Posted by pavel_lishin 15 hours ago
Quite annoying. I've tried to explain it to them, but to no avail.
in my experience like maybe <5% of the web break
That's your own mistake, because you can collaborate on Notes while your iPhone is in Lockdown
I’ll admit I thought you lost out on more by enabling.
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?
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.
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.
Stop expecting differently.
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.
Like we did on HTC G1s in 2008
https://projectzero.google/2022/03/forcedentry-sandbox-escap...
https://www.trendmicro.com/en_gb/research/21/i/analyzing-peg...
Or just spend a few billion tokens rewriting the whole chain in a memory safe language. This nonsense is inexcusable in 2026
it's a feature. expect next exploit to also be pdf or image related.
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.
The best solution would be ditching it completely for a simpler subset of features. But that will never happen.
"~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...
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.
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.
Who am I kidding, I think the PDF format will outlive us.
if apple parsed pdf with (js, swift, rust) none of this would be possible. the problem is memory-unsafe code.
Interpreters and compilers can have bugs. Bugs can cause memory safety issues.
They have the means, they have the motivation
Lately they have fewer and fewer excuses not to
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.
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.
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.
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.
We're on the same side here. I daily a Pixel with LineageOS and root.
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.
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.
2. run linux
3. run emulators
4. run VMs
5. install steam
6. make it a media server
etc
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.
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?
The evidence of hack is the feature.
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.
[ Stage 1: Safari/WebKit ] ──> [ Stage 2: KASLR Bypass ] ──> [ Stage 3: Kernel Execution ]
(Memory Corruption/RCE) (Kernel Info Leak) (UAF Privilege Escalation)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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
replacing my hn bookmark.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
They do have good hardware, but surely the hacker in you is a little sad using an IPhone!
edit: it's like... just give us the same option for the ipads / iphones please?
Now their "trusted cyber access" program is moat rather than safeguard.
> 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...
if you have a way to turn $5 easily into exploitable vulns, let me know cause that'd be a first for me
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."
Edit: hahaha you guys are funny. “The php hack” is what I meant!
"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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(Scheme_implementation...
/ducks and runs