158: You Can't Outlaw Math
25 Feb 2016Apple and the FBI, Microsoft and Xamarin, and the origin of Comic Sans.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Driving John's cold over to Craig's house
- Follow-up:
- Microsoft Buys Xamarin
- Apple and the FBI
- Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
- Post-show: #mykewasvictorious
Sponsored by:
- Squarespace: Build it beautiful. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
- Fracture: Photos printed in vivid color directly on glass. Use promo code ATP10 for 10% off your first order.
- Harry's: An exceptional shave at a fraction of the price. Use code ATP for $5 off your first purchase.
Chapters
- Driving John’s cold to Craig’s house
- Follow-up: Figma
- Origin of Comic Sans
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Microsoft buys Xamarin
- Sponsor: Fracture (code ATP10)
- Apple and the FBI
- Sponsor: Harry’s (code ATP)
- Apple and the FBI, continued
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Anything else
Driving John’s cold to Craig’s house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re in for a long show tonight, are we not? I don’t honestly, I don’t know how long the FBI thing is gonna last.
⏹️ ▶️ John you put that on the pre-show
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Marco’s classic. Honestly, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think there’s much to say
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Always says that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never say it’s gonna be a short show though That’s always you
⏹️ ▶️ John but that you say it in a different way. That’s the way you say it Can you tell I
⏹️ ▶️ John have a cold My my streak is over. I thought I was gonna go two whole winters without getting sick almost made
⏹️ ▶️ John it out of this one so close
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can we just drive you over to Craig’s house you can fix your cold I recognize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that wasn’t the best use of that metaphor but I just cannot get tired of that metaphor it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John so good yeah it’s kind of mean though like this gets back to what I was saying on the past show we
⏹️ ▶️ John were talking about the new open Apple and coming on podcast or whatever it’s so easy
⏹️ ▶️ John to make fun of that but that type of story is an example of people opening up like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the type of thing that in a more controlled PR environment environment would never come out.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s slightly unfortunate that that’s the story that they put out there because
⏹️ ▶️ John even on the merits, it’s kind of like, well, you’re trying to make an emotional appeal, but realistically
⏹️ ▶️ John speaking, that’s not an effective way for an organization to address problems to have the head of the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the head honchos of these huge swaths of the biggest company in the world be addressing problems on an individual
⏹️ ▶️ John level with their own particular max. that’s not, you need better tools to manage this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it just seems like you’re trying to sway me emotionally with this anecdote, but it doesn’t even make sense. But that’s the type
⏹️ ▶️ John of thing that you do when you open up about yourself and your personal life, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure it really is true. And so I’m glad we know that that’s what’s going on. And now we can,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess, make our own judgments about the effectiveness of the strategy of driving things to Craig
⏹️ ▶️ John Fitter East. I don’t know. It’s also trying to say how passionate they are, that even these big important people
⏹️ ▶️ John are not above getting down to a problem that they encounter, that they’re not going to leave it to
⏹️ ▶️ John the lower people and say, oh, they’ll take care of that, that they really want to fix every little problem they found. So it’s multifaceted,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s personal, it’s human, it’s flawed, it’s everything that the new open Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John the new more open Apple is about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I only have a few questions about it. First of all, in what part of a Ferrari does an iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco lot of cars.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s the rule of thumb. If you have a Ferrari, it is not your only car. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fair. Okay. Second question. Can you imagine being Federici and basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being like the tech support team for the entire company? I wonder if that’s like a
⏹️ ▶️ John power move. Like, you know, it’s like if you have something wrong with Apple Music, do you
⏹️ ▶️ John like drive your computer over to Eddie’s house?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like it’s unfair because all of Eddie’s stuff is all cloud and services. can’t really drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a broken iTunes store request over to Eddie’s house.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well you just bring you just bring your computer and say why is all my album metadata messed up fix
⏹️ ▶️ John this and you and you come back on Monday and you say is it done did you fix my album metadata? I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it’s even funnier to imagine like you know you’re Craig Federighi you’re like sitting down at dinner with your family
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know you hear you hear this like loud you know v12 pull up in the driveway like oh god again. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know I don’t know I don’t know Ferraris want to even I was just guessing there was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably a V12 one there is is there only one was only one well there’s the the FF
⏹️ ▶️ John is that V12 Casey remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought so but I too am not in encyclopedia
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John for this this
⏹️ ▶️ John to front engine V12 sitting on one’s really ugly and four-wheel drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the FF yeah is that even for a really is it’s ugly and four-wheel drive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh… dot john would suffer through
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I wouldn’t. If I got that, I would sell it immediately and buy a better one.
Follow-up: Figma
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ah, man. Anyway, we should probably do some follow-ups, shouldn’t we? Tell me about Figma, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even remember talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was that vector thing, remember? That app that was
⏹️ ▶️ John let you draw vectors in a different way. And I said on the website, basically they had a big sign-up button instead of a big
⏹️ ▶️ John download button. So I was like, oh, there’s nothing to download if you, you know, like you can sign up and I guess they’ll tell you more when it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John ready. Like as in the thing wasn’t out yet. And David Klein tweeted to say that he’s, I believe Figma
⏹️ ▶️ John is 100% in the browser, nothing to download. when it does arrive apparently it’s going to be a web app
⏹️ ▶️ John but i still think you can’t yet try it but anyway if i can try it for free online i definitely will because
⏹️ ▶️ John i’m interested in and how it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to work. Fair enough. That was quick and easy.
Origin of Comic Sans
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And, uh, why don’t you tell us about everyone’s favorite font, Comic Sans.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes. Uh, friend, a friend of the show and a flop house adjacent
⏹️ ▶️ John micro celebrity, John McCoy and a friend of mine pointed out that in all our discussion of Comic
⏹️ ▶️ John Sans, um, or, or Microsoft Bob, rather, we didn’t mention that Comic Sans, the much hated
⏹️ ▶️ John font was created for, but not shipped with Microsoft Bob. So you can read the Wikipedia entry
⏹️ ▶️ John on Comic Sans and you will see that it was created to try to fit in with the Microsoft Bob world, which explains
⏹️ ▶️ John why it’s so awful. But it didn’t it didn’t make it in time, so it didn’t ship with it. So yet another
⏹️ ▶️ John thing you can blame on Microsoft Bob.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have you ever used Microsoft Bob, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think so. I think I only I’ve read about it in magazines when it came out, but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t I didn’t have a PC, obviously, and none of my friends who had a PC had it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, John, stop listening for a second. Casey, we have to for April Fool’s Day somehow find a way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to put Microsoft Bob on a computer in John’s office.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t remember using it. I bet you I did at some point, but I don’t remember having done so.
⏹️ ▶️ John I installed Windows 8 on a VM on my Mac. That felt really weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, to be fair, Windows 8 felt really weird to Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John know. I know. Have you ever tried doing an edge swipe with a mouse cursor on a windowed
⏹️ ▶️ John VM? It’s really hard. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, in all fairness, doing everything in Windows 8 is really hard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, just remember that was my life, boys, until just a couple weeks ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, congratulations again for getting out of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you. I’m so happy. I really am. Anyway, we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are done with follow-up, are we not?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s it. That’s it. Just two small items.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow, look at us go. Let’s celebrate by talking about something awesome.
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Microsoft buys Xamarin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, there’s been big breaking news that has happened since we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recorded last. And I think it’s important we talk about it. Microsoft has bought Xamarin.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sorry. I just, yeah. That news is fine. I really appreciated your intro there. I
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t think much about Xamarin, but if you had asked me, hey, does some company own Xamarin
⏹️ ▶️ John now? I would have maybe guessed Microsoft. I know they did like NetWare on them at some point.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Something like
⏹️ ▶️ John But I had basically, honestly, I had lost track of who owned them. And they’ve been so closely associated with
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft that if you had told me, oh yeah, no, Microsoft owns Xamarin, I would have been like, oh yeah, that sounds right.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the fact that Microsoft bought them makes sense to me, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so let me catch everyone up. So Xamarin was originally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey called Mono and it was an open source re-implementation of.NET that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was designed to bring.NET to other platforms. And initially this really meant Linux, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over time it became more about allowing you to write.NET code,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey usually C-sharp code, that ran on Android and iOS. And I looked at it way back when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was Mono One, or I’m sorry, it was a long time ago, right when they first started supporting the iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forget what version that was. And as we’ve talked about a handful of times in the show,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it felt like exactly how I would have written a bridging platform to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go between the world of C-sharp and iOS. That’s a compliment. It felt really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really good. Now, it’s still a total hack, but it felt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it was really well-designed and really, really well done. Microsoft has since bought Xamarin,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which again used to be called Mono. Now, it’s being folded into Microsoft. This is an extension of what they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did a year or so, maybe two years ago when they open-sourced a lot of the.NET framework.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in parts that Xamarin and other people like them could use Microsoft code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to get the bits of.NET they needed and then Xamarin could go back to doing the thing they were good at,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which was just building that cross-platform layer. So Microsoft is buying Xamarin.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll see what that means. This reminds me of our conversations in the past about Project Islandwood, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was, slash is, I haven’t really kept up with it, a cross-platform
⏹️ ▶️ Casey setup that Microsoft had to bring iOS apps onto Windows 10.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s mostly died. Is that true? Tim Cynova
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Was it ever alive? I mean, I know they released that in some form, and I know people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looked at the code and it was horrendous and full of tons of temporary hacks and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to-do implementations and everything. Steven Penn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, because wasn’t it like a re-implementation of UIKit on top? Tim
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Cynova That was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the idea. And I remember it didn’t come out right after Swift was announced and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and is not compatible with Swift at all. And so there was that issue. And then the other issue is, yeah, like they basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it tries to be a layer so that you can write, basically you can port your iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app right over to Windows Phone or Windows in general. I don’t know which version of Windows, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right over to Windows something or other. And it would just re-implement, you know, all the basic iOS frameworks. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I honestly have not heard of anybody using it for any reason. I mean, the reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why iOS developers are not making their apps for Windows is not because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can’t cross-compile them. It’s because we don’t care because there’s not enough of a market. Literally. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not trying to be mean. It’s like, if we wanted to make apps for those platforms, we would just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make them correctly, using their native tools and their native apps. The fact that there is this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird half-compatibility layer that is kind of half-baked and kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco half-works and is probably only half-supported by anybody, that’s not really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to change anyone’s mind meaningfully. That might help out a couple of consultants on really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tight time constraints, but even then, are the clients even asking for Windows apps? It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just seems like there is so little demand and will for people to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make Windows apps. This is not going to meaningfully change that. If this was the
⏹️ ▶️ John 90s, the old story was like, don’t bother trying to make a Linux compatible
⏹️ ▶️ John implementation of the common language runtime or.net because you’re just playing into Microsoft’s
⏹️ ▶️ John trap. And even though Microsoft says all these things about, oh, you know, cross platform runtime,
⏹️ ▶️ John virtual machine environment, C sharp, blah, blah, blah, really, what they’re just trying to do is trap you. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why the Linux computer, you’re always kind of looked at them, you know, with a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John warily saying, I don’t really want to make any Linux apps using this Microsoft like, No, no, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a Microsoft technology. It’s totally open. it’ll be just like, I don’t know about that. And if we were
