[HN Gopher] Apple Prototypes and Corporate Secrets Are for Sale ...
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       Apple Prototypes and Corporate Secrets Are for Sale Online-If You
       Know Where
        
       Author : mandatory
       Score  : 44 points
       Date   : 2024-08-11 20:29 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
        
       | JKCalhoun wrote:
       | https://archive.is/4mxX1
        
       | krackers wrote:
       | >chaining together a dozen dilapidated second-generation iPhone
       | SEs and harnessing Apple's Live Text optical character-
       | recognition feature to find possible inventory tags
       | 
       | This is the second time I've read about an iPhone OCR rack
       | https://findthatmeme.com/blog/2023/01/08/image-stacks-and-ip...
       | 
       | Is this still state of the art in terms of local OCR?
        
         | talldayo wrote:
         | I think Tesseract is the smarter/faster/less obnoxious choice
         | if you're not trying to parse weird meme text like the blog is
         | doing. There's almost certainly a better paid option available
         | in our enlightened AI age, but I don't even think you'd need AI
         | for this use-case.
        
           | j45 wrote:
           | I have seen some models mix LLM with ocr to improve both.
           | 
           | Considering what apps like Notes can do low key on iOS... I
           | wouldn't be surprised if there would exist more capability.
           | 
           | Iirc, Apple was holding back improvements to Siri and other
           | techs.
        
           | kergonath wrote:
           | The Apple framework is much, much better than Tesseract, and
           | quicker as well. It is really good. Of course if you don't
           | need on-device processing, then there are cloud services that
           | are better.
        
         | mandatory wrote:
         | It's just because I did this talk and made FindThatMeme :) so
         | not a popular method, just what I used to do large scale OCR.
        
           | krackers wrote:
           | Oh I completely missed that you're actually the same guy!
        
       | JKCalhoun wrote:
       | Looks like the software was looking for labels like this:
       | https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
        
         | mandatory wrote:
         | Yep, that's an example of what the automated scanning looks
         | for. You can see a very similar example in the slides:
         | https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2032/DEF%20CON%2032%20pre...
        
       | jamesy0ung wrote:
       | A lot of prototypes can be found on a Chinese website called
       | xianyu
        
       | jfdjkfdhjds wrote:
       | the only things anyone ever wanted to know from apple is their
       | aggressive business tactics... and most of that is already public
       | thanks to the many processes they lost along the way. from labour
       | salary fixing across industries to pushing obvious monopolies in
       | the face of the publishing industry.
       | 
       | I think the only piece I'd pay to read is how they negotiated
       | with spotify.
        
       | rbanffy wrote:
       | The ones I'm interested would be the ones donated to Berkeley. I
       | hope one day they make it to a proper museum.
       | 
       | Or, at least, catalogued, scanned, and photographed.
        
       | epakai wrote:
       | Some of these developer devices get 'destroyed' and sold as
       | scrap. dosdude1 has restored some of these kinds of devices to
       | working order. There's pretty neat video of the restorations:
       | 
       | ARM Apple Silicon Developer Transition Kit:
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reQq8fx4D0Q iPod Touch dev board:
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLCt6oHPTQM
       | 
       | The PCB repair technique for the DTK is pretty cool on its own.
        
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       (page generated 2024-08-11 23:00 UTC)