Why the FBI vs. Apple Matters

To most Americans, Apple’s refusal to unlock the San Bernadino shooter’s iPhone seems an untenable position. After all, Farook is a known terrorist who committed a horrific crime. That a legal warrant should be issued to search his every sock drawer and hard drive to uncover links to other terrorists or plots is patently obvious. Clearly Apple should just give the FBI what they want. So why is Apple balking? And why does most of the tech community side with them?

The facts are a bit confusing to those outside the tech community. The average American doesn’t (and probably doesn’t want to) understand the intricacies of data encryption and security. With that in mind, I’m going to try to make a more real-world analogy that everyone can relate to, but still illustrates the problem at hand. To do that, let’s assume that this is the 1960s. “Ivan” has just committed an act of terror in the name of the USSR. He was killed in the event, but police suspect he may have had microfilmed plans and lists of other Soviet agents inside the US.

The FBI discovers Ivan has a safety deposit box at the local bank. They go to the court and get a warrant, present it to the bank, and the bank manager opens the box inside the vault and surrenders the contents inside to the authorities.

This situation is similar to requests Apple has responded to many times before. It is a request for something Apple has possession of (e.g. iMessage conversations on its servers) which are turned over willingly with the proper legal authorization. This is how most people seem to be thinking of the Farook iPhone case, but it is not similar to the current case at all. For that, let’s move on to the next scenario.

Police then discover that Ivan has an ACME Self Destructing Safe in his basement. The feds know this safe is equipped with an acid release failsafe inside the unit such that if the wrong combination is tried too many times or they attempt to force open the safe, the acid is released and all contents of the safe are destroyed.

The FBI then goes to the ACME company and asks them to open the safe. But ACME explains that even they don’t have the combination. Only Ivan did, and he’s gone. ACME doesn’t own the safe or any of its contents. It just designed and built it. Then the FBI comes back to ACME with a new plan and a court order to make ACME implement it. They want ACME to build them a device that can neutralize the acid failsafe so that the police can then just crack the safe.

However, ACME is aware that this acid neutralizing device will actually work on any of their safes, not just Ivan’s. Further, they know their safes are the bane of the FBI, and that police have hundreds of these legally confiscated safes from other crimes stored in evidence lockers across the country. The FBI would love to open them all.

ACME is worried that eventually one of the neutralizing devices or the plans for one will get out in the public or on the black market, and once that horse is out of the barn, there’s no putting it back. They realize that what the FBI is asking them to do is effectively remove the acid failsafe as a security feature from everyone’s safe, not just Ivan’s. This compromises the safety of ACME’s many legitimate customers who have trusted them to secure their belongings.

Further, the security industry as a whole is worried that if ACME yields, it sets the precedent that no one can build and sell uncrackable safes or unbreakable locks. Every security system must be penetrable by the police without the owner’s cooperation. But such a built in weakness is also exploitable for nefarious purposes, both by corrupt government agents as well as theives and spies.

This is the situation Apple finds itself in with the locked iPhone. Once it builds the crack tool, there is no reality under which it would be used just once and destroyed. Even if that tool was safely destroyed, the FBI would be back next week with another warrant for another iPhone, and they would be forced to build it again. Eventually, it becomes impractical to destroy and rebuild the tool each time, so the issue becomes about controlling access to the tool.

Therein lies the weakness. In a world where horses don’t exist, no one has to worry about watching the barn door. But once you create a horse, then the door becomes a liability. And because horses are useful, eventually you have multiples… then multiple barns… and multiple doors. It’s only a matter of time before one gets loose. After all, no security system is perfect.

Kodak is your father’s Oldsmobile

Facebook Jail — Free your Images from Facebook?

Kodak has organized a stunt whereby a man will remain trapped in a box until 1 million photos are set free from Facebook by using the new My Kodak Moments app. With the app, users can pull photos directly from their albums and their friends’ albums to create photobooks and prints, which can then be ordered on Facebook for delivery.

If you’re in New York City, you can visit Mark Malkoff in his transparent box. Or regardless of where you are, you could print something and help end his imprisonment. Or you could cry, or maybe just cringe.

Yes, I get that this is marketing schtick. It doesn’t have to make complete sense. But does it have to be embarrassing? After all, they’re nice prints. The photo books are great. The app is well done. It’s the message behind the stunt that makes me wince. (Full disclosure: I work for Kodak.)

Think about it. Kodak thinks your photos are trapped in Facebook Jail. A place where they are easily sharable with 800 million Facebook users. A place where they are archived indefinitely. A place where they are downloadable, linkable, or cross-postable on demand. Yup, these photos are confined like a lion on the Serengeti.

Further, Kodak is proposing to “free” your photos by printing them such that they exist on a single piece of paper and are only sharable with people who can see over your shoulder. This is like trying to convince people to free their music from iTunes by pressing it onto vinyl disks.

They should just hang up a sign that says, “Kodak—We don’t get it… and get off our lawn.”

Let’s face it, Kodak is in trouble. This is no secret. The news reports daily on Eastman Kodak’s efforts to remain financially solvent as it tries to shed the shame of failing to capitalize on the market’s shift to digital imaging (a technology it pioneered) and reinvent itself as a printing company, all in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Not an easy go.

