Quote:
Originally posted by Ramcoro
What is the fundamental difference between this and government searching your home, car, bank account, etc with a warrant, as prescribed by law and in line with the constitution? "Everyone's" private info is only at risk if a judge issues a warrant. They already can do that with your home. Please don't use the slippery slope fallacy. |
That's not a very good comparison.
I can only guess due to not being an engineer working on iOS. However, encryption can be when you take a string (think text) and then loop through each character in the string and use some formula or mapping algorithm to alter the character value and then the new string is unreadable unless you have the negation/decryption algorithm the does the inverse of the encryption algorithm. So, for instance, in a program I wrote in 3 minutes for fun, I could have this:
Original Text - "Hello, my ATRL username is Bloo."
Encrypted Text - "JdheeZc%50'vJE4>7'0%[#*RqQ"
The question I, and many others, have is the benefit of having a backdoor in general. If someone is a terrorist and wants to transmit messages, they can easily come up with their own encryption programs to secure their messages for them. Getting Apple to create a backdoor won't accomplish much.
Further, hacking and security breaches are done simply by the fact that there are weaknesses in code to exploit. SQL Injection attacks are a very simple example. SQL is a declarative language that you use to pull data from a database. Databases store your social security numbers, credit card information, passwords, etc. Pretty much, anything a website stores is in a database. A SQL injection would be if I were to submit SQL code into a form (a form is what you type your ATRL username into to login, among other things), that would pull RandomUser's password and show it to me... Then I could do something like:
window.alert("SELECT password FROM users WHERE username = 'RandomUser';")
*This code sample wouldn't pull data from a database, by the way (though, it is a legitimate general code injection example).
If this was valid code to pull data from a database (it's not, but it gets the point across), I would easily be able to pull RandomUser's password and then have access to their account. Most websites have patched this up by enforcing developers to use input validation to make sure the input isn't executable code. Breaches in security can be more complicated than this, but they still are simply faults in code.
Heartbleed is another terrific example that did a ton of damage, but I believe it's conceptually complicated enough to not go too into detail in this discussion (you would have to understand memory allocation and management in order to grasp it).
Going off of this, there is fear that opening a backdoor would involve opening up vulnerabilities in iOS in general so that anyone (i.e., not the government with a warrant, maybe terrorists) could breach user data.
So, with the idea of backdoor software being unproductive in finding terrorists and possibly dangerous to overall security, it should be simple to realize that a rash decision on forcing Apple to create such software is ill-informed and unwise. The government should not be passing legislation on technology when tech companies are advising against it themselves. There needs to be more technology specialists in politics.
They're texting pictures of handwritten tallies to the state party to tell them who won how many delegates