November 17, 2009 at 12:52Apple pie
This article was published in the journal Computerra at No. 31. The author of the article is Bird Kiwi. I thought the article was interesting and decided to post it completely.
Link to magazine No. 31 - the article is located on page 29.
To love sausages and laws, says a long aphorism, one should not delve into the details of their manufacture. Apple products, which have gained phenomenal popularity around the world, are equally far from both sausages and lawmaking. But if everything that this famous corporation does is called an "apple pie" and looks where it is baked, there will be no doubt about the validity of the aforementioned aphorism.
Apple, in general, has always been two-faced. One face - extremely bright and pleasant, for some time almost glamorous - has always turned to consumers, and the other - secretive, suspicious, tough and demanding - to suppliers and competitors in business. Knowing full well that only one of the two faces looks attractive, the second corporation has always tried to hide under the mask. Now this mask has ceased to hold and has begun to slide more and more noticeably.
The audience, willingly buying computers and gadgets of their favorite brand, as a rule, sees Apple in the image of a very competently managed company. Here, they are always extremely attentive to the aspirations of consumers, which is demonstrated wherever possible - from legendary user-friendly system interfaces to legions of well-trained personnel in retail networks and support services. Suppliers know Apple as a very demanding customer, unyielding in negotiations, insisting on total secrecy in all transactions and absolutely not prone to generosity if things suddenly went wrong.
Such an Apple has always been, especially in those days when the company was run by Steve Jobs. Now, however, with the advent of the iPhone App Store, a service of third-party software applications, the picture has changed markedly. This service has radically expanded the range of Apple suppliers, including an army of independent software developers (as of August of this year, their number has already exceeded 17 thousand). All these people were and, as a rule, still remain loyal fans of the Apple platform. However, as suppliers, they had the opportunity to immediately encounter another, much less pleasant mask of the corporation. And therefore, quite naturally, the Internet and the press have become much more critical reviews about how things are going in the famous company.
On the forums devoted to applications for iPhones, flicker stories about how Apple behaves arrogantly and harshly towards developers, never stooping to any explanations and simply removing their programs from the iPhone App Store as “ unsuitable. " This attitude of the company to its own fans was a complete surprise for many. For many, but not for those independent bloggers who regularly write about Apple affairs, and especially rumors about its upcoming new products. This category of fans was one of the first to encounter Apple's paranoid secrecy, especially when it came to protecting secrets about new products.
There are not many companies in the world that are just as vengeful to those who dare to violate established rules for the strictest control of information. Employees are fired from Apple for divulging even insignificant information about their work, and the company itself is famous for distributing deliberate misinformation among its own staff regarding plans for new products. People who had the opportunity to work in different companies unanimously say that they have never encountered such exorbitant concern about privacy issues.
According to a former employee of the company, published in the New York Times, Apple personnel working on top-secret projects should go through the labyrinth of security gateways every day, each time presenting electronic badge badges and entering a numerical code, to get into your workroom. As a rule, workplaces are under constant video surveillance. Those employees who work in the most critical areas, such as testing end products, are required to cover the devices under test with black blankets. If the device is removed from under the protective canopy, the employee must turn on a special red light to warn everyone else that vigilance should be increased.
With such a harsh regime of secrecy, people working at Apple are often surprised by the company's innovations no less than everyone else. For example, says Edward Eigerman, who worked for Apple for four years as a systems engineer, his stay here coincided with the development and launch of iPods, but he had no idea what kind of product was being created within the walls of the company. In 2005, Eigerman was fired when he was implicated in the “incident” for some side - one of his colleagues, who is called by pull, introduced the
business client to the possibilities of a new, not yet announced program.
According to Eigerman, Apple regularly conducts measures to identify and dismiss employees who allow information leakage. Another former employee, who wanted to remain anonymous, says that Apple’s chief vice president of marketing, Philip Schiller, has hosted internal meetings on new products more than once and informed his colleagues of knowingly false pricing or product features. After that, the press searched for news that coincided with the "deso", and the hunt began for the owners of too long a language.
Often, Apple launched misinformation directly through reporters or analysts at consulting companies. According to Gene Munster, Apple’s long-time analyst with Piper Jaffray, one of the corporation’s chief directors told him four years ago that Apple had no interest in developing a cheap iPod without a display. Soon, however, the stores were flooded with just such a product - iPod Shuffle.
