This sits so unwell with me, gives such limitless tyrannical & dictatorial control to a company.
> As much as people might look at this and think Apple is being heavy-handed, it comes down to the fact that iCloud, iOS, and the App Store are their IP and they can (within legal limits) set whatever terms they please.
Agreed. That's exactly what it seems like. And that sounds like immoral, unjustifiable, sickening hell. That Apple gets to hold all the cards, no one else on the planet gets any say in how a device might be used.
It seems to me like the law is immoral. The law is heavy handed, an idiot, and wrong. And it seems like Apple is a user/abuser of unjust power which it does not have any moral or ethical right to wield.
> Especially for these sorts of arrangements, it seems like a problem to me if the platform/IP owner doesn't have absolute, final discretion over what happens.
This sounds like a nightmare hell world to me. It contravenes the idea that any of us can ever be owners of anything. This sounds like the logic that says that only Tesla can repair Tesla cars, the logic that says only John Deere can repair John Deere tractors. This is an anti-human world, this is a bad world, this is immoral, this is wrong, this destroys & rots away at humanity as a can-do toolmaker, as an improver of the world about them. It consigns power away to fragile, remote, limited corporations. That is not a world I ever want to let happen to us. I tend towards aethism/agnosticism, but if there is a god, this flies against what graces the gods have given us to let ourselves be constrained so. It is unnatural & against the spirit of the human enterprise.
I have no love for NSO Group. It feels great seeing such a group of shady, underhanded, anti-democratic punks get served. But this is absolutely going to be yet another move in the ongoing shift towards top-down combined technocratic/legal control. It's absolutely a demonstration of Apple wielding legal power to obstruct & defend that which it simply doesn't want to have to deal with, brushing aside something inconvenient. It's absolutely a battle over what terms of service mean & whether the world has any rights of their own. I for one am not cheering for Apple's victory in having their massive iron-clad armor further enhanced.
>Agreed. That's exactly what it seems like. And that sounds like immoral, unjustifiable, sickening hell. That Apple gets to hold all the cards, no one else on the planet gets any say in how a device might be used.
I'm not a big proponent of IP, but you're basically saying it is immoral, unjustifiable, and sickening as hell that Apple enforces the rules that Apple wants on Apple products/services, which were created and offered by Apple? Who should be making the rules if not the creator and maintainer of the product/service? Why is using another product/service not an acceptable alternative?
I agree with the general direction of your comment, but certainly not with the same voracity that wouldn't allow my own company to create the rules for my own service offerings (within the confines of state/national law).
Replace "Apple" by any traditional car company and you should immediately become concerned. Shouldn't a car company have absolute, one-sided control over the cars they sell? Like should the car stop working if you agreed to obey the speed limit but then sped? Or stop working if you didn't use their branded fluids?
The fact that the modern world exists in an corporate-owned, proprietary cloud, versus the era of personal computers & personally-owned systems, is greatly greatly greatly confusing. I don't fully well know how to handle this great confusion. But ultimately, the trend of all rights being reserved by the megacorp is, ultimately, a vulgar anti-human anathema which we must shake off. Humanity must be allowed to pick up our microscopes & magnifying glasses, to peer in, to meddle. No legal contract preventing the natural sciences is ethical nor godly.
I have no idea how we do that. Perhaps decoupling the data-processing services from the data-holding entity might be a possible frontier. One could imagine being able to keep their identity, their core systems & datum wherever they want, & to convert Apple into a mere processor of those personal systems. That way we might not know what Apple is doing, but we at least can watch their black box act against us.
In general, trying to draw further extenuating circumstances, trying to say "except except except" is simply not ok. The phones we carry are part & parcel to their many services, in this weird conflux of computing. It reduces basic core human integrity to be denied access, to be rebuffed by EULA from understanding & witnessing & probing into these core techno-vessels we navigate about with. These mere technicalities presented, that our homes happen to be located inside Apple data-centers, is to me uninteresting & unimportant in the moral, ethical, humanistic & religious discussion and/or reckoning we have fallen into.
I mean, broadly speaking, I agree, but do you really think that "state-sponsored hacking group that provides the ability to break into people's phones to the worst regimes the world has to offer" is the use case you want to be enabling here...?
If I'm understanding correctly, this wasn't a case of "they agreed to the iCloud EULA because you have to have iCloud to use an iPhone". You don't, in fact. Yes, some services will be unavailable, and...it might occasionally bug you about it? (Not sure about the last, as I do have iCloud) No; they agreed to the iCloud EULA because they were trying to take advantage of unpatched iMessage bugs to break into other people's phones.
I fully agree that the scope of EULAs today is terribly overbroad, but I do not believe that making a legally-binding agreement not to abuse the service to harm other people or steal their data is an inappropriate use of them.
