Posted by pavel_lishin 16 hours ago
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…
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.
Apple is too big for that. Hard regulation is the only way out right now. Maybe breaking them up too.
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.
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.
- 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.
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 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.
> 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.
I expect that the real problem with using a Linux phone would be WhatsApp, Google Maps (the navigation part), OSMAnd. Telegram desktop maybe works.
This issue was on the ballot and will be again.
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.
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.
Support NGOs fighting for your freedom like https://eff.org.
I stopped buying Apple phones years ago.
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.
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.
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.
SMS are an American thing. Only credit card companies are using them and they are American.
So a bank shutting down a website right now and the "forcing" some Google/Apple "verification" makes a lot of sense in that context.
You can also vote with your wallet regarding banking. Put your deposits in another bank.
Edit: exiling not exhaling
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's a net benefit for society, even if you don't personally like it.
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.
They want what Apple sells.
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.
"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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Also 2 of those 3 companies were famously NOT broken up.
Guess who that benefits? Not you or me.
The tiny fraction of people willing to vote with their wallet has effectively a 0% chance of pushing big corporate to act right.
No. Regulation is the answer. Hopefully everything changes in November. That’s when GTA VI comes out.
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.
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.
Best of both worlds.
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.
Take care!
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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?
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.
If that would work, I'd be writing this on my iPhone Mini.
The local inference threshold has been crossed already. Its possible to achieve big model like performance through agent harnesses with local models.
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.
What's this about? I can't find anything, except some random Reddit posts.
But what are the options?
If Murican lobbying/corruption tries to snuff AI that threatens the Hutt cartels, China will accelerate it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
The unregulated market naturally coalesces into oligopolies or monopolies and doesn’t fix issues like this.
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.
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 :-)
> we gave in to the “ecosystem”
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
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.
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.
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.
Or why have a smartphone in the first place if you're not going to put any sort of meaningful apps on it. ;)
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 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.
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.
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.
The only security risk for apple is a job security risk if the ecosystem lock-in is eroded.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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 do you mean by that?
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
The second video, the person who's shooting the video has his face mirrored onto the screen, anonymity is gone.