Stop using Apple Devices and Software!
Apple appears to have become the monster that they initially set out to fight. You might be familiar with the ‘1984’ commercial that they released back in the day to promote the first Macintosh computer, alluding to George Orwell’s book “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” If you’re familiar with Orwell’s book, you’ll know that Orwell described a dystopian future where humankind would be enslaved in “a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, and public mind control, dictated by a political system that persecutes all individualism and independent thinking as ‘thoughtcrimes’.”
Well now Apple has itself gone full “big brother.” How times have changed. Here’s from Jeffrey Paul, “Your Computer Isn’t Yours” (November 12th, 2020):
I’m speaking, of course, of the world that Richard Stallman predicted in 1997. The one Cory Doctorow also warned us about.
On modern versions of macOS, you simply can’t power on your computer, launch a text editor or eBook reader, and write or read, without a log of your activity being transmitted and stored. […] Because it does this using the internet, the server sees your IP, of course, and knows what time the request came in.
This means that Apple knows when you’re at home. When you’re at work. What apps you open there, and how often. They know when you open Premiere over at a friend’s house on their Wi-Fi, and they know when you open Tor Browser in a hotel on a trip to another city.
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Now, it’s been possible up until today to block this sort of stuff on your Mac using a program called Little Snitch (really, the only thing keeping me using macOS at this point). In the default configuration, it blanket allows all of this computer-to-Apple communication, but you can disable those default rules and go on to approve or deny each of these connections, and your computer will continue to work fine without snitching on you to Apple.
The version of macOS that was released today, 11.0, also known as Big Sur, has new APIs that prevent Little Snitch from working the same way. The new APIs don’t permit Little Snitch to inspect or block any OS level processes. Additionally, the new rules in macOS 11 even hobble VPNs so that Apple apps will simply bypass them.
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Those shiny new Apple Silicon macs that Apple just announced, three times faster and 50% more battery life? They won’t run any OS before Big Sur.
These machines are the first general purpose computers ever where you have to make an exclusive choice: you can have a fast and efficient machine, or you can have a private one. (Apple mobile devices have already been this way for several years.)
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Your computer now serves a remote master, who has decided that they are entitled to spy on you. If you’ve the most efficient high-res laptop in the world, you can’t turn this off.
See Also
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Q: They backdoored iMessage’s end-to-end encryption?! WTF?!
A: Yup. More technical details in my HN comments here and here.
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Note that iCloud Backup itself is not end-to-end encrypted, which is what results in the iMessage key escrow issue that backdoors the end-to-end encryption of iMessage. There’s a section on that webpage that lists the stuff that is end-to-end encrypted, and iCloud Backup ain’t in there.
Neither are your iCloud photos. Apple sysadmins (and the US military and feds) can totally see all your nudes in iCloud or iMessage.
Apart from the FBI as mentioned above (and also discussed by me in a previous post), we know that Apple has also gone out of their way to help the criminal Chinese government to spy on their slaves, and with mass censorship. Not to mention the recent example where they tried to censor information on Telegram while demanding that Telegram not tell anyone about it.
Also take note of the fact that, for years, Apple has been fighting everyone’s “right to repair” their Apple devices. I suspect one important reason for this would be to prevent people from circumventing any hardware restrictions that they put inside their devices to keep it locked down in order to prevent people from removing their spyware. As mentioned in the above quote, they have already locked down their recent MacOS release and put in a back door for their own spyware to circumvent any software like firewalls and VPNs.
I mentioned in a previous post that everyone should stop using an Apple account (“Apple ID”) because of the risks involved with that, and now it’s more than clear that everyone should stop using any hardware and software from Apple as soon as possible. Apple has been co-opted by the evil it set out to fight and cannot be trusted. You should free yourself from having to rely on them yesterday instead of tomorrow.
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