Watch out for money: Apple vs FBI
Many are now watching Apple play against the FBI in the National Security Theater and rub their eyes, not understanding why Apple (in the person of Executive Director Tim Cook) unexpectedly embodied a knight in sparkling armor in defense of privacy and civil rights. Apple, after all, is the corporate giant with the second largest capitalization in US history - why do they need it?
Apple's fanaticism in protecting users in the past five years is so great that they went against the US government. The reasons for this, as always in such cases, can be understood by following the money.
Apple did not care about user security in the first time since the release of iOS. It is well known that the first versions of the iPhone lied about the security of SSL connections to mail servers. As far as I understand, because of this, they were banned for some corporate and state accounts for several years. But then Apple realized that security is not just a useful feature to please users, but a necessity. And the reason for this is Apple Pay.
It used to be said that General Motors Corporation is actually an insurance company with a car manufacturing division. The GM Pension Fund has grown to such a size (almost a hundred years) that GM had to invest money somewhere to make a profit sufficient to pay pensions: the sale of cars was not a large enough business for this. And today, Apple is sitting on the largest money bag in American history. Its legendary $ 120-150 billion of available funds has attracted the attention of investors like Karl Aikan, but even buying back shares does not blow off a huge cash cushion if you collect 90% of the profits from the entire global smartphone market. Some analysts have calculated that if Apple keeps current turnover and profits and continues to buy back shares at the same pace, by 2024 it will become privately owned, but it will still be worth $ 100 billion of available funds.
')
Of course, if you have $ 0.1 trillion, then you will not be able to simply go to the bank and say: “Please accept the deposit, how much per year do you pay?” On the one hand, with $ 0.1 trillion, you can buy several banks yourself . On the other hand, money does not exist without movement: it is a coefficient of economic efficiency. Money needs to be invested and make a profit. Over the past ten years, Apple has used a money cushion to provide a competitive advantage. With a five-year plan for product release for the future, they can predict the need for some critical components — synthetic sapphire glasses for smartphone screens, for example, or panels for 5K monitors — for years to come. There are no such components yet, but Apple knows which supplier can release them if someone lends money to build a plant (usually you need an amount from a little less than a billion dollars to several billion). So Apple finds a company like Sharp and says: “We will need a million 27-inch 5-megapixel displays in four years. We will give you money to build a plant at a rate of just 1 percentage point higher than a bank, in exchange for the exclusive right to purchase the first million of the components produced that are of the same quality. ” Everything benefits: Sharp gets a factory for mass production of new panels for high-resolution displays, and Apple invests its money in a way that brings much more profit than a regular investment fund.
But ... Apple has too much money. Since about 1998, when Steve Jobs returned, Apple began to grow as a start-up of the dot-com boom era, with large double-digit percentages of annual growth. Only she began to swell with billions of turns, and not like two guys in the garage. By 2008, probably Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, it became clear that if the strategy to seize the leading position in the global computer market of the post-PC era will be successful, then the problem of storing money will become even more acute. If you are 50-100 billion dollars a year dripping, you can not take money to the bank, you have to become a bank. That's the point of Apple Pay, and that's why Apple has become such a fanatic for protecting the privacy of users and electronic civil rights (in one narrow area).
I think you know what Apple Pay is: you use your iPhone, iPad or Watch as a reliable, trusted identification token in the store for payment. It is tied to your bank account and, in general, the phone replaces your debit and credit cards.
In the end, banks will realize - through pain - that going to bed with Apple was a bad idea, just as major publishers eventually realized that going to bed with Amazon to sell e-books was also a bad idea. Apple is now the de facto investment bank: all it needs is a banking license, a good backend, regulatory oversight, a risk management system - and it can work equally with giants like Chase, Barclays or HSBC to serve individuals. And Apple has a very good profile for each client: unlike banks and credit companies, it does not manage the infrastructure designed in the 1950s, which has been continuously updated since. For banks, the main thing is not to attract deposits or issue loans, for them the main thing is risk management. Apple, like Google, has a much closer relationship with users than any bank. For example, they can roughly observe where the phone is moving or the user's clock — and so identify fraud transactions and attempts to buy something thousands of kilometers away from the user's location. Credit card companies have card tracking methods, but these are very crude methods: Apple can significantly improve them.
