Don't forget to remove your pictures from cloud...

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For all practical purposes, there's no such thing as a human being who thinks that a briefcase left on the front step of a home (in most neighborhoods) is safe by any definition. The un-safety to that scenario is immediately and plainly obvious.

By contrast, there are plenty of human beings -- albeit clearly no one here -- who either don't see that cloud storage is theoretically accessible by others, or don't find it obvious how it could be hacked. We here in this thread might find that absurd for various reasons; apparently, those reasons run the gamut from comparably-ignorant fear to legitimate and thorough knowledge of IT security. Either way, the fact is that among the general public, there is less of an expectation of theft of private data from cloud storage than of theft of property from something left out in the open. That alone means the analogy doesn't work, except maybe in the sense that it describes some people's gut reactions.

We can rail on ignorance all we want, but the fact that it exists -- and can never be exterminated -- MUST be accounted for. It's about as human as human gets.
 
I think Apple has some responsibility also. Sure, maybe the actresses and others had poor passwords. But there should still be some sort of defense against brute force password attacks.

And I think Apple needs to think a little bit about this. These actresses and others who had their icloud accounts hacked have major followings of people. One of these people already has posted on Twitter a sarcastic comment about iCloud. I think Apple needs, for their own sake, to demonstrate a little bit more concern about all of this. You have to display some concern at least when people with major followings and connections have their accounts violated. Even if you completely ignore the people who have no power or connections.

And I can't understand myself why somebody would put naked photos of themselves on some online storage. It must be some sort of narcissistic behavior. How many times have people paid a price for putting silly stuff on their Facebook Accounts?

Whatever is put on the internet stays on the internet. If somebody is attacking people for whatever reasons all over the internet that is someday probably going to come back and affect them. I know of a guy who has attacked people all over the internet for all kinds of reasons. If any of those people who have been attacked ever decide to do something about it he might pay a price, which would be a good thing I think.

The guy has also done all kinds of goofy, silly stuff and put that on the internet also. But he thinks he is a genius.
 
Originally Posted By: d00df00d
For all practical purposes, there's no such thing as a human being who thinks that a briefcase left on the front step of a home (in most neighborhoods) is safe by any definition. The un-safety to that scenario is immediately and plainly obvious.

By contrast, there are plenty of human beings -- albeit clearly no one here -- who either don't see that cloud storage is theoretically accessible by others, or don't find it obvious how it could be hacked. We here in this thread might find that absurd for various reasons; apparently, those reasons run the gamut from comparably-ignorant fear to legitimate and thorough knowledge of IT security. Either way, the fact is that among the general public, there is less of an expectation of theft of private data from cloud storage than of theft of property from something left out in the open. That alone means the analogy doesn't work, except maybe in the sense that it describes some people's gut reactions.

We can rail on ignorance all we want, but the fact that it exists -- and can never be exterminated -- MUST be accounted for. It's about as human as human gets.


I agree.

The other thing is that Apple prides itself on making the user experience seamless and this is one of the reasons for it's success. Eg Steve Jobs was proud of how Apple manages your privacy for location services by forcing apps to go through iOS where you are asked for your permission when the app wants to access your location. Similar with how they handle parental controls.

So when you pay a premium for Apple products, one of the things you come to expect is that things are thought through by the software engineers and this saves you time and worry. I trust the parental controls on my daughter's iPad and being a bit more tech savvy, I can say that they are better implemented and more comprehensive than other platforms where I need to do more thinking about how the entire system will work.

The average person thinks very little about these things but you have to realize that Apple knows this about people and therefore designs everything to work as seamlessly as possible. People want software that just works and don't want to be worried with the details. And Apple gets to charge a premium for providing products that meet that demand. So there is implicit trust between Apple users and Apple, and users have become conditioned to just use the products without worrying to much.

I haven't investigated the cause of the breach in detail. I would say that in well run corporations, passwords are forced to be complex and changed often. Perhaps Apple needs to run a security wizard at set up that defaults to very strong security, giving the option to step down to lower security options but giving them some concise warnings about such choices.
 
Did you see this?

http://www.zdnet.com/the-apple-backdoor-that-wasnt-7000031781/

Quote:
It appears that no one reporting Zdziarski's claims as fact attended his talk, watched it online, and less than a handful fact-checked or consulted outside experts.

Which is, incidentally, what I did. I saw the talk begin to gain momentum on Twitter, then quickly flushed the idea of a story when the researchers I consulted kindly told me there was no "there" there.


Seems like the general public as well as many journalists just don't check stories before publishing them.
 
Anybody can go to that link you provided and read the entire article. Even the woman who wrote the article said in that article that Apple could probably have better security for their 'diagnostic' tool. Also check out some of the comments by individuals who seem to know a lot about computer systems.

And the woman who wrote that article probably can not be considered to be a security expert. Anybody can do some research about her on the internet.

And Zdziarski did not say that Apple had deliberately put a backdoor into the iOS operating systems. He was concerned that the 'diagnostic' tool could be misused. Read what he said.
 
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Originally Posted By: Thermo1223
Exactly, I think Apple still has some fault for their apparent lax security standards but it mostly lies with the people themselves.

That, and the other comments on my briefcase analogy, improve my analogy. A briefcase has inadequate security to store a million dollars cash on my front steps. If Apple's cloud is susceptible to brute force attacks without locking down an account, then it certainly has inadequate security to store sensitive information. Weak passwords don't help, and I'd venture that at least some of the passwords were pretty weak.

As I've mentioned previously, cloud storage has its purpose. People want to much user friendliness, though. For people who relentlessly take photos and upload them to the cloud, encrypting them before uploading them isn't very feasible.

For someone who writes iPhone apps, here's a free idea for you: write an app that uses good open source encryption before uploading anything to the cloud. I bet there's a market for that now.
wink.gif
 
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