Apple Intelligence waitlist due to PCC rollout
Now that clouds are operating at planetary scale we need to turn our attention to the privacy and security vulnerabilities that have become a regular feature of web server architectures. Until now it's basically been "take an open system and lock it down". PCC is basically ripping things up and rearchitecting everything in from the perspective of "an airtight node that is cryptographically provable to not share data with any other node and leaves no trace of your data."
Here's how insane this is:
* Apple uses custom chips that it manufactures with secure elements, providing a hardware foundation of trust.
* There is a deployment trust ceremony that helps ensure data center hardware is authentic.
* Server binaries are publicly auditable and clients verify nodes are authentic and running audited binaries before sending requests.
* Client requests are anonymized and well distributed across the cloud to ensure attackers cannot target a specific user without compromising the entirety of data center hardware.
* There's no shell you can log into these nodes with or PII in server logs/metrics.
* All request data is encrypted with node-specific private keys that are impossible to read or share with other nodes, and also rotated regularly, wiping any inadvertently retained data.
* The only state that is even potentially kept is a caching layer that is encrypted with a public key provided by the client, thus unreadable without the client's private key provided on the next request.
From a SRE perspective it's Nightmare Mode (that's a Doom reference), so you better have very good metrics enabled.
Anyway, today is a big buttcheek clenching day for Apple server engineers as this is a major new 1.0 cloud architecture on custom hardware (impossible to buy GCP/AWS instances) getting deployed to tens of millions of users. This is no doubt the reason for the waitlist that iOS 18.1 upgraders see. They are controlling the rollout to ensure it is scaling in a healthy manner.
[1] https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compute