And this is not the only anti-fraud technology. For example, Apple uses relatively good fingerprint scanners on the latest devices, with support for long pincodes and passwords. The new models have reliable hardware storage for cryptographic tokens, which are used to decipher the memory addresses in the phone where data is stored: they support (and encourage the use of) two-factor authentication. Some analysts have reported that Apple is working to improve the front camera to scan the retina. In the long run, ultra-compact, cheap DNA sequencers are on the market if you really need biometric authentication. Simultaneous use of a password and a set of biometric tests — a fingerprint scanner with a quick comparison of DNA and a front-facing camera for scanning the retina — would be an almost perfect biometric protection. Their phones are in many ways more secure than ATMs and bank card infrastructure we use to access bank accounts. And this gives phone manufacturers the opportunity to jump over the existing banking infrastructure on the effectiveness of risk management protocols, reduce fraud and at the same time know much more about user habits, to notice in advance the potentially risky behavioral patterns and block their impact.
Here's my theory: Apple sees in the distant future the creation of a global secure payment system that will supplant the VISA and Mastercard networks - and, ultimately, the opening of a subsidiary retail bank to directly provide financial services to users, using part of its huge financial reserve.
The FBI thinks that it is asking to unlock a mobile phone, because the FBI is short-sightedly focused on previous criminal investigations, not on the future of the technology industry, and the FBI does not understand that in fact it is asking for the key to hack away every ATM and bank card on the planet from 2030 (if not through Apple, then through the operating systems of other mobile phones, after the creators of Android come to their senses and smell the money too).
If the FBI gets what it wants, then a backdoor will be installed, and the payment infrastructure of the next generation will become as leaky as the current infrastructure of bank cards, with skimmers and fake identity.
And that's why Tim Cook butts with the US Department of Justice about iOS security: if no one trusts their iPhone, then no one will trust the next generation Apple Bank, and Apple will lose the best opportunity to store money bags during its takeoff into the stratosphere.
Apple's fanaticism in protecting users in the past five years is so great that they went against the US government. The reasons for this, as always in such cases, can be understood by following the money.
Apple did not care about user security in the first time since the release of iOS. It is well known that the first versions of the iPhone lied about the security of SSL connections to mail servers. As far as I understand, because of this, they were banned for some corporate and state accounts for several years. But then Apple realized that security is not just a useful feature to please users, but a necessity. And the reason for this is Apple Pay.
It used to be said that General Motors Corporation is actually an insurance company with a car manufacturing division. The GM Pension Fund has grown to such a size (almost a hundred years) that GM had to invest money somewhere to make a profit sufficient to pay pensions: the sale of cars was not a large enough business for this. And today, Apple is sitting on the largest money bag in American history. Its legendary $ 120-150 billion of available funds has attracted the attention of investors like Karl Aikan, but even buying back shares does not blow off a huge cash cushion if you collect 90% of the profits from the entire global smartphone market. Some analysts have calculated that if Apple keeps current turnover and profits and continues to buy back shares at the same pace, by 2024 it will become privately owned, but it will still be worth $ 100 billion of available funds.
')
Of course, if you have $ 0.1 trillion, then you will not be able to simply go to the bank and say: “Please accept the deposit, how much per year do you pay?” On the one hand, with $ 0.1 trillion, you can buy several banks yourself . On the other hand, money does not exist without movement: it is a coefficient of economic efficiency. Money needs to be invested and make a profit. Over the past ten years, Apple has used a money cushion to provide a competitive advantage. With a five-year plan for product release for the future, they can predict the need for some critical components — synthetic sapphire glasses for smartphone screens, for example, or panels for 5K monitors — for years to come. There are no such components yet, but Apple knows which supplier can release them if someone lends money to build a plant (usually you need an amount from a little less than a billion dollars to several billion). So Apple finds a company like Sharp and says: “We will need a million 27-inch 5-megapixel displays in four years. We will give you money to build a plant at a rate of just 1 percentage point higher than a bank, in exchange for the exclusive right to purchase the first million of the components produced that are of the same quality. ” Everything benefits: Sharp gets a factory for mass production of new panels for high-resolution displays, and Apple invests its money in a way that brings much more profit than a regular investment fund.
