• 6 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Apple has a long history of working against right to repair and third party repair shops. This includes making it difficult for third parties to source the parts needed and changing the designs to requiring part pairing in the name of security. It got to the point where repair shops were buying broken Apple products so they could hopefully source the parts needed.

    Looking through what they provided now, it’s basic stuff any third party repair shop could do if they could source the parts. It’s useful. However good electronic technicians can go beyond that and do board level repairs. But that requires schematics and diagrams. A lot of times they would have to get those through other parties who in turn got them through less than official means or violated NDAs.

    Guess what Apple isn’t providing? Board level information. This is just doing the minimum the law requires them to do.

    Bonus: Louis Rossmann talks about Apple’s history of right to repair [10 minute video]







  • Tom’s Guide has shit reporting. This was the same site that repeated the bogus DDoS smart toothbrushes story. And they’re at it again with more sensationalism.

    From something more reputable:

    The use of the victims’ faces for bank fraud is an assumption by Group-IB, also corroborated by the Thai police, based on the fact that many financial institutes added biometric checks last year for transactions above a certain amount.

    It is essential to clarify that while GoldPickaxe can steal images from iOS and Android phones showing the victim’s face and trick the users into disclosing their face on video through social engineering, the malware does not hijack Face ID data or exploit any vulnerability on the two mobile OSes.

    More from bleeping computer:

    A new iOS and Android trojan named ‘GoldPickaxe’ employs a social engineering scheme to trick victims into scanning their faces and ID documents, which are believed to be used to generate deepfakes for unauthorized banking access.

    Now, don’t get me wrong, you should take malware and social engineering attacks seriously. But get your information from sites that do real security journalism.









  • I like Cory Doctorow. I think his theory of enshittification is useful, but I find his definition flawed.

    • Why is it limited to platforms? Can’t enshittification apply to other things like applications?
    • Are business customers really required or can that step be skipped?
    • The platforms dying thing isn’t what we are seeing. For example, Amazon is absolutely enshittified. They’re not dead. More like undead, continuing to shamble on consuming everything.

    I still give credit to Cory for being an acute observer and coming up with a useful theory.