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Apple Prototypes and Corporate Secrets Are for Sale Online–If You Know Where
- JKCalhoun 2y agohttps://archive.is/4mxX1 https://archive.is/4mxX1
- krackers 2y ago>chaining together a dozen dilapidated second-generation iPhone SEs and harnessing Apple's Live Text optical character-recognition feature to find possible inventory tags This is the second time I've read about an iPhone OCR rack https://findthatmeme.com/blog/2023/01/08/image-stacks-and-iphone-racks-building-an-internet-scale-meme-search-engine-Qzrz7V6T.html https://findthatmeme.com/blog/2023/01/08/image-stacks-and-ip... Is this still state of the art in terms of local OCR?
- talldayo 2y agoI think Tesseract is the smarter/faster/less obnoxious choice if you're not trying to parse weird meme text like the blog is doing. There's almost certainly a better paid option available in our enlightened AI age, but I don't even think you'd need AI for this use-case.
- j45 2y agoI have seen some models mix LLM with ocr to improve both. Considering what apps like Notes can do low key on iOS… I wouldn’t be surprised if there would exist more capability. Iirc, Apple was holding back improvements to Siri and other techs.
- kergonath 2y agoThe Apple framework is much, much better than Tesseract, and quicker as well. It is really good. Of course if you don’t need on-device processing, then there are cloud services that are better.
- mike_d 2y ago> I think Tesseract is the smarter/faster/less obnoxious choice [...] There's almost certainly a better paid option available in our enlightened AI age It would have cost $375,000 to use cloud OCR for this project. Mandatory is absolutely a baller, but not crazy enough to spend that kind of money on the project. If you can get Tesseract to generate comparable results with sub-optimal images from eBay listings, I'd love to know more.
- oefrha 2y agoLast time I used tesseract (a year ago?) it’s still pretty useless if your text isn’t on a clean background. It doesn’t even come close to Apple’s proprietary on-device OCR.
- ranger_danger 2y agoThere is a whole page on their site dedicated to methods for improving the accuracy: https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/ImproveQuality.html https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/ImproveQuality.html I think most frontends to tesseract employ a lot of these methods and maybe more... but trying to use tesseract directly can indeed be difficult without extra processing of the image first.
- oefrha 2y agoI know, I tried many things with the photo collection I was working with, including advice from that very page, generally to relatively poor results. (I ended using Apple’s framework on macOS.) The point is tesseract is definitely not “smarter” in any way, at best it’s on par with Apple’s OCR when you hand it very clean text.
- egorfine 2y agoI have tried to use Tesseract to extract serial numbers from photos of iPhone boxes and had a 100% failure rate. I have then employed a multimodal LLM and had a 100% success rate.
- mandatory 2y agoIt's just because I did this talk and made FindThatMeme :) so not a popular method, just what I used to do large scale OCR.
- krackers 2y agoOh I completely missed that you're actually the same guy!
- JKCalhoun 2y agoLooks like the software was looking for labels like this: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fi-found-a-monitor-property-of-apple-computer-inc-expensed-v0-y8ebbqx6zy8c1.jpeg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D7ebf4e2bd71e3515927f7a48460ef0df6cea8d7a https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
- mandatory 2y agoYep, that's an example of what the automated scanning looks for. You can see a very similar example in the slides: https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2032/DEF%20CON%2032%20presentations/DEF%20CON%2032%20-%20Matthew%20Bryant%20-%20The%20Secret%20Life%20of%20a%20Rogue%20Device%20-%20Lost%20IT%20Assets%20on%20the%20Public%20Marketplace.pdf https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2032/DEF%20CON%2032%20pre...
- muscomposter 2y ago[flagged]
- jamesy0ung 2y agoA lot of prototypes can be found on a Chinese website called xianyu
- popcalc 2y agoWhat search terms to use?
- jfdjkfdhjds 2y agothe only things anyone ever wanted to know from apple is their aggressive business tactics... and most of that is already public thanks to the many processes they lost along the way. from labour salary fixing across industries to pushing obvious monopolies in the face of the publishing industry. I think the only piece I'd pay to read is how they negotiated with spotify.
- rbanffy 2y agoThe ones I’m interested would be the ones donated to Berkeley. I hope one day they make it to a proper museum. Or, at least, catalogued, scanned, and photographed.