Five years ago, Apple's obsession with secrets reached its climax - the corporation intended through the court to ban discussion of its upcoming products on the Internet. The company's lawyers started a lawsuit with several bloggers regularly covering Apple’s internal affairs and tried to prove that they violate trade secret laws and do not have the right to freedom of speech guaranteed by the constitution. The California Court of Appeal, however, sided with the bloggers, so the company, who had completely lost the case, was forced to pay $ 700,000 in legal costs. However, Apple managed to cover up some well-informed blogs (in particular, Think Secret), but not through court, but through behind-the-scenes negotiations and, of course, a solid dollar injection.
No matter how strict the rules of “secrecy secrecy” were at Apple, but even in comparison with them, the measures that were taken in 2009 to conceal information about the state of health of the co-founder and CEO of the company Steve Jobs were unprecedented. Since the fact of considerable health problems in such a well-known and constantly visible person is almost impossible to hide, and Apple stubbornly declined to honestly discuss this topic, a parallel was born in the press with the Kremlin itself during the decline of the Soviet empire - when a series of weak people tried to rule the country elders, and their health was considered one of the most important state secrets.
Against the background of the company's traditional secrecy, this parallel looks especially expressive, since Apple’s PR style - communicating with the public and the press exclusively through official press releases - is now beginning to be compared with the once-famous style of the newspaper Pravda, the main ideological speaker of the CPSU Central Committee. Now that the key details of the whole story with the illness of Apple’s leader are already known, the general outline of events looks like this. Having taken a six-month vacation in early January, supposedly to correct “hormonal imbalance,” Steve Jobs underwent an extensive course of treatment, first in connection with pancreatic cancer, and then with a liver transplant. The liver transplant operation was performed by Jobs in late April or early May, but this became known only at the end of June.
Despite the keen interest of news services and investors in the state of Jobs' health, Apple officials resolutely refused to discuss this issue, amicably repeating that the head of the company would return to his duties at the end of June.
Now that Jobs is back at the helm, one of the most heatedly debated topics among corporate governance experts is whether Apple’s actions violate the laws that dictate the amount of information that companies must disclose to the public regarding the health of their senior management. Some claim that Apple was not required to report a Jobs liver transplant, since he was on official vacation and transferred responsibility for the company's daily affairs to another director. Other experts are convinced that, given liver transplantation, Apple's official statement from January of this year - as if Mr. Jobs was only worried about hormonal imbalance - looks like a frank and deliberate lie.
However, we have to admit that to this day no one has reliable details about the medical side of this story.
However, in this immense topic “Apple, Health and PR Issues” there is another, much more alarming aspect. For with almost the same zeal that was shown in protecting secrets about Jobs’s illnesses, the corporation is trying to hide any information about the health damage that Apple products cause to consumers. To date, in particular, it is known that there are at least several dozen people who have received sensitive burns from defective batteries in iPods (see “A Very Hot Topic”). However, no one knows the exact numbers, because the company carefully hides them, and with each of the victims concludes a personal agreement “on non-disclosure” of the details of the incident - as a necessary condition for receiving compensation from the company.
Obviously, not the most successful approach that has long been established at Apple — to solve all security problems using “ideological” PR methods — extends to such technical areas as computer security or information protection.
Specialists in this field have long known that things are not important with protecting Apple computers and gadgets from hacking, information theft and other abuse-compromises. However, reputable experts do not like to talk about it publicly, preferring to keep silent as they say. The reason here is understandable and lies in the fact that Apple’s usual response to the publication of some new-found hole is to quietly set a group of faithful Mac fans on the author who unanimously go over to the researcher’s identity, interfere with people with dirt and hawk at all Internet intersections so that he then has to leave for a long time away from these essentially empty, but emotionally painful attacks.
However, along with a noticeable increase in Apple’s computer market share, there are more critically minded people and security professionals among Mac users. For this reason, at least in part, the traditional methods of PR attacks are becoming less and less effective. A good illustration of this is popular hacking conferences like Black Hat in the USA or CanSecWest in Canada, where the openly weak protection of Apple machines is increasingly being discussed.
Over the past ten years, these kinds of hacker forums have been a real curse for Microsoft. Moreover, to a large extent, it was the criticism from the stands of these conferences that finally made the Redmond team seriously tackle security problems in Windows programs. Now the focus is shifting to the Mac platform, and there is good reason to believe that Apple products today are no more secure than Microsoft programs once.
