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Monday, April 17, 2017

The Most Important Passages From Apples Challenge to the FBI BusinessWeek

"GovtOS" may make us all part of a police state, and other stark warnings from Apple.

GovtOS. Thats what Apple Inc. calls the newest product in its pipeline. Its not the brainchild of the gadget masters in Cupertino but rather an iPhone operating system conceived by some buttoned-down folks in Washington, D.C. Unlike the latest iPhone or iPad, it wasnt revealed on a stage before thousands of the faithful. Instead, it was unveiled in a stark response to the Obama administrations attempt to force the computer maker to assist in a terrorism probe. And, Apple has warned, it may someday lead to every American being made an unwilling assistant to law enforcement.

In a 65-page federal court filing on Thursday in Riverside, Calif., Apple said making it override the encryption of an iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters was wild overreach. As a legal matter, Apples lawyers swiftly disassembled the governments use of an 18th century law (the All Writs Act) to justify its demand and described in minute detail how forced compliance would play out, both for Apples technicians and whoever else is next.

Although Apple has a growing number of lawyers in this fight, it may have telegraphed its intent to make a First Amendment argument a pillar of the case. Forcing someone to write code is like forcing them to speak, Apple suggested, and thats usually a constitutional no-no. The briefs main author, Ted Boutrous of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP, is one of the nations premier media lawyers. Here are some highlights:

A Broader Threat

"Under the same legal theories advocated by the government here, the government could argue that it should be permitted to force citizens to do all manner of things necessary to assist it in enforcing the laws, like compelling a pharmaceutical company against its will to produce drugs needed to carry out a lethal injection in furtherance of a lawfully issued death warrant, or requiring a journalist to plant a false story in order to help lure out a fugitive, or forcing a software company to insert malicious code in its autoupdate process that makes it easier for the government to conduct court-ordered surveillance. "

A Threat to Privacy on a Global Scale

"This is not a case about one isolated iPhone. Rather, this case is about the Department of Justice and the FBI seeking through the courts a dangerous power that Congress and the American people have withheld: the ability to force companies like Apple to undermine the basic security and privacy interests of hundreds of millions of individuals around the globe."

A Trifecta of Illegality

"No court has ever authorized what the government now seeks, no law supports such unlimited and sweeping use of the judicial process, and the Constitution forbids it."

Christmas for Criminals and Spies

"The government wants to compel Apple to create a crippled and insecure product. Once the process is created, it provides an avenue for criminals and foreign agents to access millions of iPhones. And once developed for our government, it is only a matter of time before foreign governments demand the same tool."

The Internet of Big Brothers Things

"If Apple can be forced to write code in this case to bypass security features and create new accessibility, what is to stop the government from demanding that Apple write code to turn on the microphone in aid of government surveillance, activate the video camera, surreptitiously record conversations, or turn on location services to track the phone?s user? Nothing."

"Compelling Apple to create software in this case will set a dangerous precedent for conscripting Apple and other technology companies to develop technology to do the government?s bidding in untold future criminal investigations."

Forgot to Call Tech Support

"Unfortunately, the FBI, without consulting Apple or reviewing its public guidance regarding iOS, changed the iCloud password associated with one of the attacker?s accounts, foreclosing the possibility of the phone initiating an automatic iCloud back-up of its data to a known Wi-Fi network, which could have obviated the need to unlock the phone and thus for the extraordinary order the government now seeks. Had the FBI consulted Apple first, this litigation may not have been necessary."

Congress Already Said No

"Congress has never authorized judges to compel innocent third parties to provide decryption services to the FBI. Indeed, Congress has expressly withheld that authority in other contexts, and this issue is currently the subject of a raging national policy debate among members of Congress, the President, the FBI Director, and state and local prosecutors. Moreover, federal courts themselves have never recognized an inherent authority to order non-parties to become de facto government agents in ongoing criminal investigations."

We Just Made It, We Dont Own It

"Apple is no more connected to this phone than General Motors is to a company car used by a fraudster on his daily commute."

"Nothing connects Apple to this case such that it can be drafted into government service to write software that permits the government to defeat the security features on Apple?s standard operating system. Apple is a private company that does not own or possess the phone at issue, has no connection to the data that may or may not exist on the phone, and is not related in any way to the events giving rise to the investigation."

