[HN Gopher] Apple's Mistake
___________________________________________________________________
Apple's Mistake
Author : feross
Score : 932 points
Date : 2021-08-09 15:47 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stratechery.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (stratechery.com)
| aeoleonn wrote:
| Sooo... once child predators switch from iphone to a regular
| camera ... then what, Apple? Fuck everyone's privacy though?
| renewiltord wrote:
| Well, the idea is they have to share it. If you scan their
| Gmail, scan their iCloud, get Sony/Canon/Nikon to scan when
| copying off the camera, get Windows and Mac OS to scan images
| on copy, you can constrain them.
|
| It will be interesting what the effect on sexting will be once
| we know that some Apple employee can look at you naked because
| the tool mismatched.
| tartoran wrote:
| For whoever thinks they are fine and have nothing to hide, think
| about the clock cycles that the scanner consumes on your phone's
| cpu slowing it down and draining the battery if it scans when not
| plugged in. Second, this will classify and extract metadata from
| your own private photos, receipts, photo of your router's
| password on it and so on. This is not only a privacy concern but
| abusive move from Apple. Windows does all kindof of shady things
| under the telemetry pretext, now Apple's doing this. What I hope
| is more smartphone opensource options.
| J253 wrote:
| I'm no expert in all things Apple, but this whole thing seems, to
| me at least, pretty un-Apple like. It would be easier to
| rationalize if this was actually a directive from, say, a certain
| large nation who said "if you want to continue to do business
| here, implement this capability" and what we're seeing is Apple
| trying to spin it as a feature or in some sort of positive light.
| grouphugs wrote:
| fascism
|
| alt-right
|
| right-wing
|
| being a corporation
|
| 100% failing at privacy and security on purpose for fascist
| interests
|
| ruining the hong kong uprisings in favor of fascist and alt-right
| interests
|
| we can keep going
|
| fuck everyone that supports these people forever
| thow16161 wrote:
| My friend is a camgirl and OF girl. I take most of her pics and
| vids on my iPhone. So I have thousands of nudes of her on my
| phone.
|
| She's 24, but could pass for much younger. I'm paranoid that I'll
| get flagged.. Especially since all of her tik-toks with any skin
| shown, or any drinking get flagged.
| YokoSix wrote:
| It's the same as with parents photographing their naked babies
| in the bathtub. Those images won't be flagged because they
| aren't in the database provided to Apple. Only verified illegal
| photos should be in the database. So you and your girlfriend
| will be fine.
| Hackbraten wrote:
| Until one of the OF patrons mistakes her for a minor, reports
| the images, and their hashes somehow end up in NCMEC's
| database.
| kickopotomus wrote:
| > Those images won't be flagged because they aren't in the
| database provided to Apple
|
| This is not accurate. Apple is using perceptual hashes. If
| the features of an image are close enough to an image in the
| NCMEC database it may generate a matching hash.
| yakkityyak wrote:
| Not defending the new tech by any means, but you'd have to
| have enough matches to exceed some hidden threshold, which
| would first trigger a manual review by Apple. It seems very
| unlikely to have your own family photo result trigger
| anything.
| ByteWelder wrote:
| The problem with that is that the threshold is unknown,
| so it could be 2 or 3.
| tiagod wrote:
| These are perceptual hashes though.
|
| What if you take a picture of your naked baby in the bathtub
| or your child on the beach, and the picture is very similar
| to a known CSAM picture with a hash in the database, enough
| to pass the distance threshold they're using?
|
| The picture would be sent for screening, the Apple screener
| would indeed say that's a naked baby/child, and soon enough
| you've got the FBI (or whatever is the equivalent in your
| country) knocking on your door and arresting you for
| pedophilia.
| echohack5 wrote:
| > Only verified illegal photos should be in the database.
|
| Considering PhotoDNA, the source code of Apple's
| implementation, a 30-year Ph.D. level in cryptographic
| knowledge, and the processes by which neuralMatch actually
| run are unavailable to the OP, I think OP is justified in the
| minor paranoia of not wanting to be falsely accused of owning
| CSAM.
|
| That's precisely the problem with Apple's announcement here.
| You can't apply common sense to an algorithm and dragnet-
| style surveillance.
|
| I doubt even Apple specifically knows precisely how things
| will turn out with this system.
| [deleted]
| klelatti wrote:
| This is (rightly) causing enormous damage to Apple's brand and
| undermining one of the key messages they are using to promote the
| iPhone. What is more I'm sure Apple's executive team would
| realise that this would be the case.
|
| I can't help but feel that someone has wielded a 'big stick' to
| get Apple to do this. If not it's a huge misjudgment.
| taylorhou wrote:
| although I'm a HN reader, I'm in the camp of "since this
| doesn't affect me personally (unless apple's algo's mislabel my
| kids photos as offending), apple is helping make the world a
| better place" - not enough to make me switch away from the gold
| standard of today's "smartphone experience"
| nonbirithm wrote:
| I think that so long as there is an argument for arresting
| people that possess child pornography that the negatives will
| outweigh the positives in the eyes of the people in charge.
| Preventing child abuse was more important than everyone's
| complete privacy in Apple's opinion. Maybe it was because one
| is directly related to the outcome of a human life and the
| other is a nebulous construct to most people except those in
| the technology sphere. But those were ultimately Apple's (or
| the government's) values in this case.
