[grupthink]

After this ridiculous FaceTime bug [1] in 2019, I've disabled FaceTime permanently. Now, hackers are using zero-click exploits on iMessaging by crafting malformed images/pdfs thereby breaking the media notification parser, breaking out of the sandbox, breaking out of BlastDoor, hooking into the Springboard.app which has entitlements that grant access to everything on an iOS device. Jeff Bezos and Joshua Wong have experienced first hand how broken iPhone's security is.

I have an iPhone and iPad, and recently have been experiencing phantom rings. My iPhone/iPad would ring simultaneously for half a second and then flash "Unknown Audio" (instead of "Unknown Caller" or the caller ID). And, for phone calls, there's supposed to be a green phone icon, but these calls have blue phone icons. And the notifications don't stay in the notification screen. They're gone after the ring. I can't tell whether my phone's on the fritz or my data is being exfiltrated. Last weekend, I received 3 phantom calls in a span of 5 minutes. My phone can't be trusted for FaceTime calls and iMessages. Fucking irony.

We cannot grant absolute trust to any one entity. Do not fully trust Apple. Do not fully trust Google. Do not fully trust not your government. Granting them absolute trust grants them absolute power that can be corrupted against you absolutely. Even though Google is a privacy invasive company, at least Google doesn't have power over Android to the extent that Apple has power over iOS. Android users can still side-load the Navalny app because Google built this weakness into their system. Apple's complete authoritarian power over iOS means users don't have power to choose. Prefer to use apps/services like Signal that cannot kowtow to authoritarian regimes because these kinds of apps/services have little power that they can themselves abuse.

But actually, fuck apps, fuck serfdom. Prefer the open web. Prefer distributed systems. Self host.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/28/18201383/apple-facetime-b...