2010 Unibody Macbook schematic [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

2010 Unibody Macbook schematic [pdf]

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It all started with a guy who came to ##apple and asked for help with repairing his computer.

Things... escalated quickly from there, mini-Streisand effect and heavy use of banhammer included.

http://pastebin.com/8CJLkdwm

Probably the worst possible way Branes could have handled what would have been an insignificant incident to most.

#apple on where?

##apple, FreeNode.

EDIT: +m has been lifted. Nobody is mentioning the issue at the moment.

Looking at the log: thanks for reminding me why I no longer do IRC. All the banhammer dramas, all the time.

(This has nothing to do with information leakage or Apple.)

I'm not familiar with this channel in question, but I feel that my experiences on Freenode have been very positive as far as online communities go. Most people are still helpful and civil.

Though it's unfortunate that many channels, in general, seem to get corrupted and grow stale when carbon copies of this Brane-type of channel operator become part of the 'ruling party'.

>Looking at the log: thanks for reminding me why I no longer do IRC.

Precisely my feeling. It's been at least 12 years yet seeing that stereotypical smiley self-importance took me right back.

There are plenty of channels that have no operator and thus none of that banning, etc. drama (and there are of course +something channels, which cannot have any modes on them or modes on nicks inside the channel and thus always operate on the everyone decides for themselves who is annoying and who isn't principle).

It's a Freenode channel, unsurprisingly. Try IRCing elsewhere.

> All the banhammer dramas, all the time.

Thank god there's none of that on HN.

We got hellbans. Much cleaner.

I wonder how hellbanning would work on IRC. Seems like it could be brilliant.

A server could easily implement it, there must be some plugins that do exactly that. Disclaimer: I'm pretty much opposed to any type of hellban except in some very specific circumstances (that wouldn't apply to HN).

Just curious, why do you oppose hellbanning? I find it a rather neat solution, but have little experience with it in general.

I am opposed to hellbanning on hacker news. I believe it hurts our community for the following reasons:

* It lacks transparency - nobody knows who is hellbanned, and why they were hellbanned. There is no appeal.

* It is a crude tool - hellbanning somebody fails to take into account that they could reform their behavior, or just have made some bad decisions in the heat of an argument.

* There have been cases I have seen where useful or interesting comments have been lost because the poster is hellbanned. This demonstrates that it doesn't just have theoretical flaws - it actually is causing us to lose valuable content.

> There is no appeal.

Someone who is hellbanned can come back with a new account. Or, if they feel it was a mistake they could write a short email explaining this and asking for an unban.

> useful or interesting comments have been lost because the poster is hellbanned.

What? The content is still there.

> Someone who is hellbanned can come back with a new account. Or, if they feel it was a mistake they could write a short email explaining this and asking for an unban.

Um, are we talking about the same word here?

How can they do that? The whole point of a hell-ban is that for them everything looks normal, just the way it should be if nothing had happened.

Unless they happen to stumble upon it (viewing from another IP, maybe a friend emailed them), there's no reason to assume any action at all is required.

That is my whole point: the useless waste of time in order to even find out you were hell-banned.

As soon as you start noticing your comments haven't been getting any replies or upvotes for a couple of days: start getting nervous. You might've tripped a mod, they are often fair, but they are also human, and that's a couple of days of comments that the large "showdead=0" majority of HN simply hasn't seen.

Many people who see hellbanned posts check the history of the poster. If they can't see a reason for the ban they try to let the person know. (Another reason why it's a good idea to include an email address in your profile information.)

While HN HellBanning has banned some people unfairly it also bans a lot of spam and disruptive trolls.

I appreciate that we have different attitudes here. I'm happy with a small false-positive rate.

I guess people could check their comments using incognito mode; maybe there's even a plug-in to do that?

I see your point why it's not as hurtful as it could be. In practice, 99% of the time it isn't. I am of the opinion, however, that there's time-tested tried and true more classic modding and adminning solutions, that are just as effective, that do not take significantly more effort either.

