(sneak.berlin)
@streakmachine
// @matigo @peemee @axodys @phoneboy
There's a update on Apple's response to this:
They use deliberately confusing language here to lead you into conflating Gatekeeper with Notarization, so that you will believe that the connections are currently encrypted, while not lying. The Gatekeeper OCSP checks described in this post (“Gatekeeper performs online checks”) are not encrypted. (The notarization ones, which aren’t relevant here, are.)
Apple’s spin doctors are among the best in the world, and my hat’s off to them.
It sucks that they’ve let the NSA, CIA, your ISP, et al slurp up this unencrypted pattern-of-life data off the wire for the last 2+ years, and they’re still going to transmit the data (encrypted) to Apple in real-time, on by default every single mac, but at least the 0.01% of mac users who know about it now can turn it off, so Apple will only get a real-time log of what apps you open, when, and where for the other 99.99% of mac users. Cool.
This is, sadly, about as close as you can possibly get to a “we fucked up” from Apple PR: they’re deleting their IP logs, encrypting their shit, and letting you turn it off. This is great, but they have remained totally silent on the fact that their OS apps will still bypass your firewall and leak your IP and location past your VPN on Big Sur and how they’re still not fixing the key escrow backdoor in iMessage’s encryption so Apple sysadmins and the FBI can keep seeing your nudes and texts in iMessage.
Yeah, after reading this, this is a non-apology from Apple. They're still silent on the firewall/VPN issue and they'll continue to log every app you run by default.