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- Description Secret Government is a grand strategy game about a secret society. Remaining unseen, they have been ruling mankind for hundreds of years. Your role will not be just to lead a particular country or region, but the Brotherhood — a centuries-old organization that works in.
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It was a gray day in late 2005. I was sitting at my desk, writing code for the next year’s iPod. Without knocking, the director of iPod Software—my boss’s boss—abruptly entered and closed the door behind him. He cut to the chase. “I have a special assignment for you. Your boss doesn’t know about it. You’ll help two engineers from the US Department of Energy build a special iPod. Report only to me.”
The next day, the receptionist called to tell me that two men were waiting in the lobby. I went downstairs to meet Paul and Matthew, the engineers who would actually build this custom iPod. I’d love to say they wore dark glasses and trench coats and were glancing in window reflections to make sure they hadn’t been tailed, but they were perfectly normal thirty-something engineers. I signed them in, and we went to a conference room to talk.
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They didn’t actually work for the Department of Energy; they worked for a division of Bechtel, a large US defense contractor to the Department of Energy. They wanted to add some custom hardware to an iPod and record data from this custom hardware to the iPod’s disk in a way that couldn’t be easily detected. But it still had to look and work like a normal iPod.
They’d do all the work. My job was to provide any help they needed from Apple.
I learned that an official at the Department of Energy had contacted Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware, requesting the company’s help in making custom modified iPods. The senior VP passed the request down to the vice president of the iPod Division, who delegated it to the director of iPod Software, who came to see me. My boss was told I was working on a special project and not to ask questions.
Background
I was the second software engineer hired for the iPod project when it started in 2001. Apple Marketing hadn’t yet come up with the name iPod; the product was known by the code name P68. The first software engineer later became the director of iPod Software, the guy who gave me this special assignment. I wrote the iPod’s file system and later the SQLite database that tracked all the songs. Over time, I worked on almost every part of the iPod software, except the audio codecs that converted MP3 and AAC files into audio.
(Those audio codecs were written by two engineers with advanced degrees from Berkeley and Stanford. When they weren’t teasing each other about which school was better, they were writing mathematical audio code that I was scared to touch. You would no more let a regular engineer mess with code like that than you’d let a bike mechanic rebuild the transmission in a Porsche. They had an occasional poker game I played in. The only reason I didn’t lose all my money was that one of them enjoyed his vodka.)
Compiling the iPod operating system from source code, loading it onto an iPod, and testing and debugging it was a fairly complex process. When a new engineer started, we typically gave them a week to learn all this before we assigned them any actual tasks.
The iPod operating system wasn’t based on another Apple operating system like Classic Mac OS or Darwin, the underlying Unix core of macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and tvOS. The original iPod hardware was based on a reference platform Apple bought from a company called Portal Player. Portal Player had also provided the lower levels of the iPod OS, including power management, disk drivers, and the realtime kernel (which Portal Player had licensed from another company called Quadros). Apple bought the higher levels of the iPod OS from Pixo, a company started a few years earlier by ex-Apple engineers trying to write a general-purpose cell phone operating system to sell to mobile phone companies like Nokia and Ericsson. Pixo code handled the user interface, Unicode text handling (important for localization), memory management, and event processing. Of course, Apple engineers modified all this code, and over time, rewrote much of it.
iPod OS was written in C++. Since it didn’t support third-party apps, there was no external documentation on how it worked.
Finally, the iPod team developed on Windows computers. Apple didn’t have working ARM developer tools yet, because this was before the iPhone shipped. The iPod team used ARM developer tools from ARM Ltd., which ran only on Windows and Linux.
My job was to get Paul and Matthew up and running on a new operating system they’d never seen before, much less developed for.
Getting Started
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I requisitioned an empty office for Paul and Matthew in our building. I had IS&T (Apple’s IT department) reroute the Ethernet drops in that office so they connected only to the public Internet, outside Apple’s firewall, preventing them from accessing Apple’s internal network. Apple’s Wi-Fi network always connects outside the firewall. Even inside Apple buildings, if you’re using Wi-Fi, you need a VPN to get past Apple’s firewall. This wasn’t a collaboration with Bechtel with a contract and payment; it was Apple doing a favor under the table for the Department of Energy. But access for that favor went only so far.
Needless to say, Paul and Matthew weren’t allowed to access our source code server directly. Instead, I gave them a copy of the current source code on a DVD and explained it couldn’t leave the building. Ultimately, they were allowed to keep the modified copy of the iPod OS they built, but not the source code for it.
