JustSomeGuy1
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Apple passkey feature will be our first taste of a truly password-less future
Then go educate yourself. Nothing's perfect, but this is much much better than the status quo.davgreg said:Color me skeptical - highly skeptical of the security vulnerabilities from this kind of scheme.
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Apple passkey feature will be our first taste of a truly password-less future
blastdoor said:I remember when TouchID first came out and all of the security experts went around bemoaning how terrible it is to use biometrics in place of passwords to access a device. I believe the argument was that because biometrics cannot be changed they make terrible passwords. Whatever happened to those guys?That argument isn't very relevant, because your biometrics never go to any third parties, even Apple.The biometrics are only used as a "master password" to unlock your passkeys within your device. Then those keys are used in a zero-knowledge exchange with the server/website/whatever you're interacting with. Neither your passkey nor your biometrics ever go over the internet in that interaction. The passkey is used to mathematically prove that you are you, but it's never sent, nor can it be derived from what is sent.Encrypted passkeys may go into iCloud, but that's safe. They're useless there without your biometrics, which are never uploaded (and in fact are in the secure enclave, which is... relatively secure). -
M2 and beyond: What to expect from the M2 Pro, M2 Max, and M2 Ultra
I'm sorry, but this article is a serious failure due to ignorance of some of the basic underlying technologies.For example, the guesses about memory are completely off base. There is literally no chance at all that they're even close, based on the article's assumptions.The M1 has a bandwidth of ~68GB/s because it has a 128-bit memory bus and uses LPDDR4 memory at 4.266GT/s. The M1 Pro has higher bandwidth of ~200GB/s because it uses LPDDR5 memory at 6.4GT/s, and ALSO because it uses a double-wide bus (256 bits).The M2 has the same memory bus size (128 bits) as the M1, but it's already using LPDDR5 at 6.4GT/s. If there's an M2 Pro based on the same doubling as the M1 Pro was, it won't get any further benefit from the LPDDR5 (since the M2 already has that). It will have the same ~200GB/s bandwidth as the M1 Pro.Of course this all depends on timing - if the M2 Pro came out a year from now, higher-performance LPDDR5 might be common/cheap enough for the M2 Pro to use it, in which case you'd see additional benefits from that. But it DEFINITELY wouldn't get you to 300GB/s. LPDDR5 will never be that fast (that would require 9.6GT/s, which is not happening in the DDR5 timeframe - unless DDR6 is horribly delayed, years from now).You're also assuming Apple won't go with HBM, which is not at all a safe assumption. If they do they might well do better than 300GB/s for the "M2 Pro", if such a thing were built.Your entire article could have been written something like this:M1 Ultra = 2x M1 Max = 4x M1 Pro ~= 6x-8x M1, so expect the same with the M2 series.It's a really bad bet though.There are much more interesting things to speculate about! What are they doing for an interconnect between CPU cores, GPU cores, Neural Engine, etc? Improvements there are *critical* to better performance - the Pro, Max, and Ultra are great at some things but extremely disappointing at others, and that's mostly down to the interconnect- though software may also play some part in it (especially with the GPU).Similarly, the chip-to-chip interconnect for the Ultra is a *huge* advance in the state of the art, unmatched by any other vendor right now... and yet it's not delivering the expected performance in some (many) cases. What have they learned from this, what can they do better, and when will they do it?(Edit to add) Most of all, will desktop versions of the M2 run at significantly higher clocks? I speculated about this here when the A15 came out - that core looked a lot like something built to run at higher clocks than earlier Ax cores. I'd like to think that I was right, and that that's been their game all along. But... Apple's performance chart (from the keynote) for the M2, if accurate, suggests that I was wrong and that they don't scale clocks any better than the M1 did. That might still be down to the interconnect, though it seems unlikely. It's also possible that they're holding back on purpose, underestimating performance at the highest clocks, though that too seems unlikely (why would they?).For this reason, I suspect that the M2 is a short-lived interim architecture, as someone else already guessed. Though in terms of branding, they may retain the "M2" name even if they improve the cores further for the "M2 Pro" or whatever. That would go against all past behavior, but they don't seem terribly bound by tradition.
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HomePod mini was the single best-selling smart speaker in Q1 2022
I had a non-mini HomePod pretty early on. I *really* wanted to like it - I was dying for some really good sound in a small package. And the hardware was awesome!I still gave it to a friend after five months, and I was glad to get rid of it!When I was in the room with the HomePod and said to my phone "Hey Siri, show me the weather"... the phone would wake up, hand it to the homepod, and go back to sleep. The homepod would interrupt music (if it was playing) and *tell* me the weather. That is an intolerable level of stupid, and they never fixed it (at least as of the last time I checked).Live by the AI, die by the AI. If you're going to do everything by voice control, it has to be good, not the addlepated shit Apple gave us.
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Sonnet introduces McFiver PCIe card with 10-gig ethernet, USB-C, SSD slots
Perhaps they were made for small PCs. The "budgetoption for single-slot Thunderbolt enclosures" makes zero sense, as I pointed out. Unless, maybe, you already have one for graphics and are giving up on that. Hm. Is that market big enough to matter?atonaldenim said:Wow, this would have been a dream card for my Mac Pro 5,1s four years ago when I was still putting money into them. I currently have all 3 of those cards filling up all my PCIe slots - 10GbE, USB 3.2, NVMe. Although the Sonnet’s x8 PCIe connection would limit the bandwidth on the MP 5,1’s PCIe 2.0 bus.
It was definitely not designed for the old old Mac Pro but rather as a budget option for single-slot Thunderbolt enclosures to upgrade Mac Minis etc without taking up all their TB ports, and for PCs with few PCIe slots available. On the PC side this could give new life to a lot of older machines that don’t have Thunderbolt ports for a TB dock. Like the old HP mini tower I tinkered with turning into a TrueNAS 10GbE server. Really cool combination of useful upgrades in one card for a pretty reasonable price actually! I only wish they’d given it a x16 PCIe connection for maximum speed with older PCIe 2.0 machines.
