Apple's New Proprietary Software Locks Kill Independent Repair on New MacBook Pros (3 minute read)
All Apple computers with T2 security chips will now require proprietary software to be run following repairs, making independent repairs impossible. This includes the 2018 Macbook Pro and the iMac Pro. This is the same strategy used by John Deere to prevent farmers from doing their own tractor repairs. The CEO of iFixit says "Independent repair companies have been fixing MacBooks undaunted by the user-hostile activities Apple has taken. It could be really detrimental to schools, to people who live in rural areas. If they stick with this, it seems like a huge argument in favor of right to repair."
The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies (15 minute read)
Okay this story is crazy. In 2015, when Amazon was considering acquiring a company called Elemental which (among other things) sold these servers that were optimized for video compression. While doing their due diligence, they were inspecting a few sample servers when they discovered a tiny microchip the size of a grain of rice that wasn't supposed to be there. Amazon reports the discovery to US authorities, who launched a secret investigation. Turns out there is this company called Supermicro, a huge motherboard manufacturer, who is part of the supply chain for tons of companies including Amazon and Apple. Nearly all Supermicro motherboards are assembled by contractors in China, some of whom were bribed and/or coerced by Chinese spies (specifically a hardware hacker division of the People's Liberation Army) to plant tiny microchips inside the motherboards (some chips were smaller than a penciltip, they fit between layers of fiberglass). Overall it is believed that 30 US companies were compromised. Bloomberg reports in this article that Amazon (AWS) and Apple were both compromised, but both companies have denied the report very vehemently. The bigger takeaway here is that the US supply chain is hopelessly tied to China, and any step of this supply chain could be potentially compromised by foreign intelligence.