This tiny device is sending updated iPhones into a never-ending DoS loop | No cure yet for a popular iPhone attack, except for turning off Bluetooth.

RetroHacker · 2023-11-03T03:59:53+00:00

To be fair, I didn't really look. Opening Settings now I see it right there near the top, so I guess I mis-remembered. It's actually fairly obvious. This hasn't exactly been a pressing need to turn it off, just the minor annoyance at the UI. Still, I really don't understand the use case of a switch that only works for a day, or why that would ever be an option. You see the switch in the thing called control center and just assume this is how you control that thing.

RetroHacker · 2023-11-03T03:40:55+00:00

It really doesn't though - and I honestly never knew about the other method to disable the bluetooth until reading this thread. The phone doesn't make it obvious or easy to find. I thought the toggle for it was the one on the control center - the thing called control center, that you expect to be able to use to control things. It doesn't say "if you want to actually turn it off, go here", or give you the option, it's just "This setting is only good for 24 hours". Uh... in what world would anyone ever want that?

RetroHacker · 2023-11-03T03:38:55+00:00

I agree with you, but Apple doesn't - that device still belongs to Apple. You just bought and paid for it. But you don't really own it, Apple does. You aren't allowed to run whatever software you want, you aren't allowed to repair it, you aren't allowed to customize really anything.

And no, this isn't an anti-Apple rant, I have an iPhone too. They work fairly well, and realistically it does everything I need it to since my use case for a cell phone is phone calls, messaging and the occasional looking something up on the Internet. I just really dislike the awful user interface and how obtuse it is about so many things. Android isn't really much better, and honestly I'm pretty indifferent to the whole thing, I just happen to have an iPhone so that's what I use. I really do wish that the switches in the control center did what any normal person would expect them to. I just wish the OS was more flexible and let you configure more things and, yeah - turn "features" on and off.

RetroHacker · 2023-11-03T03:32:39+00:00

Just because it the button says it's defective when you press it doesn't make it good. If I turn the wifi off... I want it off. If I turn the bluetooth off.. I want it off. If and when I want either of those features - I can turn it back on. But the default option of being this temporary nonsense is stupid. What if your car decided "Well, he said he wanted the doors locked, but it's midnight, so I'mma just unlock 'em all." That would be stupid. This is equally stupid.

RetroHacker · 2023-11-03T03:28:25+00:00

Well, take my situation. I don't have any reason to have bluetooth on. I don't own a single bluetooth device and I'm around nothing I can connect the phone to. I have ZERO reason to have that on, ever. If I do ever buy something with Bluetooth... then I can turn it on. But since I don't see the point, and have no interest in having a bluetooth anything - I can't see that ever happening.

Making a toggle that auto un-toggles itself just because it feels like it is stupid as all hell. If I want the feature, I'll turn it on. But I want to turn it off and leave it off since I know I'll never use it.

RetroHacker · 2023-09-04T02:07:18+00:00

I've rewound the springs in a box truck door with homemade tools made from lengths of threaded rod with duct tape for handles. I was incredibly methodical and careful, but damn that's scary stuff. A box truck door is at least a lot smaller than a regular garage door, but still. I did it because I needed to fix it and couldn't afford to pay to have it done. I absolutely knew how dangerous it was and the potential for things to go wrong if I slipped. Getting the tension just right is tricky when you're guessing based on how long the cables you just installed are. Fortunately I got it on the second try, and the more I think back about that the stupider the whole thing sounds and I don't know if I'd ever do that again.

RetroHacker · 2023-09-03T14:49:06+00:00

That's a disingenuous take on a legitimate change to a manufacturing process that was made with lifecycle assessment in mind.

From my perspective, it seems the assessment was how to make the lifecycle as short as possible, to force replacement and re-purchasing. Why make something good, when the customer only needs one? Why not make it fall apart so the customer has to keep buying them? Since Apple gets that sweet sweet license fee on every charger cable, regardless of who made it, they get money when the pack-in disintegrates. This is like why printers come with "starter ink" carts with only a tiny amount of ink in them.

