11 ms·
Isn't it a shame (and waste of human life really) that everything has to be reverse engineered?
by Tepix 4y ago
Isn't it a shame (and waste of human life really) that everything has to be reverse engineered?
- vaughan 4y agoReverse engineering can be a fun adventure.
- ChrisRR 4y agoI'm guessing the number of people who just want to use the hardware massively outweighs the number of people who want to reverse engineer it Even if the software were completely open source from day 0, a reverse engineer could still not look at the source and RE the hardware.
- CGamesPlay 4y agoNot really. Wouldn't it be a shame if nothing could be released without thorough documentation, to avoid the need for someone, sometime, to maybe have to reverse engineer it?
- arjvik 4y agoI don't think OP is saying that all hardware must have thorough documentation before it can legally be released. Instead, they're claiming Apple already has some documentation internally, and it costs them nothing to release it.
- darthrupert 4y agoA pretty big guess that it wouldn't cost them anything. The process of it all plus the secrets their competition could easily learn must both be quite valuable.
- chippiewill 4y agoThey should do it, but I doubt it would cost them nothing. That internal documentation is almost certainly not fit for external consumption and would need to be reviewed and rewritten in places.
- djaychela 4y agoPerhaps, but releasing it even in an unfinished state would massively reduce the duplication-of-effort which is needed for reverse engineering. There are often clues which would take a long time to find when working blind which you can glean even from a few sentences of concrete inside knowledge.
- kilburn 4y agoHonest question because I'm totally ignorant here: can anyone shed some light on the typical roadblocks for large corporations to release documentation like this one, other than "it's just easier not to do it"?
- smallnix 4y agoReferences to internal concepts (acronyms), Hyperlinks to internal knowledge bases, insight into individual contributers & team / org composition and mention of undisclosed efforts / strategy. And undisclosed failures on whatever level that stakeholders maybe should not see.
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y agoa) commercial in confidence, and b) non-disclosure agreements with partners. Internateral documentation may also need business / developer processes sanitised.
- happymellon 4y agoIts one thing to write for your team > This is a huge clusterfuck that requires A to be set before you can use B because of no good reason. :poo: And another to publicly publish that an API is a turd because you outsourced it for time to market reasons.
- iamgopal 4y agoLot of surface for security and legal attack.
- pixiemagic 4y ago
- christophilus 4y agoOr you could just open source it.
- ChrisRR 4y agoWelcome to medical software and ISO 62304 compliance
- LordDragonfang 4y ago...No, that sounds wonderful. I want to move to that reality.
- diffeomorphism 4y agoThat is not really how opposites work. The opposite of "none" is "some" not "thorough".
- StreamBright 4y agoYeah it is. In the 90s everything had a manual. Does anybody remember how good the documentation was for new hardware? I was looking for an example but google became garbage and I can't find any good example.
- jorvi 4y agoA sheet containing all the specs, wiring, resistances etc was tacked to the inside of my 80s speaker set. Fun discovery when I revamped them!
- StreamBright 4y agoYep, that is exactly what I am talking about. Maybe it was more of a 80s thing.
- rodgerd 4y agoI feel like this is overstating how good things were. Yes, my ZX Spectrum and Amiga both came with some very nice documentation to at least the block level on how everything worked - but at the same time, every programming manual for the Amiga was an expensive Addison-Wesley tome. Every programming language beyond BASIC was an expensive proprietary product. It wasn't the paradise people seem to (mis-)remember.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- gigatexal 4y agoThat's a super cynical way of looking at it. What I see is a triumph in the very hacker ethos of being able to reverse engineer these drivers. The team is even fixing bugs and will likely get better performance out of the hardware than can be found on MacOS when it's all said and done. And all of this is done without specs.
- kelnos 4y agoI don't think the grandparent is saying that people are wasting their time; they're saying that it's a shame that they even have to do this, and that public hardware documentation isn't the norm.
- Tepix 4y agoWhat's cynical about it? Apple is benefitting from the availability of Linux on these devices. That they do nothing to help this effort is disappointing. Yes, it is a triumph in reverse engineering. I am very impressed. But why reward Apple despite not helping in this effort?
- pharmakom 4y ago> Apple is benefitting from the availability of Linux on these devices. How do we know this? I think there are downsides too.
- wanderingmind 4y agoI would absolutely run a cloud Linux VM on M1 compared to any other hardware. Apple can create a PaaS that can rival AWS
- sofixa 4y agoHave you checked AWS' Graviton?
- gigatexal 4y agothey could ... but doing so would likely cost far too many billions even for Apple. Maybe they could justify it by saying instead of paying AWS and GCP and Azure for services they could just do it all in house on Apple hardware -- and boy howdy that'd be really cool -- I don't think they REALLY think that is a useful use of their time and resources and would rather instead focus on devices and services.
- _visgean 4y agothe people working on asahi seems to have a lot of fun, i am really envious of the work they are doing!
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoTheir work is phenomenal but I also kind of wish we would all stop supporting such a company.
- yellow_lead 4y agoI don't want to put down their achievements but I somewhat agree with you. And doing free work for a corporation the size of apple that could've just supported Linux from the start. I don't think it's a waste of life necessarily, but it is a shame.
- sounds 4y agoHow would Apple corporate priorities shift from their current strategy of removing all GPL code? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3559990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3559990
- smoldesu 4y agoI dunno, put their money where their mouth is and license it as BSD instead? They seem awfully fond of the license, what with how much BSD code appears in MacOS...