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> How can they help you? How can anyone help you? Well, that's the fundamental problem. With open hardware that you fully and completely own when you buy it, s

• tshaddox 4y ago
  > Well, that's the fundamental problem. A better problem, some may say, than having a thriving market for stolen laptops. > Not a world I want to live in. But a world many may prefer to the world with a thriving market for stolen laptops.
  • 988747 4y ago
    > A better problem, some may say, than having a thriving market for stolen laptops. Some may say that, because having their laptop stolen is a problem they actually experienced. Having your device remain owned by a vendor, who only "licenses" it for you to use opens up a whole new world of problems, some of which average person can't even imagine.
    • kaba0 4y ago
      Isn’t that quite a slippery slope to call it licensing?
    • gretch 4y ago
      > Having your device remain owned by a vendor, who only "licenses" it for you to use opens up a whole new world of problems, some of which average person can't even imagine. Actually, everyone experiences this right now. Macbooks are working like this. And 99% of people are fine with it. We don't have to imagine anything
      • jjav 4y ago
        > Actually, everyone experiences this right now. That's not true. I think you're saying that Mac users are already today in an ecosystem where this could bite them hard, that much is true. But nobody gives it any thought until they personally find their multi-thousand dollar device useless and Apple refuses to help even though they totally could if they cared. Only then do they realize what a terrible situation it is.
    • brookst 4y ago
      And yet “average” people buy and sell MacBooks every day without imagining, let alone experiencing those problems. It is only thieves and ideologues who actually experience any difficulty. And while I’m all for righteous purity, I am also happy knowing that the thief who stole my MacBook from Spaces coworking in San Jose (do not ever use Spaces!) will get nothing for the risk they took, and/or that a buyer taking a too good to be true deal will get a brick. Yes, I like this world better than the free-open-insecure alternative.
      • tshaddox 4y ago
        > And while I’m all for righteous purity, I am also happy knowing that the thief who stole my MacBook from Spaces coworking in San Jose (do not ever use Spaces!) will get nothing for the risk they took, and/or that a buyer taking a too good to be true deal will get a brick. That might be a minor consolation, but the bigger point is that this will (hopefully) significantly disrupt the market for shady used MacBook sales and thus the incentive to target MacBooks for theft.
      • zakki 4y ago
        There is n=1 up there that someone is not stealing his laptop. He just forgot his firmware password. His Find My account still showing the device, but Apple doesn’t want to unlock it because he lost his receipt.
        • sbuk 4y ago
          It's unfortunate, for sure, but the warnings are abundant; in not so many words don't forget these passwords or the consequences will be dire. Losing receipts for big ticket items is, I'm afraid to say, irresponsible. File the hard copy, or scan and save in multiple secure locations. The burden of proof of ownership is on the owner, it cannot be any other way. Heck, I'm sure a credit card receipt would do. Find it on a bank statement and go to small claims in the worst case.
        • brookst 4y ago
          Sure. And that sucks. But do is it worth incentivizing the theft of n = many laptops? This is the government encryption backdoor all over again. There is no such thing as a security backdoor that can be used only by good guys. If Apple can’t determine someone is the legitimate owner of a locked device, they have two choices: allow thieves to unlock devices, resulting in more theft. Or decline to unlock for some legitimate owners who chose to lock their device and not take precautions. It’s a tough choice, but I think Apple is making the right one here. You may disagree, and that’s fine.
    • tshaddox 4y ago
      If you own a car and by some bizarre sequence of events all evidence that you own it has vanished, and then you lock yourself out, you might have a hard time getting a locksmith to unlock it for you. Police might even get upset if they see you trying to break into it! This doesn't seem very relevant to whether or not you "own" the car or "only license it." Granted, there is probably some "last resort" where you go to a judge or something, but I bet if you got an order from a judge for Apple to unlock your laptop they would do it!
      • quesera 4y ago
        In my experience, and FWIW, locksmiths do not bother asking for ID when defeating the lock on your car or house.
        • dijit 4y ago
          I had to present ID when a locksmith drilled my lock in Sweden. He took down the details of it.
  • m4rtink 4y ago
    While unfortunate for any affected individuals, still IMHO a much smaller problem than a few companies have basically full control over all computers people use. That's much more dangerous for the society than a few thieves making a buck.
    • smoldesu 4y ago
      [flagged]
      • widowlark 4y ago
        Too true, as evidenced by the comments in this thread. I fear for open computing and software based on what im seeing here.
        • altairprime 4y ago
          “If you don’t know the credentials to reuse it, it’s bricked” is a valid choice whether the hardware is open source or not. Yubikey equivalents that are fully open source still have to be shredded rather than recycled, if properly secured. Open computing isn’t incompatible with secure computing — but secure computing is absolutely incompatible with reusable computing. I have nothing against reusable computing, but I’m tired of seeing “open” and “right to repair” erroneously held up as meaningful solutions to reusable–repurposeable computing. Focusing on the core issue at hand – that you feel we should have the right to repurpose hardware in our possession without impediment – would go a long ways towards starting the correct and necessary conversations about “security” and “anti-theft” that, today, will simply not happen productively under the open/repair banners that the reuse/repurpose movement is trying to ride under.
