Comment 2S28 Re: Daring Fireball

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Naked pictures, privacy, security, and you.

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Daring Fireball (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-09-04 16:14 (#2S27)

John Gruber has a long piece up about this at http://daringfireball.net/2014/09/security_tradeoffs, and of course he rushes in to defend Apple, because that's what he usually does.
The single-worst piece I've seen regarding last week's iCloud celebrity photo leak is, by far, this one from David Auerbach at Slate. To see where Auerbach is coming from, let's skip ahead to his conclusion first:
But whether or not any of these problems were directly responsible for the leak, Apple users, from Jennifer Lawrence to corporate executives to laptop musicians to you, should be out for blood, and other companies should use this as a lesson to double- and triple-check their own security stories. Apple will probably survive though. IPhones [sic] are so cool and pretty.
The old "Apple customers are shallow fools drawn to shiny things, and easily swayed by popular opinion" angle.
Here's the problem with Auerbach's piece:
Whether or not this particular vulnerability was used to gather some of the photos - Apple is not commenting, as usual, but the ubiquity and popularity of Apple's products certainly point to the iCloud of being a likely source - its existence is reason enough for users to be deeply upset at their beloved company for not taking security seriously enough. Here are five reasons why you should not trust Apple with your nude photos or, really, with any of your data.
Don't trust Apple "with any of your data" isn't just wrong because it's a hyperbolic overreaction, it's wrong because it's potentially dangerous. What has been mostly overlooked in the reaction to this photo leak scandal, and completely lost in Auerbach's argument, is that backups are a form of security - in the same sense that life insurance is a form of security for your children and spouse.

Re: Daring Fireball (Score: 1)

by vanderhoth@pipedot.org on 2014-09-04 16:29 (#2S28)

*face palm*
backups are a form of security
Two different forms of security, making backups will ensure you can retrieve that data if your primary source is lost/wrecked/stolen/whatever. The security John's arguing about is where and how that backup is kept safe from people it doesn't belong to. One type of security helps you if you lose the data, the other type of security helps keep others from stealing your data.

Not like life insurance in the least.

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