It's not a car without a key, though, is it? It's more like a car with a factory-installed speed limiter, which the manufacturer is not obliged to help you remove or disable... and which, in fact, the manufacturer has good reasons for needing to make it hard to disable.
- I just want to be able to drive MY car as fast as I like!
- okay, but the trouble is the way this car works, if we give you the ability to disable the speed limiter, there's literally no way we can do that that doesn't also open up the possibility that when you turn on the radio, the radio station might broadcast an ad that causes an uncontrolled acceleration.
- that's a stupid way to design a car
- well yes, but this is an analogy car, not a real car. The real system in question is a turing-complete networked device designed to run arbitrary third-party software, so... the analogy is going to be slightly flawed.
And no, Apple isn't going to report a theft if you physically damage your phone, nor are they going to have a DMCA complaint if you hack your own phone in ways that let you change the way the software on it behaves (you might run into DMCS issues if you try to distribute tools to help other people do that, which is... definitely dubious, but that's what the law says; it doesn't have a great deal to do with this case of the Apple restrictions on which software the OS trusts to use its multicast API, though.)
- okay, but the trouble is the way this car works, if we give you the ability to disable the speed limiter, there's literally no way we can do that that doesn't also open up the possibility that when you turn on the radio, the radio station might broadcast an ad that causes an uncontrolled acceleration.
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This - this piece here is the fallacy in your argument. There absolutely are ways to do this. Matter of fact, Apple themselves have a nice little set of digital keys that lets them turn all these locks off as they please.
So the argument is not "We have no way to do this safely" it's "We don't believe you (the owner of the damn device) can be trusted to do this safely."
Which brings me right back to - you don't own the damn thing.
- I just want to be able to drive MY car as fast as I like!
- okay, but the trouble is the way this car works, if we give you the ability to disable the speed limiter, there's literally no way we can do that that doesn't also open up the possibility that when you turn on the radio, the radio station might broadcast an ad that causes an uncontrolled acceleration.
- that's a stupid way to design a car
- well yes, but this is an analogy car, not a real car. The real system in question is a turing-complete networked device designed to run arbitrary third-party software, so... the analogy is going to be slightly flawed.
And no, Apple isn't going to report a theft if you physically damage your phone, nor are they going to have a DMCA complaint if you hack your own phone in ways that let you change the way the software on it behaves (you might run into DMCS issues if you try to distribute tools to help other people do that, which is... definitely dubious, but that's what the law says; it doesn't have a great deal to do with this case of the Apple restrictions on which software the OS trusts to use its multicast API, though.)