Worse, as Apple acts as a provider of an increasingly popular hardware and software platform, and not just software, from a security point of view, this company occupies a unique place in the market. For example, at the last Black Hat it was shown that a regular Apple computer keyboard equipped with its own “brains” in the form of a controller and flash memory can be used as an undetectable keylogger - an interceptor of keystrokes to steal passwords and other confidential information. Or another example - it was demonstrated that iPhone phones can be used to disable mobile networks.
The trouble with Apple is not so much in the many security holes in its products, but in relation to the disclosure of vulnerabilities. And what to expect from a company focused primarily on marketing. However, one cannot say that Apple does not patch its systems - of course, it does it, like all other market participants. But Apple still believes that it’s much better for themselves to never talk about the shortcomings identified in their products.
Whenever disputants try to find at least some consensus when discussing the Apple phenomenon, there is something like this look at the secrets of the "apple pie": it seems that excessive secrecy, which certainly adds a charm of surprise to every Apple announcement of new products, does not serve the company so much same good in all other areas.
In many cases, transparency of the corporation is much more important - and the more information it gives to the public and the market, the better for everyone. Therefore, it is very strange that a company that sincerely considers itself a leader in innovation, at the same time appears before us buttoned up.
One of the functions of the new iPhone
3GS telephones is hardware data encryption, which seems to give consumers the impression that the valuable information stored in the device’s memory is now less at risk than in previous models. However, a well-known security expert demonstrated that simple hacker tools make it possible to get to this data as easily as in devices without encryption.
The problem here is even wider, because Apple tried to strengthen security measures in the new iPhones in two ways. The first is encrypted data archiving, available on any phone with iPhone OS 3.0 software and iTunes 8.2 or later. The second is the very hardware encryption available only for the iPhone 3GS series. With a superficial acquaintance, all this looks pretty solid, but iPhone expert Jonathan Zdziarski, who teaches forensics a special course on accessing data on Apple gadgets, has publicly shown how easy this imaginary protection costs.
There is no doubt that the new encryption tools will scare away only random curious people. However, serious attackers, armed with unlock and jailbreak programs like purplera1n or redsn0w (which can easily be found on the Web), can easily remove protection and gain access to all data on the phone. In a video posted on the Internet, Zdzyarski demonstrates how quickly this can be done not only for the encrypted archive of iPhones, but also for current iPhone 3GS data protected by hardware encryption.
A special piquancy of the trick is that the expert does not even need to bother with decryption. Zdzyarski shows that he can access the iPhone file system in the same way as in any other UNIX-based operating system (Zdzdarski uses original software, but the same result can be achieved using jailbreak tools). After that, the OS readily launches hardware decryption of the data and provides it to the user: "The kernel decrypts the data for you when you simply request files, so that an already decrypted copy is automatically issued in response to the call." The only advantage that encryption implemented in this way provides is that now you can remotely erase all data much faster in case of loss of the device, since only a command to destroy the crypto key is enough. But even this advantage becomes useless if the iPhone thief guesses to remove the SIM card. As an option to remotely erase data,
and the “Find my iPhone” function without a SIM card just doesn’t work. Unlike data access.
Amy Clancy, a reporter for Seattle-based KIRO7 Broadcasting Company, spent more than six months getting CPSC, the U.S. Federal Consumer Product Safety Commission, filed an Apple iPod flash case. Apple’s lawyers managed to block the journalist’s requests several times, but as a result, they managed to open up eight hundred pages of “compromising information” to the general public for the first time.
A journalistic investigation began last November when a radio listener named Jamie Balderas contacted reporters for a chest burn from an iPod Shuffle player strapped to his shirt. At first, Balderas tried to find out from Apple how often this happens, but a company representative assured her that this was an isolated case. When she asked whether it was possible to get documents from the company about such incidents and what had been done to prevent them, Apple said that Balderas would not get access to such materials.
The secrecy of the company is easy to understand, since information about the real picture with spontaneous combustion of players may well become a reason for recalling from the market the most popular products released in hundreds of millions of copies, which will result in enormous losses. Moreover, the documents that Amy Clancy obtained in the federal control authorities indicate that, in principle, product recall is quite possible. One of the reasons the CPSC did not apply any sanctions to Apple and did not insist on recalling defective products was because "the current generation of iPods uses [other] batteries that did not demonstrate the problems that the old batteries had."
Journalists have not yet been able to figure out exactly when the use of the "current generation" of batteries has begun. However, now more evidence is emerging, including direct lawsuits against Apple, according to which even the brand new iPod Touch ignites and explodes, that is, one of the latest models of the player.
