Eric Jennings

@codemonkeymike @coldclimate Well. The use case they were trying to solve for was someone steals your laptop and tries to access it without your permission. Hard part is getting owners to unlock it before donating/selling to someone else.

@0x00string @codemonkeymike @coldclimate This is an excessively rude and cruel response. The way you’re talking to people is extremely misanthropic and lacks any empathy. Honestly, dog, you’ve added nothing to this exchange except shittiness so peace out.

@codemonkeymike @coldclimate Hmm… for the hardware firmware I’d still want to have to unlock it on device rather than having an attack surface/backdoor from the internet to exploit. Apple had the issue a couple years ago with thieves exploiting the remote password change to workaround the phone protections. But I get how it sucks for this use case. Like a lot of things, for 99% of users who don’t care they should default to a version that’s secure from most thieves but not totally secure from government and then let the users who really care opt in to the stronger lockdown mode.

@codemonkeymike @coldclimate Keep in mind how proud they were of resisting government attempts to access devices and saying that they would design them so that Apple would have no ability to unlock them for governments.

@codemonkeymike @vriesk @coldclimate I’m with you that overall, the default settings for Find My should allow users to deactivate the lock remotely. Most users would benefit greatly and it would make it so much easier to transfer devices. I think they still should have an opt-in mode where you can go into a higher security mode and remote unlocks are completely disabled. I don’t think it’s pro-ewaste to make that level of security available and optional.

@codemonkeymike @vriesk @coldclimate All said and done. Good luck with the batch you have. Sucks that they’re so hard to deal with. You’re doing great work and it’s good to see people posting about it.

@mttaggart@infosec.exchange @mhoye@cosocial.ca Looks like @arstechnica@mastodon.social just pulled the article.

@mastodonmigration @wjmaggos @Teri_Kanefield @Popehat @mmasnick @mattblaze @GottaLaff I wanted to drop in to second this bit here about something in the water just generally and everywhere. People are being crazy jerks in every aspect of life now. Flipping out driving. At social beer league sports. Work. School. Everywhere. Now maybe insane online life is driving them to be crazy IRL. Or maybe the online is a reflection of how nuts they’ve become in real life. I’m not sure. But it’s definitely very tense everywhere now. Not just Mastodon.

@rastilin@aus.social @xanarin@ioc.exchange @ipg@wetdry.world Before you knock PoweredUSB too much, remember that back around 99-00 when POS systems starting using it, the primary USB spec couldn’t do more than 5V at 0.5A and USB-C was was over 15 years away. These power devices that early USB just wasn’t even interested in dealing with. And even the 1.0 versions of the USB-PD specs at 20V 5A is less than the the 24V 6A PoweredUSB ports available 20 years ago. (Although most were 12V 1.5A plugs in my experience, I worked on POS software for a few years so had tons of test hardware). It’s really only been about 5-10 years since the main USB specification caught up with USB-PD 2.0. And for a lot of those years, implementations of USB-PD were really spotty and unreliable so the hardware manufacturers didn’t have any motivation to move. Plus… PoweredUSB also had the advantage of easily telling which way to plug it in, unlike a standard USB-A plug. For the late-90’s, it was actually pretty nice.

@kodamachameleon Sorry you got scammed and harassed but that’s one hell of a funny story in the end. 🤣

@kirb Honestly one of the underrated killers of desktop towers may have been the inability of slotted RAM to keep up with soldered RAM. Esoteric PCI cards were nice but most of the desires were upgradable RAM, upgradable GPUs, and lots of hard drives. Apple’s divorce from nvidia and their desire for unified memory killed the GPU upgrade, soldered RAM killed that upgrade, and thunderbolt made external hard drive enclosures about as effective as internal drives. I’m still going to miss it though. The ability to just buy a nice desktop tower for $2000 and upgrade it over time was great.