Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24205888

So Agent Cody Banks was realistic after all: https://www.icollector.com/item.aspx?i=16246907&mobile=0

Blogspam from https://tidbits.com/2020/08/17/the-case-of-the-top-secret-ip...

Probably on Gizmodo. Steve Jobs will be rolling in his grave.

It's interesting to see Apple prototypes with serial numbers on them crop up all over the place…

What's interesting is that some people have the old (Intel) developer transition kits, even though Apple has done extraordinarily well in the intervening time period. One wonders how Apple missed them…

Exactly, and often times extraordinarily valuable because they can be used for reverse engineering, or learning how the key signing or DRM works, or can be bypassed.

Of course, most legitimate indie communities stay away from this, preferring clean-room RE efforts.

If you got your hands on the devkit without signing the NDA with Sony you could release details about how it works.

Why would Sony devkits be sensitive? What exactly do you mean by "devkit"?

"Devkits" (at least in the context used here) are hardware for developing console videogames. Console manufacturers work quite hard to control who gets to develop for their platform and how. The devkits are often quite expensive and you won't (usually) get your hands on one unless you work for a company that has signed a very detailed contract with the console manufacturer.

"devkit" in this context means a development version of a Sony gaming console, like the PlayStation. They are different from a regular retail model in that they can run unsigned code so you can develop games for them. The reason why they are sensitive is that you could use a devkit to learn how the console works internally and potentially find some exploits that could be used in the retail models. Any company using them has to sign a very restrictive NDA that basically requires the kits to be locked up, you can't talk about their development environment or precise technical details. Sony would never sell you a devkit until you pass their security assesment, and you are only allowed to have them on the condition that they are returned to Sony when no longer needed.

Obviously, the severity of the problem depends on what gets auctioned. PS4 kits? Probably not much, pretty much everything about the console and its capabilities has been leaked a long time ago. But if some PS5 devkits were to go missing right now it would be a huge deal as the console isn't even out yet.

yeah, me too , but the 'Apple Police' aspect of that marketing stunt left me with a negative impression -- so I guess it wasn't an all-around net good advertising wise.

To paraphrase a famous quote: Apple are not that dumb, and not that smart.

He is still there.

Thank you, appreciate your response. I'm glad he wasn't penalized for an honest mistake. I've heard of folks citing policy and firing great employees, good to hear a happy end to the whole situation.

IIRC His LinkedIn is on public.

A marketing stunt that involved the police conducting a raid on Jason Chen’s home and then barring Gizmodo from future Apple events? Yeah, that’d be one hell of a PR stunt if it was.

Not sure if this is the story you're thinking of, but I do recall hearing a while ago about Chinese irons and kettles that came with some, er, undocumented features:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hacked-from-china-is-your-kettl...

You can buy them: https://www.trackers-cam.com/en/gsm-spy-microphone/329-gsm-c...

The power strip calls you as soon as it detects a sound.

I remember Christmas cards produced in China, containing secret 'help me' messages from prisoners that were used as cheap labor:

https://www.npr.org/2019/12/23/790832681/6-year-old-finds-me...

Yeah, I'm amazed that there aren't any homebrew ones.

Including a Breakout clone, of course ;)

This is an April Fools article.

That's an entirely different OS and it's seriously cool. But I really do wonder why it seems like no homebrew was attempted on the original OS.

The limit on this is speed of internet transfers.

It takes 2 days for me to run badblocks on my 16TB drive!

Even less - it was asking for some tech support from Apple to learn how to hack Apple Hardware with their own (Bechtel) engineers - the actual hardware/software was done by Bechtel. Given this particular engineer is talking about it - they didn't have to undergo security clearance (if they had, they wouldn't be talking about it. Ever.)

All apple did was provide a little bit of JTAG/Build/Source Code support. The rest was up to a third party.

The BBC article is also less than 1/4 of the size, for those not enthused about reading news in short-story form.

