Very cool demos, but now I'm interested to know: does enabling Lockdown mode help at all against these exploits? It'll theoretically protect against a lot of common attack vectors, but I'm curious about its real-life effectiveness.
These are still 1-click, not zero click. So the best protection you can have is not opening unknown files that were sent to you. That being said, lockdown mode blocks all sorts of message attachments. From the videos it look like they are using pdfs in the messaging vector, which would get blocked too. So you would be safe-ish. But lockdown mode is so restrictive that it doesn't really make sense for most users. Or at least it doesn't make sense to buy a $1500 phone and then limit yourself to something you could have gotten for $50.
You don’t know what lockdown is do you? I’ve had my phone in lockdown for a year. I can’t: collaborate on notes, and it does not automatically open links in chat. Other than that my experience is identical to non lockdown.
I guess you don't browse any modern webpages? Otherwise I can't explain your perspective. You basically lose up to 95% of performance in anything remotely resembling a JS heavy web app. So it would run the same as on a cheap Android phone.
My experience has been the iPhone chip is fast enough to still run pages just fine. Maybe those ones that load 300 adverts and relay out the page 5 times as they load won’t work but they hardly worked before anyway.
Everything that runs with such a major performance decrease will also run fine on a cheap phone. If this is your normal use case that's fine, but it simply means you also didn't need such a powerful Iphone in the first place. It's like buying an RTX5090 and then playing 2048 in a browser and saying you don't understand why people always install Nvidia drivers.
some sites don't work (you can explicitly whitelist them tho) but generally it's been fine. i would honestly prefer a phone that doesn't allow any comms to any non-contact list parties at this point.
From what I can see in Apple docs, aside from web limitations it sounds great. Is there any real reason to not enable this? Like I would be deeply suspicious of a PDF sent via messages and no auto-connect to insecure WiFi is also common sense.
> Web browsing: Certain complex web technologies are blocked, which might cause some websites to load more slowly or not operate correctly. In addition, web fonts might not be displayed, and images might be replaced with a missing image icon.
Images being replaced with a missing image icon doesn't seem like a lot according to the description, and it's what you would set by default?
“Might be” seems to carry a lot of weight. I’ve been running lockdown mode and I haven’t seen any images not load. Presumably it’s only images of a certain obscure kind.
I would still be using lockdown mode if the call notifications were send to my Apple Watch. Other than that lockdown mode was working pretty good for me.
I use Lockdown Mode and the functionality I get is nothing like a $50 device. If you're being serious can you link to some $50 devices for sale that are on par with a recent iPhone Pro running in Lockdown Mode?
Subverting the secure boot/upgrade chain would require a SecureROM exploit and presumably a compromise of the Secure Enclave, so the answer is almost certainly "no" (even prior major exploits from recent memory like usbliter8 are tethered and don't exploit the enclave; the last true untethered Jailbreak was iOS 9 or something.) An upgrade would fix it. The internet reporting claims this break they are showing in this video is untethered though, which is extremely rare on its own.
I know a bunch of people that would use iPhones if iPhones had first class private backup options (the de-iclouding, like the de-googling of androids). Having root on the device would make this an option.
I run vibed apps on my iphone just fine - you have to register for a developer account and pay the annual fee, but I have an agent app running that can improve itself and push new versions over wifi just fine.
I even have realtime watch complications which no shipping app can have because of apple restrictions - developer mode lets you push complication updates realtime if you want.
I'll probably consider something more open next time I buy but just pointing out that right now with a developer account you're not actually _that_ restricted on iOS, the experience is better than you might think if you're making an app you never intend to ship.
I already have an account so I use that regardless, but AFAICT you can in fact build for your own device without paying at all. I haven't tested this though.
I am not arguing Apple's restrictions are a good thing, if I were in charge I would in fact make allowing installing your own software on your own device a legal requirement of selling hardware, yet here we are.
The videos sort of imply that these are userland rather than bootrom, whatever payload they have running is getting hit before first unlock, which isn't a lot of surface. They specifically say to not update which pretty much confirms where the attack surface is. Somewhere after the kernel starts but before the main user space is unlocked with the passcode.
I want the freedom to install the OS I want on my phone. Now if I install a proprietary OS, I get what the developers of that proprietary OS choose to do. And if that proprietary OS does not give me root access, well, that's life.
I once again am pointing to the sign that states this was never a l33t-hax0r board like you all think; it's always been an arm of one of the leading VC incubators.
I don’t think that hackers would agree to be locked out of a system, or do you mean they want to be locked out as a challenge? In any case you don’t get to choose which OS gets installed, so the parent’s opinion is hypothetical.
> In any case you don’t get to choose which OS gets installed
Of course you do. You can run GrapheneOS, or LineageOS, postmarketOS, or mobian, or many others. All of those are open source, you can modify them as you want before you flash them.
I sincerely believe you need much more than one billion tokens to rewrite the entire PDF dependency stack in a memory safe language. I think you underestimate how many features PDF has.
Seriously though, I wonder why nobody really attempted to dethrone PDF yet. How hard can it be (famous last words) to design a document format that allows what people generally expect from a PDF, but without the multimedia and interactive parts that are dangerous?
It's sandboxed, not in a VM but using the *OS sandbox/seatbelt. Running all renderers in a separate VM on a consumer phone sounds like a terrible time when you need to stay competitive regarding performance, responsiveness, etc.
It might not be a magic security wand, but so many critical vulnerabilities in software trace their origins to memory unsafe code and things like "use after free".
"~70% of the vulnerabilities Microsoft assigns a CVE each year continue to be memory safety issues" - Microsoft [1]
"We adopted Rust for its security and are seeing a 1000x reduction in memory safety vulnerability density compared to Android’s C and C++ code." - Google on Android [2]
In case of ms it's often concurrent userland-kernel transitions, and kernel doesn't control how and when they happen. Copilot is busy optimizing windows 11 and can't riir the kernel.
If I were Google I'd try to rewrite Chromium in Rust. The FFMPEG folks should try porting the whole codebase to Rust too. They can always keep the legacy versions for legacy computers (my old n270 netbook can barely play 720p@30FPS anyway, and it's too slow to downsize 4k video to 720 or 480p...), so a bigger amd64 machine will always be -reallistically- needed for anything else than <=720p consumption.
And 6 months ago someone did a little experiment using Claude to rewrite FFmpeg in Rust. It was by the own description by the person that had the AI do it, significantly slower than FFmpeg even when incorporating assembly code from FFmpeg.
Maybe with further advancements it is now possible to get a better result, or soon.
But if you are going to copy their assembly code into the Rust protect how do you definitively prove that no memory unsafe operations are happening in those parts? Seems to me that either the whole thing should be safe Rust, if the point of the rewrite is memory safety.
It kind of is, as is any other memory safe language.
You certainly can still write security vulnerabilities that don't involve memory safety violations, and these languages always have unsafe escape hatches that you can use to shoot yourself in the foot. But as long as you don't just sprinkle unsafe on everything, using a safer language is going to make a ton of vulnerabilities just disappear.
Looking at the issues from this past week, safe languages won't stop you from using 4 as your private key, but they would have entirely prevented the PHP vulnerability.
It cuts down most of the crap trying to trash your machine's RAM (virtual memory in the end, but today it's almost as if you didn't have a MMU). It's good enough.
On less powerful machines, dear Mutt+isync+msmtp users like me, please use AERC (written in Go) against these. It's slower, but far more secure than C.
Also, SLRN needs a Go rewritten clone (able to point to slrn's caché) like nothing else. Comp.misc and comp.arch still are extremely valuable.
The problem here is that pdf is over bloated with features and without strictly defined standard. Rust can't help you with that, or any language for that matter. It's akin to upgrading the security system on a house on fire.
The best solution would be ditching it completely for a simpler subset of features. But that will never happen.
I wonder if pdf.js would be more secure since it runs inside a webpage and can benefit from the browser sandboxing. Though I guess iOS has generally managed to keep most of its apps native rather than web app wrappers (as has happened on Windows).
LLM and full rewrite are a recipe for cooking something that still has flaws but also doesn't work that well. The root cause is that PDF is an old format from a more innocent era. A new document standard that keeps up with the technical and security advances, learns about the lessons PDF taught us, and allows for easy conversion from old PDFs, would be the ideal solution.
Who am I kidding, I think the PDF format will outlive us.
It’s a mix - for years I wanted root on my iPhones, just like you got on android. In practice, once I had it…? I never did much beyond installing Cydia.
With today’s hardware I might have a different take - the 18 has more than enough hardware to be a laptop so maybe I’d use it for a docking mode. But my gut is I’d probably still want a laptop even then.
To me the upshot is : billions of development, software and hardware, have gone into the platforms - it’s hard to quickly make them significantly better.
When I owned an iPod touch, the advantage of jailbreaking was to give your device certain features that the OS just didn't support. (Hell, I remember early days when iOS didn't even have a concept of wallpaper, the background was just black.)
iOS has come a long way since those days so a lot of the most common use cases of the past are no longer necessary. But the principle is the same - the hardware is a general-purpose computer but the software is locked down unnecessarily in many ways. Jailbreaking lets you do things that are outside of Apple's box.
A much-needed advantage is also keeping old devices useful. Every Apple phone slowly outlives its supported software to the point where the official AppStore has almost nothing in it. Today, it's extremely difficult to find 3P apps that work with my current iPhone 7, which is not that old, because the ecosystem cuts off old phones very quickly.
I agree, and, if you have a developer certificate from Apple, the list of wants I have is ... not that long? zero? I'd love to be pitched on it. In practice, I wanted freedom, but didn't really want to do anything with it.
The value of general computing freedom is like any other freedom: it is needed when it people are trying to express you.
And not just you. Anyone! So evaluating whether a freedom is necessary turns into a much more nebulous question of “would anyone really need this at one point now or in the future? Is this a thing we should protect in general, even if it does seem like we need it exactly now?”
For example, could Apple/Google at one point be strong armed (by any government) into including spyware onto all devices? And listeners to make sure no one ever says bad things about $DEAR_LEADER?
If the probability of yes is anywhere around 10% over the next decade, maybe it’s a good freedom to have.
The equalizer is easily 20 years old, and is restricted to presets. Presets! A parametric EQ is the only thing that can make Apple's own Powerbeats Pro sound good. And for several golden years (despite lots of Apple's work against it) we had a really good jailbreak equalizer that worked with Apple Music. Eventually I just gave up on the whole thing. But I remember going out for trail runs with good sounding music without worrying about losing my earbuds.
This is one of several things I'm considering for an Apple Music client I'm writing (they are one of the few streaming services that actually allows such a complete level of API integration, via MusicKit). Apple Music as an app is pretty mediocre, but with a 3rd-party app you can add custom EQ profiles, and even detect the type of device when it connects over Bluetooth and apply the EQ profile automatically on the fly when it is connected, to add it to the DSP processing path.
There's just less reason today for someone like me that liked the utilitarian benefits of a jailbroken iPhone. I used it for gestures, caller mini preview, grouped notifications, etc. All things that are now baked in.
I jailbroke every iPhone I had for many, many years. Most of the time it was silly skins/tweaks but there were a number of things that were huge QoL improvements. I remember BiteSMS and using it as a way to reply to a text directly in the notification instead of having to leave the app. This was before iOS had that feature and before multitasking, back when if you left the game you were playing the app would quit. Also had folders before stock iOS, things like Control Center, and a whole slew of little tweaks for other apps I used.
The downside to jailbreaking was often the instability but that was also back when the phones were way less powerful. Today, armed with LLMs, I would love to have root on my iPhone again. I'd love to rip out Siri and replace it with Claude Code or something like that.
You can do that already without jailbreaking with a-Shell[1]. It includes a wasm compiled ffmpeg binary and you can install (Python only) pip packages.
I'm for being able to hack your own device to do whatever you like with it, preferably without active resistance from its manufacturer. I'm against anybody who can convince you to open a PDF being able to hack your device to do whatever they like with it.
The point the parent commenter is making is that they want Apple to allow people the freedom to intentionally mod the functionality of their device. Not that they literally want single-click PDF exploits to be a thing.
> I'm against anybody who can convince you to open a PDF being able to hack your device to do whatever they like with it.
Who is saying this part?
Asking for an open device does not mean supporting malicious hacking of others. This is the single biggest false equivalence used by Apple and the rest of the industry to keep a closed ecosystem and restrict users' control over stuff they paid for. And people continue perpetuating it for some reason.
Nobody said exactly that, but your first comment pointed out how cool the capability is without acknowledging that it is trivial to exploit maliciously.
We're on the same side here. I daily a Pixel with LineageOS and root.
If you phone is hackable by you, what stops someone else from hacking it? Ultimately, it's a trade off between security and openness, and I think it's good that there are choices on both sides.
This comment is tricky because "hack" can mean different things in different contexts.
If I run software the OEM didn't authorize on a phone that I own and know the password for, that might be described as a "hack". Unless you're one of the horrible people trying to push OS-level DRM on everything, my doing that is a positive or neutral thing.
If a third party gets software that I didn't authorize to run on a phone that I own by tricking me into opening a malicious PDF, that's also a "hack". Almost everyone considers that a bad thing.
Once you have used an exploit to get system access to your own device, you can patch the software to prevent anyone else from using the same vulnerabilities. See e.g. https://github.com/EolnMsuk/AntiDarkSword (but of course, as more and more vulnerabilities keep being found, it becomes basically impossible to backport all the fixes)
What in these videos is so much cooler than what you can do on an Apple approved one? Other than, "As a programmer, I can do anything", I just personally don't see any capabilities unlocked that I can't have with an app or whatever. But I might be missing something.
One of the primary markets for cracked phones is for spying on partners.
In the abstract I’m a strong supporter of the idea that you should be able to use and modify a device you own as you see fit…but in the real world “ownership” is a whole lot murkier than the mental model a lot of tech people have.
The only thing I really miss from my jailbreak days is an app that could talk to the cellular baseband and display all cell towers nearby on a map and showed which you were using.
I used to have my home screens fully customized but that’s a lot of work creating icons for hundreds of apps. Or even dozens.
This is one of the strongest arguments for why ordinary users need the ability to do this. Not only because they would actually benefit from it (e.g. better ad blockers), but because things like that have a network effect that you can't get from the four people who root own their iPhone with a PDF being the only ones able to install a third party browser engine.
Retro game emulators were allowed only 2y ago and bold retro. JIT is still not allowed so they are restricted in being run in interpreted mode. Also, neither is allowed executing arbitrary arm64 binaries. And, of course, no hypervisor access. The Linux-using term (iSH) works by utilizing a x86 emulator / compatibility layer (basically translates x86 binaries and maps Linux calls to native ones). In the sole VM host available, UTM SE, the "SE" means "slow edition". Now jailbreak and you've full, JIT-capable, UTM (QEMU) and NewTerm (kinda Termux for iOS). Hypervisor access still not possible though.
I watched the “Can your iPhone do this?” video, assuming that was the coolest one. The others seemed like they’d just be showing the exploit.
It seemed like a silly party trick with no practical purpose, and required the terminal to reset things back to normal so the phone was useful again. Why does anyone want this? Surely there are better uses than what was demoed?
I used to jailbreak during the first few years of iPhone. I remember being able to drag out from the bottom right corner of the screen to have a launcher, similar to the Dock, but with more stuff. But over time, the iOS got more features and the argument for jailbreaking became less compelling. This is especially true now that so much sensitive information is in our phones… so I trust all this stuff that effectively has root?
Noob q: Does this(and most) hacks like this on the iphone likely rely on some kernel module — or what it talks to for executing code — being compromised to run arbitrary code execution? I dunno about ios but it seems from the videos that something that reads imessage attachments was compromised for privilege escalation.
Like what im mean is an attack vector shaped similar to https://pepsipu.com/blog/2026-10-switch2-jailbreak-ns2jb/ i.e. they compromised `fs` module that did not protect against a buffer attack(in memmov)? My understanding is that most core kernel modules are difficult to attack directly because of XOM, PAC and CFI like protections make it impossible for anyone/thing, so most likely only indirect attacks like above can work in such situations — there is a lot of incentive for teams like apple to do everything possible to improve security so i assume only these kind of difficult to find vectors remain.
hacks like these, where you go from a PDF to full persistence, require a chain of exploits. Pegasus, the iOS malware that made the news awhile ago, used a chain of 3 exploits like this:
I can 100% guarantee that we'll have comments from people saying they buy iPhones specifically because of the walled garden and the last thing they want is a jail broken device. On a website called Hacker News.
I'm glad to confirm your suspicion. I like to have both a walled-garden phone and several open-platform computers. They do two completely different things for me.
To be honest, I'd like my open computers to be even more open and hackable, with a secure boot path that doesn't involve any mysterious unpatchable embedded firmware or auxiliary CPUs, but we are slowly getting there with RISC V.
I want the same kind of phone. But I reject the premise that it's impossible to have a deeply nested "De-wall this device yes I know what I am doing yes I confirm I'm about to really open myself to issues if I don't understand the implications" settings option without compromising the walled mode security.
The point is that no one forces you to jailbreak your iPhone. If you like the walled garden - great! Keep using it! But I've been in plenty of discussions where iPhone users are literally against jailbreaks at all and in any form.
I want a device I can give the elderly in my family that they cannot be easily induced into doing insecure things on. If there were an unlockable iPhone and a locked iPhone I want to give them the latter. It’s not enough for me to tell them not to scroll to General and click seven times on About to activate developer mode. I would prefer to just give them a device that can’t do that.
My own parents are still relatively young and my in-laws are sceptical enough of other people that it’s currently safe but it won’t be so forever.
Just make enabling jailbroken mode require a factory reset of the device.
The biggest risk is not elderly people but rather the owner giving their passcode to someone else, e.g. a repair shop, who then enables jailbroken mode without the owner's knowledge and installs malware.
You can mitigate this problem, and the elderly person problem, by requiring the phone to be factory reset. That way any jailbreak would be extremely obvious.
> My own parents are still relatively young and my in-laws are sceptical enough of other people that it’s currently safe but it won’t be so forever.
It is always interesting to me how people equate getting old with becoming dumb. I know there is definitely some age related decline that's inevitable, but if a person has grown up with computers, and maybe more importantly, has had a hacker and curious mindset while younger, it is not likely that they will suddenly become so naive and vulnerable, even when like 80.
What usually happens is that people lose interest in learning new things and keeping up. My own mom (who passed at 73) could never be convinced to use Whatsapp messaging, thinking it is something complicated for the young ones, and yet I currently know people in their mid 70s and even much older who are still as sharp as anything and use all the cool apps.
I assume you didn’t have experience of your older relatives being targeted by professional criminals. I’m not talking about online honeytraps, in some countries these gangs will mix offline and online schemes (e.g. pretending to be social workers, driving my grandma to the bank, buying her a new smartphone to get access to her online banking, which were stopped by her luckily “forgetting” her current smartphone/banking PIN code).
That’s for Eastern Europe. I heard a similar line of reasoning for banning rooted phones in Asia and it’s easy for me to relate to that. It seems as if first-world hackers here just don’t grasp how low criminals can and will go.
I'm also from eastern Europe. This scenario you mentioned wouldn't be stopped by your inability to jailbreak the device. A criminal gang willing to go this far will just get your relative to send them money directly, or buy gift cards or send a western union transfer or literally just give them cash. Or like you said, they will literally buy your relative a new phone to set up for banking.
>>I want a device I can give the elderly in my family that they cannot be easily induced into doing insecure things on.
Perfect, I knew this would come up. It always does. "I don't want someone to convince my elderly relative to hack their phone and do something bad". It's such an infuriating argument - no, YOU can't have freedom to do whatever you want with the device you own, because MY elderly relative might get scammed.
>>I would prefer to just give them a device that can’t do that.
There are a number of phones available that can just do calls and nothing else. If your elderly relative cannot follow the most basic advice of "don't listen to people calling you and telling you to do something on your phone" then that's all they should use.
Like, honestly - if you think your elderly relative will follow a 20 step process to go to a dodgy site, run a bunch of commands to jailbreak their phone, then download an alternative store to MAYBE download a dodgy bank app....what stops them from just following instructions from a scammer to send their money urgently to this account they named because the bank is doing maintenance on their servers and the money needs to be moved now or be lost? I love these "elderly relatives" who simultaniously don't have 2 brain cells and will follow jailbreaking instructions but who won't fall for any much easier scam involving direct transfers, gift cards or even good old fashioned cash in an envelope.
> There are a number of phones available that can just do calls and nothing else.
iPhone is this phone. Easiest to use, customer-friendly, options for limiting apps, large icons etc.
But for some reason, despite the dominance of Android phones on the market, custom smartphones being released almost every month, you want the foolproof layer to be stripped from iPhone. Why?
>>iPhone is this phone. Easiest to use, customer-friendly, options for limiting apps, large icons etc.
And no one is forcing you or your elderly relative to jailbreak it.
>> you want the foolproof layer to be stripped from iPhone
No, I want you(and me) to have the ability to strip it.
>>Why?
Because I want to be able to jailbreak the device I own and run the code that I write without asking Apple for their blessing. It's not any more complicated than this.
You can do whatever you want with what you own. And I want this restricted device. So you go be the market for yours and I’ll be the market for mine. I don’t understand what the problem is here. There are no shortage of phones on the market - many of them entirely rootable. It seems like you’re upset I want to buy an EV because you want to put gas in your car. Just go buy the gas car. No one is stopping you here (well except the EU I suppose haha).
>> And I want this restricted device
>>I don’t understand what the problem is here.
That's the problem. There should be no restricted devices at all, not in the way currently presented by Apple and others.
>>It seems like you’re upset I want to buy an EV because you want to put gas in your car.
More like, you want to buy a car that's locked to only charging at Apple provided charging stations. I say every car sold should be able to charge anywhere from any station. But we're stretching the comparison thin.
I share your sentiments but I wonder realistically how far we are from AI just "jailbreaking all the things", rendering the conversation moot
Like they can try to lock some things down, and some of those barriers we may not be able to get around, but how much of enough of them will we be able to circumvent?
Ideally this would probably not affect newer hardened devices but could unlock a bunch of older otherwise "unusable" hardware that functionally is "e-waste" currently
> I can 100% guarantee that we'll have comments from people saying they buy iPhones specifically because of the walled garden and the last thing they want is a jail broken device. On a website called Hacker News.
I bought my mom an iPad and got her over to an iPhone exactly because of this.
I'd not mind if there was an unlock option, as long as it was tedious enough, such as connecting to a PC to do it. The android option of a few clicks under settings is definitely something I can see someone/some site convincing her to do.
>>The android option of a few clicks under settings is definitely something I can see someone/some site convincing her to do.
Again, the mythical mother who will follow a stranger's instructions to enable developer mode and then follow detailed instruction to install an app bypassing several warnings along the way, but not one that will simply send money from one account to the other because of some random excuse from a bank "support" agent.
The proof is in the pudding so to speak though - despite every android phone out there having developer mode, this attack almost never happens. And developer mode doesn't give you root access or ability to access other apps data - she would still have to log in into her bank, and if she's willing to do that because a random stranger told her so then it's game over anyway, no need for custom apks.
Earlier today on the thread about the google play store apocalypse I posted a comment saying that I like some things about life in Apple's walled garden. But I still upvoted the parent comment because it's true and it's funny.
Also I'd happily jailbreak my iPhone and put an alternative OS on it to extend its lifespan. I'm a living human with nuanced opinions and I'm allowed to like more than one thing.
I got curious when you mentioned "google play store apocalypse", but I can't seem to find a comment of yours on the topic today. Would you be willing to post a link?
I can root my Android phone and have in the past, but I have absolutely no desire to do so now because it adds almost no functionality in exchange for a very large security risk. I consider rooting my phone in the past quite a foolish move by someone who didn't know better.
People are trading the future of personal computing just so they can run a banking app and justify it with "but I want my phone to be locked down for security." Not even sleepwalking into corporate-controlled-computing, but actively promoting it.
10, 15 years from now the ability to run your own code will be a distant memory unless you constantly subscribe to an annual Developer Account with BigCorp. Oh no, you've coded something that violates the ToS; account terminated.
Such a wild take to me. I install an entirely different operating system on my phone (graphene) which also advises me not to root because it's stupidly unsafe to do so. I also don't log in as root on linux, nor do I log in as an administrator in windows. None of these are sane practices to anyone worried about security.
To be honest this matter more on graphene than on linux or windows because of the sandboxing of all apps by default.