Thin End of the Wedge

"The government?s flawed suggestion to delete the program and erase every trace of the activity would not lessen the burden, it would actually increase it since there are hundreds of demands to create and utilize the software waiting in the wings. If Apple creates new software to open a back door, other federal and state prosecutors?and other governments and agencies?will repeatedly seek orders compelling Apple to use the software to open the back door for tens of thousands of iPhones."

"This enormously intrusive burden?building everything up and tearing it down for each demand by law enforcement?lacks any support in the cases relied on by the government, nor do such cases exist."

"The alternative?keeping and maintaining the compromised operating system and everything related to it?imposes a different but no less significant burden, i.e., forcing Apple to take on the task of unfailingly securing against disclosure or misappropriation the development and testing environments, equipment, codebase, documentation, and any other materials relating to the compromised operating system."

It Cannot Be Destroyed

In an affidavit attached to the court filing (formally called "Apple Inc.s Motion to Vacate Order Compelling Apple Inc. to Assist Agents in Search, and Opposition to Governments Motion to Compel Assistance"), Apples manager of user privacy, Erik Neuenschwander, summed up the governments "use and destroy" idea this way: "The virtual world is not like the physical world. When you destroy something in the physical world, the effort to recreate it is roughly equivalent to the effort required to create it in the first place. When you create something in the virtual world, the process of creating an exact and perfect copy is as easy as a computer key stroke because the underlying code is persistent. Even if the underlying computer code is completely eradicated from Apple?s servers so as to be irretrievable, the person who created the destroyed code would have spent the time and effort to solve the software design, coding and implementation challenges. This process could be replicated.

Thus, GovtOS would not be truly destroyed."

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Test your Hard drive for errors and problems before you lose your important files

Hard Drive Testing Tools

Your hard drive is the most important hardware in your computer, it keeps all of your files, Pictures,documents,Music, Movies and everything on your computer so it is a wise decision to keep checking your Hard drive before it fails.There are multiple hard drive testing software available in the market but few of them are reliable and famous.
Some of these tools may be built in to your operating systems already while others are available from hard drive manufacturers that you can download from their website.

Some of the computer manufacturers ship your computer with this Hardware diagnostic tools or hard drive diagnostic tool preinstalled which you can use to test the hard drive.Some of the computers have a built in S.M.A.R.T ( Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology often written as SMART) test which test the functionality and reliability of Hard Drive.It detects and report on various indicators of reliability, in the hope of anticipating failures.

Replace your hard drive if it fails any of your tests.

Pic-21(a)

Windows operating system has its own Error checking tool that you can use to check any errors on hard drive and fix it if fixable.To run windows hard drive error checking tool go to my computer and right click on any of the drive and select properties.It will open drive properties window, Click on Tools tab, then Click on Check Now under Error Checking as shown below.

Pic-21 (b)

It will open another small window as shown in the Picture 21 (c) below so make sure the option " Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors " is checked and then click on the start button to run the scan.

Pic-21(c)

It will start the scan for hard drive and will show you messages as shown below.

Pic-21(d)

Once all the scan is completed it will show you the result or a message that No problems were found as shown in the picture -21(e) below.

Pic-21(e)

Now there is one third party free ware utility that you can use to test your hard drive.

HDDScan - Its a free hard drive testing program for all types of drives ( RAID arrays, Flash USB and SSD drives are also supported ), no matter who the manufacturer is.
It has several tools included such as SMART and a surface test.It can test storage device for errors (Bad-blocks and bad sectors), show S.M.A.R.T. attributes and change some HDD parameters such as AAM, APM, etc.
Additionally, software can be used as the hard disk temperature monitor and reading/writing benchmark ? performance graph is displayed for every test.

You can download HDDScan from the download section on this blog or download from the following link.

Download HDDScan

Available link for download

The Most Important Apple Executive Youƒ??ve Never Heard Of BusinessWeek

A visit with Cupertino?s chief chipmaker, Johny Srouji.

A little over a year ago, Apple had a problem: The iPad Pro was behind schedule. Elements of the hardware, software, and accompanying stylus weren?t going to be ready for a release in the spring. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook and his top lieutenants had to delay the unveiling until the fall. That gave most of Apple?s engineers more time. It gave a little-known executive named Johny Srouji much less.

