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Comment by jgbuddy | Hacker News Reader

Next; IOS will be decompiled and open source

I hope that continued advancements in AI make it impossible for outfits like Apple to maintain closed systems that lock the device owner out of having any control over their own hardware. We're obviously not there yet -- I'm sure 1000 things won't work on a device with this running, but it's going to be a game of cat and mouse, and mouse is moving a lot faster than cat can now.

> I hope that continued advancements in AI make it impossible for outfits like Apple to maintain closed systems that lock the device owner out of having any control over their own hardware.

Formally verified bootloaders and Secure Boot will make this all but impossible without hardware mods that do voltage glitching. It took 8 years for the checkm8 and usbliter8 exploits to be found, and I think that especially Apple has invested so much money, time and resources into securing their boot chain that the "best" thing we can hope for is a tethered jailbreak allowing a boot into another kernel.

It's only a matter of finding exploitative bugs, this already happened before in Apple devices precisely.

one click exploit is fun when you trying to jailbreak your phone; it is a nightmare when a random website do that

Bugs yes, sure, there will always be bugs. But it already is really, really difficult to get non-privileged code execution access, even harder to achieve tethered root access (i.e. root access that holds until a reboot), and all but impossible to get untethered root access that survives reboots.

I have my reservations. The cats can also use AI to make their software less buggy or even formally verified.

If I had to venture a guess it would be that this is the last stand for hackers that are able to root all kinds of older devices, but companies like Apple will shell out the money to prevent this for their next-gen devices.

It's likely that low-cost device makers will not do that, so maybe rooting will still persist for cheap stuff.

Decompiled and easily available if you know where to look? Sure. Seems likely.

But "Open Source" is a description of the licensing terms, and it ain't gonna be that. Apple will sue hosters into oblivion. It will only be available on pirate sites.

You can use debugger all you want, legally, then write the spec, then reimplement. You just can't look at the code.

We already have nearly a dozen of Adobe and Autodesk knock off apps.

Yes. Those are clones or clonish. Not originals. So saying "Autodesk is opensource" isn't correct.

A clone of autodesk may be open source however.

It's going to be great, between this and the Adobe totally-not-using-any-decompiled-code-wink clones: people are going to get sued into the ground and LLM code is going to become radioactive to corporate lawyers. Especially when they find out that they also routinely spit out GPL code verbatim.

It's going to be hilarious.

Why waste the time? Just download Darwin take a license out on arm, like those three Apple engineers get to work.

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