But it’s one thing to be late to the game. It’s another to show up at the football field with your first baseman’s mitt and your swim goggles and wonder why no one picks you for their team.

Steve Jobs Gives Dope-Slap from Beyond

The Westboro Baptist church, which has a rich history of inappropriate and distasteful demonstrations at funerals, has announced that it will be making an appearance at Steve Jobs’ memorial service. It seems the group found him insufficiently grateful to God in life, and a teacher of sin through his technical gadgetry.

The message was posted to Twitter… from an iPhone.

I’m pretty sure Jobs would have found the irony hysterical. His legacy has become so interwoven into the fabric of society that even those professing to hate him can’t escape it.

Rest in peace Mr. Jobs. You are truly one of history’s most talented geeks, and the tech world is less today without you.

Lady Gaga makes a splash as a Tech Consultant; Humanity is doomed

Last week, Grammy award-winning singer Lady Gaga confessed that she is an avid fan of Ubuntu, the Linux-based operating system. Reports are that Ubuntu’s desktop market share has shot up from 1 percent to 7 percent in just two days. Furthermore, due to a huge rise in traffic, Ubuntu’s website suffered a downtime of about 8 hours on Tuesday.

While Ubuntu is a really slick OS, made slicker by its price tag (free), it’s hardly a new kid on the block. The Linux distro has been around for years, struggling to make inroads against Microsoft and Apple. It’s got a fair following among the geek crowd, but has yet to make big inroads into the mass consumer market… until now.

Many Ubuntu enthusiasts as well as developers and investors are overjoyed, and understandably so. But what does this say about the sanity of the average person? Lady Gaga’s advice might be worth following if she opined on music, popular culture, or fashion. But if we’ve intellectually regressed to a point where we will change our computer operating system based on an offhand remark from a celebrity, what else will we buy?

It’s hard enough to figure out which experts to trust in a sea of competing voices on a topic, but there has to be some ability to discern who should warrant consideration as a person to whom we should listen. Or have we really reached the point where we are unable to discern that Lady Gaga shouldn’t even get a voice as a tech expert? Alternatively, are we just so awestruck by celebrity that we’ll do anything a celebrity says?

Even sheep are smarter than that.

Zediva tweaks the nose of Hollywood studios

DVD Monkey — A peek behind the curtain at Zediva's operations center.

A new video on-demand service called Zediva was introduced this week. It’s kind of like if Netflix and Redbox got together and turned Slingbox inside out. The key feature of the new service is that you can rent new movie releases without ever leaving home. They are employing a delivery method that appears completely legal, but is sure to get the movie studio executives running hair-on-fire to their legal departments looking to find some means to stifle them using copyright law..

The consumer advantage is access to a movie selection similar to Redbox or Blockbuster, including the latest DVD releases. That’s something neither cable or satellite video on-demand services, nor streaming services like Netflix are able to offer. You see, Hollywood studios impose a release window around new DVDs such that streaming services are not allowed to play them for a period of time. The theory being that this allows the studios to get people to buy DVDs, on which they make a tidy sum. Studios correctly assume that if you could watch the movie without getting off of the couch, you would opt for that instead. Meaning, if you’re in a rush to watch a new release, you either buy or rent a physical disc, or (heaven forbid) download a pirated torrent.

Zediva gets around that release window by actually buying DVDs and renting them to you. However, rather than having to wait by the mailbox or run to the store for the disc, Zediva helpfully pops the disc in one of their networked DVD drives and streams it to your house over the Internet. The key being that during the playing of the movie, that DVD and player are only playing to you, the renter.

Thanks to legal precedents established when Slingboxes were introduced years ago, place-shifting is perfectly legal. In the case of Slingbox, it was ruled that copyrights couldn’t prevent you from sending video content to your phone or remote computer from a box located in your house. You were paying for the content, and studios couldn’t restrict you to watching it locally, as long as you weren’t sharing or reselling it. It’s hard to see how this is different. Zediva is a DVD rental store, nothing more. They just provide Slingbox-like capability (also legal) to allow you to watch the movie remotely.

The initial popularity of Zediva is huge. They have already cut off new registrations as the demand for the service has far exceeded their capacity. Thus it seems enormously likely we’ll soon hear the screams and howls from the studios of how they will go bankrupt if this sort of thing is allowed to continue. (For reference, they screamed that when writable DVDs were introduced… and VHS tapes… and color television… Hollywood? Still solvent.)

Yet, there is a larger message here that should not be lost. The Zediva model is clever, but technologically stupid and inefficient. It exists only to do an end-around to existing copyright rules put in place to prop up dying business models. These are business models designed to create artificial scarcity and inflate prices. Zediva also illustrates a pent up market demand for access to this sort of content. People want the convenience and are willing to pay for it.

The theory of capitalism is that some new business will come along and leverage the consumer demand, thereby driving the dinosaurs to extinction. But Hollywood studios are an effective monopoly. The barrier to entrance in that business is huge. So the reality is that as long as they stick together, they can continue to abuse consumers in defiance of capitalist principles.

Kudos to Zediva for finding a way to give consumers what they want, but they may want to open up that legal defense fund now, just to get a head start.