Good Morning! Looks like the start of 2025 is keeping us busy! Apple's taking a $95M hit to settle claims that Siri was doing some unauthorized eavesdropping, passkeys are stumbling through their growing pains with platform fragmentation and user experience issues, and we've got a fascinating deep-dive into Intel's infamous $475M FDIV bug that shows the fix was actually simpler than the original implementation.

— Forrest Knight & Meghanadh Vasireddy

Apple's Siri Faces Privacy Reckoning: $95M Settlement for Alleged Eavesdropping

Context: Let's talk privacy and voice assistants. We all know Apple has been waving the privacy flag pretty hard, especially with Tim Cook calling it a "fundamental human right." But here's where it gets interesting - their star assistant Siri might have been doing some unauthorized listening.

Apple just agreed to shell out $95 million to settle a federal lawsuit, though they're not admitting they did anything wrong. The lawsuit claims Siri was picking up conversations without the magic words "Hey, Siri" between 2014 and 2024. Even worse - these recordings allegedly made their way to advertisers. Yikes.

Technical Breakdown:

• Implementation Issue: The core problem centers on wake word detection and background listening thresholds - something that's critical for voice assistant architecture but tricky to get right

• Impact Scope: We're looking at a decade of potentially affected devices across Apple's ecosystem

• User Compensation: Up to $20 per device, max 5 devices (though only 3-5% of eligible users are expected to claim)

For those in tech, this raises some fascinating questions about how we balance user experience with privacy in voice-enabled systems. The settlement might be pocket change for Apple ($95M vs $705B in profits), but it's a wake-up call for how we implement always-listening features in consumer tech.

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Passkeys in 2025: A Reality Check on Our Password-Free Future

So, we've got this elegant authentication solution called passkeys that was supposed to make passwords obsolete. While the underlying FIDO2/WebAuthn tech is solid for security, the real-world rollout isn't going quite as smoothly as we'd hoped.

What's New: After nearly two years of widespread availability, we're seeing some interesting challenges emerge. Big tech companies are essentially playing tug-of-war with user experience, and it's causing some headaches for both users and developers.

The Technical Landscape:

• Implementation Fragmentation: Each platform vendor (looking at you, Apple, Google, and Microsoft) wants to be your passkey home - leading to disconnected experiences across devices

• Sync Struggles: Moving passkeys between platforms feels like trying to get your Netflix recommendations to transfer to Hulu - it's technically possible but weirdly complex

• Security Trade-offs: Most sites still keep passwords as a backup, which kind of defeats the whole "unphishable credentials" thing

• Cross-Platform Blues: Want to use your Apple-created passkey on your Android? Better grab a second device and get ready for some QR code fun

The good news? Password managers are stepping up as the Switzerland of passkeys - neutral territory where your credentials can live in harmony. For now, this might be our best bet while the ecosystem figures itself out. Just maybe don't rush to make your mom switch to passkeys during your next tech support session.

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The $475M Bug: Looking Back at Pentium's Famous FDIV Flaw

Context: In 1994, a math professor stumbled upon something peculiar - his Pentium processor was giving wrong answers for certain floating-point divisions. What initially seemed like a minor glitch to Intel turned into one of tech's most expensive bugs, costing the company $475 million in recalls (that's over a billion in today's dollars!).

At the heart of the issue was a flawed lookup table in the chip's SRT division algorithm. Here's what made this bug fascinating:

• Root Cause: 16 missing entries in a 2048-entry PLA (Programmable Logic Array)

• Bug Trigger: Carry-save adder would occasionally access these missing entries

• Error Rate: Only 1 in 9 billion divisions failed - making it incredibly hard to catch in testing

• Fix Solution: Intel's elegant fix actually reduced transistor count by filling all unused table entries with '2'

What's especially interesting is that Intel's original PLA implementation was trying to optimize for specific mathematical bounds, but ended up creating a more complex and buggy solution. The irony? The simplified fix they eventually implemented would have saved space and prevented the bug altogether if used from the start. It's a classic reminder that sometimes, simpler really is better in hardware design.

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🔥 More Notes

• United Airlines now says first flights with Starlink Wi-Fi will take off spring 2025: United Airlines is accelerating its plan to add Starlink-enabled Wi-Fi to its planes, with the first commercial flights expected in spring 2025. The airline plans to outfit its entire fleet of nearly 1,000 planes with Starlink Wi-Fi by the end of 2025.

• Can LLMs write better code if you keep asking them to “write better code”?: Max explores whether repeatedly asking an LLM (large language model) to "write better code" can actually lead to improved code quality and performance. Through a series of iterative prompts and experiments, he finds that prompt engineering is more effective than generic "write better code" requests, but LLMs still struggle with certain optimizations and can introduce subtle bugs.

• Japan to pitch high-speed optical networks as next big export to U.S: The Japanese government plans to provide aid for fast, energy-saving optical technology to help build more data centers outside of big cities. This is expected to enable high-speed communications, reduce latency and energy consumption, and decentralize data hubs to mitigate disaster risks.

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