This month it's Zoom. Next month it's someone else. To paraphrase John Adams, our principle should be to trust no man living with power. To believe otherwise - to believe that any particular party is capable of doing no wrong - is to be deluded, or worse.
Quite right. As much as I might appreciate Apple "looking out" for its users, I would much rather suffer the odds that something happens to my machine - I consider myself a rather intelligent person, anyhow - than be beholden to the mothership. As with our governments' security apparati, it may be benevolent for a time, but once the system is in place, all it takes is a proverbial "flip of the switch."
Trust no man with power.... so was Adams advocating rule by children? Or perhaps a gynopoly? Or was he anticipating the invention of AI and welcoming our robotic overlords centuries early?
Sorry, but someone has to be entrusted with a certain amount of power, which is the point of all those checks and balances we keep hearing about, where one official or body or agency checks (meaning halts) the power of another, or balances their attempts to abuse their authority by being able to prevent it indirectly, such as by withholding funding.
The power that we, the People exercise through our government, and such agencies within it as the FTC, the FCC, the SEC, and the CPB, or whatever, plus laws as Congress from time to time enacts, are the checks we have on Apple, and our willingness to stop buying Apple products if they abuse their power is a way in which we can balance their power with our own. It’s similar to how our government was set up with the hope of making trust possible, even beneficial. But if you think you’re pretty smart, and can manage this system you’ve bought all by your lonesome and don’t need the army of software engineers who, unlike you, have access to the source-code and documentation internal to Apple on how the closed-source, proprietary parts of their OS works, then more power to you.
I’m sure anyone who is pretty intelligent can do just as well, even without the benefit of being the people to whom security researchers and white-hat hackers report problems and security holes and flaws to. All those automated crash reports from millions or billions of computers and devices... who needs any of that stuff, right?
Apple should just axe their whole software team and hire a few guys from the internet who think of themselves as pretty smart or intelligent. Think of the savings and corresponding boost in profits that would generate!
LOL