⏹️ ▶️ John still in the 90s, and Microsoft was still that company that everyone was scared of, and everyone suspected they were going to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John embrace, extend, extinguish, all this other stuff, what everyone would be saying was, see, we were really smart not to try to
⏹️ ▶️ John build anything in Linux based on the common language runtime or.NET, because if we did, now Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John bought them, and guess what, all that cross-platform stuff that they were doing before, well, that’s all over now,
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything that is in Xamarin is gonna become Windows only, and nothing’s gonna be cross-platform anymore, because
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it was just like it was a trap, basically, get people to distract Linux, which is a big threat
⏹️ ▶️ John to Microsoft in their own mind back in the 90s. And to use Microsoft technologies,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then take those technologies away, and make them proprietor from that point on. But
⏹️ ▶️ John of course, the modern Microsoft buying Xamarin for exactly the opposite reasons because they’re a company that
⏹️ ▶️ John has shown that they’re good at doing things cross platform and the new Microsoft wants to sell
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever it is they have to sell to as many people as possible and they’re moving away from
⏹️ ▶️ John the only way to get this is to get it on windows you know azure web services are an example of courting ios
⏹️ ▶️ John developers and stuff to you can use these web services with your ios app um they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll sell anything to anyone because they think they have valuable things and they’re no longer in a position where they can say
⏹️ ▶️ John we have valuable technology and the only way you can get it is to be microsoft and windows and proprietary from
⏹️ ▶️ John top to bottom because nobody does that anymore it’s not it’s not like a it’s not even an option so I think
⏹️ ▶️ John this purchase of Xamarin would have blown the minds of like a Linux advocates in the 90s the idea that they’re buying
⏹️ ▶️ John them because they’re so good at cross-platform stuff and that surely what they’re going to do with those people and that technology is
⏹️ ▶️ John more cross-platform things not like oh now finally we can stop people from using
⏹️ ▶️ John our technology to do anything except for make apps for our platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so here’s a question I don’t you know I haven’t looked too much to this, so forgive me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, you know, back in the 90s when Sun Microsystems made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this really, really expensive custom proprietary hardware and software to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run custom Sun boxes. And then Sun invented Java. And Java
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is seen by many as kind of a big strategic blunder by Sun because the whole point of Java
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to make proprietary platforms and hardware completely irrelevant and marginalize them and make the same software run everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so many people think that was Sun kind of eroding their own company’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strong points and their own revenue sources. Trying to apply that today, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what does Microsoft get big picture-wise, long-term-wise, what do they get out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making Linux servers a first-class platform for.NET
⏹️ ▶️ Marco development? Because right now, Microsoft makes a big portion of their revenue with Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco servers, and Windows Server-side components and licensing from that. And, you know, how does that…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Obviously, with Satya Nadella’s new leadership focused more on services and enterprise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff, it seems like this might be the opposite of what they wanted to do, right? It seems like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is long-term, removing them from being required to use their tools.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So now, you know, the server-side stuff… Now, before, one of the biggest reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why people would buy Windows servers was not not because they’re particularly amazing, but because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they had to run their.NET server stuff because the.NET stuff was what they were comfortable developing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in, or what they used already, or what was best for them for whatever reason. So Windows had a lot of, or Microsoft had a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of server-side software sales from people who were kind of forced to use Windows Server, who might have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chosen Linux if they could have. And with these, and the Mono project and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then the Xamarin thing, like this is not new, But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always kind of been like a second-class citizen. It was always kind of like, well, if you were the IT manager, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably wouldn’t choose that because you’d be scared of compatibility or whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how does it help Microsoft now to have Linux be or become soon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a first-class citizen to run their server-side stuff, which means nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs to buy Windows servers anymore?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why does it help Apple to open-source Swift? Or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me rephrase. Why does it help Apple to make Swift compatible with Linux? That’s a better question.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think, first of all, that Apple needs Swift on Linux because they need to run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their own services on it. I think that’s a big thing right now with Apple is that their services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are built on what is rumored to be a lot of web objects and old Java
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff and just like old stuff that either is not maintained anymore or is maintained
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only by Apple or is not the the right tool for the job or is just in disrepair. And so I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple really wants Swift on Linux for themselves, for their own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco service division. With Microsoft, I don’t know how much they need. I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s why I’m asking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if this is necessarily even a good question, but just like, is this a good idea for Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long term to make Windows Server
⏹️ ▶️ John unnecessary? Well, but they don’t make their money off Windows Server as much as they make it off exchange licenses and
⏹️ ▶️ John office licenses and stuff. And like they’re like Oracle is a great example. Oracle is
⏹️ ▶️ John an enterprise software company that makes tons and tons of money. Uh, and
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t sell, they don’t force you to buy an operating system. I mean, they do have Oracle Enterprise Linux, right? But it’s Linux,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? They don’t sell hardware. Uh, they’re just selling you their software and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s qualified and certain pieces of hardware and there’s relationships with people who will sell you the hardware and what OS you should
⏹️ ▶️ John have or whatever. But but when you sell, what they want to sell you is an
⏹️ ▶️ John exchange license for a certain number of people to whatever, and it’s not as if
⏹️ ▶️ John doing this makes it more likely that there will be a successful exchange competitor. Like Google’s always tried to do it
⏹️ ▶️ John with Google Apps and everything, which is an entirely different approach and much more server side, but as far as Microsoft’s concerned, you mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John like Apple, like oh, Apple has its own Linux server, so of course they want Swift on Linux. It’s not unreasonable to imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John that Microsoft might decide kind of like, I mean, you’re talking about Sun before one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John things that did Sun in was Linux, right? The idea that you can only run
⏹️ ▶️ John exchange on a Windows server. It’s crappy for kind of everyone, including Microsoft. Would Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John ever want to, you know, can you imagine a world where Microsoft sold you exchange
⏹️ ▶️ John and office, all which ran on the Linux of your choice, but there’s a couple that Microsoft recommends, including maybe a Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John variant of Linux. Sure. Because if that means that that Microsoft doesn’t have to spend
⏹️ ▶️ John money maintaining a a proprietary server OS that was never quite as good as Linux anyway, then that’s a win.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s sacrilege. And like the Steve Ballmer thing, what are you talking about Windows is the crown jewel and blah, blah, blah. But this is a brave
⏹️ ▶️ John new world here. And if you’re really going to do services, you can’t be tied to
⏹️ ▶️ John a particular server platform, especially when it’s one that’s like, more difficult to manage, it has fewer companies behind.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, Linux is basically raced across the entire server side ecosystem,
⏹️ ▶️ John erasing every single proprietary competitor, so much so that former proprietary competitors say, okay, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll just have our own variant of Linux. And everyone’s okay with that. And just like, that’s like that part of
⏹️ ▶️ John the ecosystem has not been become the part where you make your money and enterprise has never been you make your money off support
⏹️ ▶️ John contracts and licensing and charging proceed or perceive you or whatever the heck you do. You don’t make it off
⏹️ ▶️ John selling them hardware boxes or OS licenses.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I couldn’t agree with that enough. I remember being tangentially involved with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pricing quotes for things like SharePoint and BizTalk and all of these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey big, big, big software packages that are not the server. These are the things that you’re installing on Windows Server.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I can’t remember the details now, but oftentimes it was by processor. Then when, when multi-core
⏹️ ▶️ Casey processors became a thing, I think at some point, some software might’ve been moved to a bi-core
⏹️ ▶️ Casey installation costs. So if you have a 15 core computer, that doesn’t make any sense, a 16 core computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with, you know, I don’t know, four processors, then you’re paying 16 times,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever the single amount is like they make absurd amounts of money off of the software,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just comically large amounts of money off the software. And to come back to one of your original questions,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, like why would, why would, what, what is Microsoft in? What did they get out of this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, I think what Microsoft gets out of this is they, it would be neat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for them. if writing C sharp was kind of the lingua franca
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of server-side programming. And obviously, there will never be one language that’s the standard language
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of server-side programming. But in the same way that Java is huge today, in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part because it’s open source, so much of.NET is going open source now that why couldn’t.NET
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be the new Java in the future?
⏹️ ▶️ John And because it’s the old Java?
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s better than the old
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Java. It has better
⏹️ ▶️ John support. You know what I mean? Like, especially now that Sun has been gobbled up and everything, like
⏹️ ▶️ John who is, I mean, I guess Java lurches forward, but if anyone was going to compete against Java, as
⏹️ ▶️ John like Casey said, is the sort of default safe enterprise-y server-side language, it would be C-sharp.
⏹️ ▶️ John And part of the thing that’s been hurting Microsoft’s story is, yeah, but then we got to buy
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows servers. And everyone knows that feeling. Like, especially if you have an organization that has all their other
⏹️ ▶️ John servers that are Linux based and everyone’s happy with them. And they’re all they have an entire organization built
⏹️ ▶️ John up around managing those servers. They like the idea that they can buy different hardware from different vendors and, and change, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John different distributions and everything like that. And then someone comes in and says, Hey, you guys should use a
⏹️ ▶️ John T sharp and write all your server side stuff in C sharp using this server side framework. And it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John but then we have to introduce Windows servers. Nobody wants that. Like you can’t really mix. It’s almost like they keep those people separate.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you have one set of people who manage the Linux based
⏹️ ▶️ John servers, and one set of people who manage the Windows based servers. And I don’t know if you bring those people to the same room
⏹️ ▶️ John that they will just collide and annihilate.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think the other thing we should say a couple quick notes. First of all, C sharp is a great language.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It really, really is. I know there are going to be people out there who are rolling their eyes. But truly, C sharp
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a wonderful, wonderful language that can be many, many, many different things to many, many, many different people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’ve been writing a lot of Swift over the last couple of weeks, and I’m really loving Swift.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But C Sharp is also a truly wonderful language and fixes many of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ills that Java brought to the table. And let’s assume for a second that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your firm or your staff is really into C Sharp. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’ve never touched Microsoft servers, but they’re really into C Sharp and they think to themselves,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey man, I really want to go to the cloud with a C sharp instead of staying on premise with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Linux or on premise with Microsoft. It doesn’t matter. What cloud environment should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we go to? We could just go to Azure, which probably will do very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well with a C sharp based deployment. And even if Azure is Microsoft service behind the scenes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who cares because you don’t have to worry about it. So anyway, so I think that there’s plenty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to gain from Microsoft by doing this. But we’ll see what really ends up happening about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know how much Xamarin specifically will make a difference. But the idea of Microsoft pushing to being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everywhere, or to having C sharp everywhere, I think is a good thing. John, any other last thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, one minor point. Speaking of both Oracle and Sun, yes, of course, Oracle was the company that bought
⏹️ ▶️ John Sun, which means that Oracle does actually sell hardware now because Sun used to sell hardware and now Oracle sells hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John through Sun. So they sell ZFS storage devices and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ding! Does that count? I don’t… Does that count? Does that count as a ding?
⏹️ ▶️ John ZFS storage devices? There are file systems on them. I don’t think it counts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that’s a tough one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, I rescind my ding.