2 days ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24188791

The original article is awesome for HN.

(Those audio codecs were written by two engineers with advanced degrees from Berkeley and Stanford. When they weren’t teasing each other about which school was better, they were writing mathematical audio code that I was scared to touch. You would no more let a regular engineer mess with code like that than you’d let a bike mechanic rebuild the transmission in a Porsche. They had an occasional poker game I played in. The only reason I didn’t lose all my money was that one of them enjoyed his vodka.)

David is good story teller. Really enjoyed it.

Cheers for that, it was a good read!

That was my understanding too. What other "nuclear energy" related use would there be for a hidden Geiger counter?

Yes, but there weren’t pesky inspectors sneaking around with custom iPods then either

I have heard Russia decided to build more dangerous reactor types like the one in Chernobyl because they are cheaper + they could use the same radioactive material for nuclear weapons.

but enrichment is a nation-state level project Thats what this man of science said. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69UpMhUnEeY

is unlikely to escape the notice of the world's intelligence and energy agencies Thats how Iran and Stuxnet came together.

Some history https://www.miningreview.com/uranium/avoiding-covid-fatigue-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_in_Namibia#Back...

Teflon as mentioned in the Youtube vid at the beginning also demonstrates another way to enrich uranium. Are those the only two? I think not.

Usually "breeder" indicates a reactor with a fully closed fuel cycle that generates more fissile fuel than it consumes. A Pu-239 breeder would need to begin with critical mass of Pu-239 to begin this fuel cycle, in addition to the U-238 feedstock you are wanting to bombard. Kind of puts the cart before the horse. Additionally, the engineering for a liquid sodium or molten salt cooling system (water is too strong a fast-neutron moderator for this application) goes beyond the means of the hobbyist or extremist group.

I don't think this is what you meant, though. Why can't [an independent actor] recover Pu-239 from the core of a uranium reactor? I'll admit I don't know a lot about chemical reprocessing, but the proposition here is using a series of highly corrosive and/or explosive chemicals ([fuming] nitric acid, tributyl phosphate, hydrazine) to extract Pu-239 from very radioactive irradiated fuel rods with unknown actinide concentrations. Chemical reagents for this process (e.g. for PUREX, tributyl phosphate) are controlled and monitored by non-proliferation agencies. Chemical re-processing will not separate the Pu-240 from the Pu-239. Pu-239 is unsuitable for a gun-type weapon, as it is so fissile that it will blow itself apart in a partial detonation ("fizzle") before the slug and target are brought together--this means you need an implosion-type ("Fat man") weapon to effectively use Pu-239 as a fuel. A high concentration of Pu-240 exacerbates this problem. A fizzle in a populated area is still very bad, but not bad in a way that couldn't feasibly be produced by conventional explosives and/or chemical weapons much more easily. In order to produce enough Pu-239 to form a weapons core within years instead of decades or centuries (provided extraction is feasible), the independent actor probably is looking at a >1 MW reactor with the cooling towers and infrastructure that surrounds a project of that scale.

It is really only a viable threat for a terrorist organization if that organization has the clandestine support of a nation state.

EDIT: Or otherwise enough financial support, technical expertise, and freedom of activity to engage in serious construction projects and industrial chemistry. The point is that it's not something you can put together in a basement lab.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PUREX

Last time I heard the guy named Sheldon Cooper tried to buy yello cake Uranium and it didn't turn out well !

One incident, lane 2 of an unlit section of dual carriageway around 22:00 hrs coming out of Cambridge. Travelling in lane 2, closest to the central reservation which had armco barriers. No cars in front, passed some cars few seconds before hand, saw a bloke crouched down between the two armco barriers and he released a Muntjac deer in front of car in order to cause collision. Cars I had passed earlier, two of them had slowed down in both lanes slowing up traffic behind them. On the surface, if I wasnt vigilant, I'd never have seen the bloke crouched down in the central reservation, but my headlights spreading out to the side gave me a momentary glimpse. Had an accident ensued it would have been passed off and reported as just a wild animal collision, in this case a deer. The fact I saw the bloke crouched down though gave the game away, reported to Norfolk constabulary, they were not interested.