|
| I don't think that the phrase "giving up some amount of privacy
| to stop child abusers" will sound unreasonable to enough other
| people that don't really understand privacy. The damage to
| Apple's brand seems to be coming mostly from technologists and
| the privacy-conscious. Even if only a handful of people are
| justifiably arrested because of this change, making the
| tradeoffs not worth it in their eyes, there are still many
| other people who would believe that catching even a few more
| child abusers was the right thing to do.
|
| Reducing the reasoning to "but think of the children" ignores
| the fact that there are still reasons that CSAM is declared
| illegal. It seems that most people on these threads are
| focusing on the fact that this is a privacy disaster - which is
| absolutely is - but until there is a viable argument that on-
| device privacy is more important to the general public than
| shutting down a market that actively produces evidence of child
| abuse, I'm pessimistic that this will be walked back.
|
| What is needed are studies correlating the spread of CSAM with
| actual CSA, but they do not exist. At this point it seems to be
| taken for a fact. The taboo around the subject appears to have
| disincentivized the creation of such studies.
| biztos wrote:
| I can think of excellent arguments for arresting people that
| are planning terrorist attacks using Signal.
|
| What I can't think of is why scanning everyone's private
| messages just in case they might be those terrorists is a
| worthwhile trade-off in any kind of free society.
|
| There are lots of ways to catch the bad guys, and we'll never
| catch them all no matter what we do. In countries with a
| concept of individual privacy before the state, there need to
| be limits on how much the state gets to snoop.
|
| There are plenty of countries without any such privacy, so
| it's not like we have to guess what the far end of the
| slippery slope looks like.
| Rd6n6 wrote:
| A few months ago, everywhere you looked people were promoting
| apple as the privacy company. It was an amazing amount of viral
| goodwill and trust
| temp8964 wrote:
| How do you know this damages Apple's brand? The HN community is
| very very different from the public regarding to privacy.
|
| Maybe most of the public do not understand privacy in this
| absolute sense? Maybe even the public support scanning photoes
| to find child sex abusers?
|
| It could be a fact that the outrage is only among a very small
| number of individuals. I won't be suprised if the number is
| small even among tech persons.
| klelatti wrote:
| Can't see how 'we test all your photos' on your phone works
| with the whole iPhone protects your privacy message but we'll
| see.
| monkeynotes wrote:
| Yeah, I am pretty certain if I asked my friends what they
| thought of Apple's new photo scanning privacy concern they'd
| be like "What? Not heard about that" and that would be about
| it, move on continue loving their iPhone.
| randyrand wrote:
| privacy is something Apple markets a _ton_ to regular
| folks. even on billboards!
|
| Apple likely did market research before they chose their
| ads and decided that privacy was of mass interest.
| only_as_i_fall wrote:
| The real question is whether they can keep their pro-
| privacy image intact with this change.
|
| Also, if they don't then does it even matter at this
| point?
|
| It's possible that even if Apple dropped all pretense and
| started working with authoritarian governments to
| compromise reporters the general public in the west still
| wouldn't care.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| /r/apple is absolutely furious.
| valparaiso wrote:
| Most people there are dumb and can't even read what Apple
| said. They still think Apple is going to scan all your data
| on iPhone from the start.
| bredren wrote:
| > This is (rightly) causing enormous damage to Apple's brand
|
| Apple's brand according to HN has already been damaged by too
| many trade offs: walling off the App Store, the MacOs system
| disk, availability of stand-alone OS updates and more.
|
| Extreme temperatures and wildfires are to climate change as
| tangible customer data leaks are to Apple's implementation of
| security and privacy around its ecosystem.
|
| That is, CSAM scanning does nothing to prompt a 114 degree day
| in an iPhone user's mind.
|
| Until Americans are hauled into custody the way Belarusians are
| right now, this will not enter the customer perception of
| Apple's brand.
|
| And if that future lies ahead, it will be way too late to
| matter.
| migueldeicaza wrote:
| There is a big stick coming from the EU (and someone said the
| same is coming from the UK).
|
| My guess is that Apple designed this privacy protecting system
| so that they could deliver the solution on their own terms -
| and perhaps leading the way on how this could be done before
| they are hit with a cookie-banner-popup-level solution from
| bureaucrats.
|
| Regardless on your opinion on whether they should scan or not,
| both the EU and the UK now have a reference design that
| protects the privacy of people, and still manages to either
| identify the people that own that material, or make it more
| inconvenient to own that material.
|
| As we like to say "Deplatforming works", and in this case, a
| good useful tool for people that own those pictures is no
| longer available, and they have to resort to jumping through
| hoops and relying on more inconvient solutions. The later might
| not solve the root problem, but introduces friction that gets
| in their way.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| I was actually going to switch over to their eco system on the
| next update. (mostly for the watch, partly for blue bubble on
| texting-- sadly yes it actually matters in the dating
| market...)
|
| I'm now certainly not going to and am loudly telling all my
| friends why.
| spiderice wrote:
| Surely sticking with Google is not the logical reaction to
| this. I hate that Apple is doing this too, but Google is
| still in a league of its own when it comes to violating your
| privacy.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| Definitely all ears for options that still allow TFA apps
| like authy/okta/google authenticator needed for work.