Srouji is the senior vice president for hardware technologies at Apple. He runs the division that makes processor chips, the silicon brains inside the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV. The original plan was to introduce the iPad Pro with Apple?s tablet chip, the A8X, the same processor that powered the iPad Air 2, introduced in 2014. But delaying until fall meant that the Pro would make its debut alongside the iPhone 6s, which was going to use a newer, faster phone chip called the A9.

This is the stuff that keeps technology executives up at night. The iPad Pro was important: It was Apple?s attempt to sell tablets to business customers. And it would look feeble next to the iPhone 6s. So Srouji put his engineers on a crash program to move up the rollout of a new tablet processor, the A9X, by half a year. The engineers finished in time, and the Pro hit the market with the faster chip and a 12.9-inch display packed with 5.6 million pixels.

Srouji was nicely rewarded for his efforts. In December he became the newest member of Cook?s management team and received about 90,000 additional shares of Apple stock, which vest over a four-year period.

He also stepped into the kind of spotlight he?s avoided since joining Apple in 2008. Srouji runs what is probably the most important and least understood division inside the world?s most profitable company. Since 2010, when his team produced the A4 chip for the original iPad, Apple has immersed itself in the costly and complex science of silicon. It develops specialized microprocessors as a way to distinguish its products from the competition. The Apple-designed circuits allow the company to customize products to perfectly match the features of its software, while tightly controlling the critical trade-off between speed and battery consumption. Among the components on its chip (technically called a ?system on a chip,? or SOC) are an image signal processor and a storage controller, which let Apple tailor useful functions for taking and storing photos, such as the rapid-fire ?burst mode? introduced with the iPhone 5s. Engineers and designers can work on features like that years in advance without prematurely notifying vendors?especially Samsung, which manufactures many of Apple?s chips.

At the center of all this is Srouji, 51, an Israeli who joined Apple after jobs at Intel and IBM. He?s compact, he?s intense, and he speaks Arabic, Hebrew, and French. His English is lightly accented and, when the subject has anything to do with Apple, nonspecific bordering on koanlike. ?Hard is good. Easy is a waste of time,? he says when asked about increasingly thin iPhone designs. ?The chip architects at Apple are artists, the engineers are wizards,? he answers another question. He?ll elaborate a bit when the topic is general. ?When designers say, ?This is hard,??? he says, ?my rule of thumb is if it?s not gated by physics, that means it?s hard but doable.?

Srouji recently spent several hours with Bloomberg Businessweek over several days and guided a tour of Apple chip facilities in Cupertino, Calif., and Herzliya, Israel. This was, no doubt, strategic. Investors have battered Apple stock over the past year, sending it down more than 25 percent. Most people are already pretty satisfied with their phones, the criticism goes, and aren?t compelled to spend an additional few hundred bucks on an upgrade. (In March, Apple intends to announce an updated iPad and smaller-screen iPhone featuring the latest A9x and A9 chips, according to a person familiar with the plans, who wasn?t authorized to comment publicly.)

Apple?s usual response is to point to Jony Ive and his team of fastidiously cool, Wallabee-shod industrial designers, or to highlight elegantly tooled aluminum or an app or some new feature or gadget. There?s always something new to show off. But none of that has ever explained anything about a crucial part of Apple?s profit machine: its chips.

?I think it?s too good of a story not to be told at this stage,? Srouji says. ?Hopefully, we won?t reveal too much.?

This is the stuff that keeps technology executives up at night. The iPad Pro was important: It was Apple?s attempt to sell tablets to business customers. And it would look feeble next to theiPhone 6s. So Srouji put his engineers on a crash program to move up the rollout of a new tablet processor, the A9X, by half a year. The engineers finished in time, and the Pro hit the market with the faster chip and a 12.9-inch display packed with 5.6 million pixels.

Srouji was nicely rewarded for his efforts. In December he became the newest member ofCook?s management team and received about 90,000 additional shares of Apple stock, which vest over a four-year period.

?I think it?s too good of a story not to be told at this stage,? Srouji says. ?Hopefully, we won?t reveal too much.?

In Israel, Srouji (second from left) and Cook (right) with Apple employees.