On Linux and Windows it doesn't make a huge difference to be admin or not on a single user system. If you have a process on windows running with your user rights it can access all your data, which means game over already. Same on Linux if you aren't using heavily sandboxed flatpaks or do not run all your apps inside jails using tools like landrun or firejail.
There's a reason why enterprises don't give you an admin account on Windows. Sure damage can still be done, but the blast radius is highly reduced. It was like the first rule I learned about Linux back in the day: don't ever log in as root, don't even bother enabling it. Hell it's not even a good idea to do it on an offline computer cuz you might accidentally bork something yourself. The barrier of at least a password to install system level software or delete critical files is a good one to have.
It only limits the blast radius on multiusers systems or when people do not follow basic security measures like having a different password on each computer. I agree it is a good one to avoid breaking the system yourself too easily but that is only if you don't blindly copy paste commands with sudo.
The only thing it mitigates really is how easy a malware can hide in the system once already present. But as said earlier once running under your username it is game over, your data is right here ready to be stolen, compromised, altered, destroyed or encrypted.
I have plenty of devices like raspberry pi’s and handheld Linux gaming devices that allow free unlimited access. My phone is the one thing I want fully secured because it’s where all my most important data and keys are.
and yet it's likely to be less secure than all the others.
or does your xterm binary scans your contract list and recently opened apps and upload all that to Facebook servers? because most apps on your so secure phone do exactly that
I converted to an iphone 13 mini (from the S24 Ultra) after being on Android since the release of the HTC Desire in 2010. I used to install custom roms and tweak everything on all of my Android phones which actually lead me to the iphone because I realized I wanted a phone without all the OE clutter and Google crap. The only clutter on the iphone is icloud which stays out of the way and doesn't annoy me with subscription messages. Also I don't have time to fuck around with modifying my phone. I just want everything to work without user intervention.
"No one forces you..." is an interesting line to go down in the comments of an article that focuses on using messaging apps to deliver exploits to a cellphone. It's pretty malware adjacent. Isn't that sort of thing how Jamal Khashoggi and his friends, family, and coworkers were hacked before his murder/execution?
Uhh, what? Clearly nobody is arguing that "arbitrary remote execution is good." Apple could easily satisfy everyone by simply allowing users to unlock their own bootloader.
How would that help anyone? The unlocked bootloader on the Apple Silicon Macbooks still hasn’t resulted in a truly viable alternative to macOS. The iPhone is much, much harder. And why would carriers trust the result?
You’re missing the point. Hackers (in the tinkerer sense) just want to program their own devices, with full access to the capabilities of the underlying hardware. Apple could obviously allow that if they wanted to, in a convenient way that doesn’t increase the attack surface for malware.
Having control over one's device and allowing anything and everything to have free reign on said device are two different things.
I'd love to have more control and customizability that the user can initiate, but random executables shouldn't be able to so much as sneeze without my permission. Third party software (yes, even the FLOSS variety due to issues such as supply chain compromises) must be treated as adversarial by default, anything less is foolishness.
You’re engaging in bad faith, and parroting the same false equivalence between security and user freedom that Apple uses to keep a chokehold on their software distribution monopoly.
Having some way to unlock an iPhone doesn’t at all imply it must be done in a way that reduces security, or trusts the average user with upholding it.
Use your imagination. They could require you to have an apple developer account. Or visit an apple store. Or even limit it to a special developer unlocked iPhone flavor.
But to jailbreak you need to stay on an older iOS version (because Apple patches the bugs enabling the jailbreaks). And that means you don't get security updates.
I’m fine with a locked down iPhone. All of my financial account credentials are on there, personal photographs, etc. Since I’ve owned an iPhone, I’ve never had a non-working phone. Security and reliability are the two most important items to me when it comes to a phone.
If I want to run arbitrary software, I have a computer. I am unsure why you care if I want a locked down reliable phone.
> people saying they buy iPhones specifically because of the walled garden and the last thing they want is a jail broken device.
I’m not one of those people.
> On a website called Hacker News.
But I still find that unfair. Being a hacker doesn’t mean you want to hack every aspect of your life. I’m perfectly content hacking away on a computer, but I have no desire to hack my toaster and risk burning down my house.
These are the same people that caused this situation. A close platform is only closed until it's busted right open and then everyone is screwed because there were no eyes on it the entire time.
yeah it's kind of weird because some old mac laptops I've used were easy to work with and put on third party software (Linux), but the things like ipads and iphones not so much...
edit: it's like... just give us the same option for the ipads / iphones please?
Anything you can find with an LLM to break into a locked device/ecosystem, the operators of that ecosystem can find with an LLM too, and fix it. Right?
Only if it's in updateable software. Hardware takes longer to correct.
Hence Sam Altman's latest public comment: "I don't even know a dramatic enough word to use… models can find bugs that are outside of the normal threat model of what we think a hacker can do… hardware-level, insane stuff… I no longer think we're gonna be able to just patch all the bugs."
This is true for things other than LLMs. Outside contributors have been credited with hundreds of security fixes to macOS and iOS that were found with fuzzers and sanitizers. Just off the top of my head CVE-2019-8605. Clearly, Apple has access to AddressSanitizer and libfuzzer, but outsiders still find these things. Not only Apple: Google can find flaws in iOS but outsiders also find flaws in Chrome, so the phenomenon is widespread.
I just feel a bit sad and impotent that a number of security researchers outside the circle cannot join their "yo we found more crazy bugs" party because simply frontier labs only give access to those models with "Red Team" availability to the inner circle members/companies.
Now their "trusted cyber access" program is moat rather than safeguard.
Not in my experience (yes, sample ~= 1), where they are subpar in terms of cybersecurity (e.g. source code review). This is one of my reports using GPT 5.6 (High), GLM 5.3 High, Fable 5.1 [1]:
> On the full benchmark of 31 audited revisions, GPT-5.6 Sol High reached a weighted recall of 38.27% and GLM-5.3 High reached 30.86%. On a common subset of 12 projects, Claude Fable 5.1 High reached 65.70%, against 42.98% for GPT and 35.54% for GLM.
if you wanna have the same kind of capability as these researchers where you have tight loops calling cli stuff you won't get by with $5 at all, especially for major bugs
if you have a way to turn $5 easily into exploitable vulns, let me know cause that'd be a first for me
A reminder for people who don't follow this, Calif is Thai Duong's firm. Thai discovered the BEAST and CRIME TLS attacks (with Juliano Rizzo), and then worked at Google for a bunch of years, including on Wycheproof with Daniel Bleichenbacher. The team at Calif includes lcamtuf, Dion Blazakis, Tavis Ormandy, and Stefan Esser (among many others).
They're basically the most interesting team working in vulnerability research right now; a cross product of ludicrous talent and full-tilt AI work.
Just before I left Fly.io a few months ago, we retained Calif for an annual pentest (we'd previously worked with Tetrel, Atredis, Doyen, and I think Include?). They were spooky good. Everybody we'd worked with was good, but Calif's results were unusually high-impact.
Craziest part is it was never even intended to be a programming language. From the Wikipedia page, the founder Rasmus Lerdorf is quoted as saying:
"I don't know how to stop it [...] there was never any intent to write a programming language [...] I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language [...] I just kept adding the next logical step on the way."
And 23 years later here we are with php2shell and it powering 70% of the internet’s websites
It’s a pity we gave in to the “ecosystem” play by these huge companies.. even if I jailbreak my iOS and never let it update.. Apple can easily detect the jailbreak and lock me out of anything iCloud, and iMessage and such. iPhone would be one glorious iPod touch after that.. :-(
Seeing all these gives me the same energy of early days of jailbroken Android phones where one could become root and do whatever with the hardware…
I stopped considering such tinkering because I got tired of finding those little tweaks and fixes on forums like xda every time something was updated. With the LLMs capable of automating that tool, I might find those old school way of mobile phones again…
> Apple is too big for that. Hard regulation is the only way out
Apple is not 'too big' for savvy customers to choose differently but all the Mag 7 tech companies are too big for regulation to be a 'way out'. They now all have 'Regulatory Compliance' divisions which are about compliance as much as the 'Ministry of Truth' is about truth. Instead they are filled with highly-paid former regulators, lobbyists and lawyers who use their inside knowledge to avoid, skirt or nullify regulatory impact.
Company strategies are now purposely designed at conception to be almost impossibly difficult to prosecute or enforce. It's been working so well over the last decade that when the size of the prize is big enough, mega-tech corps are increasingly willing to just overtly violate regulations knowing they can fight in court for years until the govt settles for a reduced fine that's less than the profit already made.
> Apple is not 'too big' for savvy customers to choose differently
Except that won't matter. The "savvy" user is such a tiny minority and only an even tinier minority will be willing to coordinate a boycott. Its a drop in the bucket even if you do get a boycott going.
Good luck trying to get YouTubers to stop making endless content about these products, and, most importantly, good luck getting YouTuber fans to stop demanding this type of content.
Connecting the world via the web was always gonna result in unbreakable monopolies. We screwed ourselves and, honestly, there’s no way back now.
I agree boycotting Apple will never matter. My main point was that calling for "regulation" is a cop-out because it no longer stops Mag7 mega-corp abusers.
I also pushed back on claiming Apple is "too big" because it's another cop-out those neck-deep in the Apple plantation parrot as if it somehow makes it slightly more okay they're enabling the worst of the Mag7 rapacious abusers. Buy Apple if you want, it won't matter. Just own your choices and spare us the fig-leaf rationalizations.
No, it is an acknowledgement of reality, and a plea not to pretend to be doing something when you're not. Apple is horrible, but are no worse than Google. Better in my opinion, because they never pretended to value freedom, and have a sense of ownership over their customers that is sometimes protective. Also, the phones are simply useful longer.
> My main point was that regulation is no longer a reliable check on Mag7 mega-corp abuses.
It is a bad point that was not made at all. The fact that corporations are effectively, and often literally currently unregulated is not proof that regulation is not "a reliable check on" abuses any more than my not wearing an oven mitt and constantly being burned is proof that wearing an oven mitt is not reliable protection against being burned.
Apple is too big to choose differently. There are two choices. Both are horrible. Eventually you will need to make a choice between one or the other to participate in banking, paying your utilities, buying things in stores, logging onto any internet site, maybe paying tolls, maybe even driving (your license might be issued to your phone.) To some extent, some of these things are true now.
Why would anybody owe you a "fig-leaf" excuse? Nobody is trying to placate you. They're just telling you what they think and why they are doing what they're doing, you should be grateful.
I'm speaking as someone who uses Debian on everything, who went from N900 to Firefox's phone to a $20 Android stuck on 8 that I've never hooked to the Google Play store because I don't have (and have never had) a "Google Account," only F-Droid - a phone that I refuse to browse the internet on or connect to my email (I don't have any social media except HN.) It is nothing to brag about, it is stubbornness. It does not move the needle in any way, and I would not have to make an excuse for not doing it, especially to you.
Anyway, I don't use coreboot, don't have a Linux phone anymore, and accept binary blobs in some of my packages, so am I really doing anything?
There's nothing more annoying than this purist faux-radical attitude I hear from people so much dirtier than I am. Are you sure you're not using Apple just so you can lecture people who do? Is that the real sin that Android is committing by closing up and becoming indistinguishable from Apple on policy?
Nobody will cry for a second about you not using Apple or Android except for you. The only way to stop this is through regulation.
It doesn’t actually matter, because your phone is only working as a coincidence. Every website and app is tested for Google phones and iPhones. If you lose the ability to do something one day, the chances of you getting that functionality back without major effort from your phone manufacturer or the kindness of bored people working for free, is essentially zero.
My phone runs a desktop GNU/Linux OS with desktop Firefox (or Chromium if installed). If Firefox on desktop stops showing websites correctly, we will have a larger problem than an unsupported niche phone.
I probably never opened one of my banking apps away from home. My main use for them is to authorize the operations I'm doing from my computer. I think that I could keep an Android phone in a drawer and use it as a costly and inconvenient hardware token. By the way, for some reasons credit card companies are doing 2FA by SMS which is both stupid (security wise) and convenient (to break out from Android or iOS.)
I expect that the real problem with using a Linux phone would be WhatsApp, Google Maps (the navigation part), OSMAnd. Telegram desktop maybe works.
Then you’re not using a phone. You’re using a computer which happens to have phone capabilities. Surely you can see how this isn’t particularly useful for most people?
The pixels on their screen turn green instead of blue, and they get mad that you reminded them that Apple is a conscious choice they made instead of something they were forced into.
"[S]avvy customers" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. No consumer products technology company gets to be that large off the backs of savvy customers.
I think that it is necessary a radical political change in the US, akin to a revolution, to be able to pass and enforce meaningful regulation against big tech companies. It's the same as going against the military-industrial complex or big finance. They integrated themselves to this power structure that guarantees their interests come first not only in internal policy, but also in foreign policy. Big tech is a limb of the US empire.
I mean Lina Khan singlehandedly f-ed over consumers by blocking the merger and causing Spirit to collapse. I wouldn't necessarily say tight regulations are good
I'm blind. Apple has explicitly said they wouldn't consider the "bloody ROI" of accessibility (will fund it no matter what). This is important to me. Software freedom is also important to me. What am I to do?
Pick your priorities. There will never exist enough products to check all of the boxes that all of the people say is important to them. There is someone out there who would much rather have a product cost some amount less at the cost of accessibility features but they think a device that 'just works' is important so they buy the iPhone anyway.
The point is that your conclusion here is both the correct/obvious one, and that it ensures one explicitly cannot vote with their wallet. They have priorities too significant to be able to take part in the protest. They are invisible to the company they WANT to vote for.
Perhaps what allows Apple is to be better at certain things like that or security for average consumer is indeed at odds with some aspirations? At least in practice, not utopian dreams, that seems to be the case.
So you vote with your wallet for accessibility despite freedom and the rest of hacker news do the opposite and it all works itself out.
You grab an Android phone anyways because Android accessibility is very much on par or even better than whatever slop Apple is putting out with VoiceOver these days, and developers also somewhat care about it more on Android.
You're also going to benefit from European mandates to have accessible mobile apps anyways, it's coming for free to you.
Even this long is too long. Apple devices don’t just provide better accessibility, they make lives easier by providing better accessibility, Android lagging behind is not just a matter of feature-parity, it’s an entire ecosystem making it harder for people to engage with itself.
> You're also going to benefit from European mandates to have accessible mobile apps anyways, it's coming for free to you.
Not true, the EU tried to become a regulatory superpower and largely failed to export its rules to the rest of the world. Instead, Apple and Google just aren't bringing new features to the EU anymore.
That was the UK because it was Apple complying with a specific UK law that says the government must be able to access everyone's phones at all times.
The more common one is GDPR. Things like AI features come to Europe late, or don't come at all, because it's illegal to just record everyone all the time and transmit that information back to the mothership, which is what the feature does.
If you know of any company that would bother to spend days making accessibility improvements, yet for some reason decide to not bring those to the US release, they're the dumbest fucking company in existence.
The EU accessibility mandates will be followed by apps, not by platforms. I don't care if Apple Music wants to keep being trash, Spotify, Deezer and Tidal will improve and lift everyone with it.
What banking business? Use a web browser, or just bank in person like everyone did not long ago. Carry a credit card instead of Apple/Google Pay. That's what degoogled Android users do and it's a very minor inconvenience anyone with a little bit of maturity should be able to accept. Also, cash is much better for your privacy.
And if you require a one-time SMS code for purchase (which can be adjusted via their website, most likely), then you still have an option that is not Apple and Google. I use a dumbphone for "banking" (SMS)... and a credit card, and the website. Those are really all the 3 things I need to do banking, as you have said so correctly.
Choose a different bank, then. I've gradually stopped using the phone apps, not really by design but just because I don't often feel like that works better than the real web site. Both USAA and my local credit union have perfectly good desktop web sites.
Somebody downvoted you but I agree: I must use a banking app to either enter a code or use my fingerprint to authorize operations, login included. No bank is using SMSes anymore here (Italy.)
SMS are an American thing. Only credit card companies are using them and they are American.
Belfius for example of you have ever used itsme with them. Also Digi (a mobile phone company in Belgium) since it uses itsme for authentication. Itsme is strictly an Android and iOS app.
More info on this is going to come out, but banks are going through hell right now with AI agents accessing user accounts and even firing off transfers and other accounts activity, and their legal teams are losing their minds.
So a bank shutting down a website right now and the "forcing" some Google/Apple "verification" makes a lot of sense in that context.
The country I live in (VN) recently banned online banking without using a mobile app and biometric verification via selfie. The sites had to withdraw access.
If an entity has a product that has a trillion people choosing it, the marginal benefit to society to build an entirely new product for 1000 people or so isn't worth it. The people whose time would be required to produce that second product for a very, very small 1,000 person market would better serve society by working on other goals.
Nor should those 1,000 people get to try to use the government to tell the other trillion what product they should have to buy.
Nobody is trying to bar anyone from anything. We are talking about options. We need ways out, otherwise it's an unfair market and all we get is enshittification.
Yes, I can vote with my wallet, but no, it doesn't make a difference. I've been voting with my wallet since day 1 by never buying an iPhone because of how closed it is, and unsurprisingly, this has done absolutely nothing to change how open the iPhone is.
You and I have very different definitions of "take away".
I also think you might benefit from rereading the context here; someone said that government regulation is needed to make the iPhone ecosystem open, and someone else disagreed on the basis that voting with one's wallet is a viable alternative. I disagreed with that disagreement, arguing that voting with one's wallet doesn't produce the change that the original commenter said regulation was needed for; telling me "that's not what voting with your wallet does" is redundant, because that's literally what I was already saying. You're certainly entitled to disagree with my opinion that making the ecosystem more open is a desirable goal, but that's not a premise I introduced here, so if disagreeing with that is your intention, it's unclear to me why you picked out my comment as the one to express that when the original statement of that goal was several parent comments up from mine.
It's not redundant and he isn't disagreeing with your opinion about openness. He's saying that it's immoral to want to force your personal preferences about phone design on other people.
Buying a phone you like? Moral.
Trying to force every phone to be one you like? Immoral.
That's all it's about. Not a difference in definitions or confusing on his part, he's just saying you've got morality all wrong and need to reconsider your position.
Again, my comment that he responded to literally was just making a claim that the iPhone ecosystem is not going to become more open due to voting with one's wallet. Yes, I obviously also think it should be more open, and that's an opinion that someone can strongly disagree with, but that's not what I was saying in the comment he responded to, because whether an action is moral or not is irrelevant to the question of whether it would produce a certain effect.
My point in the comment you responded to is that if person A says "we need to eat more vegetables to be healthy", person B says "no, you will be healthy if you only eat meat", and person C says "I tried only eating meat and I was unhealthy, so I think that's evidence that meat alone might not make you healthy", it's a non-sequitur to respond to person C by saying "it's immoral for you to say someone else should eat vegetables". If you responded to person A saying that, it wouldn't be as weird, but to remain silent when person A and B are debating the health effects of vegetables but then suddenly take issue with person C trying to provide evidence about whether the claims for A and B are correct or when they didn't introduce the topic that you have moral opinions on is very weird.
That is like saying prosecuting murder is immoral because it is taking away the murderer and victims rights.
For a society to function there needs to be balance. ‘You can do whatever you want as long as enough people pay you to cover your bills’ gets bleak fast.
> Especially when you look at the malware and viruses that don't exist, because it's so protected.
There are fewer viruses on Linux than on Windows, despite being far more open. I imagine your response will be that there are a lot more iPhone users than Linux ones, but my point is that there are a lot more factors than treating "open or closed" as a binary, and at best you can make a principled hypothesis about why something doesn't exist. For all you know, maybe making it more open would allow security researchers to find and report more potential attack vectors; extra attention from being more widely used cuts both ways.
If you did that then you probably made clear your reasons which probably created mindshare with others which probably has helped the EU open up the iPhone. Don’t be so defeatist because the outcome isn’t immediately apparent.
I'm not being defeatist; I'm pretty much arguing for what you're saying, which is that I think government intervention is needed. The parent comment I was responding to said that regulation isn't needed because voting with our wallets is sufficient, and I was disagreeing.
Convincing people to vote with their wallets is much easier than convincing them to write their pols to make laws. The latter is much harder while the former allows a message to be spread. Should people do both? Yes.
Sure, I just don't see how you read my comments as inconsistent with that viewpoint though. Literally the only point I was trying to make was that when a parent comment said regulation is necessary, and someone responded "No it's not. You can vote with your wallet right now.", I thought that was a very weak counterargument to the idea that we needed regulation.
The responses to my rebuttal are honestly confusing to me; one person seems to think that I'm arguing against voting with your wallet (which seems bizarre, given that my comment was literally saying that's something I actively do), one person seems to think I introduced the idea that Apple should have a more open ecosystem to the conversation rather than inheriting it as a premise from the grandparent comment, and one person upvoted my comment. I have absolutely no clue how three different people managed to read something completely different from my comment when the context and content seems clear to me, but I guess I'm missing something here because the point that I thought would be apparent is not consistently being understood.
> this has done absolutely nothing to change how open the iPhone is.
And tell me how that doesn’t sound defeatist or come off as giving up on voting with your wallet.
I can only speak for my replies but you were too concise on your opinion that it spawned multiple interpretations. Brevity breeds misinterpretations or something or other.
> And tell me how that doesn’t sound defeatist or come off as giving up on voting with your wallet.
"This" has done nothing doesn't imply "nothing will do anything". From my perspective, it sounds like you basically were assuming that anything I didn't explicitly repeat from the parent comments was no longer relevant, whereas I would have assumed that it would be noisy and annoying for me to repeat it directly.
vote with your wallet here is to make a new phone company that uses only these user owned devices.
its not particularly feasible to do for the end customer, similar to trying to buy EVs in the US when the upstream dealer decides whata available for you.
vote with your wallet is for the ultra-wealthy.
the rest of us can vote with our votes instead, and get much better results
> the rest of us can vote with our votes instead, and get much better results
Not sure where you live or what votes you are making, but "much better results" is hardly what I've seen or expect from US politics, politicians, and the uber wealthy that run the corporations that dominate many of the most important aspects of our daily lives.
Yeah, I don't understand the parent comment, buying EV's in the US is even easier than ICE vehicles in most states. Now if they are talking about BYD being blocked in the US, so access to extremely cheap EVs, much of Europe is doing the same thing.
Pixel phones have an unlocked bootloader. One can load GrapheneOS onto those phones without needing to jailbreak them.
Even without flashing a new OS, one can install third party app stores (e.g. F-Droid) with open source apps and/or side-load modified versions of those apps.
There is no "viable third platform" because people don't vote against the two existing ones with their wallets.
Can you name an example where a government succeeded in breaking up a monopoly, and the result was better for consumers? AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft were all "broken up", but it didn't make a difference for consumers. In every case, a competitor forced them to change their ways.
I mean, breaking up Standard Oil wasn't exactly great for consumers either. And those companies eventually re-merged anyways. But ole Rockefeller sure did make out well due to the breakup.
Wake up. These mega corporations are too big to care now. Most people are uninformed or unaffected. America has been brainwashed into a FU I got mine mindset.
The tiny fraction of people willing to vote with their wallet has effectively a 0% chance of pushing big corporate to act right.
Not that many. The differences are trivial and 99%+ of people don't care, not even on forums like HN. But... how is that relevant? If you have very niche tastes then it'll be harder for you to satisfy them, whether that be in art, music or tech. Go more mainstream and you'll have plenty of options. The free market can deliver, you just may not like the level of effort the size of your market justifies.
Well, last time I checked the number was 0 and I am still lurking in some pine chat groups, so I doubt that changed. So the free market does not deliver something working here.
Since part of what I'm purposely purchasing from Google or Apple is a more secure by default system I'm probably the wrong person to ask. My wallet vote is effectively for something different than yours.
Yesno. Not fully because a functionality is not enabled yet.
It wouldn't be advised to buy the latest pixel now anyway, either get the previous one or wait a few months for Motorola Signature 27, where GrapheneOS will be first party OS, and not hated-by-the-vendor bolt-on.
If you insist on the latest pixel, go check the GrapheneOS discussion forum for all the details.
If only the Motorola Signature 27 had a headphone jack, so that I could listen to high quality music with my quality headphones.
Instead I have to buy the shitiest locked full of crapware android phone and hack it with an LLM to make it usable because apparently that's what I deserve for wanting a headphone jack.
