IOS enterprise certificates.

That means Facebook employees are not able to launch beta versions of the company’s consumer focused apps. They aren’t able to launch the company’s internal lunch menu app. Facebook’s employees are not having a fun time today.

This is about as severe a punishment as Apple can mete out without making hundreds of millions of customers angry by preventing them from loading the Facebook app.

12 Likes

This is 2019 Apple.

They probably cancelled it because they found out that they weren’t getting their share of the $20.

:wink:

3 Likes

Oh yes, I’m sure the teenagers read and understood the fine print. What assholes.

1 Like

Ah! Well then…

2 Likes

I kind of believe Facebook. If you tell people you will pay them some trivial amount of money, you are going to get lots and lots of people to sign up because they just don’t care about privacy.

So to paraphrase facebook’s denial:

There was no fight, somebody else hit her, she hit me first, it was with her consent.

2 Likes

The cascading failures would have been interesting to watch.

3 Likes

So it turns out Google had an app very similar to Facebook’s, which they were also distributing using their enterprise certificate.

Apple has now cancelled Google’s enterprise certificates as well.

Grumpy_cat_%2527good%2527

1 Like

What sucks about the cyberpunk dystopia is that there’s really nobody to cheer for.

Facebook and their ilk ought to be neutron purged with all due speed, of course, that’s not even a serious question at this point(unless you are advocating for the ‘crippling radiation poisoning would force us to carry them to the guillotine’ position; which has its points in favor of merely severe neutron purging); but it’s never heartwarming to see one of Apple’s demonstrations of the fact that, alas, the plucky cypherpunks were more wrong than they could have imagined and that strong cryptography is in fact the most dramatic tool in the arsenal of the platform vendor in the history of computing.

The prior history of proprietary connectors and obfuscated protocols spitefully broken whenever a 3rd party implementation seemed to be getting too close is a pitiful little toy problem compared to the sort of cryptographic imprimatur being wielded here.

Facebook deserves all that and more; but that doesn’t change the fact that everyone is subject to what Facebook is being punished with today; and should Mr. Cook wish it it would be them tomorrow.

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.