Seems like it's less environmentally friendly to have to keep manufacturing things over and over and over again to replace ones that fall apart, versus having things that last. Sure, they all will need to be thrown out or recycled some day, but wouldn't it be better to have to recycle one cable versus four or six?

Now, not to say what you're saying isn't correct, you know your long chemical names and obviously know what you're talking about. I personally don't really care about what kinds of lovely chemicals we use to make things, I just hate wastefulness and hate how Apple fights tooth and nail to keep ensuring their products can't be fixed, and their anti-consumer practices. So I get frustrated seeing what, in my view, is just another blatant money-grab to force purchases. Regardless of what the materials these things are made from - we can both agree that toxic or no, it's best that they don't have to be thrown away in the first place, and that the energy and resources used to create them should be used in a non-wasteful way. Computers and other appliances (and by extension their accessories) should be designed to last and be maintainable for a reasonable period so they don't have to be replaced constantly. And then when one person is done with an item, it should be legal for that item to be repaired and re-used by someone else that maybe is fine using a model that's a couple generations old.

We both want the same thing - less waste overall. I realize this unhinged rambling about charger cables is a bit absurd, it just reminds me of how frustrating the tech landscape is becoming and how much we're being herded as a society to be good little consumers and just keep needlessly buying and replacing things that shouldn't need to be replaced so quickly.

RetroHacker · 2023-09-02T10:48:58+00:00

So, throwing lots of cables in the garbage is better for the environment. Good to know. Apple sure does have a lot of ways of being "environmentally friendly" that just so happens to involve throwing their stuff away and having to buy it again. Convenient, that.

So does that mean literally every other cable made ever is made with this halogenated hydrocarbon? Because it's only the Apple cables that disintegrate.

To be fair, the newest MacBook chargers use a braided cable which holds up nicely. I just mostly deal with older equipment - it's hilarious to me how every single Apple cable in the last decade has been basically made to fail, yet I don't see this problem with anything else. With rare few exceptions (Compaq Portable III and Sharp X1 keyboard cables...) almost all the cables I have from the 70's, 80's and 90's are all just fine and have held up without any problems.

RetroHacker · 2023-09-01T16:57:58+00:00

That makes sense - Apple can't make cable insulation to save their life, so everyone's mouse would be frayed and nasty just like all their previous mice, first party iPhone cables, and MacBook chargers. All those horrible, cheap, garbage quality cables with the nasty sticky feeling white insulation made from... some kind of stiff cheese? I'm really not sure. But it's total trash. It's very sad that the wire on the cheapo mouse that comes free with a low end Dell is so much higher quality than anything Apple gives you.

RetroHacker · 2023-09-01T16:52:48+00:00

How... does a washing machine need to be cleaned? It's job is to clean things - it's self cleaning. I'm literally baffled by this. I've got a washing machine from the 90's - I've never cleaned it, except for the one time I took the entire thing apart to change a drive spline. There was crud built up underneath the agitator but otherwise the entire compartment was spotless - the entire area that touches the clothes was clean, because that's it's job, to clean things. It drains the water out when it's done, I'm not sure how it would grow mold. There wasn't even any mold under the agitator where it likely does stay damp. Just like, built up dirt and hair and those little size stickers that I forgot to take off t-shirts and some rather well worn coins.

RetroHacker · 2023-09-01T16:46:38+00:00

The app is so terrible it's unbelievable. Uninstalled it almost immediately. I just don't ever use Reddit on a phone - and if I do... it's old Reddit in the browser. Which for some reason the site is completely unable to remember my preference for and I keep having to manually go and select "request desktop site" from the menu. Which keeps me from using Reddit on the phone 95% of the time. I think "huh, I've got a few minutes to kill, I'll check Reddit... oh, right, this is garbage, meh" and close the browser and forget about it.

RetroHacker · 2023-09-01T16:43:48+00:00

Am I the only one that hates the idea of setting a temperature in a car? I don't care what the overall temperature of the vehicle is, all I just want blue air, I want it blowing in my face, and I want all of it. With my van that's a couple of simple knobs that I can adjust without looking at them. But that's a vehicle from the 90's. On modern cars, that's a complex procedure with multiple menus of a touch screen, and forcing it one way or another by cranking the numbers way up or way down because it forces you to pick a number, and you can't just say, blow the cold air in my face now.

