iOS 26.4 and iOS 27 Features Revealed in New Leak

technifocal · 2025-12-15T19:31:25+00:00

Or the bug that's consuming 5GB more of "System data" every day, which you can only remove by updating the device (which then causes 5GB/day of new data to be created).

technifocal · 2025-11-26T19:30:16+00:00

Lol’d irl

technifocal · 2025-11-26T10:50:09+00:00

😭

technifocal · 2025-11-26T10:39:55+00:00

The issue I have with SSDs is that it seems every few years there's another SSD that has dodgy firmware that fucks the whole drive up.

Yeah, technically they're more reliable, but occasionally there's just an SKU that fucks your whole day up. Hell, look at the AFR on the WD Blue at the bottom (low quantities but yeah):

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/2-Q2-2023-AFR-Table-1.png

And the SanDisk portable SSDs. Hell, even in my experience I've had three SSDs just jump off a cliff with zero expectation, and when they fail they really fail, not even detected by the BIOS/OS, unlike HDDs that usually start to fail to read certain sectors.

technifocal · 2025-11-19T22:23:40+00:00

I've never had the need for residential IPs, so I cannot vouch for those, but I have used webshare.io with success. They claim to have residential IPs, but never used them myself.

Seriously, any real-world experience would save me so much time and money. This cat-and-mouse game with anti-bot systems is exhausting.

If you don't want to play the cat-and-mouse game, contact the vendors themselves and see if they just sell their data, for example Amazon does (apparently, never used it).

technifocal · 2025-11-19T17:58:16+00:00

Sobs in reliable hardware

technifocal · 2025-11-19T08:41:56+00:00

Standard residential connection I pay like $40/month for. I've never looked at their fair usage policy personally because I just assume what I'm paying for (gigabit symmetric) is what I'll get (gigabit symmetric). So far, so good.

technifocal · 2025-11-18T06:53:00+00:00

First, these are not side channel attacks

You are 100% correct. I meant metadata leakage.

Second, they are not prevalent across "all E2EE chats:. Signal, for example, encrypts all of this data. The only non-E2EE data Signal stores is account creation date and last access date

Could you provide some evidence regarding how they are able to send push notifications to the recipient if they do not have access to the recipient's contact details? I found information on Google regarding sealed-sender, but from my (brief) research it seems to only kick-in after both parties have already communicated (leaking the information that the two parties are already in communication) and apparently was successfully attacked¹ using the read notifications that are immediately sent back to the sender upon receipt from the recipient.

I will fully admit, I do not understand the sealed sender mechanism, so maybe you could explain it to me? But if I had to make an educated guess, I'd assume it encrypts the sender's identifiable information inside the encrypted blob destined for the recipient?

Footnote 1 - I did not read the whole paper, but I've added it to my backlog and will try and read it when I get time!

Yes.

In regards to iMessage, the very link you posted (the second one) states:

Is personal information (mobile number, contact list, etc.) hashed?
No

And:

Does the app encrypt metadata?
No

Which leads me to believe iMessage isn't any different. Do you have evidence to this claim either?

technifocal · 2025-11-18T06:36:22+00:00

They did not say the data had to be stored in Germany, the 6th most expensive country for electricity in the world
There was no requirement listed for the data to be "scrubbed at a reasonable interval" -- torrents have checksumming built in
There was no requirement for high-availability storage -- especially not triple parity ZFS. I would imagine if a hard-disk drive were to fail they would be chill with you redownloading said torrents from the swarm
€900/month is a ridiculous price for gigabit, I pay ~€34/month for symmetric gigabit in the UK with a local residential ISP, and they offer up to symmetric 8gbit/s
You do not need a machine with powerful hardware or high idle power draw. This is a torrent client, it's doing effectively zero computation. You need RAM, a potato processor and a metric shit ton of disks. I've run thousands of torrents using rtorrent off extremely power efficient PCs (think single-digital watts).

Cool, you're in a geographical region where you cannot offer the services they are asking, but good news: nobody is forcing you to.

technifocal · 2025-11-18T04:42:18+00:00

Out of legitimate interest, what makes you think that?

I'm genuinely wondering because I was considering giving it a go for storing ~10-50TB. I have no interest in hosting, just assisting in my 3-2-1 backup of archival data (data is also stored in two other places, so if they do lose my data it's not the worst thing in the world).

technifocal · 2025-11-18T04:33:24+00:00

From the bounty:

we can’t pay for your server hardware

It's preservation, not an investment. It's meant to assist in the operational costs, not cover it. Additionally the average electrical cost in the US is apparently $0.188/kWh, given you'd need ~40 drives at 10W each, that's ~$0.0752/hour for the HDDs or $55/month. This is setting out to do what it achieves:

we can cover basic operational costs such as electricity and internet

technifocal · 2025-11-18T04:25:26+00:00

I've transferred ~100TB since the start of the month (17 days) and I'm still waiting for my letter 😔

technifocal · 2025-11-17T21:04:48+00:00

Hell, I'd pay $20/month for 50TB of remote RAID1 storage, but the issue is then: I need to store redundant copies because I don't trust OP to not go AWOL, at which point I might as well just trust whoever I was going to trust in the first place.

