Who is this author? It’s a very elaborately, well written post. Great job. Having followed exclaves myself this is well done
Apple Exclaves
51–60 of 233 posts
Re: Apple Exclaves
#52I think Steve truly believed at his core, very simply: your laptop is your diary, and they have a responsibility to that. I don't think Tim would be CEO if he didn't believe what Steve did. It's so weird, but I really miss Steve. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ij-jlF98SzA
Steve believed at his core that locking down devices was the best way to extract business value from users. That's why you can't install any apps without telling Apple or get your location without sending it to Apple. He also believed very strongly in good marketing, and he jumped on privacy marketing very quickly after the Facebook - Google privacy spat that coincided with the failure of iTunes Ping.
> He also believed very strongly in good marketing, and he jumped on privacy marketing very quickly after the Facebook - Google privacy spat that coincided with the failure of iTunes Ping.
I have two thoughts about this.
One, if you tell yourself a story strongly enough, it becomes real. Especially when you can structure the company to force it to become real.
Two, "marketing" is usually used disparagingly to mean something like "advertising that brainwashes customers into wanting something", but it's more like "knowing what people are going to want by the time it's ready to ship". It doesn't necessarily even include advertising. So in this case people do want privacy.
Re: Apple Exclaves
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is weird. Jobs was divisive and (not infrequently) abrasive, and why would you miss a tech billionaire anyway? Yet I also feel indebted to him and to the folks at Apple who helped to produce some of my favorite products like the Mac, the iPod, and the iPad. Jobs also said a lot of things that still resonate with me. Recently Apple introduced a "classic Mac" screensaver that shows how carefully designed the origina…
> why would you miss a tech billionaire anyway Because we miss new instances of the great products they created to earn all that money.
I could easily be wrong about this but I don't believe Jobs or anyone else at Jobs-era Apple became a billionaire because of it. Because of early infighting/getting fired, ownership was too dispersed for that.
He became a billionaire because Disney bought Pixar.
Re: Apple Exclaves
#54I think Steve truly believed at his core, very simply: your laptop is your diary, and they have a responsibility to that. I don't think Tim would be CEO if he didn't believe what Steve did. It's so weird, but I really miss Steve. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ij-jlF98SzA
Sorry I am sure the article about enclaves triggered this thought about Steve for you. I cannot how one led to the other, can you may be tell us?
hehe, it's a good question. When you get to scale, you realize you got there because a lot of humans put you there. It's part of why scaling is hard, business is an art and science that juggles the value exchange between us in society. People still here on hackernews are angry at me personally for decisions at digitalocean, in retrospect, I wish I'd handled the wipe disk thing that happened better, for example. It's both very easy and very difficult at the same time to build a business while trying super hard to love (really actually love as humans love!!!) your customer because many many things want to prevent you from loving your customer (I have government stories too, many of us do). At the end of the day, they are doing the real work, like, the real real stuff, they don't have to, I mean, they don't right? But they will, because it's the right thing to do, because Steve said so. apple here, have taken extraordinary engineering effort to say even if you compel us, we physically can’t give you access to their diary. That is to be commended, and that, is Steve Jobs.
Re: Apple Exclaves
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is weird. Jobs was divisive and (not infrequently) abrasive, and why would you miss a tech billionaire anyway? Yet I also feel indebted to him and to the folks at Apple who helped to produce some of my favorite products like the Mac, the iPod, and the iPad. Jobs also said a lot of things that still resonate with me. Recently Apple introduced a "classic Mac" screensaver that shows how carefully designed the origina…
Now that I'm becoming an old man, I've taken the time to go back and listen to him properly, to analize his thoughts and words a bit more contextually, and I've come to believe that Steve Jobs was quite misunderstood, both by us, and by himself. When I miss him I think: his thoughts were so very refined for his time, it is quite incredible and I wish he was around to hear more of them. I guess I'm a fan? Oh well...wo…
He's definitely misunderstood. If you read his biography it's incredible how much the author of it misunderstands, but if you read between the lines you can see through them. In particular you should note how he changes before and after getting married.