This and more. I find it beyond farce that Apple & it's adherents chief defense seems to be that there are other people making products that aren't Lawful-Evil to humanity. If Google one day woke up and said, we're just going to try to do what Apple does to it's users, there would be nothing left. This pretense that Apple's behavior is anything but anti-competitive, anti-trust worthy rings so hollow to me. The excuses that there are other places to go completely fail to wash for me.
It's as if these folks are saying the Carterphone victory was only won because AT&T was a monopoly. That's not how consumer rights work. That's not a solid enough platform for humanity to remain upright.
Put another way, I don't really have a problem with 3rd parties - or individuals who are so inclined - repairing Apple gear, but the recent moves have shown that the company would much rather deal with the small headaches of setting up and administering such a program if they can set the terms under which it happens.
Otherwise, legislators (think: US Congress) will do it for them, with disastrous results. Doing it like this means everybody gets something out of the deal: Consumers can choose the best repair option for them, Independent shops now can take Apple business and without worrying about warranties, and all of this happens in full view of the company and people who are watching them closely (Again, legislators).
It's a closed system and Apple sets the rules, but just about anyone can participate. On the whole, that seems like a net good to me.
* The same sentiment might apply to Deere as well, but I don't know enough about that particular situation to say if it would still be impractical to take a similar approach.
>This sits so unwell with me, gives such limitless tyrannical & dictatorial control to a company.
Do you think Apple could get some "hackers" extradited if they don't live in the US? Its that old adage, one mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter and some country's like Russia will point blank refuse extradition to the US as will other countries.
Any business can put what they like in their terms and conditions, those T's & C's are still tertiary to regional and state law if they are even enforceable.
Lawyers will let your put what ever you like in a contract, whether its reasonable and enforceable is another matter which only judges can decide.
Now if you live in the EU, there is nothing wrong with reverse engineering code, the EU court has ruled this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28809559 but the definition of a bug can be more vague because a coder might suggest a user reported bug is working as its coded, so the coder may not see it as a bug but the user might and her you just need to convince the judge. Grey area.
Another example of what was a grey area of law was initiating an email send to an email server in order to track whether an email address existed or not. Once the status of an email address was known abort the reset of the communication. It was useful for tracking people globally, and spam filters were not that good at picking this up in the past. Anyway that process has effectively been ruled illegal by the EU now as your email address supplied by your employer has to be treated as a private and personal email address so then other personal & privacy laws come into play to make the game more complicated, but you used to be able to track people globally in businesses & military to spot when people had left an employer or been moved in some cases.
Now whilst the law might seem absolute, legislation is very intentionally left vague and its judges who make it closer to being absolute with narrow specific definitions when they make a judgement, but if there's one thing I have learnt, interpretation of the law can be surprisingly vague even by judges.
So all in all this could actually be a marketing or reputation management exercise or both involving lawyers to reassure Apple customers they have made the right purchase. Running an entity beit a business or a govt can be incredibly nuanced like playing a game of chess, and sometimes its not the initial action we need to be concerned with but the resulting action.
Personally, generally I could not be more uninterested in the international legal politics behind this all. None of it is at all progressive, none of it speaks to what humanity can or could do. It's the most anodyne, boring, real world, un-possible way to take the discussion. It's mired in endless fun-house mirrors of shit-show politics that hasn't wont and can't figure out how to adapt. I can't think of a single nation that shows leadership, that has anything interesting or useful to say, any means of embracing humanity, of raising potential.
> Its that old adage, one mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter and some country's like Russia will point blank refuse extradition to the US as will other countries.
This is a great mentality, and I'd love to see more dynamic behind it. Alas. I see no nations espousing & helping the actual obvious Open Source & other progressive & pro-human, pro-enlightenment, anti-proprietary freedom fighters. I see no one standing up for more personal computing liberties. The international regime is hostile & un-comprehending of tech & it's possibilities, more interested in businesses & big tech than it is in trying to help good tech happen, which is the real oppression, the real struggle, one enacted via pervasive & harsh IP laws & seemingly ever-expanding copyright length. Sure, some nations celebrate punk-ish behavior & sticking it to the west, but I can think of precious few examples of nations actually helping the good. The recent AskHN about software/tech monastaries[1], & the complete worldwide lack of any answers whatsoever indicates to me that there is no real help or interest in the actual freedom fighters, anywhere in the world.
If you want to look at the law, I think today's example, of Russia telling 13 big tech companies they have to establish offices in Russia[2], is a near perfect example of how tech and law intersect. This is particularly menacing & threatening & scary, but it mirrors most of the relationship worldwide: aggressive, at ends, seeking constraint & control & dominance, no interest in growth or humans or improving the human-computer relationship. The law rarely serves the people, rarely amplifies possibility. It's here to insist that some antiquated self-obsessed notion of justice can be served, even when that justice so often only serves a fading out of touch law, or big vested interests, not the people.