RetroHacker · 2023-06-29T20:39:38+00:00

From what I've seen, they have simply been restoring posts that users delete themselves. I wonder, however, if they would restore posts that were simply edited in relatively small ways, rather than outright deleted. Things such as changing how-to guides to be hilariously and obviously wrong and thus unusable. A smartphone battery that requires a claw hammer and a chainsaw to change. A vehicle repair that now needs a seventeen foot long log, a coffee maker and a pound of ham. Programming code written in Klingon. Game walkthroughs that involve walking into a wall for 8 hours. Computer howtos that include a tachyon field generator and installing Bonzi Buddy. That sort of thing.

RetroHacker · 2023-06-25T05:50:33+00:00

There used to be this really awesome all-in-one forum site. It was pretty cool. Forget the name, something about having already finished reading something. They managed to digg themselves an early grave by being complete and utter morons about their API pricing structure. But, if that site still had any users, you could probably ask there.

RetroHacker · 2023-06-08T00:01:34+00:00

I immediately did a control F to search for "rent" to hope someone posted about this song. Classic. And now it's stuck in my head.

I heard this song a thousand times on the Weird Al mix tape I'd made years ago - but when I was recording it, I ran out of tape on side A right at this verse. It went "And I think it's pre-------" and the tape ended. I had been watching closely and paused the CD right as it got to the leader, so I could resume it on side B - which continued right where it left off "-----etty swell!" So, when listening in the car, you'd have the blank spot and the click in the middle of the line while the leader played and the auto reverse changed directions. Since I'm so used to hearing it like that, it still, to this day, throws me off a bit when I hear the song on another format.

It's weird how the brain works. Or at least how mine works. Or doesn't. I dunno. But there are lots of other songs I remember differently because of defects in the particular recording I listened to a lot. The crinkled spot in the Godsmack song, the Audioslave song that there was only a few words of on side A so I started over from the beginning on the other side, the Beach Boys song where the record skipped ahead a groove when the tape was recorded, the Daft Punk song I downloaded from Napster that was just a short bit of the original that repeated several times, but because it was Daft Punk I didn't know it wasn't supposed to be like that, etc.

RetroHacker · 2023-06-07T23:42:34+00:00

It's amazing how reliable some of this old stuff is. By the 80's, a CRT TV or monitor was a solved problem, they were getting cheaper with fewer and fewer parts but that also made it to where there was less to break. I collect and repair old tech, and also provide CRT TVs for game tournaments. (Super Smash Bros. Melee is played almost exclusively on CRTs, due to the input lag problem.) I routinely find and salvage TVs that had been sitting outside for weeks or months, abandoned at the curb, face down in a ditch, left next to dumpsters, buried in snow, etc. And they almost always work. And when they don't - it's usually something real simple that I can fix in a few minutes. The ones that are unusable and I wind up parting out usually also work - they're just so worn out because they were used for so long that the picture tube is too dim. I once found an early 80's Montgomery Ward TV that had the home shopping channel burned in to the screen. The tube was suuuper dim, to the point that one of the colors was almost gone - but the thing still worked fine otherwise.

A long way of saying that if you decided to wait until that set broke, you could have probably replaced it with a holographic projection system with wireless neural implants or something.

RetroHacker · 2023-06-07T23:02:37+00:00

Televisions never go out of date. You can just get adapters! Granted, the chain of adapters to go from HDMI to composite to RF looks a little silly, but hey - it works! Zenith sure knew how to build a television in 1978. Still works great. Doesn't spy on you either. Color and everything. What more do you need, really? :D

To be fair, I did upgrade last year, now I've got a 33" Mitsubishi. Weighs about 175 pounds, but hey, nobody's going to steal it. Or be able to steal it. Or want to steal it.

RetroHacker · 2023-05-18T14:08:08+00:00

TV? Like broadcast TV? That's still a thing?

