Until a few years ago you were perfectly content with keeping an agenda in your pocket and pictures in your living room's drawer. A minimum of privacy is of course needed and welcome; however, unless you're planning a major terror attack, or strategic war plans, or you have incredibly valuable industrial secrets (all cases in which you'll probably be using specialized SW to keep your information) you don't really need incredibly advanced security simply because nobody is going to spend vast amounts of time and resources to uncover your little secrets. The GP is talking about switching phone (spending money) to obtain a level of security that he won't need in a million years.
http://www.nasdaq.com/article/apple-standoff-escalates-local...
http://www.leadertelegram.com/News/Front-Page/2016/02/20/Off...
http://www.argusleader.com/story/news/2016/02/18/sf-police-c...
The NSA did infact try to build backdoors into important hardware and software standards. They did push companies into using worse crypto. The do massiv port scanning and build themself botnets from where thet attack other nation states. And thats just a tiny fraction of what they do.
So yes, I absolutly do need computer hardware and software that even the manufacturer cant break. Low level security for boot and authentification is only the first in many, many steps that we have to take all the way up to imroving usability in end user applications to make it hard to do the wrong thing.
The FBI are not the o ly player, all governments want such control, all governments have things like the NSA. Even private actors are getting better and better.
We do need better security to protect the integrety of all our data, this includes all our communication and even, if possible metadata that we produce.
There is no reasonable argument to be made that people shouldn't have higher quality products when they _don't_ cost more^.
Apple only have to develop "unbreakable" encryption once and then it costs them no more to make it available in every iPhone than to only make it available in some of them. Indeed, it'd be cheaper than maintaining both breakable and "unbreakable" variants.
There are arguments to be made about the secure enclave hardware, since it presumably costs more to make it more tamperproof.
However, securing iPhones against this particular "attack" appears to be a software issue: iOS should never apply updates without an authenticated user approving them first.
^ For the avoidance of doubt, this includes externalized costs.
If you're using a breakable crypto , you're not protected at any given time.
If you're using a watch that's waterproof up to 100m, you're safe up to 100 meters.
To be pedantic, that's not exactly what is meant by 100m Water Resistant, but your point is valid.
It depends, how many meters does it have to claim before I can make sudden movements and god forbid press the buttons underwater?
only because they weren't (thought to be) subject to casual perusal by unknown entities. this is a silly thing to even mention.
> unless you're planning a major terror attack
ah, the "if you don't have anything to hide" rhetoric. do you really buy that?
> a level of security that he won't need
unless there is some nontrivial cost or burden associated, it's a red herring to belabor whether it's "too strong" or "more than needed".
This morning I was having a conversation with my fiancee, who said "if the US government gets a warrant they can open your mail, they can tap your phone calls, they can come into your house and search -- why should your phone be some sort of zone they cannot search even with a warrant?"
I happen not to agree but this is not some wacko view.
As to why they disagree: HN's audience is not representative of the general citizenry. We're better informed about technical security matters (or we like to think we are, at least). I suspect that correlates with being less willing to trust security to the goodwill of third parties.
"If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to fear."
"If you do want something private then you must be doing something wrong, ARE YOU A TERRORIST!?!?!?!"