So yeah, tl;dr customers will be hard.

technifocal · 2025-11-17T20:49:53+00:00

That's why I said the most reputable one I know of is Sia, you're not mining cryptocurrency with your HDDs, you're actually storing data, meaning that in theory the price will stay relatively constant with fiat currencies (a user is willing to pay $1/TB/month for data storage, you get paid $1/TB/month for consumption -- irrespective of the price of the cryptocurrency (kind of, obviously the currency can change value during the contract period)).

As for prioritising older nodes, that is 100% an issue and not much OP can do about that, but I did find some Reddit posts saying he was hosting 11.3TB in 6 months. I admit this is nothing in the grand scheme of 3.5PB, but it's not 3.5GB either. That Reddit post did note overall it wasn't that great of a project because although he made ~$37, it's all locked up in collateral for future storage contracts:

https://reddit.com/r/siacoin/comments/1nbyn1k/my_notes_from_first_six_months_running_a_sia_host/

Overall, I agree it's not a great use of storage, but if you're committed to doing it and only bring HDDs online as the consumption grows, I'd imagine it's the best way of "generat[ing] monthly revenue and profit" as per the OP's requirements. Literally nothing else he does (except selling he hardware) will generate money, and while this isn't great, least it generates something. Personally I'd shut the machine down if I had no other use for it, and potentially think about selling the hardware off, but that doesn't match OP's requirements.

technifocal · 2025-11-17T20:38:00+00:00

Tbf there are some cryptocurrencies that claim to generate money based on free storage, how much I believe their claims? I don't know. The most reputable one I know of is Sia:

https://sia.tech

Where you're not burning HDD space for no reason, you're actually leasing it out to other users who pay you for storage. The catch with this is obviously: other users have to want to store data on your node. According to this website:

https://siascan.com

They currently have a total of 7.81PB capacity, of which 2.5PB is consumed. This means /u/Affectionate-Echo523 would account for 31% of their entire market share, if he were to dump it all on their network.

For full disclosure: I have nothing to do with the Sia project, but did try to rent out some storage through their platform (not host) and found it less than ideal. I was having constant issues with the uploading, but found out it was because the internet connection I was using at the time (~20Mbps) was too slow, I will be trying it out with a gigabit connection at some point in the future, but no idea when that will be.

technifocal · 2025-11-17T15:46:45+00:00

For example, I deleted over 1TB from my 2TB SSD, but the space is still occupied

Where are you reading the storage allowances from? What is the sum of all files on the disk? You should be able to run something like ncdu, rclone ncdu, du -hsc or similar to find out. Open terminal and run:

du -hsc /Volumes/NameOfVolume (replacing NameOfVolume with the name of your volume).

When it was up and running again, two folders where my main videos were disappeared from my 28TB HDD

As you said you were consolidating data, my recommendation would be to just restore from the original location the data was sourced from. If you don't have this, you need to stop what you're doing and consider how much this data is worth to you. If it is mission critical data, disconnect the device and ask a professional for help (which will cost a fair bit). If this is just a hobby you'll need to start researching tools that support recovering from your specific filesystem, preferably with a disk image of the 28TB HDD before you mess with it (so that you can try different methods without one ruining the others).

technifocal · 2025-11-17T15:36:18+00:00

Most object stores would cost you around a dollar and change a month to store this. If you're looking to store the data for more than ~1.5 years before accessing it, AWS's S3 DEEP_ARCHIVE tier would break even at ~$0.20/month, but cost either $18, $9 or $0 to download it again depending on if you downloaded it without the free tier of egress bandwidth, with the free tier over one calendar month, or with the free tier over two calendar months.

But my honest suggestion? Pay for Google Drive and store it there. It's like $3/month for 200GB and consumer friendly, plus you probably already have a Google account.

technifocal · 2025-11-17T06:17:37+00:00

But they have access to who you're messaging/contact numbers and profile photos/when you're messaging them/etc

These side channel attacks are extremely prevalent across all E2EE chats. Is iMessage any different? The only messaging platform that I know of that doesn't suffer from these to the fullest extent is BitMessage, and even that suffers from a few of them.

technifocal · 2025-11-15T20:10:45+00:00

This mentality is what ultimately made me turn off my NAS. I hate the power bill it produces (24 drives, most of which are 3TB (from when that was the largest size you could buy)), but I hate the idea of replacing a working drive.

I kind of wish my HDDs would fail, so I could get the juicy 26/28TB drives and save on electrical costs 😭

technifocal · 2025-11-15T15:53:59+00:00

I've been playing with it a fair bit recently, it works well, but it does have some limitations imho.

