Yes, and like in toxicology it matters very little if instead of injecting a spoonful of botulism you instead inject a spoonful of less dangerous anthrax. Matters of degree still care about orders of magnitude and bright lines defining fitness for purpose.
Lockdown Mode is being advertised as protecting against state-sponsored actors: “Lockdown Mode offers an extreme, optional level of security for the very few users who, because of who they are or what they do, may be personally targeted by some of the most sophisticated digital threats, such as those from NSO Group”. They are attempting to convince people who would otherwise air gap to avoid being killed that their systems are perfectly adequate. Their systems are on the order of 100x worse than what it necessary to protect against state-sponsored actors. It is not acceptable to attempt to conflate the two just because everything is a shade of gray; one is off-white and the other is off-black, they are not even remotely similar.
Apple’s advertising of Lockdown Mode is unequivocally worse for the stated use case than not having it at all since then at the very least people at risk would not be mislead into thinking Apple can protect them. If they want to change their advertising to clearly indicate that it should not be used if you are at risk of state-sponsored attacks and that there is no independent verification for any of their claims, then I would agree with you, but they are not doing that. Until they do, they should be censured for making such irresponsible and reckless claims that mislead at-risk individuals from taking proper precautions.
Lockdown Mode is being advertised as protecting against state-sponsored actors: “Lockdown Mode offers an extreme, optional level of security for the very few users who, because of who they are or what they do, may be personally targeted by some of the most sophisticated digital threats, such as those from NSO Group”. They are attempting to convince people who would otherwise air gap to avoid being killed that their systems are perfectly adequate. Their systems are on the order of 100x worse than what it necessary to protect against state-sponsored actors. It is not acceptable to attempt to conflate the two just because everything is a shade of gray; one is off-white and the other is off-black, they are not even remotely similar.
Apple’s advertising of Lockdown Mode is unequivocally worse for the stated use case than not having it at all since then at the very least people at risk would not be mislead into thinking Apple can protect them. If they want to change their advertising to clearly indicate that it should not be used if you are at risk of state-sponsored attacks and that there is no independent verification for any of their claims, then I would agree with you, but they are not doing that. Until they do, they should be censured for making such irresponsible and reckless claims that mislead at-risk individuals from taking proper precautions.