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Apple and the FBI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks a lot to Fracture for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so there’s been some interesting things going on with the United States government and Apple. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even… Do we really need to recap this? I guess we probably should give the short
⏹️ ▶️ Marco An overview would be helpful for people who listen in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, although anyone listening to the story in real time, as we noted, this story came out right after we recorded last week. So presumably everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John listening to the show when it’s released knows all these details, but we should summarize.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Does that mean I’m the one summarizing? I can take a crack at it real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do seem to be the chief summarizer on the show. Maybe John, you and John are close for that. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. Co-chief summarizers? I’m certainly not. So I know I’m safe. I can sit back here and drink my tea. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. How about I’ll take a stab at it here and you guys can interrupt when you’re ready.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there was a terrible, terrible, terrible shooting in December, I believe, of last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year in San Bernardino, California. A couple of people took it upon themselves to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey commit this really heinous act and kill a lot of people. That’s really, really terrible and there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey discussion about that. It’s terrible. It was a terrorist act. It’s something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s really unfortunate. These two people, suspects, perpetrators, whatever we’d like to call them,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of them – it was I believe a husband-wife pair. The husband had two phones, two iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as far as we know. One of them was destroyed. That was his personal phone. His wife’s personal phone also destroyed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He also had an iPhone 5C that was issued to him by his job, which coincidentally is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey San Bernardino government. The iPhone 5C has a passcode on it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it is quite possible that it could be set up such that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you enter the passcode incorrectly 10 times in a row, it will nuke everything on the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The iPhone is in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the FBI. The FBI wants what’s on that phone, but they can’t get to it because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it has this passcode. It could have the destruction setting turned on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such that if they enter the wrong code 10 times, it will destroy itself or destroy all the data.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, they were advised by Apple at some point or another, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we have iCloud backups, we don’t have any from the last six or so weeks. I forget exactly how many,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it doesn’t really matter. We don’t have a recent iCloud backup, we have a semi-recent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one. And you know what you should do is you should take the phone and bring it to this guy’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where presumably there is a known Wi-Fi network, and you should turn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the phone on and just let it sit overnight. Plug it in, let it sit overnight. And presumably, if everything has been set
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way it usually is set, that will back up, the phone will back itself up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to iCloud one more time, and the implication from what we’ve read is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not everything in iCloud is as well encrypted as perhaps we’d like it to be. Thus, Apple could get to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that data and hand it over to the FBI and everyone’s happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m actually, honestly, I’m pretty sure from Apple’s point of view, nothing in iCloud is encrypted. So there’s-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That may be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can do the encrypted backups through iTunes on your desktop, and it’s off by default. So for a while,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as we all learned, whenever we get a new phone or a phone would die, we have to get a replacement one. We have to reenter all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of our passwords. And the reason why is because anything that’s encrypted on the device in the keychain,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is where all your passwords and stuff are stored, any unencrypted backup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does not include those things. So by default, the iTunes backups wouldn’t include them unless you check the little box saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco encrypt my backup, which we all do because we are professional iPhone restorers, but not everyone knows that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then with iCloud backups, there is no option to encrypt iCloud backups, at least not today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe in the future there will be as a result of this. Well, they are encrypted, but Apple has the key. Well, right. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they aren’t encrypted to Apple. And so as a result, nothing that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco encrypted on the phone in Keychain gets backed up. But almost everything, like any kind of content,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco text messages, I assume would be there. kind of app data that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco marked as being for backup, so documents you’ve made in apps and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those would be included, and Apple had access to all of those. And Apple gave access to all of those to the FBI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before this even blew up and became a thing because Apple had access to them through iCloud. Steven
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Horwitz But they only had an older backup, several weeks old. It doesn’t matter how many. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they advised the FBI and San Bernardino police, take the phone to the San Bernardino government, whatever particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey branches this person was in, leave it on overnight and it’ll back itself up to iCloud. At which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point the police and FBI awkwardly grabbed at their collars, pulling them away from their necks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and said, about that, we might’ve changed his iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Casey password already, so that phone is going to try to back up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to iCloud maybe, and it’s going to see that it doesn’t really have the right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey password. So that’s not gonna work. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the FBI has decided to ask Apple for a few things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s, it would like Apple to write a custom build of iOS that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as far as the FBI is concerned, they are happy to be signed in such a way that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would only work on this particular device. It will allow them to,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will bypass the setting that will self-destruct the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey encryption after 10 failed passcode attempts. So they can attempt as many as they’d like.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally they’d like any sort of time delay to go away if there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is one. And I forget exactly when those came in and when they’re there and when they’re not. But suffice to say, if there is a time delay, they’d like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it to go away. And additionally, they’d like to be able to enter the passcode not by meaty fingers on on a screen, but by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bluetooth or Wi-Fi or a cable or any way so that it can be automated with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an external computer. The FBI has said, we’d like to do it at our place or Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’d prefer, we can do it at your house. That’s fine too. The end game for the FBI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is they want to be able to throw a gazillion passcodes at this thing in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a very short window of time to brute force their way into it. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, by some measures, and we’ll get into what we think here in a second, but some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people are of the opinion that that’s a perfectly reasonable point of view from the FBI,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they only want it for one phone, they only want to do it this once, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re even willing to have Apple do it in Cupertino and Apple’s own environment,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the FBI will either come to them, or if Apple gives them, like, remote access to a machine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that can enter passcodes, the FBI will do it remotely, they don’t care. They just want it this one time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for this one phone to see if possibly, maybe something on that will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey indicate that this was part of a wider terrorist plot rather than a couple of crazy people doing something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is really, really just uncool. That’s the FBI’s perspective.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s perspective is, hey, if we do this once, that’s establishing a legal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey precedent, that means you can ask us to do this many, many more times. Not only that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but we would have to write code to do this. And that seems a bit unreasonable to tell us to write a bunch of code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to allow you to, to brute force your way into a phone that we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spent a long time trying to make sure that isn’t possible. Beyond that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of government entities have come out of the woodwork over the last 48 hours saying, uh, you know what,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if this works for the FBI, we have a bunch iPhones, we’d like you to do that for two. Okay? Cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sounds great. So Apple is of the opinion that this is a backdoor. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, we’ll get into what we think in a second, but Apple says this is a backdoor. And in fact, just earlier today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tim Cook did a special with ABC News where he used the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey analogy that creating this is like creating a software version of cancer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which, by the way, I think a virus would be a better analogy there. Didn’t test as well. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought he hammered that analogy a little too hard because it isn’t that great of one.
⏹️ ▶️ John He had a handful of talking points and unfortunately the interviewer had more than a handful of questions. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it was just like after the first round it was like which one of my talking points am I going to use as a reply for this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it was the same thing just over and over and over again, which is really too bad. But in any case,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so Apple is of the opinion this is a backdoor. Once we’ve done this once we’re going to be asked to do it a thousand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times. We don’t think it’s fair to do it even once. We don’t think it’s fair to us. We don’t think it’s fair to our customers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re not into it. So Apple is saying, we’re not going to do it. And more than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, Tim Cook said in this interview, we are willing to go all the way to the Supreme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Court fighting this because we think that’s what’s right. Is that a pretty reasonable summary of where we are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, pretty much. I mean, like, there’s a lot more detail here that we could just just by stating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything we have either learned or that’s been talked about over the last week or so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since this really broke, we could fill the whole hour and a half with this and we shouldn’t because it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take too long. I think let’s assume that everyone who wants to know more about this will go and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco read up on whatever is new and whatever has happened so far and I think it’s probably safe for us to talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it now rather than just keep going over the details of it, right? Good deal. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so what do we think?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It makes me sad. Every part of this makes me sad. There’s so much of this that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just like crappy politics playing each other out, mostly on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the government side, honestly. I mean, listeners of this show should know that we do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not shy away from criticizing Apple when it is warranted.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We will call them out on things that we think are BS, or things that we think are worse than they should be or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are just not good enough. In this case, though, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple is mostly in the right, and not 100% in the right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And again, we should point out also, none of us are lawyers, so I apologize to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anybody listening to this who knows more about the law than we do, who’s screaming at whatever we don’t mention
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or get wrong. But the one thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think makes this a weaker argument for them is that it is technically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible for them to do this. And I wonder in the future, you know, I assume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s already somebody’s project at Apple, if it wasn’t already. I assume it is now somebody’s project
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at Apple to head an effort to actually make this impossible to do in the future, to remove
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their technical ability to do anything like this. There are a number of ways that they could do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. There are a number of challenges to that. Ultimately, I think I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly agree with Apple. I stand with them that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ideally shouldn’t do this, but it does weaken their argument a little bit that they can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When you say can do it, what you mean is, don’t let me put words in your mouth, I’m just trying to make sure we’re on the same page.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What you mean is they could write a custom version of iOS that is specifically for this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one and only one phone that would get the FBI what they’re asking for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think. Now, first of all, it is definitely worth reading this article, and please forgive me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the pronunciation if I get it wrong, by Jonathan Zierski.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know him, but he appears to be somebody who specializes in iOS forensics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and testifying in court using iOS forensic tools and creating forensic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tools. And his post here kind of explains the legal implications of everything Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would have to do if they make this instrument, the FBI’s demand that they make. I don’t think the FBI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really asking for just this one phone to be decrypted once and that’s it. asking for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the continuous ability to do this whenever it is warranted,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whenever there is a court order or a warrant to do it. And even if they aren’t asking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that now, that’s really what they’re asking for. Even if they’re not asking for that in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the legal text, that is what will happen here, because this will set precedent, and then it’ll be so much easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next time someone asks for this to be like, oh, well, you did it for that. This is just as important. