Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple Prototypes and Corporate Secrets Are for Sale Online–If You Know Where

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 54 posts

Re: Apple Prototypes and Corporate Secrets Are for Sale Online–If You Know Where

#21

Post by oefrha »

talldayo wrote: post #5
krackers wrote: post #3

>chaining together a dozen dilapidated second-generation iPhone SEs and harnessing Apple's Live Text optical character-recognition feature to find possible inventory tags This is the second time I've read about an iPhone OCR rack https://findthatmeme.com/blog/2023/01/08/image-stacks-and-ip... Is this still state of the art in terms of local OCR?

I think Tesseract is the smarter/faster/less obnoxious choice if you're not trying to parse weird meme text like the blog is doing. There's almost certainly a better paid option available in our enlightened AI age, but I don't even think you'd need AI for this use-case.

Last time I used tesseract (a year ago?) it’s still pretty useless if your text isn’t on a clean background. It doesn’t even come close to Apple’s proprietary on-device OCR.

Re: Apple Prototypes and Corporate Secrets Are for Sale Online–If You Know Where

#23

Post by tomcam »

grishka wrote: post #17

> After he evaluated the Time Capsule's contents, Bryant notified Apple about his findings, and the company's London security office eventually asked him to ship the Time Capsule back. > Bryant again reported his findings to Apple and returned the Mac Mini to them. Why the hell did he do that?! It's, like, the worst thing one can possibly do with these kinds of devices. Just publish stuff that doesn't have anyone's p…

Because he didn’t want the heavy hand of Apple’s legal department ruining his life

Re: Apple Prototypes and Corporate Secrets Are for Sale Online–If You Know Where

#24

Post by The_SamminAter »

Would you be willing to publish the iOS OCR server you made? It would be greatly useful in some of my products, as as you’ve noted other options have either low-quality results (tesseract, some cloud-based solutions) or are expensive in comparison for large amounts of images (most cloud-based solutions). That and it’d allow some of us to put our old phones to use.

Re: Apple Prototypes and Corporate Secrets Are for Sale Online–If You Know Where

#25

Post by grishka »

tomcam wrote: post #23
grishka wrote: post #17

> After he evaluated the Time Capsule's contents, Bryant notified Apple about his findings, and the company's London security office eventually asked him to ship the Time Capsule back. > Bryant again reported his findings to Apple and returned the Mac Mini to them. Why the hell did he do that?! It's, like, the worst thing one can possibly do with these kinds of devices. Just publish stuff that doesn't have anyone's p…

Because he didn’t want the heavy hand of Apple’s legal department ruining his life

First of all, he could release it anonymously. Second, what law or contract would he be breaking anyway? An NDA with Apple that he never signed? Sure there is a person who breached an NDA in relation to the proprietary information contained in these devices, but that person is whomever was tasked with decommissioning them before resale.

Re: Apple Prototypes and Corporate Secrets Are for Sale Online–If You Know Where

#26

Post by katbyte »

grishka wrote: post #25
tomcam wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because he didn’t want the heavy hand of Apple’s legal department ruining his life

First of all, he could release it anonymously. Second, what law or contract would he be breaking anyway? An NDA with Apple that he never signed? Sure there is a person who breached an NDA in relation to the proprietary information contained in these devices, but that person is whomever was tasked with decommissioning them before resale.

You do realize some people have morals?

Why WOULD he release it at all?

Re: Apple Prototypes and Corporate Secrets Are for Sale Online–If You Know Where

#27

Post by ranger_danger »

oefrha wrote: post #21
talldayo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Tesseract is the smarter/faster/less obnoxious choice if you're not trying to parse weird meme text like the blog is doing. There's almost certainly a better paid option available in our enlightened AI age, but I don't even think you'd need AI for this use-case.

Last time I used tesseract (a year ago?) it’s still pretty useless if your text isn’t on a clean background. It doesn’t even come close to Apple’s proprietary on-device OCR.

There is a whole page on their site dedicated to methods for improving the accuracy: https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/ImproveQuality.html

I think most frontends to tesseract employ a lot of these methods and maybe more... but trying to use tesseract directly can indeed be difficult without extra processing of the image first.

Re: Apple Prototypes and Corporate Secrets Are for Sale Online–If You Know Where

#28

Post by PradeetPatel »

katbyte wrote: post #26
grishka wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, he could release it anonymously. Second, what law or contract would he be breaking anyway? An NDA with Apple that he never signed? Sure there is a person who breached an NDA in relation to the proprietary information contained in these devices, but that person is whomever was tasked with decommissioning them before resale.

You do realize some people have morals? Why WOULD he release it at all?

Seconded, there's no tangible nor financial benefit to him for releasing the information to the world. Also: how would publishing the data "make the world a better place"?

At the same time it'll incur a non trivial amount of reputational and professional risk.

Re: Apple Prototypes and Corporate Secrets Are for Sale Online–If You Know Where

#29

Post by grishka »

katbyte wrote: post #26
grishka wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, he could release it anonymously. Second, what law or contract would he be breaking anyway? An NDA with Apple that he never signed? Sure there is a person who breached an NDA in relation to the proprietary information contained in these devices, but that person is whomever was tasked with decommissioning them before resale.

You do realize some people have morals? Why WOULD he release it at all?

Morals towards faceless corporations that would do anything and everything to keep their profits growing indefinitely? No, I don't realize why anyone would have those.

Re: Apple Prototypes and Corporate Secrets Are for Sale Online–If You Know Where

#30

Post by grishka »

PradeetPatel wrote: post #28
katbyte wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize some people have morals? Why WOULD he release it at all?

Seconded, there's no tangible nor financial benefit to him for releasing the information to the world. Also: how would publishing the data "make the world a better place"? At the same time it'll incur a non trivial amount of reputational and professional risk.

> Also: how would publishing the data "make the world a better place"?

For example, schematics of Apple devices would help people fix them on a deeper level than Apple wants (Apple doesn't do board-level repair, one 3-cent component fails and you're getting your entire motherboard replaced). Diagnostic software would help with that too. Documentation about any artificial limitations Apple imposes on these devices for its own profit, like part pairing, would make these limitations easier to bypass. Documentation about software or proprietary network protocols would help with adversarial interoperability. Even documentation on manufacturing techniques might be useful for someone building hardware — if not to copy, then to learn from it.

Post reply on HN