When the original iPhone came out in 2007, Steve Jobs was well aware of its flaws. It had no front camera, measly battery life, and a slow 2G connection from AT&T. It was also underpowered. A former Apple engineer who worked on the device said that while the handset was a breakthrough technology, it was limited because it pieced together components from different vendors, including elements from a Samsung chip used in DVD players. ?Steve came to the conclusion that the only way for Apple to really differentiate and deliver something truly unique and truly great, you have to own your own silicon,? Srouji says. ?You have to control and own it.?

One of Jobs?s trusted advisers, Bob Mansfield, Apple?s top hardware executive at the time, recruited Srouji to lead that effort. Srouji, then at IBM, was a rising star in the arcane world of semiconductor engineering. Mansfield promised him an opportunity to build something from scratch.

The decision to design semiconductors was risky. About the size of a small postage stamp, the microprocessor is the most important component of any computing device. It does the work that makes playing games, posting to Facebook, sending texts, and taking pictures seem easy. Small currents of energy move from the battery through hundreds of millions of tiny transistors, triggering commands and responses in nanoseconds. It?s like an intricate city design that fits on the tip of your finger. When the chip isn?t doing its job efficiently, the device feels sluggish, crashes, or makes users want to throw it against a wall.

If there?s a bug in software, you simply release a corrected version. It?s different with hardware. ?You get one transistor wrong, it?s done, game over,? Srouji says. ?Each one of those transistors has to work. Silicon is very unforgiving.? Among computer and smartphone makers, industry practice is to leave the processors to specialists such as Intel, Qualcomm, or Samsung, which sink billions into getting the chips right and making them inexpensively. (Apple used to co-design processors for the Macintosh, but Jobs abandoned the work in 2005 in favor of more powerful models from Intel, whose chips still power all Macs.)

When Srouji joined Apple, the company had a group of about 40 engineers working on integrating chips from various vendors into the iPhone. That grew by about 150 people in April 2008, after Apple acquired a Silicon Valley chip startup called P.A. Semi, which had a power-efficient semiconductor design. Srouji?s team found itself interacting regularly with other departments, from software programmers, who wanted chip support for new features, to Ive?s industrial designers, who wanted help making the phones flatter and sleeker. An engineer who sat in on Srouji?s meetings remembers senior managers preparing extensively for presentations, because his support was critical for getting new features approved. He was known for peppering engineers with technically sophisticated questions, particularly about contingency options if something didn?t work out as planned. He?d ask, for example, if a different form of plastic could be used that wouldn?t interfere with another component.

?The only way for Apple to really differentiate and deliver something truly unique and truly great, you have to own your own silicon?

The first public signs of Srouji?s work came in 2010 with the debut of the iPad and iPhone 4. The processor, the A4, was a modified version of a design from ARM Holdings, a British company that licenses mobile technology. The A4 was designed to power the handset?s new high-definition ?retina display.? Srouji says it was a race to get that first system-on-a-chip produced. ?The airplane was taking off, and I was building the runway just in time,? he says.

Over the next few years, Apple kept making improvements to its designs, introducing chips to accommodate fingerprint identification, video calling, and Siri, the iPhone?s voice-activated assistant, among other enhancements. When the companies using Google?s Android operating system started making tablets, they mostly used conventional mobile phone processors. Starting with the third-generation iPad in 2012, Srouji?s team designed specific chips (the A5x and A6x) to give the tablet the same pixel-packing high-definition screens as the iPhone.

These mysterious semiconductors coming from Apple were the curiosity of the tech industry, but it wasn?t until the release of the iPhone 5s in 2013 that rivals really started to pay attention. The phone featured the A7 processor, the first smartphone chip with 64 bits?double the 32-bit standard at the time. The new technology allowed for entirely new features, such as Apple Pay and the Touch ID fingerprint scanner. Developers had to rewrite applications to account for the new standard, but it gave way to smoother maps, cooler video games, and generally more responsive apps that don?t hog as much memory. (Apple?s control over hardware and software is also useful for encrypting everything on the device, a capability that has landed the company in a controversy: On Feb. 16, a judge ruled that Apple must help the FBI unlock an iPhone owned by one of the San Bernardino shooters. Apple is fighting the order, saying it would set a precedent that would undermine the privacy of all its customers.)