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think Tim Cook covered that pretty well. Honestly, ultimately I think his interview on ABC News, I watched it right before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the show tonight, I think his interview actually was very good overall. There were some parts that were a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little bit uncomfortable and cringeworthy, but overall I think it was very good and I think he came off very well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think at a time like this, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really shows the strength of Tim Cook and how we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are lucky to have Tim Cook as the CEO of Apple during times like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could not agree more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is exactly where he shines. He’s shown this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the past, but this just shows more now. He’s clearly very principled,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and he won’t be pushed around if it goes against his principles. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this just shows you’re not going to see any other company or any other executive put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up the fight that he’s going to put up on this. It’s simple as that. You’re not going to see anyone better than Tim fight this on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that side of it. I could nitpick a few little things he said, but overall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought it was very good. So honestly, I really do think that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple is totally in the right to fight this, only again, only with that asterisk that it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure would be better if their actual answer was we actually can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technically do this, it is impossible. Because then you can argue whether it should be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco legal to make things like that, but you can’t argue about this case anymore. Because everyone’s playing off everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco emotions on this. And Tim did this too with his responses. He kind of had to, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the interviewer was like, well, think about the victims. The FBI is all about, this isn’t about our ability to decrypt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phones forever. It’s about these 14 families’ victims. And yes, it is about them, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this horrible event happened. People were killed. There is nothing about that that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is anything but horrible and a huge tragedy. But the FBI is also using this for their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco political gain. They knew that. set this case up as a perfect fighting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battleground to fight this issue on that they believe they are entitled—and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not just the FBI, this is all law enforcement and federal intelligence in America—they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco believe they are entitled to access any information and any possessions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and any people that they want to, that they believe they need to, to get their job done, or that they just think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be a problem or might be relevant to crimes that might happen or might have happened. They believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are entitled to it all. And they get it most of the time. You know, like I made a quick little blog post
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about this. Look at everything we’ve learned from Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA over the last couple years and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything that’s spun out from that. It’s very clear, you know, between that and between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that happen at lower levels of law enforcement where they’re just, you know, murdering people and getting away with it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s very clear that law—the culture of law enforcement in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole country, from national down to local, is incredibly entitled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just kind of mad at—they operate like a lawless military
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dictatorship, where they are entitled to everything they want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in their minds, and they usually get it. And even when it’s illegal, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it anyway, and they get away with it most of the time, if not all the time. They get away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with it almost all the time. So they are above the law in their minds. They believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are entitled to everything and they’ll say it’s about national security but that’s kind of like angry,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco macho, neocon craziness. In reality, this culture that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have is that they are entitled to everything all the time, whatever they want they’re entitled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to, to do their job, whatever. They think they’re entitled to everything. And our country
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far in recent years, if not ever, in recent years supports that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We support by what judges say, by what the people do and don’t get mad about,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by how quickly we all forget things. The people and the courts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all the way up to the presidency, everyone in this system is complacent and permits this to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen. So the reality is, it doesn’t really matter what’s legal here. What matters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is what we will tolerate. And they know that. And so that’s why they’re playing all these emotional buttons. You know, they’re talking about the victims
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and families and Tim’s talking about kids being, you know, everyone knowing the location of your kids. This is why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this whole thing just makes me so sad. It really does because I,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh geez, I mean, let’s just say that there’s a re, there are reasons I don’t usually talk about politics.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, you know, if you think I’m like negative and bitter about Apple stuff, this is how I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about politics. So I try to avoid it as a topic for my own happiness and sanity.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just wanted to make one quick thought and then I’d like to hear what John has to say about this. But as I was watching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this interview tonight, which I think was a little bit unfortunate because as you had said or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of you had said, it was the same talking points from both sides just repeated over and over. I feel like the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entire interview could have been like four and a half minutes long. But anyway, I caught myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sitting there as I’m listening to this and I thought to myself, this is why we have Tim Cook.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is why Tim Cook is here, is for this very moment right now. Because I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doubt that maybe Steve Jobs would have fought it the same way Tim is, but I don’t know if he would have done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as good a job at it. And I am so unbelievably proud of Tim Cook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and all of Apple for standing up for what I believe to be right and for doing the right thing, because this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not easy for really either side or anyone involved, but particularly for Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and all the credit in the world to Apple. We have a tendency to call it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like we see it, and sometimes we see it to be not so sunny. But I could not be more proud of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Tim Cook than I am right now. John, what do you have to say about all this? John
⏹️ ▶️ John Greenewald I was thinking about how Steve Jobs might have handled that interview. Like, at the very least, he would have—I mean, Steve
⏹️ ▶️ John Jobs has more sort of natural charisma than Tim Cook.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like a lot of the things, when you’re watching it, if you are supportive of Apple’s position
⏹️ ▶️ John in this. The interviewer would ask some leading questions to try to, you know, get
⏹️ ▶️ John Tim to say something. And Tim would just go back to his talking points, not falling for the trap. Jobs would
⏹️ ▶️ John have said the things that we’re thinking, like the sort of, you know, come back at him and, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John take take more digs at the government and law enforcement where Tim was always like, you know, we respect law enforcement, we want to work with
⏹️ ▶️ John them, we want to work together. Jobs would have been let the fact that he is pissed been,
⏹️ ▶️ John know, be clear that he’s pissed at how this is going. You know, Tim Cook got a little bit closer. Now, it’s a question
⏹️ ▶️ John whether that would have been actually better in terms of PR or just, you know, it would have been more satisfying for
⏹️ ▶️ John people who agree with him already. Would have been any more convincing for people who don’t in the court of public opinion? I don’t know. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s, that’s a sideshow. One thing that Marco said that stuck out
⏹️ ▶️ John to me was the idea that this feels worse because Apple can technically do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, I’m not a lawyer, I don’t know about the legal consequences. But when I think about But I think that is not
⏹️ ▶️ John relevant at all because legal question wise is there’s there’s two parts
⏹️ ▶️ John of this one is the what Marco alluded to when he said, well, it would be better if they made a system that Apple couldn’t break into
⏹️ ▶️ John because then they were just Apple just say, well, you know, we can’t do anything. Oh, well, sorry, we can’t help you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, technically, we can’t help you. There’s nothing we could do all the money and all the time in the world wouldn’t solve
⏹️ ▶️ John this for us. That immediately leads to, okay, we’re just going to outlaw cryptography, which is a would
⏹️ ▶️ John be a terrible stupid rule because you can’t outlaw math.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you know, so
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. So that’s one end of that. But that’s that’s what I think this case is about. When I think about it
⏹️ ▶️ John is just because Apple can do it doesn’t mean the government can order them to do it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the government can’t make any one of its citizens or corporations
⏹️ ▶️ John or entities or whatever do compel them to do something just because they
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like it right there has to be established law as in when we issue you a search warrant,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to let us search right, that’s, you know, you can’t just say, you know, it’d be nice if Apple wrote,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, a custom operating system, let us crack into this phone. Yeah, that would be nice, wouldn’t it? But do
⏹️ ▶️ John you the government have the power to compel a corporation to do work for you because you think it would be cool? Like that?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why this is a legal case. Like this will be decided in the courts and with legislation and so on and so forth. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea, like Marco said that law enforcement, you know, they can technically do this,
⏹️ ▶️ John why Why don’t we just ask them to? Can we make them do that? Aren’t we like in charge here? Like and the answer
⏹️ ▶️ John is no, you can’t really make them and if Apple doesn’t want to, they’re going to challenge you and you’re going to have to go through the legal system and try to figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out whether this is something you can even ask them to do. So I always think it was as I have
⏹️ ▶️ John the notes here, cryptography versus conscription. Can you conscript a corporation
⏹️ ▶️ John to write software on your behalf if you are law enforcement? Because you feel like it not based on any existing
⏹️ ▶️ John law on the books or any legal precedent or whatever, just because a thing that’s possible and one
⏹️ ▶️ John of the things I think about not this is the same thing at all but like the idea that individuals and corporations
⏹️ ▶️ John can have rights the idea that the government can’t demand
⏹️ ▶️ John that you testify against yourself you have the right to remain silent they cannot
⏹️ ▶️ John compel you to speak against yourself they may ask you you know where you were you on the date such and such
⏹️ ▶️ John and if they’re accusing of something you can just not answer them and they can’t compel you to answer because
⏹️ ▶️ John it is you could answer oh Oh, it’s much worse because, you know, you have a voice, you could answer them if you want, why won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John you answer the question? They can’t compel you to because it’s your right to keep that in. And again, this may or may not be speech
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, but the whole idea that someone is capable of doing something does not mean, well, if you’re capable
⏹️ ▶️ John of doing it, the government should be able to compel you to do it. That’s, that doesn’t make any sense. So that has to be sorted out in the
⏹️ ▶️ John law. And then conceptually, since we’re late to the story, and everyone’s gone
⏹️ ▶️ John through all the details, and we went through a lot of them already anyway. The thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John really boggles my mind about this conceptually is the short view so many
⏹️ ▶️ John people have. People who are on the wrong side of this issue, as in people who don’t agree with me, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John The incredible short view they have. Just big picture. Pull back from this issue, pull back from this one
⏹️ ▶️ John phone, pull back from details about how it’s been tailor-made to set legal precedent and
⏹️ ▶️ John how all the details of the other things wanting to decode stuff and whether you can do it with
⏹️ ▶️ John this one phone and think of the the children and the terrorist victims and all this other stuff and the details of whether there’s anything on
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone and and you know also by the way the code is probably 111 or 111 or 1234
⏹️ ▶️ John they should just try those two codes and it would be unlocked but even if they did they would quickly lock it again because that’s not what this thing is about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah I mean if also if you’re talking about like what’s most likely there’s nothing on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s way more likely that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the person’s work phone that he they had personal phones that they destroyed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or were destroyed and yeah it’s very it’s way more likely the work phone has nothing useful on it. But the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco FBI knows that and they—that’s why—it isn’t about that. It’s about, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they chose this case to publicize. They chose to publicize it and not do the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco negotiations in secret where Apple requested. They chose this because they knew
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that emotionally that, like, the will of the people would probably be on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their side because they can play the angles of terrorism and victims and everything like, oh, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John getting at the will of the people. All right. So I would be speaking to the people at this point, the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who don’t agree that this is the right thing to do. Just keep pulling back from this case,
⏹️ ▶️ John from this thing, from phones, from encryption, from all the details or whatever, and just think
⏹️ ▶️ John over the last several decades or whatever, the general trend in American
⏹️ ▶️ John government has been. People being afraid and looking
⏹️ ▶️ John for anyone who promises to make them safer and giving up rights to get that imagined safety.
⏹️ ▶️ John From 9-11 on, but even before that, the whole idea was that if you scare enough people and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John we can’t, you know, someone is going to kill you and your family unless we can tap all your telephone
⏹️ ▶️ John calls and read all your mail and do all you can, like, whatever it is, just the general trend, if you put it on a graph,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can argue about specifics or whatever, but there is no arguing that the general trend has been away from
⏹️ ▶️ John civil liberties and towards government has access to more and more stuff. And that has been motivated generally
⏹️ ▶️ John by people being afraid, either people making them afraid or people legitimately being afraid and people taking advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John of that fear to say, now we in law enforcement can do our job better because you’re afraid, you
⏹️ ▶️ John need to give us these rights. And time and again, law enforcement and government have proven that
⏹️ ▶️ John once they get the rights, they don’t give them back. They use them in the ways that they didn’t say that they said they weren’t going to use
⏹️ ▶️ John them. They abuse them. There’s no repercussions for that. And it’s a ratcheting mechanism that never slides the other
⏹️ ▶️ John direction and only goes to more and more and and technology is enabling to do this. Now, every individual
⏹️ ▶️ John point you can argue with, like, oh, do I agree about this? And what about phone wiretapping? What about Snowden or whatever? You can
⏹️ ▶️ John argue every individual point, but when you put it on a big graph, this is a massive trend, a massive long-term trend
⏹️ ▶️ John away from civil liberties and towards a loss of individual rights, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Specifically, when it comes to law enforcement, surveillance, and privacy. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ John even in this individual case, you just have to, like, you have to color all of your thinking to say, should
⏹️ ▶️ John we just continue to play out this thing, these individual battles slowly ratcheting our way up?
