5 ms·

At least according to your own accounts on the Asahi IRC rooms, you were very aware of SPTM (which is part of the AS platform) and knew the people working on it

• deleted 20d ago
  [deleted]
• quitspamming 20d ago
  You are accusing someone by twisting their own words about their own self disclosed identity against them from a throwaway account created 5 hours ago. And they say irony is dead. I say this from an anonymous account but at least it isn't a throwaway. And at least I have the good taste to feel a little shame for my hypocrisy.
• politician 21d ago
  Do you work for Apple?
  • bigyabai 21d ago
    Probably not. Clean room RE is serious business, projects like Dolphin have to carefully vet contributors to remain legal.
    • 15155 20d ago
      Everyone says this, and then exactly zero cases are cited in support of or against this creative legal theory known as "clean room RE." No statute defines "clean room RE" and there's basically no relevant litigation establishing case law.
      • bigyabai 20d ago
        Who volunteers to be the shmuck that fights Nintendo's lawyers in court? Who's funding the defense against Apple? It's safest to err on the side of plausible deniability, any proximity to OEM software increases liability if things go wrong.
        • charcircuit 20d ago
          Nintendo doesn't care. There's been proprietary Nintendo SDK code in libogc (open source library for making GameCube homebrew) for years. And more recently the various decompilation process have made recreations of linked code from the SDK that compile match byte for byte. In practice the legal risk of being sued into oblivion for this is not there. If anything there would be a DMCA takedown / cease and desist.
          • literallywho 20d ago
            Right, but they are one of the biggest DMCA abusers. They killed many fan projects. They killed game renting in Japan as a concept. They killed Yuzu (a Switch emulator). And they could change their mind at any time.
            • charcircuit 20d ago
              >They killed Yuzu (a Switch emulator). For the record Yuzu included code for circumventing Nintendo's DRM they had on game carts. It violated the DMCA.
              • Akronymus 20d ago
                yuzu also sold access to more recent builds which allowed people to play unreleased nintendo games early, afair
                • mitxela 20d ago
                  Which also isn't illegal
      • mech422 20d ago
        there isn't ?? I sorta thought we figured all this out decades ago when SMB and DeCSS were being reversed? I think dosemu or something as well ? I seem to recall DeCSS being the 'hot button' as it was RE'd in a 'non clean' way, the code released, and then a 'clean room' RE could be made from the 'public' info ?? edit: actually, at the time I think there was German law allowing RE for 'interoperablity' or some such. But that was a long time ago so my memory might be off.
      • mort96 20d ago
        But there are plenty of successful projects which would probably have been taken down if it wasn't for clean room RE. I mean just look at the clean room IBM BIOS clones from "IBM compatibles" in the early days of the personal computer.
        • 15155 20d ago
          This is the same logic that the TSA uses to justify its existence. "We're so good nobody attempts it!"
          • Dylan16807 20d ago
            The background level of software copyright legal actions is significant enough. If plane attacks happened that much then it would give us solid evidence of TSA effectiveness even if they never caught anyone directly.
      • Dylan16807 20d ago
        When you say "case" does that mean you're rejecting the evidence of Phoenix technologies not getting sued along with all the other BIOS clones?
        • 15155 20d ago
          Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. "Not getting sued" doesn't validate a legal theory - legal theories are validated in court where they become case law. Until then, they are plainly speculative. This "clean room RE" fabrication is also not something so obviously compelling that nobody would ever attempt to challenge it - it's just that nobody has cared to put dollars behind it. IP provenance cases are enormously difficult to prove and are almost always settled ahead of trial. This concept is software engineer folklore more than anything.
          • Dylan16807 20d ago
            Saying you won't believe it's effective at all until someone sues and loses isn't the most compelling argument. If nobody sues then yes that is some evidence of effectiveness. It's not an absence of evidence, you're misusing that line.
      • mitxela 20d ago
        It's a defense. It's like having a moat around your castle. You don't need a moat to repel invaders since you also have a wall, and you might not get invaded anyway. There's no law saying you have to do clean room RE. It's legal for me to look at a decompiled driver and write my own driver from scratch. It's not legal for me to just copy the decompilation, and a clean room environment is solid proof that it wasn't copied, but it's not the only way to not copy it, since I could also just not copy it.
        • 15155 20d ago
          > It's a defense. Who has used it successfully in litigation?
      • bri3d 20d ago
        CA v. Altai (where the abstraction-filteration-comparison principle comes from) and SAS v. World provide pretty strong positive evidence that clean room is a valuable technique in both the US and Europe. I do agree with you that the term is misused (it’s almost completely irrelevant here, anyway) and over-applied, but “not having ever been in a position to see or access the source code” is proven, especially in SAS v World, to be a pretty strong defense that’s worth pursuing in some re-implementation scenarios.
