Eye on Winer

I agree with Dave that Apple’s “trade” (Yesterday, Today) — their brand new drive, for your drive full of sensitive information — is bad business. They shouldn’t do it or, if they do, there should be a policy that the drives are erased well (say, for example, DoD grade).

One thing about Dave, though, is that even when he’s right, he finds a way to be wrong.

You have no control over when a hard disk will crash, or any foreknowledge of when it’s even likely to crash. So there’s no way to protect against this kind of security issue.

Let’s assume that his premise is correct (no control or foreknowledge of a drive crash) let’s further assume that once the drive is “un-crashed” all of the data that used to be on it could be read. Even assuming those things, it doesn’t mean there’s no way to protect yourself.

Take a look at the principle: you have to be able to predict a security breach to protect against it. True and false. Arguably, you have to be able to predict (generally) that a breach might happen in the future, but you certainly don’t need to have any warning about specific attacks. If you did, none of our security mechanisms would work.

Dave seems to be fixated on one solution: destroying the data on the drive. In that fixation, he’s ignoring a much easier (and pre-emptive) solution: encryption. OSX comes standard with FileVault. Keep your data encrypted at all times (like you should on a laptop with sensitive information anyway) and suddenly losing your harddrive becomes a much less serious security problem.

It’s still a business/PR problem for Apple, but (as usual) Dave’s amping things up a little bit here.

Dave must spend a fair amount of energy thinking of ways to silence his critics. On his site, he employs filtering and moderation, allowing only the opinions he sees fit. That’s why it’s so ironic that he’s so up-in-arms about the Apple settlement: “Of course Apple is fascist scum for shutting down Think Secret.“

Fascist scum. For wanting to keep their corporate secrets, you know, secret. How awful of them.

If the tables were reversed and Dave was on the harmful end of leaked secrets or violated contracts, you can bet he’d have a different opinion about the ‘fascist’ nature of it.

Rex Hammond, the guy Dave is celebrating with that post, is being rather dense:

John Gruber of Daring Fireball (of which I’m a fan) suggests that I (he points here, at least) am “jumping to conclusions” by suggesting that Apple “somehow forced” Think Secret to cease publication. I’m trying my best to figure out how it’s jumping to a conclusion by interpreting the following quote as something else: “As part of the confidential settlement, no sources were revealed and Think Secret will no longer be published.” There is nothing ambiguous about that statement: If it is part of a settlement, then Apple is a party to the decision to shut the site down.

Notice the change of terminology, from “Apple ’somehow forced’ Think Secret to cease publication” to “Apple is a party to the decision to shut the site down”. That’s the conclusion you’re jumping to, Rex… that being a party to the decision means that they forced it. Here’s a plausible scenario:

Apple: Alright, just give us your sources and this all goes away.
ThinkSecret: We’re not giving you the sources. We’d rather shut down.
Apple: Okay, that’s fine. Stop publishing Think Secret and it all goes away.
ThinkSecret: Really? Okay. Deal.

This is the civil equivalent of letting someone walk for buying stolen property just by promising not to do it again.