Nor was I.... good thing I suppose.

You didnt specify the font size.

In retrospect I regret my phrasing, but I cannot change it now.

Still, I have a point. The comment I was replying to contains lots of disconnected insinuations dropped casually. Including apparently that he has had people try to kill him.

You cannot casually mention these things in a rambling monologue without sounding crazy. And discussions with crazy people on the internet are hardly ever fruitful.

So working on improving how you communicate to ensure people don’t completely dismiss what you say is a valuable exercise.

Please let us know when this novel is complete, it sounds like a fun read!

Out of interest, going by your username, do you consider yourself to be autistic? You write exactly like a relative of mine who definitely has something undiagnosed.

GPT-3 is that you?

Or swap it with one an unwitting asset carries around at work.

Because their overt inspection activities are in most cases tightly circumscribed.

CCD cameras or counting bit errors doesn’t really have great sensitivity for radiation detection. This is why they are generally not used to monitoring projects and people stick with Geiger tubes. This is my understand anyway (having worked on these kinds of projects).

The radiation detector is either a naive hypothesis, or a false flag. If you want to pretend that your audio player is completely normal, you don't connect any abnormal devices to it. Moreover, any facility in the world that prohibits visitors to have electronics on them prohibits ALL electronics. No one would make an exception for “just an ipod”. Neither would secret services that have been dealing with bugs for decades be fooled by “just an ipod”. If there was additional hardware inside, my guess that it was for unattended covert short range data transfer. Maybe they have even used the famous rock™ interface: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-16614209

But audio recording would be most straightforward function, as it is built in. Switch (or simply re-flash) the player that belongs to journalist or politician when they leave it, then recover the data periodically. That would mean they knew who their target was.

By the way, which model did Steve Jobs use? It might be possible that these “secret agents” were not secret agents at all. I suspect that any official business starts and ends with you signing papers that prevent you from, say, talking to newspapers about it because you feel like it, and existence of one-time high-profile project like that is something any sane agency would really like to keep secret. “No paper trail” is actually the most non-ordinary part of all of this, secrecy agreements are a common thing. Oral order to work with two random guys (because they have ominous business cards?), and tell them every corporate secret they need to know? Seems suspicious.

It sounds like it was really just a few hours of one engineer’s time, when he didn’t have any imminent deadlines. Not enough to compromise any ongoing projects.

Not to mention other defense / government agencies might come forward to Apple with projects.

Not really a precedent, imho, but still a great story.

My favorite part, the last line, "We wanted to release a Windows version as part of Windows 98, but sadly, Microsoft has effective building security."

First time I read this story! :) Thanks, I never knew!

Because complying with the government is a good idea when that government keeps giving you tax breaks and favourable treatment. Most companies, even ones that oppose some state policies (particularly surveillance), cooperate with government or get funding from them still. So not burning bridges is important. I'm sure the expenses weren't too significant but letting the project go free gives them tons of goodwill from the leaders.

Government pays for the work but does it through a cutout company so Apple isn't tied to work. They get the money to pay the Bechtel engineers and the government gets their iPod fairly.

Companies do free work for large potential customers all of the time, in lots of industries. The idea is that you do something small to demonstrate your capability to take on a larger paid opportunity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_concept

It's like sticking your foot in the door on the small level, except translating it to the big picture, where spending a paltry few million on a custom iPod could lead to billion dollar contracts in the long-term.

