Hacker News Reader

Comment by jb1991 | Hacker News Reader

jb1991

>Yeah, extra work for overworked IT departments. I'm sure they'll be happy to add extra work they dont have to do.

But at the benefit of less-burdened security teams, and greatly enhanced peace of mind for users and info-sensitive organizations? You can argue it's taking something highly risky like security and shifting those man hours to something not as threatening.

View on HN

Most Security Depts were just fine with HDD/ssd destruction. With new apple machines there is no possibility of this.

But security is about more than what you do at the end of a machine’s ownership, it’s all the things you have to consider while the machine is out in the world with very sensitive information on it. And now those security departments have much less to worry about because of this security architecture in the chip.

As the sibling commenter points out, this should also result in less waste as those drives do not need to be destroyed if the device is properly unlocked.

What information would be recoverable without the storage device? ROM dumps? I doubt the majority of these computers are running any super secret firmware and if they are I assume there would be extra precautions taken when its EoL.

I'm talking about machines in active use that are out in the world, with their owners -- security teams have much less to worry about than they used to, as the modern Apple security architecture takes much of the burden off them.

The problem isn’t retiring devices it is stolen or lost devices. Anything that makes it harder for thieves or protects my data is a huge win for me.

> With new apple machines there is no possibility of this.

It isn't necessary to destroy the physical media anymore, so that reduction in e-waste is fine with me. Just properly erase the device by clicking the button in settings.

And there is a perfectly secure way of having FileVault always on by default, and by rotating the keys, you are effectively "destroying" all the data on them anyway, with the bonus of not physically harming anything.

Unless, cryptography itself is broken... which would bring much wider-scale problems than destroying information on old drives anyway.

Without activation lock thieves would be more included to steal MacBooks. I’m all for making it impossible for them to use stolen devices.

They steal them anyway tho.

The world changes and so do procedures.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com