This is the second time I've read about an iPhone OCR rack https://findthatmeme.com/blog/2023/01/08/image-stacks-and-ip...
Is this still state of the art in terms of local OCR?
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.
I have then employed a multimodal LLM and had a 100% success rate.
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.
ARM Apple Silicon Developer Transition Kit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reQq8fx4D0Q iPod Touch dev board: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLCt6oHPTQM
The PCB repair technique for the DTK is pretty cool on its own.
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.
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
> 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.
We all know companies are predatory, and in many cases companies (looking right at you Google and Microsoft) continue to refuse to pay people for discovering, documenting and reporting high-severity vulnerabilities. That doesn't mean we as individuals forfeit our principles and become just as corrupt as the "faceless corporate entities."
citation needed.
Or, at least, catalogued, scanned, and photographed.
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.
I think the only piece I'd pay to read is how they negotiated with spotify.
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.
It's definitely fixed in tangible form, so it's just a matter of what qualifies, but lots of things do.
Why WOULD he release it at all?
I worked several years within Apple in one core engineering roll, in a sizeable team, and being ethical and moral was a _huge_ part of the engineering culture (at least), both when Steve Jobs was there and after.
At the same time it'll incur a non trivial amount of reputational and professional risk.
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.
As a long time an app developer (mostly Android, but I've seen my iOS coworkers deal with Apple, and I released one somewhat popular Mac app while refusing to get a developer account), I find it very disrespectful how Apple tries its best to forcibly insert itself between the users and the developers and then acts like they totally played an important role in forming that relationship. Then there's the fact that the app store policies ruin the internet as a whole. Because Apple, in its infinite wisdom, not only reviews apps on their technical merits, but if the app is for an online service, it also reviews service itself. They would totally reject a client app for something that they don't like ToS of.
Speaking of the Mac app I made, Apple is making it harder with every macOS release to run apps from "unidentified" developers. No good technical reason for that. No good technical reason for taking away the "all developers" option from the security settings either (I know that it still can be set with a terminal command). A system can be made reasonably secure without the whole security model being centralized around one self-appointed unquestionably trusted party yet Apple chose the centralized approach.
The whole EU DMA thing... I don't even know where to start. This "core technology fee" is absolutely ridiculous. The fact that every binary that is to be "sideloaded" has to go through Apple is also ridiculous. It's pretty clear what the EU regulators meant with this act, yet Apple keeps trying to work around it to keep as much of its rent-seeking as possible. All while acting like a kicked puppy.
Then there's their stance on adversarial interoperability, see Beeper.
Then there's also this whole parts pairing thing on iOS devices. Again, no good technical reason. Maybe it's to prevent stolen iPhones used for parts, but stolen iPhones are still used for parts. I'm a software guy, but for lots more complaints about artificially created hardware-related problems see Louis Rossmann: https://www.youtube.com/@rossmanngroup
But I don't think it supports acting immorally, just because Apple's involved. I would have shipped back the machine to them as well.
