Technology

Why don't politicians just fuck off?

Nothing they ever do about anything leads to an improvement.

Why can't the UK govt simply rent their spyware from Israel, like everyone else?

Good for Apple to take a stand.

As a UK citizen, I totally support this. The more that the average voter is disconvenienced because of proposed law changes like this and the (unenforcable) anti-porn laws, the more likely they are to actually pressure their MP or change how they vote.

I'll be damned if we'll have to thank the UK for getting RCS normalized.

I once had a conversation under NDA (which has expired since) with an engineer at Apple who was working on iCloud infrastructure, and he was telling me that his team was a bit shocked to read that Dropbox was releasing apps for photos at the time “because they’ve noticed that most of the files users are uploading to Dropbox are photos”. He was like: how do they know that exactly? His team had no idea and couldn’t possibly find out if the encrypted files they were storing were photos, sounds, videos, texts, whatever. That’s what encryption is for, only the client side (the devices) is supposed to know what’s up.

Not having that information meant a direct loss of business insights and value for Apple, since Dropbox had it and leveraged it. But it turns out Apple doesn’t joke around about security/privacy.