Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
theshrike79 | on: Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption
Apple PCC has been independently audited to be ultra secure.

Will the EU enforce the same for 3rd party integrations?

FinnKuhn | parent
If Apple had e.g. required competitors to undergo similar independent audits that would probably be allowed as it is quite similar to how Apple solved the third party app store issue.
MBCook | root | parent
Are we sure the EU would allow that? Or would it be seen as a way to stifle competition?
bigyabai | root | parent
I mean, Apple's PCC audits require them to individually vet each auditor before they're allowed to see the PCC nodes.

If Apple extended that philosophy to other vendors then yeah, it would be deliberately unfair and anticompetitive.

MBCook | root | parent
It sounds like they are whitelisting the hashes of all the Google software and OSes and stuff to ensure nothing is changed out from under them without them knowing.

Even if you could make all the other possible vendors run private cloud compute style stuff that would be a lot to manage.

And I can’t imagine the EU would like, and as a user I would certainly hate, the “OK you can use Grok but you lose all privacy too bad“ dialogue box they could make.

bigyabai | root | parent
I don't even think it offers a meaningful degree of security. It's a form of theater, you have to be hand-selected to perform the audit that Apple promised.

Most sysadmins know that hash matching only mitigates a small subset of rare upstream attacks. Apple could still be MITMing the whole thing (SSL added and removed here :)) and no auditor would get the chance to check. The offered audit is so weak that I would not trust any FAANG business to administrate it.

Apple is once again demanding arbitrary centralization to give them an undeserved veto power. None of this is for security.

theshrike79 | root | parent
If they're not "hand-selected", what would be the way to select the auditors?

Just have an open house for anyone interested to come poke the hardware and software?

bigyabai | root | parent
Have a set of clearly-defined requirements that doesn't randomly reject valid candidates? Nobody wants another opaque system like the App Store review process.

By the sound of it, Apple's offered audit doesn't include insight into the most dangerous parts of a system like this. This could easily lead to a situation where real security experts are denied access to promote influencer-adjacent Yes Men who rubberstamp the hashes matching without any question.

Hence my concern for "SSL added and removed here" - none of Google's famously backdoored infrastructure will be audited. For privacy purposes, Apple's promise is woefully incomplete.

loading story #48470634