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TaviRider

@ TaviRider @reddthat.com

Posts
1
Comments
50
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • How does Apple make its infomercial animations to be identical to its software UI?

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  • I’ve presented a few WWDC sessions including two video sessions, though nothing as huge as the keynote or platform state of the union. I can answer most questions you have about the process.

    The screens shown in WWDC sessions are usually screen captures from real devices. Development of the slide decks starts with a template deck that has the styles, fonts, and color themes for that year’s sessions. It includes slides that look like the latest devices, with precise rectangles the right size where screen captures will fit. As people develop their sessions they use these slides as placeholders for screenshots, animations and videos.

    During development of the OSes the code branches for what will become the first developer seed. Before WWDC, one of the builds of this branch gets marked as ready for final screenshots/videos. The idea is that the UI is close enough to what will ship in the first developer seed that the OS and sessions will match.

    Once that build is marked, the presenters take their screenshots and those get incorporated into the slides.

    You wrote “It wasn’t just a screen recorder thing”. What makes you say that?

    You asked about specialized software. Apple OS engineers have to use what are called “internal variants” of the OSes during development. These have special controls for all sorts of things. One fun thing to look for in WWDC sessions: the status bar almost always has the same details, with the same time, battery level, Wi-Fi signal strength, etc. These are real screenshots, but the people taking the videos used special overrides in the internal variants to force the status bar to show those values rather than the actual values. That makes things consistent. I think it avoids weird things like viewers being distracted by a demo device with a low battery.

  • Dream job...

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  • Cats here, cats there, Cats and kittens everywhere. Hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, Millions and billions and trillions of cats

  • Palantir may be engaging in a coordinated disinformation campaign by astroturfing these news-related subreddits: r/world, r/newsletter, r/investinq, and r/tech_news

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  • it’s sociopaths who lack empathy. And that leaves them behaving like capuchins. The one on the left is upset at the unfairness. But the one on the right doesn’t care at all. It just keeps taking its unfair advantage.

  • Apple Gave Governments Data on Thousands of Push Notifications

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  • Part of that is the responsibility of the app developer, since they define the payload that appears in the APNs push message. It’s possible for them to design it such that the push message really just says “time to ping your app server because something changed”. That minimizes the amount of data exposed to Apple, and therefore to law enforcement.

    For instance the MDM protocol uses APNS. It tells the device that it’s time to reach out to the MDM server for new commands. The body of the message does not contain the commands.

    That still necessarily reveals some metadata, like the fact that a message was sent to a device at a particular time. Often metadata is all that law enforcement wants for fishing expeditions. I think we should be pushing back on law enforcement’s use of broad requests (warrants?) for server data. We can and should minimize the data that servers have, but there’s limits. If servers can hold nothing, then we no longer have a functional Internet. Law enforcement shouldn’t feel entitled to all server data.

  • It's Official, Switch 2 Joy-Con Will Not Feature Hall Effect Sticks

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  • Nintendo has free replacement for bad Joycons for life. It’s not some planned obsolescence conspiracy.

  • T-Mobile Shows Users the Names, Pictures, and Exact Locations of Random Children

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  • Side note: Any decent kid tracker thingies that respect privacy?

    Apple Watch works well as a kid tracker if they’re old enough to wear it safely, and I think the privacy aspects are very good. It uses the FindMy network, and Apple can’t see the location. There’s a bunch of specifics here. Apple Watch used to require an iPhone, but Apple made it so you can add a kid’s watch to the family so it uses a parent’s iPhone instead.

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    I believe that the "Nicole" images being sent to Threadiverse users may be intending to deanonymize accounts

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  • iCloud Private Relay and similar relay services should also protect against IP tracking.

  • Scientists issue dire warning: Microplastic accumulation in human brains escalating

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  • The original paper about microplastics in the brain seems to have a serious methodological flaw that undermines the conclusion that our brains are swimming in microplastics.

    “False positives of microplastics are common to almost all methods of detecting them,” Jones says. “This is quite a serious issue in microplastics work.”

    Brain tissue contains a large amount of lipids, some of which have similar mass spectra as the plastic polyethylene, Wagner says. “Most of the presumed plastic they found is polyethylene, which to me really indicates that they didn’t really clean up their samples properly.” Jones says he shares these concerns.

    This is from other microplastics researchers. See this article. So before we panic about this, let’s wait for some independent replication and more agreement in the scientific community.

    Microplastics are a serious concern, and we need to deal with plastic pollution. Let’s just stick to high quality science while we do that.

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    Permanently Deleted

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  • I haven’t seen any evidence that this is solvable. You can feed in more training data, but that doesn’t mean generative AI technology is capable of using that in the way you describe.

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    Secret 'BADASS' Intelligence Program Spied on Smartphones

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  • This article is 10 years old.

  • iPhone Sharing the Photos by Default to Apple

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  • The 1:1 matching and the porn detection were separate capabilities.

    Porn detection is called Communication Safety, and it only warms the user. If it’s set up in Screen Time as a child’s device, someone has to enter the parent’s Screen Time passcode to bypass the warning. That’s it. It’s entirely local to the device. The parent isn’t notified or shown the image, and Apple doesn’t get the image. It’s using an ML model, so it can have false positives.

