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Comment by loteck | Hacker News Reader

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?...

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If he really wanted no one to be reading his tweets he’d be using BluSky or Masto…

Is there more to that thread? I can't read it if it exists, not sure if that is what the parent is talking about? But i don't have a Twitter account anymore, so maybe it's locked?

I don't know what you're seeing. It's a very long thread. Exceptionally good take on the whole thing. Apple has gone way out of their way to try and sell this thing. Above and beyond compared to how I imagine Microsoft or Google would have tackled this.

If your AI model sucks, you have to use other gimmicks to lure customers. That's marketing 101.

Create irrational fear about piracy, push privacy focused products and profits as the sheeple promptly fall for this

I've never seen someone use "sheeple" in an anti-privacy argument.

the most successful sheeple operation is the one the sheeple and the entire world is completely oblivious of it.

jokes aside, this is no different from people selling bunker beds, gold, ammunition, crypto, vpns. It is specifically for the set of gullible people who think they and their data is so important. Reality (except for 10,000 people or so) is, most lives and their 'precious' data is worthless. (I'm not talking about SSN, Bank Accounts -- those are well protected by tech cos HN seem to hate on)

Without being logged into X, you can only see the first post in a thread.

Not even that anymore, all links show is "Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot."

Impossible to see any content.

That's likely due to tracking prevention or protection by your browser because X really, really wants to track you. If you disable the tracking protection and related settings, you may be able to see the single tweet.

Ok that made me spill my coffee.

https://infosec.exchange/ has a ton of infosec people, big names.

https://ioc.exchange/@matthew_d_green - And he's there BTW :)

Or maybe (gasp!) a blog?

These two tweets stand out for me:

> Ok there are probably half a dozen more technical details in the blog post. It’s a very thoughtful design. 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.

and

> And of course, keep in mind that super-spies aren’t your biggest adversary. For many people your biggest adversary is the company who sold you your device/software. This PCC system represents a real commitment by Apple not to “peek” at your data. That’s a big deal.

I'd prefer things stay on the device but at least this is a big commitment in the right direction - or in the wrong direction but done better than their competitors, I'm not sure which.

Thanks for the link.

> As best I can tell, Apple does not have explicit plans to announce when your data is going off-device for to Private Compute. You won't opt into this, you won't necessarily even be told it's happening. It will just happen. Magically.

Presumably it will be possible to opt out of AI features entirely, i.e. both on-device and off-device?

Why would a device vendor not have an option for on-device AI only? iOS 17 AI features can be used today without iCloud.

Hopefully Apple uses a unique domain (e.g. *.pcc.apple.com) that can be filtered at the network level.

You would have to activate a clearly LLM-powered software feature and have internet access. I don't know if settings will appear to disable this, but you could imagine it would be the case. This isn't just siphoning off all your data at random.

Would Spotlight be considered a "clearly LLM-powered software feature"? Will there be an option for "non-AI Spotlight"? Disabling dozens of software features, or identifying all apps which might use LLM services, is a daunting proposition. It would be good to have a PCC kill switch, which makes opt-in usage meaningful, rather than forced.

Privacy "consent" is fundamentally broken. We've moved from "we're doing whatever the fuck we want" to "we're doing whatever the fuck we want, but on paper it's whatever the fuck you expressly asked for, whether you wanted to or not."

If you have no threat model and want to opt out of random features just because... you probably shouldn't use Apple products at all. Or Google or Microsoft.

For years, Apple has a documented set of security policies to disable off-device processing (e.g iCloud, Siri), via MDM / Apple Configurator. Apple also published details needed for enterprise network filtering to limit Apple telemetry, if all you want from Apple servers are software security updates and notifications.

With a hardened configuration, Apple has world-class device security. In time, remote PCC may prove as robust against real-world threats. Until then, it would be good to retain on-device security policy and choice for remote computation.

Apple does not publish details to limit telemetry. Nowhere in MDM or in their docs do they tell you that you can safely block xp.apple.com (telemetry) but not gs.apple.com (boot ticket signing server for updates).

Thanks, both are listed as required for software updates, https://support.apple.com/en-us/101555

Is there a good non-Apple reference for the functions performed by their servers?

Almost certainly you will be able to disable it entirely and hide the UI to re-enable it via provisioning profiles via Apple Configurator 2 or MDM.

This is actually what you have to do now if you don’t want Siri and Mail to leak your address book to Apple.

> if you don’t want Siri and Mail to leak your address book to Apple.

By disabling Siri and iCloud, or other policies?

I think the main reason might be the on-device AI is fairly limited features wise. For Apple to actually offer something useful they would need to switch between device/server constantly and they don't want to limit the product by allowing users to disable going to a server.

With OpenAI calls is different because the privacy point is stronger

"I wonder if Matt realises nobody can read his tweets without a X account?"

https://nitter.poast.org/matthew_d_green/status/180029189724...

Thanks. I wonder how long that service is going to last.

its been around a loong time

> (I wonder if Matt realizes nobody can read his tweets without a X account? Use BlueSky or Masto man)

He actually has an active Mastodon account, but this particular story is not on there (yet): https://ioc.exchange/@matthew_d_green

Inactive since 2 months

You were right until a couple of hours ago. Then this happened: https://ioc.exchange/@matthew_d_green/112597917470493480

Here's the Mastodon thread: https://ioc.exchange/@matthew_d_green/112597849837858606

He's not wrong that, given that you want to do this, this is the best way. The alternative would be to not do it at all (though an opt-out would have been good).

Beyond all the hardware complexity, another attack vector is the network infrastructure.

That is covered in the article.

Threads also is popular.

Probably the mainstream Twitter alternative at this point?

Threads is far from mainstream and just filled with spam and OnlyFans spammers at this point.

weird, i get a bunch of music and programming stuff on my Threads feed. it's not very deep, but what's on the surface is quite nice and not a bunch of almost-porn. Twitters become half porn though

By every metric Threads is mainstream:

a) Top 10 App Store charts in every country.

b) Heavily promoted through Facebook and Instagram.

c) DAUs are higher than X.

That sounds far more like Twitter than Threads. I get so much spam on Twitter now that I hit rate limits reporting it all.

There is a lot of that.

But there is far more.

Kara Swisher is on Threads, for instance.

All good ai researchers are on X. They are not switching to bluesky or masto which are frankly, lame.

You build the machine god all day and somehow find in yourself respect for what Jack let Twitter become?

If you dream of Napoleon, an elephant tooting a horn is a signal to sell.

> nobody can read his tweets without a X account

False; works fine for me logged out or incognito..

I’m on iOS. I can’t see the thread. Incognito or normally.

No, you can't see the thread. You can see the first post, but X took this away [0].

Nitter still works [1]. Also Threadreader (as can be seen linked in Green's tweet).

[0] https://tweetdelete.net/resources/view-twitter-without-accou... [1] https://nitter.poast.org/matthew_d_green

Also can't see the thread.

False

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