Security

When all the iPhones strike thirteen

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The title of this post, lifted from Orwell’s famous opening sentence of 1984 (“It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen”) is not far from the news of Apple’s recent patent for an unspecified authority’s centralized control of iPhones, granted August 28, 2012.

Before I get there, however, I just want to point out a recent and shrill warning from Apple founder Steve Wozniak:

I think it’s going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years. […] With the cloud, you don’t own anything. You already signed it away. I want to feel that I own things.

Now, back to the Apple US patent #8,254,902 in the news:

Apparatus and methods for enforcement of policies upon a wireless device
Inventors: Bell; Michael (Cupertino, CA), Lovich; Vitali (Toronto, CA)
Assignee: Apple Inc. (Cupertino, CA)
Appl. No.: 12/215,592
Filed: June 26, 2008

My favorite example in the patent text is this:

In an automotive setting, the present invention may be used to enforce policy upon a mobile device (e.g., smartphone or the like) while a user is driving, such as via the aforementioned position location (e.g., GPS) apparatus. For instance, one policy of a cellular service provider may be to blank out or prevent incoming calls to a user while that user is in a vehicle that is determined to be moving over time, unless so-called “hands free” technology (e.g., a suitable Bluetooth headset profile) is in use simultaneously. In this fashion, the user would be all but prevented from being distracted by their cellular phone while driving unless they are operating in hands-free mode (as will be mandated by California State law in July of 2008 for example).

Note the glaringly obvious problems with this concept.

First, how does the service provider know whether the phone is used by someone driving or a passenger? The control simply can’t work without a crucial piece of information that it will never get automatically. And then imagine every Apple user on a train or bus finding their phones rendered inoperable by a benevolent service provider due to lack of a “suitable Bluetooth headset.”

Second, the control begs the obvious and trivial workaround, which would fake a Bluetooth headset rendering the control useless. Unless, of course, Apple or the service provider gets a lock on what is accepted as “suitable” and at this point you should see the very slippery and ugly slope…

Third, WTF? Seriously, who in their right mind thinks a service provider is going to get this feature/functionality right and make users happy? I would wager that 9 times out of 10 the devices would stop working completely even when a “suitable” something is present and enabled. If you think a phone comes with service hiccups now you definitely don’t want a faceless provider taking control of it at a micro-level. Phone accidentally blocked? Who you gonna’ call?

Fourth, it begs the question of power, politics and thus authority. Did the user willingly request or grant a lock-down option to the service provider? Is the service provider operating on behalf of a regulatory authority as an enforcement body? This is not just another option on the phone. This is a patent specifically designed to bypass personal control of a private asset and provide a hook for outside authoritarian control.

And that’s just one paragraph. Here are some other funny ones I leave to you to slice apart with common sense…like a hot knife through butter-flavored water. Who is the authority on these decisions? In other words, central control by whom and with what trust? Who is Apple, in diefiance of the Woz warning, serving with the capability to usurp individual control?

Want to put Apple devices into airplane mode for unexplained reasons? Their patent enables that.

an airline operator or airport may cause the mobile device to enter into an “airplane” mode, wherein all electromagnetic emissions of significance are prevented, at least during flight, thereby more affirmatively preventing interference with aircraft communications or instrumentation and enhancing safety

The patent suggests marketing a suppression of device capability as something VIP-level and to “pay extra for the peace of mind”

Different facilities may enact different “lockdown” modes. For instance, a locker room facility may issue a command that prevents use of a cellular phone camera or laptop computer camera while in that area, thereby preventing surreptitious imaging of customers/users. Customers of such facilities may be willing to pay extra for the peace of mind associated with knowing that they are not being secretly photographed.

And of course no disabling technology would be worth mentioning unless you can stop terrorists

if a terrorist threat or other security breach is detected, the airport may disable at least a portion of the wireless communications within a terminal using a policy command, thereby potentially frustrating communications between individual terrorists or other criminals

For perspective, this is not the first patent I’ve noticed that Apple has requested that gives a very poorly defined “authority” (e.g. an outsider) the ability to disable functionality of a user’s iPhone. In 2011 the US patent 20110128384 described sending infrared signals to the iPhone camera that would render it useless. The examples provided in that patent included a concert where the organizers would want to centrally disable all the cameras in Apple devices.

SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR RECEIVING INFRARED DATA WITH A CAMERA DESIGNED TO DETECT IMAGES BASED ON VISIBLE LIGHT
Inventors: Tiscareno; Victor; (Issaquah, WA) ; Jonhson; Kevin; (Mundelein, IL) ; Lawrence; Cindy; (University Place, WA)
Assignee: Apple Inc. Cupertino CA
Serial No.: 629678
Series Code: 12
Filed: December 2, 2009

This other patent very clearly decreases the value of owning an Apple device. Hey, look, it has a camera built-in but an infrared signal from some other person decides for you when you can take pictures. Oh, what’s that? An infrared filter to block the incoming control signal…? Value restored.

Without further ado I’ve attempted to create a graphic mashup to illustrate some of the latest Apple news. A spaceship campus, a creepy Orwellian freedom-killing patent announcement, and of course an update to their phone.

