Apple CEO Tim Cook and Vice President of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives Lisa Jackson
attended a White House state dinner in honor of visiting Chinese President Xi Jinping, hosted by the President and First Lady. Cook and Jackson sat with the Obamas at the head table, and Cook had met previously with Xi at
a conference in Seattle attended by numerous US tech CEOs and executives, many of whom
were also at tonight's dinner. President Obama and President Xi held a joint press conference earlier in the day that covered cybersecurity, trade agreements, and military relations.
Among the guests at both the Seattle conference, where Xi gave a policy speech and attended a roundtable discussion along with private meetings, were Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Disney CEO Bob Iger, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, and others. At both the Seattle conference with business leaders and the White House meeting, Xi fielded questions about economic and cybersecurity issues, mostly stemming from a range of attacks by Chinese hackers against American businesses, though Xi has repeatedly denied his government's involvement in such activities. US authorities believe some or most of the attacks are funded and carried out by a division of the Chinese government's military.
Jackson, Cook arrive for White House dinner
In addition, tech CEOs were likely to make clear to the Chinese president their concern about some laws in China which both mandate that data on users there should remain in-country, but also could be interpreted as requiring foreign companies to make that data available to authorities on demand. Apple in particular has resisted intrusions of this sort by both foreign and US agencies, saying what little personally-identifiable user data it needs to collect is encrypted and cannot be decrypted by the company.
Ironically, during the very week that Xi was in the US, Chinese developers were found to have downloaded
adulterated copies of the Xcode development program from third-party servers, in part because Apple hosted its own version on US-based servers and thus was much slower to download. The altered copies of Xcode, dubbed XcodeGhost, proceeded to install mild malware into programs compiled with it -- though the malware did not collect any sensitive data, nor pose any genuine risk beyond exposing a potential vector for future, and more malicious attacks.
Apple has since
closed the loopholes and
instructed developers on how to obtain legitimate copies of Xcode, but not before some 4,000 titles -- mostly Chinese apps -- were affected by the issue. The tainted Xcode was also used to create some US titles, such as
Angry Birds 2 (much to the embarrassment of the companies involved), though Apple has removed all copies of the apps from its servers and posted a list of the top 25 that users might have. Updated versions re-compiled with a vetted version of Xcode are now available from the App Stores worldwide.
Cook was known to be in Washington DC on Friday when he was spotted at the
Georgetown Apple Store on Friday morning, helping to celebrate the retail arrival of the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus. He will apparently be in the area this weekend, as he is also scheduled to
meet with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi there.
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