Author Archives: Amy Littleson

This news story has been all over the place this past week. I found a great summary of what it entails here on Buzz Feed News.

Essentially Syed Farook was one of the San Bernardino terrorists and his phone was confiscated by the government immediately after the attack. His Apple ID password for the iPhone was changed soon after it was confiscated. This meant that the FBI then had no way to access the contents of the phone. Therefore the FBI requested that Apple create a special “backdoor” way to break into the phone and retrieve Farook’s information, which presumably contains details of the planning and execution of the December 2nd attacks that left 14 people dead.

Apple is refusing to create this backdoor technique. The catch is that if the Apple ID password had not been reset by someone after it was taken by the government then Apple would have been able to easily retrieve the information on the phone with an iCloud backup. However, someone in the San Bernardino Health Department did change the Apple ID password and they are claiming that they worked with the FBI to do so, and this thus made it eternally more difficult for Apple to unlock the information on the phone, which in turn caused the FBI to call for them to create a backdoor method for retrieving the information.

Clearly politics and the oligopoly of the FBI and Apple are playing a large role in this case. The political economy of Apple is insurmountable and therefore they understand the implications of creating a backdoor technique to unlock the private information of iPhones. It does make me wonder though if the FBI had the Apple ID password reset on purpose, because they knew that it would mean that they could call for Apple to create a backdoor hacking system that they then could use on many more phones to retrieve private information. Thoughts??

I read recently that Netflix now has 75 million subscribers, collecting 17 million of them this year, with 5.6 million in the past three months. Their shares have gone up 100% in the past year, and thus the Netflix investors and executives are optimistic for the future. However, this Netflix success is making a lot of TV executives anxious. One of the biggest differences between Netflix and regular television is that the content creators of Netflix series don’t have to worry about weekly ratings pressures like the creators of regular television series do. This is just another example, as also described in Media/Society, of how multiple variables affect media content and influence the content creators to produce shows that will be non-controvertial and focused on ratings.

Another point that was brought up in the article, is how much money Netflix spends on acquiring and producing content. This often causes them to produce meager profits, compared to how much revenue they’re pulling in. This is just another example of how much capital goes into the product of media, especially television and movies, and how important it is for networks, content creators, and online streamers such as Netflix to produce “hits” so that they bring in a ton of revenue to compensate for all of the shows that aren’t as popular.

I just thought that these were interesting points regarding the strengths/pressures of Netflix that I hadn’t know before! Let me know your thoughts on why you think Netflix dominates the online TV streaming industry!

-Amy Littleson