Steve Jobs may have viewed the fiery encryption debate as an opportunity, rather than a problem. One can only speculate on that now.
The legendary co-founder of Apple was a phone phreak back in 1971. Jobs and his college pal Steve Wozniak (Woz) were motivated by a 1971 story written by Ron Rosenbaum in Esquire -- titled "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" - which explained how 'You Can Tap the F.B.I.'s Crime Control Computer in the Comfort of Your Own Home' and that computer freaking may be the wave of the future.
Jobs tells the story of how he and Woz built one the first digital blue boxes in a 1994 YouTube video. The blue boxes were used to hack telephone computers in order to make free long distance phone calls to anywhere in the world.
The blue boxes were illegal -- but in spite of that Jobs and Woz were so fascinated by the magic of the fact that two teenagers (young hackers) could build this box for a couple hundred dollars and then control hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure.
Hackerpreneurs Jobs and Woz went from Berkeley dorm room to dorm room (Woz was a junior at the University of California, at Berkeley) and sold their (illegal) blue boxes for $150.
"Experiences like that taught us the power of ideas" explained Jobs. "If we hadn't have made blue boxes there wouldn't have been an
Fast-forward to today and WWSD: What Would Steve Do? Again, this is pure speculation - but perhaps Jobs would have pondered the encryption 'problem' as a market need.
Apple has sold a cumulative lifetime total of 821.8 million iPhones, according to The Motley Fool.
Jobs may have sequestered a skunkworks team in Cupertino - with orders to cook up an iPhreak App that can break the iPhone's encryption. Touch an 'Encrypt' icon for an encrypted iPhone, or a 'Decrypt' icon for unencrypted mode. Of course the App would be programmed so that each iPhone needs its own. No doubt Jobs would already have a price for the App in his head, along with projections of how many iPhone users would buy it.
And then... a special version iPhone 7 with the iPhreak App baked in. Comes in blue.
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