It’s a pity we gave in to the “ecosystem” play by these huge companies.. even if I jailbreak my iOS and never let it update.. Apple can easily detect the jailbreak and lock me out of anything iCloud, and iMessage and such. iPhone would be one glorious iPod touch after that.. :-(
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…
This comment made me think that someone should pull an ArtCraft on Android or iOS by making a good linux phone skin, with high performance auto-updating wrappers for various web apps to make them as convenient as mobile native ones. Then we can actually ditch the big corps and bask in our LLM-enabled open source utopia. Hmmmmm.
> Apple is too big for that. Hard regulation is the only way out
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.
> Apple is not 'too big' for savvy customers to choose differently
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.
I agree no user boycott of Apple will ever matter. My main point was that calling for "regulation" is a cop-out because it no longer stops Mag7 mega-corp abuses.
I also pushed back on Apple being "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.
It doesn’t actually matter, because your phone is only working as a coincidence. Every website and app is tested for Google phones and iPhones. If you lose the ability to do something one day, the chances of you getting that functionality back without major effort from your phone manufacturer or the kindness of bored people working for free, is essentially zero.
My phone runs a desktop GNU/Linux OS with desktop Firefox (or Chromium if installed). If Firefox on desktop stops showing websites correctly, we will have a larger problem than an unsupported niche phone.
I think that it is necessary a radical political change in the US, akin to a revolution, to be able to pass and enforce meaningful regulation against big tech companies. It's the same as going against the military-industrial complex or big finance. They integrated themselves to this power structure that guarantees their interests come first not only in internal policy, but also in foreign policy. Big tech is a limb of the US empire.
I'm blind. Apple has explicitly said they wouldn't consider the "bloody ROI" of accessibility (will fund it no matter what). This is important to me. Software freedom is also important to me. What am I to do?
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.
The point is that your conclusion here is both the correct/obvious one, and that it ensures one explicitly cannot vote with their wallet. They have priorities too significant to be able to take part in the protest. They are invisible to the company they WANT to vote for.
Perhaps what allows Apple is to be better at certain things like that or security for average consumer is indeed at odds with some aspirations? At least in practice, not utopian dreams, that seems to be the case.
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.
You grab an Android phone anyways because Android accessibility is very much on par or even better than whatever slop Apple is putting out with VoiceOver these days, and developers also somewhat care about it more on Android.
You're also going to benefit from European mandates to have accessible mobile apps anyways, it's coming for free to you.
> 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.
If you know of any company that would bother to spend days making accessibility improvements, yet for some reason decide to not bring those to the US release, they're the dumbest fucking company in existence.
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.
What banking business? Use a web browser, or just bank in person like everyone did not long ago. Carry a credit card instead of Apple/Google Pay. That's what degoogled Android users do and it's a very minor inconvenience anyone with a little bit of maturity should be able to accept. Also, cash is much better for your privacy.
And if you require a one-time SMS code for purchase (which can be adjusted via their website, most likely), then you still have an option that is not Apple and Google. I use a dumbphone for "banking" (SMS)... and a credit card, and the website. Those are really all the 3 things I need to do banking, as you have said so correctly.
Choose a different bank, then. I've gradually stopped using the phone apps, not really by design but just because I don't often feel like that works better than the real web site. Both USAA and my local credit union have perfectly good desktop web sites.
Belfius for example of you have ever used itsme with them. Also Digi (a mobile phone company in Belgium) since it uses itsme for authentication. Itsme is strictly an Android and iOS app.
More info on this is going to come out, but banks are going through hell right now with AI agents accessing user accounts and even firing off transfers and other accounts activity, and their legal teams are losing their minds.
So a bank shutting down a website right now and the "forcing" some Google/Apple "verification" makes a lot of sense in that context.
If an entity has a product that has a trillion people choosing it, the marginal benefit to society to build an entirely new product for 1000 people or so isn't worth it. The people whose time would be required to produce that second product for a very, very small 1,000 person market would better serve society by working on other goals.
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.
Yes, I can vote with my wallet, but no, it doesn't make a difference. I've been voting with my wallet since day 1 by never buying an iPhone because of how closed it is, and unsurprisingly, this has done absolutely nothing to change how open the iPhone is.
You and I have very different definitions of "take away".
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.
It's not redundant and he isn't disagreeing with your opinion about openness. He's saying that it's immoral to want to force your personal preferences about phone design on other people.
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.
Again, my comment that he responded to literally was just making a claim that the iPhone ecosystem is not going to become more open due to voting with one's wallet. Yes, I obviously also think it should be more open, and that's an opinion that someone can strongly disagree with, but that's not what I was saying in the comment he responded to, because whether an action is moral or not is irrelevant to the question of whether it would produce a certain effect.
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.
That is like saying prosecuting murder is immoral because it is taking away the murderer and victims rights.
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.
If you did that then you probably made clear your reasons which probably created mindshare with others which probably has helped the EU open up the iPhone. Don’t be so defeatist because the outcome isn’t immediately apparent.
I'm not being defeatist; I'm pretty much arguing for what you're saying, which is that I think government intervention is needed. The parent comment I was responding to said that regulation isn't needed because voting with our wallets is sufficient, and I was disagreeing.
Convincing people to vote with their wallets is much easier than convincing them to write their pols to make laws. The latter is much harder while the former allows a message to be spread. Should people do both? Yes.
Sure, I just don't see how you read my comments as inconsistent with that viewpoint though. Literally the only point I was trying to make was that when a parent comment said regulation is necessary, and someone responded "No it's not. You can vote with your wallet right now.", I thought that was a very weak counterargument to the idea that we needed regulation.
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.
> And tell me how that doesn’t sound defeatist or come off as giving up on voting with your wallet.
"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.
Pixel phones have an unlocked bootloader. One can load GrapheneOS onto those phones without needing to jailbreak them.
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.
I mean, breaking up Standard Oil wasn't exactly great for consumers either. And those companies eventually re-merged anyways. But ole Rockefeller sure did make out well due to the breakup.
vote with your wallet here is to make a new phone company that uses only these user owned devices.
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
> 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.
Yeah, I don't understand the parent comment, buying EV's in the US is even easier than ICE vehicles in most states. Now if they are talking about BYD being blocked in the US, so access to extremely cheap EVs, much of Europe is doing the same thing.
Wake up. These mega corporations are too big to care now. Most people are uninformed or unaffected. America has been brainwashed into a FU I got mine mindset.
The tiny fraction of people willing to vote with their wallet has effectively a 0% chance of pushing big corporate to act right.
Not that many. The differences are trivial and 99%+ of people don't care, not even on forums like HN. But... how is that relevant? If you have very niche tastes then it'll be harder for you to satisfy them, whether that be in art, music or tech. Go more mainstream and you'll have plenty of options. The free market can deliver, you just may not like the level of effort the size of your market justifies.
Well, last time I checked the number was 0 and I am still lurking in some pine chat groups, so I doubt that changed. So the free market does not deliver something working here.
Since part of what I'm purposely purchasing from Google or Apple is a more secure by default system I'm probably the wrong person to ask. My wallet vote is effectively for something different than yours.
Yesno. Not fully because a functionality is not enabled yet.
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.
If only the Motorola Signature 27 had a headphone jack, so that I could listen to high quality music with my quality headphones.
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.
True. But so long as only 1% of people care enough to do this, and they can make >1% more profit per customer with their crap - then it's more profitable for them to continue the crap.
Many things are stopping you. I see this response all the time as a counter to inappropriate behavior by monopolistic giant entities.
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 don't personally want them to stop. I like what they produce and how they produce it. As long as there are enough people like me there will be a market for this.
Voting with your wallet doesn’t mean stopping them. That isn’t what it is about. You shouldn’t get to choose to stop them because you don’t like their actions any more than I should be able to choose banning you from carriers because I don’t like your choices.
Yes, some of us simply don't give a damn. I'll continue buying Apple products because they work and I don't have to do much of anything to keep them working. Just because I like tinkering or customizing other computers/devices, doesn't mean I want to be a sysadmin to my phone lol
I’ll vote with my vote thank you. My table’s manufacturer shouldn’t get a say in what I put on my table, and Apple shouldn’t get a say about my phone either.
These clearly anti-consumer practices should just be illegal.
I'll vote with my vote as well, and my vote will not be for candidates who equate computers with tables. Hacking isn't a human right. Go buy a different phone if you don't like Apple's phones. There are a bunch to choose from.
Idk what point you think you're making, but human rights aren't an absolute law of nature, it's something we decide on.
> 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.
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.
> Apple shouldn’t get a say about my phone either.
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.
Nobody dictates how you can use your iPhone either. You can do anything with it physically that you are capable of. Apple will never say a word.
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.
> Nobody dictates how you can use your iPhone either ... physically
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.
If you have the skills to do it you can do everything you ask for there. If you don't then you should buy or make a device that suits your preferences. Vote with your wallet. Nobody forced you to buy an iPhone.
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.
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?
Give it another 6-12 months until the big AI shops shut those capabilities down and running local ones becomes cost prohibitive
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.
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.
This. The only mainstream alternative is Android, and I'm already "voting with my wallet" against Samsung, Google, and the rest for violating user privacy even more than Apple does.
How are running local ones going to become cost prohibitive? Indications are that Nvidia has been channel stuffing (artificially inflating perceived demand), which suggests massive oversupply of GPUs.
> 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.
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.
> even if I jailbreak my iOS and never let it update.. Apple can easily detect the jailbreak and lock me out of anything iCloud, and iMessage and such.
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.
> Apple has never bothered to detect jailbreaks and lock people out of iCloud and iMessage.
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.
Oh man, those early days of XDA forums and SenseUI roms on my NexusOne. Those were truly a thing of beauty. We still haven't gotten back to that level. I'm with you though, I stopped playing and moved to a stock device. Then I moved back to an iPhone and have been completely stock ever since. I haven't been excited about an iPhone since the 10 released. After that I think, "oh cool, another rectangle". "A grid of icons"... "The best camera Apple's ever put in a phone.... how wonderful".
There have been several companies that tried to sell open mobile devices over the years, but people have shown time and time again that they don't want to buy that product. We can wish it were different all we like, but in general we aren't entitled to money-losing, unmarketable products.
Regulators have been asleep for the last two decades while Apple and Google continue to extort 30% taxes from developers.
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.
> Apple can easily detect the jailbreak and lock me out of anything iCloud, and iMessage and such.
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 :-)
> even if I jailbreak my iOS and never let it update.
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
Frankly. I want Apple to lock down my iPhone as much as possible in that context.
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.
> a) Why the would you never want to update an OS in this day and age ?
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.
> Maybe your phone doesn't have banking and stuff on it
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.
My iPhone passcode was either unset or 2222 until like 2018. At times it was jailbroken af. It had messaging and stuff. Wouldn't have been the end of the world if someone hacked it, and nobody did.
We gave in because open source and hobbiests do not design good products and even worse shared systems, as much as they enjoy self-righteously declaring their values. And shared systems require trust, planning, and goal setting in a way no open system would ever build.
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.
> open source and hobbiests do not design good products
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.
This seems more correlated with big vs. small organizations, not closed vs. open organizations. There are open projects (e.g., Debian, Blender) that tick all four of your boxes in my opinion.
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.
You do understand the reasons right? iCloud, iMessages etc are an interplay of software in your device, software in cloud and some networking. They have to work together. A jailbroken phone can have a tinkered iMessage app. Supporting tinkered / unsupported versions is more overhead / possible security risk. Why would you expect them to take on that?
I agree with your point, though I can easily modify ~/Library/Messages/Attachments or ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.MobileSMS/Data on macOS, which is a platform similarly secure to an iPhone when you take sandboxing, sip, etc. into account. So Apple already supports macOS, which can be tinkered, no? I guess the argument is that by locking down iOS, a platform which was never open, they just never needed to handle that class of security risks which are introduced when customers have more freedom.
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.
You're right, but I could see Apple acting on iOS alone, just because of scale.
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.
It does not make sense for someone to lose faith in apple because someone else was able to run a modified imessage app.
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.
I just feel a bit sad and impotent that a number of security researchers outside the circle cannot join their "yo we found more crazy bugs" party because simply frontier labs only give access to those models with "Red Team" availability to the inner circle members/companies.
