orvtech

About 7 years ago it was the most affordable USB controller that identify them self as a HID device that I could find to brute force the EFI lock on a MacBook Pro https://orvtech.com/atacar-efi-pin-macbook-pro-en.html

It was really easy to setup and start pushing code to it

> ...Going forward, we will be building an option to opt out of using this partner ID...

One should be opted out by default and the option should be build to opt in.

Agree is not a "Solution" but it does not has the impact that most people are imagining.

I am just curious, what would be the right way for companies to tackle this, how would they know who is the family of a regime official for example? Most people's comments seem to be aimed at Adobe instead of the complexity that is dealing with this executive order.

Students will still have access to the software via other means as usual, the real impact would be on cloud services I guess

Yup but lets be hones that does not count for side business (rebuscarse) which is often not declared/measured.

How many of them can actually buy a license with a national average salary of $17 a month?

So, inflation?

lovely, I wonder how much the company that did this for them charged

I'll keep tipping in cash, thank you.

It is not the same traffic pattern, Uber sees a regular stream of request keeping their caches warm, Yes they might see 2X or 3X spikes every now and them but in proportion these are smaller than the spikes that the IRS will see today.

As a Venezuelan I welcome these measures. Petro coin would not have helped the people and it was meant to launder money.

Also it is a lie that is backed by PDVSA's oil [1].

[1] https://www.caracaschronicles.com/2018/02/27/petro-truly-bac...

It is worth to note that Venezuela is an oil producer country that used to sell electricity to Brazil, Guyana and Colombia.

They did it for the iCloud lock which can be circumvented by automatically rebooting the Mac every X tries.

I think so. The correct procedure would have been to assign another iCloud account and assign your self another PIN (lock it with your own PIN)... Then reformat it

The buyer tried this but he purchased it from one of his contractors so they did not do anything on writing.

The message on the first lock screen (iCloud padlock) read "Devuelve me la laptop y te devuelvo el dinero" which means "Give me back the laptop and I will return your money".

I did a low level reformat `dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sdd` with the hard drive mounted on another machine before noticing that he seller had locked theachine EFI remotely.

Well saw a spike in traffic to my site and traced the source to HN... Let's hope the migration from WordPress to Pelican pays out.

As mentioned by some of you this is from early 2013 but the code still works. Furthermore it has been tweaked (the timeouts and keypress duration) to be compatible with most Macs yet as efficient as possible.

I also did an iCloud Padlock version http://orvtech.com/ataque-fuerza-bruta-pin-icloud-en.html but it takes way longer.

I am working on a version that using a Raspberry Pi + Arduino should work on any BIOS, EFI, OR PIN lock for that matter.

Leaving politics and ideology aside, there are precedents to consider... back in 2012 Malaysia had a similar situation but the outage was wider and more pronounced.

A different precedent is the fact that phishing sites for social networks have been found on Venezuela's government-operated ISP servers not that long a go http://orvtech.com/en/general/gobierno-venezolano-elecciones...

go on... I mean do we know their IPs? they could easily move to amazon and not provide any distinguishable Browser ID, etc..

This might take more time than my previous Teensy project "Attacking the EFI PIN Lock" but I do understand that there are people that don't want to lose the content of their hard drive so this mechanism might work for them.

TBH I would pay full price. I just want to have a laptop that comes with linux out of factory.

PD: off-topic, I am tempted to get a cheap chromebook and install linux on it. I am currently researching

Now all we need are ultrabooks with linux

yeah, it failed for mee too a couple of times. I also got an error from Facebook twice. Probably one of their carriers or a CND issue

I did a little video on this a couple of weeks a go with a mini how to for Fedora users https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4766611

less talky talky more coding, I will supply coffee

This is awesome! now lets get some sweet Tux Racer or Mario Kart going! (please?)

This is the same Arduino sketch I used to brute-force the EFI Lock but I have implemented a set of conditional loops to wait the 1, 5 and 15 minutes cycles that the iCloud Lock PIN implements. I still use the Teensy 3 for automate this attack which gets done with minimal intervention, just plug it and thats it.

This is specially useful for those who dont have an apple store nearby or those who just dont want to deal with "The Geniuses".

Initially I though this lock resided on the disk only, specially since it had a nice UI. I thought "this cant be the bios"

It is a link of this chains of bad decisions but I did not wanted the information to be recovered in any way.

Testdisk managed to recover most information except that some part of the GPT were corrupted.