Or you could just read disaster porn^W^W post-apocalyptic sci fi.
So, a lot depends on what kinds of info you want to find. But overall, I'd say it's not worth reading, because life's not going to be much fun. Even if you're prepared.
Querying the blockchain does not cost anything, just making changes to it. Otherwise, verifying transactions would be a recursive cost. I could be wrong though, but pretty sure since it's distributed reads are free, writes are where it costs.
Payment channels alone are only a good solution if you consider it acceptable to establish a payment channel with everyone you want to pay. So, in other words, it only makes sense for recurring payments to the same merchant, and you pay the blockchain fee once for each merchant you want to pay. Consequently, if you only pay once you pay the same fee as an on-chain transaction, and if you pay 1000 times you pay, in average, 1000th the blockchain fee per payment.
That's so amazing to hear! It pretty much flew under the company radar--most people didn't find out about it until the first reviews of the Lion beta came out.
I don't think it was very common at Apple for an individual engineer to conceive, implement, and ship a feature like this. There was a general sentiment on the team of "let's do something with signatures," but we knew that very few people had scanners. We thought about touchpad input, but decided against it at the time. (That came much later, in either 10.11 or 10.12)
I was thinking, "well, almost no one has a scanner, but practically everyone using this application has a camera in their Mac." I built the initial prototype in OpenCV and then ported it to Apple's vDSP/Accelerate frameworks.
My favorite detail, which doesn't seem to be present in 10.12, is that you could just click on a horizontal line in a PDF; since I recorded the signature's offset relative to the baseline superimposed on the camera image, it would place the signature exactly on the line, with descenders nicely descending.
I've since moved on from macOS/iOS development, but I had a really positive experience at Apple. Met so many amazingly talented people there.
Tethered the iPhone to a Mac and used Quicktime to capture/record the device input (New Movie Recording then change the camera input to the iPhone), export as MOV (720p).
Great write up! As a programmer interested in auditing for vulnerabilities like this and others, what does the community suggest as a direction to start honing my skills with proper learning material?
What do you want to get good at? 'Memory corruption' is the term of art for these vulns. There are a lot of areas you can learn "enough" of.
Start with the Micro Corruption CTF. See which part you enjoy the most (finding, analyzing, exploiting). Each use similar but different skills.
You need to get good at assembly/machine code. You have to learn the patterns of what compiled code translates back to (structs, exception handlers, logic, etc). Machine code is the one constant. Notice how the author had mapped C structs in his hex editor? That is the sort of thing that gets you back to a conceptual hacking level instead of being down in the weeds. Get good at doing those things.
Besides what's been suggested already, there are many small open source programs that have never had an audit. You could follow the example of defuse.ca and just start doing it.
I've been building hacks (as the community calls them) since 2010.
If you get a golden build and get it working it's almost like a real mac. It's possible to get everything working 100% but it's time consuming and even in the best case scenario macOS updates will probably be a pain.
Another aspect to consider is noise. If you come from the Mac world you are probably spoiled by low noise or silent computers. PCs are very noisy and you will probably have spend time in research and money in expensive silent parts to solve this.
Finally, a common problem with hackintoshes is wifi. I've tried everything, believe me. If you intend on using Wifi your best bet is buying the same chip Apple uses with an adapter. Many manufacturers offer their Wifi drivers for macOS but those are usually finicky or outdated.
Macs (maybe with the exception of a Mac Pro) are only silent at idle, not in full load. By my definition of 'silent' at least. If you can't hear the system while gaming because you use headphones, sorry, it's not silent.
If you just randomly build a beige box hackintosh, it will be noisy. If you spend some quality time on silentpcreview, you can get one that is silent even under load. I know, I have one.
Still, I'd very much like to get a decent Mac Pro instead. Devil's in the details, let's wait and see. My hackintosh isn't becoming obsolete any time soon.
I briefly ran a hackintosh when my Biostar motherboard died and I was frustrated with how slow my old Macbook Air was running. Pretty simple process: replaced it with a Gigabyte, downloaded an installer image from my Mac, and used to TonyMac tools to set it up. Unfortunately wasn't able to get Xcode to work reliably. Everything else seemed to work but Xcode was a crashfest.
I'm not sure it's the hackintosh... now and then I hear a lot of complaints about a particular version of xcode even on native macs. I don't use it, but I have work colleagues who do.
I was running the same version of Xcode on the same version of Mac OS on a 4-5 year old Macbook Air and it worked fine there, just slow.
I've certainly had Xcode crash once in a while, but this was something else. Tried reinstalling it and no change. I don't think I even got it to finish a build.
The FC R5 is a HUGE case, and it's as good as my mac pro 2008 really. Lighter too! Very, VERY well designed, excellent filters, and I run 3 140mm fans in it so it doesn't make a noise; the fans are permanently just over the stalling speed. Really very good cases.
Their utilities (Multibeast, Unibeast, Kextbeast...) are well-though and easy to use, but it worth noting that Tonymacx86 doesn't have any plans to open source them -- you have to trust him (no one seems to know his real name, mostly for legal reasons related to Apple I think) to execute binaries with root rights on your fresh OS, or go the Vanilla (and harder) way.
I have a fully working hackintosh. Just take someones confirmed build and buy the exact same parts. I lucked out in that every piece of hardware (besides the wifi card) worked out of the box. It runs just like a mac, better actually, and I use it all the time.
The truth is that the best hackintosh is Niresh but since it's even more illegal than Unibeast and such it's banned from the tonymacx86 forum and /r/hackintosh/ both.