          • tshaddox 4y ago
            > Open computing isn’t incompatible with secure computing — but secure computing is absolutely incompatible with reusable computing. Is the first part even true? It does seem to me that there are a class of tasks, the most obvious being competitive video games, that do require that the user not have complete control over the hardware and software they're using.
• dijit 4y ago
  The main corrolarry is your user account. One could convincingly argue that dead accounts are e-waste. The main reason I guess we don't say that is because we have expiration policies. But if you lose access to your, say, facebook account with 100GiB of uploaded content, then that content is going to be sitting consuming at least 300GiB of media (replication, backups etc;). Thus: is that a problem? I see a device like this as an extension of my self, having it "open for all" is not desirable; I want to knowingly give it to someone. If someone takes it, or I do not unlock it, then I don't want the possibility for it to unlock. I paid for it, it's mine, in perpetuity until I say otherwise, even if I'm dead: since as I mentioned it's an extension of me... it is dead too.
  • smoldesu 4y ago
    > I paid for it, it's mine Funny misconception, that. You paid for it, but Apple controls it. You trust Apple to do the right thing, but you cannot prove that they do. You cannot hold them accountable for doing the right thing, either. So, how can you trust it as an extension of your self? I understand your argument, but you've based it on a misconception if you think you're the ultimate user with the greatest authority over your device. Apple makes the rules, the only thing you do as a user is agree to play by them.
    • kaba0 4y ago
      No, the great thing is that even apple can’t do everything with your device! If it’s encrypted they (presumably) can’t access that data at all. Unlocking a device by apple has no bad incentives associated, at the very worst case someone else can use your owned device without access to any of your data, aka stealing. And that assumes that apple will corruptly open it for someone else which they have zero interest in and that just accounts for regular old stealing with a billion dollar company’s help?
      • widowlark 4y ago
        you really think apple doesnt have a way to completely wipe your device without your permission?
• kaba0 4y ago
  At the same time, it hardly disincentivizes thief from laying their hands on apple devices. With that in mind I’m not sure whether this is not a worthy tradeoff.
• kkielhofner 4y ago
  As noted in the article, this is more-or-less an issue with corporate/biz MDM solutions. A corporation buying hardware from another corporation. The “user” here is and was never in control of the hardware. The only human beings close to that role are the IT department. Like it or not there are legitimate reasons corps do this. HIPAA, SOC, PCI, good old fashioned responsibility, etc. Apple isn’t the only vendor that sells systems and hardware locked in this fashion. The reason we’re talking about this and not anyone else: 1) Apple is one of the world’a most valuable companies. 2) There is a tiny but very loud minority of people who have a seething, irrational hatred of them and cannot ever acknowledge anything positive about them. 3) Their solution for this is actually implemented well and can’t be bypassed. I understand your point but we’ve gotten here for valid reasons - “XYZ employee gets laptop with 100m SSNs stolen”, etc. Speaking more broadly, you are aware that with Apple Silicon they had a massive opportunity to do as you say and “own” user hardware, right? It would have been trivial for them to utilize all of this to prevent alternate OS installation. Even if they did lock out alternate OS installation they’d lose what, 0.5% of sales from the people ranting about Apple on HN that were never really going to buy Apple anyway? Yet here we are with Asahi Linux.
  • Dylan16807 4y ago
    > I understand your point but we’ve gotten here for valid reasons - “XYZ employee gets laptop with 100m SSNs stolen”, etc. That's not the reason you're prevented from resetting the laptop.
• mannerheim 4y ago
  > With open hardware that you fully and completely own when you buy it, such problems are impossible. I don't see why, in principle, you couldn't have open hardware that provided the same capability to brick the device for unauthorised users. In which case you would be just as SOL if you forgot the credentials to that, too.
• dijit 4y ago
  > With open hardware that you fully and completely own when you buy it Unless you lose the password to unlock the BIOS. Which is not resettable via the (now very old) method of removing the CMOS battery or shorting a jumper on the motherboard for at least a decade. (I had this issue on a HP Elitebook 8440p from 2011)
• Someone 4y ago
  > With open hardware that you fully and completely own when you buy it, such problems are impossible. I don’t understand. If you have open hardware that you have full control over, choose to lock it down to make it impossible to factory reset the device without a password, and then forget that password, how does having open hardware help? If you say “there always should be a way to factory reset the device without a password” you are giving up a feature that Apple provides: making it less worthwhile to steal Apple devices.
• olliej 4y ago
  Open hardware doesn’t change this at all. Either you have an activation lock like feature or you do not. If your hardware has a path that allows a random person to circumvent it, then by definition it does not have an activation lock. This isn’t an open vs closed hardware question. This “does this feature exist”, and your argument is that it should not. This is spite of the fact that activation lock was a feature introduced specifically in response to high rates of theft, and its introduction immediately reducing that theft. Activation lock is a feature that people want, but again activation lock is either there or it is not. If your “open” hardware includes a mechanism that bypasses an ownership lock then by definition the lock is not a functional if feature. A company can make an open laptop that has an activation system that requires an authentication in or to do a full device reset, or to replace the firmware. But if that lock is in place, it can’t let you flash a new firmware on or reset it, because again that defeats the purpose.