Full disclosure: as I announced in my July 2010 presentation at The Next HOPE in NYC, after 21 years of owning Apple devices I quit use of their products for the same reason I started using them in the first place. And that’s why today I use an N9.

Updated to add: Wired tells of a lawsuit that gives some additional perspective

The ACLU has sued the District of Columbia and two police officers for allegedly seizing the cellphone of a man who photographed a police officer allegedly mistreating a citizen, and for then stealing his memory card.

Is the ACLU prepared to sue Apple service providers for disabling the iPhone?

History, Poetry, Security

This Day in History 1942: Gestapo Arrest the Harnacks

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The only American woman sentenced to death by direct order of Adolf Hitler was arrested on this day in 1942.

Mildred Fish was from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She met Arvid Harnack, a German Rockefeller Fellow, while he was at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin. They were married in 1928 and moved to Germany in 1929.

During the 1930s Mildred and Arvid traveled outside Germany but they continued residing there past the point when they knew their freedom would be severely restricted by the Nazis. This 1939 postcard from Mildred ends with the sentence “Better not write but don’t forget me…”

Mildred Harnack Postcard

Eventually the couple helped establish an underground resistance group with hundreds of members. They alerted other countries of the Nazi Army’s brutal mistreatment of occupied civilans/POWs and of Hitler’s aggressive and expansive intentions. Mildred gave advance warning to the Soviet Union, for example, of Germany’s intention to break the 1940 trade / 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop pacts and invade in 1941 (Operation Barbarossa).

Precautions were taken by the Harnaks and underground members to protect communication but they were up against more than 20 years (since 1918) of decryption and surveillance expertise in the German government. In July 1942 the Nazi Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH) Abteilung Fremde Heere West (FHW) or “High Command of the Army, Foreign Armies West” intelligence department intercepted and cracked the groups’ radio messages. In August the Gestapo began capturing members of the group, torturing them and putting them in jail. The Harnaks were arrested on September 7th, 1942.

Arvid Harnack was sentenced to death and executed just a couple months later. Mildred initially received a six year jail sentence but Hitler reversed the decision and ordered her put to death. She was beheaded by guillotine in 1943 in Ploetzensee Prison.

Wisconsin Public Television (WPT) has produced a video called “Wisconsin’s Nazi Resistance: The Mildred Fish Harnack Story”

WPT also has produced an interview with Andreas Sander, a Gestapo Prison expert on the Harnacks’ incarceration and interrogation.

Watch Andreas Sander on PBS. See more from WPT Documentaries.

“To and From the Guillotine” is a memorial poem by Mildred’s friend, Clara Leiser

Food, History, Security

What Smokers Really Smoke

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A humorous and well-written investigation of cigarettes has been posted by the Wall Street Journal.

Under “c” alone we find cardamom oil, carob bean extract, cinnamon oil, coffee extract, coriander oil, corn syrup and an oil made from camomile flowers. Gone, apparently, are some that appear in earlier lists: “civet absolute,” for example, which turns out to be a secretion from the anal gland of the civet cat, and castoreum, a comparable secretion from the Siberian beaver.

The real story here actually is that the massive amount of data generated by litigation over risk has allowed researchers to mine for historic ingredient information. Another way to look at it is that transparency forced by compliance upon product manufacturers and providers has led to some surprises.

Note: “secretion from the anal gland of the civet cat” might sound unusual but it also has been used by the sugar industry as an “ingredient in the food additives used to add butter, caramel, and rum flavorings to sweets”.

Food, Security

Drink Rate Control Through Visual Feedback

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A long time ago, although I don’t remember where, I read that the martini glass was invented during the American prohibition to get people to drink more quickly. Supposedly it opened up the rate of consumption so people could gulp and therefore reduce the risk of being caught with a drink in their hand.

The idea sounded strange (ever try to gulp out of a large martini glass?) and was stuck in my head until I read a recent study in ScienceMag that explained how it might actually work. The study describes an observed difference in drinking speeds with curved and straight glasses.

After watching video of both sessions and recording how much time it took for the drinkers to finish their beer or sodas, Attwood’s team found that one group consistently drank much faster than the others: The group drinking a full glass of lager out of curved flute glasses. In a paper published this month in PLoS ONE, the team reports that whereas the group with straight glasses nursed their 354 milliliters of lager for about 13 minutes, the group with the same amount of beer served in curved glasses finished in less than 8 minutes, drinking alcohol almost as quickly as the soda-drinkers guzzled their pop. However, the researchers observed no differences between people drinking 177 milliliters of beer out of straight versus fluted glasses.

Attwood believes that the reason for the increase in speed is that the halfway point in a curved glass is ambiguous. Social beer drinkers, she says, naturally tend to pace themselves when drinking alcohol, judging their speed by how fast they reach half-full. Another experiment in which participants were asked to judge different levels of fluid in photographs of straight and curved glasses showed that people consistently misjudge the volume in fluted glasses, Attwood says. A simple solution to this problem would be to mark beer glasses with the accurate halfway point, she says. “We can’t tell people not to drink, but we can give them a little more control.”

Straight glasses do not seem to include an angled glass like the martini shape. A better distinction might be between a vertically symmetrical glass where consumption has a constant rate versus shapes that make estimation difficult.