DAC have been more than good enough since the maturation of mp3 players in the early 2000s. The smartphone has a DAC and amplifier for its various speakers already. Heck the computer inside usb-pd power converter in the phone is many times more hardware and work and EMI constraints to respect than a DAC + amplifier for a headphone output.
The DACs/amps you linked are bigger than the Sony mp3 player I had in 2004. It had two jacks and a user replaceable battery. And it was water resistant.
The DAC I specifically linked is the size of my index finger, but since you seem to be casually suggesting that the "shitiest locked full of crapware android phone" and PCs dac are comparable with the dedicated hires dac, maybe you don't really need a phone jack and your audiophile headphones :D
True. But so long as only 1% of people care enough to do this, and they can make >1% more profit per customer with their crap - then it's more profitable for them to continue the crap.
Many things are stopping you. I see this response all the time as a counter to inappropriate behavior by monopolistic giant entities.
It's the wrong way of thinking about the problem. The whole point is that they've gained too much market power for any individual to be able to stop them meaningfully, and that collective action using the power of government is the only way.
Any argument that tries to talk people out of that is on the same side as the tech oligarchs, in my opinion.
I don't personally want them to stop. I like what they produce and how they produce it. As long as there are enough people like me there will be a market for this.
Voting with your wallet doesn’t mean stopping them. That isn’t what it is about. You shouldn’t get to choose to stop them because you don’t like their actions any more than I should be able to choose banning you from carriers because I don’t like your choices.
Yes, some of us simply don't give a damn. I'll continue buying Apple products because they work and I don't have to do much of anything to keep them working. Just because I like tinkering or customizing other computers/devices, doesn't mean I want to be a sysadmin to my phone lol
I also exclusively use cash, and do not carry any electronics, and only use FOSS software. Willing to bet my data footprint is smaller than most other tech workers.
It's not only about driving Apple out of business. If you don't use Apple, you simply don't have to deal with any Apple bullshit. All your Apple-related worries just disappear. And you even have enough money left over to afford a separate non-rooted phone for your bank (in the unlikely event you need one).
I’ll vote with my vote thank you. My table’s manufacturer shouldn’t get a say in what I put on my table, and Apple shouldn’t get a say about my phone either.
These clearly anti-consumer practices should just be illegal.
Last I heard even EU policy was ways off of that target.
Also: EU policy is very shcceptible to political tides. Sure now we love to scream sovereignty from the rooftops but that is guaranteed to change eventually.
> Apple shouldn’t get a say about my phone either.
They operate the factories manufacturing the phones. They have total say about their phones, and you have no say. Your almighty powers within the Linux terminal doesn't extend beyond it.
Nobody is stopping you from taking apart your iPhone and using AI to reverse engineer it and run custom software. Apple has made it as difficult as they can, but they haven't made it illegal, and they haven't even made it impossible, so from the law's perspective there is nothing to fix here. The law just sees yet another thing that nobody's bothered to do yet. The law wouldn't pass a regulation requiring Apple to make it easier to reverse engineer an iPhone any sooner than it would pass a regulation requiring Coca-Cola to make it easier to reverse engineer their formula.
Note that earlier this year, a YouTuber did reverse engineer the Coca-Cola formula because nothing was actually stopping someone from doing it, all this time. You could be that guy for iPhones.
Nobody dictates how you can use your iPhone either. You can do anything with it physically that you are capable of. Apple will never say a word.
Just like Apple with their products, the table manufacturer decides the exact measurements and materials of the table. You vote with your wallet and purchase the product you prefer, or make your own if you are capable.
> Nobody dictates how you can use your iPhone either ... physically
Come on. You know very well what we're talking about. This whole discussion started about software. Can I can load any app I want? Can I remove any app I want? I can remove their ads from my phone?
No of course not. I can put my app on my phone only if they bless it. I can't sell an app to another iPhone user and have them use it without apple's blessing. I can't remove the ads they keep spamming me for iCloud, or whatever service they release this month.
And please don't tell me it's because I get a license rather than a purchase since that's exactly my point. You wouldn't accept a license agreement for your table, and there would be outrage and major public backlash if any they tried; "Here's your made in china table, you are not allowed to place an American flag on it".
But because it's sprinkled with magic software dust, we have people in comment threads simping for the right of companies to do this to their customers.
If you have the skills to do it you can do everything you ask for there. If you don't then you should buy or make a device that suits your preferences. Vote with your wallet. Nobody forced you to buy an iPhone.
Would you buy a Honda Civic and cry that Honda is not permitting you to get the functions you wanted from it? If you have the skills, you can do whatever you want with your car physically and Honda won't stop you. If you don't have the skills, you have to buy a car that suits better your preferences. Whether that's hauling logs, having more horsepower, removing seatbelts, or whatever you like.
I'll vote with my vote as well, and my vote will not be for candidates who equate computers with tables. Hacking isn't a human right. Go buy a different phone if you don't like Apple's phones. There are a bunch to choose from.
Idk what point you think you're making, but human rights aren't an absolute law of nature, it's something we decide on.
> Hacking isn't a human right.
Hacking is such a loaded term for "the right to use the thing I purchased how I see fit".
> Go buy a different phone if you don't like Apple's phones. There are a bunch to choose from.
This is beside the point (and may not always be true). The ability for the manufacturer of a thing I bought and ostensibly own to tell me how to use my property.
It's really not that hard to understand. The fact that it's a computer doesn't change anything.
This comment made me think that someone should pull an ArtCraft on Android or iOS by making a good linux phone skin, with high performance auto-updating wrappers for various web apps to make them as convenient as mobile native ones. Then we can actually ditch the big corps and bask in our LLM-enabled open source utopia. Hmmmmm.
Give it another 6-12 months until the big AI shops shut those capabilities down and running local ones becomes cost prohibitive
I don't expect that to happen, but I do expect Apple et al to spend trillions of tokens hardening their platforms against users and red-teaming to find these sorts of holes before release.
The loss of your purchase is insignificant compared to the money Apple and Google make from their walled gardens.
Plus what other viable options are there in this duopoly?
Apparently there’s a popular 3rd option in Asia but is there any support for western apps? And how are you going to convince a million other people to switch?
Many Android phones are not unlockable without hacking. They use cryptography to protect the bootloader and to get the unlock code for your own phone first you need to provide them all your information.
Where would you point said wallet? Google isn't far behind Apple on this from, ahead in some ways, and many (all?) of the FOSS Linux powered phones cost even more than iPhones do.
Then maybe you’re onto something here: the hardware is subsidized. Point being that if you want the cheaper, subsidized device, you have to make some compromises.
That holds only as long as people can afford the unsubsidized prices or do without. I'm not sure that wither are tenable given modern life at least in the US.
Easier said than done. Because, "Apple can do no wrong" is the general public perception. Look at any wrongdoing by Apple - whether they were caught slowing down the phones, degrading cameras on purpose or even the lawsuit where they were caught spying on people's voice recordings. There will always be some NPC defending them as if the billion dollar corporation gives a shit about them.
That or "Apple is the only pro-privacy company in the world" despite there being an active lawsuit against them for the exact opposite.
So, I say: Vote with your wallet. Fuck them...and the fanboys.
This. The only mainstream alternative is Android, and I'm already "voting with my wallet" against Samsung, Google, and the rest for violating user privacy even more than Apple does.
How are running local ones going to become cost prohibitive? Indications are that Nvidia has been channel stuffing (artificially inflating perceived demand), which suggests massive oversupply of GPUs.
> even if I jailbreak my iOS and never let it update.. Apple can easily detect the jailbreak and lock me out of anything iCloud, and iMessage and such.
As someone who's been jailbreaking since the iPhone 3GS (and held onto a iOS 17.0 device for the longest time), Apple has never bothered to detect jailbreaks and lock people out of iCloud and iMessage.
If anything, it's those sleazy security framework providers that provide jailbreak detection to apps and cause them to either lock people out of accounts and features, or crash entirely.
Some government-mandated audit processes (at least, that's what I understand here in Singapore) also require jailbreak detection.
> Apple has never bothered to detect jailbreaks and lock people out of iCloud and iMessage.
Not entirely true. It absolutely has in the case of the Hackintosh. In fact many a year ago that’s what inspired me to get my first Mac, because every release of macOS made it harder and harder with custom bootloader and kexts to get around Apple’s active efforts to ensure you couldn’t use those unless you were on an actual Apple device, not just running their OS.
An iOS jailbreak is trying to use an Apple device like a Linux device, with access to the filesystem and private APIs.
A Hackintosh is more like emulating the APIs (and an actual Apple serial number, which I guess they use to gate access to iCloud and iMessage) required to boot and run macOS on an Intel PC.
No, I get it, but it's still somewhat fallacious to say Apple doesn't care about "unauthorized" access to devices or services (whether or not you agree that such authority is reasonable or not).
> I stopped considering such tinkering because I got tired of finding those little tweaks and fixes on forums like xda every time something was updated.
Several vendors sell Android devices that allow bootloader unlocking, Pixels being the most known.
Once unlocked, Magisk is the current and most used rooting tool.
I considered getting another pixel with grapheneOS or calyxOS a couple years ago. It's definitely an option, and you can get used-but-still-supported pixels for like $100.
I bought a fp4 from murena because it is supported by postmarketOS, and the postmarketOS support has kept improving. I think the end goal is to run some sort of convergent linux that is as similar to desktop linux in environment as possible. That removes the requirement to completely re-write all the userspace tools for android.
grapheneOS is a dead end as long as it is android based and google and OEMs that are indifferent to open source plight lead android development. A very well written dead-end but a developmental dead end nonetheless.
GrapheneOS developers won't support other platforms because they don't have extensive enough trusted computing "security" features. Trusted computing the nail which seals its own coffin and locks anyone out of running their own OS.
Oh man, those early days of XDA forums and SenseUI roms on my NexusOne. Those were truly a thing of beauty. We still haven't gotten back to that level. I'm with you though, I stopped playing and moved to a stock device. Then I moved back to an iPhone and have been completely stock ever since. I haven't been excited about an iPhone since the 10 released. After that I think, "oh cool, another rectangle". "A grid of icons"... "The best camera Apple's ever put in a phone.... how wonderful".
There have been several companies that tried to sell open mobile devices over the years, but people have shown time and time again that they don't want to buy that product. We can wish it were different all we like, but in general we aren't entitled to money-losing, unmarketable products.
Regulators have been asleep for the last two decades while Apple and Google continue to extort 30% taxes from developers.
There was a glimmer of hope with the DMA but regulators are again asleep, emboldening Google to cripple app installation outside of their store and force developers to enter into a contract with Google to distribute from the developer's own website.
> Apple can easily detect the jailbreak and lock me out of anything iCloud, and iMessage and such.
Don't sign into any of Apple services then! Just use it as a pure developer playground or create an alternate ID. Can't be looking for everything everywhere :-)
> even if I jailbreak my iOS and never let it update.
Two things:
a) Why the would you never want to update an OS in this day and age ?
b) I understand the perspective of people insisting on wanting to be able to root their phone. But how about we take a step back and look at the reality of the 2026 security environment ? An environment where you have:
- Increasing volumes of increasingly sneaky security exploits on one side
- A phone with your 2FA apps, your banking apps, your email apps, your kids photos on the other
Frankly. I want Apple to lock down my iPhone as much as possible in that context.
If I want to be root, I can do so on my desktop or a cloud VM or whatever.
But making root on a phone easy just seems like a recipe for disaster... if its easy for you, its easy for the bad guys too.
> a) Why the would you never want to update an OS in this day and age ?
Because updates break the jailbreak. If Apple actually had a sanctioned way to let you do what you want with the device you bought there would indeed be very little reason to not update.
> Maybe your phone doesn't have banking and stuff on it
I don't know where you live, but where I am most banks insist on proprietary 2FA via their own app. Only (some of) the fintechs allow TOTP.
Yes you can get your codes via SMS, but I thnk we all know what a security mess SMS is. I would rather have the bank's proprietary app since at least everything will be going over HTTPS and also eliminates most of the vulnerabilities associated with SMS just by virtue of being an app.
My iPhone passcode was either unset or 2222 until like 2018. At times it was jailbroken af. It had messaging and stuff. Wouldn't have been the end of the world if someone hacked it, and nobody did.
I’ve never used iCloud. I hate Apple but I hate Google more. Instead of iCloud I use WebDav, CalDav, Bitwarden and NextCloud. Contacts, calendar, passwords and photos that I control. I recommend the same to others but I can count on one hand who has actually gone away from iCloud into such a setup.
We gave in because open source and hobbiests do not design good products and even worse shared systems, as much as they enjoy self-righteously declaring their values. And shared systems require trust, planning, and goal setting in a way no open system would ever build.
1) They of course lack the resources
2) Often lack professional displince across all skills required
3) Mostly make for themslves or whats interesting, not whats needed.
This seems more correlated with big vs. small organizations, not closed vs. open organizations. There are open projects (e.g., Debian, Blender) that tick all four of your boxes in my opinion.
> open source and hobbiests do not design good products
This is opinion. In my opinion, closed products are not good products. To me, openness and freedom trump subjectively better UX any day.
> as much as they enjoy self-righteously declaring their values.
Consider that in our society and software ecosystem, this is all but required to stave off the forces that would enclose the software commons that these "self-righteous" volunteers work so hard to maintain.
Great for professionally administered servers or expert power users. Not for much else. Until recently, esoteric use-cases like playing audio were catastrophically unsolved. And then those got better around when screen sharing, accessibility devices, and remote-assistance tools all broke because of another OSS schism. Installing and running an ordinary program requires choosing among a handful of ways of doing that (container systems, package managers) even on the same distro. And then if a graphical program wants to do crazy stuff like "open a file", well, the permissioning situation is "fragmented" to put it generously.
Gaming? Gaming works great on Linux now! ...because a corporation with centralized planning, KPIs, and incentives spent hundreds of millions of dollars on it.
I like Linux. It's been my daily driver for years, on and off. I use it for a living, I use it for a hobby. But that doesn't mean it's not a perfect example of every single one of the OSS flaws that GP listed.
You do understand the reasons right? iCloud, iMessages etc are an interplay of software in your device, software in cloud and some networking. They have to work together. A jailbroken phone can have a tinkered iMessage app. Supporting tinkered / unsupported versions is more overhead / possible security risk. Why would you expect them to take on that?
I agree with your point, though I can easily modify ~/Library/Messages/Attachments or ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.MobileSMS/Data on macOS, which is a platform similarly secure to an iPhone when you take sandboxing, sip, etc. into account. So Apple already supports macOS, which can be tinkered, no? I guess the argument is that by locking down iOS, a platform which was never open, they just never needed to handle that class of security risks which are introduced when customers have more freedom.
I did actually discover a bug in iOS (related to photos which have failed to sync to icloud for the past four years) by investigating why there were over 23k empty folders in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.photos.ImageConversionService/Data/tmp/, fwiw.
You're right, but I could see Apple acting on iOS alone, just because of scale.
There are some orders of magnitude more iOS/iPadOS devices than macOS devices.
There's a bunch of ways we could debate ourselves about things Apple would or wouldn't do, but at the end of the day, Apple is going to do whatever is in it's best interest.
It does not make sense for someone to lose faith in apple because someone else was able to run a modified imessage app.
For apple to entertain this idea is to create more problems for themselves in the long run.
If you understand this from my perspective, which is that these actions are motivated by a desire for more control. It begins to make more sense. If you can benefit from increased control, then these unreasonable expectations of security against your customers (held by other customers) are a desirable problem to have as opposed to an increasing burden.
Imagine the same being said of a car manufacturer. "We need to install security measures in place to prevent you from modifiying your car because other people may see that modified versions of our cars exist and that tarnishes our brand somehow".
As long there is no reason to allow companies to exert this control over consumers, it just allows the manufacturer to enforce a total monopoly on the post-market.
I'm continually amazed that PDF has survived this long while so many other technologies have died. Not only is it a constant vulnerability, but it's not even good at its job. Absolutely miserable UX and DX.
I disagree. PHP had a wonderful DX. Deploying a website literally meant connecting to the server over FTP, and drag-n-dropping your PHP files. Same for updates. Oh, and back then, IIRC even Windows Explorer supported FTP. It was literally just "write the URL, drop the files". How do you deploy a Node webapp? A python webapp? How do you make sure it stays up? Do you expose is directly or behind a nginx?
This gave me warm fuzzy feelings of nostalgia. Jailbreaking my iPod touch back in the day was so fun before there was anything serious on these devices.
Cool to see our work here. I'm Thai, and I run Calif. Happy to answer any questions.
We'll publish the technical details of these hacks over the coming weeks. Writing these articles takes time, and we've been busy with a PHP thing [1].
In the meantime, check out The Great Glyph Grift [2] for a glimpse of what can go wrong when iOS parses PDFs.
Just in case you wonder, we've disclosed most of the bugs in these exploit chains to Apple and will disclose the rest. So far in 2026, we've reported close to 100 bugs to Apple. We don't accept Apple bounties, and we're not being paid for this work. We don't sell bugs or exploits, and we have no sponsors funding this research.
We do this because it's fun, intellectually challenging, and we want to help make the iPhone safer. We also have a business to run, so we do need some marketing points.
Hey Thai- How much of the at Calif is managing agents to explore ideas? Are ideas coming from agents themselves or still human generated, and has that changed since y'all started the company?
On the cost side- How expensive is it to develop each of these demos w.r.t. inference cost? Are y'all purely using OAI/A\ cyber models or are there OSS models being used too?
There are loads of these exploits which exist in the hands of private hacking groups and state organisations which have not been made public. Always assume your device is able to be compromised from those who have the motivation and dedication.
Is it an exploit around the library that handles PDF parsing/opening? Can someone explain how files / attachement are open on a mobile device ( android/iPhone).
I don't understand how in 2026 this is still a thing, we have many safe languages to parse/deserialize data. Why is it complicated?
PDFs are basically executables, that's why it's hard. They support running code, they support decoding images which themselves have their own custom compressors that are basically code. Anything to do with image formats is rife for bad decoders, insane compression algorithms from the 90s, and a PDF is basically 1000 formats inside many different container types with executable code plastered on everywhere. If you want to make a compatible PDF viewer you'll need to be able to implement an image decoder algorithm for a fax machine that was specific to Japan in the late 80s, which was somehow ratified into a standard and is used today by all the top legal firms, or something absurd like that. When you open a PDF on your computer, depending on how it is being parsed, it can even make outbound network connections without you knowing. To safely open a PDF you need one of those bomb proof suits, a disposable laptop, and even then you might be going home without eyebrows.
Willing to bet that a default "treat PDFs/documents/spreadsheets as dumb" option in operating systems would eliminate the majority of common one-click vulnerabilies out there. And exactly 0.001% of actual use cases would be affected.
This is one of the things iOS's Lockdown Mode does. I wish the features of Lockdown Mode were able to be enabled individually instead of a single all or none option.
Your link doesn’t say anything about PDFs. And if I remember correctly it only disables PDF previews in Messages. This means if you have a zero-click exploit now it becomes a one-click exploit. I fail to see how that’s relevant given the article is already demonstrating a one-click exploit.
I’ve turned on lockdown mode while this CVE insanity is going on. It’s far less disruptive than I expected. The only thing I noticed missing is web gl is disabled.
PDFs are just absurdly complicated in general. Dumbing down the parser might be the right idea. I wonder what consequences that would have with how intertwined PostScript and PDF in general are with macOS/iOS; maybe that's why the PostScript engine was removed with macOS Sonoma/iOS 17? I don't know if that was only user facing behavior and Apple is still working to remove the internal usages.
That's kind of what Adobe does with downloaded PDFs, you have to click the Enable button to turn on more document features. My schematic capture app will output a PDF that has links that will take you to specific spots on a page and also some JavaScript where you can right click on a part and see it's BOM information. None of that stuff works until you click the Enable button. I've also seen some vendors offer not only normal 3D model files and 2D drawings but a PDF that has an interactive 3D model inside. It's kinda cool how much random shit can go into a PDF but it's clearly a massive malware vector.
One neat thing I've seen is a PDF that will ping an IP catcher when opened in Adobe, regardless of the security level. The same can be done with word docs, excel spreadsheets, and even SVGs.
I read it more as "don't implement JS, 3D object rendering, slideshow transitions, sound annotations and the other 999 insane features that I'm not even aware exist"
I think he just means disable any of the "advanced" features mentioned above like accessing web content, running custom scripts, etc etc. You might still be vulnerable to any dependencies they use for image rendering itself but I bet it would make it drastically more safe.
Then just have a button for turning those on as needed on a case by case basis
That isn’t really true, it’s not hard for PDF viewers to block by default (or just not implement) the problematic features, which also aren’t critical for the vast majority of PDF files.
The exploitable bugs are typically the usual, some buffer overflow in an underlying image or font library or similar, but unrelated to PDFs being “executable”.
What a sleight of hand. PDF's are obviously not executable, any more than text files are. Decoders are executable and they can choose to unsafely handle input. Even plain text editors can have exploits. It's no different than any piece of complex software.
The characterization of the PDF format specifically being “basically code” in any substantial manner is simply incorrect. The only PDF-specific features that reasonably meet that description is the PostScript support, which has fallen out of use decades ago and was completely removed in PDF 2.0, and the JavaScript support, which is optional, prohibited in PDF/A, and can easily be limited or omitted by a PDF viewer.
Older PDFs support PostScript XObjects: literal embedded PostScript code. Not sure it counts tho, because IIRC it was never executed by PDF viewer itself. It was "gives this to printer when printing"
> Beginning with PDF 1.1, a content stream can include PostScript language fragments. These fragments are used only when printing to a PostScript output device; they have no effect either when viewing the document on-screen or when printing it to a non-PostScript device. In addition, applications that understand PDF are unlikely to be able to interpret the PostScript fragments. Hence, this capability should be used with extreme caution and only if there is no other way to achieve the same result. Inappropriate use of PostScript XObjects can cause PDF files to print incorrectly.
> Note: Since PDF 1.4 encompasses all of the Adobe imaging model features of the PostScript language, there is no longer any reason to use PostScript XObjects. This feature is likely to be removed from PDF in a future version.
Yeah a lot of those fancy PDF features are Adobe-only. It's not that other apps can't support those features, it's that no one in their right mind wants to spend endless amounts of money and time trying to sandbox it.
Most people have some understanding that shady websites can give you malware, a drive-by exploit is pretty rare but it's good that most people think just visiting a site could infect your computer. But a PDF is just a document, right? Just thinking that a PDF is just words on a page is exactly why it's such an insidious threat. Or they'll get a PDF as an email attachment, see that it's not an exe or something weird, and open it because they think a document is safe.
I think it's more the image formats PDF supports? I could be wrong, but there was that forcedentry vulnerability (which was insanely cool, even if really bad)
From the standpoint of a layman it looks like there's a lot of overlap between writing safe web browsers/engines and writing safe PDF readers/engines. There just hasn't been anywhere near as much of an impetus to push PDF readers/engines in that direction because most of us aren't interacting with PDFs nearly as often as we interact with the web (and things built on web tech).
The difference is that web browsers absolutely need to support JavaScript to correctly display many important web sites, whereas that’s not necessary for PDF. You also don’t have to deal with vulnerability footguns like XSS/CSRF/CORS in PDF. Except for some rare special use cases that PDF viewers don’t need to support, nothing has to happen online for PDF. It’s really not comparable.
I'm pretty sure not even the safe languages would help you here. PDF allows you to pretty much run arbitrary code since it supports javascript, images, and a bunch of other things I'm forgetting, and you can't not implement javascript support or otherwise be selective about what you support with it because then all the end-users will complain when they get that one PDF that they need to fill out but it needs JS because... Nobody knows.
I'm not sure if this is real, but if it is: this week is unbelievable. I really hope it's not the new normal, but unfortunately I don't believe this myself.
If this continues I'll argue that you have to be absolutely insane to allow network connected electronics into your home in the future. This is Apple, known for locking down their device to the extreme, and yes some people would love to use this for jailbreaking their phones, other organisations want to root your phone for .... other purposes.
Insecure webpages, broken certificates and an insecure PDF library... You shouldn't have anything more connected than an FM radio at this point. Security is no longer something a private individual can deal with.
There's every incentive for nation states and other espionage outfits to keep these types of exploits under wraps. This has probably been the new normal for some time ..
I for one have experienced multiple lifetimes worth of internet madness and will be looking to airgap / disconnect as many devices as I can get away with.
People have been paying a premium to companies like Apple for a reason. You've got nothing to worry about.