Now their "trusted cyber access" program is moat rather than safeguard.
if you wanna have the same kind of capability as these researchers where you have tight loops calling cli stuff you won't get by with $5 at all, especially for major bugs
if you have a way to turn $5 easily into exploitable vulns, let me know cause that'd be a first for me
Cool to see our work here. I'm Thai, and I run Calif. Happy to answer any questions.
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.
My favourite part from the first video is how much effort it took to drag up from the bottom of the screen to get back to the home-screen. This reflects my experience with how iOS handles touch gestures in general.. also super easy to accidentally activate "Reachability" mode!
You say this, but have you tried an old iPhone recently? I did, and it was actually pretty terrible. The quick little swipes to switch between apps is so much more natural now.
Try going back to thumb typing, no long press symbols , and no cursor movement from your spacebar. I've almost thrown my test iPhone at work across a room more times than I'd like to admit (since it doesn't belong to me)...
I recently learned you can swipe on the address bar in Android-Chrome to navigate to the next/previous tab. Also, press+hold on the tab count button to show the tab's options e.g. close tab. Now my address bar is on the bottom of the screen.
Terrible discoverability. I guess the genalpha kids know gestures like this, but stuff like this makes me feel like a boomer.
Safari added this in iOS recently. You can also swipe up on the address bar (after tapping it to make it "big") to swipe between pages, similar to the home screen. Found it on accident.
Very cool demos, but now I'm interested to know: does enabling Lockdown mode help at all against these exploits? It'll theoretically protect against a lot of common attack vectors, but I'm curious about its real-life effectiveness.
These are still 1-click, not zero click. So the best protection you can have is not opening unknown files that were sent to you. That being said, lockdown mode blocks all sorts of message attachments. From the videos it look like they are using pdfs in the messaging vector, which would get blocked too. So you would be safe-ish. But lockdown mode is so restrictive that it doesn't really make sense for most users. Or at least it doesn't make sense to buy a $1500 phone and then limit yourself to something you could have gotten for $50.
You don’t know what lockdown is do you? I’ve had my phone in lockdown for a year. I can’t: collaborate on notes, and it does not automatically open links in chat. Other than that my experience is identical to non lockdown.
some sites don't work (you can explicitly whitelist them tho) but generally it's been fine. i would honestly prefer a phone that doesn't allow any comms to any non-contact list parties at this point.
From what I can see in Apple docs, aside from web limitations it sounds great. Is there any real reason to not enable this? Like I would be deeply suspicious of a PDF sent via messages and no auto-connect to insecure WiFi is also common sense.
I use Lockdown Mode and the functionality I get is nothing like a $50 device. If you're being serious can you link to some $50 devices for sale that are on par with a recent iPhone Pro running in Lockdown Mode?
It might not be a magic security wand, but so many critical vulnerabilities in software trace their origins to memory unsafe code and things like "use after free".
"~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]
If I were Google I'd try to rewrite Chromium in Rust. The FFMPEG folks should try porting the whole codebase to Rust too. They can always keep the legacy versions for legacy computers (my old n270 netbook can barely play 720p@30FPS anyway, and it's too slow to downsize 4k video to 720 or 480p...), so a bigger amd64 machine will always be -reallistically- needed for anything else than <=720p consumption.
It kind of is, as is any other memory safe language.
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.
It cuts down most of the crap trying to trash your machine's RAM (virtual memory in the end, but today it's almost as if you didn't have a MMU). It's good enough.
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.
LLM and full rewrite are a recipe for cooking something that still has flaws but also doesn't work that well. The root cause is that PDF is an old format from a more innocent era. A new document standard that keeps up with the technical and security advances, learns about the lessons PDF taught us, and allows for easy conversion from old PDFs, would be the ideal solution.
Who am I kidding, I think the PDF format will outlive us.
Subverting the secure boot/upgrade chain would require a SecureROM exploit and presumably a compromise of the Secure Enclave, so the answer is almost certainly "no" (even prior major exploits from recent memory like usbliter8 are tethered and don't exploit the enclave; the last true untethered Jailbreak was iOS 9 or something.) An upgrade would fix it. The internet reporting claims this break they are showing in this video is untethered though, which is extremely rare on its own.
The videos sort of imply that these are userland rather than bootrom, whatever payload they have running is getting hit before first unlock, which isn't a lot of surface. They specifically say to not update which pretty much confirms where the attack surface is. Somewhere after the kernel starts but before the main user space is unlocked with the passcode.
It’s a mix - for years I wanted root on my iPhones, just like you got on android. In practice, once I had it…? I never did much beyond installing Cydia.
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.
When I owned an iPod touch, the advantage of jailbreaking was to give your device certain features that the OS just didn't support. (Hell, I remember early days when iOS didn't even have a concept of wallpaper, the background was just black.)
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.
A much-needed advantage is also keeping old devices useful. Every Apple phone slowly outlives its supported software to the point where the official AppStore has almost nothing in it. Today, it's extremely difficult to find 3P apps that work with my current iPhone 7, which is not that old, because the ecosystem cuts off old phones very quickly.
I agree, and, if you have a developer certificate from Apple, the list of wants I have is ... not that long? zero? I'd love to be pitched on it. In practice, I wanted freedom, but didn't really want to do anything with it.
I jailbroke every iPhone I had for many, many years. Most of the time it was silly skins/tweaks but there were a number of things that were huge QoL improvements. I remember BiteSMS and using it as a way to reply to a text directly in the notification instead of having to leave the app. This was before iOS had that feature and before multitasking, back when if you left the game you were playing the app would quit. Also had folders before stock iOS, things like Control Center, and a whole slew of little tweaks for other apps I used.
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.
There's just less reason today for someone like me that liked the utilitarian benefits of a jailbroken iPhone. I used it for gestures, caller mini preview, grouped notifications, etc. All things that are now baked in.
I'm for being able to hack your own device to do whatever you like with it, preferably without active resistance from its manufacturer. I'm against anybody who can convince you to open a PDF being able to hack your device to do whatever they like with it.
The point the parent commenter is making is that they want Apple to allow people the freedom to intentionally mod the functionality of their device. Not that they literally want single-click PDF exploits to be a thing.
> I'm against anybody who can convince you to open a PDF being able to hack your device to do whatever they like with it.
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.
Nobody said exactly that, but your first comment pointed out how cool the capability is without acknowledging that it is trivial to exploit maliciously.
We're on the same side here. I daily a Pixel with LineageOS and root.
If you phone is hackable by you, what stops someone else from hacking it? Ultimately, it's a trade off between security and openness, and I think it's good that there are choices on both sides.
Once you have used an exploit to get system access to your own device, you can patch the software to prevent anyone else from using the same vulnerabilities. See e.g. https://github.com/EolnMsuk/AntiDarkSword (but of course, as more and more vulnerabilities keep being found, it becomes basically impossible to backport all the fixes)
This comment is tricky because "hack" can mean different things in different contexts.
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.
I watched the “Can your iPhone do this?” video, assuming that was the coolest one. The others seemed like they’d just be showing the exploit.
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?
What in these videos is so much cooler than what you can do on an Apple approved one? Other than, "As a programmer, I can do anything", I just personally don't see any capabilities unlocked that I can't have with an app or whatever. But I might be missing something.
Retro game emulators were allowed only 2y ago and bold retro. JIT is still not allowed so they are restricted in being run in interpreted mode. Also, neither is allowed executing arbitrary arm64 binaries. And, of course, no hypervisor access. The Linux-using term (iSH) works by utilizing a x86 emulator / compatibility layer (basically translates x86 binaries and maps Linux calls to native ones). In the sole VM host available, UTM SE, the "SE" means "slow edition". Now jailbreak and you've full, JIT-capable, UTM (QEMU) and NewTerm (kinda Termux for iOS). Hypervisor access still not possible though.
The only thing I really miss from my jailbreak days is an app that could talk to the cellular baseband and display all cell towers nearby on a map and showed which you were using.
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.
Noob q: Does this(and most) hacks like this on the iphone likely rely on some kernel module — or what it talks to for executing code — being compromised to run arbitrary code execution? I dunno about ios but it seems from the videos that something that reads imessage attachments was compromised for privilege escalation.
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.
hacks like these, where you go from a PDF to full persistence, require a chain of exploits. Pegasus, the iOS malware that made the news awhile ago, used a chain of 3 exploits like this:
I can 100% guarantee that we'll have comments from people saying they buy iPhones specifically because of the walled garden and the last thing they want is a jail broken device. On a website called Hacker News.
I'm glad to confirm your suspicion. I like to have both a walled-garden phone and several open-platform computers. They do two completely different things for me.
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.
I want the same kind of phone. But I reject the premise that it's impossible to have a deeply nested "De-wall this device yes I know what I am doing yes I confirm I'm about to really open myself to issues if I don't understand the implications" settings option without compromising the walled mode security.
The point is that no one forces you to jailbreak your iPhone. If you like the walled garden - great! Keep using it! But I've been in plenty of discussions where iPhone users are literally against jailbreaks at all and in any form.
I want a device I can give the elderly in my family that they cannot be easily induced into doing insecure things on. If there were an unlockable iPhone and a locked iPhone I want to give them the latter. It’s not enough for me to tell them not to scroll to General and click seven times on About to activate developer mode. I would prefer to just give them a device that can’t do that.
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.
> 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.
>>I want a device I can give the elderly in my family that they cannot be easily induced into doing insecure things on.
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.
You can do whatever you want with what you own. And I want this restricted device. So you go be the market for yours and I’ll be the market for mine. I don’t understand what the problem is here. There are no shortage of phones on the market - many of them entirely rootable. It seems like you’re upset I want to buy an EV because you want to put gas in your car. Just go buy the gas car. No one is stopping you here (well except the EU I suppose haha).
Earlier today on the thread about the google play store apocalypse I posted a comment saying that I like some things about life in Apple's walled garden. But I still upvoted the parent comment because it's true and it's funny.
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.
I got curious when you mentioned "google play store apocalypse", but I can't seem to find a comment of yours on the topic today. Would you be willing to post a link?
I can root my Android phone and have in the past, but I have absolutely no desire to do so now because it adds almost no functionality in exchange for a very large security risk. I consider rooting my phone in the past quite a foolish move by someone who didn't know better.
People are trading the future of personal computing just so they can run a banking app and justify it with "but I want my phone to be locked down for security." Not even sleepwalking into corporate-controlled-computing, but actively promoting it.
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.
I have plenty of devices like raspberry pi’s and handheld Linux gaming devices that allow free unlimited access. My phone is the one thing I want fully secured because it’s where all my most important data and keys are.
Such a wild take to me. I install an entirely different operating system on my phone (graphene) which also advises me not to root because it's stupidly unsafe to do so. I also don't log in as root on linux, nor do I log in as an administrator in windows. None of these are sane practices to anyone worried about security.
To be honest this matter more on graphene than on linux or windows because of the sandboxing of all apps by default.
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.
I converted to an iphone 13 mini (from the S24 Ultra) after being on Android since the release of the HTC Desire in 2010. I used to install custom roms and tweak everything on all of my Android phones which actually lead me to the iphone because I realized I wanted a phone without all the OE clutter and Google crap. The only clutter on the iphone is icloud which stays out of the way and doesn't annoy me with subscription messages. Also I don't have time to fuck around with modifying my phone. I just want everything to work without user intervention.
"No one forces you..." is an interesting line to go down in the comments of an article that focuses on using messaging apps to deliver exploits to a cellphone. It's pretty malware adjacent. Isn't that sort of thing how Jamal Khashoggi and his friends, family, and coworkers were hacked before his murder/execution?
Uhh, what? Clearly nobody is arguing that "arbitrary remote execution is good." Apple could easily satisfy everyone by simply allowing users to unlock their own bootloader.
How would that help anyone? The unlocked bootloader on the Apple Silicon Macbooks still hasn’t resulted in a truly viable alternative to macOS. The iPhone is much, much harder. And why would carriers trust the result?
You’re missing the point. Hackers (in the tinkerer sense) just want to program their own devices, with full access to the capabilities of the underlying hardware. Apple could obviously allow that if they wanted to, in a convenient way that doesn’t increase the attack surface for malware.
Having control over one's device and allowing anything and everything to have free reign on said device are two different things.
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.