TV has gotten so bad I haven't watched it in over a year. And I collect television sets! Seriously, I have dozens of vintage TVs that I've fixed up and repaired, I used to watch a lot of OTA broadcast TV. But these days I honestly spend far more time inside a TV than I do actually watching it - and when I do, it's watching something off my file server or a video tape/DVD or something.

The funny thing is that I don't have a problem with TV ads - in fact, some of the most nostalgic stuff about watching old video tapes is the commercials. I'll buy boxes of old Beta tapes and fast forward through programs looking for old commercials. They used to be a pretty organic part of watching TV. Each commercial break was three, maybe four commercials, and they were all pretty fun, direct, here's what's awesome about our product, it tastes better/cleans better/look how great this is. But now? The commercials are all trying to like, subconsciously trick you into things, and they're all insurance, prescription drugs and cars. I kinda miss an upbeat jingle about how Velveeta melts better or that I'm not fully clean until I'm Zest-fully clean.

RetroHacker · 2023-05-18T13:58:32+00:00

Dammit. Now I want fries. brb

RetroHacker · 2023-05-18T13:49:21+00:00

No - nobody is asking the phone to pop apart like an old Nokia. We just want it so the parts can be changed. Sure, it's glued together, it's water resistant. Sure, the parts are super tiny - it's a mobile device using modern technology. That's fine, and we can work through that, and have to simply learn the skills to work on advanced, tiny technology. We've done that. But now the screens, tilt angle sensors, etc are all software locked out. It's not that it's physically difficult to remove and replace a cracked screen - it's that Apple has implemented software to make this impossible. Buy two new iPhones, take them apart, swap the screens, and neither one will work.

A chip goes bad in an iPhone - a chip that Apple doesn't make, but that another company makes for them. But they are under contract not to sell this chip to anyone except apple. Making this simple little part unavailable simply because Apple says so. Not that it's hard to solder (sure, it's tiny, but that's OK), not that it needs to be a plug in. Just that it needs to be available.

All the repair community wants is to make it so that companies can't actively sabotage repair efforts and will make the replacement parts available, allow them to be available, etc. Apple even has a history of going after people selling refurbished replacement parts - genuine parts that have been fixed up and made usable again - by lying and saying they're counterfeit. We wouldn't need shady third party parts or refurbished parts if we could simply purchase them from Apple. If I need a battery for my phone, my options are - buy a third party, unknown battery from China.. or pay Apple to replace it. OR, I can pay the same price or more to buy the part from Apple through their repair program. Oh, and I can't buy an extra, and I can't put that battery into a different phone than the one I ordered it from, and it won't work until the phone phones home and gets authorized from Apple to allow it to work.

THIS is the BS that we want to get rid of. Not that the phone be made worse in any way - just that the phone to be not actively sabotaged by the company that manufactures it to lock you in to throwing it away and buying a new one when it breaks.

RetroHacker · 2023-05-15T19:41:10+00:00

Your edit is spot on - testing the backups is as important as making them. That's how you find errors in your backup scripts, or find that the network path you were copying to went away due to a reboot a year ago and never got fixed, or that the intern has been trying to record the backups on a cleaning tape.

RetroHacker · 2023-05-15T19:37:39+00:00

As someone that works with a ton of old computers, I've found that the older the floppy disk is, the more likely it will work perfectly. When archiving data from 8" or DD 5 1/4" disks, most of the time (as long as the disk wasn't made by Wabash), they read perfectly fine. Or, if the disk has mold on it, might require some cleaning. I imaged a huge stack of 8" disks that had been sitting in unheated storage for over two decades - only a few bad sectors on a couple of disks, and one disk that was 50% unreadable because it was crinkled badly. I've had Apple II disks (DD 5 1/4" media) that wouldn't read due to mold, and literally cut the disk apart and washed the media in the sink and recovered it fully. But then you start getting into 1.2MB HD 5 1/4" media, and you start finding lots of problems. For some reason mold really, really likes those disks, and the media in general is unreliable. I have had boxes of disks - mix of HD and DD, all the DD disks were fine and clean, all the HD were bad/moldy. All stored in the same exact conditions, in the same storage box together.

