An Analy­sis of Apple’s Fil­e­Vault 2.

This is an analy­sis of Apple’s disk encryp­tion pro­gram, Fil­e­Vault 2, that first appeared in the Lion oper­at­ing sys­tem. Short sum­mary: they couldn’t break it. (Pre­sum­ably, the ver­sion in Moun­tain Lion isn’t any different.)

[Schneier on Secu­rity]

This is good news, but of course it’s impor­tant to keep in mind that Fil­e­Vault 2 secu­rity can be com­pro­mised by accept­ing the option (on by default, as I recall) to send a recov­ery key to Apple. The best secu­rity in the world is use­less if you give the keys to some­one who will give them up the first time some thug points a gun at him.

Ask Ars: how safe is my data stored in iCloud? [Ars Tech­nica]

An inter­est­ing arti­cle which ulti­mately con­cludes that it’s “safe enough.” How­ever, right there in the arti­cle is some­thing which con­tra­dicts its conclusion:

As far as your Safari book­marks or iPhone pho­tos, how­ever, that infor­ma­tion is only given out when required by law, such as when it’s required by court order. “We may also dis­close infor­ma­tion about you if we deter­mine that, for pur­poses of national secu­rity, law enforce­ment, or other issues of pub­lic impor­tance, dis­clo­sure is nec­es­sary or appro­pri­ate,” Apple wrote in its pri­vacy policy.

In other words, it’s not really safe at all. If it were, it would be impos­si­ble for Apple to ever dis­close any­thing, for any rea­son, because they wouldn’t be able to get to it to dis­close it.

Apple Acquires Siri.

Tim­o­thy Hay:

Apple Inc. has acquired Siri Inc. just a few months after the
start-up’s voice-activated personal-assistant pro­gram launched
in the App Store, an investor in San Jose-based Siri told
VentureWire.

[Dar­ing Fire­ball]

I down­loaded the Siri app on my iPad, and it reminds me a lot of the long-dead “Por­tico” ser­vice from Gen­eral Magic. How­ever, I think an app that runs on a hand­held device is con­sid­er­ably more use­ful than the phone-based Portico.

iPad Appli­ca­tion Design. The iPad may be a larger ver­sion of the iPhone in terms of the hard­ware and oper­at­ing sys­tem, but treat­ing it as the same device would be fool­ish. It turns out that increas­ing the dis­play size of touch-screen hard­ware can trans­form it into an entirely new class of device. [Matt Leg­end Gem­mell]

It’s true that the iPad is basi­cally a larger iPod Touch, but the dif­fer­ence that extra size makes is actu­ally pretty sig­nif­i­cant. The author looks at some of the ways that being big­ger matters.