rincebrain

Sure, but that'd be a waste.

Part of the reason e.g. Cellebrite is obsessive about not telling people many specifics about their product capabilities outside of NDA is that Apple is quite serious about trying to fix these things, and "we can crack every iPhone before the 14" probably tells them a fair bit about what might have a flaw.

Tools like that lose a lot of value if anyone paying enough attention can infer they exist, even indirectly, like if all the TSA agents you know suddenly switch to Android phones, or some of them tell you not to bring iPhones through security and won't tell you why, or a thousand other vectors for rumors to start.

All it takes is enough rumors for people to say it's enough to not trust any more, and suddenly you've lost a lot of the value of a secret information source.

So if you have a tool like that, where most people don't think it's readily available, the way you probably use it is very sparingly, to keep it that way.

You need to not just force the update, but also forbid using pre-updated ones in migration, since someone might conceivably have an off-for-many-years device they wake up and want to migrate.

The long tail of stupid edge cases is very long indeed.

Evidently you can, though in traditional macOS fashion, you exploit Apple secretly changing the setting for you if you do a magic dance.[1][2]

I've never had a reason to try it, but there's also a remark that 99% of the Macs sold probably don't need to change the system-wide keyboard layout defaults, either...

[1] - https://heylon.ca/how-to-permanently-switch-default-keyboard...

[2] - https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/change-the-system-l...

This feels like it's probably a stupid oversight chain like, keyboard layouts are user-specific data, so they're not decrypted before first unlock/set globally because the machine might have multiple users with different keyboard layouts.

That seems very unlikely if only because Apple probably has the equivalent of big flashing nuclear stockpile grade warning signs internally around anything that involves the phrase "one off firmware release", since they have every interest in convincing any nation-state or anyone else that it would be quite difficult and something they have no interest in to do if they ever try to compel them to make one.

The article mentions that he tried that and it scans as a different character.

This fails if they let you keep your password migrating between devices, though, so you probably need a version somewhere in the middle that flags it as an issue and flags it as not allowing migration without changing the passphrase.

If the data you care about is encrypted with a token locked behind your passcode input, and it's not theoretically brute forceable by being a 4 character numeric only thing, then not easily, no.

Could they produce an update that is bespoke and stops encrypting the next time you unlock, push it to your phone before seizing it, wait for some phone home to tell them it worked, and then grab it?

Perhaps, but the barrier to making Apple do that is much higher than "give us the key you already have", and only works if it's a long planned thing, not a "we got this random phone, unlock it for us".

(It's also something of a mutually-assured destruction scenario - if you ever compel Apple to do that, and it's used in a scenario where it's visibly the case that 'the iPhone was backdoored' is the only way you could have gotten that data, it's game over for people trusting Apple devices to not do that, including in your own organization, even if you somehow found a legal way to compel them to not be permitted to do it for any other organization.)

"My picture gets a call to the police if I use it at my day job" is a hell of a sentence, for example.

I have been in or next to a number of social circles with such missing stairs, where for various reasons people in the groups have decided to not directly acknowledge certain Facts that are known about some members, because it would involve them confronting their hypocrisy.

Someone cheating regularly on their partner, flagrant substance use problems, controlling people who ostracize anyone who doesn't agree with their sometimes insane perspectives...

People will go along with quite a lot to avoid friction, especially as they get older and picking up new social circles becomes higher cost.

It's possibly the most telling thing, when you see what people say is a hard line versus how they actually respond to it.

My recollection of current events at the time was that you were already having a dogshit experience using computers for many common things in the XP era with underpowered video hardware and trying anything complex in a browser, or Flash things with a lot of assets, so it's less forcing escalating a baseline and more recognizing the realities of what people were already expecting in a "good" computer and building thing that could take advantage of that.

I would agree it should have degraded much more gracefully and more readily than it did, but I'm quite confident we hadn't hit the point of minimal returns on improvements in hardware that would be necessary for such an argument yet.

Hell, I probably wouldn't make that argument until large amounts of RAM and VRAM (or unified RAM) are ubiquitous, because so many workloads degrade so badly with too little of either.

Less mythic on SSDs than spinning rust, in my experience.