Apple didn’t provide them any hardware or software tools. I gave them the specs for the Windows computers they needed, along with the ARM compiler and JTAG debugger. They bought retail iPods to work on, several dozen at least, possibly many more.
As with all Apple buildings, everyone had to present an Apple badge to the badge reader to unlock the door and enter the iPod building. Only employees cleared for our building were allowed in. On each floor, there was another locked door and badge reader, and only people cleared for that floor were allowed in.
So every day, Paul and Matthew called me from the lobby since they didn’t have Apple badges. I signed them in as guests and escorted them to their office. Eventually, I arranged to get them vendor badges, as if they were selling Apple coffee or memory chips, so I didn’t have to sign them in daily. I was a programmer, not a babysitter.
Top Men
Paul and Matthew were smart—top men, even—and with a little help, they were up and running pretty quickly. I showed them how to set up the development tools, build a copy of the operating system from source, and load it into the iPod. We made some temporary changes to the user interface, so we could see that their build was actually running. I showed them how to use the JTAG hardware debugger, which was rather finicky. They dove into their work.
As they learned their way around the system, they explained what they wanted to do, at least in broad strokes. They had added special hardware to the iPod, which generated data they wanted to record secretly. They were careful to make sure I never saw the hardware, and I never did.
We discussed the best way to hide the data they recorded. As a disk engineer, I suggested they make another partition on the disk to store their data. That way, even if someone plugged the modified iPod into a Mac or PC, iTunes would treat it as a normal iPod, and it would look like a normal iPod in the Mac Finder or Windows Explorer. They liked that, and a hidden partition it was.
Next, they wanted a simple way to start and stop recording. We picked the deepest preferences menu path and added an innocuous-sounding menu to the end. I helped them hook this up inside the code, which was rather non-obvious. In all other respects, the device functioned as a normal iPod.
At the time, the latest iPod was the fifth-generation iPod, better known as the “iPod with video.” It was relatively easy to pop open the case and close it again without leaving obvious marks, unlike the iPod nano models that became popular shortly after. Plus, the fifth-generation iPod had a 60 GB disk, so there was plenty of room to have lots of songs and still record extra data. And it was the last iPod for which Apple didn’t digitally sign the operating system.
That was important because it made the fifth-generation iPod somewhat hackable. Hobbyists enjoyed getting Linux to run on iPods, which was hard to do without the special knowledge and tools Apple possessed. We on the iPod engineering team were impressed. But Apple corporate didn’t like it. Starting with the iPod nano, the operating system was signed with a digital signature to block the Linux hackers (and others). The boot ROM checked the digital signature before loading the operating system; if it didn’t match, it wouldn’t boot.
I don’t think Paul and Matthew ever asked Apple about signing their custom operating system build so it would run on the iPod nano. I’m pretty sure Apple would have refused. The larger fifth-generation iPod was better suited to their purposes anyway.
After a few months of on-again, off-again work in their requisitioned office, Paul and Matthew finished integrating their custom hardware into the iPod and wrapped up the project. They moved their computers and debugging hardware back to Bechtel’s office in Santa Barbara. They returned the latest DVD with Apple source code to me, along with their Apple vendor badges. They said goodbye, and I never saw them again. The DVD sat on a shelf in my office for years, until I finally tossed it while cleaning up. Jumper (pepperoni_pizza55554) mac os.
What Were They Doing?
The Department of Energy is huge. Its 2005 budget was $24.3 billion. It’s responsible for the US nuclear weapons and nuclear power programs, including the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which was part of the Manhattan Project. As the DOE’s budget request says:
The FY 2005 budget proposes $9.0 billion to meet defense-related objectives. The budget request maintains commitments to the nuclear deterrence requirements of the Administration’s Nuclear Posture Review and continues to fund an aggressive strategy to mitigate the threat of weapons of mass destruction.
My guess is that Paul and Matthew were building something like a stealth Geiger counter. Something that DOE agents could use without furtively hiding it. Something that looked innocuous, that played music, and functioned exactly like a normal iPod. You could walk around a city, casually listening to your tunes, while recording evidence of radioactivity—scanning for smuggled or stolen uranium, for instance, or evidence of a dirty bomb development program—with no chance that the press or public would get wind of what was happening. Like all other electronic gadgets, Geiger counters have gotten smaller and cheaper, and I was amused to run across the Radiation Alert Monitor 200, which looks an awful lot like a classic iPod.