|
| ie, afaik pureism is not an option
| duckmysick wrote:
| I'm not sure about the brand, but their stock seems to be doing
| fine. Barely a dent.
| whoknowswhat11 wrote:
| I keep on reading that taking steps to prevent CASM is doing
| "huge damage" to their brand. Or that blocking minors from
| sending nudes if they are on a child account under their parent
| is doing huge damage.
|
| Really?
|
| You know some late night comedian is going to do some jokes
| about pedo's having to switch to android. You think that is
| damaging to apples' brand?
|
| My guess is some android folks do a follow eventually (as
| usual).
|
| I'm a parent. Even for those of us who are into privacy etc
| (yes, I did the early PGP key signing parties, EFF / ACLU stuff
| etc) I'm having a hard time seeing how this damages Apple's
| brand. I don't want this crap being sent to my children -
| PERIOD. If they are on a child account PLEASE screen it.
|
| Folks - pay attention to the kind of laws that will get passed
| and do get passed. Most folks will throw away a lot of civil
| rights for these types of issues.
|
| I found the arguments against this surprisingly uncompelling. I
| saw an HN article about how apple is committing felonies etc -
| it just didn't seem well founded. And everything is over
| hyperbolic over the top its insane.
| brandon272 wrote:
| My expectations from Apple would be scaled way back if they
| weren't preaching fairly consistently that they treat privacy
| as a "fundamental human right". They've marketed this as not
| only a competitive difference but also a moral imperative.
|
| To claim that you treat privacy as a fundamental human right
| is an extraordinary claim that requires significant effort
| and action to back up. To me, "fundamental human rights"
| apply to everyone - all humans - including children.
|
| Their commitment to this was already called into question for
| several reasons, including their partial commitment to E2E as
| well as their actions in other countries (i.e. China).
|
| When you give your users privacy with numerous conditions
| attached indicating all the times they don't have it, you
| aren't giving them privacy. Full stop.
|
| It's like going to someone's home, having them tell you that
| they are champions for privacy and then going to the bathroom
| and seeing a damn camera attached to the wall. "Oh, that,
| don't worry. I only look at the footage if something gets
| stolen."
| r00fus wrote:
| You may be conflating two features. 1 - Messages fix. 2 -
| scanning your entire Photos library and sending hashes to an
| unaccountable, no oversight nonprofit (NCMEC) to be compared
| with CSAM hashes - with no way to contest what you send.
|
| 1 is arguably a good feature (though it's very intrusive - it
| has a benefit).
|
| 2 is a monstrous invasion of privacy. It has no benefit to
| you, the user, only a massive potential threat.
|
| Finally, the NCMEC is founded by someone who admitted, if he
| was judged by the own law he helped pass, he'd be considered
| a sex offender when he was dating his then-girlfriend.
| bzbarsky wrote:
| > scanning your entire Photos library
|
| The parts of it being uploaded to iCloud, not the whole
| thing, yes?
|
| > and sending hashes to an unaccountable, no oversight
| nonprofit (NCMEC)
|
| As I understand it, the whole point is that the hashes are
| computed on-device and compared to the NCMEC database on-
| device. Is my understanding incorrect?
| josephcsible wrote:
| Your understanding is incorrect. The NCMEC database is
| unavailable to your device. The hashes are checked by
| communicating with a server. In particular, only the
| server ever learns if there was a match, not your device.
| willseth wrote:
| Wrong.
| krinchan wrote:
| > The parts of it being uploaded to iCloud, not the whole
| thing, yes?
|
| This is policy, not capability. The capability is each
| and every image can be scanned.
|
| > As I understand it, the whole point is that the hashes
| are computed on-device and compared to the NCMEC database
| on-device. Is my understanding incorrect?
|
| You are incorrect but also the concern is NCMEC's
| database's accuracy. Also, going by other NPO's the
| government has taken an interest in, NCMEC is very
| exposed to government control. They can easily decide to
| allow the government to slip a few extra hashes in their
| database and tell no one. They can do this in exchange
| for protecting their NPO status, a national security
| letter, anything. We will never know and if we find out,
| we will have no way to hold them accountable. Ever.
|
| Anyway, the NMEC database is NDA'ed and a secret. It's
| not open to review or auditing. It's also grossly
| inaccurate and nearly useless.
|
| You are taking these points entirely out of context and
| in a vacuum. It reads a bit bad faith and win an Internet
| argument at any cost.
| bzbarsky wrote:
| > This is policy, not capability. The capability is each
| and every image can be scanned.
|
| Are you familiar with the implementation? If it's in the
| uploader, then the capability for each image to be
| scanned sounds like it would involve a bunch of code
| changes.
|
| But let's posit that the implementation just checks the
| "uploaded to iCloud" flag and hence this is "just
| policy". I agree that this is concerning, but I think
| it's important to distinguish between "could do X" and
| "is doing X" when describing a situation.
|
| > You are incorrect
|
| I would love to be enlightened here. Can you please point
| me to an explanation of how my understanding is
| incorrect?
|
| > but also the concern is NCMEC's database's accuracy
|
| I absolutely share this concern.
|
| > You are taking these points entirely out of context and
| in a vacuum.