As was widely reported at that time, the three letter agencies were among the largest customers of NeXTStep, the software that forms the basis of the professional operating system that Apple later acquired to replace the original unorthodox (and barely functioning) software that Jobs hobbled together with a motley crew of hackers while running Apple during the DOS era. Enterprises of all kinds that had the flexibility (or pressure) to think outside of the box went with NeXTStep because it allowed totally custom applications to be developed in record time (using things like Interface Builder, today part of the visual layout in Xcode). It is totally unsurprising that they would turn to their long time partner Steve Jobs for help with a mobile solution and that he would do it for free to eventually sell of more technology to those long time customers from before he sold NeXT to Apple and became its iCEO.

Government: "We'll give you this big no-bid contract, but there's one other thing you need to do for us first..."

Easy, have your boss's boss tell them.

It should be noted that this situation is not all that uncommon at Apple. For pre-1.0 iOS work, e.g., often individual engineers on macOS teams were tapped to do iOS specific changes to their components without their managers having clearance to know about it.

For the Mac Intel switch, the situation was even more curious, as the earlier work was carried out by a larger group of engineers, with little special secrecy, but the final stretch was done by a smaller subset of those engineers in strict secrecy, while the others were led to conclude that the effort had petered out.

The difference in this case was, of course, that the client of the special project was apparently external…

Here's the link to the original article - https://tidbits.com/2020/08/17/the-case-of-the-top-secret-ip...

If you've looked at the open source particle detector[1] you see that the "sensor" can be a reverse biased diode. Nothing very fancy.

[1] https://github.com/ozel/DIY_particle_detector

Apparently he did in 1988. Things at NeXT must have been desperate: https://www.wired.com/2012/06/steve-jobs-security-clearance/

Edit: It actually says he got the clearance because Pixar was doing some government work at the time.

For only about two years in the late 80’s.

Plausible deniability is a great idea if the CEO has to testify before congress every once in a while.

(For those not in the know, Tony was the leader of iPod Projects back then, basically acting as full 100% confirmation of this story being true.)

what's an ipod?

It's also possibly one of the reasons we're so worried about Huawei here in the US right now: We know what our guys can do. We may know a fair bit about what China can or has done. And nobody wants to talk specifically about what those things are.

Using traditional film is more or less how radioactivity was discovered in the first place:

https://www2.lbl.gov/abc/wallchart/chapters/03/4.html

Using modern sensors seems like the logical extension of that.

I honestly suspect the reporter was at least very confused, but the firmware for the BMC on SuperMicro boards has had some serious security vulnerabilities from time to time --- I wonder if that's the base of story, and it got confused from there.

Wow, interesting read. Wonder what else they do to normal apple products.

While true, samizdat was already a threat to the regime and I’m sure the wide availability of photocopiers would have made that a much bigger headache for the Soviet government. They already resorted to registering typewriters because that’s how samizdat was typically produced and copied.

People in the real world often have terrible opsec. Maybe we take our instincts about information security for granted these days. Maybe the Soviets just photocopied their own butts to prank the CIA. I honestly don’t know.

If I were a Soviet agent, I would have fed the machine disinformation. But who knows.

No less believable than the bugged IBM typewriters that were used at the US Embassy for nearly a decade before the hack was found:

https://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/selectric/

It wasn’t like they just strapped a camera in there, there was a ton of tradecraft and ingenuity involved.

Example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)

Once upon a time, people believed that kings were appointed by God to care about common folk, guide and discipline them. It's fun to see a modern commoner showing the same dedication to a corporate business.

If by “part of the PRISM program” you mean “responds to court orders and routinely fights orders that are too broad”, then I suppose that is accurate.

Friend used to be a security engineer at Apple and was thoroughly disillusioned with their privacy stance after working there for three years.

You act like companies had a choice

Maybe, but that wouldn’t necessarily require modifications to the iPod. iPods could be used as USB external drives and you could just load it on there without having to mess with the OS at all.

legit why did this get downvoted?...

Apple will neither confirm nor deny the existence of such a project.

measure radiation without being noticed", but what are the actual situations where you would want to do that?

Most likely it was for use against Iran or some allies who we didn't want to overtly say we don't trust.