Decade of people's purchases has been invested into safety and security. It's absolutely unthinkable that a $7t market cap company with an army of 200k workers will ever leave people high and dry. They proudly went public, so we know they have the public's interests at heart.
I think in time (a few years) the gap will close a bit. As AI is used to harden software, it will be harder to break. Software not validated by AI will continue to be vulnerable to it.
So what happens if AI becomes something that you need to actually pay real money for? Then only Apple, Google and Microsoft can affort to do network exposed software. Smaller companies and solo developers are just f-ed if the price of running LLMs goes up as investor money dries up.
It would make me so happy if this would allow running UTM.app with Hypervisor support on iPadOS. I don't want to travel with two devices, the would be enough, but sometimes I need a real desktop. Apple, of course, wants you to buy two devices. I do have UTM with Jit Linux running on my iPad, via altstore and entitlements and so on, but it is all a bit complex and still fairly slow.
My favourite part from the first video is how much effort it took to drag up from the bottom of the screen to get back to the home-screen. This reflects my experience with how iOS handles touch gestures in general.. also super easy to accidentally activate "Reachability" mode!
You say this, but have you tried an old iPhone recently? I did, and it was actually pretty terrible. The quick little swipes to switch between apps is so much more natural now.
I recently learned you can swipe on the address bar in Android-Chrome to navigate to the next/previous tab. Also, press+hold on the tab count button to show the tab's options e.g. close tab. Now my address bar is on the bottom of the screen.
Terrible discoverability. I guess the genalpha kids know gestures like this, but stuff like this makes me feel like a boomer.
Android Firefox had that swipe gesture for a long time. You tap the tabs count to show all tabs. You can close any of them from there. A long tap opens a menu. New tab, new private tab, close tab.
Safari added this in iOS recently. You can also swipe up on the address bar (after tapping it to make it "big") to swipe between pages, similar to the home screen. Found it on accident.
Try going back to thumb typing, no long press symbols , and no cursor movement from your spacebar. I've almost thrown my test iPhone at work across a room more times than I'd like to admit (since it doesn't belong to me)...
> They are going to run out of vulns eventually when the code is rewritten in a memory safe lang
that's just not how it works at all though is it. Good luck writing the kernel, firmware etc in a completely memory-safe way. And even if that was accomplished, memory safety isn't the only class of vulnerabilities, it's just the most common.
> and the rest are found
If they kept a stable version with no updates or new features *ever*, only security patches, for decades, then maybe that could be possible, yeah. But Apple users aren't exactly the kind of people who would enjoy such stability and security anyways, it comes with the compromise of novelty. Stability and security aren't very fashionable either.
edit: Obviously a "memory-safe way" means no `unsafe` blocks in Rust, too.
edit#2: This is all assuming we don't get true AGI. I hope my assumption is right
Aside from bragging how cool they are, what value is there for demonstrating a yet-to-be-patched vulnerability? I don't understand why old-guard infosec stars from Calif can do as they want, responsible disclosure be damned.
Just as a reminder for some folks here: During their WeWorm research in July–September 2026, Calif didn't stop at proving RCE to Tencent—they spent an extra week using AI to build a fully functional, self-propagating zero-click worm across three live phones, triggering temporary account bans from Tencent during testing.
I don't see this as irresponsible disclosure. They show that the vulns exist, but don't give any other details (unlike previous Calif releases). Not even a hint at what the exploit chain is like other than that it starts with a PDF, which is a surprise to no one.
They're of course also doing it for internet kudos, but attracting attention like this will help encourage people to update. Thanks to this article, I'm going to apply the next iOS security update ASAP, and tell everyone I know to do this the same. (hopefully it comes out soon)
I do wish they clearly stated the vulns have had been reported to Apple and when.
We disclosed most of the bugs used in these chains to Apple, and are going to disclose the rest, if not already.
>Just as a reminder for some folks here: During their WeWorm research in July–September 2026, Calif didn't stop at proving RCE to Tencent—they spent an extra week using AI to build a fully functional, self-propagating zero-click worm across three live phones, triggering temporary account bans from Tencent during testing.
Not sure what exactly your point is. The WeWorm demo was done in a controlled environment.
Also we do this for free. We don't charge neither Tencent nor Apple. We don't even take their bounties. Why can't we have some fun?
If you're so upset about how we do it, my suggestion is go find your own bugs.
You literally just said your company released an exploit demo before disclosing some of these vulnerabilities to the vendor.
As for your suggestion, I was an infosec researcher, I worked for 3 years with vendors to help them patch before I can even tweet anything about my research. I even flew to their HQ to assist in patching when needed. After Covid I transitioned to a development role, and now I'm on the other end, handling security reports from researchers.
Based on this dual point of view, let me tell you that for a security engineer in Apple that will learn from your video about vuln your company did not even disclose yet, this karma harvesting is as far from "coordinated disclosure" as possible. Their managers will be fuming, and the stress they will be in given the media frenzy will be off the charts.
What is the value of revealing anything at this time point, when no patch is out? What use is it for the public?
Just last Black hat there was a "glimpse disclosure" that was later followed with proper fixes and details. I gave my AI agent the details that were supposed to be "useless", before the patch was out, and it found the vulnerability in less than an hour.
We shouldn't even enter this game. And with the track record of this specific group, I didn't exactly get the impression that their incentive is to help fix things, but rather to promote their brand while others be damned.
A couple of PDF exploits from iMessage and Signal leading to code execution, and an app that roots the phone. Also, they seem to have managed to make their malware survive a reboot, which is difficult. That's another reason why automatic reboots are considered a security feature: exploits leaving malware in-memory are a lot easier to build than malware that survives a full reboot, passing all stages of signature checks and validation.
Yes, why don't they just say it instead of posting videos. Opening a sinister PDF in iOS can give them access to what exactly? anything/everything? What iOS versions or devices, etc?
This post gave me flashbacks to jailbreak era w/ Cydia. It's interesting to think that a lot of the those old plugins and tweaks have basically become standard supported features of the iOS now (SBSettings, Activator, WinterBoard, Zephyr, ...).
When they hacked the M5 (one week after release!), they used a data-only attack, which is outside the scope of MIE. That could be the case here, or something else entirely. We don't know.
Someone correct me please if I’m wrong but is this because iOS doesn’t sandbox their processes? I think I read Safari in particular doesn’t, but wonder if this is system-wide issue.
The more of this stuff we see, the more people will start using GrapheneOS, I guess.
Also wonder why they choose to publish and not cash-in the Apple bounty..
iOS does sandbox their processes really well, that's why this hack was as difficult as it was. The Safari thing you're talking about is JIT - iOS disables all runtime code generation across the system except in Safari (for JavaScript), but this is a completely separate thing from sandboxing.
Actually, no, I now remember this was about iMessage specifically and how it isn't completely isolated/runs as system service or sth? Or about the renderer?
Which would make sense because these attacks seem to exploit the same weakness.
iMessage's attachment renderer is also sandboxed, actually. You might be talking about this vulnerability: https://projectzero.google/2021/12/a-deep-dive-into-nso-zero..., but the second half of the vulnerability exploit chain was finding a way out of the CoreGraphics (Apple's image rendering library) sandbox to hack the rest of the system.
why do we see pdf viewer exploits on ios when we have sandboxing mechanisms nowadays like wasm? Or is this exploit accounting for the sandbox breakage?
This made me miss Cydia and the old jailbreaking days so much. Was such an exciting time to have an iPhone with the tinkering. Anyone still remember iDitDahText https://iditdahtext.com/iDitDahText.html?
Slightly offtopic but I find it slightly funny that they have accomplished to hack the iPhone yet the name of the third video is: Can you iPhone do this?
I would like to think that they might've created the video so fast and perhaps out of so excitement that the name of the title had the typo :-D
Too bad this will be patched instead of allowing the device owner to control their own device.
Of course it's better that they found that before some shady mercenary spyware company, but I'd also want to control my ios device the same way they did in the video, but no, that's not for us.
I think we will probably see more and more restrictions on frontier models in the coming months. This is not what behemoths like Apple and Sony want to see.
Paradoxically, people are happier to buy things that they have control over, but boy, Apple loves to control every layer of consumerism.
If the current frontier allows for this, we can probably expect alternative models to reach the same spot in a matter of months as well. The cat's out of the bag, for better of worse.
Do we want everyone who doesn’t know how to program a car to reprogram their car? I.e. I think there should be restrictions on frontier models to ensure safety of others.
The paradox is that if the models are restricted, more exposed software will exist. I'm not convinced you can make a model that allows you to build secure software without it also being able to build exploits.
First of all this is crazy that even on hn we were a few days behind this.
Second fuck Apple. Fuck all tech companies. And seriously fuck late stage capitalism. Foss or nothing. There should be a rule if you pay for it it has to be foss. This way people can still make proprietary but they just can’t charge for it.
We have zero privacy, zero security, all our politicians and all the corporations are against us.
Media parsing is an endless exploit vector. Like fuck. At some point you have to be like they (not just Apple) keep it broken
An yea I know foss gets these issues too. But if the only option was foss, then at least the whole world’s focus would be on it
My dream is to release an iOS app that self-installs and not say anything special about it other than having a "Download for iPhone" button on my website. If someone asked me, I'd answer: "Huh, what do you mean? It's our app for the iPhone."
It's better to use 0-day exploits to install legitimate software by now. It saves everyone from a lot of hassle. Or, more realistically for most, make a web app and forget about native apps.
marvelous to see that your kids and grandkids wont be safe because capable people will rather do this than care about safety and security, opening up more and more attack surface ...
god fucking damn it, they really turned hackers into exactly what they wanted.
one can't help but manically lough at the ridiculous deformed minds of these people.
and it feeds corporations in such a perfect manner. if you don't want to be at the whims of disgusting private people that constantly escape law enforcement, all you can do is join a corpo and their VPNs so you have an admin team with faces and names that you can rely on and who know you do your part in the company. law enforcement is fucking worthless. I can't believe this. staying anonymous all the time, never letting any normal people with normal lives know when they are in danger or being watched.
god fucking damn it, these fucking lying lefty fucking fucks
I guess I've never really understood why people who don't like the way the iPhone and apple ecosystem work buy apple products. There are plenty of other options out there. Every time articles about this and the App Store pop up it seems as if the comments are filled with a whole lot of android users that are upset that iPhone's aren't like androids. That's not to say those are all of the comments and there aren't clearly iPhone users who want these options but again, why buy a product that doesn't support these things if they're so important to you in the first place.
Very cool demos, but now I'm interested to know: does enabling Lockdown mode help at all against these exploits? It'll theoretically protect against a lot of common attack vectors, but I'm curious about its real-life effectiveness.
yes for PDFs in iMessage where would be blocked, not sure in Signal though. No idea for 3rd one.
It only blocks auto loading. Clicking on the PDF will have the same effect.
These are still 1-click, not zero click. So the best protection you can have is not opening unknown files that were sent to you. That being said, lockdown mode blocks all sorts of message attachments. From the videos it look like they are using pdfs in the messaging vector, which would get blocked too. So you would be safe-ish. But lockdown mode is so restrictive that it doesn't really make sense for most users. Or at least it doesn't make sense to buy a $1500 phone and then limit yourself to something you could have gotten for $50.
You don’t know what lockdown is do you? I’ve had my phone in lockdown for a year. I can’t: collaborate on notes, and it does not automatically open links in chat. Other than that my experience is identical to non lockdown.
I guess you don't browse any modern webpages? Otherwise I can't explain your perspective. You basically lose up to 95% of performance in anything remotely resembling a JS heavy web app. So it would run the same as on a cheap Android phone.
My experience has been the iPhone chip is fast enough to still run pages just fine. Maybe those ones that load 300 adverts and relay out the page 5 times as they load won’t work but they hardly worked before anyway.
Everything that runs with such a major performance decrease will also run fine on a cheap phone. If this is your normal use case that's fine, but it simply means you also didn't need such a powerful Iphone in the first place. It's like buying an RTX5090 and then playing 2048 in a browser and saying you don't understand why people always install Nvidia drivers.
Send me a webpage that you can’t view in lockdown. I haven’t had a single problem. I guess I’m just not really relevant in your eyes.
Breaking is not the issue (at least most of the time), but the performance loss is everywhere.
it's very rare that they break but there's some popular ones like booking.com
in my experience like maybe <5% of the web break
My only gripe with lockdown mode is that my banking app loads icons from some source that ends up being blocked.
Quite annoying. I've tried to explain it to them, but to no avail.
You lose a lot: https://support.apple.com/en-us/105120
some sites don't work (you can explicitly whitelist them tho) but generally it's been fine. i would honestly prefer a phone that doesn't allow any comms to any non-contact list parties at this point.
From what I can see in Apple docs, aside from web limitations it sounds great. Is there any real reason to not enable this? Like I would be deeply suspicious of a PDF sent via messages and no auto-connect to insecure WiFi is also common sense.
been using it for years, haven't found a compelling reason not to yet
The iPhone is so expensive, definitely want shared photo albums to be part of the ecosystem experience.
I’ll admit I thought you lost out on more by enabling.
Doesn't seem like a lot according to the description and pretty much what I would set by default.
> Web browsing: Certain complex web technologies are blocked, which might cause some websites to load more slowly or not operate correctly. In addition, web fonts might not be displayed, and images might be replaced with a missing image icon.
Images being replaced with a missing image icon doesn't seem like a lot according to the description, and it's what you would set by default?
“Might be” seems to carry a lot of weight. I’ve been running lockdown mode and I haven’t seen any images not load. Presumably it’s only images of a certain obscure kind.
Yeah what I want is a configurable version of lockdown mode where I can have my agent sync my allowlist with my hardware.
Like give me the list of what I can turn on and off, and then let me choose my lockdown sphere.
That’s the future, and it’s coming.
your future, ironically, is android 2.3, before google went full monopoly evil
I would still be using lockdown mode if the call notifications were send to my Apple Watch. Other than that lockdown mode was working pretty good for me.
It works great for me too.
But there are weirdnesses.
For example, you can't add a person to phone favorites.
Does the favorites added before enabling lockdown mode remain or they get removed as well?
> had my phone in lockdown for a year. I can’t: collaborate on notes
That's your own mistake, because you can collaborate on Notes while your iPhone is in Lockdown
I can send my friends a PDF of a restaurant's menu over iMessage. I think that wouldn't work for you?
I use Lockdown Mode and the functionality I get is nothing like a $50 device. If you're being serious can you link to some $50 devices for sale that are on par with a recent iPhone Pro running in Lockdown Mode?
I’d bet the security of those $50 phones is worse than an iPhone without lockdown mode.
#3 is so nice, I want root access to my phone. Does anyone know if doing this can lock Apple out from updating/removing it?
Subverting the secure boot/upgrade chain would require a SecureROM exploit and presumably a compromise of the Secure Enclave, so the answer is almost certainly "no" (even prior major exploits from recent memory like usbliter8 are tethered and don't exploit the enclave; the last true untethered Jailbreak was iOS 9 or something.) An upgrade would fix it. The internet reporting claims this break they are showing in this video is untethered though, which is extremely rare on its own.
Genuinely, why have an iPhone in the first place if you want this?
I know a bunch of people that would use iPhones if iPhones had first class private backup options (the de-iclouding, like the de-googling of androids). Having root on the device would make this an option.
It's good to have that option for every phone out there.
What are alternatives? I keep thinking I want something I can run vibed apps on, especially something grok bot right on device.
I run vibed apps on my iphone just fine - you have to register for a developer account and pay the annual fee, but I have an agent app running that can improve itself and push new versions over wifi just fine.
I even have realtime watch complications which no shipping app can have because of apple restrictions - developer mode lets you push complication updates realtime if you want.
I'll probably consider something more open next time I buy but just pointing out that right now with a developer account you're not actually _that_ restricted on iOS, the experience is better than you might think if you're making an app you never intend to ship.
So whats the going rate nowadays for running your own apps in your own device? 100$ a year?
I already have an account so I use that regardless, but AFAICT you can in fact build for your own device without paying at all. I haven't tested this though.
I am not arguing Apple's restrictions are a good thing, if I were in charge I would in fact make allowing installing your own software on your own device a legal requirement of selling hardware, yet here we are.
you can load your custom apps by usb onto any android phone.
usb not required android adb works wirelessly
The videos sort of imply that these are userland rather than bootrom, whatever payload they have running is getting hit before first unlock, which isn't a lot of surface. They specifically say to not update which pretty much confirms where the attack surface is. Somewhere after the kernel starts but before the main user space is unlocked with the passcode.
I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I disagree.
I want the freedom to install the OS I want on my phone. Now if I install a proprietary OS, I get what the developers of that proprietary OS choose to do. And if that proprietary OS does not give me root access, well, that's life.
the fact this opinion is voted down, is clear proof HN is late to be renamed something else, because hacker it isn't
I once again am pointing to the sign that states this was never a l33t-hax0r board like you all think; it's always been an arm of one of the leading VC incubators.
Stop expecting differently.
Curious now: why did they call it "hackernews"? I came for the name, definitely not for the VCs. The one thing I dislike more than BigTech is VCs.
You answered your own question :)
Haha yeah, well played :-)
HN for HackerNots.
I don’t think that hackers would agree to be locked out of a system, or do you mean they want to be locked out as a challenge? In any case you don’t get to choose which OS gets installed, so the parent’s opinion is hypothetical.
> In any case you don’t get to choose which OS gets installed
Of course you do. You can run GrapheneOS, or LineageOS, postmarketOS, or mobian, or many others. All of those are open source, you can modify them as you want before you flash them.
HN has and always will be majority lil VC money funded tech bros who know nothing about actual hacking
Well the governments and supranational bodies who want to read your messages would be aghast at you having root on your phone.
Like we did on HTC G1s in 2008
What's with iOS and pdfs pwning them? Reminds me of the ForcedEntry in Pegasus.
https://projectzero.google/2022/03/forcedentry-sandbox-escap...
https://www.trendmicro.com/en_gb/research/21/i/analyzing-peg...
PDF has been an entry point since forever, it is extremely complex and can in some cases even run javascript, it has a huge attack surface.
Why can't Apple just sandbox the damn thing? Run the renderer in a VM, call it a day.
Or just spend a few billion tokens rewriting the whole chain in a memory safe language. This nonsense is inexcusable in 2026
I sincerely believe you need much more than one billion tokens to rewrite the entire PDF dependency stack in a memory safe language. I think you underestimate how many features PDF has.
I wish that Apple today was a little more like the Apple that ruthlessly murdered the floppy disc and Flash.
Seriously though, I wonder why nobody really attempted to dethrone PDF yet. How hard can it be (famous last words) to design a document format that allows what people generally expect from a PDF, but without the multimedia and interactive parts that are dangerous?
Network effect. Most documents are PDF. You would need at least backward compatibility, which would mean opening doors to the existing problem.
Firefox has been working on this and are making good headway over the last few years.
It's sandboxed, not in a VM but using the *OS sandbox/seatbelt. Running all renderers in a separate VM on a consumer phone sounds like a terrible time when you need to stay competitive regarding performance, responsiveness, etc.
it offers just enough cover and deniability. Q.e.d this sub thread.
it's a feature. expect next exploit to also be pdf or image related.
The sandbox is just another layer
A bulletproof vest is just another layer.
Too huge attack surface. Good candidate for victim trust (who would not open a pdf file on an iPhone?).
So pdf and images are the best vector for iPhones.
Once you escape the parser you have to reach and escape the sandbox and from there reach the kernel.
That's why you need Rust in any image decoder. FFMPEG too.
Apple has been propagating Swift for more than a decade now and at least in theory, it should be on par with Rust in terms of safety I'd say.
It mostly is. Has pretty much caught up with all of rust actually (while being much more readable).
They probably link libraries written in C, given the scope of the pdf and image parsing.
Rust is not a magic security wand.
It might not be a magic security wand, but so many critical vulnerabilities in software trace their origins to memory unsafe code and things like "use after free".
"~70% of the vulnerabilities Microsoft assigns a CVE each year continue to be memory safety issues" - Microsoft [1]
"We adopted Rust for its security and are seeing a 1000x reduction in memory safety vulnerability density compared to Android’s C and C++ code." - Google on Android [2]
This is also worth looking: https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/memory-safet...
References: 1. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/msrc/blog/2019/07/a-proactiv... 2. https://blog.google/security/rust-in-android-move-fast-fix-t...
In case of ms it's often concurrent userland-kernel transitions, and kernel doesn't control how and when they happen. Copilot is busy optimizing windows 11 and can't riir the kernel.
If I were Google I'd try to rewrite Chromium in Rust. The FFMPEG folks should try porting the whole codebase to Rust too. They can always keep the legacy versions for legacy computers (my old n270 netbook can barely play 720p@30FPS anyway, and it's too slow to downsize 4k video to 720 or 480p...), so a bigger amd64 machine will always be -reallistically- needed for anything else than <=720p consumption.
> The FFMPEG folks should try porting the whole codebase to Rust too.
They don’t seem convinced that that would be a meaningful use of time for them. (2025)
https://itsfoss.com/news/ffmpeg-swipe-at-rust/
And 6 months ago someone did a little experiment using Claude to rewrite FFmpeg in Rust. It was by the own description by the person that had the AI do it, significantly slower than FFmpeg even when incorporating assembly code from FFmpeg.
https://github.com/sharifhsn/wedeo
Maybe with further advancements it is now possible to get a better result, or soon.
But if you are going to copy their assembly code into the Rust protect how do you definitively prove that no memory unsafe operations are happening in those parts? Seems to me that either the whole thing should be safe Rust, if the point of the rewrite is memory safety.
What folks at Ladybird did this year. Started adopting rust for part if not all their engine.
They didn't enumerate everything you need, nor did they say Rust was a magic security wand. Cast your gas somewhere else.
"Seatbelts don't solve car crashes so there's no need to wear one!"
No, but it was created to mitigate these sorts of risks.
It kind of is, as is any other memory safe language.
You certainly can still write security vulnerabilities that don't involve memory safety violations, and these languages always have unsafe escape hatches that you can use to shoot yourself in the foot. But as long as you don't just sprinkle unsafe on everything, using a safer language is going to make a ton of vulnerabilities just disappear.
Looking at the issues from this past week, safe languages won't stop you from using 4 as your private key, but they would have entirely prevented the PHP vulnerability.
It cuts down most of the crap trying to trash your machine's RAM (virtual memory in the end, but today it's almost as if you didn't have a MMU). It's good enough.
On less powerful machines, dear Mutt+isync+msmtp users like me, please use AERC (written in Go) against these. It's slower, but far more secure than C. Also, SLRN needs a Go rewritten clone (able to point to slrn's caché) like nothing else. Comp.misc and comp.arch still are extremely valuable.
The problem here is that pdf is over bloated with features and without strictly defined standard. Rust can't help you with that, or any language for that matter. It's akin to upgrading the security system on a house on fire.
The best solution would be ditching it completely for a simpler subset of features. But that will never happen.
> The best solution would be ditching it completely for a simpler subset of features. But that will never happen.
Like the saying goes:
Everyone uses only 20% of the features, but it's a different 20% for different people.
If it wasn't PDF it'd be something else. It's everything after the PDF that's alarming here - how did they break out of the app sandbox?
I wonder if pdf.js would be more secure since it runs inside a webpage and can benefit from the browser sandboxing. Though I guess iOS has generally managed to keep most of its apps native rather than web app wrappers (as has happened on Windows).
Well it was TIFF one time
TIFFs were used as part of a PSP jailbreak as well iirc
Never mind - that only applied to origins PDF 1.x.
Does Lockdown block all PDFs?
No, it doesn't.
pdf is the new swf
Incidentally, both created by Adobe.
macromedia has entered the chat.
Maybe with LLMs a full rewrite that’s more secure could be done
LLM and full rewrite are a recipe for cooking something that still has flaws but also doesn't work that well. The root cause is that PDF is an old format from a more innocent era. A new document standard that keeps up with the technical and security advances, learns about the lessons PDF taught us, and allows for easy conversion from old PDFs, would be the ideal solution.
Who am I kidding, I think the PDF format will outlive us.
> PDF is an old format from a more innocent era
if apple parsed pdf with (js, swift, rust) none of this would be possible. the problem is memory-unsafe code.
> if apple parsed pdf with (js, swift, rust) none of this would be possible
Interpreters and compilers can have bugs. Bugs can cause memory safety issues.
A full rewrite of what? iOS? I hope you’re kidding
Apple can rewrite the media and PDF libraries in no time in Swift/Rust, they have tons of money to waste.