Qualcomm, then as now the biggest designer of phone chips, made the expensive decision to scrap development of its 32-bit chips and put all its resources into catching up. Handset companies all ?wanted the shiny new thing,? says Ryan Smith, the editor-in-chief of AnandTech, a website that publishes exhaustive reviews of semiconductor designs. ?The A7 really turned the world upside down.?

Srouji can?t restrain a smile when recalling competitors? reactions to Apple?s 64-bit surprise. ?When we pick something,? he says, ?it?s because we think there?s a problem that nobody can do, or there is some idea that?s so unique and differentiating that the best way to do it is you have to do it yourself.?

Chip-durability testing at an unmarked Apple lab in Cupertino.

Srouji was born in Haifa, a port city in northern Israel. He was the third child of four. His family was Christian Arab, a minority within a minority in the Jewish state. ?Haifa is one of the most integrated cities in Israel,? he says. ?You have Christians, you have Muslims, Jews, Bah ?¡s, you have any religion you want, and everyone lives together in peaceful harmony. Integration worked for me.?

Srouji?s father owned a metal pattern-making business outside the city, and from age 10, Srouji spent weekends and summers helping him pattern wooden moldings that were used to make engine parts, medical equipment, and other machinery. His father had an unusual philosophy: He would undercharge customers for complicated work while overcharging for easier jobs. ?If there was a very complex thing that he?d never done, he wanted to do it,? Srouji says.

His father, who died in 2000, constantly reminded him not to get comfortable in the family business. Education was more important. In high school, Srouji got perfect grades in math, physics, chemistry, and science. He was introduced to computers by an instructor who also taught at the nearby Technion Israel Institute of Technology, one of the world?s top engineering schools. ?I fell in love,? Srouji says.

He enrolled at the Technion, spent late nights in the computer lab drafting out code in pencil, and earned undergraduate and master?s degrees in computer science. His master?s thesis was on new techniques for testing software and hardware systems. ?At the time it was very progressive,? says Orna Berry, general manager of the EMC Center of Excellence in Israel and corporate vice president of innovation, who met Srouji at the Technion. ?I?m not surprised he is where he is.?

After graduating, Srouji got a job with IBM, which had placed its largest non-U.S. research facility in Haifa, the better to attract the big brains coming out of the Technion and other Israeli universities. He researched distributed systems, an emerging field in which computers in different locations are networked together to complete computationally intensive assignments. Ensuring the machines communicated correctly required skill building hardware and writing software algorithms.

?Sometimes I wondered?when he got an assignment and within a day it was complete and perfect?if he was brilliant or just didn?t sleep at night,? says Srouji?s first boss, Oded Cohn, vice president and lab director for IBM Haifa Research. ?In some cases, the conclusion was both.?

Although Israel grapples with Jewish-Arab tensions all the time, none of it mattered in Srouji?s world. Cohn, who remains friends with him, says their different backgrounds never came up. ?Technical people treat technical people based on personality and technical ability,? he says. ?You don?t think about it. You just work together. The rest goes away.?

In 1993, Srouji left IBM for Intel, where he created techniques for running simulations that test the strength of semiconductor designs. During a visit to the U.S. in 1999, he used a 20-minute car ride with a manager, fellow Israeli Uri Weiser, to lobby for a three-year stint at Intel?s research hub in Austin. Assuming Srouji was also Jewish, Weiser invited him to an Israeli Memorial Day celebration at a synagogue in Texas.

?He looked at me and said, ?I?m a Christian Arab,??? recalls Weiser, who gave Srouji the Texas assignment. ?I said, ?Well, come and join and learn about your environment,? and he said OK. He was there sitting with a kippah in the synagogue and following everything.?

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Download Click

Monday, April 17, 2017

The Most Important Passages From Apples Challenge to the FBI BusinessWeek

The Most Important Passages From Apples Challenge to the FBI BusinessWeek

Wednesday, February 1, 2017

Test your Hard drive for errors and problems before you lose your important files

Test your Hard drive for errors and problems before you lose your important files

Saturday, January 21, 2017

The Most Important Apple Executive Youƒ??ve Never Heard Of BusinessWeek

The Most Important Apple Executive Youƒ??ve Never Heard Of BusinessWeek