My reading is that this was a one off or a very small batch, not a manufactured product.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_MASINT

Just goes to show, you really should take your whiskey neat.

At the time, an iPod might have been as innocent enough to not warrant any concern at a security checkpoint. Cellphones, cameras, and any other obvious recording equipment would be more scrutinized whereas a music player would not. Someone like a janitor listening to music while mopping would get less scrutiny than a visitor trying to take a tour of restricted areas with an iPod in their pocket. The visitor has to pass through the same checkpoints but the janitor is a known person, they show up to work all the time and maybe they have a story about how they won a new iPod in a raffle (while actually getting paid to walk around with it). Guards trust the janitor since he's already been vetted so they let him through with it. Or maybe he sneaks it in in the hope that he receives less punishment if caught because it's just an iPod, it's not like he smuggled in a camera. A visitor getting caught with the same iPod would be immediately kicked out get in a lot more trouble because they just received instructions not to bring anything in.

In Shayer's article (not the top-level BBC article) he makes the comment that they developed the iPod OS on Windows machines since the compiler and tools for building on ARM were not yet available on Mac. You make a good point about developing software for other platforms, though, and I'm sure there are also quite a few Mac and Linux boxes in software divisions at Microsoft for the same reason.

I'm sure Apple would prefer that every iPod user own a Mac

Not if it's an old mac ;-) I was an early iPod touch adopter (bought with X-mas money IIRC). Plugged it into my iBook G4 and was informed the version of iTunes was both too old and the latest this laptop was going to get.

Plugged it into a Windows 2000/XP machine (which I think was already old for the time) and it managed to get the latest version of iTunes.

Now of course, I'm aware of the context of the PPC to Intel shift and that there was a non-zero cost to maintaining both streams of iTunes build but it really put me off Apple at the time.

AFAIR much early Microsoft development was on Xenix.

The original XBox 360 was developed on PowerMac G5’s. https://www.anandtech.com/show/1686/5

Ah, reaction is often telling. Thank you downvoters. ;-)

If Shayer's (in turn, Apple's) participation were classified, he would be looking at a serious criminal offense for writing the article. The hardware and functionality of the devices that the Bechtel engineers were integrating, about which Shayer only speculates, could well have been so classified, though.

Top secret classifications usually have time limits. As in secrets in the project loses its classification status after a few years.

It was cutting edge at the time. There were no clones.

Would you want to be accused of being a spy?

On second thought I wonder if it was a geiger counter that can secretly phone home and report data when connected to the Internet when the user adds music. Get into the Apple supply chain and make sure they end up in Apple stores near your "targets".

That's exactly why it would need to be undetectable.

Why would you go through the pain of all this

So that it's extremely difficult to detect that it's not a regular ipod, even if disassembled.

already made American companies components' made in china

FTFY

Since you are an expert, can you explain the zero day that would be needed to get Stuxnet onto the SCADA/first computer?

Obviously the final product might not have used this iPod. It was a huge operation on many levels with failed projects. This iPod also obviously might not have been for recording, since that's a level one misdirect, oh it's secret spy recording device, person who's watched to much James Bond.

But how did they do the 'usb' zero day since you know it isn't a iPod?

I expect that the real purpose of the project was simply to let those two engineers learn iPod development. Afterward, they had the expertise and software tools to make an iPod do many things, not just collect data.

I guess everyone on HN is checking their discs for hidden partions now...

You know it's possible to have a signed boot loader without locking the owner out of the device.

Moreover, I do mind such freedom being taken away.

I know! This was the main thing I noticed about this article. I was like really -.-

Many years ago I worked on open source MP3 player firmware at Rockbox.org, we created a feature to develop skins for the UI so you could make it look exactly like the original firmware if you wanted. Why wouldn't they use that, from the secrecy of their own office, instead of asking Apple (or any other manufacturer) to participate and risk the kind of "leak" that we see now?