      • xoa 20d ago
        >No statute defines "clean room RE" and there's basically no relevant litigation establishing case law. You seem confused here? "Clean Room RE" is simply a descriptive result of copyright law in the US, and is well established. In the US there is no "sweat of the brow doctrine", pure facts simply cannot be copyrighted at all, nor underlying methods/ideas (that's patents). And as a direct result of the latter, again unlike patents, if two people truly independently write the same thing, both get separate copyright. "Clean room reverse engineering" is just applying that to make any legal fight much cheaper or discourage it from every being bothered with in the first place. You have an RE "dirty" team that goes through copyrighted software and makes a specification that is purely factual, ie, "function 1 takes (int16)X input and does equation ABC on it, function 2 takes (long)X & (long)Y inputs and does LMN" etc. A factual/math spec like that cannot be copyrighted, so it breaks any derivation chain. They then give that, and only that with no other communications, to the clean team. If someone with no other exposure to the software being RE'd uses that spec to write a new piece of software themselves, then by definition the result cannot have any copyright of the original. It's a brand new work based off a list of uncopyrightable facts & math/ideas (though worth noting it could still get tripped up by abomination that is software patents). There are other ways to argue against copyright infringement successfully, but they're much more subjective, which legally speaking reads "expensive, uncertain". CRRE simply trades that for two clear binary questions: was the spec copyrightable, and did the people writing a new piece of software from that spec have any previous exposure to the original? If the answers to that are no, then all arguments about function names being similar or whatever are no longer relevant. On the subject of LLMs, one curious twist is that proprietary software might have less effective protection then open source depending on how it all goes. A coding LLM almost certain trained on all open source software available on the web. So there's at least some argument it's tainted. But proprietary software is proprietary. If the LLM has never had any of the source code in its training input, then isn't it clean in terms of producing anything derivative of that? That'll be kinda interesting, and might leave some companies with a bit of a conundrum (or I guess pushing the patent side even harder, but that has a much more sane 20 year expiration date vs copyright).
      • tzs 19d ago
        > No statute defines "clean room RE" and there's basically no relevant litigation establishing case law. It doesn't really make sense for it to be in a statute or in case law. When you are a copyright infringement defendant the plaintiff has the burden of proving two things: (1) that they have valid and enforceable copyright rights, and (2) that you infringed those rights. Direct proof of the later is rare, so they usually prove infringement by showing you had access to the work and that your alleged infringing work is substantially similar. There are some defenses in the statute, such as fair use. With these defenses you are basically saying "Even if they prove everything that normally would prove they case, there is this exception that says in these circumstances I'm allowed to do that". (That's called an affirmative defense). There are also affirmative defenses that were developed in case law. First sale doctrine was originally a case law developed affirmative defense, but was later incorporated in the statute. Copyright misuse is another case law affirmative defense. That one has not been incorporated into statute. There are also non-affirmative defenses, often called negative defenses or failure-of-proof defenses. With these your defense it "They can't prove I did this thing that is necessary for them to win". Clean room implementations are not technically a defense. They are a development methodology designed to provide rebuttal evidence to support a future failure-of-proof defense if you are accused of infringement. How would you even put that in a statute? As far as case law goes all the case law you'd expect to see is around the particular evidence offered to show the implementers really did not have access to copyrighted elements of plaintiff's work, like record keeping and proof of authenticity and things like that. An analogy would be like not having alcohol at an event you are hosting that is open to families because you want to make sure you don't violate laws against serving alcohol to minors. You aren't going to find a statute that says "Not having served alcohol to children is a defense to a charge violating the not serving alcohol to children statute". It is implicit in the not serving alcohol to children statute. Any case law you find on this will not be about whether not serving alcohol to children is a valid way to avoid violating the not serving alcohol to children law. It will be about whether or not some kid that had alcohol got it from you or snuck it in from outside or about whether you took care to make sure your caterer adhered to you no alcohol policy or things like that.
• ADevWithAnIdea 21d ago
  The friend I am referring to I met at Stanford around April of 2026 in a dorm event. We've spoken in person exactly once (I use "friend" loosely to describe anyone I've spoken to who I'm not on bad terms with) and at no point did we discuss anything detailed about Apple Silicon. For further context, I left Apple in June of 2025.
  • flippingheck 20d ago
    Isn't that chat log from 2024?
    • vesrah 20d ago
      If you read the page it says 2026-06-04.
      • flippingheck 20d ago
        Ah. I read the post, but only saw "2024-07-16 04:52 ChanServ changed [...]" On mobile I didn't see the full URL, and zoomed before I saw the calendar. My bad.
    • mathisfun123 20d ago
      am i crazy or is the date stamp not literally in the link?
• viraptor 21d ago
  Spend enough time in tech and you'll know lots of people who know both technical and business secrets and are under various levels of NDAs. The message you link to explicitly mentions only public info was exchanged. Just talking to someone is not an indication of infringement in any way.
  • Eufrat 20d ago
    I think this comment is missing the forest for the trees. Obviously, ephemeral interaction is going to happen. The author’s blogpost is sloppy and has some signs of being AI written. This kind of bleeds into the main point I’m going to make. Asahi Linux folks are clearly more conservative and erring on the side of caution, so, this means that the glibness with which the author is treating any of this is probably sufficient cause to refuse his entries. It is unclear if LLMs should be considered a toxic waste dump in terms of trying to maintain a clean room. We have not established a standard. It is clear the author doesn’t think this is a big deal, so that’s one conflict. The other conflict is that it is not clear what their exact interactions with Apple Silicon folks is and their glibness of it doesn’t clarify anything. If you take a group that is trying to be very careful about the potential legal landmines a still nascent technology has and you get someone that espouses a general glibness about those concerns wanting to merge code…why on earth would you expect that group to accept them as a contributor? This is not to say this isn’t really cool and a neat use of LLMs, but it is totally understandable why Asahi Linux won’t accept the fruits of this kind of development. If it turns out that Apple can identify its non-OSS code in this, it’ll be a mess.
    • noir_lord 20d ago
      > Asahi Linux folks are clearly more conservative and erring on the side of caution I mean they are working around and on hardware controlled by a nearly 5 trillion market cap behemoth who has resources on the level of some nation states. I'd be erring on the side of caution as well if they could hire that many lawyers.
• flippingheck 20d ago
  > <StanfordAppliedCyber[m]> one of my friends is a very senior engineer who lead a lot of the sptm work and controls a lot of boot, may talk to him about it (obviously he hasn't told me anything that isn't public) For the lazy.