Posting on February 29 because the streak respects the Gregorian calendar’s technical debt. (A leap year is a backport patch for the solar system’s refusal to use round numbers. The 100/400 exception rules are the comments nobody reads.)
The story consuming tech: Apple vs. the FBI. A court ordered Apple to write a custom iOS build (investigators want it to unlock the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone) and Tim Cook refused, publicly, in an open letter. The ask isn’t “hand over data you have”; it’s “engineer a master key that doesn’t exist.” Every security person I respect lands the same place: you cannot build a backdoor that only good guys walk through. A key that exists is a key that leaks, and see every breach this blog has covered. Congress is grandstanding, engineers are explaining threat models on cable news, and for once my industry’s fight is the fight. However it resolves, the precedent outlives the case.
Senior-job note: I now sit in the meetings where we decide what data we don’t collect. Turns out the strongest privacy engineering is a smaller database. You can’t be compelled to produce what you never stored.
TIL: secure enclaves and key derivation, went deep on how iPhone encryption actually works. The design assumes Apple itself is a threat actor. Paranoia as architecture. Beautiful.