⏹️ ▶️ John How does this all end? Such a long slide. You have to at some point say,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a limit. You just can’t keep asking for more and more and more and generations of people living and dying and
⏹️ ▶️ John just getting used to what the government does until, you just can’t keep going in that direction forever. It has to
⏹️ ▶️ John be a pendulum, it has to be a cycle, there has to be a swing. And at some point you have start
⏹️ ▶️ John swinging in the other direction. At some point, the people, you know, your fear of being killed by terrorists
⏹️ ▶️ John has to be trumped by the, granted, much more intellectual ideas that are, you know, the country
⏹️ ▶️ John is supposedly founded on of, you know, some amount of individual liberty and rights. And again, let’s not swing
⏹️ ▶️ John back and all in the other direction. Like, we have freedom of speech, but we also have, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John slander laws and, you know, can’t yell fire in a crowded theater. Like, it’s just, it’s just like the basics of civics 101.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are extremes, and we we are headed, we’ve been headed in this other direction for so long that I just think that
⏹️ ▶️ John every problem that touches on this issue at all has to be viewed in the context of the humongous
⏹️ ▶️ John long clear unidirectional slide that we’ve been in for so long. And so anybody who’s for
⏹️ ▶️ John this, I have to say, don’t, you know, don’t think of this individual issue. Do you agree that
⏹️ ▶️ John this we’ve been going this direction for far too long? At what point do we need to turn around? At what point do we need to start swinging
⏹️ ▶️ John in the other direction? I think personally, we’re way past that point. But even if you don’t think we’re past that point.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re not thinking about that point, if just every time something comes up that you’re afraid of or that you knee
⏹️ ▶️ John jerk, you know, support the troops, law enforcement is always right, the government is our friend, blah, blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John if every single time something comes up, it’s never going to even occur to you to look at where we’re going and how we have to swing in the other
⏹️ ▶️ John direction. And I’m far from, you know, a libertarian individual rights nut
⏹️ ▶️ John job type of person. Like, I’m far from that. But I’m just saying, like, no matter where you are, if you never, if you never
⏹️ ▶️ John consider, like, this movement, this graph, suspect, then it will never occur to you to just…
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s no like, oh, it’ll be too late. Like, there is no too late. It’ll just be the new normal, the new normal, the new normal. The only thing
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll have to compare ourselves with is the rest of the world that is hopefully slightly more sane in these matters, although the UK
⏹️ ▶️ John shows maybe not, because they’ve got surveillance everywhere, too. Things need to eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John swing back in the other direction, and it just seems like anybody who is at this point against this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is showing that they’re thinking entirely with their heart and
⏹️ ▶️ John their fear and all those things, you know, do them credit in general. But when it comes to establishing
⏹️ ▶️ John legal precedents and giving powers to the government to, you know, rights to privacy, and
⏹️ ▶️ John again, it’s all these details, like people don’t know these details about encryption and all like, it’s too esoteric. It’s too that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the perfect case for the government. It’s too, Tim Cook can’t make the real case, because it’s too detailed and your eyes glaze over and you’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John like, but terrorist bad, give the government what they want, right? That is exactly the same thing that’s got us doing
⏹️ ▶️ John all the crazy things we’ve been doing since 9 11. And I just feel like you can’t continue to go in that direction forever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everybody should, at the very least, every time they make any argument about it, they should have to explain
⏹️ ▶️ John why not only is this the right thing to do in this case, but I believe that is essential for us to ratchet
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing up one more notch, you know, for for for invading our privacy and for giving law
⏹️ ▶️ John enforcement government more power. In fact, that is essential. And this because if anyone says it’s just this one time, or just
⏹️ ▶️ John as one thing or whatever, it’s like they they haven’t looked at history, recent history, or ancient history, or any kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John history. That’s not the way it works. Once someone gets power, they don’t give it up again unless you take it from them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but honestly, I totally agree. First of all, I think everything you just said is gold.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But looking at history, and looking at the present,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, and the direction and everything, I don’t think I see a lot of evidence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it ever really does swing back in the direction.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you know, America itself was a swing in the other direction. There was more authoritarian government
⏹️ ▶️ John control under a king than there was under a democracy. There was a huge swing in the other direction. It does go back
⏹️ ▶️ John and forth in cycles. Like, if you just study history, there are times where the government has more power over its
⏹️ ▶️ John citizenry and then less power and then more and then less. And you know, it’s clear which direction we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going in now and it’s clear why in America anyway. There’s no reason we can’t reverse
⏹️ ▶️ John that trend. And you would think like, oh well, you know, people like being under the king because
⏹️ ▶️ John it provides a measure of safety and if without a king, like the, you know, the Mongol hordes would come and kill them or whatever. Like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John always some reason to be like, yeah, it’s terrible, but it’s better than the alternative, right? But at some point people
⏹️ ▶️ John are like, you know, F the king. We’re chopping his head off and we’re going to have our own system of government
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. Like we’re throwing his tea overboard. Like those are big messy calamities, but
⏹️ ▶️ John there are smaller victories as well. I mean, just look at the Constitution. been amended many times to
⏹️ ▶️ John give people more rights and and take rights away from the government say, you know, previously
⏹️ ▶️ John you could own people now we think that’s not such a great idea. So maybe write that into the Constitution
⏹️ ▶️ John or for the example, you can’t drink alcohol anymore. No, never mind. You can, you know, previously
⏹️ ▶️ John we had the right to stop you from drinking alcohol. Then later we said, no, we probably shouldn’t have that right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but on the other side of it, like, like, maybe I mean, first of all, you know, there’s different there’s different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco versions of like a government that has too much power, that’s too oppressive, that people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco revolt against or overthrow. You know, like it, I granted this is way out of our usual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comfort zone, so please forgive me for anything I’m butchering here. But you know, like, if you think about like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way that we are being oppressed by the surveillance and police states here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s in a way that most people don’t care about, because they don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it affects them. And so it’s hard, like if the government is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taxing the crap out of you, you know, like or taking your land and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that, like you know, if that’s happening to a whole bunch of people, that’s enough to make people revolt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in most cases historically. But if they’re just like, you know, keeping records of your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco text messages and in these weird secret things that no one really thinks about or knows about and then even when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re told they exist everyone’s like yeah well it doesn’t really matter and then we all forget and go watch The Bachelor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I feel like the the ways in which things are going so badly that we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking about here are ways that people don’t care about
⏹️ ▶️ John enough. But they care about them when there are consequences though. Well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but but for most people there are no consequences to this that they see.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t matter if it’s not consequences for most people for anything you just matters that there are consequences
⏹️ ▶️ John for somebody you just need you just need basically you need an attractive
⏹️ ▶️ John young person to encounter a problem you know like like for the
⏹️ ▶️ John same perfect storm that makes these things a great case of the FBI there’s the opposite too right and
⏹️ ▶️ John and here here’s the thing that makes me optimistic about it because in general despite insane
⏹️ ▶️ John gerrymandering and all sorts of other things we still have a system where people vote
⏹️ ▶️ John and so if people get angry enough the people who are in power get voted out and new people
⏹️ ▶️ John get voted in. So it’s always up to someone else to find a way to exploit the public to get them elected.
⏹️ ▶️ John And people are always motivated to do that. And there are smart people trying to get them elected instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of somebody else. And so there will always be at least some way for us to effect change.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but also like, but over time, you know, as as as technology has progressed, as the world has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gotten more, you know, just more kind of globalized and, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as, as like everything including manipulation and centralization
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of power has progressed. What if oppression by government and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by police apparatuses, apparatus, what if this has actually gotten so good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that now they’re so good and things are so big and there’s so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power concentrated in so few hands these days and the science
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of manipulating people and manipulating the media and controlling the messaging of everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has gotten so advanced. We have gotten so good at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco concentrating power, basically, and keeping those people in power that that kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overthrow or change just doesn’t happen anymore. In ways, certain forms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of warfare basically don’t happen anymore because we as a society have found more effective
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things you know, to cover those needs or wants. You know, certain types
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of media don’t exist anymore. Certain types of legal issues are just not debated anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Certain types of freedoms are just assumed that we will either always have or that we will never have. It seems like we’ve moved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forward, we’ve moved past many of these things, and we’ve advanced so much that I feel like the police
⏹️ ▶️ Marco states are so in control now of almost every first-world country.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so the combination of of the establishment of control here, along with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these issues usually not bothering most everyday people in ways that they can notice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or get mad about, plus the ability for the people who want to keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things this way to very effectively control the media narrative and to have media
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so centralized that’s even possible. I feel like the conditions are such now that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a significant revolution can’t really happen anymore. Does that make sense? Is that Am I just crazy?
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re falling into the Illuminati trap where you imagine that it’s possible for a conspiracy of people to actually
⏹️ ▶️ John keep their stuff together and actually be all powerful and controlling. Bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John line, people are people. That’s what undoes all of these things. Like, if any grand conspiracy theory requires people
⏹️ ▶️ John to be so much more competent than anyone else, so much more intelligent and capable and organized
⏹️ ▶️ John and able to keep secrets and able to, like, that any conspiracy
⏹️ ▶️ John theory that relies on that is obviously false because that just it’s not happened. There are no better set of people better able to
⏹️ ▶️ John control things and if the and that’s what I was saying before, there may be individual people who are good at that, but they’re at opposition
⏹️ ▶️ John to each other. And also all of them are just plain old people with their own stupid foibles and desires
⏹️ ▶️ John and things that don’t make any sense. And that general, the general chaos of people being people
⏹️ ▶️ John means that in the end, not saying it all works itself out. But like I said, as long
⏹️ ▶️ John as you’re as long as you’re not in a military dictatorship in which you have to like have a bloody revolution to change
⏹️ ▶️ John things as long as we still have some way to change things without taking up arms, which
⏹️ ▶️ John at this point would be non workable anyway, because seriously, the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John United States population versus the entire US Army. If you set up that battle, assuming both
⏹️ ▶️ John sides were highly motivated against each other, which makes no sense because the army is made up of the children of the citizenry or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, if you can imagine that scenario, we lose every time anyway, doesn’t matter.
⏹️ ▶️ John As long as voting still functions in some tiny way, which is getting tinier all the time, granted,
⏹️ ▶️ John but as long as it still works in some way, and as long as people are still stupid people with their own weird
⏹️ ▶️ John desires and motivations, that sort of dystopian
⏹️ ▶️ John sci-fi narrative where the few rule, the Illuminati
⏹️ ▶️ John rule and the Morlocks are just lulled into a sense of… In many ways,
⏹️ ▶️ John idiocracy is a much more plausible scenario in which everybody’s a bunch of dunces.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like the reason idiocracy resonates so much, and we use it as such an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often metaphor in these circles, is because that it, like, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way that I’m picturing there being a big problem for any kind of meaningful progress on these fronts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not the Illuminati situation. It’s not a big conspiracy theory. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything, what we’ve seen over the last, you know, 10-20 years or whatever, probably longer, what we’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that the government or those in power can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audacious things, possibly even things that are illegal, and they can just do them right in the open.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if they message it correctly, which they have found more and more effective ways to do over time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as long as it’s messaged correctly publicly, they can get away with it almost every time. But
⏹️ ▶️ John are people who are motivated to get them out of office. Other people want those jobs, and they have the same tools and knowledge
⏹️ ▶️ John at their disposal to battle them. If someone does something like that, guaranteed, when they come up for election
⏹️ ▶️ John and someone wants to run against them, they’re going to bring up the thing, and they’re going to bring it up in the unfavorable angle, using all the tricks
⏹️ ▶️ John of the trade and emotional appeals. I think elections—again, not the cure for this,
⏹️ ▶️ John but elections are the hedge against this, because all the tools they have to get away with stuff, people who
⏹️ ▶️ John want them out of office have to run against them to do the exact same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but that’s also based on a number of big assumptions of, A, that the population
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cares what people say in election debates and everything. But you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to learn how to make them care. That’s how you get elected. You have to do all the tricks in the book to get people… I mean, look
⏹️ ▶️ John at Donald Trump. He’s using all the tricks in the barrel to get, you know, to win the Republican nomination. He’s an idiot,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? How is he doing that? Because he knows how to manipulate and play the game, right? Not that I’m saying he’s the greatest person,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like, if Donald Trump can, you know, get this close to being president, it shows that
⏹️ ▶️ John anybody can, like, you know what I mean? Like, it’s… the tools are are there for everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone has access to Twitter. Everyone can be on a reality show where they say you’re fired. Everybody can put their face on it. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the tools are there for everybody. And people are constantly hungry to kick out the old guys and
⏹️ ▶️ John bring in the new guys. And I know it’s possible because elections happen. And if they can convince you to vote for them, then they get
⏹️ ▶️ John the job and then they can be corrupt and have power and do stuff or whatever, you know, so like, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John in sci fi stories, it’s always like well, or in military dictatorships or in places like North Korea,
⏹️ ▶️ John where the people have no power and literally sometimes have no food, right? It’s much
⏹️ ▶️ John harder. But in a first world country, with us, even a remotely functioning
⏹️ ▶️ John government where people get to vote, you there was always hope. And even if it’s a hope of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John get the current terrible people out and get a different even more terrible, but terrible in a different way person in
⏹️ ▶️ John that still hope it’s not as if like, it’s going to be you know, a military dictatorship
⏹️ ▶️ John where the supreme ruler passes it on to his son and so on and so forth and the only way you get out
⏹️ ▶️ John of it is with a bloody revolution or something. So I’m not as pessimistic as you are about it because I think
⏹️ ▶️ John most of the scenarios where it’s like intractable
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’re never going to escape from it just don’t work out in reality because people are just people, like I said.
