technology
- Enable a six-digit passcode on your device.
- Set your device to erase itself after 10 failed passcode attempts. You should do these two steps anyway!
- Before you get to airport security, turn your device off. iOS devices require a passcode to unlock themselves the first time after they’re turned on. For dumb legal reasons, passcodes are generally thought to be protected by the 5th amendment, but fingerprints are not.
- Turn on iCloud backup.
- When it’s finished backing up, reset your device to its factory settings.
- When you get where you’re going, restore your device from backup.
- Turn on iCloud backup.
- When it’s finished backing up, reset your device.
- Start using it. Add a few contacts. Set up a (disposable) email account. Add some songs.
- Turn on iCloud backup. Let it finish.
- Leave this device at home.
- When you get where you’re going, buy a replacement device. Restore it from the backup you made earlier. Now you have an exact clone of the original.
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This isn’t meant as advice for criminals. Lots of people travel with information they’re legally obligated to safeguard, like company plans, legal documents, and other confidential information. ↩︎
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Similar ideas apply for Android and other devices, but I don’t have one of those to experiment with. ↩︎
- You’re writing an instant messaging app that can more easily share information with law enforcement agencies, or one designed to make that impossible. Either of those alter how governments interacts with their citizens.
- You made a ride-sharing app. It’s now easy for drivers to sign up and start making money, at the expense of existing taxi drivers. Your app alters the workforce.
- Your website does a better job of calculating its users’ income taxes and giving them bigger refunds. It shifts the flow of money through the economy.
Google v. Oracle - victory!
This morning the US Supreme Court ruled for Google in Oracle’s case against them. This is wonderful news for American software engineering as the opposite ruling would have been disastrous for the entire industry.
Consider a comprehensive, albeit farfetched, analogy that illustrates how the API is actually used by a programmer. Imagine that you can, via certain keystrokes, instruct a robot to move to a particular file cabinet, to open a certain drawer, and to pick out a specific recipe. With the recipe in hand, the robot then moves to your kitchen and gives it to a cook to prepare the dish. This example mirrors the API’s task-related organizational system. Through your simple command, the robot locates the right recipe and hands it off to the cook. In the same way, typing in a method call prompts the API to locate the correct implementing code and hand it off to your computer. And importantly, to select the dish that you want for your meal, you do not need to know the recipe’s contents, just as a programmer using an API does not need to learn the implementing code. In both situations, learning the simple command is enough.
I think that’s a great analogy, if I do say so myself.
Google v. Oracle, by analogy
Suppose Joe opens a restaurant. He hires a waiter who is really great at following directions, but speaks no English. Over time, Joe comes up with a way of working with this waiter that’s very precise and detailed. You can ask the waiter for things like “order burger plus cheese plus ketchup no tomato no onion” or “bring check” or “bring water”. However, you have to say things exactly the right way each time. You can’t just say “order cheeseburger” instead of “order burger plus cheese”, or “bring me some water” instead of “bring water”. If you do, the waiter will only say “I don’t understand” and wait for you to say it the right way.
All of this is explained on the menu, and the waiter is otherwise good enough at his job that people are willing to learn the Joe’s Cafe way of ordering their food and asking for the check afterward.
A while later, Gina decides to open a different restaurant across town from Joe’s place. Her food is nothing like Joe’s, she uses different suppliers, her kitchen has a brand new setup she invented herself, and she uses little robot dogs instead of waiters. However, she does a little market research and finds out that a lot of people in her city are use to ordering food the Joe way. To make it easier for her customers, she programs her robot dogs to respond to requests the same way that Joe’s waiter would. Then they’ll be able to order food and enjoy her restaurant without having to learn a whole new system!
Now, at Joe’s, if you say “order burger plus cheese”, the waiter writes this down, carries the order to the kitchen, and hands it to the cook. The cook follows the instructions, hands the food to the waiter, and the waiter takes it back to the table. Gina’s restaurant doesn’t have burgers, but if you tell her robot dog to “order steak plus potato”, it transmits the order via radio to the kitchen where a 3D printer makes it and then sends it to your table via a flying drone.
In other words, you place your order at Gina’s restaurant the same way you would at Joe’s, but almost everything else about the process is completely different because Gina came up with her system from scratch. As it turns out, a few orders do happen to work the same because there are only so many ways to react to “bring water”. That’s natural, though. Gina didn’t copy Joe’s “leave the table, fill a pitcher with water, bring it back to the table, and fill the empty glasses” process; that’s just the way you do it.
This is same as the relationship between Oracle and Google. Oracle bought a company who made a programming language called Java that became popular. When Google was making their Android phones, they wanted to make it easy for developers to write apps and games for it. Since so many people were already familiar with Java, they decided to let developers use it. However, they made their own Java from scratch that looks like Oracle’s Java from a programmer’s point of view but is completely different behind the scenes. As with Joe and Gina, the way you place your order is the same, but that’s where the similarity ends.
Oracle is suing Google because they say it’s unfair that Google allowed their developers to write programs in something that looks like Java, except without it actually being Java, and that Google should pay them for the privilege.
If it’s not reasonable that Gina should have to pay Joe just because her robot dog knows how to respond to “order steak plus potato”, then it’s not reasonable that Google should have to pay Oracle since they didn’t use any of Oracle’s underlying work.
Google is asking the US Supreme Court to declare that they didn’t copy Oracle’s programming code when they created their own work-alike system. For the sake of the US software industry, I hope Google wins.
As a personal note, I don’t like eating at either Joe’s or Gina’s restaurant. The food’s awful in both places. I still don’t think that Gina (or Google) owe Joe (or Oracle) anything.
Search-proof your devices when traveling
Over-eager airport security has recently taken to making travelers unlock their phones and tablets for examination. This is both unforgivably invasive and trivially easy to defeat. Here’s how to protect your data1 on your iPhone or iPad2 when traveling.
Simplest: disable Touch ID
Now you have at least the physical ability to refuse to unlock your device. Be prepared for mental or legal pressure to supply your password, though. File this under “better than nothing”.
If you want to keep your current device
You’re traveling with a device, but one as bare as the day you originally bought it. Be prepared to explain why you’re carrying an empty device.
Keep your device, but less suspicious
Now you have a plausibly used device. When you get to your destination, reset your device again. Restore it from backup. This is more work than the previous instructions, but also less suspicious.
If you’d rather travel bare-handed
This is the most expensive option, but you can’t unlock what you don’t have.
Conclusion
Searching travelers’ devices at airports is security theater. It’s a massive and inconvenient violation of privacy, and only the world’s least prepared criminals would ever get caught this way. I guarantee I’m not the first person to think of backing up a phone and restoring it at my destination. Since it’s ineffective and almost certainly unconstitutional, cooler heads would recommend ending these pointless searches. Don’t wait for that to happen. Protect your data.
Technology IS Politics
It’s not possible for technologists to avoid politics because technology is politics:
None of those are inherently bad, but they do cause changes in the lives and finances of their users. After all, if they didn’t affect people we wouldn’t be doing them.
Technology is politics. It’s logically inconsistent and meaningless to tell an engineer that they’re “too political” or that they should “stick to tech”.