Link to magazine No. 31 - the article is located on page 29.
To love sausages and laws, says a long aphorism, one should not delve into the details of their manufacture. Apple products, which have gained phenomenal popularity around the world, are equally far from both sausages and lawmaking. But if everything that this famous corporation does is called an "apple pie" and looks where it is baked, there will be no doubt about the validity of the aforementioned aphorism.
Apple, in general, has always been two-faced. One face - extremely bright and pleasant, for some time almost glamorous - has always turned to consumers, and the other - secretive, suspicious, tough and demanding - to suppliers and competitors in business. Knowing full well that only one of the two faces looks attractive, the second corporation has always tried to hide under the mask. Now this mask has ceased to hold and has begun to slide more and more noticeably.
The audience, willingly buying computers and gadgets of their favorite brand, as a rule, sees Apple in the image of a very competently managed company. Here, they are always extremely attentive to the aspirations of consumers, which is demonstrated wherever possible - from legendary user-friendly system interfaces to legions of well-trained personnel in retail networks and support services. Suppliers know Apple as a very demanding customer, unyielding in negotiations, insisting on total secrecy in all transactions and absolutely not prone to generosity if things suddenly went wrong.
Such an Apple has always been, especially in those days when the company was run by Steve Jobs. Now, however, with the advent of the iPhone App Store, a service of third-party software applications, the picture has changed markedly. This service has radically expanded the range of Apple suppliers, including an army of independent software developers (as of August of this year, their number has already exceeded 17 thousand). All these people were and, as a rule, still remain loyal fans of the Apple platform. However, as suppliers, they had the opportunity to immediately encounter another, much less pleasant mask of the corporation. And therefore, quite naturally, the Internet and the press have become much more critical reviews about how things are going in the famous company.
It looks like a special service
On the forums devoted to applications for iPhones, flicker stories about how Apple behaves arrogantly and harshly towards developers, never stooping to any explanations and simply removing their programs from the iPhone App Store as “ unsuitable. " This attitude of the company to its own fans was a complete surprise for many. For many, but not for those independent bloggers who regularly write about Apple affairs, and especially rumors about its upcoming new products. This category of fans was one of the first to encounter Apple's paranoid secrecy, especially when it came to protecting secrets about new products.
There are not many companies in the world that are just as vengeful to those who dare to violate established rules for the strictest control of information. Employees are fired from Apple for divulging even insignificant information about their work, and the company itself is famous for distributing deliberate misinformation among its own staff regarding plans for new products. People who had the opportunity to work in different companies unanimously say that they have never encountered such exorbitant concern about privacy issues.
According to a former employee of the company, published in the New York Times, Apple personnel working on top-secret projects should go through the labyrinth of security gateways every day, each time presenting electronic badge badges and entering a numerical code, to get into your workroom. As a rule, workplaces are under constant video surveillance. Those employees who work in the most critical areas, such as testing end products, are required to cover the devices under test with black blankets. If the device is removed from under the protective canopy, the employee must turn on a special red light to warn everyone else that vigilance should be increased.
With such a harsh regime of secrecy, people working at Apple are often surprised by the company's innovations no less than everyone else. For example, says Edward Eigerman, who worked for Apple for four years as a systems engineer, his stay here coincided with the development and launch of iPods, but he had no idea what kind of product was being created within the walls of the company. In 2005, Eigerman was fired when he was implicated in the “incident” for some side - one of his colleagues, who is called by pull, introduced the
business client to the possibilities of a new, not yet announced program.
According to Eigerman, Apple regularly conducts measures to identify and dismiss employees who allow information leakage. Another former employee, who wanted to remain anonymous, says that Apple’s chief vice president of marketing, Philip Schiller, has hosted internal meetings on new products more than once and informed his colleagues of knowingly false pricing or product features. After that, the press searched for news that coincided with the "deso", and the hunt began for the owners of too long a language.
Often, Apple launched misinformation directly through reporters or analysts at consulting companies. According to Gene Munster, Apple’s long-time analyst with Piper Jaffray, one of the corporation’s chief directors told him four years ago that Apple had no interest in developing a cheap iPod without a display. Soon, however, the stores were flooded with just such a product - iPod Shuffle.
