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posted by janrinok on Sunday February 11 2018, @03:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the so-I-guess-he-will-never-work-there dept.

A former Apple intern has been blamed for a leak of iOS source code. The intern reportedly distributed it to five friends in the iOS jailbreaking community, and the code eventually spread out of this group:

Earlier this week, a portion of iOS source code was posted online to GitHub, and in an interesting twist, a new report from Motherboard reveals that the code was originally leaked by a former Apple intern.

According to Motherboard, the intern who stole the code took it and distributed it to a small group of five friends in the iOS jailbreaking community in order to help them with their ongoing efforts to circumvent Apple's locked down mobile operating system. The former employee apparently took "all sorts of Apple internal tools and whatnot," according to one of the individuals who had originally received the code, including additional source code that was apparently not included in the initial leak.

The DMCA notice GitHub received from Apple that resulted in the takedown of the ZioShiba/iBoot repository.

Related:
Leak of iBoot Code to GitHub Could Potentially Help iPhone Jailbreakers.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by requerdanos on Monday February 12 2018, @03:11AM (2 children)

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 12 2018, @03:11AM (#636553) Journal

    "Taking a copy of the software he did not own is theft."

    But he did own that copy. He made it himself.

    Yes, he made it himself, but we don't know for sure that he used his own media to do so... Let's for a moment imagine that when the staffer allegedly copied something that apple had some rights to under patent, trademark, and/or coypright law, that that staffer used a usb stick that they found there in the office, and took it--stole it--from the office, as the medium to hold that copied material.

    Even if that were the case--and I see no evidence supporting it--here is the reason that we do not focus on the hypothetical stealing of a usb stick, but rather the unauthorized copying of the apple code.

    The USB stick probably cost about $50. (it's a $5 usb stick, but this is apple, so $50.) That makes the theft a misdemeanor, and frankly, one likely to fall through the cracks of selective enforcement.

    The rights to the apple program code, on the other hand, have a value more than the average person's net worth. It is arguably more wrong to violate those rights to the tune of incalculable value, than to violate the property rights by fifty bucks.

    The stealing of the relatively worthless usb stick, even if it happened, is inconsequential in comparison to the unauthorized copying of the valuable program code.

    Here is the payoff, for the "It's totally stealing" people: Now, the reason you were able to follow the previous sentence is that "stealing" means one thing and "unauthorized copying" means something else, and you know it, and were able to keep up with which is which. If they were synonyms (and they still aren't), you would not have been able to parse any sense out of it.

    A possible source of your confusion is that many news outlets see charges filed against people in the fields of trademark law, patent law, or copyright law, which are dense, complex fields, and they hear "blah blah blah" because they believe (perhaps rightly) that the intricacies of these laws are over the head of the average reader/listener/viewer--so they "dumb down" the situation by making a comparison to something that the less-intelligent can probably understand (stealing). Until today, I thought that this was pretentious nonsense, but now I understand that it's over the heads of a lot more people--even here on this site--than I would have imagined. I have been giving some of you people more credit than you are due, it seems.

    I hope this helps (but seriously have my doubts).

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  • (Score: 2) by EETech1 on Monday February 12 2018, @07:44AM (1 child)

    by EETech1 (957) on Monday February 12 2018, @07:44AM (#636600)

    In their opening argument, lawyers for Waymo claimed that Uber stole the trade secrets because it was worried that it was going to get beaten in the race to develop self-driving cars

    • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday February 12 2018, @04:06PM

      by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 12 2018, @04:06PM (#636719) Journal

      lawyers for Waymo claimed that Uber stole the trade secrets

      In a civil suit, lawyers can and do claim just about anything, but no one was criminally charged with a crime involving stealing.