allisonaparrish@friend.camp
Oct 13, 2026, 5:51 PMremember when a big tech company could release a new product and you could think about anything other than surveillance, planned obsolescence, vendor lock-in and e-waste
Replies
- allisonaparrish@friend.campOct 13, 2026, 6:07 PM
i also don't understand the point of apple's "secure exclaves." okay, so you can't access the audio or video data directly. but you *can* access records of the individual people who are using the device, tied to their apple account, and what they're talking about, presumably with timestamps? how is that any better at all
- allisonaparrish@friend.campOct 13, 2026, 6:11 PM
[me, after i've archived all of the images in your camera roll] oh no no no no. I don't have your data. I just have blocks of discrete cosine transforms *derived* from your data. it's all very secure
lime with barcodescanlime@misc.nameOct 13, 2026, 6:09 PM@aparrish computer users are conditioned to expect technical security measures to exist, and conditioned not to assemble those measures into a coherent threat model
Oct 13, 2026, 6:09 PM@aparrish I tend to think of it as a control mechanism. It ensures no one can decide what is done with the gathered data other than Apple. Not the government, not the user, no one. Apple is the one who decides which sorts of data may be preserved and acted on and which must be locked away and reserved for the agents of the Trusted Party (Apple). Through this preservation of order a peaceful world society may be reached
Oct 13, 2026, 6:13 PM@aparrish discrete cosine transforms (encryption by xor'ing each byte with `int(cos(90°))`)
Oct 13, 2026, 6:50 PM@aparrish this is how we get πfs
Bee Sprawlbugsprawlbug@mastodon.socialOct 13, 2026, 6:25 PM@aparrish my thought about it: This setup is ideally-designed to let Apple respect the letter of the law in places like the EU (where they sometimes attempt to constrain ad-based surveillance) while ignoring the spirit
lawmakers are forced to choose some arbitrarily-bright line between 'personally-identifying' info (PII) and non, for the sake of it being enforceable... which means as a tech company you just need some argument for how e.g.: your DCT results identify ppl without being 'personal'
- allisonaparrish@friend.campOct 13, 2026, 6:30 PM
@sprawlbug yeah, I guess I can take some solace in the fact that apple is at least *pretending* that it provides some kind of security, instead of going full joe rogan "[monster truck voice] we're really sticking it to those EU freedom-hating pencil-necks with this technically compliant but totally useless feature"
Oct 13, 2026, 7:01 PM@aparrish @sprawlbug I've not worked on this stuff at apple but I have worked adjacent to this stuff at a previous job and:
the whole point is to be able to say stuff like "you are only told of the presence of a specific person, but you can not just constantly record the video/audio footage".
I'm happy to talk about what kinds of useful privacy stuff it DOES enable if people are interested!
Oct 13, 2026, 7:32 PM@erikarn @aparrish @sprawlbug I had figured this was just to work around wiretapping laws. I'd be curious to hear more, though!
- Oct 13, 2026, 9:15 PM
@varx @aparrish @sprawlbug If you want to implement things like "wake word" on microphone, or "is someone in the room" on camera (think smart speaker, video conferencing portal) then in the past you'd have to stream the audio/video into the SoC, run normal software on it, and make a decision.
Later on you could offload that to some always on part of the SoC.
In both cases, going from that to "always recording and uploading into the cloud" is a quick jump.
- Oct 13, 2026, 9:17 PM
@varx @aparrish @sprawlbug Similarly, if you wanted to do biometric fingerprinting of someone's voice or photo for authentication? Same deal. Having it end up at the SoC for some random bit of software to run over means (a) someone could just write software to always read/record it, and (b) malware could do the same thing.
- Oct 13, 2026, 9:18 PM
@varx @aparrish @sprawlbug With something like this, you can't - you upload firmware/model into the secure enclave, and the rest of the SoC doesn't /see/ the audio/video. You give it something like a set of vectors representing the faces -> names you want to match, and then not even the OS gets to open the camera/microphone. All it gets is output like "person X is here", "person Y said a word", etc.
It means you can do stuff like absolutely sandbox away camera/mic access unless REQUIRED.
- Oct 13, 2026, 9:19 PM
@varx @aparrish @sprawlbug Now, this would be better if it were done by someone whos trusted to not abuse it for advertisement/people tracking reasons, I agree.
But it DOES mean you can treat security much more seriously. You can have the SoC completely off and unable to access camera/microphone until you've authenticated yourself, and authenticated you're allowed to access the camera/microphone. Malware can't just hijack the camera/mic drivers and get access to background audio/video.
- Oct 13, 2026, 9:22 PM
@varx @aparrish @sprawlbug So in short - it changes how you interact with the hardware. Before hand your OS would need access to the camera/mic to implement random features, and malware / bad apps could just open those in the background however which way they could to gain unfettered access to stuff they shouldn't.
Now you can add things like wake word, photo auth, audio auth, etc by pushing biometric info to the secure enclave and getting auth results out, without granting access to hardware.
- allisonaparrish@friend.campOct 13, 2026, 10:36 PM
@erikarn @varx @sprawlbug that does make sense, especially the malware angle, but i still think it's a little disingenuous on apple's part to advertise it specifically as a "privacy" feature—I think when most people are thinking about privacy, they mean "my activity is meaningfully private from advertisers, and even the vendor" not "bad actors can't access raw video/audio" (as a consumer, i would be pleased to learn that a device offers the former, and would just assume it promises the latter)
kitkit@friend.campOct 13, 2026, 7:57 PM@aparrish "secure exclaves" is what i call the domes with laser turrets on top that were erected on the moon for mining. in act 2 it is revealed that there are carnivorous moon worms that can simply dig up through the floor of the domes, bypassing the laser defense
Oct 13, 2026, 6:13 PM@aparrish I do not actually remember that.
- allisonaparrish@friend.campOct 13, 2026, 6:14 PM
@jwz lol fair enough!
Oct 13, 2026, 7:42 PM@aparrish no, can't remember that mythical time. Must have been before 1977.
- allisonaparrish@friend.campOct 13, 2026, 7:48 PM
@TheOneDoc i dunno, i feel like the first person who pounded a clay tablet flat from the mud of the Euphrates was probably thinking "how can i turn this into passive income"
ティージェーグレェteajaygrey@snac.bsd.cafeOct 13, 2026, 9:39 PMCommodore Amiga announcement, black tie event.
Andy Warhol using an Amiga to do a realtime color portrait of Blondie.
On prototype hardware.
The designers knew the "fill" function had a bug.
Andy used it, did not crash!
Stuff of legends.
Photoshop didn't even exist yet.
Folks in 2026?
Can they even understand?
(That black tie gala affair was in 1985 if I remember correctly. Stuff about the bug and not crashing were learned from the Viva Amiga documentary. I was not there in personal attendance and didn't buy a used Amiga 2000 until 1994 [and bought an Amiga 1200 later that same year.])
christachrista@friend.campOct 13, 2026, 10:24 PM@aparrish oooh also also! in what terrible way are they going to use my data in a monetization ploy in some medium range future?