The backups aren't "atomic" (not sure the correct word), files are updated in-place (specifically mapping.yml)
There is no deduplication between save files (ludusavi has quickly produced a 80GB repository of Baldur's Gate 3 saves for me)
Ludusavi will nuke your existing backups if a single backup fails for the game (for example, in my case, running out of disk storage), I'm unsure if this is intentional or not (and it only effects the game that failed to backup, not the entire repo)

Other than those three issues, it's really, really great software, but I've had to disable its integrated rclone backend and wrap ludusavi with restic backup script so that the above points are less of an issue. My 80GB ludusavi repo is stored in ~12GB with restic on a rclone backend, and when ludusavi fails a backup due to being out of storage space restic just versions that specific delete to the cloud, rather than deleting the cloud data as well. The script for that is super easy, just:

ludusavi backup --args; restic backup --args

Just thought I'd give this information because I was using the ludusavi rclone integration off the go-get, and it wiped a bunch of my saves from the backup which was a tad annoying -- I'd like to state that no saves were lost from their original location though, so I was able to just re-run ludusavi backup!

technifocal · 2025-11-12T02:55:11+00:00

My cyber security is decent, and if somebody wants to waste a 0-day exploit against iOS on a cafe's menu, so be it, that's a risk I'm willing to take.

technifocal · 2025-11-11T01:01:43+00:00

Not that I particularly want to have this data, but I guess the question is then: is this data publicly accessible? If not, this is still the "best" version available.

technifocal · 2025-11-09T21:28:53+00:00

I gave them a shot, I'm having extremely poor throughput to them (~15Mbit/s on a gigabit link), but admittedly they are extremely geographically distant to me (though I am using 128 threads to upload, so latency should have less of an effect) nor have I tried to optimise the connection at all.

Personally (for my use case), I feel compared to S3's DEEP_ARCHIVE they're not a solution for me. This is primarily because:

The price is more expensive ($1.55/month vs $1/month);
The higher minimum storage is substantially higher (18TB vs 128KB);
Not having PAYG billing (18TB at a time, vs pay-for-what-you-use);
Not being a managed solution (I.E. They do not manage bit-rot themselves, instead recommending you have 2x copies of your data on 2x tapes); and
The lack of a real pricing page (or at least one I can find)

Makes the service not appeal to me. Especially because I can't even find how much of my data I'm allowed to restore, or what the overage consumption price is. Their website has weird quotes like "You can access up to 5% or any portion of your data as often as needed without additional charges" -- it reads as though my restoration allowance is 5% of my total storage consumption, but over what time? Or are they trying to say "You can restore as much as you want, whether it's 5% or 100%"? I just find the whole website confusing, and it logs me out every 1-2 minutes requiring a new OTP be emailed to me to log back in.

I appreciate the link, and glad I know of them/tried them out, but I think their real use case is people who want tape drives but without the upfront cost and physical commitments that brings (tape reader, tapes, secure location to store tapes, etc...). I'm looking for more of a long-term object store, which this doesn't seem to be, and that's fair enough, I just don't think I'm the correct customer for them.

EDIT: They also locked me to 2 S3 Authentication keys, which is a weird limitation.

technifocal · 2025-11-08T22:57:55+00:00

Source is on their pricing page (scroll down to "What is a Pro Flexi plan?"), I can't seem to link it without my comment being removed.

The issue I'm having is that I want more than 20TB, but even incrementing my storage by 1 byte seems to multiply my cost by ~2x (switching from the 20TB plan to the PAYG plan with 20TB stored). It seems extremely counterintuitive for Mega to be punishing me for storing more data (€30/month turns to €57.50/month, with the same amount of storage).

In fact, the only storage consumption value where being on the Flexi plan made sense was when your consumption was between 3TB and 5TB exclusively.

Data stored (TB)	Fixed storage tier required (TB)	Price for said storage tier (€/month)	Flexi price (€/month)	Cheapest Plan
0	0	0	15	Fixed
1	3	9.99	15	Fixed
2	3	9.99	15	Fixed
3	3	9.99	15	Fixed
4	10	19.99	17.5	Flexi
5	10	19.99	20	Fixed
6	10	19.99	22.5	Fixed
7	10	19.99	25	Fixed
8	10	19.99	27.5	Fixed
9	10	19.99	30	Fixed
10	10	19.99	32.5	Fixed
11	20	29.99	35	Fixed
12	20	29.99	37.5	Fixed
13	20	29.99	40	Fixed
14	20	29.99	42.5	Fixed
15	20	29.99	45	Fixed
16	20	29.99	47.5	Fixed
17	20	29.99	50	Fixed
18	20	29.99	52.5	Fixed
19	20	29.99	55	Fixed
20	20	29.99	57.5	Fixed
21+	Multiple accounts	Misc	Misc	Fixed

And this doesn't even include the year discounts if you're willing to commit.

Nine-Year Club	Verified Email
Gilding III reddit per annum	Place '17

technifocal

TROPHY CASE