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Good luck. It’s much easier to talk about it. The last open OS I have seen reach a semi-mainstream level of adoption was started in the early 90’s, more than 30 years ago, by some Linus guy.
And (basically) nobody running linux is individually verifying the source code of every little piece of software that goes into it (maybe Linus is), so you're still trusting someone .
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I don’t think that’s completely fair. It basically puts Apple in the same bucket as Google or OpenAI. Google obviously tracks everything you do for ads, recommendations, AI, you name it. They don’t even hide it, it’s a core part of their business model. Apple, on the other hand, has made a pretty serious effort to ensure that no employee can access your data on these AI systems. That’s hugely different! They’re going…
What makes you think that internal access control at Apple is any better than Google's, Microsoft's or OpenAI's? Google employees have long reported that you can't access user data with standard credentials, for example. Also, what makes you think that Apple's investments on chip design and OS is superior to Google's? Google is known for OpenTitan and other in-house silicon projects. It's also been working in secure…
There are multiple verified stories on the lengths Apple goes internally to keep things secret.
I saw a talk years ago about (I think) booting up some bits of the iCloud infrastructure, which needed two different USB keys with different keys to boot up. Then both keys were destroyed so that nobody knows the encryption keys and can't decrypt the contents.
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I don’t think that’s completely fair. It basically puts Apple in the same bucket as Google or OpenAI. Google obviously tracks everything you do for ads, recommendations, AI, you name it. They don’t even hide it, it’s a core part of their business model. Apple, on the other hand, has made a pretty serious effort to ensure that no employee can access your data on these AI systems. That’s hugely different! They’re going…
It's completely fair, because regardless of third party audits, chips, etc, there are backdoors right along the line, that are going to provide Apple and the government with secret legal access to your data. They can simply go to a secret court, receive a secret judgment, and be authorised to secretly view your data. Does anyone really think this is not already the case? There is no transparency. A licensed third par…
Build your system so that it can't be decrypted, don't log anything etc. Mullvad has been doing this with VPNs and law enforcement has tested it - there's nothing for them to get.
Same has been proven with Apple not allowing FBI to open an iPhone, because it'd set a precedent. Future iPhone versions were made so that it's literally impossible for even Apple to open a locked iPhone.
There's no reason why they wouldn't go to same lengths on their private cloud compute. It's the one thing they can do that Google can't.
Some good comments on this from cryptographer Matt Green here: https://x.com/matthew_d_green/status/1800291897245835616?t=C... (I wonder if Matt realizes nobody can read his tweets without a X account? Use BlueSky or Masto man) Edit: here's his thread combined https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1800291897245835616.html?...
If he really wanted no one to be reading his tweets he’d be using BluSky or Masto…
https://ioc.exchange/@matthew_d_green - And he's there BTW :)
I have a big question here. Who is this for? Dont get me wrong I think it's a great effort. This is some A+ nerd stuff right here. It's speaking my languge. But Im just going to figure out how to turn off "calls home". Cause I dont want it doing this at all. Is this speaking to me so I tell others "apple is the most secure option"? I don't want to tell others "linux" because I don't want to do tech support for that.…
It's for shareholders. Microsoft and Nvidia have a bigger market cap than Apple now, thanks to the AI investor boom. Apple need to show they can be all about AI, too. But Apple have the institutional culture to maintain privacy.
Don't get me wrong, I've always appreciated apples on device ml/AI features, those have always been powerful, interesting and private but these announcements feel very rushed, it's literally a few weeks after Microsoft's announcements.
They've basically done almost exactly what Microsoft announced with a better UX and a pinky promise about privacy. How are they going to pay for all of that compute? Is this going to be adjusted into the price of the iPhones and MacBook? and then a subscription layer is going to be added to continue paying for it? I don't feel comfortable with the fact that my phone is basically extending it's hardware to the cloud. No matter how "private" it is it's just discomforting to know that apple will be doing inference on things seemingly randomly to "extend" compute capabilities.
Also what on earth is apple high on, integrating a third party API into the OS, how does that even make sense. Google was always a separate app, or a setting in safari, you didn't have Google integrated at an OS level heck you don't have that on Android. It feels very discomforting to know that today my phone could phone home to somewhere other than iCloud.
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Private Cloud Compute servers have no persistent storage so there would be nothing to see upon opening the kimono. You'd need some sort of government requested live wire tap thing to harvest the data out of the incoming requests, which might be a different situation. I'm, of course, just some dude on the internet, thinking up a counter-point to this concern, who knows if I am even remotely in the right ballpark.
mandatory 30 day retention policies or something like it
I have a big question here. Who is this for? Dont get me wrong I think it's a great effort. This is some A+ nerd stuff right here. It's speaking my languge. But Im just going to figure out how to turn off "calls home". Cause I dont want it doing this at all. Is this speaking to me so I tell others "apple is the most secure option"? I don't want to tell others "linux" because I don't want to do tech support for that.…
I'm trusting Apple more in this case, they have an incentive to keep things private and according to experts they're doing everything they can to do so.
"Indeed, if you gave an excellent team a huge pile of money and told them to build the best “private” cloud in the world, it would probably look like this." - Matthew D. Green
What are the longer term implications that Apple is doing this on their own hardware and not Nvidia? This seems like a big thing to me, an idiot.
But this is just inference. What did they use to train their foundation models?
And Apple clearly has made some custom server hardware and slapped a ton of them on a board just to do the PCC stuff.
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I mean it was famously tested in 2015 after the San Bernardino attack. Apple didn’t back down [1] and later sued the company who sold the zero-day to the govt to unlock the phone [2]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/14/azimuth...
Also famously tested (and failed) much more recently. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-... Apple shills are the worst.
The thing with cloud and with anything related to it, anything that connects to the internet somehow... is that, unless it's open source and the servers decentralized, you are always trusting SOMEONE. Sure, Apple might make their best to ensure nobody – but them – have access to your data... but Apple controls all the end points. It controls the updates your iPhone receives, it controls the servers where this happens…
I don’t think that’s completely fair. It basically puts Apple in the same bucket as Google or OpenAI. Google obviously tracks everything you do for ads, recommendations, AI, you name it. They don’t even hide it, it’s a core part of their business model. Apple, on the other hand, has made a pretty serious effort to ensure that no employee can access your data on these AI systems. That’s hugely different! They’re going…
I'm trying to understand if this is really possible. I know they claim so but is there any info on how this would prevent Apple from executing different code to what is presented for audit?