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Taking a deposition doesn’t mean he was in court. He could have been in his own office while the person was being deposed. The angle for Apple to take would be to try and prove that he staged the deposition after learning about the bug in order to file a lawsuit. Apple’s failure to deal with this sooner will cost them and ultimately this will be good for the consumer.

He’s making the accusation. Apple just needs to sit and get him to show his ‘evidence’. I’m unsure how he’s going to prove and ‘unknown’ person listened.
 
Apple is more unpolished with its software than I would expect for paying top $ for a phone. That includes at the XR price point too.
This bug is not something one would do unintentionally. You have to know about it ,in order to exploit it. Bugs like this exist everywhere. The fact that Apple stopped Group FaceTime is a good thing.
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Anyone wants to start a class action again Apple with SMS message forwarding unable to reply on another iPhone with same Apple ID issue? It only happens to the latest iPhone Xs Max, Xs and XR because of the e-sim.
Did you talk to Apple Support about this?
 
Surprising that a lawyer doesn't recognize these four letters -- EULA.

Ironically, crafted by other lawyers to shield software companies from liabilities from bugs in their products.

Like it or not (I don't), that's how the software business works.

I suspect the judge will know what those letters mean, and if not, Apple's lawyers will remind them.
 
I feel like there must be some sort of legal text in the user agreement for FaceTime that protects Apple from this sort of thing. They are simply providing a free service, and if you're using a consumer service like FaceTime during a deposition, that's on you, not Apple.
 
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I feel like there must be some sort of legal text in the user agreement for FaceTime that protects Apple from this sort of thing. They are simply providing a free service, and if you're using a consumer service like FaceTime during a deposition, that's on you, not Apple.
I think the point is you wouldn't know that you were being listened to:"a person could force a FaceTime connection with another person, providing access to a user's audio and sometimes video even when the FaceTime call was not accepted." - they evidently (lawyer speak :) were not using FaceTime, but simply declined a call.
I was delighted to hear of group calls with FaceTime after waiting years since I often used this feature in iChat. Let's see how long before they fix it.
 
I am just saying that you would expect better than iOS 11 bugs or FaceTime privacy bugs being caught through internal testing.

It is literally impossible to catch every bug through any kind of internal testing for an application that complex. Catching bugs requires a diverse set devices and user conditions to be able to trigger enough possible scenarios, and at times are even random. Even with that, 20 years later there could still be undiscovered bugs. After all it took 24 years for the Meltdown and Spectre processor exploits to manifest, and when that happened hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of secure environments were exploitable. Bug fixes are essentially never ending unless support for a version is dropped, and the only reason bug fixes stopped in that case is because they stopped bothering to fix it.

Your expectations exceed reality / are unrealistic.
 
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I'm curious if there are other similar bugs that can turn on our cameras and mics without us, the users, realising it
 
That's not the point here, the case is that these insecurity invulnerabilities are happening a lot for a company who prides itself agaisnt their competitions of having strong security and privacy measures when in reality they're just like the others and Apple isn't special. This is also the case of most Apple users who keep defending Apple for everything start to see that Apple as a company doesn't really give a damn anymore about the costumer and their only caring is the profit from their overpriced gadgets. I can't count the times I've seen people posting the following "Apple's premium is worth because the experience is the best, big free and privacy controlled" which isn't true and never will.

Everyone is human!
The idea that you can trust any company to be 100% bug free, accident free etc.. is kind of crazy. Not even car companies, airplane builders etc.. are 100% bug free. It's impossible.

The reality is additional features add complexity which increases the vulnerability to bugs. Its impossible to have it any other way apart from to not introduce additional features. That's what finance companies and nuclear power plants do.. not update their stuff!

Apple cant do that otherwise there will be no business.

It's obvious that this bug is there because they added additional callers to face time which meant whatever test frameworks were setup and passed, didn't account for how things work with additional callers properly. But for years this team would never have had to look outside the series of tests they normally use, now they have to and they got caught out. It happens. All you can do is solve it as soon as possible.

