Apple says ‘screw you’ to Europe’s largest hacker conference

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The Chaos Computer Club, Europe’s largest collective of hackers, claims that Apple rejected the group’s streaming video app — which would allow users to watch talks from its Chaos Communications Congress event.

Why? Because members of the conference had previously hacked iOS, and Apple doesn’t want to help spread the hacking word.

The Congress event has run for 31 years, and regularly attracts more upwards of 10,000 delegates. In its rejection, Apple cited the following clause in its guidelines:

“You will not, through use of the Apple Software, Apple-issued certificates, services or otherwise, create any Covered Product or other code or program that would disable, hack or otherwise interfere with the Security Solution, or any security, digital signing, digital rights management, verification or authentication mechanisms implemented in or by iOS, the Apple Software, or any services, or other Apple software or technology, or enable others to do so.”

Apple also reportedly objected to eight scheduled talks including “Hardware Attacks: Hacking chips on the (very) cheap,” “Bluetooth Hacking – The State of the Art,” “Hacking Medical Devices,” “Game Hacking & Reverse Engineering,” “Crypto-hacking Export Restrictions,” “Jailbreak: an introduction,” “Social engineering and industrial espionage,” and “$ kernel-> Infect (): Creating a crypto virus Symfony2 for apps.”

Apple has something of a love-hate relationship with hackers. Company co-founder Steve Wozniak identified very strongly with the nascent “white hat” hacker community, although the ethos seemed at odds with Steve Jobs’ controlling view of the Apple ecosystem.

In recent years, Apple has played a game of cat-and-mouse with the jailbreak community — often even (somewhat mockingly) publicly acknowledging jailbreakers when fixing vulnerabilities in versions of iOS.

Personally, I don’t have too much of an issue with Apple banning this particular app. People will take issue at the company’s supposedly draconian measures, but at least in this case it cited a specific objection rather than simply making a purely subjective dismissal.

And, hey, the conference live streams are available on both the Chaos Computer Club’s official website and YouTube — both of which are accessible using your Apple device!

Source: The Register

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