You’re engaging in bad faith, and parroting the same false equivalence between security and user freedom that Apple uses to keep a chokehold on their software distribution monopoly.
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.
I’m fine with a locked down iPhone. All of my financial account credentials are on there, personal photographs, etc. Since I’ve owned an iPhone, I’ve never had a non-working phone. Security and reliability are the two most important items to me when it comes to a phone.
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.
> people saying they buy iPhones specifically because of the walled garden and the last thing they want is a jail broken device.
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.
These are the same people that caused this situation. A close platform is only closed until it's busted right open and then everyone is screwed because there were no eyes on it the entire time.
Anything you can find with an LLM to break into a locked device/ecosystem, the operators of that ecosystem can find with an LLM too, and fix it. Right?
Only if it's in updateable software. Hardware takes longer to correct.
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."
This is true for things other than LLMs. Outside contributors have been credited with hundreds of security fixes to macOS and iOS that were found with fuzzers and sanitizers. Just off the top of my head CVE-2019-8605. Clearly, Apple has access to AddressSanitizer and libfuzzer, but outsiders still find these things. Not only Apple: Google can find flaws in iOS but outsiders also find flaws in Chrome, so the phenomenon is widespread.
Craziest part is it was never even intended to be a programming language. From the Wikipedia page, the founder Rasmus Lerdorf is quoted as saying:
"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
Aside from bragging how cool they are, what value is there for demonstrating a yet-to-be-patched vulnerability? I don't understand why old-guard infosec stars from Calif can do as they want, responsible disclosure be damned.
Just as a reminder for some folks here: During their WeWorm research in July–September 2026, Calif didn't stop at proving RCE to Tencent—they spent an extra week using AI to build a fully functional, self-propagating zero-click worm across three live phones, triggering temporary account bans from Tencent during testing.
I don't see this as irresponsible disclosure. They show that the vulns exist, but don't give any other details (unlike previous Calif releases). Not even a hint at what the exploit chain is like other than that it starts with a PDF, which is a surprise to no one.
They're of course also doing it for internet kudos, but attracting attention like this will help encourage people to update. Thanks to this article, I'm going to apply the next iOS security update ASAP, and tell everyone I know to do this the same. (hopefully it comes out soon)
I do wish they clearly stated the vulns have had been reported to Apple and when.
We disclosed most of the bugs used in these chains to Apple, and are going to disclose the rest, if not already.
>Just as a reminder for some folks here: During their WeWorm research in July–September 2026, Calif didn't stop at proving RCE to Tencent—they spent an extra week using AI to build a fully functional, self-propagating zero-click worm across three live phones, triggering temporary account bans from Tencent during testing.
Not sure what exactly your point is. The WeWorm demo was done in a controlled environment.
Also we do this for free. We don't charge neither Tencent nor Apple. We don't even take their bounties. Why can't we have some fun?
If you're so upset about how we do it, my suggestion is go find your own bugs.
What is the value of revealing anything at this time point, when no patch is out? What use is it for the public?
Just last Black hat there was a "glimpse disclosure" that was later followed with proper fixes and details. I gave my AI agent the details that were supposed to be "useless", before the patch was out, and it found the vulnerability in less than an hour.
We shouldn't even enter this game. And with the track record of this specific group, I didn't exactly get the impression that their incentive is to help fix things, but rather to promote their brand while others be damned.
Is it an exploit around the library that handles PDF parsing/opening? Can someone explain how files / attachement are open on a mobile device ( android/iPhone).
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?
PDFs are basically executables, that's why it's hard. They support running code, they support decoding images which themselves have their own custom compressors that are basically code. Anything to do with image formats is rife for bad decoders, insane compression algorithms from the 90s, and a PDF is basically 1000 formats inside many different container types with executable code plastered on everywhere. If you want to make a compatible PDF viewer you'll need to be able to implement an image decoder algorithm for a fax machine that was specific to Japan in the late 80s, which was somehow ratified into a standard and is used today by all the top legal firms, or something absurd like that. When you open a PDF on your computer, depending on how it is being parsed, it can even make outbound network connections without you knowing. To safely open a PDF you need one of those bomb proof suits, a disposable laptop, and even then you might be going home without eyebrows.
Willing to bet that a default "treat PDFs/documents/spreadsheets as dumb" option in operating systems would eliminate the majority of common one-click vulnerabilies out there. And exactly 0.001% of actual use cases would be affected.
This is one of the things iOS's Lockdown Mode does. I wish the features of Lockdown Mode were able to be enabled individually instead of a single all or none option.
I’ve turned on lockdown mode while this CVE insanity is going on. It’s far less disruptive than I expected. The only thing I noticed missing is web gl is disabled.
Your link doesn’t say anything about PDFs. And if I remember correctly it only disables PDF previews in Messages. This means if you have a zero-click exploit now it becomes a one-click exploit. I fail to see how that’s relevant given the article is already demonstrating a one-click exploit.
PDFs are just absurdly complicated in general. Dumbing down the parser might be the right idea. I wonder what consequences that would have with how intertwined PostScript and PDF in general are with macOS/iOS; maybe that's why the PostScript engine was removed with macOS Sonoma/iOS 17? I don't know if that was only user facing behavior and Apple is still working to remove the internal usages.
That's kind of what Adobe does with downloaded PDFs, you have to click the Enable button to turn on more document features. My schematic capture app will output a PDF that has links that will take you to specific spots on a page and also some JavaScript where you can right click on a part and see it's BOM information. None of that stuff works until you click the Enable button. I've also seen some vendors offer not only normal 3D model files and 2D drawings but a PDF that has an interactive 3D model inside. It's kinda cool how much random shit can go into a PDF but it's clearly a massive malware vector.
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.
I read it more as "don't implement JS, 3D object rendering, slideshow transitions, sound annotations and the other 999 insane features that I'm not even aware exist"
I think he just means disable any of the "advanced" features mentioned above like accessing web content, running custom scripts, etc etc. You might still be vulnerable to any dependencies they use for image rendering itself but I bet it would make it drastically more safe.
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 a sleight of hand. PDF's are obviously not executable, any more than text files are. Decoders are executable and they can choose to unsafely handle input. Even plain text editors can have exploits. It's no different than any piece of complex software.
The characterization of the PDF format specifically being “basically code” in any substantial manner is simply incorrect. The only PDF-specific features that reasonably meet that description is the PostScript support, which has fallen out of use decades ago and was completely removed in PDF 2.0, and the JavaScript support, which is optional, prohibited in PDF/A, and can easily be limited or omitted by a PDF viewer.
Older PDFs support PostScript XObjects: literal embedded PostScript code. Not sure it counts tho, because IIRC it was never executed by PDF viewer itself. It was "gives this to printer when printing"
Yeah a lot of those fancy PDF features are Adobe-only. It's not that other apps can't support those features, it's that no one in their right mind wants to spend endless amounts of money and time trying to sandbox it.
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.
I think it's more the image formats PDF supports? I could be wrong, but there was that forcedentry vulnerability (which was insanely cool, even if really bad)
From the standpoint of a layman it looks like there's a lot of overlap between writing safe web browsers/engines and writing safe PDF readers/engines. There just hasn't been anywhere near as much of an impetus to push PDF readers/engines in that direction because most of us aren't interacting with PDFs nearly as often as we interact with the web (and things built on web tech).
The difference is that web browsers absolutely need to support JavaScript to correctly display many important web sites, whereas that’s not necessary for PDF. You also don’t have to deal with vulnerability footguns like XSS/CSRF/CORS in PDF. Except for some rare special use cases that PDF viewers don’t need to support, nothing has to happen online for PDF. It’s really not comparable.
I'm pretty sure not even the safe languages would help you here. PDF allows you to pretty much run arbitrary code since it supports javascript, images, and a bunch of other things I'm forgetting, and you can't not implement javascript support or otherwise be selective about what you support with it because then all the end-users will complain when they get that one PDF that they need to fill out but it needs JS because... Nobody knows.
A reminder for people who don't follow this, Calif is Thai Duong's firm. Thai discovered the BEAST and CRIME TLS attacks (with Juliano Rizzo), and then worked at Google for a bunch of years, including on Wycheproof with Daniel Bleichenbacher. The team at Calif includes lcamtuf, Dion Blazakis, Tavis Ormandy, and Stefan Esser (among many others).
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.
There are loads of these exploits which exist in the hands of private hacking groups and state organisations which have not been made public. Always assume your device is able to be compromised from those who have the motivation and dedication.
I'm not sure if this is real, but if it is: this week is unbelievable. I really hope it's not the new normal, but unfortunately I don't believe this myself.
If this continues I'll argue that you have to be absolutely insane to allow network connected electronics into your home in the future. This is Apple, known for locking down their device to the extreme, and yes some people would love to use this for jailbreaking their phones, other organisations want to root your phone for .... other purposes.
Insecure webpages, broken certificates and an insecure PDF library... You shouldn't have anything more connected than an FM radio at this point. Security is no longer something a private individual can deal with.
There's every incentive for nation states and other espionage outfits to keep these types of exploits under wraps. This has probably been the new normal for some time ..
I for one have experienced multiple lifetimes worth of internet madness and will be looking to airgap / disconnect as many devices as I can get away with.
People have been paying a premium to companies like Apple for a reason. You've got nothing to worry about.
Decade of people's purchases has been invested into safety and security. It's absolutely unthinkable that a $7t market cap company with an army of 200k workers will ever leave people high and dry. They proudly went public, so we know they have the public's interests at heart.
I think in time (a few years) the gap will close a bit. As AI is used to harden software, it will be harder to break. Software not validated by AI will continue to be vulnerable to it.
So what happens if AI becomes something that you need to actually pay real money for? Then only Apple, Google and Microsoft can affort to do network exposed software. Smaller companies and solo developers are just f-ed if the price of running LLMs goes up as investor money dries up.
It would make me so happy if this would allow running UTM.app with Hypervisor support on iPadOS. I don't want to travel with two devices, the would be enough, but sometimes I need a real desktop. Apple, of course, wants you to buy two devices. I do have UTM with Jit Linux running on my iPad, via altstore and entitlements and so on, but it is all a bit complex and still fairly slow.
> They are going to run out of vulns eventually when the code is rewritten in a memory safe lang
that's just not how it works at all though is it. Good luck writing the kernel, firmware etc in a completely memory-safe way. And even if that was accomplished, memory safety isn't the only class of vulnerabilities, it's just the most common.
> and the rest are found
If they kept a stable version with no updates or new features *ever*, only security patches, for decades, then maybe that could be possible, yeah. But Apple users aren't exactly the kind of people who would enjoy such stability and security anyways, it comes with the compromise of novelty. Stability and security aren't very fashionable either.
edit: Obviously a "memory-safe way" means no `unsafe` blocks in Rust, too.
edit#2: This is all assuming we don't get true AGI. I hope my assumption is right
First of all this is crazy that even on hn we were a few days behind this.
Second fuck Apple. Fuck all tech companies. And seriously fuck late stage capitalism. Foss or nothing. There should be a rule if you pay for it it has to be foss. This way people can still make proprietary but they just can’t charge for it.
We have zero privacy, zero security, all our politicians and all the corporations are against us.
Media parsing is an endless exploit vector. Like fuck. At some point you have to be like they (not just Apple) keep it broken
An yea I know foss gets these issues too. But if the only option was foss, then at least the whole world’s focus would be on it
This post gave me flashbacks to jailbreak era w/ Cydia. It's interesting to think that a lot of the those old plugins and tweaks have basically become standard supported features of the iOS now (SBSettings, Activator, WinterBoard, Zephyr, ...).
A couple of PDF exploits from iMessage and Signal leading to code execution, and an app that roots the phone. Also, they seem to have managed to make their malware survive a reboot, which is difficult. That's another reason why automatic reboots are considered a security feature: exploits leaving malware in-memory are a lot easier to build than malware that survives a full reboot, passing all stages of signature checks and validation.
Yes, why don't they just say it instead of posting videos. Opening a sinister PDF in iOS can give them access to what exactly? anything/everything? What iOS versions or devices, etc?
When they hacked the M5 (one week after release!), they used a data-only attack, which is outside the scope of MIE. That could be the case here, or something else entirely. We don't know.
