Apple gives privacy one minute

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APPLE NEWS By Silvia Eckert “California streaming” ducks the controversial CSAM issue at last week’s annual iPhone event. As reported by Brian Livings
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Mr. Austin, Susan Bradley

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Charmed, I’m sure not. Each and every tech company on the planet encounters prospective deals with devils on a regular basis. And what complicates these things ad nauseum is that all of the scant-at-best legalities which could protect individual privacy, but serve only transnational mega-companies who literally don’t care what they do with private parties’ data. Tech companies do illicit deals all the time.

Having participated in, and watched computer security for two decades, there are exactly zero acceptable reasons why Apple or any other OS company should either do, or get away with this. Governments have already had OS’s under surreptitious surveillance since the time the internet became ‘public’. Governments already have surreptitious back-door access to your computers, and have had that since Windows came on the scene.

So anything on which Apple acts is a clear, incontrovertible, egregious invasion of privacy. And I’ll believe based on long threads of real evidence, that when Apple’s executives write and speak, they were always in bed with the military-industrial complex, and its entertainment division, politics.

The easiest way to protect any computer is to air-gap it, and have your own security wizards audit your systems on a regular basis.

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This was an “Apple Event” that I did not watch, because it was going to be mostly about those “i” devices I do not use. But reading the reviews afterwards, I found opinions there ranging from between meh! and decidedly poor ones. Going by those opinions, as well as by present ones, it looks to me like this was more of an “Apple Non-Event.”

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV

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Apple did some interesting things to penetrate the Chinese market which accounts for something like 20% of their revenue.   The CSAM thing itself wasn’t terribly surprising, the convoluted slippery slope method they’re using is.  Apple is secretive; their products, mostly commodity items, are crazy expensive and look like flattened or half used soap bars.

Apple places “comforting” blurbs throughout their devices and sites (the ones mere mortals can actually enter) promising privacy, no outside ads, etc., nothing anyone except wall-eyed disciples or plain low information users would ever believe.  They’ve been very successful at creating one of the largest cults on earth.

We have exactly one Apple device, an iPad because it’s very useful as a replacement for an arm stretching load of college notebooks.  Works much better than other tablets we tried; a good product.  The kid using it saves stuff on a usb drive; friends have no idea what that thing is, “Use iCloud, man!”  Yup, a gigantic cult.  Kid uses Signal, too, a total outcast.

So, of course Apple will sidestep this thing, it’s the Apple Way.

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Mr. Austin

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I am not a groupie of Tim Cook, but I am a recommender of the Apple Macs, the computers  and only of these (everything else I do with a clamshell good enough to make phone calls and now and then receive and, or send text). The Mac’s hardware and the macOS, uh …  OS, are both reliable and the latter has given me a lot less to worry about than Windows did, the Redmond OS that I used for almost a quarter of a century before making the switch to the Cupertino stuff.

When it comes to my belief on Cook’s reassurances as to the security offered to us users by Apple, I am agnostic.

When it comes to iCloud, I have it disabled, as always have done with anything with “Cloud” in the name, way before getting (as a gift) this, my first and, by now, four years old Mac. I don’t use the voice assistant Siri (also disabled) and I don’t use Safari, the Apple browser (enabled, but ignored): I prefer my own choice of browser, thank you so very much.

I use the usual browser security/privacy/anti ads addons and have Intego VirusBarrier AV for real-time patrolling for malignant incrustations and Intego NetBarrier for keeping a check on what is in the Mac that is babbling to the outside world (both recommended by Nathan Parker). I hover the cursor on unopened, unexpected emails URL links, in the preview panel. Maybe, occasionally, I would inspect the full headers of such emails. And that’s as far as I am prepared to go to secure a relative degree of safety that, I believe, is all one can, sanely, ever hope to have in this world.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV

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