Apple outages, Apple injustices – FSF perspective

Yes, propietary devices are very secure. Very easy to lock myself out permanently.

Yesterday I tried to help someone to login to Samsung Android tablet. There is Android Q feature that requires previous Gmail account and password, even after factory reset. Tried 3 gmail accounts of tablet owner. Login works on laptop, but not on tablet. Reply from Samsung was, there are no workarounds. So it's not possible to login to tablet, and not possible to install any alternative operating system. So that tablet is expensive paperweight.

It was an expired certificate check that failed ungracefully.

All you had to do was black hole the Apple server in DNS (just add it to your hosts file with a bogus IP address) and apps launched fine.

Apparently no one at Apple tested the code to make it fail if the server acknowledged but never otherwise responded. If the server isn't there, the code failed gracefully (and immediately). I'm sure that race condition has been patched and any similar code now has several new test to their QA suite. Live and learn.

These checks are also anonymized and are also covered in their privacy policy. As a publicly traded company, making false statements in such a policy would have severe financial implications so anyone implying Apple are lying better have some damn good evidence to back it up.

Since these checks are useful in weeding out malicious software once the server was back up I removed the Apple server from my hosts file to let them resume. If you think Apple is full of crap from a privacy standpoint you can continue to block the certificate server involved in the checks and your Mac still runs just fine.

Which is my core problem with crap "articles" like this. I really like the FSF, but sensationalistic pieces like this DO NOT help their messaging - especially when they are factually inaccurate :( NOTHING was locked down; it was a security check that failed ungracefully but could be easily bypassed to enable the machine to function normally. If it was "locked down" there would have been no bypass.

When people tell me that Apple is the most secure computer company, I imagine they believe everything they are told by advertisements.

> To make sure Apple gets the message, please keep up the emails you have been sending to Tim Cook letting him know that you are getting rid of your Apple devices or will not buy any Apple devices until they stop using the facade of security to lock down users.

And what would this achieve? Apple yawns at the sight of folks that tell them that 'they will not buy any Apple devices' for any reason. So what? 10M more new users will take their place.

I bet the FSF has been telling others to do this for years and yet Apple is still Apple. Tim 'Apple' Cook probably marked them all as spam and laughed all the way to the Bank of Apple Inc.