Someone correct me please if I’m wrong but is this because iOS doesn’t sandbox their processes? I think I read Safari in particular doesn’t, but wonder if this is system-wide issue.
The more of this stuff we see, the more people will start using GrapheneOS, I guess.
Also wonder why they choose to publish and not cash-in the Apple bounty..
iOS does sandbox their processes really well, that's why this hack was as difficult as it was. The Safari thing you're talking about is JIT - iOS disables all runtime code generation across the system except in Safari (for JavaScript), but this is a completely separate thing from sandboxing.
Actually, no, I now remember this was about iMessage specifically and how it isn't completely isolated/runs as system service or sth? Or about the renderer?
Which would make sense because these attacks seem to exploit the same weakness.
iMessage's attachment renderer is also sandboxed, actually. You might be talking about this vulnerability: https://projectzero.google/2021/12/a-deep-dive-into-nso-zero..., but the second half of the vulnerability exploit chain was finding a way out of the CoreGraphics (Apple's image rendering library) sandbox to hack the rest of the system.
why do we see pdf viewer exploits on ios when we have sandboxing mechanisms nowadays like wasm? Or is this exploit accounting for the sandbox breakage?
This made me miss Cydia and the old jailbreaking days so much. Was such an exciting time to have an iPhone with the tinkering. Anyone still remember iDitDahText https://iditdahtext.com/iDitDahText.html?
Slightly offtopic but I find it slightly funny that they have accomplished to hack the iPhone yet the name of the third video is: Can you iPhone do this?
I would like to think that they might've created the video so fast and perhaps out of so excitement that the name of the title had the typo :-D
Too bad this will be patched instead of allowing the device owner to control their own device.
Of course it's better that they found that before some shady mercenary spyware company, but I'd also want to control my ios device the same way they did in the video, but no, that's not for us.
I think we will probably see more and more restrictions on frontier models in the coming months. This is not what behemoths like Apple and Sony want to see.
Paradoxically, people are happier to buy things that they have control over, but boy, Apple loves to control every layer of consumerism.
Do we want everyone who doesn’t know how to program a car to reprogram their car? I.e. I think there should be restrictions on frontier models to ensure safety of others.
If the current frontier allows for this, we can probably expect alternative models to reach the same spot in a matter of months as well. The cat's out of the bag, for better of worse.
The paradox is that if the models are restricted, more exposed software will exist. I'm not convinced you can make a model that allows you to build secure software without it also being able to build exploits.
My dream is to release an iOS app that self-installs and not say anything special about it other than having a "Download for iPhone" button on my website. If someone asked me, I'd answer: "Huh, what do you mean? It's our app for the iPhone."
It's better to use 0-day exploits to install legitimate software by now. It saves everyone from a lot of hassle. Or, more realistically for most, make a web app and forget about native apps.
I guess I've never really understood why people who don't like the way the iPhone and apple ecosystem work buy apple products. There are plenty of other options out there. Every time articles about this and the App Store pop up it seems as if the comments are filled with a whole lot of android users that are upset that iPhone's aren't like androids. That's not to say those are all of the comments and there aren't clearly iPhone users who want these options but again, why buy a product that doesn't support these things if they're so important to you in the first place.
It’s a pity we gave in to the “ecosystem” play by these huge companies.. even if I jailbreak my iOS and never let it update.. Apple can easily detect the jailbreak and lock me out of anything iCloud, and iMessage and such. iPhone would be one glorious iPod touch after that.. :-(
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…
Vote with your wallet. Fuck them.
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.
This comment made me think that someone should pull an ArtCraft on Android or iOS by making a good linux phone skin, with high performance auto-updating wrappers for various web apps to make them as convenient as mobile native ones. Then we can actually ditch the big corps and bask in our LLM-enabled open source utopia. Hmmmmm.
> Vote with your wallet.
Apple is too big for that. Hard regulation is the only way out right now. Maybe breaking them up too.
> Apple is too big for that. Hard regulation is the only way out
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.
> Apple is not 'too big' for savvy customers to choose differently
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.
There are other words for "savvy user":
- 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.
I agree no user boycott of Apple will ever matter. My main point was that calling for "regulation" is a cop-out because it no longer stops Mag7 mega-corp abuses.
I also pushed back on Apple being "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.
It will matter for yourself and for the companies that support user freedom. Sent from my Librem 5.
It doesn’t actually matter, because your phone is only working as a coincidence. Every website and app is tested for Google phones and iPhones. If you lose the ability to do something one day, the chances of you getting that functionality back without major effort from your phone manufacturer or the kindness of bored people working for free, is essentially zero.
My phone runs a desktop GNU/Linux OS with desktop Firefox (or Chromium if installed). If Firefox on desktop stops showing websites correctly, we will have a larger problem than an unsupported niche phone.
Yes they are because the alternatives are worse.
I think that it is necessary a radical political change in the US, akin to a revolution, to be able to pass and enforce meaningful regulation against big tech companies. It's the same as going against the military-industrial complex or big finance. They integrated themselves to this power structure that guarantees their interests come first not only in internal policy, but also in foreign policy. Big tech is a limb of the US empire.
Did you see how much flak Lina Khan got for pushing in that direction?
This issue was on the ballot and will be again.
No it's not. You can vote with your wallet right now. Nothing is stopping you.
I'm blind. Apple has explicitly said they wouldn't consider the "bloody ROI" of accessibility (will fund it no matter what). This is important to me. Software freedom is also important to me. What am I to do?
> What am I to do?
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.
The point is that your conclusion here is both the correct/obvious one, and that it ensures one explicitly cannot vote with their wallet. They have priorities too significant to be able to take part in the protest. They are invisible to the company they WANT to vote for.
Perhaps what allows Apple is to be better at certain things like that or security for average consumer is indeed at odds with some aspirations? At least in practice, not utopian dreams, that seems to be the case.
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.
> What am I to do?
Support NGOs fighting for your freedom like https://eff.org.
You grab an Android phone anyways because Android accessibility is very much on par or even better than whatever slop Apple is putting out with VoiceOver these days, and developers also somewhat care about it more on Android.
You're also going to benefit from European mandates to have accessible mobile apps anyways, it's coming for free to you.
Nope - iPhone accessibility is much better than any alternative.
> 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.
What features are missing in the EU, though?
If you know of any company that would bother to spend days making accessibility improvements, yet for some reason decide to not bring those to the US release, they're the dumbest fucking company in existence.
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.
What if I want to vote against both Apple and Google but still be able to do my banking business?
What banking business? Use a web browser, or just bank in person like everyone did not long ago. Carry a credit card instead of Apple/Google Pay. That's what degoogled Android users do and it's a very minor inconvenience anyone with a little bit of maturity should be able to accept. Also, cash is much better for your privacy.
And if you require a one-time SMS code for purchase (which can be adjusted via their website, most likely), then you still have an option that is not Apple and Google. I use a dumbphone for "banking" (SMS)... and a credit card, and the website. Those are really all the 3 things I need to do banking, as you have said so correctly.
It’s not possible. Logging in to a banking website is becoming strictly speaking impossible w/o a phone.
Choose a different bank, then. I've gradually stopped using the phone apps, not really by design but just because I don't often feel like that works better than the real web site. Both USAA and my local credit union have perfectly good desktop web sites.
I've never really experienced that. Which banks?
Belfius for example of you have ever used itsme with them. Also Digi (a mobile phone company in Belgium) since it uses itsme for authentication. Itsme is strictly an Android and iOS app.
More info on this is going to come out, but banks are going through hell right now with AI agents accessing user accounts and even firing off transfers and other accounts activity, and their legal teams are losing their minds.
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 bank without Apple iOS/macOS or Google Android/Chrome.
You can also vote with your wallet regarding banking. Put your deposits in another bank.
Select your bank(s) accordingly.
When one party has a trillion votes and you have like 1000 or so, that is not voting. That is just exiling yourself.
Edit: exiling not exhaling
If an entity has a product that has a trillion people choosing it, the marginal benefit to society to build an entirely new product for 1000 people or so isn't worth it. The people whose time would be required to produce that second product for a very, very small 1,000 person market would better serve society by working on other goals.
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.
Use a laptop
Why should your bank trust you?
Yes, I can vote with my wallet, but no, it doesn't make a difference. I've been voting with my wallet since day 1 by never buying an iPhone because of how closed it is, and unsurprisingly, this has done absolutely nothing to change how open the iPhone is.
Voting with your wallet doesn’t mean you get to take away from others. It means choosing companies you want to support.
You and I have very different definitions of "take away".
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.
It's not redundant and he isn't disagreeing with your opinion about openness. He's saying that it's immoral to want to force your personal preferences about phone design on other people.
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.
Again, my comment that he responded to literally was just making a claim that the iPhone ecosystem is not going to become more open due to voting with one's wallet. Yes, I obviously also think it should be more open, and that's an opinion that someone can strongly disagree with, but that's not what I was saying in the comment he responded to, because whether an action is moral or not is irrelevant to the question of whether it would produce a certain effect.
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.
That is like saying prosecuting murder is immoral because it is taking away the murderer and victims rights.
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.
If you did that then you probably made clear your reasons which probably created mindshare with others which probably has helped the EU open up the iPhone. Don’t be so defeatist because the outcome isn’t immediately apparent.
I'm not being defeatist; I'm pretty much arguing for what you're saying, which is that I think government intervention is needed. The parent comment I was responding to said that regulation isn't needed because voting with our wallets is sufficient, and I was disagreeing.
Convincing people to vote with their wallets is much easier than convincing them to write their pols to make laws. The latter is much harder while the former allows a message to be spread. Should people do both? Yes.
Sure, I just don't see how you read my comments as inconsistent with that viewpoint though. Literally the only point I was trying to make was that when a parent comment said regulation is necessary, and someone responded "No it's not. You can vote with your wallet right now.", I thought that was a very weak counterargument to the idea that we needed regulation.
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.
It’s your phrasing. Reread your comment:
> 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.
> And tell me how that doesn’t sound defeatist or come off as giving up on voting with your wallet.
"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.
But the alternative is another monopolistic tech giant. There is no viable third platform. So I agree with OP, the answer is breaking them up.
Pixel phones have an unlocked bootloader. One can load GrapheneOS onto those phones without needing to jailbreak them.
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.
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.
Standard Oil.
Also 2 of those 3 companies were famously NOT broken up.
I mean, breaking up Standard Oil wasn't exactly great for consumers either. And those companies eventually re-merged anyways. But ole Rockefeller sure did make out well due to the breakup.
vote with your wallet here is to make a new phone company that uses only these user owned devices.
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
> 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.
Target has been losing a lot of money with people deciding to ship elsewhere, it wiry, it just takes a lot of people to get together and do it
> similar to trying to buy EVs in the US
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.
Yeah, I don't understand the parent comment, buying EV's in the US is even easier than ICE vehicles in most states. Now if they are talking about BYD being blocked in the US, so access to extremely cheap EVs, much of Europe is doing the same thing.
It'd be about as effective as voting blue/red in a solidly red/blue state. All you're doing is signaling about yourself.
Wake up. These mega corporations are too big to care now. Most people are uninformed or unaffected. America has been brainwashed into a FU I got mine mindset.
The tiny fraction of people willing to vote with their wallet has effectively a 0% chance of pushing big corporate to act right.
I voted with my wallet and apple is still an untouchable giant conglomerate that does whatever it wants, what now chief?
Idiots who say "vote with your wallet" are buying into the billionaire idea of "1$ = 1 vote".
Guess who that benefits? Not you or me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem
Serious question: What alternative phones do you suggest? I've tried PinePhone and PinePhone Pro and it was painful.
Painful is the price you can choose to pay. Everyone has different priorities.
Yeah, but who is using a pinephone as their daily driver?
Not that many. The differences are trivial and 99%+ of people don't care, not even on forums like HN. But... how is that relevant? If you have very niche tastes then it'll be harder for you to satisfy them, whether that be in art, music or tech. Go more mainstream and you'll have plenty of options. The free market can deliver, you just may not like the level of effort the size of your market justifies.
Well, last time I checked the number was 0 and I am still lurking in some pine chat groups, so I doubt that changed. So the free market does not deliver something working here.
Since part of what I'm purposely purchasing from Google or Apple is a more secure by default system I'm probably the wrong person to ask. My wallet vote is effectively for something different than yours.