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope you’re right. I am, don’t worry. It’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. I mean, you usually are, so I have some confidence here. You’re generally right. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not to say that it can’t be disastrous, because I think one of the sci-fi scenarios that is
⏹️ ▶️ John plausible is the one where you get the crazy person like Trump or something in there, or like the, what is it, um,
⏹️ ▶️ John Firestarter, anyway, don’t want to spoil that book for people. Someone like Trump comes in and then
⏹️ ▶️ John nukes somebody and we all die. That’s always a possibility. But I feel like I lived through that as a child of the 80s, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s old hat now, the whole world could blow up at any second because of a cowboy in the White House. still a possibility.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s still out there. So don’t say that that’s not gonna happen because it could but that again, that could have happened back in
⏹️ ▶️ John the old ye olden days of the 80s just as much as can happen with President Trump and terrorist nuking
⏹️ ▶️ John things or whatever terrorist nuking things by the way is exactly why they want to be able to monitor every single thing you do. Aren’t you afraid of terrorist nuking
⏹️ ▶️ John you please let me have access to everything in your entire life and you have no rights and we can hold you without trial forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow. All right, let’s talk about something that’s happy and awesome. And then I have a question for you
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Apple and the FBI, continued
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⏹️ ▶️ John Real-time follow-up. I’m gonna blame this on the cold, which by the way I have. Hey, have you heard I have a cold? I have a cold.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not Firestarter, obviously, the dead zone. Sorry. Brain fart
⏹️ ▶️ John there. And, you know, as Donald Trump would say, he can shield himself from an assassin by holding a young child in
⏹️ ▶️ John front of him to still win the nomination. All right, enough politics.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John my goodness. Now that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sad… Yeah, seriously.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Is there anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better we could talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about tonight? Well, I have a question that’s related but maybe less sad, hopefully less sad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s assume, well, it’s going to start sad actually. Let’s assume that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple is told you have to do this and the world is upset,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we are upset. Actually, we haven’t talked that much about how this relates to the rest of the world. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone’s upset. Apple’s told they have to do this. When Apple says to its engineers,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have to do this now. What happens if all the engineers that work at Apple that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have any sort of knowledge as to how to make this happen just say no?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they get fired because it’s insubordination.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do they? I mean, one would assume I agree.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s civil disobedience.
⏹️ ▶️ John Civil disobedience is basically like if you refuse to do what the law says you have to do, you
⏹️ ▶️ John accept the consequences of it, which is either get fired or go to jail. I mean, like, basically, if Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John CEOs refuse to comply with the thing, then they’re in contempt of court or whatever, you know, thing. And they, and
⏹️ ▶️ John if the people in charge of the company cooperate and tell their subordinates to do it, and the subordinates
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t, then the subordinates get fired for insubordination. It’s not as if there’s some scenario where
⏹️ ▶️ John we can all sit on their hands and say, well, you told us to do it, and I told these guys to do it, but they won’t. Oh, well. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John court order is a court order, and there’s consequences for whoever it is that decides to defy it. And,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they could. civil disobedience is a way to protest unjust laws, but part of civil disobedience
⏹️ ▶️ John is that you accept the punishment associated with disobeying the laws, and that’s part of civil disobedience.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yes, that could happen, but I really doubt it would.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. I mean, yeah, eventually, like, you know, if Tim Cook was thrown in jail over not obeying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a final court order, then somebody else would replace him because the company would have to continue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco operating somehow, and then that person would authorize it. Or Or they’d go to jail and the next person would. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it’s like eventually you’d find somebody who would do it. So that’s not really
⏹️ ▶️ John And really, realistically speaking, they would just do it if they were ordered to. But then simultaneously, what they would be doing is, like Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John said before, they’re already obviously, you know, working on an operating system that they themselves can’t hack into. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John just leads to the next legal fight, which is, should it be legal to make these things? Which is another incredibly stupid legal
⏹️ ▶️ John fight that, like, at a certain point, law enforcement becomes just so misguided in what they want.
⏹️ ▶️ John in some respects, I’d say they’re already past that point. I know, but like when the system is working the way you expect it to like law
⏹️ ▶️ John enforcement is highly motivated to to get all the powers that possibly can to to
⏹️ ▶️ John enforce the law and solve crimes, right? It’s checks and balances that there has to be some opposing force. The other
⏹️ ▶️ John side is yeah, law enforcement. You may want this, but civil rights dictate X, Y and Z like and when the checks and balances
⏹️ ▶️ John get out of balance, then we you know, that’s why you get this long term trend and what didn’t take much to unbalance it just
⏹️ ▶️ John giant terrorist attacks on American soil and then it gets all in balance, right? balance, right? Can also make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the minor correction that law enforcement’s incentive is not to solve crimes. It’s to close cases,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not necessarily solving them just to close the case. Solving them suggests
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re doing it correctly. In the grand scheme of things, again, people being people, the idea is just to
⏹️ ▶️ John obtain power, but whatever. I’ll not get into motivations and particular disincentives.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, when things are working well, like what I’m getting at is that it’s not necessarily a bad thing to have two
⏹️ ▶️ John parts of your system of government that are in opposition to each other and both highly motivated
⏹️ ▶️ John and doing everything they can. It’s a problem when one side keeps winning for decades on end because then you get
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they’re not balancing each other anymore. Like there is no more balance right but in this case in the crypto thing
⏹️ ▶️ John like say, Apple’s order to do it, they do it. Two years later, they come up with a new version of iOS that they
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t even crack into eventually all the old iOS devices would go out of use. So no criminals are using them anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John And of course, all the criminals upgraded to the one that Apple can’t break into. A similar scenario comes up,
⏹️ ▶️ John law enforcement has this thing, they want to get into it, Apple can’t do it, they’re pissed off about it,
⏹️ ▶️ John it becomes a legal issue, you know, the senators and
⏹️ ▶️ John congresspeople who think they can best get elected by scaring their citizenry
⏹️ ▶️ John into thinking this needs to be done, they say, it’s outrageous that an American company can make phones that the American
⏹️ ▶️ John government can’t break into, that should not be allowed, and so they propose legislation that makes cryptography illegal, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And at that point you would hope someone in law enforcement would realize that it’s it’s asinine
⏹️ ▶️ John right America can make whatever it wants illegal you can’t get rid of math like the rest of the world has
⏹️ ▶️ John the math people can write programs themselves that make cryptography that in theory
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t be cracked by you know the world’s biggest computers for some you know like that’s you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John unring that bell like that exists and so if you make it illegal for all that’s going to do
⏹️ ▶️ John is make law-abiding US companies not do that, but everyone else can do
⏹️ ▶️ John it, right? And it doesn’t help law enforcement, right? And practically
⏹️ ▶️ John speaking, criminals, including terrorists, are not as sophisticated as people think they are, but if they wanted to be,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, even this guy’s phone, if he had used an alphanumeric password, the government
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t, the FBI wouldn’t be able to ask Apple to crack into it anyway, because it would take too long, right? Maybe he did on his personal
⏹️ ▶️ John phone. Yeah, well, he destroyed So anyway, the way the system should work is
⏹️ ▶️ John American companies should be able to make technology they want with the best, you know, cryptography available to them. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the government should be able to spend its whole jillions of dollars in tax money to fund,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, what are they called? Like, not black box budget, but like, you know, budget
⏹️ ▶️ John that you know, there’s some word for like secret budgets, you’re not even allowed to know how much money they spend like Homeland Security
⏹️ ▶️ John and the NSA, by all means, give this iPhone to to the NSA’s experts and have them break
⏹️ ▶️ John into it using huge supercomputers that you built with taxpayer money. Like, if you figure out how to break in,
⏹️ ▶️ John good on you, right? Because that is a proper balance where
⏹️ ▶️ John people get to make better and better cryptography unconstrained by the law, and the government, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a little bit unbalanced, but the government with its huge funding gets to hire the smartest people in the world
⏹️ ▶️ John and build the world’s biggest computers to try to crack that cryptography, and yeah, you can have that battle. worked
⏹️ ▶️ John for, you know, forever in this country, is that the government does have smart
⏹️ ▶️ John people to try to crack things, and people try to make uncrackable things on the outside, and they go back and forth, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But this is the new strategy of, like, we don’t want to do that, it seems hard, Apple, can you just unlock it for us? And so… Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it isn’t about this phone. It’s about having easier and faster access to any phone they
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, to be able to… basically to be able to… I’m the boss of you, I can make you do things. Yeah. If Apple loses
⏹️ ▶️ John this case, Apple will unlock the phone, then Apple will use its lobbying power and its millions and try to
⏹️ ▶️ John rally the tech companies to try to get legislation to make this, you know, like, it’ll be the whole political process,
⏹️ ▶️ John but eventually Apple will make a phone that they themselves can’t crack into, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John that will be a political football where it has to be who can, can we try to make this illegal? Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John that fight will be, you know, like, it’s the same in all these things, you would would hope eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John the public will be persuaded that Apple and privacy and cryptography kind of has a point even
⏹️ ▶️ John as esoteric as it is I think eventually it will be understandable enough
⏹️ ▶️ John that because like the crypto one you just have to explain to him look make this illegal for Apple doesn’t do anything terrorists can do this right
⏹️ ▶️ John now you know it doesn’t doesn’t matter all it does is mean that it’s easier for other people to get into your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t make it any easier for people to get into terrorists phones because a terrorists don’t do important things on phones and be
⏹️ ▶️ John if they wanted to encrypt thing so that no one could get it except for them they could do it now they could have done it a decade ago
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s they have the technology that’s not what’s stopping them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have a lot more hope than I do for our people and our politicians and our law enforcement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because everything you just said could apply also to drugs like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make drugs illegal then regular people will be penalized for not having drugs but then everyone else will have drugs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah and they did it anyway and it’s look what it’s doing like it yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John I would make I I would make the same big picture argument with the war on drugs where it’s like it regardless of what you may think about
⏹️ ▶️ John an Individual issue what has happened over the past 10 20 30 40 50 years in terms of the war on
⏹️ ▶️ John drugs And what have the results be what are the intended goals? And what are the actual results been and maybe pick a different
⏹️ ▶️ John strategy if what you’re trying to do is the exact opposite of what? You’re causing to happen and that gets into all you
⏹️ ▶️ John know puritanical America that actually does have deep roots in America the whole idea of like
⏹️ ▶️ John finding who to blame or punish versus solving the actual problem and yeah yeah yeah this is not a political podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re going into too many issues but uh
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah some things
⏹️ ▶️ John some things do seem really intractable because of the particular nature of america we haven’t even talked about guns by the way which
⏹️ ▶️ John i’m sure we’ll get feedback about there’s all those arguments you uh you uh gave on cryptography exactly the same arguments
⏹️ ▶️ John you could give for anyway we’re not gonna talk about guns anyway people have opinions but this it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of a shame that this is weird and esoteric and techie because
⏹️ ▶️ John in that way it probably Like Apple, Apple could lose this one. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to lose this one in the court of public opinion. Apple could win it in the legal court.