|
| No, I don't think I am. I think there is enough heated
| rhetoric going on here, with people mis-stating what is
| actually going on to justify how they feel about it, that
| it's worth being very clear about what the problems here
| really are. Otherwise it feels like people are arguing
| against strawmen and makes it too easy to dismiss
| concerns that are very pertinent.
|
| The original article for this thread, by the way, does a
| good job here.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| > This is policy, not capability. The capability is each
| and every image can be scanned.
|
| That capability is in every software/app that has access
| to your photos and to the internet, on any device.
| ique wrote:
| > The parts of it being uploaded to iCloud, not the whole
| thing, yes?
|
| If you leave your phone on default settings, that's all
| of them. In fact you need to turn off a lot of things.
| Turn off backups, Photo Stream, Files, Mail Drop, album
| sharing (make sure you don't accept any invites to shared
| albums or you will get flagged) and I'm sure there are
| more iCloud integrations I'm not aware of.
|
| It's actually quite hard to not use iCloud, by design.
| bzbarsky wrote:
| Thank you, that is useful context!
| whoknowswhat11 wrote:
| No - the amount of bad info in these discussions has
| gotten incredible. The more overblown the claims the more
| trashy the data it seems they are based on.
|
| It's funny, it is literally in the first paragraph of the
| system overview in terms of how the database of hashes is
| stored - "which is securely stored on users' devices"
| josephcsible wrote:
| You misunderstand what that quote is referring to.
| willseth wrote:
| No, he's not. Read the documentation. The hash database
| your photos are compared to will live on your device, and
| scanning happens entirely on-device.
|
| "Apple further transforms this database into an
| unreadable set of hashes, which is securely stored on
| users' devices."
| josephcsible wrote:
| Read further down:
|
| > the blinding step using the server-side secret is not
| possible on device because it is unknown to the device.
| The goal is to run the final step on the server and
| finish the process on server. This ensures the device
| doesn't know the result of the match, but it can encode
| the result of the on-device match process before
| uploading to the server.
| willseth wrote:
| This is a confusing paragraph, but the "final step" is
| not matching per se. The final step _reveals_ whether a
| match occurred - but it 's clear that the database exists
| on-device and the database _lookup_ occurs on-device.
|
| Note the last part: "... but it can encode the result of
| the on-device match process before uploading to the
| server." The result of the match already exists before it
| is uploaded to the server. This is also made clear in the
| diagram.
|
| Depending on how you define "matching," it either occurs
| on-device or _no explicit matching actually occurs_. The
| server gets a payload for each uploaded image and
| attempts to use its server-side secret to derive its
| decryption key from the header. If (and only if) the
| image _was_ a match - as determined by the blinded on-
| device comparison - it will now have a key to decrypt the
| rest of the payload (for review). Note that neither
| client nor server explicitly compare the real database
| hash to the image hash. The comparison is absorbed into
| crypto "properties."
| josephcsible wrote:
| Do you agree with these two statements?
|
| 1. For every image that's scanned, whether matching or
| non-matching, some data will be sent to the server.
|
| 2. Your phone never learns and has no way to tell which
| images match and which ones don't.
| willseth wrote:
| Ugh. Feel free to expound any of your vague replies in
| this thread with actual explanations that make sense
| under any reasonable interpretation of "on device."
| willseth wrote:
| > scanning your entire Photos library and sending hashes to
| an unaccountable, no oversight nonprofit (NCMEC) to be
| compared with CSAM hashes - with no way to contest what you
| send.
|
| This is simply incorrect. It's clearly documented how this
| works. 1) only files about to be uploaded to iCloud are
| scanned, 2) Apple maintains the hashes for comparison in
| their servers (not NCMEC), 3) only after multiple photos
| match is the account flagged for review, 4) they are
| reviewed by Apple to catch false positives, 5) only after
| match is confirmed is the account disabled and the user
| reported to NCMEC, and 6) you can still appeal to Apple to
| have your account reinstated.
|
| https://www.apple.com/child-
| safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni...
| switch007 wrote:
| > I don't want this crap being sent to my children
|
| You can always not buy your child a device.
|
| Parents will recoil in horror at the suggestion, being told
| what to do and limiting their child's freedom ! Indeed,
| welcome to our world, where we suffer huge affronts on our
| freedom and privacy in the name of "the children".
| zionic wrote:
| Also a parent, and I couldn't more strongly disagree with
| you.
|
| We cannot protect our children by building a dystopia for
| them to grow up in, and normalizing this kind of invasive
| spyware on every device is pretty much guaranteeing that.
| klelatti wrote:
| > You know some late night comedian is going to do some jokes
| about pedo's having to switch to android. You think that is
| damaging to apples' brand?
|
| No just the start of a whole stream of attacks from WhatsApp
| / Facebook:
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/6/22613365/apple-icloud-
| csam...
|
| Also just read the full range of comments.
|
| The fact that you're saying elsewhere that everyone is
| misunderstanding and it's all overblown is sort of making my
| point that it's affecting the brand.
|
| Plus you're saying other firms capture images so that's fine
| - no! Those other firms haven't made privacy a central
| feature of their brand.
