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U.S. Committee Sends Letter to Tim Cook Asking for Answers About Group FaceTime Eavesdropping Flaw

Except: posting a tweet about a bug is not "reporting a bug". Large monolithic software companies have a process for this and just posting it on the web isn't going to notify the proper teams that there's a problem found.

Understandably there should be a way for the average user to report a bug but then Apple would be beset with a tidal wave of non-bugs that are probably "works as designed".

In this case, it is a problem. The length of time it is taking makes me wonder if they found evidence of someone internally doing some nefarious programming for a three letter entity.
 
goodness, its a bug! Who is having super confidential conversations on FaceTime?!?!?! Thats what secure platforms like Webex and Skype Business are for!
 
C DM said:
Quite a few assumptions and jumps to conclusions there.
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Well, anyone who suggest Apple is innocent here is likewise jumping to conclusions. Unless, of course, you are immune from such natural human traits.
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christophermdia said:
goodness, its a bug! Who is having super confidential conversations on FaceTime?!?!?! Thats what secure platforms like Webex and Skype Business are for!
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No, it's about eavesdropping without people knowing it. It's not about someone listening in on Face Time conversations.
 
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Admittedly, this bug is bad. But it is a bug. What is it with mainstream media these days picking on Apple for everything they do? The only company that actively cares about privacy is friggin' Apple! There are other companies that really have some nasty skeletons in their closet. *cough* Alphabet *cough*. Nobody even seems to care about their malignant and intentional behavior concerning privacy.
 
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The positive aspect of this is government not showing favoritism to any one company especially one that has thrown poop at the wind at other companies in regards to privacy like Facebook and Google.
 
thadoggfather said:
Stop being childish. I linked to an article (and there are many) where they did take over a week to respond.


Nice try, Gruber.
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Well there were a lot of big words involved, so I'll try to explain. The article states: "On Friday, Apple’s product security team encouraged Ms. Thompson, a lawyer, to set up a developer account to send a formal bug report. But it wasn’t until Monday ... that Apple raced to disable Group FaceTime and said it was working on a fix."

Now, I checked a calendar and found that Monday is, in fact, just one business day after Friday.
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macsrcool1234 said:
Wrong.

There is literally a tweet on Jan 20 and a youtube video demo'ing the bug.

Try again.
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Correct. I specifically said it was a day after a formal bug report was filed. Apple cannot possibly look into and verify every single "bug" that gets reported to them from every random Twitter user.
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IG88 said:
Why didn't they do that when they were first notified? Why did they wait until it went public?
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Probably because THEY DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT IT! Honestly I'm not sure why this is so difficult to understand. One random woman with no profile photo sent a single tweet about this bug and everyone here takes that as 100% irrefutable proof that Apple MUST have known about it that very second.

How many tweets do we think Apple gets per day? How many bug reports that are wrong or dumb or not a bug at all? And even if some lowly staffer manning the Twitter page saw the tweet, took it seriously, and somehow managed to pass it to the correct person, does that person not get a bit of time to verify the information? I'm sure the security team or whoever would need to verify the bug, try to figure out who is affected by it, and think about a patch.

But no, I guess they should have just pressed the big red button immediately on one random person's word. Give me a break.
 
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jarman92 said:
Well there were a lot of big words involved, so I'll try to explain. The article states: "On Friday, Apple’s product security team encouraged Ms. Thompson, a lawyer, to set up a developer account to send a formal bug report. But it wasn’t until Monday ... that Apple raced to disable Group FaceTime and said it was working on a fix."

Now, I checked a calendar and found that Monday is, in fact, just one business day after Friday.
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Correct. I specifically said it was a day after a formal bug report was filed. Apple cannot possibly look into and verify every single "bug" that gets reported to them from every random Twitter user.
[doublepost=1549470681][/doublepost]

Probably because THEY DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT IT! Honestly I'm not sure why this is so difficult to understand. One random woman with no profile photo sent a single tweet about this bug and everyone here takes that as 100% irrefutable proof that Apple MUST have known about it that very second.

How many tweets do we think Apple gets per day? How many bug reports that are wrong or dumb or not a bug at all? And even if some lowly staffer manning the Twitter page saw the tweet, took it seriously, and somehow managed to pass it to the correct person, does that person not get a bit of time to verify the information? I'm sure the security team or whoever would need to verify the bug, try to figure out who is affected by it, and think about a patch.

But no, I guess they should have just pressed the big red button immediately on one random person's word. Give me a break.
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Why are you taking this so personal? Strange behavior.
 
