More Apple for the day

The New York Times has an editorial by Jim Kerstetter about the FBI and Apple:

We are now nearly a week into the public fight between Apple and the FBI, and neither side appears ready to back down. In case you missed the story, the Federal Bureau of Investigation wants Apple to write software that would help investigators circumvent the security settings of an iPhone that belonged to one of the shooters in the San Bernardino, California mass shooting.
Technically, this isn’t about breaking encryption, it’s about figuring out a password. The iPhone has a setting that would erase its data after ten incorrect attempts at the password. What the FBI wants, essentially, is for Apple to write software that would let it keep guessing until it hits the code.
But here is where it gets tricky: Apple says that would essentially amount to writing software to ruin its own security. Though the FBI says this is a one-shot deal important to a terrorism investigation, Apple executives believe writing that software would open a can of worms for law enforcement in the United States and around the world.
There is also a free-speech wrinkle to this fight. Many courts have ruled that writing software is akin to writing speech. Compelling Apple to do this, civil libertarians worry, would be like compelling Apple to say or write something in particular.
Still following? It seems many Americans are, and so far they seem to be siding with the FBI, 51 percent to 38 percent, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.
But Apple executives may be able to take comfort in the knowledge that a legal fight is not a popularity contest.

Rico says no one is going to stop buying Apple products just because they pissed off the FBI; maybe just the opposite. (And, if the FBI is so smart, let them hire their own fourteen-year-old hackers to do the job.)