Linked List: January 3, 2014

Friday, 3 January 2014

Macminicolo 2014 Promo ★

My thanks to Macminicolo for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. They have a great promotion to celebrate the new year and their tenth year of hosting Mac Minis: a quad-core Mac Mini with 500 GB SSD drive, 16 GB of RAM, an external drive for backups, and a full year of hosting. The price: $2014 — a savings of $645.

At Q Branch, we use a Macminicolo server for Xcode automated testing, our internal wiki, web development staging, and more, and we couldn’t be happier with it. Low cost, high performance, and terrific customer support. I can’t think of a better way to host a Mac server.

Matthew Panzarino: ‘Apple Says It Has Never Worked With NSA To Create iPhone Backdoors, Is Unaware Of Alleged DROPOUTJEEP Snooping Program’ ★

Amidst all the NSA-related revelations stemming from Edward Snowden is a recent one reported by Der Spiegel of a program called “DROPOUTJEEP”, which purportedly gave the NSA full control over a target’s iPhone. Everything: location, the cameras, the microphone. The NSA’s description claimed a “100% success rate”, which in turn prompted questions as to whether Apple was aiding and abetting the NSA and had provided some sort of backdoor. Apple issued a statement denying any such cooperation.

It seems pretty clear that DROPOUTJEEP was/is a jailbreak — full control, but requires access to the device. It’s not some sort of remote switch they can flip. Der Spiegel’s information dates back to 2008, but I think it’s pretty safe to assume that anything the jailbreak community can do, the NSA can do better. If you’re an NSA target and they get their hands on your iPhone, game over.

The Builder’s High ★

Michael Lopp:

The things we’re giving to the future are feeling increasingly unintentional and irrelevant.