Google Pixel + GrapheneOS
Isn’t the latest Google Pixel not supported by GrapheneOS?
Yesno. Not fully because a functionality is not enabled yet.
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.
If only the Motorola Signature 27 had a headphone jack, so that I could listen to high quality music with my quality headphones.
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.
Instead of relying on the crappy built-in DAC with utterly nasty audio on this shitty phone, you can use a good phone AND your quality headphones: https://www.whathifi.com/best-buys/hi-fi/best-dacs#section-t...
Best of both worlds.
I think Corey Doctorow has the best retort to this. They want you to vote with your wallet because they have thicker wallets than you.
No. Regulation is the answer. Hopefully everything changes in November. That’s when GTA VI comes out.
True. But so long as only 1% of people care enough to do this, and they can make >1% more profit per customer with their crap - then it's more profitable for them to continue the crap.
Many things are stopping you. I see this response all the time as a counter to inappropriate behavior by monopolistic giant entities.
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 don't personally want them to stop. I like what they produce and how they produce it. As long as there are enough people like me there will be a market for this.
Voting with your wallet doesn’t mean stopping them. That isn’t what it is about. You shouldn’t get to choose to stop them because you don’t like their actions any more than I should be able to choose banning you from carriers because I don’t like your choices.
Yes, some of us simply don't give a damn. I'll continue buying Apple products because they work and I don't have to do much of anything to keep them working. Just because I like tinkering or customizing other computers/devices, doesn't mean I want to be a sysadmin to my phone lol
I have not purchased any Apple or Google products in a decade. Straight up ignoring them is a perfectly viable call in the modern world.
And yet Google still knows everything about you.
Meta
I’ll vote with my vote thank you. My table’s manufacturer shouldn’t get a say in what I put on my table, and Apple shouldn’t get a say about my phone either.
These clearly anti-consumer practices should just be illegal.
I'll vote with my vote as well, and my vote will not be for candidates who equate computers with tables. Hacking isn't a human right. Go buy a different phone if you don't like Apple's phones. There are a bunch to choose from.
Idk what point you think you're making, but human rights aren't an absolute law of nature, it's something we decide on.
> 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.
Which country does this vote happen in?
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.
> Apple shouldn’t get a say about my phone either.
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.
And my table manufacturer operates the factories that makes it, that doesn't mean we give them the right to dictate how we use it.
Nobody dictates how you can use your iPhone either. You can do anything with it physically that you are capable of. Apple will never say a word.
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.
> Nobody dictates how you can use your iPhone either ... physically
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.
If you have the skills to do it you can do everything you ask for there. If you don't then you should buy or make a device that suits your preferences. Vote with your wallet. Nobody forced you to buy an iPhone.
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.
> Vote with your wallet
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?
> and running local ones becomes cost prohibitive.
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.
Give it another 6-12 months until the big AI shops shut those capabilities down and running local ones becomes cost prohibitive
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.
Fair point. The megacorps probably are able to outspend pretty much any grassroots mmovement bar maybe a government led one.
>Give it another 6-12 months until the big AI shops shut those capabilities down and running local ones becomes cost prohibitive.
The local inference threshold has been crossed already. Its possible to achieve big model like performance through agent harnesses with local models.
> Vote with your wallet
If that would work, I'd be writing this on my iPhone Mini.
It did work. You're just a very small minority of users, as are most people here.
What is your current phone?
There are already open weight models that are quite capable and can use any provider.
> Vote with your wallet. Fuck them.
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.
> degrading cameras on purpose
What's this about? I can't find anything, except some random Reddit posts.
> Vote with your wallet.
But what are the options?
This. The only mainstream alternative is Android, and I'm already "voting with my wallet" against Samsung, Google, and the rest for violating user privacy even more than Apple does.
And while you're at it, make real change happen in the US national elections by voting for a third party! That'll show them!
How are running local ones going to become cost prohibitive? Indications are that Nvidia has been channel stuffing (artificially inflating perceived demand), which suggests massive oversupply of GPUs.
> Give it another 6-12 months until the big AI shops shut those capabilities down and running local ones becomes cost prohibitive.
If Murican lobbying/corruption tries to snuff AI that threatens the Hutt cartels, China will accelerate it.
> 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.
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.
https://github.com/topjohnwu/magisk
https://magiskmanager.com/
Such antiuser behavior from Apple or others should be illegal.
> even if I jailbreak my iOS and never let it update.. Apple can easily detect the jailbreak and lock me out of anything iCloud, and iMessage and such.
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.
> Apple has never bothered to detect jailbreaks and lock people out of iCloud and iMessage.
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.
A Hackintosh is different from an iOS jailbreak.
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.
That's why my next phone will be an unlocked Android device (Shiftphone 8), but murena[0] has also other nice devices that are unlocked.
[0]https://murena.com/products/smartphones/
Oh man, those early days of XDA forums and SenseUI roms on my NexusOne. Those were truly a thing of beauty. We still haven't gotten back to that level. I'm with you though, I stopped playing and moved to a stock device. Then I moved back to an iPhone and have been completely stock ever since. I haven't been excited about an iPhone since the 10 released. After that I think, "oh cool, another rectangle". "A grid of icons"... "The best camera Apple's ever put in a phone.... how wonderful".
I remember a long while ago when you could jailbreak iOS with a corrupted font in a pdf.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JailbreakMe
There have been several companies that tried to sell open mobile devices over the years, but people have shown time and time again that they don't want to buy that product. We can wish it were different all we like, but in general we aren't entitled to money-losing, unmarketable products.
A functioning government committed to free markets would mandate unlocked devices.
The unregulated market naturally coalesces into oligopolies or monopolies and doesn’t fix issues like this.
Regulators have been asleep for the last two decades while Apple and Google continue to extort 30% taxes from developers.
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.
> Apple can easily detect the jailbreak and lock me out of anything iCloud, and iMessage and such.
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 :-)
> Apple can easily detect the jailbreak and lock me out
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.
Can't anyone customize the source of grapheneOS and simultaneously get a phone that is not trying to disable itself?
Am I the only person/iPhone user that hasn’t given in to the iCloud ecosystem?
> even if I jailbreak my iOS and never let it update.
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:
Frankly. I want Apple to lock down my iPhone as much as possible in that context.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.
> a) Why the would you never want to update an OS in this day and age ?
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.
Updates slow down your phone, eg Liquid Ass. Lots of people follow the rule of only running the OS that came with your iPhone.
Maybe your phone doesn't have banking and stuff on it
> Maybe your phone doesn't have banking and stuff on it
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.
Passkeys are the standardized version of the bank's proprietary app. Well, except for the device attestation part, that won't happen on iPhones.
I think you meant to say TOTP.
I get why TOTP is the better standard, but nothing uses that because the UX in most implementations was horrendous for like 8 years.
USA, Chase lets me set a passkey
If your phone does not have any important or sensitive on it, why even secure it?
> If your phone does not have any important or sensitive on it, why even secure it?
Or why have a smartphone in the first place if you're not going to put any sort of meaningful apps on it. ;)
My iPhone passcode was either unset or 2222 until like 2018. At times it was jailbroken af. It had messaging and stuff. Wouldn't have been the end of the world if someone hacked it, and nobody did.
Did it have access to your email?
Not my important one
If I'm happy with how it's working, an update can only break things.
We gave in because open source and hobbiests do not design good products and even worse shared systems, as much as they enjoy self-righteously declaring their values. And shared systems require trust, planning, and goal setting in a way no open system would ever build.
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.
> open source and hobbiests do not design good products
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.
This seems more correlated with big vs. small organizations, not closed vs. open organizations. There are open projects (e.g., Debian, Blender) that tick all four of your boxes in my opinion.
this must be nailed to the wall somewhere at autodesk
linux?
... is an example in support of GP's point.
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.
You do understand the reasons right? iCloud, iMessages etc are an interplay of software in your device, software in cloud and some networking. They have to work together. A jailbroken phone can have a tinkered iMessage app. Supporting tinkered / unsupported versions is more overhead / possible security risk. Why would you expect them to take on that?
I agree with your point, though I can easily modify ~/Library/Messages/Attachments or ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.MobileSMS/Data on macOS, which is a platform similarly secure to an iPhone when you take sandboxing, sip, etc. into account. So Apple already supports macOS, which can be tinkered, no? I guess the argument is that by locking down iOS, a platform which was never open, they just never needed to handle that class of security risks which are introduced when customers have more freedom.
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.
You're right, but I could see Apple acting on iOS alone, just because of scale.
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.
My computer is jailbroken, I have sip disabled yet icloud and imessage work. So what makes my computer different from my phone?
Who bears the security risk? The user.
The only security risk for apple is a job security risk if the ecosystem lock-in is eroded.
The risk to Apple is everyone else’s trust being eroded by having their ecosystem compromised. Why risk it?
It does not make sense for someone to lose faith in apple because someone else was able to run a modified imessage app.
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.
I just feel a bit sad and impotent that a number of security researchers outside the circle cannot join their "yo we found more crazy bugs" party because simply frontier labs only give access to those models with "Red Team" availability to the inner circle members/companies.
Now their "trusted cyber access" program is moat rather than safeguard.
You can do a lot with the Chinese open source models.
That assumes you have the hardware capable of running inference on them at a reasonable speed
Or $10 on open router.
Or it assumes you have $5 to spend on the tokens for inference. Not everyone has the money.
it takes a lot more than that....
On OpenRouter, GLM 5.3 Flash costs $0.0285 for 1M input tokens and $0.0923 for 1M output tokens. [1]
[1] https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-5.3-flash
if you wanna have the same kind of capability as these researchers where you have tight loops calling cli stuff you won't get by with $5 at all, especially for major bugs
if you have a way to turn $5 easily into exploitable vulns, let me know cause that'd be a first for me
Cool to see our work here. I'm Thai, and I run Calif. Happy to answer any questions.
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.
[1] https://calif.io/php2shell
[2] https://calif.io/research/the-great-glyph-grift
the videos just don't hit the same without the dancing anime girl and the electronic dance music.
My favourite part from the first video is how much effort it took to drag up from the bottom of the screen to get back to the home-screen. This reflects my experience with how iOS handles touch gestures in general.. also super easy to accidentally activate "Reachability" mode!
The reason they're having trouble is because they're in the simulator.
Also, if reachability bothers you like it does me, you can disable it.
Seriously I want a physical home button again
You say this, but have you tried an old iPhone recently? I did, and it was actually pretty terrible. The quick little swipes to switch between apps is so much more natural now.
Try going back to thumb typing, no long press symbols , and no cursor movement from your spacebar. I've almost thrown my test iPhone at work across a room more times than I'd like to admit (since it doesn't belong to me)...
I wish. The iPhone 5S is the last one I can reliably type on. Idk what they did to screw up the hitboxes.
Perhaps if you know how. Watching my dad use his iPhone.. Every time have to teach him something new, and hope he remembers it.
So stupid interface. No discoverability.
I recently learned you can swipe on the address bar in Android-Chrome to navigate to the next/previous tab. Also, press+hold on the tab count button to show the tab's options e.g. close tab. Now my address bar is on the bottom of the screen.
Terrible discoverability. I guess the genalpha kids know gestures like this, but stuff like this makes me feel like a boomer.
Safari added this in iOS recently. You can also swipe up on the address bar (after tapping it to make it "big") to swipe between pages, similar to the home screen. Found it on accident.
Yes, my wife has an iPhone 6, I wish I had that. Though half of that is the jack.
I will keep my SE 3rd gen a looong time for that specific reason
https://x.com/calif_io/status/2113570095549337977
We peaked in the early 00s with warez key generators featuring banger synth tracks.
You might enjoy Dubmood - Lost Floppies Vol 3, released this year.
Here you go… https://lnkd.in/p/g9_uh79c
So true.
Very cool demos, but now I'm interested to know: does enabling Lockdown mode help at all against these exploits? It'll theoretically protect against a lot of common attack vectors, but I'm curious about its real-life effectiveness.
yes for PDFs in iMessage where would be blocked, not sure in Signal though. No idea for 3rd one.
It only blocks auto loading. Clicking on the PDF will have the same effect.
