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

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

#31

Post by userbinator »

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

Instead, Apple's legal department will now ruin someone else's life --- one of its own employees, most likely.

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

#32

Post by oefrha »

ranger_danger wrote: post #27
oefrha wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know, I tried many things with the photo collection I was working with, including advice from that very page, generally to relatively poor results. (I ended using Apple’s framework on macOS.) The point is tesseract is definitely not “smarter” in any way, at best it’s on par with Apple’s OCR when you hand it very clean text.

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

#33

Post by _boffin_ »

The_SamminAter wrote: post #24

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.

Here's something i've used a few times. It's not using the phone, but rather a mac mini that's sitting in the corner. Quickly made this repo -- mind the mess.

https://github.com/mr-boffin/fruit-native-ocr

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

#34

Post by jjtheblunt »

grishka wrote: post #29
katbyte wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a plainly depraved attitude.

I worked several years within Apple in one core engineering roll, in a sizeable team, and being ethical and moral was a _huge_ part of the engineering culture (at least), both when Steve Jobs was there and after.

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

#35

Post by userbinator »

miki123211 wrote: post #18

This is why solutions like Bitlocker with a good TPM or FileVault are so important. They can essentially guarantee that the disk encryption key will only be released from the security module if the computer is running a fully-trusted and signed OS. Even if you take the drive out of the machine, the data on that drive is completely useless to you. Incidentally, this is also what makes short PINs secure; the TPM conten…

the TPM contents are unreadable, even to a skilled attacker

Depends how "skilled". Nation-state level? Most definitely not. "IC break" services in China? Maybe. AFAIK TPMs are based on similar secure-processor designs as the chips in payment cards and other smartcards, and even those with enough determination and $$$, or the right equipment, will get you through.

Here's an old but quite thorough discussion of the techniques involved: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-630.pdf

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

#36

Post by toast0 »

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.

I'm sure there's plenty of copyright violation in uploading a dump.

It's definitely fixed in tangible form, so it's just a matter of what qualifies, but lots of things do.

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

#37

Post by userbinator »

epakai wrote: post #15

Some of these developer devices get 'destroyed' and sold as scrap. dosdude1 has restored some of these kinds of devices to working order. There's pretty neat video of the restorations: ARM Apple Silicon Developer Transition Kit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reQq8fx4D0Q iPod Touch dev board: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLCt6oHPTQM The PCB repair technique for the DTK is pretty cool on its own.

That first video appeared on HN with some discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40422359

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

#38

Post by grishka »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #34
grishka wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a plainly depraved attitude. I worked several years within Apple in one core engineering roll, in a sizeable team, and being ethical and moral was a _huge_ part of the engineering culture (at least), both when Steve Jobs was there and after.

Engineering culture maybe. But I take issue with the management and its goals.

As a long time an app developer (mostly Android, but I've seen my iOS coworkers deal with Apple, and I released one somewhat popular Mac app while refusing to get a developer account), I find it very disrespectful how Apple tries its best to forcibly insert itself between the users and the developers and then acts like they totally played an important role in forming that relationship. Then there's the fact that the app store policies ruin the internet as a whole. Because Apple, in its infinite wisdom, not only reviews apps on their technical merits, but if the app is for an online service, it also reviews service itself. They would totally reject a client app for something that they don't like ToS of.

Speaking of the Mac app I made, Apple is making it harder with every macOS release to run apps from "unidentified" developers. No good technical reason for that. No good technical reason for taking away the "all developers" option from the security settings either (I know that it still can be set with a terminal command). A system can be made reasonably secure without the whole security model being centralized around one self-appointed unquestionably trusted party yet Apple chose the centralized approach.

The whole EU DMA thing... I don't even know where to start. This "core technology fee" is absolutely ridiculous. The fact that every binary that is to be "sideloaded" has to go through Apple is also ridiculous. It's pretty clear what the EU regulators meant with this act, yet Apple keeps trying to work around it to keep as much of its rent-seeking as possible. All while acting like a kicked puppy.

Then there's their stance on adversarial interoperability, see Beeper.

Then there's also this whole parts pairing thing on iOS devices. Again, no good technical reason. Maybe it's to prevent stolen iPhones used for parts, but stolen iPhones are still used for parts. I'm a software guy, but for lots more complaints about artificially created hardware-related problems see Louis Rossmann: https://www.youtube.com/@rossmanngroup

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

#40

Post by egorfine »

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.

I have tried to use Tesseract to extract serial numbers from photos of iPhone boxes and had a 100% failure rate.

I have then employed a multimodal LLM and had a 100% success rate.

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