Technology

U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump is having a go at Apple Inc. a day after arguing with the Catholic Church. At a South Carolina rally on Friday, Trump said that people should “boycott Apple” unless the world’s largest information technology company and one of the biggest corporations in the world changes its ways and abides by a court order and opens up its iPhones to FBI scrutiny. The security services want to have a peak inside smart-phones to look for ‘terrorist’ phone numbers, relating to last year’s San Bernardino massacre.

The New York Times has reported that Iran would have been a target for an extensive cyber attack, capable of bringing down power grids, air defense systems and communications, if the nuclear negotiations had failed. ars technica reports: The contingency plan, known internally as Nitro Zeus, was intended to be carried out in the event that diplomatic efforts to curb Iran’s nuclear development program failed and the US was pulled into a war between Iran and Israel, according to an article published by The New York Times.

The FBI have won a lawsuit that will force Apple to develop security software designed to override encryption security features embedded in the iPhone.  The court decision was arrived at utilizing an old antidemocratic law from the 18th century – allowing the government to expand its police-state powers of surveillance on American citizens.

The question of how to balance government surveillance with individual privacy is really quite simple. On one side the government believes that the investigation of someone who is either planning or has actually carried out a crime should be without any conditions, that all evidence potentially relating to the event should be accessible to law enforcement.

The event that has gripped the tech and libertarian community over the past 48 hours has been Tim Cook's stern refusal to comply with a subpoena demanding that Apple unlock the iPhone 5C belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters for a full FBI inspection.

As reported previously, Judge Sheri Pym of U.S. District Court in Los Angeles said on Tuesday that Apple must provide "reasonable technical assistance" to investigators seeking to unlock data on - in other words hack - an iPhone 5C that had been owned by Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the San Bernardino shooters.