Hacker News Reader

Comment by owow123 | Hacker News Reader

"On a technical level..."

Sorry, what? Does buying a device from Apple contractually oblige me to turn on the phone and agree to the EULA on "first run"? What about second hand markets?

What if I was smart / tooled up enough to replace the Iphone flash storage with my own OS (without running "first run")?

At what "technical level" would what your saying make any sense? Because it seems far more like a "contractual condition of purchase" (I appear to have made that term up) issue vs a "technical" issue to me.

View on HN

By technical level I meant that the security chip only allows admin users to change the security level to one that allows booting linux, and in order to create admin users, you need to accept the EULA. Also see my reply to your sibling comment.

How much this mechanism enforced by the SEP can be circumvented with physical access by e.g. desoldering some components and replacing them with alternatives, I don't know. If the SEP is located on the main M1 SoC, you will probably have a hard time though.

Also note that this thread is talking about laptops, not phones.

> By technical level I meant that the security chip only allows admin users to change the security level to one that allows booting linux, and in order to create admin users, you need to accept the EULA

Hmm, again a "theory" - its a software limit not a hardware one. If I could pwn apples root account that statement would not hold true (I dont write exploits against Apple, I dont know what's "state of the art").

My initial comment was to point out the fact "at a technical level" is a silly comment, at a "technical level" there is likely to always be > 0 vulnerabilities so you are wrong (hence current Apple root access on Iphones through "jail breaking")

> Also note that this thread is talking about laptops, not phones.

Ironically Iphone is probably harder than a laptop, I moved the goal posts against myself (see latest M1/M2 kernel upstream work as evidence of that) - which I appreciate is annoying, so sorry for that!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com