The answer was available to Apple all along, if only the technique was patented to promote the progress of science and useful arts so that Apple engineers could be inspired on how to use their own operating system

Can you explain it plainly? I seems like there's a funny joke or irony in there but I don't have the experience to detect it properly.

NSO Group’s iOS exploit was sold to nation states who spied on journalists and dissidents with it. The code behind it got leaked a few days ago and its a mind bending process that essentially did what I described, using an old image decompression algorithm. Its so absurd and also perceptive that making fun of it is the best way to process it.

> Maybe they should find logic gates in the decompression algorithm

There is an iMessage zero-click exploit from NSO Group used in the wild. Project Zero did a deep dive on it:

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-deep-dive-i...

After a series of steps, the exploit eventually arrives at the need to do general computation. They achieve this by utilizing a part of the JBIG2 decompression algorithm, effectively using the phases of decompression to emulate logic gates to eventually build NAND gates, and from that a simple instruction set for a virtual computer. They then execute arbitrary code on this virtual machine.

> use those to emulate a threaded cpu, and launch a multithreaded decoding process on that cpu

This is a tongue-in-cheek joke I suppose. Even if you built multi-threading support on the virtual machine, it is still an emulated environment running within a single-threaded decompression algorithm. So it is effectively single-threaded on the real machine.

> which finds the original decompression process in memory and executes on the same image being decompressed

The original exploit is quite meta, so OP is just making a meta joke here.

When I read the comment I suspected immediately that it was a joke in reference to the above exploit, but it was cryptic enough that I wasn't quite sure.

There was a recent 0 day in iMessage relating to image parsing, in a open library that Apple used. I’m not sure why the poster is being so vague, but the blog post is an interesting read.

The second comment just seems like a dig at apple in general.

and the software patent system with the supporting wording in the US constitution

there are levels to this absurdity

you have quite the curious style in conveying information implicitly

It’s a reference to a post from a few days ago about an iMessage exploit using some legacy PDF decompression algorithm. This comment explains it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29569155

the exploit is called ForcedEntry

Oh didn’t realize. I’ll leave the link in case anyone wants to read about it though.