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Apple Exclaves

randomaugustine.medium.com

61–70 of 233 posts

Re: Apple Exclaves

#61
post #25

Earlier 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…

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 h…

I don’t remember many details from the biography at this point, but I remember not liking it either. It seemed like it was written with the assumption the reader already knew the about Steve’s more public life and career, and skipped over much of it. It didn’t feel like it would be a good source for future generations to learn about Steve, as it seemed to largely ignore the entire reason a book was being written about him. I also remembering it seeming largely negative, trumpeting the views of critics, and while downplaying the good to balance it out. Though this could also be my memory fading, feel free correct me if I’m wrong.

It was my first Isaacson biography, and didn’t leave me excited for another one.

Re: Apple Exclaves

#62
post #60
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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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Me?!? I don't even drink alcohol. I'm just being expressive, last I checked it was allowed??

Re: Apple Exclaves

#64
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me?!? I don't even drink alcohol. I'm just being expressive, last I checked it was allowed??

Commenters are getting increasingly cynical on here. I wouldn’t worry about it.

If we lose a bastion of being able to speak quite freely in front of other intelligent humans, that will be a shame.

Re: Apple Exclaves

#65
post #40
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?)

I'm not sure how complex modern display controllers are, but I could imagine a simple priority hardware overlay functionality that an exclave has access to (similar to the dedicated "cursor overlay" functionality some older GPUs had, as far as I understand). Once you have that, you can take the idea further: Displaying an indicator that confirms that all your keystrokes are going to an exclave validating your passwor…

They should have done half height function keys and kept the Touch Bar. Best of both worlds.

Re: Apple Exclaves

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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Re: Apple Exclaves

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They are being polite. The Dataflow blog post barely goes beyond running strings.

Re: Apple Exclaves

#68
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commenters are getting increasingly cynical on here. I wouldn’t worry about it.

If we lose a bastion of being able to speak quite freely in front of other intelligent humans, that will be a shame.

Don’t worry, the more reasonable of us on HN helped to flag that troll comment into oblivion.

Thanks for sharing your story.

Re: Apple Exclaves

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That seems very unlikely since nothing of that sort was ever attempted by Jobs on their desktops.

I'm not sure it's so much about extracting value exactly but Jobs long believed in making sealed appliances that people couldn't and wouldn't have to tinker with as opposed to more easily modify able computers sold by competitors

https://folklore.org/Diagnostic_Port.html

> Expandability, or the lack thereof, was far and away the most controversial aspect of the original Macintosh hardware design. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was a strong believer in hardware expandability, and he endowed the Apple II with luxurious expandability in the form of seven built-in slots for peripheral cards ... >This flexibility allowed the Apple II to be adapted to a wider range of applications, and quickly spawned a thriving third-party hardware industry.

...

> Apple's other co-founder, Steve Jobs, didn't agree with Jef about many things, but they both felt the same way about hardware expandability: it was a bug instead of a feature. Steve was reportedly against having slots in the Apple II back in the days of yore, and felt even stronger about slots for the Mac. He decreed that the Macintosh would remain perpetually bereft of slots, enclosed in a tightly sealed case, with only the limited expandability of the two serial ports.

> Mac hardware designer Burrell Smith and his assistant Brian Howard understood Steve's rationale, but they felt differently about the proper course of action. Burrell had already watched the Macintosh's hopelessly optimistic schedule start to slip indefinitely, and he was unable to predict when the Mac's pioneering software would be finished, if ever. He was afraid that Moore's Law would make his delayed hardware obsolete before it ever came to market. He thought it was prudent to build in as much flexibility as possible, as long as it didn't cost too much.

> Burrell decided to add a single, simple slot to his Macintosh design, which made the processor's bus accessible to peripherals, that wouldn't cost very much, especially if it wasn't used. He worked out the details and proposed it at the weekly staff meeting, but Steve immediately nixed his proposal, stating that there was no way that the Mac would even have a single slot.

> But Burrell was not that easily thwarted. He realized that the Mac was never going to have something called a slot, but perhaps the same functionality could be called something else. After talking it over with Brian, they decided to start calling it the "diagnostic port" instead of a slot, arguing that it would save money during manufacturing if testing devices could access the processor bus to diagnose manufacturing errors. They didn't mention that the same port would also provide the functionality of a slot.

>This was received positively at first, but after a couple weeks, engineering manager Rod Holt caught on to what was happening, probably aided by occasional giggles when the diagnostic port was mentioned. "That things really a slot, right? You're trying to sneak in a slot!", Rod finally accused us at the next engineering meeting. "Well, that's not going to happen!"

> Even though the diagnostic port was scuttled, it wasn't the last attempt at surreptitious hardware expandability. When the Mac digital board was redesigned for the last time in August 1982, the next generation of RAM chips was already on the horizon. The Mac used 16 64Kbit RAM chips, giving it 128K of memory. The next generation chip was 256Kbits, giving us 512K bytes instead, which made a huge difference.

> Burrell was afraid the 128Kbyte Mac would seem inadequate soon after launch, and there were no slots for the user to add RAM. He realized that he could support 256Kbit RAM chips simply by routing a few extra lines on the PC board, allowing adventurous people who knew how to wield a soldering gun to replace their RAM chips with the newer generation. The extra lines would only cost pennies to add.

> But once again, Steve Jobs objected, because he didn't like the idea of customers mucking with the innards of their computer. He would also rather have them buy a new 512K Mac instead of them buying more RAM from a third-party. But this time Burrell prevailed, because the change was so minimal. He just left it in there and no one bothered to mention it to Steve, much to the eventual benefit of customers, who didn't have to buy a whole new Mac to expand their memory.

Re: Apple Exclaves

#70
post #54
post #50

Earlier 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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