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One of the value props was the inability to reset and resell if it were lost or stolen. Now that it’s cracked there is more of an incentive to not try and find the owner.

As for actual data security you are probably right


> One of the value props was the inability to reset and resell if it were lost or stolen.

It's sure one of those nice to have features, but there's no good reason why it has to be mandatory like it is. All in all, having a device purposefully retain some information when you factory reset it is user-hostile.

The "lost or stolen" argument also hardly holds for desktop computers like Mac Pro or Mac Mini or iMac, yet they still have T2s in them.


It seems like this is a feature designed to shrink the "used" market for Apple products -- and not a user benefiting feature.


But one of the things about Apple products that makes people okay with the exorbitant pricing is the resale value. I thought Apple themselves realized this?


No, they want both you and the potential pre-owned Mac buyer to buy a new device each.


> The "lost or stolen" argument also hardly holds for desktop computers

Why ? People's houses get broken into all the time.

And probably 99.999% of laptops never leave a person's house.


Is the crack in hardware or software? Any links on it? I thought the iPhones at least could not be reset by thieves?


> The mini operating system on the T2 (SepOS) suffers from a security vulnerable also found in the iPhone 7 since it contains a processor based on the iOS A10.

> ..Using the checkm8 exploit originally made for iPhones, the checkra1n exploit was developed to build a semi-tethered exploit for the T2 security chip, exploiting a flaw. This could be used to e.g. circumvent activation lock, allowing stolen iPhones or macOS devices to be reset and sold on the black market.

> Since sepOS/BootROM is Read-Only Memory for security reasons, interestingly, Apple cannot patch this core vulnerability without a new hardware revision.

Crouching T2, Hidden Danger (2020-10-05) https://ironpeak.be/blog/crouching-t2-hidden-danger/


A demo of the T2 hardware exploit on iMacs can be found here: https://blog.t8012.dev/plug-n-pwn/

From what I could find, the encryption keys of the T2 are still secure but the OS running on it is not. Wiping the SSD and/or repairing another might be enough to resell the device without any locks but I'm not 100% sure about that.


Every device up to the iphone X has been cracked btw so the factory reset protection can be bypassed.


Can you provide some links?


The argument isn't that its better than buying a new battery, the argument is that it isn't conveyed in the contract.

EDIT: Also, knowing this happens without Apple adjusting their own terms may be grounds for fraud, so somebody has to change their language anyways.


Highest GDP in the world?


At incredible human cost to your own people and to others.

If GDP is your end goal you are lost.


I’ve heard another take that Spotify ownership allows them to play almost any music because JRE inherits Spotify’s license to play it.

Also this is a licensing deal for a set period. Ownership of JRE itself doesn’t change and after the three years the contract as written is over.


I tried Jitsi Meet in a conference call of forty people and we all switched to Google Meet because it was so unreliable and broken. This might have to do with compute limits on the server side (Kubernetes auto scaling?) but it didn’t work.

I use MS Teams wherever possible because it just works and most group calls I am on are in a business context anyways so the other integrations are pretty useful


I also hate all open source Remote Desktop solutions, but I ended up using SPICE with Proxmox. Nothing else will forward audio and handling Remote Desktop at a virtualization level is the most reliable and flexible of everything else that I have tried.

Only downside is that it doesn’t work with LXC containers, but that’s not a big problem considering only five or so machines need graphics.

EDIT: another downside is lack of client support on iOS. I’d love to work on my iPad with a Magic Keyboard but no client exists that handles SPICE AFAIK.


>AGI could be the ultimate tool to free every human being from toil

I don't believe that's inherently a good thing if you mean that literally. I used to subscribe more to the AnPrim/Ted Kaczynski ideology that toil is an inherent part of human satisfaction and allowing people to "free" themselves from it goes against millions of years of evolution and positive feedback loops. I'm sure some people can fill the gaps just fine, but we aren't talking in terms of "some".

(I'm not Derrick Jensen, he follows a similar ideology and I chose the name as a parody of the average HN poster. Does HN have an anti-impersonation policy?)


Perhaps you should have called yourself "Not_Derrick_Jensen". Because I am not Sammy Hagar. ;-)


I have had nothing but bad experiences with Lenovo ThinkPads, and refuse to buy anything else of theirs (especially in the wake of Superfish).

I had a T60 that had the both hinges snap in the case in normal operation, x230 screen broke and it refuses to start without reinserting the battery. I had similar screen issues with an x100e but at least that didn't have a quality persona around it, so I can't say I'm surprised.

I gave up a while ago and just use an iPad for everything (currently a student so I use the pencil heavily). If something warrants me using a keyboard then I just do at home with a tiny NUC I bought for cheap (HP EliteDesk 705 G2 Mini).


I can't speak for anything but the X1 Carbon series. I will say when this thing arrived it had a battery issue, but Lenovo overnighted a box and turned around a fixed machine in less than a week.


I see that they haven’t improved their QC. Why can they test their computer before shipping them to us, consumer? By the end before i switched to Mac, i was simply ordering 2 and keeping the one with the less issues.


Time has value, and economies of scale make it more efficient. I worked at a CSA for a while and the amount of time it would take an individual to have the diversity of foods we provide would have taken them far longer. I have nothing against gardening on its own, but the marginal value add of doing something else yourself doesn’t always exceed the value of your time and the opportunity cost of not doing something else.

You could always live an AnPrim lifestyle and that’s fine (one of Kaczynski’s main points was that specialization in the abstract is incompatible with people), but there are more obvious reasons why more people don’t do that.


Companies exist to maximize some measure, and maximizing "social" isn't inherently a good thing. All the nonsense that happens on social media is the same as what happens in real life, but you can't monetize/optimize the real world in the same way.


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