And apple tend not to react immediately to issues like this because alerting more people to an issue like this without having a remedy is asking for trouble. Unless you have a solution or way of managing it what is the point of exacerbating the issue by telling everyone?
 
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As long as imperfect people write code, and imperfect people audit said code, bugs of various levels will happen. No way to prevent it.

Apple is not the only company that releases software with bugs.

If they take a week to respond to such a serious issue, there's a problem.
 
On Windows and Android, definitely. On Mac and iOS, probably.

As you said, probably. We can't be sure. And here we're talking about a company that "tricks" users to even sync their document and desktop files to iCloud when they purchase a new computer. MS doesn't do that.
 
MS doesn't do that.

They certainly try to nudge you into it, Windows 10 has been telling me to "protect my data" by using oneDrive quite often on my home-computer.

PS: I do not feel "tricked" by MS or Apple because they ask me to use their cloud-storage
 
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As you said, probably. We can't be sure. And here we're talking about a company that "tricks" users to even sync their document and desktop files to iCloud when they purchase a new computer. MS doesn't do that.

You're right MS doesn't trick users to sync their documents and desktop files to iCloud, instead they do it to Azure / OneDrive.

Personally, I'd take a system that is "probably" exploitable in that way, over a system that I already know is definitely exploitable in that way. To put it another way, it's possible macOS and iOS can be exploited that way ... iCloud has nothing to do with that at all, and has no bearing on anything. iCloud's servers are encrypted and in another location, and them being exploitable or not does not affect nor make a difference if the laptop itself is exploitable. Still this is possibility. Even if iCloud didn't exist the laptop exploit would still be a possibility, neither has anything to do with the other nor is the exploit of one dependent upon or due to another.

It is with absolute certainty that a Windows computer and Android phone can be exploited. Doesn't matter if you use the cloud or not, your files are accessible. Do you think that's better?
 
You're right MS doesn't trick users to sync their documents and desktop files to iCloud, instead they do it to Azure / OneDrive.

Personally, I'd take a system that is "probably" exploitable in that way, over a system that I already know is definitely exploitable in that way. To put it another way, it's possible macOS and iOS can be exploited that way ... iCloud has nothing to do with that at all, and has no bearing on anything. iCloud's servers are encrypted and in another location, and them being exploitable or not does not affect nor make a difference if the laptop itself is exploitable. Still this is possibility. Even if iCloud didn't exist the laptop exploit would still be a possibility, neither has anything to do with the other nor is the exploit of one dependent upon or due to another.

It is with absolute certainty that a Windows computer and Android phone can be exploited. Doesn't matter if you use the cloud or not, your files are accessible. Do you think that's better?

I don't disagree with you. I'm expressing my concern about Apple's security. I don't know about Azure to be honest.

But going back to encrypted files at rest on iCloud is not enough to me. For some professions files shouldn't be on icloud! And I happen to know people who didn't realise every document they had was uploaded.

Going back to facetime a convenient solution would be a light next to our camera (as it is on imac)
 
Going back to facetime a convenient solution would be a light next to our camera (as it is on imac)

The problem with smartphones is that they are active when you are not looking at them. You could have set your phone to silent/vibrate and just ignored the call, in that case you also wont notice the light next to the camera and people could still have eavesdropped.

Maybe someone will design a sleeve that specifically blocks the microphones when the phone is inside. Would have to be very specific per model though...
 
What was the loss or damage?

Apple almost instantly took down Group FaceTime and I don’t think anyone can demonstrate damages.

Thrown out or minimal impact. Money grab. Next.

You don’t know what loss or damage this guy suffers. You are just guessing about it.

What is you or anyone so pissed off when someone suing a multi-billion company? Everyone gets rights to sue someone or some company. I don’t see what is wrong with that. It will decided by court.
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What a money-grabbing parasite. I hope he drowns in the fiery pits of hell.

Why are you so pissed off when someone suing Apple?

Apple has been sued and lost several court case before. You never know if this particular guy suffered any loss or damages. You are just guessing.

Were you pissed off for a guy suing or suing Apple?
 