And that's the thing, except for the few rare cases I've outlined (IMO so rare that it's cost effective to just special-case it in code, rather than making an easy admin button for it), it's just not necessary to waste people's time like that.

One other aspect in which it actually performs worse: if you get banned, you get noticed. so you know you did something wrong. and you can work to fix this. the amount of people for which this "slap on the wrists" actually works, is actually a lot larger than the amount of sociopaths that will never ever learn and actually require hellbanning and other tricks to get rid of.

I am opposed as it is implemented in some cases algorithmicly and I've been hellbanned for using the wrong brand name in an on topic comment.

I don't use brand names in comments anymore.

Looking at my threads page I found that I lied: I used to brand-name today.

I suck.

And brands are unescapable....

Instead of writing out all my own thoughts on the matter (I've did before on HN, but I don't know how to find those particular 2 or 3 comments), this article pretty much covers it: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-h...

The only exception (and this might be in the article as well, but I'll mention it because it's IMO the only exception) is when you've got a recurring troll, one that gets banned, and IP-banned, but returns through a new proxy every time. At that point, wasting as much of their time as possible is pretty much your only defence. Although in my own experience, even then, slow-banning works just as well if not better. And I've experimented with a number of very novel deterrence methods when I was forum-admin on a (sometimes) rather trollish forum, but only against the truly notorious bad apples. That place, it was of utmost importance to be as light-handed with modding as possible, because drama is really sticky.

In all other situations you are just wasting the valuable time of normal people. Normal people you may disagree with, or ones that are really really difficult. But some of our favourite hackers and open source coders are really really difficult people. If you hell-ban someone, they might not notice for a few months, spending effort on their posts, you really burned a bridge there.

And don't forget you will make mistakes, somebody makes one thoughtless tasteless (awful) joke, gets hellbanned, continues contributing their valuable insights like nothing happened (because they don't know) until they somehow find out (which can take a long time), I have seen this happen on HN, and it is such a terrible waste of the bright minds we have here. That is why I am opposed to hell-bans.

Thanks for explaining. It seems to me that the dynamic would be less problematic on IRC, because it'll be much more quickly apparent that people don't see what you're writing.

I could see it being used as the last step in a series of escalating steps, where a hellban is only used after repeated violations and evading a more regular ban. But now we're getting into levels of rules and bureaucracy that probably aren't worth it.

I'm a little confused here. Is this an official Apple-run IRC channel and Branes is an Apple employee?

No, he's just a little troll op that thinks he knows things.

Plenty more bans are being made. To be fair, the topic itself states: Breaking NDA, asking about warez, hackintosh, unsupported VMs or proprietary information = kickban. Obviously this is proprietary information, so it doesn't belong in ##apple.

To be fair, that was only added 15 minutes after the events in the pastebin. I was there for it.

The response (That will be reported to AppleCare Services. Good luck getting help from an authorised Apple service provider, you'll need it.) reminds me of this blast from the past:

Berkeley laptop thief is scared out of his wits by professor http://boingboing.net/2005/04/20/berkeley-laptop-thie.html

Thief didn't hand over the laptop ... not sure he was scared out of his wits.

Internet Archive version of the transcript, since the link in the article seems to go to a blog that's offline:

http://web.archive.org/web/20050424001416/http://blastradius...

I'm severely tempted to join and start trolling these jerks.

And to think, the Apple ][ shipped with a manual that included schematics for the p/s, keyboard, and motherboard. As a 10 year old geek this manual was gold.

ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/documentation/misc/a2_reference_manual_alt.pdf

So did the original IBM PC BTW.

So now, I will build a Mac Book pro out of old Pentium IIIs and 128MB DIMMs. I knew those spare parts collecting mouse poop in my parent's garage would come in useful.

Why is their Apple logo (printed at the bottom of every page) so horrendously ugly? http://d.pr/i/dCoo

Probably because these were designed to be printed on a plotter, not a conventional printer, and thus line art is the standard.