In no time? What are you talking about? It’d take months even with llms for it to be fully polished and tested if they started now.
That is essentially "in no time" on Apple's release cadence.
If anybody has the resources to do it, tho, they do
They have the means, they have the motivation
Lately they have fewer and fewer excuses not to
Man, sucks to see these "hacked" iPhones doing so many cooler things than my Apple-approved one.
It’s a mix - for years I wanted root on my iPhones, just like you got on android. In practice, once I had it…? I never did much beyond installing Cydia.
With today’s hardware I might have a different take - the 18 has more than enough hardware to be a laptop so maybe I’d use it for a docking mode. But my gut is I’d probably still want a laptop even then.
To me the upshot is : billions of development, software and hardware, have gone into the platforms - it’s hard to quickly make them significantly better.
When I owned an iPod touch, the advantage of jailbreaking was to give your device certain features that the OS just didn't support. (Hell, I remember early days when iOS didn't even have a concept of wallpaper, the background was just black.)
iOS has come a long way since those days so a lot of the most common use cases of the past are no longer necessary. But the principle is the same - the hardware is a general-purpose computer but the software is locked down unnecessarily in many ways. Jailbreaking lets you do things that are outside of Apple's box.
A much-needed advantage is also keeping old devices useful. Every Apple phone slowly outlives its supported software to the point where the official AppStore has almost nothing in it. Today, it's extremely difficult to find 3P apps that work with my current iPhone 7, which is not that old, because the ecosystem cuts off old phones very quickly.
I agree, and, if you have a developer certificate from Apple, the list of wants I have is ... not that long? zero? I'd love to be pitched on it. In practice, I wanted freedom, but didn't really want to do anything with it.
Let me try to pitch you:
The value of general computing freedom is like any other freedom: it is needed when it people are trying to express you.
And not just you. Anyone! So evaluating whether a freedom is necessary turns into a much more nebulous question of “would anyone really need this at one point now or in the future? Is this a thing we should protect in general, even if it does seem like we need it exactly now?”
For example, could Apple/Google at one point be strong armed (by any government) into including spyware onto all devices? And listeners to make sure no one ever says bad things about $DEAR_LEADER?
If the probability of yes is anywhere around 10% over the next decade, maybe it’s a good freedom to have.
> I never did much beyond installing Cydia.
Watusi was great, it let you disable the blue checkmark on Whatsapp. (Since been added as a setting)
I also used a tweak that let me auto-block certain phone prefixes that spammers used. Quite useful.
Was also useful that it allowed you to install multiple copies of an app (such as whatsapp), though no longer a need for that either.
You can delegate an app to filter calls now, so you don’t need a jailbreak for any of these.
The equalizer is easily 20 years old, and is restricted to presets. Presets! A parametric EQ is the only thing that can make Apple's own Powerbeats Pro sound good. And for several golden years (despite lots of Apple's work against it) we had a really good jailbreak equalizer that worked with Apple Music. Eventually I just gave up on the whole thing. But I remember going out for trail runs with good sounding music without worrying about losing my earbuds.
This is one of several things I'm considering for an Apple Music client I'm writing (they are one of the few streaming services that actually allows such a complete level of API integration, via MusicKit). Apple Music as an app is pretty mediocre, but with a 3rd-party app you can add custom EQ profiles, and even detect the type of device when it connects over Bluetooth and apply the EQ profile automatically on the fly when it is connected, to add it to the DSP processing path.
There's just less reason today for someone like me that liked the utilitarian benefits of a jailbroken iPhone. I used it for gestures, caller mini preview, grouped notifications, etc. All things that are now baked in.
I jailbroke every iPhone I had for many, many years. Most of the time it was silly skins/tweaks but there were a number of things that were huge QoL improvements. I remember BiteSMS and using it as a way to reply to a text directly in the notification instead of having to leave the app. This was before iOS had that feature and before multitasking, back when if you left the game you were playing the app would quit. Also had folders before stock iOS, things like Control Center, and a whole slew of little tweaks for other apps I used.
The downside to jailbreaking was often the instability but that was also back when the phones were way less powerful. Today, armed with LLMs, I would love to have root on my iPhone again. I'd love to rip out Siri and replace it with Claude Code or something like that.
I just want to be able to run things like yt-dlp on iPhone
You can do that already without jailbreaking with a-Shell[1]. It includes a wasm compiled ffmpeg binary and you can install (Python only) pip packages.
[1]: https://holzschu.github.io/a-Shell_iOS/
The only reason to do this today is to turn your iPhone into a tool for other nefarious purposes or clickbot type farms.
I'm for being able to hack your own device to do whatever you like with it, preferably without active resistance from its manufacturer. I'm against anybody who can convince you to open a PDF being able to hack your device to do whatever they like with it.
The point the parent commenter is making is that they want Apple to allow people the freedom to intentionally mod the functionality of their device. Not that they literally want single-click PDF exploits to be a thing.
Who is saying this?
The link here demonstrates an exploit which runs arbitrary code on an iPhone when the user opens a PDF.
> I'm against anybody who can convince you to open a PDF being able to hack your device to do whatever they like with it.
Who is saying this part?
Asking for an open device does not mean supporting malicious hacking of others. This is the single biggest false equivalence used by Apple and the rest of the industry to keep a closed ecosystem and restrict users' control over stuff they paid for. And people continue perpetuating it for some reason.
Nobody said exactly that, but your first comment pointed out how cool the capability is without acknowledging that it is trivial to exploit maliciously.
We're on the same side here. I daily a Pixel with LineageOS and root.
If you phone is hackable by you, what stops someone else from hacking it? Ultimately, it's a trade off between security and openness, and I think it's good that there are choices on both sides.
This comment is tricky because "hack" can mean different things in different contexts.
If I run software the OEM didn't authorize on a phone that I own and know the password for, that might be described as a "hack". Unless you're one of the horrible people trying to push OS-level DRM on everything, my doing that is a positive or neutral thing.
If a third party gets software that I didn't authorize to run on a phone that I own by tricking me into opening a malicious PDF, that's also a "hack". Almost everyone considers that a bad thing.
One does not imply the other.
Once you have used an exploit to get system access to your own device, you can patch the software to prevent anyone else from using the same vulnerabilities. See e.g. https://github.com/EolnMsuk/AntiDarkSword (but of course, as more and more vulnerabilities keep being found, it becomes basically impossible to backport all the fixes)
iOS has enough zero-click exploits that you don't exactly get a choice between the two.
You don't get that choice on any mobile platform.
What in these videos is so much cooler than what you can do on an Apple approved one? Other than, "As a programmer, I can do anything", I just personally don't see any capabilities unlocked that I can't have with an app or whatever. But I might be missing something.
One of the primary markets for cracked phones is for spying on partners.
In the abstract I’m a strong supporter of the idea that you should be able to use and modify a device you own as you see fit…but in the real world “ownership” is a whole lot murkier than the mental model a lot of tech people have.
I don't want folding iPhone, I want an iPhone I that turns to desktop once I plug it into USB-C monitor. It has faster CPU and more RAM than Neo.
The only thing I really miss from my jailbreak days is an app that could talk to the cellular baseband and display all cell towers nearby on a map and showed which you were using.
I used to have my home screens fully customized but that’s a lot of work creating icons for hundreds of apps. Or even dozens.
1. install apps without the app store so we dont ahve to pay 100 bucks yearly for it to apple
2. run linux
3. run emulators
4. run VMs
5. install steam
6. make it a media server
etc
run a real browser!
This is one of the strongest arguments for why ordinary users need the ability to do this. Not only because they would actually benefit from it (e.g. better ad blockers), but because things like that have a network effect that you can't get from the four people who root own their iPhone with a PDF being the only ones able to install a third party browser engine.
Apple added emulator support a couple of years ago. Delta works great.
I’ve seen and used terminal applications from the App Store that seem to run a Linux VM locally, which would check off items 2 and 4.
Retro game emulators were allowed only 2y ago and bold retro. JIT is still not allowed so they are restricted in being run in interpreted mode. Also, neither is allowed executing arbitrary arm64 binaries. And, of course, no hypervisor access. The Linux-using term (iSH) works by utilizing a x86 emulator / compatibility layer (basically translates x86 binaries and maps Linux calls to native ones). In the sole VM host available, UTM SE, the "SE" means "slow edition". Now jailbreak and you've full, JIT-capable, UTM (QEMU) and NewTerm (kinda Termux for iOS). Hypervisor access still not possible though.
I watched the “Can your iPhone do this?” video, assuming that was the coolest one. The others seemed like they’d just be showing the exploit.
It seemed like a silly party trick with no practical purpose, and required the terminal to reset things back to normal so the phone was useful again. Why does anyone want this? Surely there are better uses than what was demoed?
I used to jailbreak during the first few years of iPhone. I remember being able to drag out from the bottom right corner of the screen to have a launcher, similar to the Dock, but with more stuff. But over time, the iOS got more features and the argument for jailbreaking became less compelling. This is especially true now that so much sensitive information is in our phones… so I trust all this stuff that effectively has root?
I took this as a demonstration of ownage on the latest release, versus an attempt to show some jailbreak-only feature.
The evidence of hack is the feature.
Noob q: Does this(and most) hacks like this on the iphone likely rely on some kernel module — or what it talks to for executing code — being compromised to run arbitrary code execution? I dunno about ios but it seems from the videos that something that reads imessage attachments was compromised for privilege escalation.
Like what im mean is an attack vector shaped similar to https://pepsipu.com/blog/2026-10-switch2-jailbreak-ns2jb/ i.e. they compromised `fs` module that did not protect against a buffer attack(in memmov)? My understanding is that most core kernel modules are difficult to attack directly because of XOM, PAC and CFI like protections make it impossible for anyone/thing, so most likely only indirect attacks like above can work in such situations — there is a lot of incentive for teams like apple to do everything possible to improve security so i assume only these kind of difficult to find vectors remain.
hacks like these, where you go from a PDF to full persistence, require a chain of exploits. Pegasus, the iOS malware that made the news awhile ago, used a chain of 3 exploits like this:
Hoping more "unsupported" older "iDevices" can be made usable with newer software with something like "jailbreaking"
It's a felony to subvert the natural order of disposable tech consumerism.
I can 100% guarantee that we'll have comments from people saying they buy iPhones specifically because of the walled garden and the last thing they want is a jail broken device. On a website called Hacker News.
I'm glad to confirm your suspicion. I like to have both a walled-garden phone and several open-platform computers. They do two completely different things for me.
To be honest, I'd like my open computers to be even more open and hackable, with a secure boot path that doesn't involve any mysterious unpatchable embedded firmware or auxiliary CPUs, but we are slowly getting there with RISC V.
I want the same kind of phone. But I reject the premise that it's impossible to have a deeply nested "De-wall this device yes I know what I am doing yes I confirm I'm about to really open myself to issues if I don't understand the implications" settings option without compromising the walled mode security.
The point is that no one forces you to jailbreak your iPhone. If you like the walled garden - great! Keep using it! But I've been in plenty of discussions where iPhone users are literally against jailbreaks at all and in any form.
I want a device I can give the elderly in my family that they cannot be easily induced into doing insecure things on. If there were an unlockable iPhone and a locked iPhone I want to give them the latter. It’s not enough for me to tell them not to scroll to General and click seven times on About to activate developer mode. I would prefer to just give them a device that can’t do that.
My own parents are still relatively young and my in-laws are sceptical enough of other people that it’s currently safe but it won’t be so forever.
Just make enabling jailbroken mode require a factory reset of the device.
The biggest risk is not elderly people but rather the owner giving their passcode to someone else, e.g. a repair shop, who then enables jailbroken mode without the owner's knowledge and installs malware.
You can mitigate this problem, and the elderly person problem, by requiring the phone to be factory reset. That way any jailbreak would be extremely obvious.
Mostly agree with you, but:
> My own parents are still relatively young and my in-laws are sceptical enough of other people that it’s currently safe but it won’t be so forever.
It is always interesting to me how people equate getting old with becoming dumb. I know there is definitely some age related decline that's inevitable, but if a person has grown up with computers, and maybe more importantly, has had a hacker and curious mindset while younger, it is not likely that they will suddenly become so naive and vulnerable, even when like 80.
What usually happens is that people lose interest in learning new things and keeping up. My own mom (who passed at 73) could never be convinced to use Whatsapp messaging, thinking it is something complicated for the young ones, and yet I currently know people in their mid 70s and even much older who are still as sharp as anything and use all the cool apps.
I assume you didn’t have experience of your older relatives being targeted by professional criminals. I’m not talking about online honeytraps, in some countries these gangs will mix offline and online schemes (e.g. pretending to be social workers, driving my grandma to the bank, buying her a new smartphone to get access to her online banking, which were stopped by her luckily “forgetting” her current smartphone/banking PIN code).
That’s for Eastern Europe. I heard a similar line of reasoning for banning rooted phones in Asia and it’s easy for me to relate to that. It seems as if first-world hackers here just don’t grasp how low criminals can and will go.
Interesting. I'm actually from Ghana, I guess our criminals have not advanced to that level yet. Nigeria may be a different matter though.
I'm also from eastern Europe. This scenario you mentioned wouldn't be stopped by your inability to jailbreak the device. A criminal gang willing to go this far will just get your relative to send them money directly, or buy gift cards or send a western union transfer or literally just give them cash. Or like you said, they will literally buy your relative a new phone to set up for banking.
Sadly there’s also dementia where a gradual decline occurs. And I’m pretty sure learning gets harder.
>>I want a device I can give the elderly in my family that they cannot be easily induced into doing insecure things on.
Perfect, I knew this would come up. It always does. "I don't want someone to convince my elderly relative to hack their phone and do something bad". It's such an infuriating argument - no, YOU can't have freedom to do whatever you want with the device you own, because MY elderly relative might get scammed.
>>I would prefer to just give them a device that can’t do that.
There are a number of phones available that can just do calls and nothing else. If your elderly relative cannot follow the most basic advice of "don't listen to people calling you and telling you to do something on your phone" then that's all they should use.
Like, honestly - if you think your elderly relative will follow a 20 step process to go to a dodgy site, run a bunch of commands to jailbreak their phone, then download an alternative store to MAYBE download a dodgy bank app....what stops them from just following instructions from a scammer to send their money urgently to this account they named because the bank is doing maintenance on their servers and the money needs to be moved now or be lost? I love these "elderly relatives" who simultaniously don't have 2 brain cells and will follow jailbreaking instructions but who won't fall for any much easier scam involving direct transfers, gift cards or even good old fashioned cash in an envelope.
> There are a number of phones available that can just do calls and nothing else.
iPhone is this phone. Easiest to use, customer-friendly, options for limiting apps, large icons etc.
But for some reason, despite the dominance of Android phones on the market, custom smartphones being released almost every month, you want the foolproof layer to be stripped from iPhone. Why?
>>iPhone is this phone. Easiest to use, customer-friendly, options for limiting apps, large icons etc.
And no one is forcing you or your elderly relative to jailbreak it.
>> you want the foolproof layer to be stripped from iPhone
No, I want you(and me) to have the ability to strip it.
>>Why?
Because I want to be able to jailbreak the device I own and run the code that I write without asking Apple for their blessing. It's not any more complicated than this.
You can do whatever you want with what you own. And I want this restricted device. So you go be the market for yours and I’ll be the market for mine. I don’t understand what the problem is here. There are no shortage of phones on the market - many of them entirely rootable. It seems like you’re upset I want to buy an EV because you want to put gas in your car. Just go buy the gas car. No one is stopping you here (well except the EU I suppose haha).
>> And I want this restricted device >>I don’t understand what the problem is here.
That's the problem. There should be no restricted devices at all, not in the way currently presented by Apple and others.
>>It seems like you’re upset I want to buy an EV because you want to put gas in your car.
More like, you want to buy a car that's locked to only charging at Apple provided charging stations. I say every car sold should be able to charge anywhere from any station. But we're stretching the comparison thin.
I share your sentiments but I wonder realistically how far we are from AI just "jailbreaking all the things", rendering the conversation moot
Like they can try to lock some things down, and some of those barriers we may not be able to get around, but how much of enough of them will we be able to circumvent?
Ideally this would probably not affect newer hardened devices but could unlock a bunch of older otherwise "unusable" hardware that functionally is "e-waste" currently
Windows malware that says stuff like click Yes on the warning bar or box shows how well that works.
sounds like those rich college kids who pretend to be intellectual communists.
> I can 100% guarantee that we'll have comments from people saying they buy iPhones specifically because of the walled garden and the last thing they want is a jail broken device. On a website called Hacker News.
I bought my mom an iPad and got her over to an iPhone exactly because of this.
I'd not mind if there was an unlock option, as long as it was tedious enough, such as connecting to a PC to do it. The android option of a few clicks under settings is definitely something I can see someone/some site convincing her to do.
Correct me if I am wrong, but you don't get root access via the android developer options.
>>The android option of a few clicks under settings is definitely something I can see someone/some site convincing her to do.
Again, the mythical mother who will follow a stranger's instructions to enable developer mode and then follow detailed instruction to install an app bypassing several warnings along the way, but not one that will simply send money from one account to the other because of some random excuse from a bank "support" agent.
The proof is in the pudding so to speak though - despite every android phone out there having developer mode, this attack almost never happens. And developer mode doesn't give you root access or ability to access other apps data - she would still have to log in into her bank, and if she's willing to do that because a random stranger told her so then it's game over anyway, no need for custom apks.
Could you let your mom know she's the reason phones suck? Thanks.
Earlier today on the thread about the google play store apocalypse I posted a comment saying that I like some things about life in Apple's walled garden. But I still upvoted the parent comment because it's true and it's funny.
Also I'd happily jailbreak my iPhone and put an alternative OS on it to extend its lifespan. I'm a living human with nuanced opinions and I'm allowed to like more than one thing.
I got curious when you mentioned "google play store apocalypse", but I can't seem to find a comment of yours on the topic today. Would you be willing to post a link?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50209087
thanks
The meaning of Hacker here is VC Startup Founder
You said what I was thinking. If anyone has links for _hacker_ news drop them here ;)
Can't, I'd be autobanned, but this one is allowed at least: https://unslop.news/
THANK YOU! i somehow missed this.
replacing my hn bookmark.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660783#49663549
I can root my Android phone and have in the past, but I have absolutely no desire to do so now because it adds almost no functionality in exchange for a very large security risk. I consider rooting my phone in the past quite a foolish move by someone who didn't know better.
People are trading the future of personal computing just so they can run a banking app and justify it with "but I want my phone to be locked down for security." Not even sleepwalking into corporate-controlled-computing, but actively promoting it.
10, 15 years from now the ability to run your own code will be a distant memory unless you constantly subscribe to an annual Developer Account with BigCorp. Oh no, you've coded something that violates the ToS; account terminated.
Such a wild take to me. I install an entirely different operating system on my phone (graphene) which also advises me not to root because it's stupidly unsafe to do so. I also don't log in as root on linux, nor do I log in as an administrator in windows. None of these are sane practices to anyone worried about security.
To be honest this matter more on graphene than on linux or windows because of the sandboxing of all apps by default.
On Linux and Windows it doesn't make a huge difference to be admin or not on a single user system. If you have a process on windows running with your user rights it can access all your data, which means game over already. Same on Linux if you aren't using heavily sandboxed flatpaks or do not run all your apps inside jails using tools like landrun or firejail.
There's a reason why enterprises don't give you an admin account on Windows. Sure damage can still be done, but the blast radius is highly reduced. It was like the first rule I learned about Linux back in the day: don't ever log in as root, don't even bother enabling it. Hell it's not even a good idea to do it on an offline computer cuz you might accidentally bork something yourself. The barrier of at least a password to install system level software or delete critical files is a good one to have.
It only limits the blast radius on multiusers systems or when people do not follow basic security measures like having a different password on each computer. I agree it is a good one to avoid breaking the system yourself too easily but that is only if you don't blindly copy paste commands with sudo.
The only thing it mitigates really is how easy a malware can hide in the system once already present. But as said earlier once running under your username it is game over, your data is right here ready to be stolen, compromised, altered, destroyed or encrypted.
I have plenty of devices like raspberry pi’s and handheld Linux gaming devices that allow free unlimited access. My phone is the one thing I want fully secured because it’s where all my most important data and keys are.
and yet it's likely to be less secure than all the others.
or does your xterm binary scans your contract list and recently opened apps and upload all that to Facebook servers? because most apps on your so secure phone do exactly that
I converted to an iphone 13 mini (from the S24 Ultra) after being on Android since the release of the HTC Desire in 2010. I used to install custom roms and tweak everything on all of my Android phones which actually lead me to the iphone because I realized I wanted a phone without all the OE clutter and Google crap. The only clutter on the iphone is icloud which stays out of the way and doesn't annoy me with subscription messages. Also I don't have time to fuck around with modifying my phone. I just want everything to work without user intervention.
And you can keep doing that, no once forces you to jailbreak.
"No one forces you..." is an interesting line to go down in the comments of an article that focuses on using messaging apps to deliver exploits to a cellphone. It's pretty malware adjacent. Isn't that sort of thing how Jamal Khashoggi and his friends, family, and coworkers were hacked before his murder/execution?
Uhh, what? Clearly nobody is arguing that "arbitrary remote execution is good." Apple could easily satisfy everyone by simply allowing users to unlock their own bootloader.
How would that help anyone? The unlocked bootloader on the Apple Silicon Macbooks still hasn’t resulted in a truly viable alternative to macOS. The iPhone is much, much harder. And why would carriers trust the result?
You’re missing the point. Hackers (in the tinkerer sense) just want to program their own devices, with full access to the capabilities of the underlying hardware. Apple could obviously allow that if they wanted to, in a convenient way that doesn’t increase the attack surface for malware.
Having control over one's device and allowing anything and everything to have free reign on said device are two different things.
I'd love to have more control and customizability that the user can initiate, but random executables shouldn't be able to so much as sneeze without my permission. Third party software (yes, even the FLOSS variety due to issues such as supply chain compromises) must be treated as adversarial by default, anything less is foolishness.
Why would you trust the user with their own security. Have you not seen the ten most common passwords?
You’re engaging in bad faith, and parroting the same false equivalence between security and user freedom that Apple uses to keep a chokehold on their software distribution monopoly.
Having some way to unlock an iPhone doesn’t at all imply it must be done in a way that reduces security, or trusts the average user with upholding it.
Use your imagination. They could require you to have an apple developer account. Or visit an apple store. Or even limit it to a special developer unlocked iPhone flavor.
Yeah, this gives a new meaning to demanding your password at the border.
I like jailbreaks.
But to jailbreak you need to stay on an older iOS version (because Apple patches the bugs enabling the jailbreaks). And that means you don't get security updates.
Except for the good old days when jailbreaks included patching the exploit :)
I’m fine with a locked down iPhone. All of my financial account credentials are on there, personal photographs, etc. Since I’ve owned an iPhone, I’ve never had a non-working phone. Security and reliability are the two most important items to me when it comes to a phone.
If I want to run arbitrary software, I have a computer. I am unsure why you care if I want a locked down reliable phone.
> people saying they buy iPhones specifically because of the walled garden and the last thing they want is a jail broken device.
I’m not one of those people.
> On a website called Hacker News.
But I still find that unfair. Being a hacker doesn’t mean you want to hack every aspect of your life. I’m perfectly content hacking away on a computer, but I have no desire to hack my toaster and risk burning down my house.
These are the same people that caused this situation. A close platform is only closed until it's busted right open and then everyone is screwed because there were no eyes on it the entire time.
It’s reasonable to like to hack things, but to want a phone that just works.
Not sure what your definition of "hack" is but apple seems to be "anti hack" on all fronts.
They do have good hardware, but surely the hacker in you is a little sad using an IPhone!
Yeah I have a perfectly fine iPad air and pro that are completely unusable. Nothing installs and nothing supports whats installed.
yeah it's kind of weird because some old mac laptops I've used were easy to work with and put on third party software (Linux), but the things like ipads and iphones not so much...
edit: it's like... just give us the same option for the ipads / iphones please?
Anything you can find with an LLM to break into a locked device/ecosystem, the operators of that ecosystem can find with an LLM too, and fix it. Right?
Only if it's in updateable software. Hardware takes longer to correct.
Hence Sam Altman's latest public comment: "I don't even know a dramatic enough word to use… models can find bugs that are outside of the normal threat model of what we think a hacker can do… hardware-level, insane stuff… I no longer think we're gonna be able to just patch all the bugs."