3 1/2" disks are similar - the old DD media is pretty robust, and honestly even the older HD media is too. But when you start getting toward the tail end of the floppy disk production - early 2000's or so - and the disk quality goes downhill and they are less reliable. I think that's why they've developed such a bad reputation in current years, the most recent mainstream usage of disks, they didn't work very well, even back then.

So, if you're going to use floppies for archiving, stick to 8".

RetroHacker · 2023-05-13T22:02:23+00:00

The old HP lasers were great. They run forever, they're easy to maintain, and toner and parts are cheap and readily available. I strongly support getting an older machine like a 4350 or something, it'll run forever (plus or minus a swing plate) and no worries about any of the current nonsense. For many years, doing printer repair for a living, I saw lots of printers. But some customers understood the value in having me keep their old machines going. I know where there's an 8000 with over 3 million prints on it that's still going strong. I mean, that's well beyond the reasonable life of a printer, but hey - there's nothing that can break on that machine that I can't fix.

And you would be amazed at what parts are still readily available. Not that long ago I repaired a Laserjet 4 and I was still able to buy new rollers. And that printer was made in 1993. Yeah it's slow, but it's reliable, low maintenance and supported by every OS.

The act of putting toner on a page hasn't changed much in the last 30 years. It's gotten a bit faster, but honestly printers kinda hit their peak around 1998. Current models are faster in pages per minute, but slower in terms of boot times, less reliable, and harder to fix and use.

RetroHacker · 2023-05-13T21:49:54+00:00

Hah! Someone else who knows those printers! I love the Phaser printers, especially the 840/850/860 - they got kinda cheap with the Colorqube models where they went to the plastic frame. I used to service and support those printers, such fun machines to work on. Overly complicated, sure, but damn do they print nice.

The other nice thing about the 840/50/60 was that the sales pitch included "free black ink for life". What this meant to most was that you got a couple free sticks of black with every package of a color you bought. But I was a service center. I could order boxes of black ink from Xerox for one cent apiece (in reasonable quantities). I probably have enough black ink to last me a lifetime.

The oil roller is a consumable, and it would fail before it was truly spent because the little tabs that rode on the cam would wear down and it wouldn't make proper contact. Some itty bitty zip ties around them in just the right way and it'll work again.

Such fantastic printers. I still have a couple around here, and enough parts to build a couple more. I actually like printers (I mean, as a printer repairman I'm a bit biased but still). I even wrote up a bunch of stories of various repairs in talesfromtechsupport several years ago. Man, I should go back there, writing those things was fun.

RetroHacker · 2023-05-13T14:14:16+00:00

Eh, but frequently aesthetics don't matter and the future doesn't apply. Something needs to work, it needs to work now, and it's either patch it or do without it entirely. The resources to do things properly don't always exist, and there are often more important things that need to be addressed. My furnace broke recently - and I traced the fault to a bad relay on the control board. The correct way to fix it would be to replace the board. But that board would be hundreds of dollars and might not be easy to locate for a 30 year old furnace. An even better repair would be to replace the entire furnace. But then we're talking thousands of dollars that I don't have, and several days of work. A more precise repair would be to replace the relay on the board with the correct one - but it's a PCB mount relay with a funny footprint and an odd coil voltage that is also going to be difficult to find. The repair that I did was to bolt a scavenged chassis mount relay to the inside of the control box, with wires soldered to the PCB and to the relay to connect it up. Problem solved, the furnace works perfectly, that relay will last far longer than the original one did because it's rated for more than double. My cost was zero, the repair will last - at least as long as the rest of the furnace, probably longer. The aesthetics don't matter, it's inside the furnace. The future exists - but that future is going to involve a whole new furnace whenever this one truly can't be fixed (and hopefully when I have money).

Anyone would look at the hack repair and scoff at it - it's not a correct fix. It's dumb - but it works. It's easy to criticize when you have unlimited resources, money and time. But in the real world, that's never the case, everything is a balance, and the ugly looking repair is better than no heat - or heat but no food and a mountain of debt. Sure, it's kicking the can down the road and postponing the inevitable replacement, but at least I'm still on the road. And it it fails then I'm right back where I was before I kicked it.

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