FBI wants to pwn your iPhone (and Apple)

Unless you live under a rock (or use a BlackBerry?), you have no doubt heard about the brouhaha over Apple’s latest battle against the FBI and DOJ. In summary, the FBI has a court order containing very specific technical requests for Apple to implement in order to unlock the iPhone 5C used by one of the San Bernardino terrorists, Sayed Rizwan Farook. The attack by Farook and his wife occurred on December 2, 2015 killed 14 people.

Apple doesn’t want to do it, so it’s very likely this battle will be drawn out.

First, the good news: this court order is the FBI’s admission that it cannot break Apple’s encryption on iOS, the operating system of its mobile devices. If you enable an unlock PIN and/or TouchID and run iOS 8 or later, your data is even more secured.

(On a side note: Why hasn’t such a court order been seen for an Android device? Ponder that for a moment…)

Besides strong encryption, Apple also implements features to thwart brute force attempts to compromise an iOS device:

• The user data can be wiped after a certain number of incorrect PIN entries
• There’s a delay after every incorrect PIN entry
• The PIN has to be manually entered on the screen

Thus, the court order aims to compel Apple to create a specialized, custom iOS for the seized iPhone 5C that will bypass the above three security features. In essence, the FBI wants to be able to have unlimited PIN guesses with no delays via a wired or wireless connection.

My take (and there are others) is that Apple probably has the technical capabilities to achieve this and grant the government’s wishes. However, I do not think Apple should comply without a fight simply because of the precedence this will set. Consider these scenarios and consequences:

• Think about how many Apple devices get seized and are investigated by law enforcement. It would be burdensome for Apple to have to create a custom iOS tailored to each individual device in order to assist authorities in such matters.
• What if such a custom iOS is leaked to the wild or sold to the highest bidder, either by a member of law enforcement or even by an employee of Apple? Imagine the damage if a nation-state or hacker has access to this.
• Should the FBI win this battle, foreign governments will likely follow suit, knowing Apple could be compelled to assist their authorities in unlocking devices.

American corporations are not agents of the U.S. government. If this battle is lost, then most tech companies will need a special department just to serve the FBI, NSA, TSA, and other three-letter agencies. There is a distrust between people and government today, and that’s why most people side with Apple on this issue, especially when people heavily rely on mobile devices to store personal data. The fear is that a precedence would allow the government to encroach further into our personal lives.

Apple unveils unified communications for the masses at WWDC

After years of development and hype, the promise of unified communications remains partially fulfilled. Yes, there are some nice UC implementations today…if you buy more vendor software and maybe even hardware. Yes, UC works great…if you only use the company issued devices.

Apple bought Novauris to boost speech recognition

TechCrunch broke the news the other day about Novauris getting acquired by Apple. As with many of Apple’s smaller acquisitions, this transaction was kept low profile, and it actually happened last year. Nothing on the companies’ websites indicates such an announcement. Apple definitely regards any improvement to speech recognition as a critical component in delivering the best mobile experience, namely with Siri on iOS.

Apple acquires more Nortel patents

When Nortel went down in flames, its legacy was a trove of patents that any tech/telecom company would salivate over. Add on to the fact that patent litigation has now become offensive maneuvers in the tech sector, it was no surprise when the likes of BFFs (“best frenemies forever”) Google and Apple showed tremendous (albeit low-profile) interest when these patents came up for sale.

These patents were so important that Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Ericsson, and RIM actually joined forces to establish Rockstar Bidco (now Rockstar Consortium) to buy the rights to the trove. Apple dumped $2.6 billion out of the whole $4.5 billion to get access to these patents that Rockstar purchased. This was mostly a defensive move in case somebody sues.

Now Apple is going on the offensive. According to reports Apple now owns over 1,000 of these patents:

But getting full rights to the patent likely helps Apple use the patents offensively in its ongoing lawsuits. If you do not own a patent, but merely have licensed it, you can’t go out and sue someone for using the patent. Having outright ownership of a patent allows Apple to use the patents offensively.

This transfer of patents wasn’t a huge announcement so I don’t think Apple wanted to advertise this as a warning/deterrent. Apple bought these quietly, and I think it’s because they’re ready to use them with specific targets in mind.

Telax announces an HTML5 contact center agent software

Isn’t this intriguing… Hosted/cloud contact center provider Telax made an announcement about the release of an HTML5-based agent desktop software, Call Center Agent (CCA), with an emphasis on its ability to run on Apple Macs.