These are still 1-click, not zero click. So the best protection you can have is not opening unknown files that were sent to you. That being said, lockdown mode blocks all sorts of message attachments. From the videos it look like they are using pdfs in the messaging vector, which would get blocked too. So you would be safe-ish. But lockdown mode is so restrictive that it doesn't really make sense for most users. Or at least it doesn't make sense to buy a $1500 phone and then limit yourself to something you could have gotten for $50.
You don’t know what lockdown is do you? I’ve had my phone in lockdown for a year. I can’t: collaborate on notes, and it does not automatically open links in chat. Other than that my experience is identical to non lockdown.
> had my phone in lockdown for a year. I can’t: collaborate on notes
That's your own mistake, because you can collaborate on Notes while your iPhone is in Lockdown
You lose a lot: https://support.apple.com/en-us/105120
Yeah what I want is a configurable version of lockdown mode where I can have my agent sync my allowlist with my hardware.
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.
Doesn't seem like a lot according to the description and pretty much what I would set by default.
some sites don't work (you can explicitly whitelist them tho) but generally it's been fine. i would honestly prefer a phone that doesn't allow any comms to any non-contact list parties at this point.
From what I can see in Apple docs, aside from web limitations it sounds great. Is there any real reason to not enable this? Like I would be deeply suspicious of a PDF sent via messages and no auto-connect to insecure WiFi is also common sense.
been using it for years, haven't found a compelling reason not to yet
I can send my friends a PDF of a restaurant's menu over iMessage. I think that wouldn't work for you?
I use Lockdown Mode and the functionality I get is nothing like a $50 device. If you're being serious can you link to some $50 devices for sale that are on par with a recent iPhone Pro running in Lockdown Mode?
What's with iOS and pdfs pwning them? Reminds me of the ForcedEntry in Pegasus.
https://projectzero.google/2022/03/forcedentry-sandbox-escap...
https://www.trendmicro.com/en_gb/research/21/i/analyzing-peg...
PDF has been an entry point since forever, it is extremely complex and can in some cases even run javascript, it has a huge attack surface.
Too huge attack surface. Good candidate for victim trust (who would not open a pdf file on an iPhone?).
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.
That's why you need Rust in any image decoder. FFMPEG too.
Apple has been propagating Swift for more than a decade now and at least in theory, it should be on par with Rust in terms of safety I'd say.
They probably link libraries written in C, given the scope of the pdf and image parsing.
It mostly is. Has pretty much caught up with all of rust actually (while being much more readable).
Rust is not a magic security wand.
It might not be a magic security wand, but so many critical vulnerabilities in software trace their origins to memory unsafe code and things like "use after free".
"~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...
If I were Google I'd try to rewrite Chromium in Rust. The FFMPEG folks should try porting the whole codebase to Rust too. They can always keep the legacy versions for legacy computers (my old n270 netbook can barely play 720p@30FPS anyway, and it's too slow to downsize 4k video to 720 or 480p...), so a bigger amd64 machine will always be -reallistically- needed for anything else than <=720p consumption.
What folks at Ladybird did this year. Started adopting rust for part if not all their engine.
No, but it was created to mitigate these sorts of risks.
It kind of is, as is any other memory safe language.
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.
It cuts down most of the crap trying to trash your machine's RAM (virtual memory in the end, but today it's almost as if you didn't have a MMU). It's good enough.
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.
Well it was TIFF one time
Never mind - that only applied to origins PDF 1.x.
Maybe with LLMs a full rewrite that’s more secure could be done
LLM and full rewrite are a recipe for cooking something that still has flaws but also doesn't work that well. The root cause is that PDF is an old format from a more innocent era. A new document standard that keeps up with the technical and security advances, learns about the lessons PDF taught us, and allows for easy conversion from old PDFs, would be the ideal solution.
Who am I kidding, I think the PDF format will outlive us.
> PDF is an old format from a more innocent era
if apple parsed pdf with (js, swift, rust) none of this would be possible. the problem is memory-unsafe code.
> if apple parsed pdf with (js, swift, rust) none of this would be possible
Interpreters and compilers can have bugs. Bugs can cause memory safety issues.
A full rewrite of what? iOS? I hope you’re kidding
Apple can rewrite the media and PDF libraries in no time in Swift/Rust, they have tons of money to waste.
In no time? What are you talking about? It’d take months even with llms for it to be fully polished and tested if they started now.
#3 is so nice, I want root access to my phone. Does anyone know if doing this can lock Apple out from updating/removing it?
Subverting the secure boot/upgrade chain would require a SecureROM exploit and presumably a compromise of the Secure Enclave, so the answer is almost certainly "no" (even prior major exploits from recent memory like usbliter8 are tethered and don't exploit the enclave; the last true untethered Jailbreak was iOS 9 or something.) An upgrade would fix it. The internet reporting claims this break they are showing in this video is untethered though, which is extremely rare on its own.
The videos sort of imply that these are userland rather than bootrom, whatever payload they have running is getting hit before first unlock, which isn't a lot of surface. They specifically say to not update which pretty much confirms where the attack surface is. Somewhere after the kernel starts but before the main user space is unlocked with the passcode.
Well the governments and supranational bodies who want to read your messages would be aghast at you having root on your phone.
Like we did on HTC G1s in 2008
Man, sucks to see these "hacked" iPhones doing so many cooler things than my Apple-approved one.
It’s a mix - for years I wanted root on my iPhones, just like you got on android. In practice, once I had it…? I never did much beyond installing Cydia.
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.
When I owned an iPod touch, the advantage of jailbreaking was to give your device certain features that the OS just didn't support. (Hell, I remember early days when iOS didn't even have a concept of wallpaper, the background was just black.)
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.
A much-needed advantage is also keeping old devices useful. Every Apple phone slowly outlives its supported software to the point where the official AppStore has almost nothing in it. Today, it's extremely difficult to find 3P apps that work with my current iPhone 7, which is not that old, because the ecosystem cuts off old phones very quickly.
I agree, and, if you have a developer certificate from Apple, the list of wants I have is ... not that long? zero? I'd love to be pitched on it. In practice, I wanted freedom, but didn't really want to do anything with it.
I jailbroke every iPhone I had for many, many years. Most of the time it was silly skins/tweaks but there were a number of things that were huge QoL improvements. I remember BiteSMS and using it as a way to reply to a text directly in the notification instead of having to leave the app. This was before iOS had that feature and before multitasking, back when if you left the game you were playing the app would quit. Also had folders before stock iOS, things like Control Center, and a whole slew of little tweaks for other apps I used.
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.
There's just less reason today for someone like me that liked the utilitarian benefits of a jailbroken iPhone. I used it for gestures, caller mini preview, grouped notifications, etc. All things that are now baked in.
I'm for being able to hack your own device to do whatever you like with it, preferably without active resistance from its manufacturer. I'm against anybody who can convince you to open a PDF being able to hack your device to do whatever they like with it.
The point the parent commenter is making is that they want Apple to allow people the freedom to intentionally mod the functionality of their device. Not that they literally want single-click PDF exploits to be a thing.
Who is saying this?
The link here demonstrates an exploit which runs arbitrary code on an iPhone when the user opens a PDF.
> I'm against anybody who can convince you to open a PDF being able to hack your device to do whatever they like with it.
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.
Nobody said exactly that, but your first comment pointed out how cool the capability is without acknowledging that it is trivial to exploit maliciously.
We're on the same side here. I daily a Pixel with LineageOS and root.
If you phone is hackable by you, what stops someone else from hacking it? Ultimately, it's a trade off between security and openness, and I think it's good that there are choices on both sides.
Once you have used an exploit to get system access to your own device, you can patch the software to prevent anyone else from using the same vulnerabilities. See e.g. https://github.com/EolnMsuk/AntiDarkSword (but of course, as more and more vulnerabilities keep being found, it becomes basically impossible to backport all the fixes)
This comment is tricky because "hack" can mean different things in different contexts.
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.
iOS has enough zero-click exploits that you don't exactly get a choice between the two.
You don't get that choice on any mobile platform.
I watched the “Can your iPhone do this?” video, assuming that was the coolest one. The others seemed like they’d just be showing the exploit.
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?
I took this as a demonstration of ownage on the latest release, versus an attempt to show some jailbreak-only feature.
The evidence of hack is the feature.
What in these videos is so much cooler than what you can do on an Apple approved one? Other than, "As a programmer, I can do anything", I just personally don't see any capabilities unlocked that I can't have with an app or whatever. But I might be missing something.
1. install apps without the app store so we dont ahve to pay 100 bucks yearly for it to apple
2. run linux
3. run emulators
4. run VMs
5. install steam
6. make it a media server
etc
Apple added emulator support a couple of years ago. Delta works great.
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.
Retro game emulators were allowed only 2y ago and bold retro. JIT is still not allowed so they are restricted in being run in interpreted mode. Also, neither is allowed executing arbitrary arm64 binaries. And, of course, no hypervisor access. The Linux-using term (iSH) works by utilizing a x86 emulator / compatibility layer (basically translates x86 binaries and maps Linux calls to native ones). In the sole VM host available, UTM SE, the "SE" means "slow edition". Now jailbreak and you've full, JIT-capable, UTM (QEMU) and NewTerm (kinda Termux for iOS). Hypervisor access still not possible though.
run a real browser!
The only thing I really miss from my jailbreak days is an app that could talk to the cellular baseband and display all cell towers nearby on a map and showed which you were using.
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.
Noob q: Does this(and most) hacks like this on the iphone likely rely on some kernel module — or what it talks to for executing code — being compromised to run arbitrary code execution? I dunno about ios but it seems from the videos that something that reads imessage attachments was compromised for privilege escalation.
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.
hacks like these, where you go from a PDF to full persistence, require a chain of exploits. Pegasus, the iOS malware that made the news awhile ago, used a chain of 3 exploits like this:
Hoping more "unsupported" older "iDevices" can be made usable with newer software with something like "jailbreaking"
It's a felony to subvert the natural order of disposable tech consumerism.
I can 100% guarantee that we'll have comments from people saying they buy iPhones specifically because of the walled garden and the last thing they want is a jail broken device. On a website called Hacker News.
I'm glad to confirm your suspicion. I like to have both a walled-garden phone and several open-platform computers. They do two completely different things for me.
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.
I want the same kind of phone. But I reject the premise that it's impossible to have a deeply nested "De-wall this device yes I know what I am doing yes I confirm I'm about to really open myself to issues if I don't understand the implications" settings option without compromising the walled mode security.
The point is that no one forces you to jailbreak your iPhone. If you like the walled garden - great! Keep using it! But I've been in plenty of discussions where iPhone users are literally against jailbreaks at all and in any form.
I want a device I can give the elderly in my family that they cannot be easily induced into doing insecure things on. If there were an unlockable iPhone and a locked iPhone I want to give them the latter. It’s not enough for me to tell them not to scroll to General and click seven times on About to activate developer mode. I would prefer to just give them a device that can’t do that.
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.
Mostly agree with you, but:
> 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.
Sadly there’s also dementia where a gradual decline occurs. And I’m pretty sure learning gets harder.
>>I want a device I can give the elderly in my family that they cannot be easily induced into doing insecure things on.
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.
You can do whatever you want with what you own. And I want this restricted device. So you go be the market for yours and I’ll be the market for mine. I don’t understand what the problem is here. There are no shortage of phones on the market - many of them entirely rootable. It seems like you’re upset I want to buy an EV because you want to put gas in your car. Just go buy the gas car. No one is stopping you here (well except the EU I suppose haha).
Windows malware that says stuff like click Yes on the warning bar or box shows how well that works.
Earlier today on the thread about the google play store apocalypse I posted a comment saying that I like some things about life in Apple's walled garden. But I still upvoted the parent comment because it's true and it's funny.
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.
I got curious when you mentioned "google play store apocalypse", but I can't seem to find a comment of yours on the topic today. Would you be willing to post a link?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50209087
thanks
I can root my Android phone and have in the past, but I have absolutely no desire to do so now because it adds almost no functionality in exchange for a very large security risk. I consider rooting my phone in the past quite a foolish move by someone who didn't know better.
People are trading the future of personal computing just so they can run a banking app and justify it with "but I want my phone to be locked down for security." Not even sleepwalking into corporate-controlled-computing, but actively promoting it.
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.