But ... Apple has too much money. Since about 1998, when Steve Jobs returned, Apple began to grow as a start-up of the dot-com boom era, with large double-digit percentages of annual growth. Only she began to swell with billions of turns, and not like two guys in the garage. By 2008, probably Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, it became clear that if the strategy to seize the leading position in the global computer market of the post-PC era will be successful, then the problem of storing money will become even more acute. If you are 50-100 billion dollars a year dripping, you can not take money to the bank, you have to become a bank. That's the point of Apple Pay, and that's why Apple has become such a fanatic for protecting the privacy of users and electronic civil rights (in one narrow area).
I think you know what Apple Pay is: you use your iPhone, iPad or Watch as a reliable, trusted identification token in the store for payment. It is tied to your bank account and, in general, the phone replaces your debit and credit cards.
In the end, banks will realize - through pain - that going to bed with Apple was a bad idea, just as major publishers eventually realized that going to bed with Amazon to sell e-books was also a bad idea. Apple is now the de facto investment bank: all it needs is a banking license, a good backend, regulatory oversight, a risk management system - and it can work equally with giants like Chase, Barclays or HSBC to serve individuals. And Apple has a very good profile for each client: unlike banks and credit companies, it does not manage the infrastructure designed in the 1950s, which has been continuously updated since. For banks, the main thing is not to attract deposits or issue loans, for them the main thing is risk management. Apple, like Google, has a much closer relationship with users than any bank. For example, they can roughly observe where the phone is moving or the user's clock — and so identify fraud transactions and attempts to buy something thousands of kilometers away from the user's location. Credit card companies have card tracking methods, but these are very crude methods: Apple can significantly improve them.
And this is not the only anti-fraud technology. For example, Apple uses relatively good fingerprint scanners on the latest devices, with support for long pincodes and passwords. The new models have reliable hardware storage for cryptographic tokens, which are used to decipher the memory addresses in the phone where data is stored: they support (and encourage the use of) two-factor authentication. Some analysts have reported that Apple is working to improve the front camera to scan the retina. In the long run, ultra-compact, cheap DNA sequencers are on the market if you really need biometric authentication. Simultaneous use of a password and a set of biometric tests — a fingerprint scanner with a quick comparison of DNA and a front-facing camera for scanning the retina — would be an almost perfect biometric protection. Their phones are in many ways more secure than ATMs and bank card infrastructure we use to access bank accounts. And this gives phone manufacturers the opportunity to jump over the existing banking infrastructure on the effectiveness of risk management protocols, reduce fraud and at the same time know much more about user habits, to notice in advance the potentially risky behavioral patterns and block their impact.
Here's my theory: Apple sees in the distant future the creation of a global secure payment system that will supplant the VISA and Mastercard networks - and, ultimately, the opening of a subsidiary retail bank to directly provide financial services to users, using part of its huge financial reserve.
The FBI thinks that it is asking to unlock a mobile phone, because the FBI is short-sightedly focused on previous criminal investigations, not on the future of the technology industry, and the FBI does not understand that in fact it is asking for the key to hack away every ATM and bank card on the planet from 2030 (if not through Apple, then through the operating systems of other mobile phones, after the creators of Android come to their senses and smell the money too).
If the FBI gets what it wants, then a backdoor will be installed, and the payment infrastructure of the next generation will become as leaky as the current infrastructure of bank cards, with skimmers and fake identity.
And that's why Tim Cook butts with the US Department of Justice about iOS security: if no one trusts their iPhone, then no one will trust the next generation Apple Bank, and Apple will lose the best opportunity to store money bags during its takeoff into the stratosphere.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/392337/
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