⏹️ ▶️ John But even if Apple like quote unquote wins in court, they’re going to come out of this as a company that half of America
⏹️ ▶️ John thinks helps terrorists. There’s just no avoiding that, which is a shame for Apple. It’s a shame for people
⏹️ ▶️ John who don’t understand the larger implications who don’t understand the trends in American
⏹️ ▶️ John life over the past several decades or who agree with it because they’re constantly terrified of everything because because
⏹️ ▶️ John they watch Fox News all the time. I don’t know. Or any news for that matter. Let’s not just call it. I watch
⏹️ ▶️ John NBC all the time and all they know is the things they’re going to kill them. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s that’s a shame. And that’s a bummer for Apple. I mean, it’s got a bum Tim Cook out because I think he’s a savvy
⏹️ ▶️ John enough person to know that even if he wins, he loses a little bit in this one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s why it’s so it’s so interesting and admirable here on the side of it that that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are standing up for this, because The upside for them is not large here.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is almost no upside for them. I don’t understand. You could say, oh, the upside is that they can sell more
⏹️ ▶️ John people phones. Like Marco said, people don’t care enough about this. They’re, I’m going to buy the Apple phone because it’s less
⏹️ ▶️ John likely the government’s going to know and thinks about that. There’s barely any upside for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is a net loss for Apple, no matter how this turns out, I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like. Absolutely. It’s a huge loss. And I mean, the silver lining I can see in this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only silver lining I can really see in this is that Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no stranger to bad press, you know, and to negativity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about them and, you know, rumors or slight mistruths or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even truths about them that just suck being spread in the media very quickly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and basically sticking around forever. You know, any kind of, like, you know, iPhone own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flaw or the or like the the quitting your apps thing even or like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea that they’re like that they changed the the dock port to the lightning port to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey make you rebuy all your cable if we started
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s there’s like negative negativity about Apple spreads so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much in in the general population now that you know this is not new for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple this won’t be the only negative thing about that a lot of people truly or falsely believe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the other thing is that might help them here is part of what makes it so hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for things like the Snowden revelations to really stick around in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco news cycle that people will move on. You know, like next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week Kanye West will say something and that’ll be like and then all this won’t matter anymore. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the attention span of the hot topic in American news is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so short, especially for something like this where, you know, like the Snowden stuff, where it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of complicated and there’s no good solution or endgame
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here that’s going to happen. And just understanding the topic in general is complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve had a number of non-geeks bring up this topic in the last week or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so since it came out. And every time, their reaction is not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is Apple doing to help terrorists? It’s, what exactly is going on here? Because it’s a hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco topic to understand if you aren’t very technical and also haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco read a really good summary of it. It’s all very sensationalized and very, you know, very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being boosted by the media here and there. But nobody really, like, in general, people don’t really understand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it or don’t have a very accurate picture of it. So it’s, honestly, I don’t think it’s going to stick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around for very long in the news cycle. I think I’d be surprised if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anybody was talking about it two weeks from now. To give some
⏹️ ▶️ John support for your pessimism, Marco, by the way. Like, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco think about,
⏹️ ▶️ John for issues like this that are technical, that people don’t really care that much about,
⏹️ ▶️ John that you need to kind of be into the intellectual or legal side of it to really have it hold your attention
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s too complicated to think about otherwise, very often leads to terrible laws
⏹️ ▶️ John that take a long time, if ever, to go away. It doesn’t mean they’ll never go away, it just means that
⏹️ ▶️ John we may all be dead. Some recent examples are like the DMCA, all the weird,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, stuff involving cable television and
⏹️ ▶️ John breaking encryption on ink cartridges for printers, and like all the
⏹️ ▶️ John laws, most of those are done by corporate lobbying, obviously, but laws that are about technical issues.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like if I feel it really feel like if you took any individual American and put them into a room
⏹️ ▶️ John and explain the DMCA and the actual consequences of it, they would come down on the side that this is a stupid law.
⏹️ ▶️ John They would understand the motivations, but this is not the way to do it because it can be abused in all these ways and look at how it works and blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the bottom line is that pass it’s still the law of land. It’s not going to go anytime soon. Eternal copyright, another great example. You can explain
⏹️ ▶️ John some of that until you’re blue in the face. You could probably convince pretty much everybody individually. But overall, people
⏹️ ▶️ John are like, yeah I don’t know whatever they should own Mickey Mouse I guess like no one no one thinks about the long-term
⏹️ ▶️ John consequences of copyright without end or any like outlawing encryption is
⏹️ ▶️ John entire patent system yeah the entire patent system like outlawing encryption would that
⏹️ ▶️ John cancel could they outlaw encryption despite how stupid it is like I’m hoping that law enforcement realize that one encrypted
⏹️ ▶️ John is pointless they wouldn’t even pursue it but if they did pursue it they’d get it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cuz law enforcement is is not a culture of of trying to understand things.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not a culture. It’s just like some things are, you know, like you need people, like sort of subject matter experts
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking about the consequences, and then also pair them with people who are good at convincing other people
⏹️ ▶️ John to do what they say, and that’s how you get good law. It’s really easy to get bad laws, and we have lots of examples
⏹️ ▶️ John of bad laws. You’re just hoping that like, and what I’m getting at is that your pessimism is
⏹️ ▶️ John not that this is like a, you know, a one-way slide into doom. It’s just that some of these things it’s like a really,
⏹️ ▶️ John really long time to turn around long enough that you know, we won’t live to see them like do you think we’ll ever live to see the DMCA
⏹️ ▶️ John taken away? No, probably not. Do you think we’ll ever live to see reasonable copyright or patent law? Certainly
⏹️ ▶️ John not, right. But doesn’t mean those things are hopeless, and they will never swing back
⏹️ ▶️ John in the other direction because all you need, because people are so fickle and have short
⏹️ ▶️ John attention spans and can’t be into the intellectual details of every single freaking thing that the government does,
⏹️ ▶️ John the system is always ripe for a small group of smart people to capitalize on a crisis
⏹️ ▶️ John in a way to make something good happen instead of something bad. And that is always a possibility in
⏹️ ▶️ John any sort of democracy. And so that’s why I think long term, we’ll never get to the really cool dystopias in the sci fi
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I always think about when I watch those movies
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, that’s fine. But long term, long term, like
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, even though you have the rise of Hitler, right? Eventually, people realize we should fight this guy, right? it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll never have something like that, that would be a fantasy. Well, what about Hitler? He was pretty terrible. He was, you’re right, but it didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John lead to, and it’s Hitler forever. Like, you know, people die, people are killed,
⏹️ ▶️ John people fight, like, again, we could all nuke ourselves and that makes it, that’s the only sci-fi I believe, where everybody’s
⏹️ ▶️ John nukes, like, yeah, that could happen, and then, you know, the machines take over, I guess, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the ones where it’s just like a bunch of people who sort of like boil the frog and they slowly, they slowly, slowly,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, find themselves increasingly dire situations and they can’t get themselves out of it and then you just fast forward
⏹️ ▶️ John like thousands of years and it never gets any better that just doesn’t seem plausible to because in the end people
⏹️ ▶️ John are people they don’t want to be uncomfortable they don’t want to you know be sad or hurt they want
⏹️ ▶️ John to just hang out and the holodeck will kill everybody we all know that but aside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m too depressed to even make an infinite timescale joke
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t need an even time scale for holodeck you need a holodeck and that’s That’s it. End of humanity. Sorry, everybody.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John at atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and
⏹️ ▶️ John T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check the podcast so long
Post-show: Anything else
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so what do you want to talk about then? What’s happy these days?
⏹️ ▶️ John else besides this? I want to save my Blu-ray thing for a happier,
⏹️ ▶️ John more tech-heavy week when we come out of this politics show and swear
⏹️ ▶️ John never to talk about it. You know what? It’s Apple’s fault, right? It’s not like we choose. It’s like the car thing. It’s like Apple building
⏹️ ▶️ John a car. You know, we had a car podcast, and now we have a tech podcast. And then Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John decides they’re going to make a car, maybe, allegedly, possibly, that’s not on us. It’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John you say, you just wanted to talk about cars again. I’m not making there be rumors about Apple making a car.
⏹️ ▶️ John And similarly, we don’t want to talk about politics on the show. We avoid it as much as we can. But then Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John the main tech company we talk about in the show, has to get into a big fight in the government on a political
⏹️ ▶️ John What can we do? I’m sorry, it had to happen. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John very difficult to talk about political issues without getting political. So if you’re angry that we talk about in the politics in
⏹️ ▶️ John the show and you’re thinking of sending us an email or tweet that tells us we should stick to technology, we were. Blame
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple. Blame the government. This is a technology-related issue, 100%. So was
⏹️ ▶️ John that the happy topic? No, that’s just like the preemptive whining.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey At this point, I feel like we should just pull the record and be done. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Is there news?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to bite. I’m not I’m not gonna bite. I’m not gonna bite.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanted to know if there was news, but if there’s no news,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of course, they always assume there’s no news about the Mac Pro. Because almost all the time, with the exception
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Phil Schiller’s app innovation, every other time there’s no news about the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, there was the repair thing, where everyone’s Mac Pros that were, like, failing, they have, like, a repair extension program
⏹️ ▶️ John to help them, right? Oh, goddammit. That wasn’t this week, though. I know, it was semi-recent. I feel bad
⏹️ ▶️ John for Mike, because he sold his because it was flaky, but if he had kept it a little bit longer, he could have got, you know, all new guts guts that presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t suffer from whatever weird problems he was having.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but the iMac was a better computer for him anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought it was just it’s great for putting your iPad in front of. It’s a nice backdrop.
