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Apple’s T2 security chip jailbreak

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Re: Apple’s T2 security chip jailbreak

#311

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You don't care that you can't change out the SSD, but you will care when you take your dead laptop to the Genius Bar and they tell you it's going to be cheaper to buy a new one and that your data is already gone.

All I care about is having a high-quality *nix machine. Right now, a MacBook Pro with macOS fits that bill well: the calculus may very well change, on both the hardware and OS side, when x86 is replaced with ARM64, though.

macOS on Apple silicon is just as UNIX as your Intel Mac was, at least at the moment.

Re: Apple’s T2 security chip jailbreak

#312

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Nvidia gpus require proprietary drivers that are only provided for specific distros and are only supported for a small amount of time. And if you find any bug well tough luck, nobody can help you. For a work setup that you rely on someone else in the company for support they might be fine but I wouldn't recommend them for a personal setup. All this is on top of the fact that they still don't support Wayland and you h…

10 years of support on the latest driver branch (current branch goes back to the 600 series, and the 400 series was dropped in June) doesn’t exactly seem like a small amount of time.

Yes that's what they say officially. You'd be hard pressed to run any of those old cards without issues.

Re: Apple’s T2 security chip jailbreak

#313
post #273
post #233

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Don't know why you were downvoted, it's common knowledge that state actors can break Apple's encryption. Apple makes a huge show of refusing to break their own encryption but with a subpoena they legally have to provide the encrypted data and then state actors just go elsewhere for cracking.

citation needed

These discussions always conflate iCloud data, including device backups, with on-device access. It is possible to use iOS without iCloud.

Re: Apple’s T2 security chip jailbreak

#314

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But isn't the repair being harder a net-benefit for the consumer? It's not like the repair is arbitrarily harder. It's harder because the repairs in question deal with the TouchID sensor and the SSD, like you said. I wouldn't want someone being able to access my data just by replacing a component on the computer that then bypassed all the security systems present on the computer. It's the same situation as when repla…

"You should have had a backup" is not an acceptable excuse for not having a data recovery mechanism. Furthermore, full disk encryption is not bypassable in the way you suggest. Your login password is (supposed to be) the key material for the encryption, which is stored off-device, preferably in your head. In other disk encryption systems that are not locked to a particular encryption chip, if you take the disk out of…

>Your login password is (supposed to be) the key material for the encryption, which is stored off-device, preferably in your head.

This is referencing the Touch Bar repair which means that the user has encrypted their drive with Touch ID. The only reason any repair would be harder is because the Touch ID sensor is paired to the secure enclave. The same goes for the SSD. Without the key, as you stated, you shouldn't be able to access the data so I don't see how that's any different than "having a data recovery mechanism". A data recovery mechanism shouldn't exist if you don't have the proper keys.

Re: Apple’s T2 security chip jailbreak

#315
post #250

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Because a hardware vendor telling you what you can and can't do with the stuff you own is immoral.

Then don’t buy it? It’s not like Apple is the only vendor. Kind of hard to have diversity/options if everyone keeps insisting all vendors do everything the same way.

Or instead of that, people can engage in the entirely legal act of both purchasing it, and the entirely legal act of hacking it.

Customers have a legal right to do basically anything they want with something that they own.

Re: Apple’s T2 security chip jailbreak

#316

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Why do you believe it's moral for you to do work which is making people's data less secure, helping law authority crack iPhones, etc?

It's work which is enabling freedom , something that people are unfortunately giving up far too much of these days...

I think that over-simplifies the idea too much. "Freedom" on its own isn't a constant positive. We don't give people the "freedom" to murder each other or modify their cars in whatever ways they want. In fact, some people choose Apple because it doesn't provide them the freedom to do anything they want which includes breaking their devices in ways that they don't know. Having that freedom isn't necessarily a net positive for some people.

Re: Apple’s T2 security chip jailbreak

#317
post #139
post #84

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> Apple keyboards break down after several years with the touchpad and butterfly keyboard disasters are even unusable afresh. You cannot replace anything, and are way overpriced. I have 10 and 15 year old iBooks and MacBooks and MacBook Pros with intact keyboards... You mixed the issue with the butterfly BS keyboards in the past 2-3 years with the old Apple keyboards (which didn't just "break down"). The resale value…

> with the butterfly BS keyboards in the past 2-3 years Sadly 4 years now, they started in 2016. It's the main issue blocking me from buying another MBP - this keyboard broke when it was already out of warranty, I really don't want to risk it again.

I have a 2016 Macbook Pro that is out of warranty and Apple is replacing the keyboard at no cost. Unless you broke the keyboard through abuse, any keyboard issues present as a result of "BS keyboards" are covered by Apple.

Re: Apple’s T2 security chip jailbreak

#318
post #142

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Some of the people here can’t understand that some people have different opinions. I don’t care that I can’t easily change the SSD. If that were important to me, I would buy a different laptop. I don’t consider my MacBook Pro to be working against me, at all.

You don't care that you can't change out the SSD, but you will care when you take your dead laptop to the Genius Bar and they tell you it's going to be cheaper to buy a new one and that your data is already gone.

No, I don't. I have backups of my data and, while it's not ideal that they can't swap out the SSD without swapping out the logic board, I don't care how they get it working again as long as they do get it working and Apple, at least in my experience, has been way more solid than any other computer manufacturer.

Re: Apple’s T2 security chip jailbreak

#319

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I'm a user on a 2019 16-inch MBP (MacBookPro16,1) who hopes to move to Linux as my base OS on this hardware full-time over the next 12 months. ( https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux ) This is because I honestly cannot find a laptop with the combination of 64+ GB RAM, a non-NDIVIA GPU (edit: to clarify, this is because of NVIDIA's notoriously bad compatibility with Linux), and other premium hardware aspects like…

> I honestly cannot find a laptop with the combination of 64 GB RAM, a non-NDIVIA GPU, and other premium hardware like its market-leading trackpad at this time Only 14”, and perhaps less performant, but here is this one: https://puri.sm/products/librem-14/ .

It's trackpad probably isn't as good as that of the MBP.

Re: Apple’s T2 security chip jailbreak

#320
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people buy iPhones / Macs because of the (intended) security provided by things like the T2 chip.

Such people would have no issue if they were to be provided with a 20 character secret code that allows rooting and fine grained security control. They would simply not enter it and rely on Apple's decisions for them. This pretty much kills the whole "intended" security line, the intent is user control.

You're completely ignoring the fact that a large part of the user base of these products explicitly buys these products because they don't have these options. Windows attempted to add UAC control to the OS so that people wouldn't install random files from websites without being notified of the changes being made and browsers tried to add systems where users had to go into the options and turn off protections in Windows Defender to be able to install. What was the end result? These websites just started offering tutorials that showed users how to turn off those protections and bypass them completely. If you give people a way to bypass security, they'll do it in order to get to what they think they want. The problem is that most people don't understand the unintended consequences of those actions. That's the entire reason why people trust Apple to make those decisions on their behalf.
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