| tfehring wrote:
| I agree that the idea of the AG bringing felony charges
| against Apple employees because of their approach to dealing
| with CSAM is pretty far-fetched. But the article you're
| referring to [0] is correct to point out that Apple will be
| silently exfiltrating unencrypted data from its users'
| devices to be reviewed by its employees, meaning that they'll
| be viewing arbitrary content from Apple users' devices
| without their knowledge or consent. That's not speculation,
| it follows directly from Apple's explanation of how the
| system will work, with the only safeguard being Apple's
| purported one-in-a-trillion false positive rate for the on-
| device scanning that causes the data to be sent to Apple.
|
| [0] https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/929
| -On...
| whoknowswhat11 wrote:
| You are confusing encryption with access to encryption.
|
| Apple ALREADY has access to all you icloud photos. Period.
| How do you think they offer them to you via website and
| various sync services.
|
| So they can encrypt them at rest or in transit, but their
| KMS or whatever gives them access ALREADY to these very
| same photos.
|
| This illustrates I think how bad this convo has been from
| the HN side. A lot of bad info out there on this which
| makes the totally overblown responses even worse.
|
| Heads up - your phone ALEADY uploads photos to iCloud if
| you let it, and those photos are accessible by Apple
| ALREADY.
| danielschonfeld wrote:
| While logical to assume, that's not a given. I think some
| of us want to believe that the keys to those said images
| are uploaded encrypted to the cloud. And the ability to
| sync between devices just means adding more keys to your
| account. So unless you know something we don't, it's not
| 100% that they sit unencrypted on Apple's servers, or
| that they have the keys to decrypt them.
|
| It is sound judgement tho, to assume that they do.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| The AG bringing felony charges isn't far-fetched its
| ridiculous. Does anyone think a trillion dollar company
| with a giant legal staff hasn't vetted this in a hundred
| different ways? They are probably going country by country
| to validate legality. It will not be implemented anywhere
| they don't find that it is 100% legal.
| hendersoon wrote:
| Apple's brand won't be sullied until they give-in to a
| government order to flag other types of illegal images (gay
| porn in Saudi Arabia, say, or pictures of the Tank Man in
| China) and are caught doing it.
|
| Apple's rejoinder is that they will simply refuse to do that.
| And that's great, until you consider that all the iPhones are
| made in China and China is more than willing to apply immense
| pressure including but not limited to shutting down Foxconn
| if they feel strongly about it.
| whoknowswhat11 wrote:
| Most of the major tech co's have already adapted to China's
| requests.
|
| That in general means hosting data about chinese nationals
| in china, usually using state govt controlled datacenters,
| and making sure the keys to decrypt content are also local
| and accessible to those state controlled employees.
|
| You should have little to no privacy expectation in china
| as an example.
|
| For example AWS is careful to use this language about it's
| china regions: "Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region
| operated by NWCD"
|
| They used to block KMS services in China as well.
|
| Apple has said it will (generally) follow the law in the
| countries it operates in. Until we say apple can make its
| own laws that is probably what it'll have to do.
| hendersoon wrote:
| Apple already acquiesced to China in that manner, yes.
| They store all iCloud data in China and they gave the
| Chinese government the encryption keys.
|
| This is a bit different in that they're scanning files on
| client devices, /not/ solely in the cloud.
| friedman23 wrote:
| >I found the arguments against this surprisingly uncompelling
|
| I think it just goes to show that people don't actually care
| about privacy and civil liberties. You can't argue against
| "think of the children" without being labeled heartless or a
| pedophile so no one with true influence will argue against it
| since nobody wants to die on the child porn hill. This is
| what happens when your thought leaders are all cynical and
| value money and power above all else.
|
| While I'm a privacy advocate I could see that the arguments
| were fruitless. The popular conception of the constitution
| today is that it is a joke. People mock liberties like
| freedom of speech so you just know privacy is something
| people do not care about.
| temp8964 wrote:
| People do care about privacy, but not in that absolute
| sense. You think privacy is 100% or 0%, but vast majority
| of the public don't think so.
| whoknowswhat11 wrote:
| exactly. This seems a pretty low intrusion way to deal
| with a somewhat important issue to a lot of folks. They
| already had access to these icloud photos on icloud, this
| was in a way something to keep the scanning OFF their
| servers.
|
| I really continue to doubt this is going to have huge
| damage to apple's brand. More likely - others will rush
| to copy this (or be forced to by govts elected by people
| who want this).
| friedman23 wrote:
| So you would be in favor of installing cameras in all
| homes that detects child abuse, murder, and rape in an
| automated fashion? It can use microphones to detect
| people in distress. This would prevent many more heinous
| crimes than what apple is proposing we do and it will
| only be used for detecting horrible acts.
|
| By your logic this would be acceptable and we could all
| still claim to value privacy.
| whoknowswhat11 wrote:
| We are discussing a specific set of technologies.
|
| That said, camera's are already spreading pretty quickly
| (check out ring doorbell and friends) and homeowners are
| voluntarily registering these with local police
| departments.
|
| So yes, people don't mind if they are recorded going into
| and out of their own house and voluntary let police
| review this footage.
|
| Again, I think folks are overstating the "huge" damage to
| apple's brand.
| friedman23 wrote:
| People haven't had ring forced on them inside their homes
| yet.
|
| Like I said in another comment, the principle is whether
| forcing surveillance on people to prevent crimes is ok.