Five years ago, Apple's obsession with secrets reached its climax - the corporation intended through the court to ban discussion of its upcoming products on the Internet. The company's lawyers started a lawsuit with several bloggers regularly covering Apple’s internal affairs and tried to prove that they violate trade secret laws and do not have the right to freedom of speech guaranteed by the constitution. The California Court of Appeal, however, sided with the bloggers, so the company, who had completely lost the case, was forced to pay $ 700,000 in legal costs. However, Apple managed to cover up some well-informed blogs (in particular, Think Secret), but not through court, but through behind-the-scenes negotiations and, of course, a solid dollar injection.
Kremlin style
No matter how strict the rules of “secrecy secrecy” were at Apple, but even in comparison with them, the measures that were taken in 2009 to conceal information about the state of health of the co-founder and CEO of the company Steve Jobs were unprecedented. Since the fact of considerable health problems in such a well-known and constantly visible person is almost impossible to hide, and Apple stubbornly declined to honestly discuss this topic, a parallel was born in the press with the Kremlin itself during the decline of the Soviet empire - when a series of weak people tried to rule the country elders, and their health was considered one of the most important state secrets.
Against the background of the company's traditional secrecy, this parallel looks especially expressive, since Apple’s PR style - communicating with the public and the press exclusively through official press releases - is now beginning to be compared with the once-famous style of the newspaper Pravda, the main ideological speaker of the CPSU Central Committee. Now that the key details of the whole story with the illness of Apple’s leader are already known, the general outline of events looks like this. Having taken a six-month vacation in early January, supposedly to correct “hormonal imbalance,” Steve Jobs underwent an extensive course of treatment, first in connection with pancreatic cancer, and then with a liver transplant. The liver transplant operation was performed by Jobs in late April or early May, but this became known only at the end of June.
Despite the keen interest of news services and investors in the state of Jobs' health, Apple officials resolutely refused to discuss this issue, amicably repeating that the head of the company would return to his duties at the end of June.
Now that Jobs is back at the helm, one of the most heatedly debated topics among corporate governance experts is whether Apple’s actions violate the laws that dictate the amount of information that companies must disclose to the public regarding the health of their senior management. Some claim that Apple was not required to report a Jobs liver transplant, since he was on official vacation and transferred responsibility for the company's daily affairs to another director. Other experts are convinced that, given liver transplantation, Apple's official statement from January of this year - as if Mr. Jobs was only worried about hormonal imbalance - looks like a frank and deliberate lie.
However, we have to admit that to this day no one has reliable details about the medical side of this story.
However, in this immense topic “Apple, Health and PR Issues” there is another, much more alarming aspect. For with almost the same zeal that was shown in protecting secrets about Jobs’s illnesses, the corporation is trying to hide any information about the health damage that Apple products cause to consumers. To date, in particular, it is known that there are at least several dozen people who have received sensitive burns from defective batteries in iPods (see “A Very Hot Topic”). However, no one knows the exact numbers, because the company carefully hides them, and with each of the victims concludes a personal agreement “on non-disclosure” of the details of the incident - as a necessary condition for receiving compensation from the company.
Advantages that are not
Obviously, not the most successful approach that has long been established at Apple — to solve all security problems using “ideological” PR methods — extends to such technical areas as computer security or information protection.
Specialists in this field have long known that things are not important with protecting Apple computers and gadgets from hacking, information theft and other abuse-compromises. However, reputable experts do not like to talk about it publicly, preferring to keep silent as they say. The reason here is understandable and lies in the fact that Apple’s usual response to the publication of some new-found hole is to quietly set a group of faithful Mac fans on the author who unanimously go over to the researcher’s identity, interfere with people with dirt and hawk at all Internet intersections so that he then has to leave for a long time away from these essentially empty, but emotionally painful attacks.
However, along with a noticeable increase in Apple’s computer market share, there are more critically minded people and security professionals among Mac users. For this reason, at least in part, the traditional methods of PR attacks are becoming less and less effective. A good illustration of this is popular hacking conferences like Black Hat in the USA or CanSecWest in Canada, where the openly weak protection of Apple machines is increasingly being discussed.
Over the past ten years, these kinds of hacker forums have been a real curse for Microsoft. Moreover, to a large extent, it was the criticism from the stands of these conferences that finally made the Redmond team seriously tackle security problems in Windows programs. Now the focus is shifting to the Mac platform, and there is good reason to believe that Apple products today are no more secure than Microsoft programs once.