I have plenty of devices like raspberry pi’s and handheld Linux gaming devices that allow free unlimited access. My phone is the one thing I want fully secured because it’s where all my most important data and keys are.
Such a wild take to me. I install an entirely different operating system on my phone (graphene) which also advises me not to root because it's stupidly unsafe to do so. I also don't log in as root on linux, nor do I log in as an administrator in windows. None of these are sane practices to anyone worried about security.
To be honest this matter more on graphene than on linux or windows because of the sandboxing of all apps by default.
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 meaning of Hacker here is VC Startup Founder
You said what I was thinking. If anyone has links for _hacker_ news drop them here ;)
Can't, I'd be autobanned, but this one is allowed at least: https://unslop.news/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660783#49663549
I converted to an iphone 13 mini (from the S24 Ultra) after being on Android since the release of the HTC Desire in 2010. I used to install custom roms and tweak everything on all of my Android phones which actually lead me to the iphone because I realized I wanted a phone without all the OE clutter and Google crap. The only clutter on the iphone is icloud which stays out of the way and doesn't annoy me with subscription messages. Also I don't have time to fuck around with modifying my phone. I just want everything to work without user intervention.
And you can keep doing that, no once forces you to jailbreak.
"No one forces you..." is an interesting line to go down in the comments of an article that focuses on using messaging apps to deliver exploits to a cellphone. It's pretty malware adjacent. Isn't that sort of thing how Jamal Khashoggi and his friends, family, and coworkers were hacked before his murder/execution?
Uhh, what? Clearly nobody is arguing that "arbitrary remote execution is good." Apple could easily satisfy everyone by simply allowing users to unlock their own bootloader.
How would that help anyone? The unlocked bootloader on the Apple Silicon Macbooks still hasn’t resulted in a truly viable alternative to macOS. The iPhone is much, much harder. And why would carriers trust the result?
You’re missing the point. Hackers (in the tinkerer sense) just want to program their own devices, with full access to the capabilities of the underlying hardware. Apple could obviously allow that if they wanted to, in a convenient way that doesn’t increase the attack surface for malware.
Having control over one's device and allowing anything and everything to have free reign on said device are two different things.
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.
Why would you trust the user with their own security. Have you not seen the ten most common passwords?
You’re engaging in bad faith, and parroting the same false equivalence between security and user freedom that Apple uses to keep a chokehold on their software distribution monopoly.
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.
Yeah, this gives a new meaning to demanding your password at the border.
I like jailbreaks.
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.
Except for the good old days when jailbreaks included patching the exploit :)
I’m fine with a locked down iPhone. All of my financial account credentials are on there, personal photographs, etc. Since I’ve owned an iPhone, I’ve never had a non-working phone. Security and reliability are the two most important items to me when it comes to a phone.
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.
> people saying they buy iPhones specifically because of the walled garden and the last thing they want is a jail broken device.
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.
It’s reasonable to like to hack things, but to want a phone that just works.
Not sure what your definition of "hack" is but apple seems to be "anti hack" on all fronts.
They do have good hardware, but surely the hacker in you is a little sad using an IPhone!
These are the same people that caused this situation. A close platform is only closed until it's busted right open and then everyone is screwed because there were no eyes on it the entire time.
Yeah I have a perfectly fine iPad air and pro that are completely unusable. Nothing installs and nothing supports whats installed.
Anything you can find with an LLM to break into a locked device/ecosystem, the operators of that ecosystem can find with an LLM too, and fix it. Right?
Only if it's in updateable software. Hardware takes longer to correct.
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."
This is true for things other than LLMs. Outside contributors have been credited with hundreds of security fixes to macOS and iOS that were found with fuzzers and sanitizers. Just off the top of my head CVE-2019-8605. Clearly, Apple has access to AddressSanitizer and libfuzzer, but outsiders still find these things. Not only Apple: Google can find flaws in iOS but outsiders also find flaws in Chrome, so the phenomenon is widespread.
Same guys who found the PHP.
Edit: hahaha you guys are funny. “The php hack” is what I meant!
They found the PHP?
Yes, actually PHP was not invented but discovered in nature. That’s why it’s a bit wild sometimes, because it still remembers its origins.
PHP was born as a templating language, but mutated into a programming language, and then grew organically from there.
Craziest part is it was never even intended to be a programming language. From the Wikipedia page, the founder Rasmus Lerdorf is quoted as saying:
"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
Everything becomes a programming language in due time. At work we have YAML files with #if and #include statements…
Does that mean eventually a programming language becomes a crab or a crab becomes a programming language?
Is that before or after it evolves to read mail?
But that only raises the question: what bore PHP? A bit of a C(hicken) and an egg situation.
I am reasonably certain PHP is not written in Chicken.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(Scheme_implementation...
I mean there's no way there was any intelligent design behind it
/ducks and runs
Didn't know that the PHP was lost, thanks for pointing that out.
They found the PHP vulnerability that has upended the world, or so it seems.
The Princely Hippopotamus Parlor in this case.
Aside from bragging how cool they are, what value is there for demonstrating a yet-to-be-patched vulnerability? I don't understand why old-guard infosec stars from Calif can do as they want, responsible disclosure be damned.
Just as a reminder for some folks here: During their WeWorm research in July–September 2026, Calif didn't stop at proving RCE to Tencent—they spent an extra week using AI to build a fully functional, self-propagating zero-click worm across three live phones, triggering temporary account bans from Tencent during testing.
I don't see this as irresponsible disclosure. They show that the vulns exist, but don't give any other details (unlike previous Calif releases). Not even a hint at what the exploit chain is like other than that it starts with a PDF, which is a surprise to no one.
They're of course also doing it for internet kudos, but attracting attention like this will help encourage people to update. Thanks to this article, I'm going to apply the next iOS security update ASAP, and tell everyone I know to do this the same. (hopefully it comes out soon)
I do wish they clearly stated the vulns have had been reported to Apple and when.
We disclosed most of the bugs used in these chains to Apple, and are going to disclose the rest, if not already.
>Just as a reminder for some folks here: During their WeWorm research in July–September 2026, Calif didn't stop at proving RCE to Tencent—they spent an extra week using AI to build a fully functional, self-propagating zero-click worm across three live phones, triggering temporary account bans from Tencent during testing.
Not sure what exactly your point is. The WeWorm demo was done in a controlled environment.
Also we do this for free. We don't charge neither Tencent nor Apple. We don't even take their bounties. Why can't we have some fun?
If you're so upset about how we do it, my suggestion is go find your own bugs.
Is it irresponsible? They've revealed barely anything about how it works, besides that the first step is a PDF, and something about Glyph Grift.
What is the value of revealing anything at this time point, when no patch is out? What use is it for the public?
Just last Black hat there was a "glimpse disclosure" that was later followed with proper fixes and details. I gave my AI agent the details that were supposed to be "useless", before the patch was out, and it found the vulnerability in less than an hour.
We shouldn't even enter this game. And with the track record of this specific group, I didn't exactly get the impression that their incentive is to help fix things, but rather to promote their brand while others be damned.
Crazy, you would think Apple would have already done AI-assisted vulnerability scans using the latest and most expensive models.
Absolutely crazy how PDF parsing and image rendering are still exploitable.
Is PDF the new Flash? It just does too much for its own good, it has become a huge attack vector
Is it an exploit around the library that handles PDF parsing/opening? Can someone explain how files / attachement are open on a mobile device ( android/iPhone).
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?
PDFs are basically executables, that's why it's hard. They support running code, they support decoding images which themselves have their own custom compressors that are basically code. Anything to do with image formats is rife for bad decoders, insane compression algorithms from the 90s, and a PDF is basically 1000 formats inside many different container types with executable code plastered on everywhere. If you want to make a compatible PDF viewer you'll need to be able to implement an image decoder algorithm for a fax machine that was specific to Japan in the late 80s, which was somehow ratified into a standard and is used today by all the top legal firms, or something absurd like that. When you open a PDF on your computer, depending on how it is being parsed, it can even make outbound network connections without you knowing. To safely open a PDF you need one of those bomb proof suits, a disposable laptop, and even then you might be going home without eyebrows.
Willing to bet that a default "treat PDFs/documents/spreadsheets as dumb" option in operating systems would eliminate the majority of common one-click vulnerabilies out there. And exactly 0.001% of actual use cases would be affected.
This is one of the things iOS's Lockdown Mode does. I wish the features of Lockdown Mode were able to be enabled individually instead of a single all or none option.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/105120
I’ve turned on lockdown mode while this CVE insanity is going on. It’s far less disruptive than I expected. The only thing I noticed missing is web gl is disabled.
Your link doesn’t say anything about PDFs. And if I remember correctly it only disables PDF previews in Messages. This means if you have a zero-click exploit now it becomes a one-click exploit. I fail to see how that’s relevant given the article is already demonstrating a one-click exploit.
PDFs are just absurdly complicated in general. Dumbing down the parser might be the right idea. I wonder what consequences that would have with how intertwined PostScript and PDF in general are with macOS/iOS; maybe that's why the PostScript engine was removed with macOS Sonoma/iOS 17? I don't know if that was only user facing behavior and Apple is still working to remove the internal usages.
No. Very few PDF exploits come from the officially sanctioned way of running code (JavaScript) inside PDF. Most are just plain old parser bugs.
That's kind of what Adobe does with downloaded PDFs, you have to click the Enable button to turn on more document features. My schematic capture app will output a PDF that has links that will take you to specific spots on a page and also some JavaScript where you can right click on a part and see it's BOM information. None of that stuff works until you click the Enable button. I've also seen some vendors offer not only normal 3D model files and 2D drawings but a PDF that has an interactive 3D model inside. It's kinda cool how much random shit can go into a PDF but it's clearly a massive malware vector.
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.
Did we do that with Excel spreadsheets so that macros are disabled by default?
"dumb" isn't a real thing in computer science though. You mean render them to bitmaps in a sandbox?
I read it more as "don't implement JS, 3D object rendering, slideshow transitions, sound annotations and the other 999 insane features that I'm not even aware exist"
Would require defining what features are needed. "Require PDF/A" is probably a reasonable approximation, though it would break most PDFs
I think he just means disable any of the "advanced" features mentioned above like accessing web content, running custom scripts, etc etc. You might still be vulnerable to any dependencies they use for image rendering itself but I bet it would make it drastically more safe.
Then just have a button for turning those on as needed on a case by case basis
If you disable features then people will see important documents as white rectangles and complain and you'll get a reputation as not working.
"It's for security, honey."
"Okay. If you aren't going to sign this rental agreement, you have five minutes to move your stuff out of my house."
> PDFs are executables, that's why it's hard.
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 a sleight of hand. PDF's are obviously not executable, any more than text files are. Decoders are executable and they can choose to unsafely handle input. Even plain text editors can have exploits. It's no different than any piece of complex software.
The characterization of the PDF format specifically being “basically code” in any substantial manner is simply incorrect. The only PDF-specific features that reasonably meet that description is the PostScript support, which has fallen out of use decades ago and was completely removed in PDF 2.0, and the JavaScript support, which is optional, prohibited in PDF/A, and can easily be limited or omitted by a PDF viewer.
> the PostScript support
What do you mean by that?
Older PDFs support PostScript XObjects: literal embedded PostScript code. Not sure it counts tho, because IIRC it was never executed by PDF viewer itself. It was "gives this to printer when printing"
> PDFs are executables, that's why it's hard. They support running code
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?
Yeah a lot of those fancy PDF features are Adobe-only. It's not that other apps can't support those features, it's that no one in their right mind wants to spend endless amounts of money and time trying to sandbox it.
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.
I think it's more the image formats PDF supports? I could be wrong, but there was that forcedentry vulnerability (which was insanely cool, even if really bad)
From the standpoint of a layman it looks like there's a lot of overlap between writing safe web browsers/engines and writing safe PDF readers/engines. There just hasn't been anywhere near as much of an impetus to push PDF readers/engines in that direction because most of us aren't interacting with PDFs nearly as often as we interact with the web (and things built on web tech).
The difference is that web browsers absolutely need to support JavaScript to correctly display many important web sites, whereas that’s not necessary for PDF. You also don’t have to deal with vulnerability footguns like XSS/CSRF/CORS in PDF. Except for some rare special use cases that PDF viewers don’t need to support, nothing has to happen online for PDF. It’s really not comparable.
