Apple Exclaves • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple Exclaves

#171

Post by m463 » Mon, Mar 10, 2025, 8:04 PM UTC

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 totally agree. I think the best time was when they switched to the intel architecture, and their machines were good at interoperating with the rest of the world.

But I think they're regressed. I think sj was good at getting apple to interface with the rest of the world, and make course corrections. But now they've forgotten how.

Everything apple does is more apple ecosystem, ignore everyone else.

Sort of like the 7-habits dependent, independent, interdependent. Now they're back to independent.

so... they ignore the rest of the world. their own hardware, their own languages, everything else comes from their store. admittedly macos still allows people to run their own software, but ios doesn't let you run software or even access your own filesystem.

Re: Apple Exclaves

#172

Post by jjtheblunt » Mon, Mar 10, 2025, 8:05 PM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #132

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,…

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. I used to think this, too. His recent ring-kissing antics have changed my mind. He, too, can be bought for a price. You don't write a check…

who is actively trying to decimate the gay community? honest question!

Re: Apple Exclaves

#173

Post by spyke112 » Mon, Mar 10, 2025, 8:55 PM UTC

rollcat wrote: post #129

amelius wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Fedo…

Fedora is really good though. I’ve daily driven Windows, MacOS and Linux, Fedora is by far the best developer experience I’ve had so far. But then again, I tend to setup my devbox quite spartan, so that it just works.

Re: Apple Exclaves

#174

Post by reaperducer » Mon, Mar 10, 2025, 9:15 PM UTC

KerrAvon wrote: post #142

reaperducer wrote: post #132

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. I used to think this, too. His recent ring-kissing antics have changed my mind. He, too, can be bought for a price. You don't write a check…

Genuine question: what would you have him do at that point instead? It’s notable that he did that after all the other billionaires did it. Apple can’t go alone on this, they’d be taken apart by a right wing smear campaign (and possibly violence against Apple stores — how many thousands of Apple employees would be affected?). Collective action, even in corporate America, is required to beat these people. The failure h…

Genuine question: what would you have him do at that point instead?

He's a leader. He should lead.

Re: Apple Exclaves

#175

Post by sroussey » Mon, Mar 10, 2025, 9:21 PM UTC

api wrote: post #117

We could have avoided so much hardware and OS complexity if we'd instead (mostly) discarded the idea of shipping and running compiled code directly on the hardware. TL;DR: we are doing things in hardware that ought to be done in software, and we're giving software too close to metal access. User mode should be something like the JVM, but more language-neutral, something based around WASM for example. The runtime for…

MS had a research project that built an OS from CLR.

One of the great things about it (in my opinion) was the lack of context switching. It broke a fundamental assumption about how an OS should work. It could also do global optimizations.

Re: Apple Exclaves

#176

Post by michaelt » Mon, Mar 10, 2025, 10:09 PM UTC

als0 wrote: post #131

transpute wrote: post #5

> SK runs on the same high speed application processors as XNU/iOS. To make this possible, additional processor privilege levels are required — likely supported by virtualization extensions Recent Apple phone and laptop SoCs include hardware support for nested virtualization, including the M4 iPad Pro where an exclave is used for the camera LED. Hopefully the next revision of the Apple Platform Security guide will co…

> 150+ TrustZone CVEs, https://www.cve.org/CVERecord/SearchResults?query=trustzone It’s important to note that most of those CVEs are to do with vulnerable software that manufacturers put in the TrustZone protected environment (many of which are garbage). There are very few vulnerabilities reported about the hardware itself.

Personally, I've always thought the fact these vulnerabilities keeps happening demonstrates that TrustZone's secure execution environment just isn't designed well.

If you're a phone designer, and you're going to put unlock PIN validation into a trusted execution environment? Sure, makes sense. If you're going to put your widevine DRM code into a trusted execution environment? I guess.

But why did they make a design that means a vulnerability in the DRM code allows an attack on the PIN validation code? That means the attack surface is huge.

You gotta keep these clowns separated if you don't want them spraying each other with water and throwing pies down each other's trousers.

Re: Apple Exclaves

#177

Post by 9dev » Mon, Mar 10, 2025, 10:16 PM UTC

KerrAvon wrote: post #142

reaperducer wrote: post #132

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. I used to think this, too. His recent ring-kissing antics have changed my mind. He, too, can be bought for a price. You don't write a check…

Genuine question: what would you have him do at that point instead? It’s notable that he did that after all the other billionaires did it. Apple can’t go alone on this, they’d be taken apart by a right wing smear campaign (and possibly violence against Apple stores — how many thousands of Apple employees would be affected?). Collective action, even in corporate America, is required to beat these people. The failure h…

This is the exact mindset the Germans put forth when questioned after the war: What should we have done anyway? We were just following orders. We didn’t know what would happen. They would only have taken us, too, if we resisted.

If a few more of us would have stood up at the time, the world could look very differently today.

Re: Apple Exclaves

#178

Post by 9dev » Mon, Mar 10, 2025, 10:26 PM UTC

-__---____-ZXyw wrote: post #137

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

> It's so weird, but I really miss Steve. When I see the sincere sentiment sometimes expressed towards Jobs, I wonder if something similar is being tapped into when people - often tech people - use and experience LLMs. To put it a bit bluntly, it almost feels like there's a mystical or religious element to it. As if we desperately want there to be miracles, and oracles, and god-like, caring men who can provide us wit…

If you haven’t, I recommend reading Harari, specifically Homo Deus and Nexus. He writes at length about what he calls dataism, a new kind of religion filling the void liberalism and enlightenment left in us. Good reads.

Re: Apple Exclaves

#179

Post by fc417fc802 » Mon, Mar 10, 2025, 10:28 PM UTC

spyke112 wrote: post #173

rollcat wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Fedo…

Fedora is really good though. I’ve daily driven Windows, MacOS and Linux, Fedora is by far the best developer experience I’ve had so far. But then again, I tend to setup my devbox quite spartan, so that it just works.

I'm also confused when I see threads like this. For dev work I've yet to try a distro that didn't "just work". The only real friction I've run into is the tradeoff between stability versus package freshness but that's going to be a tradeoff with any software environment.

Re: Apple Exclaves

#180

Post by adamtaylor_13 » Mon, Mar 10, 2025, 10:30 PM UTC

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 one of the most technically-inclined people I know in my personal social circle (not true in my professional circle.) I'd even probably go so far as to label myself a "hacker". But I do care about UX (which Apple nails). I do care about convenience (which Apple nails.) And I do care about privacy (which, and I know I'll get flak for this, Apple _also nails_ when compared to any other device on the market that isn't explicitly marketed to developers.)

However, despite being an actual software engineer, I'm no security researcher. I don't understand kernels or privilege elevation or anything deeper than the UNIX shell I work in. So it's nice to have a system that's 99% safe by default, but still allows me to run crons, or programmatically open/modify things, and generally script my machine to look and behave the way I want.

Apple is the perfect middle-ground for people like me. Just because you can't fiddle with a kernel hardly makes this a "hood-welded-shut" machine. There are processes on my Windows machine that I'm not allowed to kill even as an administrator. I can `kill -9` whatever the hell I want on my Mac.

There's a very large group of people who operate like me, and are even less technical than I am, but love things like Keyboard Maestro or Apple scripts which allow them to tweak little things. Windows has no comparison and as far as I've witnessed it's one of the most frustrating operating systems in existence. Most people do not have the time or desire to run Linux. So, you are left with Apple which nails several of selling points that no other ecosystem nails.

That's why people, including "hackers", are enthusiastic about this "hood-welded-shut" system.