| The set of technologies is irrelevant, Apple is going
| through personal information that has not been
| voluntarily shared with the public by the content owner
| to detect criminal activities. I don't see how that is
| different from installing microphones and cameras inside
| people's homes with the passive ability to detect crime.
| Why can't a landlord install this kind of technology in
| their tenant's apartments?
| temp8964 wrote:
| I don't think so. This is a case by case reasoning. There
| is no straight logic leads to jumping from scanning
| iCloud photos to installing cameras in homes.
| friedman23 wrote:
| The principle is that it's fine to install surveillance
| if we are preventing horrible things from happening.
| swiley wrote:
| As I, and a small minority have pointed out for years: Apple's
| privacy marketing has always been fake; this is a PR failure
| more than it is a technical failure. I had nearly given up on
| hacker news because this idea had been so controversial here in
| the past, and I'm not sure I should have stayed since it took
| this long for everyone to notice.
| [deleted]
| wayoutthere wrote:
| You're right; this feels like a "do what we tell you or we go
| after you for <insert any of a thousand things Apple is guilty
| of>" situation.
| r00fus wrote:
| > This is (rightly) causing enormous damage to Apple's brand
|
| Is it, really? I think they feel this will blow over.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Historically, taking a position against measures which (even if
| only nominally) stop CSAM because they have abstract, negative
| privacy consequences is difficult. Try to explain to the average
| person why Apple's decision here is ominous, and the first
| question you'll get is "wait, why do you want to protect child
| abusers?"
|
| I've been getting angry about this for the last week, and am just
| now getting to the point where I can accept the reality that the
| snowball is already rolling. The government isn't going to step
| in and prevent this, unless it's to make the backdoor larger, and
| nobody who was going to buy an iPhone or use iCloud is going to
| stop because of this. So, it's done. Apple will put a backdoor on
| your phone and yes, and _obviously_ that backdoor will eventually
| be used for things beyond the scope of what they 're telling you
| now.
| fassssst wrote:
| Perhaps Apple should add "at home iCloud server" support to Macs
| so you can selfhost your personal iCloud, and keep all your data
| on your own property with easy UX.
| [deleted]
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| It feels like unreasonable search and seizure. That's my property
| that is being searched constantly and without a warrant to make
| sure I'm not committing a crime.
| Jenk wrote:
| How do we know this isn't a three letter government org silently
| pressuring apple into compliance?
|
| I see Apple getting a lot of flak but I'm surprised as anyone
| that they have decided to suddenly buck their trend/perception of
| being pro privacy quite so dramatically.
| annadane wrote:
| I actually completely understand WHY the average "lay-person"
| thinks encryption must be bad because it allows terrorists and
| child pornographers to confer in secret to plan their nasty
| deeds. It's completely defensible to think that way from a
| standpoint of human nature and it would make all the sense in the
| world for that to be the case - that indeed, encryption is
| fundamentally something we cannot have due to xyz. Now, that's
| not how the situation actually is, but understanding that it
| isn't is more complex than thinking about it for a brief amount
| of time only
| animex wrote:
| Now that Apple has demonstrated ability/capacity to scan for
| unencrypted content, law enforcement & government agencies with
| court-backing will compel them to provide any content moving
| forward.
|
| However, the majority of Apple users are uncaring and/or unaware
| of these recent changes and it will not affect their sales beyond
| the tiny tech minority.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| this is just a show of loyalty to the government to prevent any
| sort of monopoly action against Apple. The government actually
| loves monopolies because it makes monitoring citizens easier. The
| Feds would hate for Google, Facebook, or Apple to be broken up.
| Much better to have everybody using a small number of platforms
| with government backdoor access
|
| Wouldn't be surprised if this was agreed to behind closed doors
| in exchange for other assurances from the government. The
| government passing laws forcing Apple to do this would be very
| bad PR, better for Apple to appear to do it voluntarily
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| >The government actually loves monopolies because it makes
| monitoring citizens easier.
|
| Care to cite a source for that claim?
| [deleted]
| Rd6n6 wrote:
| > The government actually loves monopolies because it makes
| monitoring citizens easier.
|
| You make it sound like the government is a single person with a
| plan. I don't think people and departments in a government are
| very coherent and aligned, it's a huge number of people with a
| zoo of mandates and everyone is fighting to be seen as somebody
| who makes things happen
| kfprt wrote:
| In this case the incentives align. Much easier dealing with
| one or two parties than many.
| Agingcoder wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree with the premises that I own my device,
| which most people seem to take for granted.
|
| After all, in the iPhone case, I'm not allowed to root it,
| install anything I want on it, etc. Apple already controls it,
| and already decides what I can do with it.
|
| So, if Apple decides that it can't be used to send child
| pornography, how is it different from 'standard' usage
| restrictions ? Or is it only the fact that it might trigger a
| call to law enforcement which is a problem, and without this
| call, everything would be ok ? In other words, would an iPhone
| which detects child porn and refuses to do anything ('error :
| illegal content') with it be ok? Or would this be a violation of
| privacy?
| itronitron wrote:
| I'm trying to think of another situation where a company has a
| default starting position that their customers are breaking the
| law during normal use of their product.