Tell me - is everyone else as nervous as I am clicking on a .pdf from a .ru domain?

No, but the Apple legal team has been informed about it so you're technically downloading illegal content.

how does what the apple legal team know change the legality of the download?

You're aware that the content is illegal as they have confirmed it - otherwise you might have had doubt

I am aware of no such thing. All I know is that some random person on a random forum claims that some lawyer at Apple claims it's illegal. And even if it was 100% illegal to view in the US, that doesn't say anything about the rest of the world.

The content may have been a civil breach of contract for the originator to disseminate, but you commit no breach nor crime by looking at it, as you have no non-disclosure agreement with Apple.

Quite a few of us probably DO have an active NDA with Apple (e.g. from being a Registered Apple Developer). Though IANAL ,from my reading of the terms viewing the materials shouldn't constitute a breach of the NDA either.

You're not Disclosing anything by downloading it, so I don't think the Non-Disclosure Agreement would apply.

Right. And unless the materials were specifically enumerated, even then, it'd be hard to argue that your NDA for software development would apply to "a service manual I obtained from someone who didn't have the right to distribute".

That might need to be qualified: depending on jurisdiction, just because if you don't have a contract with Apple, you shouldn't necessarily assume you're safe from civil liability (if you use or pass it on to others, at least). Here in England, in some circumstances it's possible to be held liable in Breach of Confidence for passing on information you come across that you know is confidential, even without any kind of pre-existing relationship like a NDA.

(N.B. I have no idea whether that's true anywhere else but England. Also IANAL, this isn't legal advice, etc.)

When it's posted on the front page of a news site, it's hardly confidential any more...

True. I was thinking of the submitter, though - it's not obvious to me that a court would consider a file uploaded to an anonymous file sharing site is part of the public domain (test: 'so generally accessible that it cannot be regarded as confidential') before it reached the front page of hn.

What exactly is "illegal content"?

downvotes? I assumed he was making a joke? I normally try to not comment about voting, but in this instance I'm actually curious whether he was making a joke or not.

Apparently not, I clicked it. After a long wait all I get is a corrupt PDF...uh, oh.

Rendered alright in the Chrome PDF viewer. It did have PRELIMINARY all over it, though.

I don't think many people use Adobe Reader these days, and I am not aware of any serious PDF exploits targeting other clients.

maybe not alot of the hacker news readers .. but alot of regular people do use Adobe Reader ...

Sorry, should have clarified that. I was replying to a question on HN about "everyone else", presumably "everyone else on HN."

I use Chrome to view PDFs, it isolates the process and doesn't support as many "extensions" as reader, so it is much safer. Works very well.

It's the ones you're not aware of that you need to worry about ;)

Apple PDF and Evince/Poppler are vulnerability-prone C/C++ codebases and have had bugs.

Chrome and Firefox builtin PDF readers are your best bet...

Firefox's PDF reader is written using JS.

It's all over the Internet right now.

how big deal is this?

(serious question)

Apple Legal is just going to C&D them and the leaker.

You can't stop the signal. But to answer the original question, this really isn't very interesting.

Not a big deal at all. Schematics only show how to connect the various bits and pieces. Maybe there is one or two things that were secret before, but anyone with a little time, a scope, a voltage meter and some time could have figured out how most of it connected anyway.

And they also show what those bits and pieces are, which is actually quite a big deal, because the components often have non-helpful labels on them (like "Apple" "some internal ID"), which makes it almost impossible to find datasheets on them or source them (say you want to replace a component on the board that you suspect is broken).

So not really sure what would have been a big deal if not this..

I don't think this is a big deal at all. It's not like you can build a Mac from scratch just by following those schematics.

At most they might be useful for someone looking to do reverse engineering.

China.

What other than repair is this really good for?

Snitches get stitches.

I realized this is getting downvoted because I didn't put it up in the IRC thread, where I originally attempted.

An uptight taddle-tale handles something poorly in IRC. Completely textbook.

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