Most web browsers actually make decent PDF viewers by default don't they ?
I'm pretty sure not even the safe languages would help you here. PDF allows you to pretty much run arbitrary code since it supports javascript, images, and a bunch of other things I'm forgetting, and you can't not implement javascript support or otherwise be selective about what you support with it because then all the end-users will complain when they get that one PDF that they need to fill out but it needs JS because... Nobody knows.
A reminder for people who don't follow this, Calif is Thai Duong's firm. Thai discovered the BEAST and CRIME TLS attacks (with Juliano Rizzo), and then worked at Google for a bunch of years, including on Wycheproof with Daniel Bleichenbacher. The team at Calif includes lcamtuf, Dion Blazakis, Tavis Ormandy, and Stefan Esser (among many others).
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.
Thanks Tom! You're always super kind to us.
Video 3 get a root shell agains 27.0.1 which is the latest iOS version installed on my lovely se3.
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
There are loads of these exploits which exist in the hands of private hacking groups and state organisations which have not been made public. Always assume your device is able to be compromised from those who have the motivation and dedication.
Oh boy, what a week. Must be great working in cybersec right now.
It is rapidly becoming cyber only (assuming it is not already there under the hood).
#4 is very interesting. Truly untethered (persistent) jailbreaks haven't been a thing for 10 years.
This brings back lots of memory of jail-breaking iPhone era and cydia the alternative jailbroken iPhone app store.
The second video, the person who's shooting the video has his face mirrored onto the screen, anonymity is gone.
More details: https://onejailbreak.com/blog/iphone-duo-ios-27-1-jailbreak-...
i suspect there is an article under all of the ads but i don't have the patience to look for it
I suspect you don't use an ad blocker :-)
I'm not sure if this is real, but if it is: this week is unbelievable. I really hope it's not the new normal, but unfortunately I don't believe this myself.
It's a minuscule part of the new normal.
If this continues I'll argue that you have to be absolutely insane to allow network connected electronics into your home in the future. This is Apple, known for locking down their device to the extreme, and yes some people would love to use this for jailbreaking their phones, other organisations want to root your phone for .... other purposes.
Insecure webpages, broken certificates and an insecure PDF library... You shouldn't have anything more connected than an FM radio at this point. Security is no longer something a private individual can deal with.
> You shouldn't have anything more connected than an FM radio at this point.
They can still hack your mind with ads.
There's every incentive for nation states and other espionage outfits to keep these types of exploits under wraps. This has probably been the new normal for some time ..
I for one have experienced multiple lifetimes worth of internet madness and will be looking to airgap / disconnect as many devices as I can get away with.
People have been paying a premium to companies like Apple for a reason. You've got nothing to worry about.
Decade of people's purchases has been invested into safety and security. It's absolutely unthinkable that a $7t market cap company with an army of 200k workers will ever leave people high and dry. They proudly went public, so we know they have the public's interests at heart.
I assuming there is a /s missing from the end of your post.
> They proudly went public, so we know they have the public's interests at heart.
God I hope this is sarcasm.
I think in time (a few years) the gap will close a bit. As AI is used to harden software, it will be harder to break. Software not validated by AI will continue to be vulnerable to it.
So what happens if AI becomes something that you need to actually pay real money for? Then only Apple, Google and Microsoft can affort to do network exposed software. Smaller companies and solo developers are just f-ed if the price of running LLMs goes up as investor money dries up.
It would make me so happy if this would allow running UTM.app with Hypervisor support on iPadOS. I don't want to travel with two devices, the would be enough, but sometimes I need a real desktop. Apple, of course, wants you to buy two devices. I do have UTM with Jit Linux running on my iPad, via altstore and entitlements and so on, but it is all a bit complex and still fairly slow.
They are going to run out of vulns eventually when the code is rewritten in memory safe lang & the rest are found.
> They are going to run out of vulns eventually when the code is rewritten in a memory safe lang
that's just not how it works at all though is it. Good luck writing the kernel, firmware etc in a completely memory-safe way. And even if that was accomplished, memory safety isn't the only class of vulnerabilities, it's just the most common.
> and the rest are found
If they kept a stable version with no updates or new features *ever*, only security patches, for decades, then maybe that could be possible, yeah. But Apple users aren't exactly the kind of people who would enjoy such stability and security anyways, it comes with the compromise of novelty. Stability and security aren't very fashionable either.
edit: Obviously a "memory-safe way" means no `unsafe` blocks in Rust, too.
edit#2: This is all assuming we don't get true AGI. I hope my assumption is right
He's right though. We'll run out of vulnerabilities eventually.
Im pretty sure more vulnerabilities are being created in new code all the time.
First of all this is crazy that even on hn we were a few days behind this.
Second fuck Apple. Fuck all tech companies. And seriously fuck late stage capitalism. Foss or nothing. There should be a rule if you pay for it it has to be foss. This way people can still make proprietary but they just can’t charge for it.
We have zero privacy, zero security, all our politicians and all the corporations are against us.
Media parsing is an endless exploit vector. Like fuck. At some point you have to be like they (not just Apple) keep it broken
An yea I know foss gets these issues too. But if the only option was foss, then at least the whole world’s focus would be on it
Is this day0 or did apple and signal get notified?
I want to boot linux in a vm at full-speed. is that too much to ask?
This post gave me flashbacks to jailbreak era w/ Cydia. It's interesting to think that a lot of the those old plugins and tweaks have basically become standard supported features of the iOS now (SBSettings, Activator, WinterBoard, Zephyr, ...).
Please let this be real. I need my 17 Pro to be jailbroken. I may keep my 13 Mini if it works for it too. This will be bliss.
Just let me know when I can install an alternate OS to my junk drawer of 6-10 year old iPhones. That's the holy grail.
What are these videos actually demonstrating?
A couple of PDF exploits from iMessage and Signal leading to code execution, and an app that roots the phone. Also, they seem to have managed to make their malware survive a reboot, which is difficult. That's another reason why automatic reboots are considered a security feature: exploits leaving malware in-memory are a lot easier to build than malware that survives a full reboot, passing all stages of signature checks and validation.
Yes, why don't they just say it instead of posting videos. Opening a sinister PDF in iOS can give them access to what exactly? anything/everything? What iOS versions or devices, etc?
Check out https://calif.io/research/the-great-glyph-grift, which shows one could go wrong with PDF in iOS.
We're gonna publish more in the coming weeks. Writing these blog posts take time, and we've been busy with another PHP thing.
> with another PHP thing.
oh man...
Marketing by security researchers and companies has gotten unbearable. They only want their name out there and not actually make devices more secure.
We disclosed most bugs to Apple, and are going to disclose the rest. We've disclosed probably close to 100 bugs to Apple in the past 6 months.
We've also been working with closely with the Signal Foundation to help them reduce the attack surface.
It's not true that we don't want to make devices more secure. We do and it's why we do this research.
We also do want our name out there because we're having a lot of fun and want to share that with our friends and the rest of the world.
Rooting, pretty much. Aka, executing code which shows their flying logo, but could also be exfiltrating data without displaying anything.
Stay on 27.0 or upgrade to 27.0.1?
How did they bypass MTE? Wasn't it suppose to make such exploits basically impossible?
We don't know if Calif bypassed MIE.
When they hacked the M5 (one week after release!), they used a data-only attack, which is outside the scope of MIE. That could be the case here, or something else entirely. We don't know.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48139219
Someone correct me please if I’m wrong but is this because iOS doesn’t sandbox their processes? I think I read Safari in particular doesn’t, but wonder if this is system-wide issue.
The more of this stuff we see, the more people will start using GrapheneOS, I guess.
Also wonder why they choose to publish and not cash-in the Apple bounty..
iOS does sandbox their processes really well, that's why this hack was as difficult as it was. The Safari thing you're talking about is JIT - iOS disables all runtime code generation across the system except in Safari (for JavaScript), but this is a completely separate thing from sandboxing.
Actually, no, I now remember this was about iMessage specifically and how it isn't completely isolated/runs as system service or sth? Or about the renderer?
Which would make sense because these attacks seem to exploit the same weakness.
iMessage's attachment renderer is also sandboxed, actually. You might be talking about this vulnerability: https://projectzero.google/2021/12/a-deep-dive-into-nso-zero..., but the second half of the vulnerability exploit chain was finding a way out of the CoreGraphics (Apple's image rendering library) sandbox to hack the rest of the system.
so i see we're still going with the apocalypse today too
why do we see pdf viewer exploits on ios when we have sandboxing mechanisms nowadays like wasm? Or is this exploit accounting for the sandbox breakage?
I'm tired, boss
Right that does it. I'm fucking off to the pub and drinking myself under the table after this week.
No anime girl videos. Progress!
Here you go! https://x.com/calif_io/status/2113570095549337977
Ok so you became "root", but who knows, Apple might have "superroot" and if that is not enough "god-mode".
Apple does have that and generally you need to break it to do the kinds of things demonstrated here
guess who put themselves on the must-hack list of every single national intelligence agency
Man... PDF is such an unfortunate file format.
public wont be getting this jailbreak, it is just another flex like elon's flipping car.
Oct 16th post;
More recently: iPhone Duo Jailbreak vid https://x.com/calif_io/status/2113570095549337977 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50206680)
Apple doesn't use AI to vibecode and/or pentest their software?
I think we have a right to know.
Well, surely you know that “AI” is just pattern matching and useless for Real Engineering work by Real Engineers.
Yeah, real engineers don't use grep either ...
This made me miss Cydia and the old jailbreaking days so much. Was such an exciting time to have an iPhone with the tinkering. Anyone still remember iDitDahText https://iditdahtext.com/iDitDahText.html?
Slightly offtopic but I find it slightly funny that they have accomplished to hack the iPhone yet the name of the third video is: Can you iPhone do this?
I would like to think that they might've created the video so fast and perhaps out of so excitement that the name of the title had the typo :-D
Too bad this will be patched instead of allowing the device owner to control their own device.
Of course it's better that they found that before some shady mercenary spyware company, but I'd also want to control my ios device the same way they did in the video, but no, that's not for us.
In principle it should be possible to jailbreak-patch the OS so that it will patch any patches to your liking.
So you think they will release the full exploit?
In this thread. Apple Acolytes Anonymous.
Seriously, California has a cathedral problem, may the vault dweller succeed.
Now - does the Signal 1-click work on Graphene?
I think we will probably see more and more restrictions on frontier models in the coming months. This is not what behemoths like Apple and Sony want to see.
Paradoxically, people are happier to buy things that they have control over, but boy, Apple loves to control every layer of consumerism.
Apple doesn't want security researchers to find bugs? Then why do they have a $2m bug bounty?
Awarding security researcher != Average Joe being able to jailbreak your device.
Hope you understand the difference.
Do we want everyone who doesn’t know how to program a car to reprogram their car? I.e. I think there should be restrictions on frontier models to ensure safety of others.
If the current frontier allows for this, we can probably expect alternative models to reach the same spot in a matter of months as well. The cat's out of the bag, for better of worse.
The paradox is that if the models are restricted, more exposed software will exist. I'm not convinced you can make a model that allows you to build secure software without it also being able to build exploits.
Bro rewrite IOS in Rust :)
My dream is to release an iOS app that self-installs and not say anything special about it other than having a "Download for iPhone" button on my website. If someone asked me, I'd answer: "Huh, what do you mean? It's our app for the iPhone."
You can do this on Android
Not for long now...
Still, but with a one-time 24-hour delay, at least until Google pulls a future Xiaomi.
This "there will be literally no difference between apple and Google in 70 days" is great propaganda for Apple.
It's better to use 0-day exploits to install legitimate software by now. It saves everyone from a lot of hassle. Or, more realistically for most, make a web app and forget about native apps.
BASED
Eli5 the iMessage video? They open a file that calls their webapp?
Curious to see how many tokens was spent
I guess I've never really understood why people who don't like the way the iPhone and apple ecosystem work buy apple products. There are plenty of other options out there. Every time articles about this and the App Store pop up it seems as if the comments are filled with a whole lot of android users that are upset that iPhone's aren't like androids. That's not to say those are all of the comments and there aren't clearly iPhone users who want these options but again, why buy a product that doesn't support these things if they're so important to you in the first place.