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Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

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131–140 of 267 posts

Re: Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

#131
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure you can power off your device! Just take out the batt-- oh...

Swappable battery is a trend that should return- to both phones and electric vehicles.

Dream on.

Re: Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

#132
Hmm. Feeling very good about dumping iPhone to simple flip. My last iPhone was old SE with home button and touch ID. Somehow I managed to remove smartphone habits of my life. It is a bliss. Highly recommend. It is a stellar investment in ones future, psychologically, technically and in general.

Re: Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

#133
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as the timeframe scales with the size of the battery. A phone battery should be swappable in a few minutes. A car battery should be swappable in a day or two. They have to be heavily shielded in case of an accident.

> A car battery should be swappable in a day or two Nio currently swaps out their car batteries in about 3 minutes, much like you'd get an oil change at Jiffy Lube or something. It's completely automated except someone pulls the car in/out of the bay for you. I imagine that human step will be relatively short lived. > they have to be heavily shielded in case of an accident. Yes, it's just a simple matter of purposefu…

And how many people drive more than 300km per day AND don't have the time to wait 50 minutes, but only got 5? The replaceable car batteries is technically possible (heck, everything is possible with engineering), but totally useless.

Re: Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

#134
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without disagreeing with anything you've said there, even if you /think/ you have nothing to hide now and happen to be correct in practice, it's a terrible assumption to think that you can count on that being true forever. Imagine you witness a murder in a restaurant, cold blooded and it's dirty cops working for a three letter institution that did it. You want to give evidence like a law abiding, upstanding citizen w…

Except in that case you don't know you have to hide and 101 other things you do make you easier to track than this. And odds are you're not turning off your phone all the way every single time you change locations to start so... I have nothing to hide is different than "I literally need to hide".

Yep "I have nothing to hide" is always completely false.

"I literally need to hide and I'm also aware of that change" might be true or might be false. You might "literally need to hide" and not know it while the so-called "nothing" you had to hide is used against you when you have done nothing morally or legally wrong.

Re: Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

#135
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree but like if you want an open system why are you using an iPhone? Maybe Green is a little guilty of slurping up Apple's privacy marketing?...

At this point, there's only two mobile OS players. All of these upstarts don't have enough market share to count (hopefully, just for now). Nobody's family members use something other than iOS/Android. Maybe some of your friends do, but that's a small market. With that established, just because one uses iOS/Android does not mean they are not about openess or security or privacy or whatever. It probably just means the…

Which is why his twitter thing felt so odd and uncharacteristic especially coming from a professor of cryptography nonetheless. AOP has been around for years. If he's made the concession to use an iPhone because that's where people are, why freak out about some new feature like you were born yesterday? This is Apple, you know they don't document shit. Go look at core crypto... it's doc-gen function signatures and structs. They don't even tell you how big their chacha20-poly1305 nonce is. The only reason they have a security handbook is so that the government would approve iPhone use. Why not look at the prior art out there surrounding the protocol published by people who are concerned like you are and weigh in as a security expert instead of having a twitter fit and then throwing HN under the bus when they point this shit out to you and say "hmm he's kinda overreacting this isn't news and actually the protocol is pretty good".

Re: Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> now have an AOP (Always on Processor) They've long had this. It's how they turn on when picked up (by tracking the motion sensor) or when touching the screen (tracking capacitive sensor)

This seems different to those examples because it works when the phone is powered off. AFAIK neither pick up nor touching the screen have ever done anything when the phone is powered off, only when it’s asleep.

Yes, exactly. Many of the things I’ve seen mentioned in the comments, such as wake on motion or responding to “hey Siri” are waking from sleep. AFAIK, you can’t power on via motion or hey Siri.

Re: Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

#137
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The chances of you being directly spied on are low. The chances of someone being spied on who could influence the world around you is much higher. So a journalist could be spied on right before they break a big story, potentially leading to a cover up. That’s the problem with stuff like this. Even if you have “nothing to hide” you might rely on someone who legitimately does.

Without disagreeing with anything you've said there, even if you /think/ you have nothing to hide now and happen to be correct in practice, it's a terrible assumption to think that you can count on that being true forever. Imagine you witness a murder in a restaurant, cold blooded and it's dirty cops working for a three letter institution that did it. You want to give evidence like a law abiding, upstanding citizen w…

Yeah. I've also heard it likened to "Who needs freedom of speech? I have nothing to say"

Re: Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

#138
post #132

Hmm. Feeling very good about dumping iPhone to simple flip. My last iPhone was old SE with home button and touch ID. Somehow I managed to remove smartphone habits of my life. It is a bliss. Highly recommend. It is a stellar investment in ones future, psychologically, technically and in general.

Personally I find it rare to actually call someone, so a flip phone would be mostly useless to me. I suppose texting is still a thing though.

Re: Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

#139
This seems analogous to esp32 deep sleep. In this mode the co processor can monitor gpio pins on the device to wake up or even control some parts of the device… very useful for battery powered devices… makes total sense apple and probably all smart phones have a similar multi chip architecture to mange the device power and sensors… it does suck that the side effect of this could be used for evil and that even when we use the power off features it doesn’t turn completely off… I do miss real on off toggle switches that actually break the copper connection between the chips and the current…

Re: Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

#140
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The chances of you being directly spied on are low. The chances of someone being spied on who could influence the world around you is much higher. So a journalist could be spied on right before they break a big story, potentially leading to a cover up. That’s the problem with stuff like this. Even if you have “nothing to hide” you might rely on someone who legitimately does.

Without disagreeing with anything you've said there, even if you /think/ you have nothing to hide now and happen to be correct in practice, it's a terrible assumption to think that you can count on that being true forever. Imagine you witness a murder in a restaurant, cold blooded and it's dirty cops working for a three letter institution that did it. You want to give evidence like a law abiding, upstanding citizen w…

The 'Dirty Cop is Gonna Get You' is the 'gradeschool silliness' here. It's 1000x more likely that the criminals who did the murder want you killed because you're a witness. Witness intimidation is widespread and 'default' in some communities ('snitches get stitches'), and while the 'Dirty Cop' thing does happen in reality, it happens mostly on Netflix, and there's a difference between overzealous prosecutors/cops and 'dirty cops'.

Also consider that tech will exonerate as much as otherwise: for such and such murder, the 'background use' of the tech would be to provide you with an alibi.

Forensics have generally improved Justice I think, not the other way around.

In the end I think Apple's issue should be one of transparency and privacy and we need to push them towards that.

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