⏹️ ▶️ John He puts the screen saver on it so he can look at it while he uses his iPad in front of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh iPad people, you can talk about them. That’s not, no they have good news. They have a pencil news this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John we didn’t mention that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, with the 9.3, the 9.3 beta, all the betas up till now had had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco removed the ability to use the Apple Pencil to do certain UI tasks like scrolling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lists and panning things. And our friends noted that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the last few weeks and months as 9.3 has been in beta and then we heard from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few people I think including ATP Tipster that this was actually not a bug this is actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a choice Apple had made that the pencil shouldn’t be used for these things. And And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the last few days, a whole bunch of people wrote articles about it. And last week or two weeks ago, Cortex complained about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it very effectively. And so there was a whole bunch of complaining about it over the last couple of weeks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then Apple announced yesterday, I believe, that, well, they gave a wonderfully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spun PR statement to the effect of, oh, we always plan to do it this way. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next beta, it’ll be back. It was just temporarily removed. You know, and of course, it wasn’t. And of course, that was PR spin.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s fine. Well, see,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, like, I don’t know if I take that at face value because the thing again, this is the more open Apple, which is nice that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John telling us like in the old Apple wouldn’t tell us at all, like we would, you know, be under NDA and developers would
⏹️ ▶️ John told us something. I mean… Baby steps, right? But the real thing is what I’ve always been thinking of is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what would be the motivation for removing this functionality? I think Stephen F on Twitter had a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ John speculation about what it might be, but he was wrong. I’m like, why would they remove it? Like, assume it’s intentional,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And assume they’re not telling you this intentional because they want to. I’m just trying to think of a plausible reason for them to intentionally
⏹️ ▶️ John remove it. Like I can’t come up with anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The best reasons I heard were, one was the idea that you could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be like scrolling things with your finger, but you should only be using the pencil to like tap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or make marks on things and to kind of clarify what the pencil is used for. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, people aren’t idiots. They know what the pencil is for. So I think that’s not a great reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The The other reason I heard that was more likely and more credible was simply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple didn’t want people to get into the habit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of not using touch as the primary interface to iOS in general, to the overall UI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and overall usage of these devices. They wanted the primary interface to remain touch, and they didn’t want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anybody making apps that had a bunch of tiny touch targets, and they didn’t want people to be using pencil
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full-time. reality is that is not that is not also a good enough reason like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all like if people make apps with a bunch of tiny text targets who cares if there’s truly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that’s truly not what most people are doing those apps won’t succeed the market will solve that problem
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s that’s such a bad reason that I like to think that it wasn’t there but but here it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John is a modern Apple right so the say say that was the reason what I would like to see is
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple to say that like why can’t that debate ever happen in public it’s This is like a half debate
⏹️ ▶️ John where they passive-aggressively do something, don’t tell you why, people complain, and then they reverse it and never told you
⏹️ ▶️ John why they were going to do it in the first place. Instead of like the first beta comes out with it, news
⏹️ ▶️ John sites realize that this is the thing, they write stories about it, and then there’s a public dialogue
⏹️ ▶️ John where Apple immediately says, oh no, no, no, guys, you don’t understand, here’s why we did this. We did it because we don’t want people making an absolute touch
⏹️ ▶️ John target. Well, at least then you can have a real debate about the merits of the issue, as opposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to now where the debate happens entirely internally and it’s just a one-sided thing where people complain outside
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe you’re screaming into a void or maybe Apple is listening. Did you convince them or maybe they’re going to say it was
⏹️ ▶️ John an accident like this whole black box thing where you don’t know another word. We need to be privy to everything that’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John on there, but I just think it would behoove everyone in this relation in this dysfunctional relationship being between customer
⏹️ ▶️ John and cooperation to speak openly with each other to believe enough in
⏹️ ▶️ John each other for Apple to tell us the real reason they want to make a functional change in the OS. And then we can talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about the reasons why we think that’s dumb, or, you know, like, instead of just saying, we can’t tell this is a mistake
⏹️ ▶️ John or not, but God, if this is intentional, please don’t do it. Because maybe Apple can convince us,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they have a really good reason that we haven’t thought of, right? Or maybe you know, the reason has to do with unreleased product
⏹️ ▶️ John that we don’t know about, and they can’t tell us I understand this is always going to be a limited situation here, I just feel like it would be
⏹️ ▶️ John a healthier, it would be a healthier feedback loop between customer and cooperation.
⏹️ ▶️ John that either one has entire rights to know what the other one is thinking all the time, but I think we need to get closer
⏹️ ▶️ John to a relationship where people like Marco don’t assume that everything Apple says is a lie, because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to reveal their real reasoning.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t say that. I just think the PR statement was pretty clearly BS, but it doesn’t really matter.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. You’re just assuming it is, because the reason sounds so dumb to you, but then you don’t know what to think. Do you think,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, are they being disingenuous? Why would they hide it? Especially since they’ve changed their mind. Wouldn’t you come out and say
⏹️ ▶️ John we were originally doing it for reason X but now we’re convinced because that would be the truth then the truth would be we had this
⏹️ ▶️ John reason people complained we were convinced by their complaints that our reasons don’t trump their desires
⏹️ ▶️ John therefore we changed our mind like that’s a healthy that’s a healthy dialogue instead of if you know again
⏹️ ▶️ John if what you’re saying is true instead of pretending that that wasn’t really the case and oh we were always meant to do
⏹️ ▶️ John this right assuming again assuming they’re pretending it just seems like a dysfunctional relationship
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah i don’t know at least at least it’s fixed You know, like, whenever people in our parts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make big complaints about a change, Apple is floating in a beta, we always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hear from people, I always see people responding, or they respond to me if I’m one of the critics, of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why do you bother doing this? You’re just complaining about Apple. But the reason we bother doing it is because it works, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then these things do tend to get fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s random reward, it works sometimes. It works randomly, you know? Like, if it worked every
⏹️ ▶️ John time, it wouldn’t be as motivating to do it. And if it worked never, we would never do it. But it works enough of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think, you know, like, these kind of decisions, these are probably debated inside Apple, right? Almost every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decision that, like, we get mad about, chances are people inside Apple were also mad about them, and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco argued about them. And so when outsiders pile onto the argument or draw attention to the argument,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that helps that side inside Apple win the argument or it helps change people’s minds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it is very effective and again you’re not going to win every time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because like if you’re trying to argue for something like well you know what I’m tired of app review there shouldn’t be app review like well you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know you’re not going to win that that’s unlikely. You can keep arguing
⏹️ ▶️ John that because someday that like that will be on the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco table. On an infinite time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John scale! It’ll be on the table again.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco got it! Well
⏹️ ▶️ John you know and another example is you can complain about the file system for I I don’t know, a decade. Alright, we feel better now.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then, you know, maybe eventually they’ll come around. But yeah, I mean, it’s a function of the
⏹️ ▶️ John tech press. I mean, this is happening whether, you know, whether Apple admits it or not, of course it’s always been happening
⏹️ ▶️ John because Apple’s made up of people and they read tech press about themselves because, you know, that’s the way it works. And
⏹️ ▶️ John as you pointed out, there’s always dissension within the company, but in the end, certain people
⏹️ ▶️ John are in charge and certain people aren’t. And Apple’s not a democracy, and neither is the press and neither is anything else.
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re just trying to get is a healthier symbiosis where
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s potential customers are telling it what they would want. And Apple wants to
⏹️ ▶️ John give customers what they want, but maybe not those customers. Maybe they see other customers who they’re not currently talking to, or they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like, it’s not it’s not as if the customer should be in charge of Apple. And it’s not as if Apple should be in charge of the
⏹️ ▶️ John customers. It’s just the and it’s opening up like I feel like the dialogue is opening up more than it used to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is healthy. We just have a ways to go yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you guys use the iPad Pro, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You talking about me and John or me and Tiff? You and Tiff. Oh, she uses it. Yeah, she uses it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco she uses the pencil to navigate a bunch of stuff. And if I use the iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or any iPad on a regular basis, I would certainly consider doing the same thing because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the pencil a lot. As an input device, it is really nice. And there’s all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorts of arguments other people have made about it being either more efficient or better for advanced work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or better for ergonomics for or better for accessibility for certain people
⏹️ ▶️ John or it just feels better. The mic argument is sometimes it just feels better. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I were an iPad user, or if I was the kind of person who liked writing things with pens and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pencils, I would certainly be using it all the time. But neither of those things apply to me, unfortunately.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s not it’s not really for me. But I do respect it a lot as a really nice input device.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do wonder a little bit though, like in these type of feedback cycles
⏹️ ▶️ John and relationships that part of the reason the old Apple would not do something like this is because it was seen as like a sign
⏹️ ▶️ John of weakness, like, oh, we weren’t, we weren’t right. We were wrong about something. We need to change it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John part of it is also that it is legitimately like taking,
⏹️ ▶️ John taking the, the angry feedback from your most enthusiastic users
⏹️ ▶️ John as a way to design your products as a formula for death. Like Apple doesn’t do that for a good reason. You never
⏹️ ▶️ John want to like just listen to your most enthusiastic users because you will evolve your
⏹️ ▶️ John product in a way that caters more and more to like the the the expert, the super
⏹️ ▶️ John enthusiast. And you will never you’ll never get something like the iPhone because the super Apple enthusiasts were like drawing pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John of like OS 10 on a phone or something. You know what I mean? Like Apple doesn’t do that to its credit. It
⏹️ ▶️ John knows the trap of our Microsoft is done it so many ways. You keep adding features because your experts wants features and you go to your experts or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. But for the iPad Pro, it’s kind of a sign that Apple realizes
⏹️ ▶️ John that at this point in the iPad Pro’s history, that fanatical group of users who really
⏹️ ▶️ John love the thing, that’s all they’ve got at this point. Like they, if they’re going to betray those people for
⏹️ ▶️ John some larger market that they don’t have faith that that will materialize. So they better listen to
⏹️ ▶️ John the most passionate iPad Pro users, because there aren’t many iPad Pro users presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John and it is kind of a high-end enthusiast product like there’s a whole other line of iPads for the rest of the world and phones
⏹️ ▶️ John for the rest of the world but for the iPad Pro now if you’re gonna listen to anybody
⏹️ ▶️ John about anything like that’s where you would do it on the other hand if the iPad Pro was burning up the sales
⏹️ ▶️ John chart and everybody was buying one and it was like taking over for the Mac and Mac sales are gonna be down
⏹️ ▶️ John 50% and iPad Pro sales were gonna be like half the iPhone sales next year they would feel confident
⏹️ ▶️ John to ignore those people and say it’s more important to go with our gut instinct of whatever their internal reasoning is. So
⏹️ ▶️ John in some ways it gives me a, you know, a view of how apple sees the current state of the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John pro market. Uh, they’re not in a position right now to just do what they want.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, it, you know, despite the, the, the house of enthusiasts, whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John on many other markets, for example, the iPhone people howling to be able to sideload apps, apple
⏹️ ▶️ John confidently ignored them as the sales graph for iPhones went, you know, up like a ski jump.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, and that’s, they were in a position of strength there, but on the iPad pro, not right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And as much as it, as much as it sucks for apple to be like losing things as you know, as much as it sucks for them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like what comes out of them when they have like a fire under them. You know, like I like when they’re not in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a dominant position, when they’re fighting really hard, that tends to be when the best stuff comes out of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco except for TV boxes.
⏹️ ▶️ John competition in that market that’s a different topic that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly have you used it that’s my blu-ray top I know I know I’m just saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also thought there was so much competition that was really good until I tried to use the competition
⏹️ ▶️ John well there is this lot of competition it’s just not really good yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s fair is that a fire lit under them is just like a tepid water dripping on their toes I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s called fire but yeah it doesn’t really work that way I’d like to set it on fire