|
| If car manufacturers installed a breathalyzer ignition interlock
| device on every car (new or currently owned) that would save some
| lives, but I'm pretty sure very few people would tolerate it.
| 0x000000001 wrote:
| U.S. Senate bill seeks to require anti-drunk driving vehicle
| tech
|
| https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-bill-seeks-requir...
| kfprt wrote:
| Truly dystopian. I can't wait until someone has to drive to
| the hospital but has been drinking and can't.
| asadlionpk wrote:
| Should they be driving though? They can always call 911
| wilg wrote:
| There is no drunk driving exception based on where or why
| you are driving.
| aeoleonn wrote:
| Goodbye All Apple Devices
|
| Hello All Linux Devices
| stakkur wrote:
| Imagine if home builders, under pressure from law enforcement and
| government bodies, included built-in devices in your home that
| monitored and analyzed your behaviors and interactions, just to
| 'keep people safe'.
|
| And you couldn't uninstall them, even though you own the home.
|
| And you couldn't know when a human was reviewing 'suspicious
| behavior' telemetry, which included images, video and audio of
| you and your family.
|
| And you couldn't control anything about when and where this
| happened, except by moving house.
|
| And all of this was framed as a 'safety' problem, and if you
| complained about this, you were considered one of the 'screeching
| voices of the minority'.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Not during construction but people sure do put devices in their
| homes that tick all those boxes and you know what, they mostly
| don't care.
| randyrand wrote:
| What devices are you talking about?
|
| specifically this box "And you couldn't know when a human was
| reviewing 'suspicious behavior' telemetry, which included
| images, video and audio of you and your family."
|
| and this box: "And you couldn't uninstall them"
| zionic wrote:
| How do we make them care? Or more politically worded, show
| them it is in their interest to care?
| rnjesus wrote:
| lobby, or run for their office.
|
| edit: er, i think i misunderstood your question.
| brandon272 wrote:
| They voluntarily install those cameras in their homes and it
| isn't for the express purpose of government surveillance.
| wallacoloo wrote:
| > It's truly disappointing that Apple got so hung up on its
| particular vision of privacy that it ended up betraying the
| fulcrum of user control: being able to trust that your device is
| truly yours.
|
| These devices haven't been "truly yours" for a _decade_. Hence,
| jail-breaking. Maybe this is just the first time you've
| encountered friction against the walled garden and become widely
| aware of its existence, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there
| before.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| how probable is it even to find CP in an iphone, considering that
| is not really possible to upload stuff directly and that most
| likely those people would not use anything that s connected to
| the cloud. I think it's more interesting that this will now be in
| the desktop
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| I like this fairly subtle take (which I agree with the author
| that Apple's cloud product is essentially a betrayal of their
| privacy stance).
|
| The subtle take I got is that devices should be completely
| private... given that is what you pay for. This drives Apple's
| phone system into that "unremovable bloatware" which I pretty
| much want to escape from on Android devices without necessarily
| setting up all the control myself. I wanted to trust Apple's
| hardware for privacy (and already understood the limits of their
| privacy in their cloud), but now I feel betrayed as this product
| can be eventually used for more sinister practices should a
| government pass laws necessitating it, as highlighted in many
| other comments.
| josh_today wrote:
| I wouldn't stop where Ben Thompson drew the privacy line between
| "your device versus the cloud".
|
| Your content should be _your_ content regardless of where it
| lives.
|
| -Photos -Texts -Social Posts -Notes, Reminders
|
| These are all what make up a person's life. At one point in the
| not so distant future all of our data will live in the cloud, are
| we then property of the cloud providers?
| bialpio wrote:
| Not sure if I fully agree with "Your content should be your
| content regardless of where it lives." - the cloud operators
| own the hardware that hosts this content, they could want to
| impose limitations on it, irrespective of whether they have any
| legal obligations to do so. An analogy to me would be: "Yes,
| you can park your RV on my lot, just don't cook meth in it.".
|
| You can still manage your own data so that it is opaque to the
| cloud providers - encrypt it and don't share the key with them.
| They'll have no insight into the blobs of data that you're
| uploading to them.
| josh_today wrote:
| To use your own analogy- as an RV lot owner, should you have
| the right to install cameras in every RV to ensure no one is
| cooking meth?
| bialpio wrote:
| I can certainly ask every RV owner to agree to it and they
| are free to accept my terms or look for another lot. Or
| maybe I can say that every RV will be sniffed by a dog and
| in case it detects something, the RV will be entered to
| check for compliance with the rule.
|
| Edit: to be clear, what I'm trying to say is that there are
| 2 parties entering an agreement here, the owner of the
| infrastructure also has some rights because we recognize
| the rights to private property.
| aj3 wrote:
| That's a pretty idealistic view. I guess the issue boils down
| to whether you believe there are things in digital realms that
| are illegal to possess.
|
| For comparison, it's pretty obvious that there are certain
| things in physical realm that citizens shouldn't have. So it
| would be wrong to claim "my things are mine and no one should
| be able to inspect them or take away from me, no matter what
| those things are". Examples for things citizens should not
| posses: weapons of mass destruction and slaves.
|
| Apple et al argue that CSAM should be digital content that
| nobody ought to possess. So while you're obviously technically
| capable of storing it, it shouldn't be legal.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| > I guess the issue boils down to whether you believe there
| are things in digital realms that are illegal to possess.