- epakai 2y agoSome of these developer devices get 'destroyed' and sold as scrap. dosdude1 has restored some of these kinds of devices to working order. There's pretty neat video of the restorations: ARM Apple Silicon Developer Transition Kit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reQq8fx4D0Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reQq8fx4D0Q iPod Touch dev board: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLCt6oHPTQM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLCt6oHPTQM The PCB repair technique for the DTK is pretty cool on its own.
- userbinator 2y agoThat first video appeared on HN with some discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40422359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40422359
- userbinator 2y ago[flagged]
- grishka 2y ago> After he evaluated the Time Capsule's contents, Bryant notified Apple about his findings, and the company's London security office eventually asked him to ship the Time Capsule back. > Bryant again reported his findings to Apple and returned the Mac Mini to them. Why the hell did he do that?! It's, like, the worst thing one can possibly do with these kinds of devices. Just publish stuff that doesn't have anyone's personal data in it. That'll make the world better in the end.
- tomcam 2y agoBecause he didn’t want the heavy hand of Apple’s legal department ruining his life
- grishka 2y agoFirst of all, he could release it anonymously. Second, what law or contract would he be breaking anyway? An NDA with Apple that he never signed? Sure there is a person who breached an NDA in relation to the proprietary information contained in these devices, but that person is whomever was tasked with decommissioning them before resale.
- katbyte 2y agoYou do realize some people have morals? Why WOULD he release it at all?
- PradeetPatel 2y agoSeconded, there's no tangible nor financial benefit to him for releasing the information to the world. Also: how would publishing the data "make the world a better place"? At the same time it'll incur a non trivial amount of reputational and professional risk.
- grishka 2y ago> Also: how would publishing the data "make the world a better place"? For example, schematics of Apple devices would help people fix them on a deeper level than Apple wants (Apple doesn't do board-level repair, one 3-cent component fails and you're getting your entire motherboard replaced). Diagnostic software would help with that too. Documentation about any artificial limitations Apple imposes on these devices for its own profit, like part pairing, would make these limitations easier to bypass. Documentation about software or proprietary network protocols would help with adversarial interoperability. Even documentation on manufacturing techniques might be useful for someone building hardware — if not to copy, then to learn from it.
- miki123211 2y agoThis is why solutions like Bitlocker with a good TPM or FileVault are so important. They can essentially guarantee that the disk encryption key will only be released from the security module if the computer is running a fully-trusted and signed OS. Even if you take the drive out of the machine, the data on that drive is completely useless to you. Incidentally, this is also what makes short PINs secure; the TPM contents are unreadable, even to a skilled attacker, so if the TPM is guaranteeed to wipe itself after 10 tries, even a 4-digit PIN is secure enough.
- userbinator 2y agothe TPM contents are unreadable, even to a skilled attacker Depends how "skilled". Nation-state level? Most definitely not. "IC break" services in China? Maybe. AFAIK TPMs are based on similar secure-processor designs as the chips in payment cards and other smartcards, and even those with enough determination and $$$, or the right equipment, will get you through. Here's an old but quite thorough discussion of the techniques involved: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-630.pdf https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-630.pdf
- noident 2y agoI don't understand. Why aren't these devices using full disk encryption?
- egorfine 2y agoSome people are incapable of locating and checking a checkbox. I know, it sounds incredibly weird for us, tech people, but that's a reality.
- kome 2y agovery, very brilliant! but the fact he returned the data is mind-blowing to me... i would have published everything on a torrent and good luck.
- fsflover 2y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41220153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41220153
- The_SamminAter 2y agoWould you be willing to publish the iOS OCR server you made? It would be greatly useful in some of my products, as as you’ve noted other options have either low-quality results (tesseract, some cloud-based solutions) or are expensive in comparison for large amounts of images (most cloud-based solutions). That and it’d allow some of us to put our old phones to use.
- _boffin_ 2y agoHere's something i've used a few times. It's not using the phone, but rather a mac mini that's sitting in the corner. Quickly made this repo -- mind the mess. https://github.com/mr-boffin/fruit-native-ocr https://github.com/mr-boffin/fruit-native-ocr
- The_SamminAter 2y agoI’m afraid neither user or the repo exist on github - perhaps did you typo?
- kotaKat 2y agoThe amount of corporate crap I find on eBay from e-recycling is abundant and fantastic. And cheap! I've seen everything from Amazon's palm-scanners to a tactical LTE base station once used by NIST to all sorts of Zebras full of fun software.
- brandondebra 2y ago[dead]