Whenever I asked Paul and Matthew what they were building, they changed the subject and started arguing about where to go for lunch. Standard geeks.
The Custom iPod That Never Existed
Only four people at Apple knew about this secret project. Me, the director of iPod Software, the vice president of the iPod Division, and the senior vice president of Hardware. None of us still work at Apple. There was no paper trail. All communication was in person.
If you asked Apple about the custom iPod project and got past the stock “No comment,” the PR people would tell you honestly that Apple has no record of any such project.
But now you know.
If you know of an example that ought to be in this page but isn'there, please writeto <[email protected]>to inform us. Please include the URL of a trustworthy reference or twoto serve as specific substantiation.
Types of Apple malware
Back Doors
- 2019-07Apple appears to say that there is a back door in MacOS for automatically updating some (all?) apps.The specific change described in the article was not malicious—it protected users from surveillance by third parties—but that is a separate question.
- 2016-07The Dropbox app for Macintosh takes control of user interface items after luring the user into entering an admin password.
- 2015-04Mac OS X had an intentional local back door for 4 years, which could be exploited by attackers to gain root privileges.
- 2010-11The iPhone has a back door for remote wipe. It's not always enabled, but users are led into enabling it without understanding.
- 2008-08The iPhone has a back door that allows Apple to remotely delete apps which Apple considers “inappropriate”. Jobs said it's OK for Apple to have this power because of course we can trust Apple.
![Mac Mac](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/7e10c1b33dca10cfbc776d515a3b0a095573ee5e/0_156_4323_2593/master/4323.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctYWdlLTIwMTcucG5n&s=00565b9a9ea892e35b9150dba2e1ba77)
Censorship
Apple mainly uses iOS, which is a typical jail, to impose censorshipthrough the Apple Store. Please refer to the Apple Jailssection for more information.
DRM
Digital restrictions management, or “DRM,” refers tofunctionalities designed to restrict what users can do with the datain their computers.
- 2019-08Apple is putting DRM on iPhone batteries, and the system proprietary software turns off certain features when batteries are replaced other than by Apple.
- 2017-04DRM makes the iPhone 7 nearly unrepairable by anyone else but Apple.
- 2015-12Apple uses DRM software to prevent people from charging an iThing with a generic USB cable.
- 2008-11DRM (digital restrictions mechanisms) in MacOS. This article focuses on the fact that a new model of Macbook introduced a requirement for monitors to have malicious hardware, but DRM software in MacOS is involved in activating the hardware. The software for accessing iTunes is also responsible.
- 2007-08DRM that caters to Bluray disks. (The article focused on Windows and said that MacOS would do the same thing subsequently.)
- 2007-03iTunes videos have DRM, which allows Apple to dictate where its customers can watch the videos they purchased.
Incompatibility
In this section, we list characteristics of Apple programs that block orhinder users from switching to any alternative program—and, inparticular, from switching to free software which can liberate the devicethe software runs on.
- 2018-03In MacOS and iOS, the procedure for converting images from the Photos format to a free format is so tedious and time-consuming that users just give up if they have a lot of them.
- 2018-02Apple devices lock users in solely to Apple services by being designed to be incompatible with all other options, ethical or unethical.
- 2016-05iWork (office software that runs on MacOS, iOS and iCloud) uses secret formats and provides no means of converting them to or from Open Document Formats. iWork formats have changed several times since they were first introduced. This may have had the effect of thwarting reverse engineering efforts, thus preventing free software from fully supporting them.iWork formats are considered unfit for document preservation.
Insecurity
These bugs are/were not intentional, so unlike the rest of the file they do not count as malware. We mention them to refute the supposition that prestigious proprietary software doesn't have grave bugs.
- 2020-12Commercial crackware can get passwords out of an iMonster, use the microphone and camera, and other things.
- 2020-11Apple has implemented a malware in its computers that imposes surveillance on users and reports users' computing to Apple.The reports are even unencrypted and they've been leaking this data for two years already. This malware is reporting to Apple what user opens what program at what time. It also gives Apple power to sabotage users' computing.
- 2019-08A series of vulnerabilities found in iOS allowed attackers to gain access to sensitive information including private messages, passwords, photos and contacts stored on the user's iMonster.The deep insecurity of iMonsters is even more pertinent given that Apple's proprietary software makes users totally dependent on Apple for even a modicum of security. It also means that the devices do not even try to offer security against Apple itself.