Not particularly frequent either way, but I have absolutely had models of SSDs where it became clear after a few months of use that a significant fraction of them appeared to be corrupting their internal state and serving incorrect data back to the host, leading to errors and panics.

(_usually_ this was accompanied by read or write errors. But _usually_ is notable when you've spent some time trying to figure out if the times it didn't were a different problem or the same problem but silent.)

There was also the notorious case with certain Samsung spinning rust and dropping data in their write cache if you issued SMART requests...

As far as I can see, no, the author disabled nothing of the sort that he documented.

I suspect that the author's intent is less "I do not view this as a bug" and more "I do not think it's useful to get into angry debates over whether something is a bug". I do not know whether this is a common thing on btrfs discussions, but I have certainly seen debates to that effect elsewhere.

(My personal favorite remains "it's not a data loss bug if someone could technically theoretically write something to recover the data". Perhaps, technically, that's true, but if nobody is writing such a tool, nobody is going to care about the semantics there.)

It was more despised for being a gaping security hole than anything else, as I recall - the things you could do with it were really neat demos, but even back then, I said "I am not loading a random website that can access local things every time I log in".

I would argue that was less that WPF was the wrong life choice and more that Microsoft shouldn't have bent the knee to Intel's antitrust push to say their crap hardware was sufficient. [1]

[1] - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/03/the-vista-capable-de...

I believe the problem here is that that works precisely once, then they stop inviting you to the classified parties.

So as he gets older, the cost/benefit changes, but I believe that's why he hasn't, is that his calculus involves him being the only one this reliable on screaming about what's going on behind closed doors.

I do, generally, think that banning (or legalizing) things in their entirety is often ineffective, and if you just make them entirely and equally illegal/legal you no longer have any levers to stop people making them as toxic as possible. (Look at how insanely pinpoint-targeted at addiction exploitation sports betting has become in the US, for example.)

In this specific case, it's because I don't think you can whack-a-mole things that tickle the addictive feedback loops in people's brains everywhere faster than people can engineer their ways around it or find new ways to exploit things that do those same things without being caught in the laws, so I think you need to both:

- raise the cost of making it too painful for people who aren't self-moderating enough and keep the most lethal edges off it (e.g. ceilings on how much you can spend, making you have to take active action that takes more than a few seconds so you can't impulse-click and blow a fortune on One More Hit, no feedback mechanisms that incentivize spending more when you already spent a lot...)

- limit how harmful it can be to people who are too young and haven't yet learned what it does to them and that they need to be careful (e.g. use something like having access to a credit card you can input on request as a proxy for verifying you're an adult, and try to ensure any of the foam padded Kid Slot Machines(tm) can't be traded in a useful fashion for cash or paid for with cash, even with verification)

In some sense, the original video games with this kind of feedback loop were arcade games - you got a variable amount of reward for your input token, and they had to give you enough to convince you to keep doing it. Microtransactions with lootboxes are just that feedback loop taken to the logical limit, but I don't necessarily think people who hate microtransactions would consider games like that as a similar evil, precisely because, like physical blind boxes, the quantization and scale is so much smaller, and it's so much higher friction to blow a fortune on it.

The problem is that you need humans to run datacenters, and so that puts ceilings on how far away from humans you can put them without the humans no longer being willing to commute there.

And the cost of building all the infra to support humans living in an area that humans are not already populating is enormous.

(Opinions my own, naturally.)

I think they're right, really.

Obviously you need to require enough friction that the experiences are comparable (e.g. no letting someone impulse buy 100 times in half a second without having to re-type their "I am an adult" payment info or something analogous, possibly just a hard ceiling for everyone), but I don't think you can ban everything that touches the same sharp edge, and you can't mandate that parents teach their kids how to handle it.

So I think the best you can do is put hard limits on people's ability to hurt themselves without at least an "are you really sure" check, and maybe something like not allowing cash in the exchange without adult verification so the kids might, at worst, gamble their FunBux they earned playing a game and get burned on having lost a lot of FunBux, rather than their or their parents' cash. (This doesn't stop parents from giving their kids their credit card, but that's not really a problem you can solve...)

I think the reason for that is less that they didn't want to do it and more that they hadn't polished the mechanisms for it.

I've said before that the analogue for these sorts of games is arcade games - where you had to put in currency per unit time of enjoyment, and they had to try to guesstimate play time versus amount they're willing to pay for it and then would go in person to "test" arcades with early versions of games to see if they were wrong.