This is true for things other than LLMs. Outside contributors have been credited with hundreds of security fixes to macOS and iOS that were found with fuzzers and sanitizers. Just off the top of my head CVE-2019-8605. Clearly, Apple has access to AddressSanitizer and libfuzzer, but outsiders still find these things. Not only Apple: Google can find flaws in iOS but outsiders also find flaws in Chrome, so the phenomenon is widespread.
I just feel a bit sad and impotent that a number of security researchers outside the circle cannot join their "yo we found more crazy bugs" party because simply frontier labs only give access to those models with "Red Team" availability to the inner circle members/companies.
Now their "trusted cyber access" program is moat rather than safeguard.
You can do a lot with the Chinese open source models.
Not in my experience (yes, sample ~= 1), where they are subpar in terms of cybersecurity (e.g. source code review). This is one of my reports using GPT 5.6 (High), GLM 5.3 High, Fable 5.1 [1]:
> On the full benchmark of 31 audited revisions, GPT-5.6 Sol High reached a weighted recall of 38.27% and GLM-5.3 High reached 30.86%. On a common subset of 12 projects, Claude Fable 5.1 High reached 65.70%, against 42.98% for GPT and 35.54% for GLM.
[1] https://github.com/CoinFabrik/soroban-audit-harness/blob/mai...
How about Kimi?
That assumes you have the hardware capable of running inference on them at a reasonable speed
Or $10 on open router.
Or it assumes you have $5 to spend on the tokens for inference. Not everyone has the money.
it takes a lot more than that....
On OpenRouter, GLM 5.3 Flash costs $0.0285 for 1M input tokens and $0.0923 for 1M output tokens. [1]
[1] https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-5.3-flash
if you wanna have the same kind of capability as these researchers where you have tight loops calling cli stuff you won't get by with $5 at all, especially for major bugs
if you have a way to turn $5 easily into exploitable vulns, let me know cause that'd be a first for me
Token burn is insane and it sucks at long horizon tasks.
A reminder for people who don't follow this, Calif is Thai Duong's firm. Thai discovered the BEAST and CRIME TLS attacks (with Juliano Rizzo), and then worked at Google for a bunch of years, including on Wycheproof with Daniel Bleichenbacher. The team at Calif includes lcamtuf, Dion Blazakis, Tavis Ormandy, and Stefan Esser (among many others).
They're basically the most interesting team working in vulnerability research right now; a cross product of ludicrous talent and full-tilt AI work.
Just before I left Fly.io a few months ago, we retained Calif for an annual pentest (we'd previously worked with Tetrel, Atredis, Doyen, and I think Include?). They were spooky good. Everybody we'd worked with was good, but Calif's results were unusually high-impact.
I love these people and everything they're doing.
Thanks Tom! You're always super kind to us.
Same guys who found the PHP.
Edit: hahaha you guys are funny. “The php hack” is what I meant!
They found the PHP?
Yes, actually PHP was not invented but discovered in nature. That’s why it’s a bit wild sometimes, because it still remembers its origins.
PHP was born as a templating language, but mutated into a programming language, and then grew organically from there.
Craziest part is it was never even intended to be a programming language. From the Wikipedia page, the founder Rasmus Lerdorf is quoted as saying:
"I don't know how to stop it [...] there was never any intent to write a programming language [...] I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language [...] I just kept adding the next logical step on the way."
And 23 years later here we are with php2shell and it powering 70% of the internet’s websites
Everything becomes a programming language in due time. At work we have YAML files with #if and #include statements…
Does that mean eventually a programming language becomes a crab or a crab becomes a programming language?
Crabs are programs
Is that before or after it evolves to read mail?
But that only raises the question: what bore PHP? A bit of a C(hicken) and an egg situation.
I am reasonably certain PHP is not written in Chicken.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(Scheme_implementation...
I mean there's no way there was any intelligent design behind it
/ducks and runs
Didn't know that the PHP was lost, thanks for pointing that out.
They found the PHP vulnerability that has upended the world, or so it seems.
The Princely Hippopotamus Parlor in this case.
It’s a pity we gave in to the “ecosystem” play by these huge companies.. even if I jailbreak my iOS and never let it update.. Apple can easily detect the jailbreak and lock me out of anything iCloud, and iMessage and such. iPhone would be one glorious iPod touch after that.. :-(
Seeing all these gives me the same energy of early days of jailbroken Android phones where one could become root and do whatever with the hardware… I stopped considering such tinkering because I got tired of finding those little tweaks and fixes on forums like xda every time something was updated. With the LLMs capable of automating that tool, I might find those old school way of mobile phones again…
Vote with your wallet. Fuck them.
You shouldn’t have to use LLMs to run your software.
Give it another 6-12 months until the big AI shops shut those capabilities down and running local ones becomes cost prohibitive.
> Vote with your wallet.
Apple is too big for that. Hard regulation is the only way out right now. Maybe breaking them up too.
> Apple is too big for that. Hard regulation is the only way out
Apple is not 'too big' for savvy customers to choose differently but all the Mag 7 tech companies are too big for regulation to be a 'way out'. They now all have 'Regulatory Compliance' divisions which are about compliance as much as the 'Ministry of Truth' is about truth. Instead they are filled with highly-paid former regulators, lobbyists and lawyers who use their inside knowledge to avoid, skirt or nullify regulatory impact.
Company strategies are now purposely designed at conception to be almost impossibly difficult to prosecute or enforce. It's been working so well over the last decade that when the size of the prize is big enough, mega-tech corps are increasingly willing to just overtly violate regulations knowing they can fight in court for years until the govt settles for a reduced fine that's less than the profit already made.
> Apple is not 'too big' for savvy customers to choose differently
Except that won't matter. The "savvy" user is such a tiny minority and only an even tinier minority will be willing to coordinate a boycott. Its a drop in the bucket even if you do get a boycott going.
There are other words for "savvy user":
- early adopter
- trend setter
- tastemaker
- that one family member who understands tech so everyone else in the family goes to them for tech advice
In other words, yes "savvy" users are a minority ... but they influence many more users.
Good luck trying to get YouTubers to stop making endless content about these products, and, most importantly, good luck getting YouTuber fans to stop demanding this type of content.
Connecting the world via the web was always gonna result in unbreakable monopolies. We screwed ourselves and, honestly, there’s no way back now.
I agree boycotting Apple will never matter. My main point was that calling for "regulation" is a cop-out because it no longer stops Mag7 mega-corp abusers.
I also pushed back on claiming Apple is "too big" because it's another cop-out those neck-deep in the Apple plantation parrot as if it somehow makes it slightly more okay they're enabling the worst of the Mag7 rapacious abusers. Buy Apple if you want, it won't matter. Just own your choices and spare us the fig-leaf rationalizations.
No, it is an acknowledgement of reality, and a plea not to pretend to be doing something when you're not. Apple is horrible, but are no worse than Google. Better in my opinion, because they never pretended to value freedom, and have a sense of ownership over their customers that is sometimes protective. Also, the phones are simply useful longer.
> My main point was that regulation is no longer a reliable check on Mag7 mega-corp abuses.
It is a bad point that was not made at all. The fact that corporations are effectively, and often literally currently unregulated is not proof that regulation is not "a reliable check on" abuses any more than my not wearing an oven mitt and constantly being burned is proof that wearing an oven mitt is not reliable protection against being burned.
Apple is too big to choose differently. There are two choices. Both are horrible. Eventually you will need to make a choice between one or the other to participate in banking, paying your utilities, buying things in stores, logging onto any internet site, maybe paying tolls, maybe even driving (your license might be issued to your phone.) To some extent, some of these things are true now.
Why would anybody owe you a "fig-leaf" excuse? Nobody is trying to placate you. They're just telling you what they think and why they are doing what they're doing, you should be grateful.
I'm speaking as someone who uses Debian on everything, who went from N900 to Firefox's phone to a $20 Android stuck on 8 that I've never hooked to the Google Play store because I don't have (and have never had) a "Google Account," only F-Droid - a phone that I refuse to browse the internet on or connect to my email (I don't have any social media except HN.) It is nothing to brag about, it is stubbornness. It does not move the needle in any way, and I would not have to make an excuse for not doing it, especially to you.
Anyway, I don't use coreboot, don't have a Linux phone anymore, and accept binary blobs in some of my packages, so am I really doing anything?
There's nothing more annoying than this purist faux-radical attitude I hear from people so much dirtier than I am. Are you sure you're not using Apple just so you can lecture people who do? Is that the real sin that Android is committing by closing up and becoming indistinguishable from Apple on policy?
Nobody will cry for a second about you not using Apple or Android except for you. The only way to stop this is through regulation.
adderall post?
It will matter for yourself and for the companies that support user freedom. Sent from my Librem 5.
It doesn’t actually matter, because your phone is only working as a coincidence. Every website and app is tested for Google phones and iPhones. If you lose the ability to do something one day, the chances of you getting that functionality back without major effort from your phone manufacturer or the kindness of bored people working for free, is essentially zero.
My phone runs a desktop GNU/Linux OS with desktop Firefox (or Chromium if installed). If Firefox on desktop stops showing websites correctly, we will have a larger problem than an unsupported niche phone.
How's your banking apps run on that?
With the money you save by not using Apple, you can afford the cheapest phone compatible with your bank, if they don't have internet banking.
Sure, if you want to carry 2 phones.
I probably never opened one of my banking apps away from home. My main use for them is to authorize the operations I'm doing from my computer. I think that I could keep an Android phone in a drawer and use it as a costly and inconvenient hardware token. By the way, for some reasons credit card companies are doing 2FA by SMS which is both stupid (security wise) and convenient (to break out from Android or iOS.)
I expect that the real problem with using a Linux phone would be WhatsApp, Google Maps (the navigation part), OSMAnd. Telegram desktop maybe works.
I switched to a bank not forcing me into the American duopoly.
Then you’re not using a phone. You’re using a computer which happens to have phone capabilities. Surely you can see how this isn’t particularly useful for most people?
Right up until you send someone with an iPhone a text message or email someone with a Gmail account...
What happens then?
The pixels on their screen turn green instead of blue, and they get mad that you reminded them that Apple is a conscious choice they made instead of something they were forced into.
"[S]avvy customers" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. No consumer products technology company gets to be that large off the backs of savvy customers.
Yes they are because the alternatives are worse.
I think that it is necessary a radical political change in the US, akin to a revolution, to be able to pass and enforce meaningful regulation against big tech companies. It's the same as going against the military-industrial complex or big finance. They integrated themselves to this power structure that guarantees their interests come first not only in internal policy, but also in foreign policy. Big tech is a limb of the US empire.
Did you see how much flak Lina Khan got for pushing in that direction?
This issue was on the ballot and will be again.
Lina Khan had great ideas but ultimately her legacy is eliminating low cost airfare
I mean Lina Khan singlehandedly f-ed over consumers by blocking the merger and causing Spirit to collapse. I wouldn't necessarily say tight regulations are good
do you mean "over-fed"?
No it's not. You can vote with your wallet right now. Nothing is stopping you.
I'm blind. Apple has explicitly said they wouldn't consider the "bloody ROI" of accessibility (will fund it no matter what). This is important to me. Software freedom is also important to me. What am I to do?
> What am I to do?
Pick your priorities. There will never exist enough products to check all of the boxes that all of the people say is important to them. There is someone out there who would much rather have a product cost some amount less at the cost of accessibility features but they think a device that 'just works' is important so they buy the iPhone anyway.
The point is that your conclusion here is both the correct/obvious one, and that it ensures one explicitly cannot vote with their wallet. They have priorities too significant to be able to take part in the protest. They are invisible to the company they WANT to vote for.
The good thing about voting is that not everyone needs to be right. The average vote is always far more accurate than any individual vote.
Perhaps what allows Apple is to be better at certain things like that or security for average consumer is indeed at odds with some aspirations? At least in practice, not utopian dreams, that seems to be the case.
So you vote with your wallet for accessibility despite freedom and the rest of hacker news do the opposite and it all works itself out.
> What am I to do?
Support NGOs fighting for your freedom like https://eff.org.
Choose an alternative. Plenty of non-Apple phones out there.
I stopped buying Apple phones years ago.
You grab an Android phone anyways because Android accessibility is very much on par or even better than whatever slop Apple is putting out with VoiceOver these days, and developers also somewhat care about it more on Android.
You're also going to benefit from European mandates to have accessible mobile apps anyways, it's coming for free to you.
Nope - iPhone accessibility is much better than any alternative.
For how long? I can envision a troop of vibecoders super-charging android accessibility.
Clearly they haven't. I'm going to assume the blind person is the one who's correct about what it's like to use a phone while blind.
Even this long is too long. Apple devices don’t just provide better accessibility, they make lives easier by providing better accessibility, Android lagging behind is not just a matter of feature-parity, it’s an entire ecosystem making it harder for people to engage with itself.
I guess "easily hacked" is more accessible. But maybe prompt your agent better?
> You're also going to benefit from European mandates to have accessible mobile apps anyways, it's coming for free to you.
Not true, the EU tried to become a regulatory superpower and largely failed to export its rules to the rest of the world. Instead, Apple and Google just aren't bringing new features to the EU anymore.
What features are missing in the EU, though?
Encryption comes to mind. That was the UK I think, but the EU isn't far behind.
That was the UK because it was Apple complying with a specific UK law that says the government must be able to access everyone's phones at all times.
The more common one is GDPR. Things like AI features come to Europe late, or don't come at all, because it's illegal to just record everyone all the time and transmit that information back to the mothership, which is what the feature does.
If you know of any company that would bother to spend days making accessibility improvements, yet for some reason decide to not bring those to the US release, they're the dumbest fucking company in existence.
The EU accessibility mandates will be followed by apps, not by platforms. I don't care if Apple Music wants to keep being trash, Spotify, Deezer and Tidal will improve and lift everyone with it.
What if I want to vote against both Apple and Google but still be able to do my banking business?
What banking business? Use a web browser, or just bank in person like everyone did not long ago. Carry a credit card instead of Apple/Google Pay. That's what degoogled Android users do and it's a very minor inconvenience anyone with a little bit of maturity should be able to accept. Also, cash is much better for your privacy.
And if you require a one-time SMS code for purchase (which can be adjusted via their website, most likely), then you still have an option that is not Apple and Google. I use a dumbphone for "banking" (SMS)... and a credit card, and the website. Those are really all the 3 things I need to do banking, as you have said so correctly.
It’s not possible. Logging in to a banking website is becoming strictly speaking impossible w/o a phone.
Choose a different bank, then. I've gradually stopped using the phone apps, not really by design but just because I don't often feel like that works better than the real web site. Both USAA and my local credit union have perfectly good desktop web sites.
Yes you want a phone for SMS to log on to the web site. But I avoid banking apps on a phone. Dont need them.
In the EU the app is often mandatory, no SMS fallback
Somebody downvoted you but I agree: I must use a banking app to either enter a code or use my fingerprint to authorize operations, login included. No bank is using SMSes anymore here (Italy.)
SMS are an American thing. Only credit card companies are using them and they are American.
I never do Banking on my phone and never had an issue.
I've never really experienced that. Which banks?
Belfius for example of you have ever used itsme with them. Also Digi (a mobile phone company in Belgium) since it uses itsme for authentication. Itsme is strictly an Android and iOS app.
More info on this is going to come out, but banks are going through hell right now with AI agents accessing user accounts and even firing off transfers and other accounts activity, and their legal teams are losing their minds.
So a bank shutting down a website right now and the "forcing" some Google/Apple "verification" makes a lot of sense in that context.
The country I live in (VN) recently banned online banking without using a mobile app and biometric verification via selfie. The sites had to withdraw access.
Or instead of hamstringing your entire way of life and making things immeasurably harder.. we could regulate them too.
You can bank without Apple iOS/macOS or Google Android/Chrome.
You can also vote with your wallet regarding banking. Put your deposits in another bank.
When one party has a trillion votes and you have like 1000 or so, that is not voting. That is just exiling yourself.
Edit: exiling not exhaling
If an entity has a product that has a trillion people choosing it, the marginal benefit to society to build an entirely new product for 1000 people or so isn't worth it. The people whose time would be required to produce that second product for a very, very small 1,000 person market would better serve society by working on other goals.
Nor should those 1,000 people get to try to use the government to tell the other trillion what product they should have to buy.
Nobody is trying to bar anyone from anything. We are talking about options. We need ways out, otherwise it's an unfair market and all we get is enshittification.
But if the 1000 are persuading others with meaningful benefits and gaon momentum it's a different story.
It's really not. Not when they make it impossible to use government and banking services without Google play services.
Select your bank(s) accordingly.
Use a laptop
Why should your bank trust you?
Yes, I can vote with my wallet, but no, it doesn't make a difference. I've been voting with my wallet since day 1 by never buying an iPhone because of how closed it is, and unsurprisingly, this has done absolutely nothing to change how open the iPhone is.
Voting with your wallet doesn’t mean you get to take away from others. It means choosing companies you want to support.
You and I have very different definitions of "take away".
I also think you might benefit from rereading the context here; someone said that government regulation is needed to make the iPhone ecosystem open, and someone else disagreed on the basis that voting with one's wallet is a viable alternative. I disagreed with that disagreement, arguing that voting with one's wallet doesn't produce the change that the original commenter said regulation was needed for; telling me "that's not what voting with your wallet does" is redundant, because that's literally what I was already saying. You're certainly entitled to disagree with my opinion that making the ecosystem more open is a desirable goal, but that's not a premise I introduced here, so if disagreeing with that is your intention, it's unclear to me why you picked out my comment as the one to express that when the original statement of that goal was several parent comments up from mine.
It's not redundant and he isn't disagreeing with your opinion about openness. He's saying that it's immoral to want to force your personal preferences about phone design on other people.
Buying a phone you like? Moral.
Trying to force every phone to be one you like? Immoral.
That's all it's about. Not a difference in definitions or confusing on his part, he's just saying you've got morality all wrong and need to reconsider your position.
Again, my comment that he responded to literally was just making a claim that the iPhone ecosystem is not going to become more open due to voting with one's wallet. Yes, I obviously also think it should be more open, and that's an opinion that someone can strongly disagree with, but that's not what I was saying in the comment he responded to, because whether an action is moral or not is irrelevant to the question of whether it would produce a certain effect.
My point in the comment you responded to is that if person A says "we need to eat more vegetables to be healthy", person B says "no, you will be healthy if you only eat meat", and person C says "I tried only eating meat and I was unhealthy, so I think that's evidence that meat alone might not make you healthy", it's a non-sequitur to respond to person C by saying "it's immoral for you to say someone else should eat vegetables". If you responded to person A saying that, it wouldn't be as weird, but to remain silent when person A and B are debating the health effects of vegetables but then suddenly take issue with person C trying to provide evidence about whether the claims for A and B are correct or when they didn't introduce the topic that you have moral opinions on is very weird.
That is like saying prosecuting murder is immoral because it is taking away the murderer and victims rights.
For a society to function there needs to be balance. ‘You can do whatever you want as long as enough people pay you to cover your bills’ gets bleak fast.
Many people benefit from Apple's closed system. Especially when you look at the malware and viruses that don't exist, because it's so protected.
It's a net benefit for society, even if you don't personally like it.
> Especially when you look at the malware and viruses that don't exist, because it's so protected.
There are fewer viruses on Linux than on Windows, despite being far more open. I imagine your response will be that there are a lot more iPhone users than Linux ones, but my point is that there are a lot more factors than treating "open or closed" as a binary, and at best you can make a principled hypothesis about why something doesn't exist. For all you know, maybe making it more open would allow security researchers to find and report more potential attack vectors; extra attention from being more widely used cuts both ways.
I think you have entirely the wrong comment chain and poster in mind with your response.
It turns out 99.9999% of iPhone users don’t want what HN wants.
They want what Apple sells.
If you did that then you probably made clear your reasons which probably created mindshare with others which probably has helped the EU open up the iPhone. Don’t be so defeatist because the outcome isn’t immediately apparent.
I'm not being defeatist; I'm pretty much arguing for what you're saying, which is that I think government intervention is needed. The parent comment I was responding to said that regulation isn't needed because voting with our wallets is sufficient, and I was disagreeing.
Convincing people to vote with their wallets is much easier than convincing them to write their pols to make laws. The latter is much harder while the former allows a message to be spread. Should people do both? Yes.
Sure, I just don't see how you read my comments as inconsistent with that viewpoint though. Literally the only point I was trying to make was that when a parent comment said regulation is necessary, and someone responded "No it's not. You can vote with your wallet right now.", I thought that was a very weak counterargument to the idea that we needed regulation.
The responses to my rebuttal are honestly confusing to me; one person seems to think that I'm arguing against voting with your wallet (which seems bizarre, given that my comment was literally saying that's something I actively do), one person seems to think I introduced the idea that Apple should have a more open ecosystem to the conversation rather than inheriting it as a premise from the grandparent comment, and one person upvoted my comment. I have absolutely no clue how three different people managed to read something completely different from my comment when the context and content seems clear to me, but I guess I'm missing something here because the point that I thought would be apparent is not consistently being understood.
It’s your phrasing. Reread your comment:
> this has done absolutely nothing to change how open the iPhone is.
And tell me how that doesn’t sound defeatist or come off as giving up on voting with your wallet.
I can only speak for my replies but you were too concise on your opinion that it spawned multiple interpretations. Brevity breeds misinterpretations or something or other.
> And tell me how that doesn’t sound defeatist or come off as giving up on voting with your wallet.
"This" has done nothing doesn't imply "nothing will do anything". From my perspective, it sounds like you basically were assuming that anything I didn't explicitly repeat from the parent comments was no longer relevant, whereas I would have assumed that it would be noisy and annoying for me to repeat it directly.
I dont really care anymore to discuss this, thanks.
Usually people who don't want to discuss things don't go out of their way to keep commenting
vote with your wallet here is to make a new phone company that uses only these user owned devices.
its not particularly feasible to do for the end customer, similar to trying to buy EVs in the US when the upstream dealer decides whata available for you.
vote with your wallet is for the ultra-wealthy.
the rest of us can vote with our votes instead, and get much better results
> the rest of us can vote with our votes instead, and get much better results
Not sure where you live or what votes you are making, but "much better results" is hardly what I've seen or expect from US politics, politicians, and the uber wealthy that run the corporations that dominate many of the most important aspects of our daily lives.
Target has been losing a lot of money with people deciding to ship elsewhere, it wiry, it just takes a lot of people to get together and do it
> similar to trying to buy EVs in the US
You're kidding right? It seems like every other car around here is a Tesla or some other EV. It's mostly Teslas and trucks really.
Yeah, I don't understand the parent comment, buying EV's in the US is even easier than ICE vehicles in most states. Now if they are talking about BYD being blocked in the US, so access to extremely cheap EVs, much of Europe is doing the same thing.
But the alternative is another monopolistic tech giant. There is no viable third platform. So I agree with OP, the answer is breaking them up.
Pixel phones have an unlocked bootloader. One can load GrapheneOS onto those phones without needing to jailbreak them.
Even without flashing a new OS, one can install third party app stores (e.g. F-Droid) with open source apps and/or side-load modified versions of those apps.
> There is no viable third platform.
There is no "viable third platform" because people don't vote against the two existing ones with their wallets.
Can you name an example where a government succeeded in breaking up a monopoly, and the result was better for consumers? AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft were all "broken up", but it didn't make a difference for consumers. In every case, a competitor forced them to change their ways.
Standard Oil.
Also 2 of those 3 companies were famously NOT broken up.
I mean, breaking up Standard Oil wasn't exactly great for consumers either. And those companies eventually re-merged anyways. But ole Rockefeller sure did make out well due to the breakup.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem
It'd be about as effective as voting blue/red in a solidly red/blue state. All you're doing is signaling about yourself.
I voted with my wallet and apple is still an untouchable giant conglomerate that does whatever it wants, what now chief?
Idiots who say "vote with your wallet" are buying into the billionaire idea of "1$ = 1 vote".
Guess who that benefits? Not you or me.
Wake up. These mega corporations are too big to care now. Most people are uninformed or unaffected. America has been brainwashed into a FU I got mine mindset.
The tiny fraction of people willing to vote with their wallet has effectively a 0% chance of pushing big corporate to act right.
I think Corey Doctorow has the best retort to this. They want you to vote with your wallet because they have thicker wallets than you.
No. Regulation is the answer. Hopefully everything changes in November. That’s when GTA VI comes out.