- 2016-07A vulnerability in Apple's Image I/O API allowed an attacker to execute malicious code from any application which uses this API to render a certain kind of image file.
- 2016-04A bug in the iThings Messages app allowed a malicious web site to extract all the user's messaging history.
- 2013-11The NSA can tap data in smart phones, including iPhones, Android, and BlackBerry. While there is not much detail here, it seems that this does not operate via the universal back door that we know nearly all portable phones have. It may involve exploiting various bugs. There are lots of bugs in the phones' radio software.
Interference
Various proprietary programs often mess up the user's system. They are like sabotage, but they are not grave enough to qualify for the word “sabotage”. Nonetheless, they are nasty and wrong. This section describes examples of Apple committing interference.
- 2019-08Apple is putting DRM on iPhone batteries, and the system proprietary software turns off certain features when batteries are replaced other than by Apple.
Jails
Jails are systems that impose censorship on application programs.
- 2019-04Apple plans to require that all application software for MacOS be approved by Apple first.Offering a checking service as an option could be useful and would not be wrong. Requiring users to get Apple's approval is tyranny. Apple says the check will only look for malware (not counting the malware that is part of the operating system), but Apple could change that policy step by step. Or perhaps Apple will define malware to include any app that China does not like.For free software, this means users will need to get Apple's approval after compilation. This amounts to a system of surveilling the use of free programs.
- 2008-03iOS, the operating system of the Apple iThings, is the prototype of a jail. It was Apple that introduced the practice of designing general purpose computers with censorship of application programs.Here is an article about the code signing that the iThings use to lock up the user.Curiously, Apple is beginning to allow limited passage through the walls of the iThing jail: users can now install apps built from source code, provided the source code is written in Swift. Users cannot do this freely because they are required to identify themselves. Here are details. While this is a crack in the prison walls, it is not big enough to mean that the iThings are no longer jails.
Examples of censorship by Apple jails
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- 2020-08Apple is putting the squeeze on all business conducted through apps for iMonsters.This is a symptom of a very big injustice: that Apple has the power to decide what software can be installed on an iMonster. That it is a jail.
- 2019-10Apple has banned the app that Hong Kong protesters use to communicate.Obeying the “local laws” about what people can do with software is no excuse for censoring what software people can use.
- 2019-10Apple censors the Taiwan flag in iOS on behalf of the Chinese government. When the region is set to Hong Kong, this flag is not visible in the emoji selection widget but is still accessible. When the region is set to mainland China, all attempts to display it will result in the “empty emoji” icon as if the flag never existed.Thus, not only does Apple use the App Store as an instrument of censorship, it also uses the iThing operating system for that purpose.
- 2019-05Users caught in the jail of an iMonster are sitting ducks for other attackers, and the app censorship prevents security companies from figuring out how those attacks work.Apple's censorship of apps is fundamentally unjust, and would be inexcusable even if it didn't lead to security threats as well.
- 2017-10Apple is censoring apps for the US government too. Specifically, it is deleting apps developed by Iranians.The root of these wrongs is in Apple. If Apple had not designed the iMonsters to let Apple censor applications, Apple would not have had the power to stop users from installing whatever kind of apps.
- 2017-07Apple deleted several VPNs from its app store for China, thus using its own censorship power to strengthen that of the Chinese government.
- 2017-01Apple used its censorship system to enforce Russian surveillance by blocking distribution of the LinkedIn app in Russia.This is ironic because LinkedIn is a surveillance system itself. While subjecting its users to its own surveillance, it tries to protect its users from Russian surveillance, and is therefore subject to Russian censorship.However, the point here is the wrong of Apple's censorship of apps.
- 2017-01Apple used its censorship system to enforce China's censorship by blocking distribution of the New York Times app.
- 2016-05Apple censors games, banning some games from the cr…app store because of which political points they suggest. Some political points are apparently considered acceptable.
- 2015-09Apple banned a program from the App Store because its developers committed the enormity of disassembling some iThings.
- 2015-09As of 2015, Apple systematically bans apps that endorse abortion rights or would help women find abortions.This particular political slant affects other Apple services.
- 2015-06Apple has banned iThing applications that show the confederate flag. Not only those that use it as a symbol of racism, but even strategic games that use it to represent confederate army units fighting in the Civil War.This ludicrous rigidity illustrates the point that Apple should not be allowed to censor apps. Even if Apple carried out this act of censorship with some care, it would still be wrong. Whether racism is bad, whether educating people about drone attacks is bad, are not the real issue. Apple should not have the power to impose its views about either of these questions, or any other.