The internet reduced that feedback cycle to minutes, so we speedran evolution on it.

TBH, I don't see monthly fee games as even in the same category of concern - at least, not in a vacuum. Games with microtransactions, yes, absolutely, but that's true whether it's nominally a pay-once game or not, I think.

I said in another comment, I don't hate the idea of allowing microtransaction/gambling-style mechanics in games as long as they can't involve real currency on either side, if children are the market - not because I think it's great for kids, but because I think you're not going to manage to ban everything that's the same addictive "shape" as those, and allowing people to be exposed to that in a venue they care about, but with foam sword padding so you can't blow actual money on it, is probably a reasonable risk/reward balance.

(You might reasonably argue that this is just going to lead to kids being primed for addictive behaviors as adults, but the only thing that's going to help that is being mindful about it, e.g. education, and nothing short of people the kids respect reinforcing that is going to change that whether the games allow this sort of soft pain or not...and being exposed to something like Vegas naive or primed is going to, I think, have the same outcomes either way if you're not mindful about it.)

I would, I think, probably argue that the problem is less that they're gambling and more that they involve actual money.

I think exposing people to addictive mechanics with guard rails is probably useful for teaching you how you respond to them, before you go to Vegas and blow far more than you budgeted.

In particular, I don't think you're going to ban addictive things faster than people can build them, and I know you can't rely on parents having conversations with kids, so I feel like all you can do is try to remove the whirring buzzsaw of real money incentives and let people learn that it's sharp, but foam sword sharp, where you can't ruin your life permanently (easily) with it.

Both things are true, though.

The fact that gacha games are so popular is _why_ they had enough attention to explicitly ban the most toxic patterns at the time. [1]

There's an interesting question of how far to push the bans, though - "in theory" your goals should probably be "don't let people prey on addictive behaviors" and "minimize people impulse buying more than they can afford", but the latter especially is...very hard to make an empirical rule for, and then you get into logistics like people just making additional accounts to get around it...

[1] - http://www.vg247.com/2012/05/18/kompu-gacha-freemium-systems...

I would speculate it's something like, if your innate immune system is running "hotter", it's going to reduce the amount of time it takes to clear anything it runs into, leading to less time spent inflaming anything, in a similar fashion to how it significantly reduced viral payloads, leading to negligible symptoms when the adaptive immune system batted cleanup.

I'm always surprised when I see B&N stores.

I see a fair number of them, scattered around, not even in ultra-populated areas, but the last 3 or 4 times I've stopped in to try and buy things for e.g. holiday gifts, they've had none of the things I was looking for in stock, and they always seem empty.

Yes.

I pointed to the runner because otherwise it seemed likely I'd get a comment insisting there's no proof it's used in Firefox.

Detecting that is the point, yes.

Well, yes, the author described it as "a heuristic", which checking sentinel values would seem to match.

The example I gave in there is of adding sentinel values in your data, so you can check the constants in your data structures later and go "oh, this is overwritten with garbage" versus "oh, this is one or two bits off". I would imagine plumbing things like that through most common structures is what was done there, though I haven't done the archaeology to find out, because Firefox is an enormous codebase to try and find one person's commits from several years ago in.

The simplest way to do this, what I believe memtest86 and friends do, is to write a fixed pattern over a region of memory and then read it back later and see if it changed; then you write patterns that require flipping the bits that you wrote before, and so on.

Things like [1] will also tell you that something corrupted your memory, and if you see a nontrivial (e.g. lots of bits high and low) magic number that has only a single bit wrong, it's probably not a random overwrite - see the examples in [2].

There's also a fun prior example of experiments in this at [3], when someone camped on single-bit differences of a bunch of popular domains and examined how often people hit them.

edit: Finally, digging through the Mozilla source, I would imagine [4] is what they're using as a tester when it crashes.

[1] - https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/commit/917c4a6bfa...

[2] - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1762568

[3] - https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2019/DEF%20CON%2019%20pre...

[4] - https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/blob/main/toolkit...

I would imagine it's the GDPR "ACCEPT ALL COOKIES" in big font and then in very small low contrast text "select some cookies" or "reject cookies" that they were describing.