Worse, as Apple acts as a provider of an increasingly popular hardware and software platform, and not just software, from a security point of view, this company occupies a unique place in the market. For example, at the last Black Hat it was shown that a regular Apple computer keyboard equipped with its own “brains” in the form of a controller and flash memory can be used as an undetectable keylogger - an interceptor of keystrokes to steal passwords and other confidential information. Or another example - it was demonstrated that iPhone phones can be used to disable mobile networks.
The trouble with Apple is not so much in the many security holes in its products, but in relation to the disclosure of vulnerabilities. And what to expect from a company focused primarily on marketing. However, one cannot say that Apple does not patch its systems - of course, it does it, like all other market participants. But Apple still believes that it’s much better for themselves to never talk about the shortcomings identified in their products.
Whenever disputants try to find at least some consensus when discussing the Apple phenomenon, there is something like this look at the secrets of the "apple pie": it seems that excessive secrecy, which certainly adds a charm of surprise to every Apple announcement of new products, does not serve the company so much same good in all other areas.
In many cases, transparency of the corporation is much more important - and the more information it gives to the public and the market, the better for everyone. Therefore, it is very strange that a company that sincerely considers itself a leader in innovation, at the same time appears before us buttoned up.
How would encryption
One of the functions of the new iPhone
3GS telephones is hardware data encryption, which seems to give consumers the impression that the valuable information stored in the device’s memory is now less at risk than in previous models. However, a well-known security expert demonstrated that simple hacker tools make it possible to get to this data as easily as in devices without encryption.
The problem here is even wider, because Apple tried to strengthen security measures in the new iPhones in two ways. The first is encrypted data archiving, available on any phone with iPhone OS 3.0 software and iTunes 8.2 or later. The second is the very hardware encryption available only for the iPhone 3GS series. With a superficial acquaintance, all this looks pretty solid, but iPhone expert Jonathan Zdziarski, who teaches forensics a special course on accessing data on Apple gadgets, has publicly shown how easy this imaginary protection costs.
There is no doubt that the new encryption tools will scare away only random curious people. However, serious attackers, armed with unlock and jailbreak programs like purplera1n or redsn0w (which can easily be found on the Web), can easily remove protection and gain access to all data on the phone. In a video posted on the Internet, Zdzyarski demonstrates how quickly this can be done not only for the encrypted archive of iPhones, but also for current iPhone 3GS data protected by hardware encryption.
A special piquancy of the trick is that the expert does not even need to bother with decryption. Zdzyarski shows that he can access the iPhone file system in the same way as in any other UNIX-based operating system (Zdzdarski uses original software, but the same result can be achieved using jailbreak tools). After that, the OS readily launches hardware decryption of the data and provides it to the user: "The kernel decrypts the data for you when you simply request files, so that an already decrypted copy is automatically issued in response to the call." The only advantage that encryption implemented in this way provides is that now you can remotely erase all data much faster in case of loss of the device, since only a command to destroy the crypto key is enough. But even this advantage becomes useless if the iPhone thief guesses to remove the SIM card. As an option to remotely erase data,
and the “Find my iPhone” function without a SIM card just doesn’t work. Unlike data access.
Very hot topic
Amy Clancy, a reporter for Seattle-based KIRO7 Broadcasting Company, spent more than six months getting CPSC, the U.S. Federal Consumer Product Safety Commission, filed an Apple iPod flash case. Apple’s lawyers managed to block the journalist’s requests several times, but as a result, they managed to open up eight hundred pages of “compromising information” to the general public for the first time.
A journalistic investigation began last November when a radio listener named Jamie Balderas contacted reporters for a chest burn from an iPod Shuffle player strapped to his shirt. At first, Balderas tried to find out from Apple how often this happens, but a company representative assured her that this was an isolated case. When she asked whether it was possible to get documents from the company about such incidents and what had been done to prevent them, Apple said that Balderas would not get access to such materials.
The secrecy of the company is easy to understand, since information about the real picture with spontaneous combustion of players may well become a reason for recalling from the market the most popular products released in hundreds of millions of copies, which will result in enormous losses. Moreover, the documents that Amy Clancy obtained in the federal control authorities indicate that, in principle, product recall is quite possible. One of the reasons the CPSC did not apply any sanctions to Apple and did not insist on recalling defective products was because "the current generation of iPods uses [other] batteries that did not demonstrate the problems that the old batteries had."
Journalists have not yet been able to figure out exactly when the use of the "current generation" of batteries has begun. However, now more evidence is emerging, including direct lawsuits against Apple, according to which even the brand new iPod Touch ignites and explodes, that is, one of the latest models of the player.