- 2014-12More examples of Apple's arbitrary and inconsistent censorship.
- 2014-05Apple used this censorship power in 2014 to ban all bitcoin apps for the iThings for a time. It also banned a game about growing marijuana, while permitting games about other crimes such as killing people. Perhaps Apple considers killing more acceptable than marijuana.
- 2014-02Apple rejected an app that displayed the locations of US drone assassinations, giving various excuses. Each time the developers fixed one “problem”, Apple complained about another. After the fifth rejection, Apple admitted it was censoring the app based on the subject matter.
Manipulation
- 2013-08“Dark patterns” are user interfaces designed to mislead users, or make option settings hard to find.This allows a company such as Apple to say, “We allow users to turn this off” while ensuring that few will understand how to actually turn it off.
Pressuring
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Proprietary companies can take advantage of their customers by imposing arbitrary limits to their use of the software. This section reports examples of hard sell and other unjust commercial tactics by Apple.
- 2015-10Apple Siri refuses to give you information about music charts if you're not an Apple Music subscriber.
Sabotage
These are situations in which Apple employs its power over usersto directly intervene in ways that harm them or block their work.
- 2019-08When Apple suspects a user of fraud, it judges the case secretly and presents the verdict as a fait accompli. The punishment to a user found guilty is being cut off for life, which more-or-less cripples the user's Apple devices forever. There is no appeal.
- 2018-10Apple and Samsung deliberately degrade the performance of older phones to force users to buy their newer phones.
- 2018-05Apple has blocked Telegram from upgrading its app for a month.This evidently has to do with Russia's command to Apple to block Telegram in Russia.The Telegram client is free software on other platforms, but not on iThings. Since they are jails, they don't permit any app to be free software.
- 2017-10MacOS High Sierra forcibly reformats SSD boot drives, and changes the file system from HFS+ to APFS, which cannot be accessed from GNU/Linux, Windows or even older versions of MacOS.
- 2017-06Apple will stop fixing bugs for older model iThings.Meanwhile, Apple stops people from fixing problems themselves; that's the nature of proprietary software.
- 2017-04The iPhone 7 contains DRM specifically designed to brick it if an “unauthorized” repair shop fixes it. “Unauthorized” essentially means anyone besides Apple.(The article uses the term “lock” to describe the DRM, but we prefer to use the term digital handcuffs.)
- 2016-06Apple stops users from fixing the security bugs in Quicktime for Windows, while refusing to fix them itself.
- 2016-05The Apple Music client program scans the user's file system for music files, copies them to an Apple server, and deletes them.
- 2016-02iOS version 9 for iThings sabotages them irreparably if they were repaired by someone other than Apple. Apple eventually backed off from this policy under criticism from the users. However, it has not acknowledged that this was wrong.
- 2015-10Apple forced millions of iThings to download a system upgrade without asking the users. Apple did not forcibly install the upgrade but the downloading alone caused lots of trouble.
- 2014-12Apple deleted from iPods the music that users had got from internet music stores that competed with iTunes.
- 2007-09An Apple firmware “upgrade” bricked iPhones that had been unlocked. The “upgrade” also deactivated applications not approved by Apple censorship. All this was apparently intentional.
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Subscriptions
- 2020-08Apple can remotely cut off any developer's access to the tools for developing software for iOS or MacOS.Epic (Apple's target in this example) makes nonfree games which have their own malicious features, but that doesn't make it acceptable for Apple to have this sort of power.
Surveillance
- 2020-04Apple whistleblower Thomas Le Bonniec reports that Apple made a practice of surreptitiously activating the Siri software to record users' conversations when they had not activated Siri. This was not just occasional, it was systematic practice.His job was to listen to these recordings, in a group that made transcripts of them. He does not believes that Apple has ceased this practice.The only reliable way to prevent this is, for the program that controls access to the microphone to decide when the user has “activated” any service, to be free software, and the operating system under it free as well. This way, users could make sure Apple can't listen to them.
- 2019-10Safari occasionally sends browsing data from Apple devices in China to the Tencent Safe Browsing service, to check URLs that possibly correspond to “fraudulent” websites. Since Tencent collaborates with the Chinese government, its Safe Browsing black list most certainly contains the websites of political opponents. By linking the requests originating from single IP addresses, the government can identify dissenters in China and Hong Kong, thus endangering their lives.