The biography is really awful though. It constantly misquotes people - Bill Gates is directly quoted as saying something so technically inaccurate he can't possibly have said it.
I also remember that every time his son is quoted it's because he was telling a dick joke. At one point the book claims this is why Apple Park is a circle. Why the author did this is not clear to me.
(Btw, I have an unreported Jobs story about this myself. Actually two. I'm not going to tell them, so feel free to just imagine.)
Re: Apple Exclaves
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most likely attack model I can imagine is that a jailbroken phone still won’t be able to violate certain functionality (eg a recording LED remains lit, various supervisor functionality can’t be disabled, etc)
Oh; so the camera LED and camera data path would run a remote attestation protocol with the exclave, and the exclave would make sure the led is on whenever it’s forwarding on data from the camera? (Though I’m not convinced that will actually work on modern apple devices, where the led is pixels that run through the compositor — I guess the video driver stack and window managers are also exclaves in this world?)
The article mentions the display controller runs an Apple OS so I could see there being a secure way for an exclave to call into it for the onscreen indicators.
I would expect that to mean they're not included in screenshots so I'm curious now whether that's true for the iPhone 16.
Re: Apple Exclaves
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
For more detail, there's a 3-part series on iOS SPTM and TXM: Aug 2023, https://www.df-f.com/blog/ios17 Nov 2023, https://www.df-f.com/blog/ios-17round2 Feb 2025, https://www.df-f.com/blog/sptm3
Somewhat less detail, actually.
DF blog series source reference, https://randomaugustine.medium.com/on-apple-exclaves-d683a2c...
I would particularly like to highlight the work of Dataflow Forensics and their much more advanced work dissecting SPTM without the benefit of source code. I enthusiastically await their promised blog post about exclaves and hope they will answer many of the remaining questions, provide gory disassembly explanations, and correct all my mistakes and assumptions!Re: Apple Exclaves
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now that I'm becoming an old man, I've taken the time to go back and listen to him properly, to analize his thoughts and words a bit more contextually, and I've come to believe that Steve Jobs was quite misunderstood, both by us, and by himself. When I miss him I think: his thoughts were so very refined for his time, it is quite incredible and I wish he was around to hear more of them. I guess I'm a fan? Oh well...wo…
I still think about how he tried to cure cancer with crystals and then when that didn’t work he used his wealth to get residency in a different state to jump in line for a transplant and still died before his yacht got completed. I don’t misunderstand him at all. Especially the parking in handicap spaces part. Very easy to understand what kind of person he was through his actions. Perhaps we will never see eye to eye…
He didn’t jump the line, he just got in multiple lines.
Re: Apple Exclaves
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now that I'm becoming an old man, I've taken the time to go back and listen to him properly, to analize his thoughts and words a bit more contextually, and I've come to believe that Steve Jobs was quite misunderstood, both by us, and by himself. When I miss him I think: his thoughts were so very refined for his time, it is quite incredible and I wish he was around to hear more of them. I guess I'm a fan? Oh well...wo…
I still think about how he tried to cure cancer with crystals and then when that didn’t work he used his wealth to get residency in a different state to jump in line for a transplant and still died before his yacht got completed. I don’t misunderstand him at all. Especially the parking in handicap spaces part. Very easy to understand what kind of person he was through his actions. Perhaps we will never see eye to eye…
> Do I contradict myself?
> Very well then I contradict myself,
> (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
When you speak ill of Jobs you are speaking on his moral character. When others (incl. myself) speak positively on Jobs, they are speaking on his design, business, and life philosophies, which are quite profound. [0]
How you want to weigh the two is up to you, but it is not a contradiction to say someone contains both good and bad.
Re: Apple Exclaves
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry I am sure the article about enclaves triggered this thought about Steve for you. I cannot how one led to the other, can you may be tell us?
hehe, it's a good question. When you get to scale, you realize you got there because a lot of humans put you there. It's part of why scaling is hard, business is an art and science that juggles the value exchange between us in society. People still here on hackernews are angry at me personally for decisions at digitalocean, in retrospect, I wish I'd handled the wipe disk thing that happened better, for example. It's…
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