Just how private is Apple's Private Cloud Compute? You can test it to find out In June, Apple used its Worldwide Developer Conference to announce the creation of the Private Cloud Compute platform to run its AI Intelligence applications, and now it's asking people to stress test the system for security holes. Apple has revealed that the platform (PCC) runs on custom-built server hardware and runs a …
> ....managed and hosted in a way that's superior to what you can do yourself.
I refer the honourable gentleman to https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/10/ovh/
It doesn't get much more "Come on then if you think you're hard enough" than this.
So specifically to those who've been bleating here and elsewhere for years that Apple security is just for show, they don't really care about it, Apple and Google have the same approaches etc etc etc ad f**king nauseam;
Put up, or shut up.
"It doesn't get much more "Come on then if you think you're hard enough" than this."
That's part of the problem too. If you are running your own servers and doing a pretty good job on security, unless you are Sony, chances are that there won't be herds of black hats trying to get in. AWS, iCloud or another giant provider is a mega target. If somebody figures out how to pry open the side door, lots of goodies could pour out. Not just for one customer, but many. Rolling your own also means that when the time comes that the system catches fire, falls over and sinks into the swamp, you can throw money at the problem and get it resolved. Renting space with a company that's likely orders of magnitude bigger than yours just means hoping they get it fixed quickly without any insight to what happened and what's being done about it. You can try and call to whine/beg/threaten and it's most likely they'll just let you listen to a loud and distorted recording of "The Girl from Ipanema" (instrumental) with breaks every 30 seconds telling you how important your call is. You phone is fully charged, right?
"If somebody figures out how to pry open the side door, lots of goodies could pour out."
Potentially yes, although these days the data encryption itself is pretty good and rarely broken; data breaches generally happen when the system around the encryption breaks down. In Private Cloud, the data is heavily E2E encrypted and the cloudy bit is about storing the 'blobs' of encrypted data in private containers.
So my understanding from scanning the Apple white paper is that they're asking people to test the containers; even if in the worst case a serious scalable vulnerability is found, the attacker will have access to 'blobs' of highly encrypted data which they can't do anything with (except gloat that they have it). The system may well have been thoroughly compromised, Apple will need to do a ground-up rethink and everyone will have to change their passwords again, but your actual data should be inaccessible. It might be deleted though, so.... always have a working backup yadda yadda
Note how the Apple Fanbois/gurls praise the bravery of Apple to do this without noticing the 'thing' that MS and others get daily/hourly grief for.
Namely, using the masses to do your testing for you.
Apple have no choice, this sort of testing is the *only* way to go as you will be letting the 'barbarian hoards' get access when this is released for real and they *WILL* break it !!!
I do not support MS or Apple or any of the usual tech behemoths *but* simply notice the change in attitude for Apple.
Still think GenAI/LLMs are not fit for purpose no matter how you paint them a 'pretty colour' or give them a Apple logo !!!
:)
Plenty of differences, so my apologies for bringing some reality to the table:
- Apple tends to produce better code in general, they're not very much for the MVP idea (or pre-MVP if the quality of Microsoft's latest version of Outlook is anything to go by);
- They tell people it's under test as opposed to just using people as guinea pigs a la Microsoft (I'm guessing this is where Musk got his "Let's just throw FSD on the road, doesn't matter who dies" idea from);
- You can actually opt out;
- They put real money behind it;
- Apple has already publicly stated it doesn't think we're there yet, according to their researchers there is as yet no "I" in LLMs.
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