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Apple Exclaves

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Re: Apple Exclaves

#121

Post by brookst »

lordofgibbons wrote: post #113
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the things about Tim Cook, that people don’t really talk about (which, IMO, is appropriate), is that he’s openly gay. Most times, this doesn’t mean anything, but there’s very few demographics that understand the need for privacy and data protection, better than gay folks. Of course, he’s still at the whim of the Board, and he’s no spring chicken, so there’s no guarantee that his successor would feel the same,…

> Of course, he’s still at the whim of the Board, and he’s no spring chicken, so there’s no guarantee that his successor would feel the same At the risk of sounding like Richard Stallman, that exactly is the problem with buying into such walled-prison ecosystem of devices. You're at the mercy of Apple pushing an update that can unilaterally take away your privacy and rights. They already do that with sending hashes o…

Sure, and every time you eat at a restaurant they could poison you.

This is mainly a concern if you are a high value target likely to be the first person poisoned. For most of us, that’s not true, and a formerly good actor turning evil would be noticed long before it came our turn.

So there’s the idealist “I can’t be sure my favorite restaurant won’t poison me today, so I’m never eating there again”, and the pragmatic “the benefits I get outweigh the slim chance that today is the day they decide to attack boring people like me” outlook.

I’ll never fault someone for being the idealist; the concerns are unfalsifiable. But to me it looks like a rough way to live. Maybe just because I really am that boring so it’s hard to relate to having any super secret stuff that would put me among the first to be attacked.

Re: Apple Exclaves

#122

Post by mike_hearn »

teknologist wrote: post #84

I wonder if it's possible for app devs to use Exclaves. The thing that irks me about Apple is that they invent this new amazing internal stuff but then completely wall it off from devs, leaving everyone else (banking apps, wallets, secure messaging, etc.) to continue running in unsecured user space.

They don't do that. Apple userspace has continually got more secure too.

One simple example: recent versions of macOS run all apps inside a sandbox, even those that don't opt in. One thing the sandbox blocks is apps modifying each others files, which up until then had been a major weakness of the security system (signatures of a bundle were checked at first-run, but not on every execution).

Re: Apple Exclaves

#123

Post by jjtheblunt »

lambdaone wrote: post #114

I'm quite surprised that they use a secure exclave to control the physical camera LED - this is absolutely massive overengineering to do something very simple. A tiny bit of hardwired dedicated logic integrated into the camera module would be more than adequate to do this - just gating of either the digital I/O or the power to the camera, and a pulse-stretcher so the LED goes on for at least a few seconds each time t…

You can’t just add circuits and discrete components like an extra led without screwing up RF sensitivity. Cf. “Rf desense”, for example.

Re: Apple Exclaves

#124

Post by brookst »

dlivingston wrote: post #59
6stringmerc wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bot…

The worst part of internet culture is the conflation of simplicity and reductionism. Comments are short, people have different contexts, so there’s an instinct to reduce everything to binary and fight to the death over the binary value.

Worst of all is the false good person / bad person dichotomy that leads to great offense at any slight praise for someone the reader has decided is a bad person, or any slight criticism of someone the reader has decided is a good person.

I can’t think of anything less fruitful than arguing over whether a public figure’s personal plus professional life makes them a 100% good person or 100% bad person. It’s strange the conversation ever happens, and yet it’s so incredibly common.

Re: Apple Exclaves

#125

Post by brookst »

sapphicsnail wrote: post #83
auggierose wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know very few people who would't use their wealth to try to save their lifes, or that of their loved ones. It's kind of what wealth is for.

You know that's still bad right?

What’s the point of making a moral judgment about a bit of human nature that literally everyone in earth shares? It doesn’t make you or me superior to condemn it; we would do the same. So… what does “bad” even mean in this context?

Re: Apple Exclaves

#126

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

lordofgibbons wrote: post #113
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the things about Tim Cook, that people don’t really talk about (which, IMO, is appropriate), is that he’s openly gay. Most times, this doesn’t mean anything, but there’s very few demographics that understand the need for privacy and data protection, better than gay folks. Of course, he’s still at the whim of the Board, and he’s no spring chicken, so there’s no guarantee that his successor would feel the same,…

> Of course, he’s still at the whim of the Board, and he’s no spring chicken, so there’s no guarantee that his successor would feel the same At the risk of sounding like Richard Stallman, that exactly is the problem with buying into such walled-prison ecosystem of devices. You're at the mercy of Apple pushing an update that can unilaterally take away your privacy and rights. They already do that with sending hashes o…

Stallman is a brilliant and passionate chap, but he's also a lifelong academic, and has very different life priorities than people that need to make a living at shipping things.

He's one end of the spectrum, and NSO is at the other end. The best place is somewhere in the middle.

Re: Apple Exclaves

#127

Post by brookst »

Kudos wrote: post #77
astrange wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 so…

> "knowing what people are going to want by the time it's ready to ship" Isn't that Product rather than Marketing?

Some companies run this as “inbound marketing” (collecting needs, understanding market size) versus “outbound marketing” (advertising, conferences).

Re: Apple Exclaves

#128

Post by andrewcl »

lambdaone wrote: post #114

I'm quite surprised that they use a secure exclave to control the physical camera LED - this is absolutely massive overengineering to do something very simple. A tiny bit of hardwired dedicated logic integrated into the camera module would be more than adequate to do this - just gating of either the digital I/O or the power to the camera, and a pulse-stretcher so the LED goes on for at least a few seconds each time t…

You have to wonder if it is over engineering, or a resolution for something they've discovered from shipping so many phones. I wouldn't think of the camera as a security vector, but maybe Apple thinks it is?

Re: Apple Exclaves

#129

Post by rollcat »

amelius wrote: post #107
neom wrote: post #9

I 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

As someone who builds industrial/scientific machines, the consumer oriented devices that Apple makes are completely unusable for me. Locking down completely capable computing devices seems like such a waste. I'm also not a fan of how Apple controls devices and the market of software after the device has changed owner. I'm staying the hell away from this ecosystem. Not sure why many so-called "hackers" are so enthusia…

I'm a self-branded hacker so I'll share my motivation:

Shit. Works.

This is critical. I can focus on my actual task at hand, rather than fiddling with the system.

Some perspective: I've been on Debian for 15 years, and I still hold it in very high regard for servers. I'm also an occasional Alpine & OpenBSD user; and Windows for games. I've tried Ubuntu, couldn't stop it from getting in my way. Before you suggest Fedora, Arch, NixOS, whatever: I'm done distro-hopping. The experience is about equal everywhere. No amount of "choice" beats thoughtful design, accessibility, and vertical integration.

Re: Apple Exclaves

#130

Post by api »

lambdaone wrote: post #114

I'm quite surprised that they use a secure exclave to control the physical camera LED - this is absolutely massive overengineering to do something very simple. A tiny bit of hardwired dedicated logic integrated into the camera module would be more than adequate to do this - just gating of either the digital I/O or the power to the camera, and a pulse-stretcher so the LED goes on for at least a few seconds each time t…

What if they want to add Face ID to the Mac but have the camera light not illuminate for that internal function, since that can also be developed securely so that nothing in user space can access the camera during that query.
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