Serious question: What alternative phones do you suggest? I've tried PinePhone and PinePhone Pro and it was painful.
Painful is the price you can choose to pay. Everyone has different priorities.
Yeah, but who is using a pinephone as their daily driver?
Not that many. The differences are trivial and 99%+ of people don't care, not even on forums like HN. But... how is that relevant? If you have very niche tastes then it'll be harder for you to satisfy them, whether that be in art, music or tech. Go more mainstream and you'll have plenty of options. The free market can deliver, you just may not like the level of effort the size of your market justifies.
Well, last time I checked the number was 0 and I am still lurking in some pine chat groups, so I doubt that changed. So the free market does not deliver something working here.
Since part of what I'm purposely purchasing from Google or Apple is a more secure by default system I'm probably the wrong person to ask. My wallet vote is effectively for something different than yours.
Google Pixel + GrapheneOS
Isn’t the latest Google Pixel not supported by GrapheneOS?
Yesno. Not fully because a functionality is not enabled yet.
It wouldn't be advised to buy the latest pixel now anyway, either get the previous one or wait a few months for Motorola Signature 27, where GrapheneOS will be first party OS, and not hated-by-the-vendor bolt-on.
If you insist on the latest pixel, go check the GrapheneOS discussion forum for all the details.
If only the Motorola Signature 27 had a headphone jack, so that I could listen to high quality music with my quality headphones.
Instead I have to buy the shitiest locked full of crapware android phone and hack it with an LLM to make it usable because apparently that's what I deserve for wanting a headphone jack.
Can you not buy a USB to headphone jack adapter?
Instead of relying on the crappy built-in DAC with utterly nasty audio on this shitty phone, you can use a good phone AND your quality headphones: https://www.whathifi.com/best-buys/hi-fi/best-dacs#section-t...
Best of both worlds.
DAC have been more than good enough since the maturation of mp3 players in the early 2000s. The smartphone has a DAC and amplifier for its various speakers already. Heck the computer inside usb-pd power converter in the phone is many times more hardware and work and EMI constraints to respect than a DAC + amplifier for a headphone output.
The DACs/amps you linked are bigger than the Sony mp3 player I had in 2004. It had two jacks and a user replaceable battery. And it was water resistant.
I could go on and on.
The DAC I specifically linked is the size of my index finger, but since you seem to be casually suggesting that the "shitiest locked full of crapware android phone" and PCs dac are comparable with the dedicated hires dac, maybe you don't really need a phone jack and your audiophile headphones :D
Take care!
This is the right answer. Soon there will be a Motorola option too.
True. But so long as only 1% of people care enough to do this, and they can make >1% more profit per customer with their crap - then it's more profitable for them to continue the crap.
Many things are stopping you. I see this response all the time as a counter to inappropriate behavior by monopolistic giant entities.
It's the wrong way of thinking about the problem. The whole point is that they've gained too much market power for any individual to be able to stop them meaningfully, and that collective action using the power of government is the only way.
Any argument that tries to talk people out of that is on the same side as the tech oligarchs, in my opinion.
I don't personally want them to stop. I like what they produce and how they produce it. As long as there are enough people like me there will be a market for this.
Voting with your wallet doesn’t mean stopping them. That isn’t what it is about. You shouldn’t get to choose to stop them because you don’t like their actions any more than I should be able to choose banning you from carriers because I don’t like your choices.
Yes, some of us simply don't give a damn. I'll continue buying Apple products because they work and I don't have to do much of anything to keep them working. Just because I like tinkering or customizing other computers/devices, doesn't mean I want to be a sysadmin to my phone lol
> Apple is too big for that.
I think you're wrong, but even if you're right, why wouldn't you vote with your wallet anyway?
You alone might not hurt Apple much, but it could certainly help whatever upstart competitor you choose to support.
I have not purchased any Apple or Google products in a decade. Straight up ignoring them is a perfectly viable call in the modern world.
And yet Google still knows everything about you.
I also exclusively use cash, and do not carry any electronics, and only use FOSS software. Willing to bet my data footprint is smaller than most other tech workers.
Meta
It's not only about driving Apple out of business. If you don't use Apple, you simply don't have to deal with any Apple bullshit. All your Apple-related worries just disappear. And you even have enough money left over to afford a separate non-rooted phone for your bank (in the unlikely event you need one).
I’ll vote with my vote thank you. My table’s manufacturer shouldn’t get a say in what I put on my table, and Apple shouldn’t get a say about my phone either.
These clearly anti-consumer practices should just be illegal.
Which country does this vote happen in?
Last I heard even EU policy was ways off of that target.
Also: EU policy is very shcceptible to political tides. Sure now we love to scream sovereignty from the rooftops but that is guaranteed to change eventually.
> Apple shouldn’t get a say about my phone either.
They operate the factories manufacturing the phones. They have total say about their phones, and you have no say. Your almighty powers within the Linux terminal doesn't extend beyond it.
And my table manufacturer operates the factories that makes it, that doesn't mean we give them the right to dictate how we use it.
Nobody is stopping you from taking apart your iPhone and using AI to reverse engineer it and run custom software. Apple has made it as difficult as they can, but they haven't made it illegal, and they haven't even made it impossible, so from the law's perspective there is nothing to fix here. The law just sees yet another thing that nobody's bothered to do yet. The law wouldn't pass a regulation requiring Apple to make it easier to reverse engineer an iPhone any sooner than it would pass a regulation requiring Coca-Cola to make it easier to reverse engineer their formula.
Note that earlier this year, a YouTuber did reverse engineer the Coca-Cola formula because nothing was actually stopping someone from doing it, all this time. You could be that guy for iPhones.
Nobody dictates how you can use your iPhone either. You can do anything with it physically that you are capable of. Apple will never say a word.
Just like Apple with their products, the table manufacturer decides the exact measurements and materials of the table. You vote with your wallet and purchase the product you prefer, or make your own if you are capable.
> Nobody dictates how you can use your iPhone either ... physically
Come on. You know very well what we're talking about. This whole discussion started about software. Can I can load any app I want? Can I remove any app I want? I can remove their ads from my phone?
No of course not. I can put my app on my phone only if they bless it. I can't sell an app to another iPhone user and have them use it without apple's blessing. I can't remove the ads they keep spamming me for iCloud, or whatever service they release this month.
And please don't tell me it's because I get a license rather than a purchase since that's exactly my point. You wouldn't accept a license agreement for your table, and there would be outrage and major public backlash if any they tried; "Here's your made in china table, you are not allowed to place an American flag on it".
But because it's sprinkled with magic software dust, we have people in comment threads simping for the right of companies to do this to their customers.
If you have the skills to do it you can do everything you ask for there. If you don't then you should buy or make a device that suits your preferences. Vote with your wallet. Nobody forced you to buy an iPhone.
Would you buy a Honda Civic and cry that Honda is not permitting you to get the functions you wanted from it? If you have the skills, you can do whatever you want with your car physically and Honda won't stop you. If you don't have the skills, you have to buy a car that suits better your preferences. Whether that's hauling logs, having more horsepower, removing seatbelts, or whatever you like.
I'll vote with my vote as well, and my vote will not be for candidates who equate computers with tables. Hacking isn't a human right. Go buy a different phone if you don't like Apple's phones. There are a bunch to choose from.
Idk what point you think you're making, but human rights aren't an absolute law of nature, it's something we decide on.
> Hacking isn't a human right.
Hacking is such a loaded term for "the right to use the thing I purchased how I see fit".
> Go buy a different phone if you don't like Apple's phones. There are a bunch to choose from.
This is beside the point (and may not always be true). The ability for the manufacturer of a thing I bought and ostensibly own to tell me how to use my property.
It's really not that hard to understand. The fact that it's a computer doesn't change anything.
I agree with you except that "Hacking isn't a human right" part
This comment made me think that someone should pull an ArtCraft on Android or iOS by making a good linux phone skin, with high performance auto-updating wrappers for various web apps to make them as convenient as mobile native ones. Then we can actually ditch the big corps and bask in our LLM-enabled open source utopia. Hmmmmm.
Give it another 6-12 months until the big AI shops shut those capabilities down and running local ones becomes cost prohibitive
I don't expect that to happen, but I do expect Apple et al to spend trillions of tokens hardening their platforms against users and red-teaming to find these sorts of holes before release.
Fair point. The megacorps probably are able to outspend pretty much any grassroots mmovement bar maybe a government led one.
> Vote with your wallet
The loss of your purchase is insignificant compared to the money Apple and Google make from their walled gardens.
Plus what other viable options are there in this duopoly?
Apparently there’s a popular 3rd option in Asia but is there any support for western apps? And how are you going to convince a million other people to switch?
Many Android phones are not unlockable without hacking. They use cryptography to protect the bootloader and to get the unlock code for your own phone first you need to provide them all your information.
Where would you point said wallet? Google isn't far behind Apple on this from, ahead in some ways, and many (all?) of the FOSS Linux powered phones cost even more than iPhones do.
Then maybe you’re onto something here: the hardware is subsidized. Point being that if you want the cheaper, subsidized device, you have to make some compromises.
That holds only as long as people can afford the unsubsidized prices or do without. I'm not sure that wither are tenable given modern life at least in the US.
> and running local ones becomes cost prohibitive.
Running local models is getting -cheaper- every month in spite of rising hardware costs due to intelligence compression innovations like Bonsai2.
I build operating systems for a living using only consumer GPUs at home.
> Vote with your wallet
If that would work, I'd be writing this on my iPhone Mini.
It did work. You're just a very small minority of users, as are most people here.
What is your current phone?
>Give it another 6-12 months until the big AI shops shut those capabilities down and running local ones becomes cost prohibitive.
The local inference threshold has been crossed already. Its possible to achieve big model like performance through agent harnesses with local models.
There are already open weight models that are quite capable and can use any provider.
> Vote with your wallet. Fuck them.
Easier said than done. Because, "Apple can do no wrong" is the general public perception. Look at any wrongdoing by Apple - whether they were caught slowing down the phones, degrading cameras on purpose or even the lawsuit where they were caught spying on people's voice recordings. There will always be some NPC defending them as if the billion dollar corporation gives a shit about them.
That or "Apple is the only pro-privacy company in the world" despite there being an active lawsuit against them for the exact opposite.
So, I say: Vote with your wallet. Fuck them...and the fanboys.
> degrading cameras on purpose
What's this about? I can't find anything, except some random Reddit posts.
Buy Jolla phone
> Vote with your wallet.
But what are the options?
This. The only mainstream alternative is Android, and I'm already "voting with my wallet" against Samsung, Google, and the rest for violating user privacy even more than Apple does.
And while you're at it, make real change happen in the US national elections by voting for a third party! That'll show them!
How are running local ones going to become cost prohibitive? Indications are that Nvidia has been channel stuffing (artificially inflating perceived demand), which suggests massive oversupply of GPUs.
> Give it another 6-12 months until the big AI shops shut those capabilities down and running local ones becomes cost prohibitive.
If Murican lobbying/corruption tries to snuff AI that threatens the Hutt cartels, China will accelerate it.
> even if I jailbreak my iOS and never let it update.. Apple can easily detect the jailbreak and lock me out of anything iCloud, and iMessage and such.
As someone who's been jailbreaking since the iPhone 3GS (and held onto a iOS 17.0 device for the longest time), Apple has never bothered to detect jailbreaks and lock people out of iCloud and iMessage.
If anything, it's those sleazy security framework providers that provide jailbreak detection to apps and cause them to either lock people out of accounts and features, or crash entirely.
Some government-mandated audit processes (at least, that's what I understand here in Singapore) also require jailbreak detection.
> Apple has never bothered to detect jailbreaks and lock people out of iCloud and iMessage.
Not entirely true. It absolutely has in the case of the Hackintosh. In fact many a year ago that’s what inspired me to get my first Mac, because every release of macOS made it harder and harder with custom bootloader and kexts to get around Apple’s active efforts to ensure you couldn’t use those unless you were on an actual Apple device, not just running their OS.
A Hackintosh is different from an iOS jailbreak.
An iOS jailbreak is trying to use an Apple device like a Linux device, with access to the filesystem and private APIs.
A Hackintosh is more like emulating the APIs (and an actual Apple serial number, which I guess they use to gate access to iCloud and iMessage) required to boot and run macOS on an Intel PC.
No, I get it, but it's still somewhat fallacious to say Apple doesn't care about "unauthorized" access to devices or services (whether or not you agree that such authority is reasonable or not).
I think it makes sense that you'd get banned if you did iMessage type abuse via jailbreak too. There just isn't some flag isJailbroken or something.
What is iMessage abuse on a Hackintosh? It’s connected to an Apple account. You’re running macOS. What is inherently abusive about it?
> I stopped considering such tinkering because I got tired of finding those little tweaks and fixes on forums like xda every time something was updated.
Several vendors sell Android devices that allow bootloader unlocking, Pixels being the most known.
Once unlocked, Magisk is the current and most used rooting tool.
The procedure is quite straightforward.
https://github.com/topjohnwu/magisk
https://magiskmanager.com/
That's why my next phone will be an unlocked Android device (Shiftphone 8), but murena[0] has also other nice devices that are unlocked.
[0]https://murena.com/products/smartphones/
Or a Pixel with GrapheneOS?
I considered getting another pixel with grapheneOS or calyxOS a couple years ago. It's definitely an option, and you can get used-but-still-supported pixels for like $100.
I bought a fp4 from murena because it is supported by postmarketOS, and the postmarketOS support has kept improving. I think the end goal is to run some sort of convergent linux that is as similar to desktop linux in environment as possible. That removes the requirement to completely re-write all the userspace tools for android.
grapheneOS is a dead end as long as it is android based and google and OEMs that are indifferent to open source plight lead android development. A very well written dead-end but a developmental dead end nonetheless.
GrapheneOS developers won't support other platforms because they don't have extensive enough trusted computing "security" features. Trusted computing the nail which seals its own coffin and locks anyone out of running their own OS.
> A very well written dead-end but a developmental dead end nonetheless.
Why is that? Android being open source, GrapheneOS could fork if it became big enough?
> GrapheneOS developers won't support other platforms
Official partnership with Motorola doesn't count as "other platforms" for you?
> "security" features
Your using quotes for "security" probably explains why you're fine with Murena.
> Trusted computing the nail which seals its own coffin and locks anyone out of running their own OS.
I don't understand that. Do you believe GrapheneOS locks you out of your own OS? GrapheneOS is open source, you know that?
> Apple can easily detect the jailbreak and lock me out
Does this actually happen? They did not do that in the good old days.
I do know that some apps try to detect jailbreaks and annoyingly refuse to let people log in. Banking and such.
Oh man, those early days of XDA forums and SenseUI roms on my NexusOne. Those were truly a thing of beauty. We still haven't gotten back to that level. I'm with you though, I stopped playing and moved to a stock device. Then I moved back to an iPhone and have been completely stock ever since. I haven't been excited about an iPhone since the 10 released. After that I think, "oh cool, another rectangle". "A grid of icons"... "The best camera Apple's ever put in a phone.... how wonderful".
I remember a long while ago when you could jailbreak iOS with a corrupted font in a pdf.
There was a website jailbreakme you simple slid a slider and you were done.
From Wikipedia
August 1, 2010, exploited a vulnerability in the FreeType library used while rendering PDF files.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JailbreakMe
There have been several companies that tried to sell open mobile devices over the years, but people have shown time and time again that they don't want to buy that product. We can wish it were different all we like, but in general we aren't entitled to money-losing, unmarketable products.
A functioning government committed to free markets would mandate unlocked devices.
The unregulated market naturally coalesces into oligopolies or monopolies and doesn’t fix issues like this.
Regulators have been asleep for the last two decades while Apple and Google continue to extort 30% taxes from developers.
There was a glimmer of hope with the DMA but regulators are again asleep, emboldening Google to cripple app installation outside of their store and force developers to enter into a contract with Google to distribute from the developer's own website.
> Apple can easily detect the jailbreak and lock me out of anything iCloud, and iMessage and such.
Don't sign into any of Apple services then! Just use it as a pure developer playground or create an alternate ID. Can't be looking for everything everywhere :-)
Such antiuser behavior from Apple or others should be illegal.
Can't anyone customize the source of grapheneOS and simultaneously get a phone that is not trying to disable itself?
> even if I jailbreak my iOS and never let it update.
Two things:
a) Why the would you never want to update an OS in this day and age ?
b) I understand the perspective of people insisting on wanting to be able to root their phone. But how about we take a step back and look at the reality of the 2026 security environment ? An environment where you have:
Frankly. I want Apple to lock down my iPhone as much as possible in that context.If I want to be root, I can do so on my desktop or a cloud VM or whatever.
But making root on a phone easy just seems like a recipe for disaster... if its easy for you, its easy for the bad guys too.
> a) Why the would you never want to update an OS in this day and age ?
Because updates break the jailbreak. If Apple actually had a sanctioned way to let you do what you want with the device you bought there would indeed be very little reason to not update.
Updates slow down your phone, eg Liquid Ass. Lots of people follow the rule of only running the OS that came with your iPhone.
Maybe your phone doesn't have banking and stuff on it
> Maybe your phone doesn't have banking and stuff on it
I don't know where you live, but where I am most banks insist on proprietary 2FA via their own app. Only (some of) the fintechs allow TOTP.
Yes you can get your codes via SMS, but I thnk we all know what a security mess SMS is. I would rather have the bank's proprietary app since at least everything will be going over HTTPS and also eliminates most of the vulnerabilities associated with SMS just by virtue of being an app.
Passkeys are the standardized version of the bank's proprietary app. Well, except for the device attestation part, that won't happen on iPhones.
I think you meant to say TOTP.
I get why TOTP is the better standard, but nothing uses that because the UX in most implementations was horrendous for like 8 years.
USA, Chase lets me set a passkey
If your phone does not have any important or sensitive on it, why even secure it?
> If your phone does not have any important or sensitive on it, why even secure it?
Or why have a smartphone in the first place if you're not going to put any sort of meaningful apps on it. ;)
My iPhone passcode was either unset or 2222 until like 2018. At times it was jailbroken af. It had messaging and stuff. Wouldn't have been the end of the world if someone hacked it, and nobody did.
Did it have access to your email?
Not my important one
If I'm happy with how it's working, an update can only break things.
Am I the only person/iPhone user that hasn’t given in to the iCloud ecosystem?
I’ve never used iCloud. I hate Apple but I hate Google more. Instead of iCloud I use WebDav, CalDav, Bitwarden and NextCloud. Contacts, calendar, passwords and photos that I control. I recommend the same to others but I can count on one hand who has actually gone away from iCloud into such a setup.
We gave in because open source and hobbiests do not design good products and even worse shared systems, as much as they enjoy self-righteously declaring their values. And shared systems require trust, planning, and goal setting in a way no open system would ever build.
1) They of course lack the resources
2) Often lack professional displince across all skills required
3) Mostly make for themslves or whats interesting, not whats needed.
4) The release schedule is laughable at best.
This seems more correlated with big vs. small organizations, not closed vs. open organizations. There are open projects (e.g., Debian, Blender) that tick all four of your boxes in my opinion.
> open source and hobbiests do not design good products
This is opinion. In my opinion, closed products are not good products. To me, openness and freedom trump subjectively better UX any day.
> as much as they enjoy self-righteously declaring their values.
Consider that in our society and software ecosystem, this is all but required to stave off the forces that would enclose the software commons that these "self-righteous" volunteers work so hard to maintain.
this must be nailed to the wall somewhere at autodesk
linux?
... is an example in support of GP's point.
Great for professionally administered servers or expert power users. Not for much else. Until recently, esoteric use-cases like playing audio were catastrophically unsolved. And then those got better around when screen sharing, accessibility devices, and remote-assistance tools all broke because of another OSS schism. Installing and running an ordinary program requires choosing among a handful of ways of doing that (container systems, package managers) even on the same distro. And then if a graphical program wants to do crazy stuff like "open a file", well, the permissioning situation is "fragmented" to put it generously.
Gaming? Gaming works great on Linux now! ...because a corporation with centralized planning, KPIs, and incentives spent hundreds of millions of dollars on it.
I like Linux. It's been my daily driver for years, on and off. I use it for a living, I use it for a hobby. But that doesn't mean it's not a perfect example of every single one of the OSS flaws that GP listed.
You do understand the reasons right? iCloud, iMessages etc are an interplay of software in your device, software in cloud and some networking. They have to work together. A jailbroken phone can have a tinkered iMessage app. Supporting tinkered / unsupported versions is more overhead / possible security risk. Why would you expect them to take on that?
I agree with your point, though I can easily modify ~/Library/Messages/Attachments or ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.MobileSMS/Data on macOS, which is a platform similarly secure to an iPhone when you take sandboxing, sip, etc. into account. So Apple already supports macOS, which can be tinkered, no? I guess the argument is that by locking down iOS, a platform which was never open, they just never needed to handle that class of security risks which are introduced when customers have more freedom.
I did actually discover a bug in iOS (related to photos which have failed to sync to icloud for the past four years) by investigating why there were over 23k empty folders in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.photos.ImageConversionService/Data/tmp/, fwiw.
You're right, but I could see Apple acting on iOS alone, just because of scale.
There are some orders of magnitude more iOS/iPadOS devices than macOS devices.
There's a bunch of ways we could debate ourselves about things Apple would or wouldn't do, but at the end of the day, Apple is going to do whatever is in it's best interest.
My computer is jailbroken, I have sip disabled yet icloud and imessage work. So what makes my computer different from my phone?
Who bears the security risk? The user.
The only security risk for apple is a job security risk if the ecosystem lock-in is eroded.
The risk to Apple is everyone else’s trust being eroded by having their ecosystem compromised. Why risk it?
It does not make sense for someone to lose faith in apple because someone else was able to run a modified imessage app.
For apple to entertain this idea is to create more problems for themselves in the long run.
If you understand this from my perspective, which is that these actions are motivated by a desire for more control. It begins to make more sense. If you can benefit from increased control, then these unreasonable expectations of security against your customers (held by other customers) are a desirable problem to have as opposed to an increasing burden.
Imagine the same being said of a car manufacturer. "We need to install security measures in place to prevent you from modifiying your car because other people may see that modified versions of our cars exist and that tarnishes our brand somehow".
As long there is no reason to allow companies to exert this control over consumers, it just allows the manufacturer to enforce a total monopoly on the post-market.
Is PDF the new Flash? It just does too much for its own good, it has become a huge attack vector
I'm continually amazed that PDF has survived this long while so many other technologies have died. Not only is it a constant vulnerability, but it's not even good at its job. Absolutely miserable UX and DX.
I disagree. PHP had a wonderful DX. Deploying a website literally meant connecting to the server over FTP, and drag-n-dropping your PHP files. Same for updates. Oh, and back then, IIRC even Windows Explorer supported FTP. It was literally just "write the URL, drop the files". How do you deploy a Node webapp? A python webapp? How do you make sure it stays up? Do you expose is directly or behind a nginx?
PHP won exactly because it had a wonderful DX.
This gave me warm fuzzy feelings of nostalgia. Jailbreaking my iPod touch back in the day was so fun before there was anything serious on these devices.
Cool to see our work here. I'm Thai, and I run Calif. Happy to answer any questions.
We'll publish the technical details of these hacks over the coming weeks. Writing these articles takes time, and we've been busy with a PHP thing [1].
In the meantime, check out The Great Glyph Grift [2] for a glimpse of what can go wrong when iOS parses PDFs.
Just in case you wonder, we've disclosed most of the bugs in these exploit chains to Apple and will disclose the rest. So far in 2026, we've reported close to 100 bugs to Apple. We don't accept Apple bounties, and we're not being paid for this work. We don't sell bugs or exploits, and we have no sponsors funding this research.
We do this because it's fun, intellectually challenging, and we want to help make the iPhone safer. We also have a business to run, so we do need some marketing points.
[1] https://calif.io/php2shell
[2] https://calif.io/research/the-great-glyph-grift
I saw your keynote at BSides a few weeks ago and it blew my mind and it looks like it was just the beginning!
Why not accept the Apple bounties and donate it or something?
Hey Thai- How much of the at Calif is managing agents to explore ideas? Are ideas coming from agents themselves or still human generated, and has that changed since y'all started the company?
On the cost side- How expensive is it to develop each of these demos w.r.t. inference cost? Are y'all purely using OAI/A\ cyber models or are there OSS models being used too?
Big fan!
Video 3 get a root shell agains 27.0.1 which is the latest iOS version installed on my lovely se3.
