Apple Prototypes and Corporate Secrets Are for Sale Online–If You Know Where

[krackers]

>chaining together a dozen dilapidated second-generation iPhone SEs and harnessing Apple's Live Text optical character-recognition feature to find possible inventory tags

This is the second time I've read about an iPhone OCR rack https://findthatmeme.com/blog/2023/01/08/image-stacks-and-ip...

Is this still state of the art in terms of local OCR?

[mandatory]

It's just because I did this talk and made FindThatMeme :) so not a popular method, just what I used to do large scale OCR.

[talldayo]

I think Tesseract is the smarter/faster/less obnoxious choice if you're not trying to parse weird meme text like the blog is doing. There's almost certainly a better paid option available in our enlightened AI age, but I don't even think you'd need AI for this use-case.

[epakai]

Some of these developer devices get 'destroyed' and sold as scrap. dosdude1 has restored some of these kinds of devices to working order. There's pretty neat video of the restorations:

ARM Apple Silicon Developer Transition Kit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reQq8fx4D0Q iPod Touch dev board: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLCt6oHPTQM

The PCB repair technique for the DTK is pretty cool on its own.

[userbinator]

That first video appeared on HN with some discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40422359

[JKCalhoun]

https://archive.is/4mxX1

[miki123211]

This is why solutions like Bitlocker with a good TPM or FileVault are so important.

They can essentially guarantee that the disk encryption key will only be released from the security module if the computer is running a fully-trusted and signed OS. Even if you take the drive out of the machine, the data on that drive is completely useless to you.

Incidentally, this is also what makes short PINs secure; the TPM contents are unreadable, even to a skilled attacker, so if the TPM is guaranteeed to wipe itself after 10 tries, even a 4-digit PIN is secure enough.

[userbinator]

the TPM contents are unreadable, even to a skilled attacker

Depends how "skilled". Nation-state level? Most definitely not. "IC break" services in China? Maybe. AFAIK TPMs are based on similar secure-processor designs as the chips in payment cards and other smartcards, and even those with enough determination and $$$, or the right equipment, will get you through.

Here's an old but quite thorough discussion of the techniques involved: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-630.pdf

[noident]

I don't understand. Why aren't these devices using full disk encryption?

[egorfine]

Some people are incapable of locating and checking a checkbox. I know, it sounds incredibly weird for us, tech people, but that's a reality.

[grishka]

> After he evaluated the Time Capsule's contents, Bryant notified Apple about his findings, and the company's London security office eventually asked him to ship the Time Capsule back.

> Bryant again reported his findings to Apple and returned the Mac Mini to them.

Why the hell did he do that?! It's, like, the worst thing one can possibly do with these kinds of devices. Just publish stuff that doesn't have anyone's personal data in it. That'll make the world better in the end.

[tomcam]

Because he didn’t want the heavy hand of Apple’s legal department ruining his life

[notinmykernel]

IMO, it's a personal philosophy. Similar to why hackers choose to report vulnerabilities to bug bounties vs. release findings on sites like Hack Forums.

We all know companies are predatory, and in many cases companies (looking right at you Google and Microsoft) continue to refuse to pay people for discovering, documenting and reporting high-severity vulnerabilities. That doesn't mean we as individuals forfeit our principles and become just as corrupt as the "faceless corporate entities."

[egorfine]

> That'll make the world better in the end

citation needed.

[rbanffy]

The ones I’m interested would be the ones donated to Berkeley. I hope one day they make it to a proper museum.

Or, at least, catalogued, scanned, and photographed.

[JKCalhoun]

Looks like the software was looking for labels like this: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....

[mandatory]

Yep, that's an example of what the automated scanning looks for. You can see a very similar example in the slides: https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2032/DEF%20CON%2032%20pre...

[jamesy0ung]

A lot of prototypes can be found on a Chinese website called xianyu

[popcalc]

What search terms to use?

[The_SamminAter]

Would you be willing to publish the iOS OCR server you made? It would be greatly useful in some of my products, as as you’ve noted other options have either low-quality results (tesseract, some cloud-based solutions) or are expensive in comparison for large amounts of images (most cloud-based solutions). That and it’d allow some of us to put our old phones to use.

[_boffin_]

Here's something i've used a few times. It's not using the phone, but rather a mac mini that's sitting in the corner. Quickly made this repo -- mind the mess.

https://github.com/mr-boffin/fruit-native-ocr

[kotaKat]

The amount of corporate crap I find on eBay from e-recycling is abundant and fantastic. And cheap!

I've seen everything from Amazon's palm-scanners to a tactical LTE base station once used by NIST to all sorts of Zebras full of fun software.

[kome]

very, very brilliant! but the fact he returned the data is mind-blowing to me... i would have published everything on a torrent and good luck.

[fsflover]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41220153

[jfdjkfdhjds]

the only things anyone ever wanted to know from apple is their aggressive business tactics... and most of that is already public thanks to the many processes they lost along the way. from labour salary fixing across industries to pushing obvious monopolies in the face of the publishing industry.

I think the only piece I'd pay to read is how they negotiated with spotify.