rob53

I could care less about whether Apple has one of these devices but I do want to know what kind of procurement justification these government buyers used. In my opinion none of them have any legitimate justification to buy one, especially from a sensitive country like Israel. This requires additional paperwork and high level approval, except for those three-letter agencies that get dark money from Congress. Looking at the list I can't see how any of them received the justification for a hacking tool. I hope someone files a FOIA request for procurement records because I doubt they had any justification for buying them. As for the pharmaceuticals and oil refineries, I could see this hacking tool used to make sure employees aren't stealing corporate information but there's other ways of dealing with that (MDM systems logging all communications made by company devices, which is absolutely legal). Government-procured mobile devices have the same right to access all their devices and shouldn't have to rely on hacking tools, if they're configured properly the system administrator already has all the information they need. This is why certain politicians use personal phones to conduct government business (illegal) to not get caught so easily. 

The sad thing about members of Congress is that there's no requirement for having a functioning brain. If you're elected, you serve. I would guess that every member of Congress pays technically qualified people to assist them in deciding what to do. Of course every single one of these people, along with lobbyists, has an opinion on what should be done. So do we but we are not heard by Congress. Every single mobile device owned by the US Government has been extensively configured. Android devices are allowed but I doubt the configuration allows side-loading, instead using as secure as possible mobile device management (MDM) system. Non-government users have access to these MDM systems but I doubt more than 0.00001% of non-government and non-commercial users actually use these systems. Once side-loading is allowed, and there better be a setting to disable this ability and it better be set to disable by default, hackers will finally have the ability to bypass these settings (if they weren't there, there wouldn't be a way to bypass them), adding hidden email, message and website malware, totally destroying the entire Apple ecosystem. Every Appleinsider commenter nows this would happen and it would happen on day one. It might still happen even with a heavily locked down MDM system. We've all seen this on the Mac, especially in the early days. It still happens today but mainly from non-certificated apps where the user intentionally bypasses Apple's controls. 

We all know we have to follow the money when anything happens in Congress. This isn't an antitrust bill because there's way too many other businesses that do the same thing. It's a money grab by politicians and a push to stop certain companies who might not be paying off politicians enough. I spent the vast majority of my working career protecting computer systems from attack and Apple is providing a service to its customers that Congress doesn't understand while agreeing with a few software companies who are greedy. If Apple is forced to allow side-loading and my iOS devices are compromised, I will be filing a lawsuit against the US Government for forcing Apple to be less secure.

Final comment. The other participants in this idiotic Act are our three-letter agencies who have been fighting for years to get a backdoor into Apple products. Side-loading will be accomplished whenever you log onto a government website or use a government-sponsored (or required) iOS app. Tell me I'm wrong with actual documentation that says these agencies are not funding any of these politicians or providing any of the technical people bogus information to get them to force this change. 

killroy said:

rob53 said:

sflocal said:

Dr.MORO said:

Hi all,
Just an amateur question.
Thunderbolt 3/4 is compatible to carry PCIe of what specification or lower at this moment?
…

The current Thunderbolt spec provides 40gb/s bandwidth.  While fast, it's still far below PCIe 3.0 max of 32GB/s.  I don't see a time where Thunderbolt will be at the same speed as the native PCIe bus.  

The PCIe 6.0 specification I think will be geared more for servers than for consumer PC's.  It involves some pretty expensive tech, and motherboard fabrication to handle those high speeds which is why it will be limited to servers, render-farms, etc..

In other words, there’s nothing really wrong with the version Apple used in the 2019 Mac Pro. Apple didn’t put any devices in the Mac Pro that would economically benefit from PCIe 4/5/6 so author is complaining about nothing. 

Just a note here, The M1 CPU is PCIe 4.

And Thunderbolt running on PCIe 4 bus isn’t any faster than thunderbolt running on PCIe 3.

swat671 said:

sflocal said:

Dr.MORO said:

Hi all,
Just an amateur question.
Thunderbolt 3/4 is compatible to carry PCIe of what specification or lower at this moment?
And is Thunderbolt 3/4 capable of carrying this new PCIe 6.0 specification at this moment hardware-wise, or needs some better hardware like Thunderbolt 5 in the future?
And also the same question with Apple M1 CPU architecture able to handle PCIe 6.0 hardware-wise, just with software tweaks, or need to wait for new and better Apple CPU of the future?
Just interested.
Thanks.

The current Thunderbolt spec provides 40gb/s bandwidth.  While fast, it's still far below PCIe 3.0 max of 32GB/s.  I don't see a time where Thunderbolt will be at the same speed as the native PCIe bus.  

The PCIe 6.0 specification I think will be geared more for servers than for consumer PC's.  It involves some pretty expensive tech, and motherboard fabrication to handle those high speeds which is why it will be limited to servers, render-farms, etc..

Since when is 32 faster than 40?

Small “b” vs big “B.” G doesn’t matter but should be cap-G for giga. 

aatb said:

rob53 said:

And we’re congratulating the largest vendor of malware for what reason? 

Following the notification process correctly and helping MacOS be more secure?  

Vulnerability had to do with software Microsoft didn’t like so they tried to work around it. When they discovered how to attack it, one employee had the ethics to tell Apple about it. Microsoft doesn’t do anything that isn’t of value to them. They spent decades not patching their software because they felt there wasn’t an alternative. Now they have a good income stream from Mac users so they’re trying to keep it.

5 posts??