- 2019-10The Chinese Communist Party's “Study the Great Nation” app requires users to grant it access to the phone's microphone, photos, text messages, contacts, and internet history, and the Android version was found to contain a back-door allowing developers to run any code they wish in the users' phone, as “superusers.” Downloading and using this app is mandatory at some workplaces.Note: The Washington Post version of the article (partly obfuscated, but readable after copy-pasting in a text editor) includes a clarification saying that the tests were only performed on the Android version of the app, and that, according to Apple, “this kind of ‘superuser’ surveillance could not be conducted on Apple's operating system.”
- 2019-05In spite of Apple's supposed commitment to privacy, iPhone apps contain trackers that are busy at night sending users' personal information to third parties.The article mentions specific examples: Microsoft OneDrive, Intuit's Mint, Nike, Spotify, The Washington Post, The Weather Channel (owned by IBM), the crime-alert service Citizen, Yelp and DoorDash. But it is likely that most nonfree apps contain trackers. Some of these send personally identifying data such as phone fingerprint, exact location, email address, phone number or even delivery address (in the case of DoorDash). Once this information is collected by the company, there is no telling what it will be used for.
- 2018-09Adware Doctor, an ad blocker for MacOS, reports the user's browsing history.
- 2017-11The DMCA and the EU Copyright Directive make it illegal to study how iOS cr…apps spy on users, because this would require circumventing the iOS DRM.
- 2017-09In the latest iThings system, “turning off” WiFi and Bluetooth the obvious way doesn't really turn them off. A more advanced way really does turn them off—only until 5am. That's Apple for you—“We know you want to be spied on”.
- 2017-02Apple proposes a fingerprint-scanning touch screen—which would mean no way to use it without having your fingerprints taken. Users would have no way to tell whether the phone is snooping on them.
- 2016-11iPhones send lots of personal data to Apple's servers. Big Brother can get them from there.
- 2016-09The iMessage app on iThings tells a server every phone number that the user types into it; the server records these numbers for at least 30 days.
- 2015-09iThings automatically upload to Apple's servers all the photos and videos they make.iCloud Photo Library stores every photo and video you take, and keeps them up to date on all your devices. Any edits you make are automatically updated everywhere. […]The adventures of dash mac os. (From Apple's iCloud information as accessed on 24 Sep 2015.) The iCloud feature is activated by the startup of iOS. The term “cloud” means “please don't ask where.”There is a way to deactivate iCloud, but it's active by default so it still counts as a surveillance functionality.Unknown people apparently took advantage of this to get nude photos of many celebrities. They needed to break Apple's security to get at them, but NSA can access any of them through PRISM.
- 2014-11Apple has made various MacOS programs send files to Apple servers without asking permission. This exposes the files to Big Brother and perhaps to other snoops.It also demonstrates how you can't trust proprietary software, because even if today's version doesn't have a malicious functionality, tomorrow's version might add it. The developer won't remove the malfeature unless many users push back hard, and the users can't remove it themselves.
- 2014-10MacOS automatically sends to Apple servers unsaved documents being edited. The things you have not decided to save are even more sensitive than the things you have stored in files.
- 2014-10Apple admits the spying in a search facility, but there's a lot more snooping that Apple has not talked about.
- 2014-10Various operations in the latest MacOS send reports to Apple servers.
- 2014-09Apple can, and regularly does, remotely extract some data from iPhones for the state.Extra extra (sidiq2761) mac os. This may have improved with iOS 8 security improvements; but not as much as Apple claims.
- 2014-07Several “features” of iOS seem to exist for no possible purpose other than surveillance. Here is the Technical presentation.
- 2014-01Spotlight search sends users' search terms to Apple.
- 2014-01The iBeacon lets stores determine exactly where the iThing is, and get other info too.
- 2013-12Either Apple helps the NSA snoop on all the data in an iThing, or it is totally incompetent.
- 2013-08The iThing also tells Apple its geolocation by default, though that can be turned off.
- 2012-10There is also a feature for web sites to track users, which is enabled by default. (That article talks about iOS 6, but it is still true in iOS 7.)
- 2012-04Users cannot make an Apple ID (necessary to install even gratis apps) without giving a valid email address and receiving the verification code Apple sends to it.
Tyrants
Tyrants are systems that reject any operating system not“authorized” by the manufacturer.
- 2014-12Apple arbitrarily blocks users from installing old versions of iOS.
- 2012-05The Apple iThings are tyrant devices. There is a port of Android to the iThings, but installing it requires finding a bug or “exploit” to make it possible to install a different system.