And again you have to take their word for it because it's proprietary.
And even if it did work as expected, given the track record of 3 lettres agences, the chance they didn't gag order their way into a back door for this one is also very low.
I find it naïve that after what we learned for the last 20 years people still believe this PR.
I mean it's proprietary, but we understand the architecture well enough and have high degree of trust for a reason. Trusted execution environments have been around for years with really good results from a security and privacy perspective. Apple enclaves have been around over a decade and exclave 2 years now [1]. If security researchers find that backdoors exists and not just an exploit, it's in Apple's best interest to fix it based on bad PR alone.
AWS enclaves [2] have been around for a few years now with decent research on the topic and they are highly secure from personal experience and pentesting [3]. The idea at least is similar for exclaves, instead of a separate VM or a completely detached coprocessor chip, Exclaves create isolated resources on the main system-on-chip.
What bad PR? When it was released that Apple let the gov suck all the user data throught the PRISM programme, as there any drawback?
No. Most People just shrugged. Gag order, they were forced, not their fault.
Why would you even remotely believe that they are not under a similar situation with the current admin? It's just ridiculously naïve.
In fact, with the recent ledger scandal we know you can bypass good hardware security in clever ways if you are an external actor.
But in this case the actor is just Apple, they can do whatever they want. And Tim Cook offered a gold bribe to trump in public, so we know for a fact they are under pressure.
We know Apple have cheated in the past (the home button scandal). We know they have a lied about privacy (turned out 3rd party contractors had access to your siri conversation).
Your position is just not credible in 2026. It's the xkcd wrench vs encryption type of argument, and it ignores two decades of history.
Reading such argument on HN tells me Snowden did throw away his life for nothing, damn.
I'm assuming good faith for you, please do so for me when it comes to credibility. I don't think the supporting references and my argument that I think your position is too skeptical warrants reducing it to XKCD.
> What bad PR?
It literally changed Apple's marketing and privacy features for years to come [1] and at the next request of the FBI forced them to choose privacy and security as something the would like to be known for and incorporate into their products long term. [2] Snowden made a note how effective Apple's encryption had become in 2016. [3]
> Why would you even remotely believe that they are not under a similar situation with the current admin? It's just ridiculously naïve.
Multiple aspects of the larger program was done without the knowledge of the tech companies, PRISM was no where near the level of pervasiveness as Upstream. [3]. They inserted a man in the middle on the fiber lines leaving data centers to copy traffic, functionally making backdoors unnecessary.
> 3rd party contractors had access to your siri conversation
I'm glad that one was leaked, it's something that a lot of us thought was happening with many voice assistants, and it shows just why sensitive quality control should not be outsourced.
> Your position is just not credible in 2026 . . . ignores two decades of history. . . Reading such argument on HN tells me Snowden did throw away his life for nothing, damn.
Same goes to you, you ignored all improvements related to this discourse over that time. I'm highly skeptical of many corporations, including Apple, but my goals are to understand the whole picture and direction. Overall Apple has been up and down in terms of security and privacy commitments, but significantly better compared to companies such as Google, Huawei, and Meta.
> A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision
Obsolete today. What we need is reminding ourselves that we should held accountable the people behind the computer. There is always one in the chain, sometimes a CEO.
Dude, you have a mythical creature at your disposal at retail, chill, it's going to be ok.
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