    CSAM detection was exact 1:1 matching using a privacy-preserving hashing system. It prevented users uploading known CSAM to iCloud, and that’s it. Apple couldn’t tell if there was a match or find out the hashes of images being evaluated.

    Many people misunderstood and conflated the two capabilities, and often claimed without evidence that they did things that they were designed never to do. Apple abandoned the CSAM detection capability.

  • Dying boy, 15, gets wish: losing virginity [Chicago Sun Times, Dec. 23, 2001]

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  • I’m wondering why clergy were consulted. I can’t imagine a worse place to go for insight into the ethics of human sexuality. Was it a Catholic hospital?

  • Police investigate manifesto reportedly left by girl who killed two in school shooting

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  • Let’s require the 10 commandments be posted on every sensible gun regulation bill so they’ll get bipartisan support.

  • The Privacy Accelerationists Manifesto

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  • This is too techno-utopian. There’s also a place for governments. Comprehensive privacy legislation would also change the world for the better. Ignoring that is exactly what the largest invaders of privacy want.

  • How to I make this into a WiFi hotspot without any new hardware or access points?

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  • On the phone you used to take the photo, turn on the personal hotspot.

  • Apple Quietly Introduced iPhone Reboot Code Which is Locking Out Cops

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  • So even with BFU, does the iPhone not connect to the internet? I guess i hadn’t noticed it doesn’t.

    Well, it’s complicated. Most of these topics are. In BFU state, an iPhone (or iPad with cellular) with an active SIM and active data plan will connect to the Internet. It won’t connect to Wi-Fi at all. If you have USB restricted mode disabled and the right accessory connected it will connect to an Ethernet network, but that may fail if the network requires 802.1x and the credential is not available in BFU state. Similarly if USB restricted mode is disabled you can use tethering to a Mac to share its network.

    For location, there’s two mechanisms. One mechanism relies on directly communicating with the device, which only works if the device has network.

    The other mechanism is the “FindMy network” which uses a Bluetooth low energy (BTLE) beacon to let other nearby devices detect it, and they report that to FindMy. It’s a great technology. The way it uses rotating IDs preserves your privacy while still letting you locate your devices. I know that this works when a device is powered off but the battery is not completely dead. I’m not sure if it works in BFU state… my guess it that it does work. But this is not networking. It’s just a tiny Bluetooth signal broadcasting a rotating ID, so it’s one-way communication.

    Other than that, I’m not as sure how things work. I believe Bluetooth is disabled by default in BFU state, but I suspect users can choose to re-enable Bluetooth in BFU state to connect to accessibility accessories. I’m not sure about the new emergency satellite communication.

    But one thing I know for sure is that Apple has world class security engineers, and one area they work hard to secure is devices in BFU state.

  • Is there a way to guarantee a mobile device or tablet can only access my own services and block all other traffic?

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  • On iPhones and iPads there are several technologies available for monitoring and filtering network traffic. Filter network traffic from the Apple Deployment Guide has an overview of the technologies and their trade-offs.

  • Apple Quietly Introduced iPhone Reboot Code Which is Locking Out Cops

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  • I’m glad you find this informative. It’s a topic that’s important to me both personally and professionally, and there’s a lot of wrong information out there. But the best and most reliable info is in the Apple Platform Security Guide, such as Activating data connections securely and Direct memory access protections for Mac computers.

    In this topic I don’t think there’s any important difference between USB-C and lightning. Both form factors support a bunch of USB protocols as well as some Apple-only protocols, and both have USB restricted mode.

  • Apple Quietly Introduced iPhone Reboot Code Which is Locking Out Cops

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  • It’s more complicated than that. It’s called USB restricted mode. The lightning port is always willing to do a minimal subset of the protocols that it supports in order to do smart charging. By default most of the protocols it supports are disabled in BFU state. In AFU state it gets more complex than that. Accessories that you’ve previously connected can connect for one hour after the device is locked. This helps keep USB restricted mode from being really annoying if you briefly disconnect and reconnect an accessory.

    USB restricted mode can be disabled by a user option (Settings > [Touch / Face] ID & Passcode > Allow Access When Locked > Accessories) or by a configuration profile. Disabling it allows accessories to connect at any time, and generally lowers the security of your device. But in some cases that’s necessary, for instance when you use an accessibility accessory to use your device.

    If USB restricted mode is a concern for you, you should consider Lockdown Mode (Settings > Privacy & Security > Lockdown Mode). This changes several settings on your device to make it much more resilient to attack.

  • Apple Quietly Introduced iPhone Reboot Code Which is Locking Out Cops

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  • It’s not that simple. iOS has a really sophisticated system for deciding which things to keep in memory and which to evict, and it only does that when it needs more resources. Choosing which apps to kill is based on how recently an app was used, how much of share resources are in use, how often the app gets used, if it’s doing background processing, and other more subtle signals.

    Usually if people notice apps being killed when in the background a lot it’s because one of the apps they’re switching to is using a lot of resources, which forces the eviction of other apps.