Generally I consider myself extremely progressive & hopeful for what governance & governments can do and should do. And I think if government wanted to deploy tech to help the people, if it would stop allowing endless private control to reign, great things would happen (Ron Wyden for president, 2028). But right now trying to frame questions & challenges in terms of the law is not-great. The law affords deep & vast powers to it's vested interests & the ideas of law itself. Yet in your particular scenario, it also simultaneously jealously & vengefully guards actual access to it's means power, to the reigns of state-sponsored violence & enforcement. The question posed, about whether Apple could get access to this executive use of force, isn't particularly relevant to me, and I don't think it reflects on the widescale systematic bureaucratic control companies like Apple & the prevailing worldwide laws get to impose via EULAs against the people of humanity.
Some of the comments on Facebook getting the OK from federal US Court of Appeals to also try to sue the NSO Group[3] are somewhat in line with your questions & scenarios. The comments there talk to the ability to try to pursue legal action, but the inability to actually get the state/states to do anything about it. In some ways, this is an ideal case. It shows that a state that wanted to support freedom fighters, that wanted to support emancipatory, liberated, pro-personal computing, might be able to. There's just not a lot of good guys out there trying to help spring us free from the walled gardens we're locked in.
My apologies for not trying to take up the question better. I think there's interesting material here. But to me, these questions return us to a not-compelling legalistic mindset, a practical view, that isn't capable of adequately considering how entrapped humanity at large is by the corporation's abilities to write it's own rules, by the de-personalization & de-accessing of computing that the cloudification of the world has brought upon us, & consigned us into. Whether or not this tyranny has the power to cross international boundaries & come get us isn't a particularly interesting subproblem to me. Generally I feel like the world has conformed to the prevailing notions of corporate techno-sovereignty.
In a way, we are just witnessing and commenting on the survival needs and actions of different entities, beit a country, laws, finance, companys, groups, religions or individuals. They all have different needs for their survival and this is just one story on one entity and the interactions of those involved like the courts, law, Apple, NSO, The Press, consumers or users, Judges, Govts, administrations, etc etc.
AFAIK there is not a country on this planet that does not believe in sky faeries in one form or another (?Antarctica?), likewise we generally all eat the same things, with minor regional differences, similar practices and needs so until you can get the main users ie humans to increase their intelligence and knowledge, it would seem this planet is stuck in a slowly evolving pattern of operation which still has various self destruct risks, some easily quantifiable others not.
The problem still remains, Apple have massaged the Ego of many via advertising and functionality creating this walled garden.
Russia telling 13 mostly US tech companies has already been done by the EU with servers having to be located in the EU, so the EU has led the way on that issue apart from the obvious US data gathering in the first place by building the services and tech!
To me its just survival of the fittest of entities and whether cultures/country's are now holding back some of these entities which can then come back and bite the culture and country into non existence.
When is an action a Zerohedge?
> As much as people might look at this and think Apple is being heavy-handed, it comes down to the fact that iCloud, iOS, and the App Store are their IP and they can (within legal limits) set whatever terms they please.
Agreed. That's exactly what it seems like. And that sounds like immoral, unjustifiable, sickening hell. That Apple gets to hold all the cards, no one else on the planet gets any say in how a device might be used.
It seems to me like the law is immoral. The law is heavy handed, an idiot, and wrong. And it seems like Apple is a user/abuser of unjust power which it does not have any moral or ethical right to wield.
> Especially for these sorts of arrangements, it seems like a problem to me if the platform/IP owner doesn't have absolute, final discretion over what happens.
This sounds like a nightmare hell world to me. It contravenes the idea that any of us can ever be owners of anything. This sounds like the logic that says that only Tesla can repair Tesla cars, the logic that says only John Deere can repair John Deere tractors. This is an anti-human world, this is a bad world, this is immoral, this is wrong, this destroys & rots away at humanity as a can-do toolmaker, as an improver of the world about them. It consigns power away to fragile, remote, limited corporations. That is not a world I ever want to let happen to us. I tend towards aethism/agnosticism, but if there is a god, this flies against what graces the gods have given us to let ourselves be constrained so. It is unnatural & against the spirit of the human enterprise.
I have no love for NSO Group. It feels great seeing such a group of shady, underhanded, anti-democratic punks get served. But this is absolutely going to be yet another move in the ongoing shift towards top-down combined technocratic/legal control. It's absolutely a demonstration of Apple wielding legal power to obstruct & defend that which it simply doesn't want to have to deal with, brushing aside something inconvenient. It's absolutely a battle over what terms of service mean & whether the world has any rights of their own. I for one am not cheering for Apple's victory in having their massive iron-clad armor further enhanced.