The FBI holds an iPhone that was owned by one of the San Bernardino terrorists, Syed Rizwan Farook, and wants Apple to crack it. Apple CEO Tim Cook is defying the FBI request and the court order that accompanied it, saying that cracking the phone would require developing a special version of iOS that could bypass passcode encryption. If such a genetically modified mobile OS escaped into the wild it could be used by anyone to crack any current iPhone, which would be bad for Apple’s users and bad for Amurica, Cook says. So he won’t do it, dag nabbit.
That’s the big picture story dominating the tech news this […]
Fourteen years ago I gave a speech to the National Association of State and Provincial Lotteries at their annual meeting, held that year in Minneapolis. They gave me a hand-carved wooden duck decoy that’s on my bookshelf today. My topic was this thing called the Internet and what it would mean to state lotteries and organized gambling in general. I told them it would rock their world. And it has. But thanks to a ruling last week from the U.S. Department of Justice, the lotteries may finally be in a position to fight back.