MacRumors said:



The U.S. Committee on Energy & Commerce
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For readers not keeping score on the organization and current majorities in the US Congress, it might have been helpful to point out that its the US House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce, that the Democrats have a new majority in that house, and thus committee chairs are from that party, whereas in the Senate....
 
MarkB786 said:
Well, anyone who suggest Apple is innocent here is likewise jumping to conclusions. Unless, of course, you are immune from such natural human traits.
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No, it's about eavesdropping without people knowing it. It's not about someone listening in on Face Time conversations.
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You make it sound as if Apple was benefiting from this bug. Should this have been caught somewhere along the line before production deployment, probably. But this is simply a bug that was overlooked. Was it a big bug with potentially dangerous outcomes, yes. I am confused as to how you think Apple benefited from this bug or why they ‘intentionally’ implemented it. And yes, it is eavesdropping without my consent, but is it not only when I have an incoming Group FaceTime call? If I get a call when I am unable to answer, in a meeting or such, I don’t generally let my phone keep ringing or vibrating. I usually decline the call. I also don’t normally continue my conversation during this and certainly wouldn’t if I was speaking of highly confidential information. I am not trying to dismis the severity of the bug, it is indeed bad. I’m not trying to make excuses for Apple, this should have been caught during testing. I happened to catch a password reset bug in another companies software that allowed you to reset the password of any user, including the admin account using any valid account in the system. This was after the software was commercially available for a very long time. Is that worse? Either way, there would be no benefit to the company who created the software so it was still just a bug that needed fixing. Sadly, to my knowledge, they never addressed it.
 
What about the days when anyone with a radio scanner could listen to cellular phone conversations?
Nobody got sued back then as far as I can remember.
This bug has been blown way over proportions, and becoming a feeding feast for money hungry people and entities.
 
Yet the Google Play store was recently overflowing with apps that steal your data and images without your knowledge and that got zero attention.
 
applefan69 said:
Because the job of our government is to defend the rights of the people. This is deemed as a breach of those rights. Once again, why are there all these idiots thinking this is some kind of minor "oopsy we slipped". No this is a smoking gun.

Any self respecting person should want to hold the corporation accountable. We should consider ourselves blessed we have a government that cares enough to do this for us. How is an investigation going to hurt you any? The regulators asking these questions get paid the same regardless if they ask the questions or not, so why is there any problem here?
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Absolutely ridiculous, smoking gun? Like Apple designed that into their software for use, laughable.

You mean the government that wanted back doors put into the software so they (and anyone else) could get into phones without the owner knowing? You have a warped sense of what the government is all about in this day and age. The 'regulators' can't come up with a reasonable data privacy plan like the EU did but they act like they are really concerned with privacy. This is a publicity show they are putting on. Lastly, I couldn't care less how much they are getting paid, my problem with them is they are only acting like they care about it so they can further advance their agenda, which isn't protecting your privacy.
 
You would think that there are more pressing issues in the country that should be addressed.
 
jarman92 said:
Correct. I specifically said it was a day after a formal bug report was filed. Apple cannot possibly look into and verify every single "bug" that gets reported to them from every random Twitter user.
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And how did that end up?

You really need to educate yourself on the matter. The tweet was followed up with correspondence from the security team and the emails were posted. Look at the tweets.

Try again.
 
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They should send letters to Google and Microsoft their OSs are less secure and flawed left right and centre, they is always going to be security flaws in any system, Apple addressed it well, first thing one dose it keep it quiet as you work to address it denie every thing else if your open and talk about it before patching it that encourages cyber criminals to start targeting the system before it’s patched
 
mi7chy said:
The positive aspect of this is government not showing favoritism to any one company especially one that has thrown poop at the wind at other companies in regards to privacy like Facebook and Google.
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Obviously a definitional issue at play here or just hyperbole for hyperboles sake. Facebook has willingly misused your personal data and got caught.

Apple had a bug in a software product and does not misuse your personal data.
 
MarkB786 said:
Well, anyone who suggest Apple is innocent here is likewise jumping to conclusions. Unless, of course, you are immune from such natural human traits.
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No, it's about eavesdropping without people knowing it. It's not about someone listening in on Face Time conversations.
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It's possible not to suggest direct guilt or innocence as well--not everything is on one extreme or another.
 
grad said:
Are you implying that Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc are just innocent victims and not the servants of the system ?
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Yes, the US government and these companies are separate entities. I thought everyone knew that.
 
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