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Comment by jameshart | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. I thought I recalled talking about this on HN previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10355868

    _-__--- on Oct 8, 2015 | parent | favorite | on: Verizon revives "zombie cookie" device tracking on...

    Tor as an OS-level feature may not spark the best reaction. It's been given a bad name ("deep web," silk road, etc) in mass media and many people don't understand it enough to think of it as anything other than bad.
    I think that it'd be cool to have, but I don't think that Apple would ever implement it.

        jameshart on Oct 8, 2015 [–]

        Agree, it's phenomenally unlikely, but then again there is a part of me which could actually imagine Apple doing something like it. They wouldn't use Tor, of course, they'd build a proprietary equivalent, and then come out on a black stage to 'introduce Apple Undercover, a revolutionary enhancement to personal network privacy and security'.

View on HN

Your prediction of it being called Apple Undercover is significantly more 80’s though. And I like it.

So much so that I would accept Apple using something other than Helvetica this one time for a Miami Vice typeface and a Michael Knight and Kitt intro at WWDC.

I cannot stress enough that Hasselhoff needs to stay in character the entire time or the whole concept doesn’t work.

Hasselhoff drifts on to stage in KITT, jumps out, and tackles Tim Cook. They then get up, shake, laugh, and take turns explaining how iCloud+ VPN makes it look like everything you do online comes from Apple.

KITT & Siri start flirting.

He may sing in German as the musical guest they sometimes have at the end of the keynotes, but that’s as much flexibility as I’m willing to allow.

The Hoff MUST sing ‘Jump in my car’ for this to really land.

https://youtu.be/dm7jEA3frY4

Can William Daniels at least voice the car saying "one more thing" before throwing it to Hasselhoff?

> I would accept Apple using something other than Helvetica

At this point, Helvetica itself would give a retro feeling if used by Apple. They’ve been all in on San Francisco for several years.

Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.

https://imgur.com/gallery/2eBXYnT

It's funny how here in 2021 I read 1984 San Francisco as being in sPoNgEbOb vOiCe.

Apple is in crossfire:

(a) There is pressure from many governments to give backdoor for surveillance. Or just comply with subpoenas that are against human rights.

(b) Complying with local laws generates PR damage. It makes privacy and ethics as a brand strategy look disingenuous.

The solution is, of course, to generate truly secure system where Apple can't make backdoors. Those services may not be available in some countries, but then it's just missing service, not a compromised system.

This is something Apple is increasingly working on. For example, in Fall 2020 they actually revised their CPU designs (including older CPUs) with a new Secure Enclave design that uses mailboxes to more securely store the number authentication attempts inside the secure enclave.

The goal of this is to make it so that even if the FBI had an incident similar to 2016, Apple would not be able to fulfill their request to make a backdoor, and the FBI wouldn't be able to make a backdoor even if they had the power to sign and run any code they wanted on the phone.

That's how you make a secure system these days. You can't just make it secure to everyone but yourself and fight the government - you need to secure it from yourself as well.

That only works if you don't give control of the servers over to a third party and also use encryption on the servers. Which Apple has not been able to do across the board.

That is only true as far as your on devices Data. They still have to provide everything they have on iCloud.

Wow props for quite a prediction. You definitely deserve some recognition for that one.

An even more impressive prediction in 2015, a time when Apple was not positioned as some type of savior of user privacy.

I’m not so sure. If you read back up that thread, the thought that triggered it was from qzervaas:

   Apple's already shown they don't like this behaviour with their randomised MAC addresses in iOS 8+.

And elsewhere in the thread people called out the fact apple had already introduced support for ad blocking. So Apple’s privacy-positive posture was already in the air.

I think there is a sense in which privacy was already a differentiator for Apple in iOS (as contrasted with Google’s motives in android in particular of course) - so this did feel like a not completely implausible way they could go to double down on that differentiator.

Steve Jobs talking about this at D8 in 2010, and of course the privacy features he talks about were baked into the OS APIs from the start.

Apple's rift with Google over user data collection in Google Maps goes back to 2009 when Google held Apple to ransom for the user data in return for turn-by-turn directions. Apple refused and started building their own maps service, buying Placebase in July that year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39iKLwlUqBo

If anyone's interested in reading more, here's an article which discusses why Apple switched from Google Maps:

http://allthingsd.com/20120926/apple-google-maps-talks-crash...

I actually wrote a deep dive on Apple’s pivot to privacy. https://saturation.substack.com/p/apple-facebook-and-the-glo...

It's really not about privacy though, the insight needed (not that I'm saying it was easy to make this particular prediction) is that Apple is all about the Walled Garden. It can't be Tor because Apple doesn't own Tor, and so that's not inside the Walled Garden, whereas "Apple Undercover" even if it were functionally no better or worse than Tor, is magically blessed by the Apple branding. And Apple have been all about Walled Gardens for decades.

Tor has reputation problems. Lots of services block tor exit nodes because of all the abuse that comes from them.

By making it a feature for paying subscribers only, Apple probably hopes that their solution won't be interesting for criminals. (Apple will likely cooperate with law enforcement)

Using Tor would be an insane choice for 99% of Apple users.

"Oh, let me turn on undercover... why is my bank online account suspended and my PayPal banned?"

I love the moments when you can point back to an old post and say, "called that!"

(No snark, I really do love it.)

Enjoy the moment, future seer.

Hey there, can I call you? I have some questions about the future!

No offense or anything but what’s the point of making this comment outside of showing that you were right? Good prediction.

(Fair question. I just found it amusing. I'm annoyed it got voted to the top. For substantive discussion, people should look down page)

Dont. You should be proud. I made numerous prediction that turns out to be right when everyone else is calling you crazy. You should enjoy the moment of victory. And I do remember reading your comment at the time, so it is great you link it back.

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