I don't disagree with you. I'm expressing my concern about Apple's security. I don't know about Azure to be honest.

But going back to encrypted files at rest on iCloud is not enough to me. For some professions files shouldn't be on icloud! And I happen to know people who didn't realise every document they had was uploaded.

Going back to facetime a convenient solution would be a light next to our camera (as it is on imac)


The Facetime light was already exploited and disabled. Google, "isight light hack." That has since been patched, but it reflects that even such security measures don't really amount to much. It's because of that almost ten year old exploit that I think it's probable that someone thought a way around the patch, and never published it.

I think most people are generally better served by a monitored and secured datacenter. Considering that most people have no idea how to secure their computer, or monitor it for intrusions.

Personally, I would rather trust my files in an encrypted datacenter that is almost physically impossible to penetrate, where paid white hat hackers proactively monitor it and patch it 24/7 ... than to think my unmonitored, encrypted laptop is more secure. Granted, a datacenter is a juicier and more obvious target, and my data might be a consequence of someone else's targeting ... but my laptop is significantly more hackable, albeit less targetable (unless I connect to public wifi).

Pros and cons / tradeoffs with each, so it's really a matter of perspective.

But personally, I'm very experienced in professional computer security, and even I don't have the patience to monitor my laptop. With Windows that was a daily task, with MacOS's true / pure Unix subsystem I'm less concerned. But even then my laptop is basically empty, and everything is on an encrypted and multi-firewalled NAS, with SELinux secured and encrypted off-site, ssh key only accessible, single point of entry backups. I'm certain my cloud backups are more secure than my NAS. I put significant effort into it because I knew it was in the cloud. That logic is similar in other cloud versus laptop situations, that because it's "the cloud" more effort is put into security.
 
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The Facetime light was already exploited and disabled. Google, "isight light hack." That has since been patched, but it reflects that even such security measures don't really amount to much. It's because of that almost ten year old exploit that I think it's probable that someone thought a way around the patch, and never published it.

I think most people are generally better served by a monitored and secured datacenter. Considering that most people have no idea how to secure their computer, or monitor it for intrusions.

Personally, I would rather trust my files in an encrypted datacenter that is almost physically impossible to penetrate, where paid white hat hackers proactively monitor it and patch it 24/7 ... than to think my unmonitored, encrypted laptop is more secure. Granted, a datacenter is a juicier and more obvious target, and my data might be a consequence of someone else's targeting ... but my laptop is significantly more hackable, albeit less targetable (unless I connect to public wifi).

Pros and cons / tradeoffs with each, so it's really a matter of perspective.

But personally, I'm very experienced in professional computer security, and even I don't have the patience to monitor my laptop. With Windows that was a daily task, with MacOS's true / pure Unix subsystem I'm less concerned. But even then my laptop is basically empty, and everything is on an encrypted and multi-firewalled NAS, with SELinux secured and encrypted off-site, ssh key only accessible, single point of entry backups. I'm certain my cloud backups are more secure than my NAS. I put significant effort into it because I knew it was in the cloud. That logic is similar in other cloud versus laptop situations, that because it's "the cloud" more effort is put into security.

First of all thank for explaining few technical details. I understand your point. I can only speak for myself. I am not experienced in computer security as yourself but I consider myself above the average user. With macos 10.13 (I think? :) ) without realising it while installing it, it was preselected to sync everything on cloud. Even if I would like the convenience of having my data on cloud I'm simply not allowed to put medical records online - even if Apple secures my files. I realised that lots of other people didn't realise it as well.

For a company that advocates security so much I would expect something more. As a consumer I can't be specific, like yourself probably, of what I would like Apple to do but right now I don't get the feeling of being as secure with Apple as I would like.

I understand this case with facetime is a bug but I'm reading here that Apple was informed soon enough. I remember last year we has similar issues (with password if I remember). Confusing users to sync files on cloud is another problem for some people. Do you believe that Apple could handle privacy a bit better maybe? It's a question that I would like an expert on computer security to answer. I'm always learning something new here :)
 
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