Archive for March 1, 2018

Thursday, March 1, 2018

SwiftNIO

SwiftNIO:

SwiftNIO is a cross-platform asynchronous event-driven network application framework for rapid development of maintainable high performance protocol servers & clients.

It’s like Netty, but written for Swift.

Update (2018-03-02): Ben Cohen:

Two strengths of Swift that worked really well for SwiftNIO:

- tight, deterministic memory management

- easy transition between C/Unsafe and higher-level APIs

There are still some places in the code that are a little bit, uh, Java-y. PRs welcome!

Update (2018-03-05): Vapor:

We have branches of Vapor and Fluent 3.0 built on #swiftnio successfully running and passing tests. Integration went very smoothly with few breaking changes. With close to 15k LOC deleted so far, we think this is definitely the right choice going forward and we’re excited!

Twitter Launches Bookmarks for Saving Tweets

Jesar Shah (MacRumors):

To bookmark a Tweet, tap the share icon under the Tweet and select, “Add Tweet to Bookmarks”. To find it later, tap “Bookmarks” from your profile icon menu. You can remove Tweets from your Bookmarks at any time. Also, only you can see what you’ve bookmarked.

Nick Heer:

Unfortunately, there’s nothing in this announcement nor anything in Twitter’s documentation that suggests they’re making this available to third-party developers; I hope they do.

Respecting Privacy at Basecamp

Noah Lorang:

Many companies, especially startups, review every signup manually and reach out to interesting looking customers. I get lots of these emails, and every one leaves me unsettled.

Tons of companies will also use the fact that you signed up as permission to identify you as a customer for marketing purposes. Over the years, I’ve had to ask no fewer than a dozen companies to remove Basecamp from their marketing material.

I find both of these practices to be distasteful.

I don’t think companies should promote you as a customer without asking.

Cellebrite Can Now Unlock Recent iPhones

Thomas Fox-Brewster:

Cellebrite, a Petah Tikva, Israel-based vendor that’s become the U.S. government’s company of choice when it comes to unlocking mobile devices, is this month telling customers its engineers currently have the ability to get around the security of devices running iOS 11 (right up to 11.2.6). That includes the iPhone X, a model that Forbes has learned was successfully raided for data by the Department for Homeland Security back in November 2017, most likely with Cellebrite technology.

Jeff Atwood:

“The story I hear is that Cellebrite hires ex-Apple engineers and moves them to countries where Apple can’t prosecute them under the DMCA or its equivalents”

I’m not sure where this quote comes from, as it’s not in the current version of the article.

Ray [REDACTED] (via Nick Heer):

If you are concerned by this then one thing you can due to mitigate it is to change your iPhone PIN from a six digit number to an alphanumeric passphrase. The cellebrite exploit involves a brute force PIN trick that allows unlimited attempts without wiping.

Previously: iOS 9 Source Code Leak, FBI Asks Apple for Secure Golden Key.

Update (2018-03-05): Thomas Fox-Brewster:

Just a week after Forbes reported on the claim of Israeli U.S. government manufacturer Cellebrite that it could unlock the latest Apple iPhone models, another service has emerged promising much the same. Except this time it comes from an unknown entity, an obscure American startup named Grayshift, which appears to be run by long-time U.S. intelligence agency contractors and an ex-Apple security engineer.

In recent weeks, its marketing materials have been disseminated around private online police and forensics groups, offering a $15,000 iPhone unlock tool named GrayKey, which permits 300 uses. That's for the online mode that requires constant connectivity at the customer end, whilst an offline version costs $30,000. The latter comes with unlimited uses.

The Rise of China As a Digital Totalitarian State

Xiao Qiang:

Zhou’s story is the latest example of how much stricter state control has become across the Chinese Internet, especially social media platforms. In China, censorship and propaganda go hand in hand, backed by the use of physical force, including police visits, arrests and attacks by state media on people who have expressed controversial political opinions online.

Ever since he came to power in 2012, President Xi Jinping has attempted to bolster the authority of the Communist Party in part by imposing wide-ranging policies to gain ideological and informational control over the media and Internet. In 2017, the country’s first cybersecurity law came into effect; it requires Internet companies to allow even more surveillance of their networks, submit to mandated security reviews of their equipment and provide data to government investigators when requested, among other regulations.

The University of Toronto-based Citizen Lab has identified various surveillance mechanisms used to monitor social media platforms such as WeChat, which can leave people with the sense that they have a surveillance weapon in their pockets. What’s more, these mechanisms remain in effect when individuals leave the country, as do large number of Chinese students who study abroad.

Previously: iCloud in China and on Google’s Cloud.