This really blown my mind, and seem the 1/2 video is installed a app by click pdf link?
I guess and hope there will be update from apple quickly
There are loads of these exploits which exist in the hands of private hacking groups and state organisations which have not been made public. Always assume your device is able to be compromised from those who have the motivation and dedication.
Is it an exploit around the library that handles PDF parsing/opening? Can someone explain how files / attachement are open on a mobile device ( android/iPhone).
I don't understand how in 2026 this is still a thing, we have many safe languages to parse/deserialize data. Why is it complicated?
PDFs are basically executables, that's why it's hard. They support running code, they support decoding images which themselves have their own custom compressors that are basically code. Anything to do with image formats is rife for bad decoders, insane compression algorithms from the 90s, and a PDF is basically 1000 formats inside many different container types with executable code plastered on everywhere. If you want to make a compatible PDF viewer you'll need to be able to implement an image decoder algorithm for a fax machine that was specific to Japan in the late 80s, which was somehow ratified into a standard and is used today by all the top legal firms, or something absurd like that. When you open a PDF on your computer, depending on how it is being parsed, it can even make outbound network connections without you knowing. To safely open a PDF you need one of those bomb proof suits, a disposable laptop, and even then you might be going home without eyebrows.
Willing to bet that a default "treat PDFs/documents/spreadsheets as dumb" option in operating systems would eliminate the majority of common one-click vulnerabilies out there. And exactly 0.001% of actual use cases would be affected.
This is one of the things iOS's Lockdown Mode does. I wish the features of Lockdown Mode were able to be enabled individually instead of a single all or none option.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/105120
Your link doesn’t say anything about PDFs. And if I remember correctly it only disables PDF previews in Messages. This means if you have a zero-click exploit now it becomes a one-click exploit. I fail to see how that’s relevant given the article is already demonstrating a one-click exploit.
I’ve turned on lockdown mode while this CVE insanity is going on. It’s far less disruptive than I expected. The only thing I noticed missing is web gl is disabled.
PDFs are just absurdly complicated in general. Dumbing down the parser might be the right idea. I wonder what consequences that would have with how intertwined PostScript and PDF in general are with macOS/iOS; maybe that's why the PostScript engine was removed with macOS Sonoma/iOS 17? I don't know if that was only user facing behavior and Apple is still working to remove the internal usages.
No. Very few PDF exploits come from the officially sanctioned way of running code (JavaScript) inside PDF. Most are just plain old parser bugs.
That's kind of what Adobe does with downloaded PDFs, you have to click the Enable button to turn on more document features. My schematic capture app will output a PDF that has links that will take you to specific spots on a page and also some JavaScript where you can right click on a part and see it's BOM information. None of that stuff works until you click the Enable button. I've also seen some vendors offer not only normal 3D model files and 2D drawings but a PDF that has an interactive 3D model inside. It's kinda cool how much random shit can go into a PDF but it's clearly a massive malware vector.
One neat thing I've seen is a PDF that will ping an IP catcher when opened in Adobe, regardless of the security level. The same can be done with word docs, excel spreadsheets, and even SVGs.
Did we do that with Excel spreadsheets so that macros are disabled by default?
"dumb" isn't a real thing in computer science though. You mean render them to bitmaps in a sandbox?
I read it more as "don't implement JS, 3D object rendering, slideshow transitions, sound annotations and the other 999 insane features that I'm not even aware exist"
Would require defining what features are needed. "Require PDF/A" is probably a reasonable approximation, though it would break most PDFs
I think he just means disable any of the "advanced" features mentioned above like accessing web content, running custom scripts, etc etc. You might still be vulnerable to any dependencies they use for image rendering itself but I bet it would make it drastically more safe.
Then just have a button for turning those on as needed on a case by case basis
If you disable features then people will see important documents as white rectangles and complain and you'll get a reputation as not working.
"It's for security, honey."
"Okay. If you aren't going to sign this rental agreement, you have five minutes to move your stuff out of my house."
> PDFs are executables, that's why it's hard.
That isn’t really true, it’s not hard for PDF viewers to block by default (or just not implement) the problematic features, which also aren’t critical for the vast majority of PDF files.
The exploitable bugs are typically the usual, some buffer overflow in an underlying image or font library or similar, but unrelated to PDFs being “executable”.
What a sleight of hand. PDF's are obviously not executable, any more than text files are. Decoders are executable and they can choose to unsafely handle input. Even plain text editors can have exploits. It's no different than any piece of complex software.
The characterization of the PDF format specifically being “basically code” in any substantial manner is simply incorrect. The only PDF-specific features that reasonably meet that description is the PostScript support, which has fallen out of use decades ago and was completely removed in PDF 2.0, and the JavaScript support, which is optional, prohibited in PDF/A, and can easily be limited or omitted by a PDF viewer.
> the PostScript support
What do you mean by that?
Older PDFs support PostScript XObjects: literal embedded PostScript code. Not sure it counts tho, because IIRC it was never executed by PDF viewer itself. It was "gives this to printer when printing"
TIL! This is what PDF 1.7 spec says (§4.7.1):
> Beginning with PDF 1.1, a content stream can include PostScript language fragments. These fragments are used only when printing to a PostScript output device; they have no effect either when viewing the document on-screen or when printing it to a non-PostScript device. In addition, applications that understand PDF are unlikely to be able to interpret the PostScript fragments. Hence, this capability should be used with extreme caution and only if there is no other way to achieve the same result. Inappropriate use of PostScript XObjects can cause PDF files to print incorrectly.
> Note: Since PDF 1.4 encompasses all of the Adobe imaging model features of the PostScript language, there is no longer any reason to use PostScript XObjects. This feature is likely to be removed from PDF in a future version.
> PDFs are executables, that's why it's hard. They support running code
I don't think Apple's PDF renderer supports e.g. running JS, you'd need real Acrobat for that. Or are you talking about something else?
> they support decoding images which themselves have their own custom compressors that are also basically code themselves.
But this is fundamentally true for anything that displays images, right? Or are the PDF formats particularly bad for some reason?
Yeah a lot of those fancy PDF features are Adobe-only. It's not that other apps can't support those features, it's that no one in their right mind wants to spend endless amounts of money and time trying to sandbox it.
Most people have some understanding that shady websites can give you malware, a drive-by exploit is pretty rare but it's good that most people think just visiting a site could infect your computer. But a PDF is just a document, right? Just thinking that a PDF is just words on a page is exactly why it's such an insidious threat. Or they'll get a PDF as an email attachment, see that it's not an exe or something weird, and open it because they think a document is safe.
I think it's more the image formats PDF supports? I could be wrong, but there was that forcedentry vulnerability (which was insanely cool, even if really bad)
From the standpoint of a layman it looks like there's a lot of overlap between writing safe web browsers/engines and writing safe PDF readers/engines. There just hasn't been anywhere near as much of an impetus to push PDF readers/engines in that direction because most of us aren't interacting with PDFs nearly as often as we interact with the web (and things built on web tech).
The difference is that web browsers absolutely need to support JavaScript to correctly display many important web sites, whereas that’s not necessary for PDF. You also don’t have to deal with vulnerability footguns like XSS/CSRF/CORS in PDF. Except for some rare special use cases that PDF viewers don’t need to support, nothing has to happen online for PDF. It’s really not comparable.
Most web browsers actually make decent PDF viewers by default don't they ?
I'm pretty sure not even the safe languages would help you here. PDF allows you to pretty much run arbitrary code since it supports javascript, images, and a bunch of other things I'm forgetting, and you can't not implement javascript support or otherwise be selective about what you support with it because then all the end-users will complain when they get that one PDF that they need to fill out but it needs JS because... Nobody knows.
Oh boy, what a week. Must be great working in cybersec right now.
It is rapidly becoming cyber only (assuming it is not already there under the hood).
#4 is very interesting. Truly untethered (persistent) jailbreaks haven't been a thing for 10 years.
This brings back lots of memory of jail-breaking iPhone era and cydia the alternative jailbroken iPhone app store.
The second video, the person who's shooting the video has his face mirrored onto the screen, anonymity is gone.
More details: https://onejailbreak.com/blog/iphone-duo-ios-27-1-jailbreak-...
i suspect there is an article under all of the ads but i don't have the patience to look for it
I suspect you don't use an ad blocker :-)
I'm not sure if this is real, but if it is: this week is unbelievable. I really hope it's not the new normal, but unfortunately I don't believe this myself.
It's a minuscule part of the new normal.
If this continues I'll argue that you have to be absolutely insane to allow network connected electronics into your home in the future. This is Apple, known for locking down their device to the extreme, and yes some people would love to use this for jailbreaking their phones, other organisations want to root your phone for .... other purposes.
Insecure webpages, broken certificates and an insecure PDF library... You shouldn't have anything more connected than an FM radio at this point. Security is no longer something a private individual can deal with.
> You shouldn't have anything more connected than an FM radio at this point.
They can still hack your mind with ads.
There's every incentive for nation states and other espionage outfits to keep these types of exploits under wraps. This has probably been the new normal for some time ..
I for one have experienced multiple lifetimes worth of internet madness and will be looking to airgap / disconnect as many devices as I can get away with.
People have been paying a premium to companies like Apple for a reason. You've got nothing to worry about.
Decade of people's purchases has been invested into safety and security. It's absolutely unthinkable that a $7t market cap company with an army of 200k workers will ever leave people high and dry. They proudly went public, so we know they have the public's interests at heart.
I assuming there is a /s missing from the end of your post.
> They proudly went public, so we know they have the public's interests at heart.
God I hope this is sarcasm.
I think in time (a few years) the gap will close a bit. As AI is used to harden software, it will be harder to break. Software not validated by AI will continue to be vulnerable to it.
So what happens if AI becomes something that you need to actually pay real money for? Then only Apple, Google and Microsoft can affort to do network exposed software. Smaller companies and solo developers are just f-ed if the price of running LLMs goes up as investor money dries up.
It would make me so happy if this would allow running UTM.app with Hypervisor support on iPadOS. I don't want to travel with two devices, the would be enough, but sometimes I need a real desktop. Apple, of course, wants you to buy two devices. I do have UTM with Jit Linux running on my iPad, via altstore and entitlements and so on, but it is all a bit complex and still fairly slow.
the videos just don't hit the same without the dancing anime girl and the electronic dance music.
My favourite part from the first video is how much effort it took to drag up from the bottom of the screen to get back to the home-screen. This reflects my experience with how iOS handles touch gestures in general.. also super easy to accidentally activate "Reachability" mode!
The reason they're having trouble is because they're in the simulator.
Also, if reachability bothers you like it does me, you can disable it.
Seriously I want a physical home button again
You say this, but have you tried an old iPhone recently? I did, and it was actually pretty terrible. The quick little swipes to switch between apps is so much more natural now.
Perhaps if you know how. Watching my dad use his iPhone.. Every time have to teach him something new, and hope he remembers it.
So stupid interface. No discoverability.
Whenever I use my wife's iphone I feel like an idiot. I've been working in tech for 20 years
I recently learned you can swipe on the address bar in Android-Chrome to navigate to the next/previous tab. Also, press+hold on the tab count button to show the tab's options e.g. close tab. Now my address bar is on the bottom of the screen.
Terrible discoverability. I guess the genalpha kids know gestures like this, but stuff like this makes me feel like a boomer.
Android Firefox had that swipe gesture for a long time. You tap the tabs count to show all tabs. You can close any of them from there. A long tap opens a menu. New tab, new private tab, close tab.
Safari added this in iOS recently. You can also swipe up on the address bar (after tapping it to make it "big") to swipe between pages, similar to the home screen. Found it on accident.
Try going back to thumb typing, no long press symbols , and no cursor movement from your spacebar. I've almost thrown my test iPhone at work across a room more times than I'd like to admit (since it doesn't belong to me)...
I wish. The iPhone 5S is the last one I can reliably type on. Idk what they did to screw up the hitboxes.
Yes, my wife has an iPhone 6, I wish I had that. Though half of that is the jack.
I will keep my SE 3rd gen a looong time for that specific reason
https://x.com/calif_io/status/2113570095549337977
We peaked in the early 00s with warez key generators featuring banger synth tracks.
You might enjoy Dubmood - Lost Floppies Vol 3, released this year.
Don't worry, they got you:
https://xxcancel.com/calif_io/status/2113570095549337977
Here you go… https://lnkd.in/p/g9_uh79c
So true.
Just let me know when I can install an alternate OS to my junk drawer of 6-10 year old iPhones. That's the holy grail.
They are going to run out of vulns eventually when the code is rewritten in memory safe lang & the rest are found.
> They are going to run out of vulns eventually when the code is rewritten in a memory safe lang
that's just not how it works at all though is it. Good luck writing the kernel, firmware etc in a completely memory-safe way. And even if that was accomplished, memory safety isn't the only class of vulnerabilities, it's just the most common.
> and the rest are found
If they kept a stable version with no updates or new features *ever*, only security patches, for decades, then maybe that could be possible, yeah. But Apple users aren't exactly the kind of people who would enjoy such stability and security anyways, it comes with the compromise of novelty. Stability and security aren't very fashionable either.
edit: Obviously a "memory-safe way" means no `unsafe` blocks in Rust, too.
edit#2: This is all assuming we don't get true AGI. I hope my assumption is right
He's right though. We'll run out of vulnerabilities eventually.
Im pretty sure more vulnerabilities are being created in new code all the time.
Crazy, you would think Apple would have already done AI-assisted vulnerability scans using the latest and most expensive models.
Absolutely crazy how PDF parsing and image rendering are still exploitable.
I want to boot linux in a vm at full-speed. is that too much to ask?
Aside from bragging how cool they are, what value is there for demonstrating a yet-to-be-patched vulnerability? I don't understand why old-guard infosec stars from Calif can do as they want, responsible disclosure be damned.
Just as a reminder for some folks here: During their WeWorm research in July–September 2026, Calif didn't stop at proving RCE to Tencent—they spent an extra week using AI to build a fully functional, self-propagating zero-click worm across three live phones, triggering temporary account bans from Tencent during testing.
I don't see this as irresponsible disclosure. They show that the vulns exist, but don't give any other details (unlike previous Calif releases). Not even a hint at what the exploit chain is like other than that it starts with a PDF, which is a surprise to no one.
They're of course also doing it for internet kudos, but attracting attention like this will help encourage people to update. Thanks to this article, I'm going to apply the next iOS security update ASAP, and tell everyone I know to do this the same. (hopefully it comes out soon)
I do wish they clearly stated the vulns have had been reported to Apple and when.
We disclosed most of the bugs used in these chains to Apple, and are going to disclose the rest, if not already.
>Just as a reminder for some folks here: During their WeWorm research in July–September 2026, Calif didn't stop at proving RCE to Tencent—they spent an extra week using AI to build a fully functional, self-propagating zero-click worm across three live phones, triggering temporary account bans from Tencent during testing.
Not sure what exactly your point is. The WeWorm demo was done in a controlled environment.
Also we do this for free. We don't charge neither Tencent nor Apple. We don't even take their bounties. Why can't we have some fun?
If you're so upset about how we do it, my suggestion is go find your own bugs.
You literally just said your company released an exploit demo before disclosing some of these vulnerabilities to the vendor.
As for your suggestion, I was an infosec researcher, I worked for 3 years with vendors to help them patch before I can even tweet anything about my research. I even flew to their HQ to assist in patching when needed. After Covid I transitioned to a development role, and now I'm on the other end, handling security reports from researchers.
Based on this dual point of view, let me tell you that for a security engineer in Apple that will learn from your video about vuln your company did not even disclose yet, this karma harvesting is as far from "coordinated disclosure" as possible. Their managers will be fuming, and the stress they will be in given the media frenzy will be off the charts.
Very cool work, I love what you guys are doing!
Is it irresponsible? They've revealed barely anything about how it works, besides that the first step is a PDF, and something about Glyph Grift.
What is the value of revealing anything at this time point, when no patch is out? What use is it for the public?
Just last Black hat there was a "glimpse disclosure" that was later followed with proper fixes and details. I gave my AI agent the details that were supposed to be "useless", before the patch was out, and it found the vulnerability in less than an hour.
We shouldn't even enter this game. And with the track record of this specific group, I didn't exactly get the impression that their incentive is to help fix things, but rather to promote their brand while others be damned.
would this let you use the usb port to host serial devices? Swooning pretty hard at the idea of this. <3
Please let this be real. I need my 17 Pro to be jailbroken. I may keep my 13 Mini if it works for it too. This will be bliss.
What are these videos actually demonstrating?
A couple of PDF exploits from iMessage and Signal leading to code execution, and an app that roots the phone. Also, they seem to have managed to make their malware survive a reboot, which is difficult. That's another reason why automatic reboots are considered a security feature: exploits leaving malware in-memory are a lot easier to build than malware that survives a full reboot, passing all stages of signature checks and validation.
Yes, why don't they just say it instead of posting videos. Opening a sinister PDF in iOS can give them access to what exactly? anything/everything? What iOS versions or devices, etc?
Marketing by security researchers and companies has gotten unbearable. They only want their name out there and not actually make devices more secure.
We disclosed most bugs to Apple, and are going to disclose the rest. We've disclosed probably close to 100 bugs to Apple in the past 6 months.
We've also been working with closely with the Signal Foundation to help them reduce the attack surface.
It's not true that we don't want to make devices more secure. We do and it's why we do this research.
We also do want our name out there because we're having a lot of fun and want to share that with our friends and the rest of the world.
how are they supposed to get paid?
Check out https://calif.io/research/the-great-glyph-grift, which shows one could go wrong with PDF in iOS.
We're gonna publish more in the coming weeks. Writing these blog posts take time, and we've been busy with another PHP thing.
> with another PHP thing.
oh man...
Rooting, pretty much. Aka, executing code which shows their flying logo, but could also be exfiltrating data without displaying anything.
This post gave me flashbacks to jailbreak era w/ Cydia. It's interesting to think that a lot of the those old plugins and tweaks have basically become standard supported features of the iOS now (SBSettings, Activator, WinterBoard, Zephyr, ...).
Stay on 27.0 or upgrade to 27.0.1?
How did they bypass MTE? Wasn't it suppose to make such exploits basically impossible?
We don't know if Calif bypassed MIE.
When they hacked the M5 (one week after release!), they used a data-only attack, which is outside the scope of MIE. That could be the case here, or something else entirely. We don't know.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48139219
Someone correct me please if I’m wrong but is this because iOS doesn’t sandbox their processes? I think I read Safari in particular doesn’t, but wonder if this is system-wide issue.
The more of this stuff we see, the more people will start using GrapheneOS, I guess.
Also wonder why they choose to publish and not cash-in the Apple bounty..
iOS does sandbox their processes really well, that's why this hack was as difficult as it was. The Safari thing you're talking about is JIT - iOS disables all runtime code generation across the system except in Safari (for JavaScript), but this is a completely separate thing from sandboxing.
Actually, no, I now remember this was about iMessage specifically and how it isn't completely isolated/runs as system service or sth? Or about the renderer?
Which would make sense because these attacks seem to exploit the same weakness.
iMessage's attachment renderer is also sandboxed, actually. You might be talking about this vulnerability: https://projectzero.google/2021/12/a-deep-dive-into-nso-zero..., but the second half of the vulnerability exploit chain was finding a way out of the CoreGraphics (Apple's image rendering library) sandbox to hack the rest of the system.
Yes, I think that was it, thanks!
Is this day0 or did apple and signal get notified?
so i see we're still going with the apocalypse today too
why do we see pdf viewer exploits on ios when we have sandboxing mechanisms nowadays like wasm? Or is this exploit accounting for the sandbox breakage?
I'm tired, boss
Right that does it. I'm fucking off to the pub and drinking myself under the table after this week.
Ok so you became "root", but who knows, Apple might have "superroot" and if that is not enough "god-mode".
Apple does have that and generally you need to break it to do the kinds of things demonstrated here
guess who put themselves on the must-hack list of every single national intelligence agency
No anime girl videos. Progress!
Here you go! https://x.com/calif_io/status/2113570095549337977
Man... PDF is such an unfortunate file format.
Oct 16th post;
More recently: iPhone Duo Jailbreak vid https://x.com/calif_io/status/2113570095549337977 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50206680)
Apple doesn't use AI to vibecode and/or pentest their software?
I think we have a right to know.
Well, surely you know that “AI” is just pattern matching and useless for Real Engineering work by Real Engineers.
Yeah, real engineers don't use grep either ...
This made me miss Cydia and the old jailbreaking days so much. Was such an exciting time to have an iPhone with the tinkering. Anyone still remember iDitDahText https://iditdahtext.com/iDitDahText.html?
Slightly offtopic but I find it slightly funny that they have accomplished to hack the iPhone yet the name of the third video is: Can you iPhone do this?
I would like to think that they might've created the video so fast and perhaps out of so excitement that the name of the title had the typo :-D
Too bad this will be patched instead of allowing the device owner to control their own device.
Of course it's better that they found that before some shady mercenary spyware company, but I'd also want to control my ios device the same way they did in the video, but no, that's not for us.
In principle it should be possible to jailbreak-patch the OS so that it will patch any patches to your liking.
So you think they will release the full exploit?
In this thread. Apple Acolytes Anonymous.
Seriously, California has a cathedral problem, may the vault dweller succeed.
Now - does the Signal 1-click work on Graphene?
public wont be getting this jailbreak, it is just another flex like elon's flipping car.
I think we will probably see more and more restrictions on frontier models in the coming months. This is not what behemoths like Apple and Sony want to see.
Paradoxically, people are happier to buy things that they have control over, but boy, Apple loves to control every layer of consumerism.
Apple doesn't want security researchers to find bugs? Then why do they have a $2m bug bounty?
Awarding security researcher != Average Joe being able to jailbreak your device.
Hope you understand the difference.
If the current frontier allows for this, we can probably expect alternative models to reach the same spot in a matter of months as well. The cat's out of the bag, for better of worse.
Do we want everyone who doesn’t know how to program a car to reprogram their car? I.e. I think there should be restrictions on frontier models to ensure safety of others.
The paradox is that if the models are restricted, more exposed software will exist. I'm not convinced you can make a model that allows you to build secure software without it also being able to build exploits.
First of all this is crazy that even on hn we were a few days behind this.
Second fuck Apple. Fuck all tech companies. And seriously fuck late stage capitalism. Foss or nothing. There should be a rule if you pay for it it has to be foss. This way people can still make proprietary but they just can’t charge for it.
We have zero privacy, zero security, all our politicians and all the corporations are against us.
Media parsing is an endless exploit vector. Like fuck. At some point you have to be like they (not just Apple) keep it broken
An yea I know foss gets these issues too. But if the only option was foss, then at least the whole world’s focus would be on it
Bro rewrite IOS in Rust :)
My dream is to release an iOS app that self-installs and not say anything special about it other than having a "Download for iPhone" button on my website. If someone asked me, I'd answer: "Huh, what do you mean? It's our app for the iPhone."
You can do this on Android
Not for long now...
Still, but with a one-time 24-hour delay, at least until Google pulls a future Xiaomi.
This "there will be literally no difference between apple and Google in 70 days" is great propaganda for Apple.
It's better to use 0-day exploits to install legitimate software by now. It saves everyone from a lot of hassle. Or, more realistically for most, make a web app and forget about native apps.
BASED
Eli5 the iMessage video? They open a file that calls their webapp?
Curious to see how many tokens was spent
marvelous to see that your kids and grandkids wont be safe because capable people will rather do this than care about safety and security, opening up more and more attack surface ...
god fucking damn it, they really turned hackers into exactly what they wanted.
one can't help but manically lough at the ridiculous deformed minds of these people.
and it feeds corporations in such a perfect manner. if you don't want to be at the whims of disgusting private people that constantly escape law enforcement, all you can do is join a corpo and their VPNs so you have an admin team with faces and names that you can rely on and who know you do your part in the company. law enforcement is fucking worthless. I can't believe this. staying anonymous all the time, never letting any normal people with normal lives know when they are in danger or being watched.
god fucking damn it, these fucking lying lefty fucking fucks
I guess I've never really understood why people who don't like the way the iPhone and apple ecosystem work buy apple products. There are plenty of other options out there. Every time articles about this and the App Store pop up it seems as if the comments are filled with a whole lot of android users that are upset that iPhone's aren't like androids. That's not to say those are all of the comments and there aren't clearly iPhone users who want these options but again, why buy a product that doesn't support these things if they're so important to you in the first place.