|
| not at all. I'm pretty sure nobody here thinks CSAM should be
| legal. The topic at hand is whether that means everyone
| should be subjected to blanket surveillance by default.
|
| Just because there's child abuse out there doesn't mean you
| can walk into a random persons house and rummage through
| their drawers, and by the same logic Apple or anyone else
| should have no business digging through my phone.
|
| It's not idealistic at all, it's simply opposition to
| surveillance of people who have done nothing to warrant such
| suspicion. I don't know about the US, but here in Germany we
| have the so called _Briefgeheimnis_. (literally: secrecy of
| letters). Privacy of correspondence is almost sacrosanct and
| can only ever be violated under extreme circumstances, not
| casually or systematically, that 's what the Stasi used to
| do.
| websites2023 wrote:
| What percentage of your computer's storage are you willing to
| rent out to storing CSAM?
| least wrote:
| I think it's a kind of fine distinction... for now. My primary
| concern with Apple's proposed implementation of CSAM detection
| hinges almost entirely on the fact that it is performed on
| device. I use iCloud photos right now knowing fully well that
| it is subject to these scans.
|
| I think ideally things would truly be E2E encrypted, in which
| case Apple or any other cloud provider doesn't have to trouble
| themselves about what's on their servers, since no one but the
| user could ever look at the contents of it. In this case a big
| blob of data up to the storage limits of the person's plan is
| the only thing they'd have to worry about.
|
| That is also the other issue with Apple's proposed
| implementation. It completely circumvents E2EE and makes it
| entirely pointless. It doesn't preserve privacy in any respect
| whatsoever.
|
| And to what end? You might capture a few people that are
| syncing their child porn on iCloud without encrypting it
| themselves first, but does this really make children any safer?
| It certainly endangers anyone using an iPhone given the
| technology doesn't discriminate against what kind of hashes it
| provides and increases the scope of surveillance on everyone.
| These sorts of things are extremely hard to undo.
| anonymouswacker wrote:
| For those of us who just bought new iPhones (over the 2 week
| return period) and are having buyer's remorse after this
| decision, is there a way to return this now that the product is
| different than when I purchased it? Credit card chargeback, etc?
| I would like to switch to a phone I can control.
| lbriner wrote:
| One of the best protections against invasion of privacy and
| feature creep is to require an independently obtained warrant
| that is served to the person in question.
|
| Firstly, this allows the general public to get an idea of how
| much governments or police are interfering in people's lives but
| secondly, the enforcers have to convince someone (usually a
| judge) that their case has merit before they start defaming
| someone or taking away their liberty.
|
| We shouldn't be as scared about lacking privacy as we should be
| about the fact that our privacy can be invaded with little
| oversight and sometimes without us even knowing about it!
|
| Also, we need to speak up for those who are much more likely to
| be affected by privacy invasions (black, Muslim, other minorities
| etc.) even if we are white and don't think it will be a problem
| for us personally.
| qeternity wrote:
| Most of the comments ignore that this is likely to be well
| received by many consumers, because it sounds good on the
| surface: Apple is using tech magic to fight bad guys. Hooray!
|
| Worse, it's nearly impossible for a competitor to market against
| without risking the general population believing you tacitly
| approve CSAM. How does Google market Android without coming
| across like a safe haven for pedophilia?
| wccrawford wrote:
| In an era with so many people screaming, "Defund the police!" I
| can't see how reporting more stuff to the police automatically
| is going to go over well PR-wise.
|
| Even before that phrase, we were already in era of "Don't talk
| to the cops without your lawyer, especially if you're
| innocent." Giving those same cops more information is not in
| your own best interest.
| qeternity wrote:
| > In an era with so many people screaming, "Defund the
| police!"
|
| This is a very vocal, very small minority. The most ardent
| police reformers I know believe that law enforcement is
| necessary. Defunding has devastating consequences on those
| who are most vulnerable.
| [deleted]
| asteroidbelt wrote:
| It's hard to predict what will consumers think.
|
| It will be enough to have one big scandal with police crashing
| into innocent person house after they shared a photo of their
| child on the beach with their close relatives to change public
| opinion of this feature.
|
| Even from business perspective Apple is playing very risky game
| here. It can backfire.
|
| Also let's keep in mind that iPhones are usually owned by
| higher income more educated left-leaning people. And have a
| look how MSM (which is generally left-leaning) writes about
| this feature. For example, Guardian here
| https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/07/week-i...
| "Privacy. That's (no longer) iPhone." Such coverage of Apple
| may result in people switching away from iPhones, or for
| example, switching to Google for photo storage, and switching
| further away from iMessage.
|
| It is very unclear how events will unfold.
| yyyk wrote:
| It took me time to think about this news. I despise the cavalier
| attitude some people in software engineering have towards the
| social consequences of their work. A community where 'think of
| the children' is an ironic phrase is a sick one. Yet, something
| here doesn't smell entirely right.
|
| TL;DR: I think one of three must be correct:
|
| A) NCMEC is seriously neglecting protecting children by accepting
| a subpar solution. We're getting the client-side scanning
| precedent without any benefit to society.
|
| OR
|
| B) Apple is not entirely ditching server-side scanning, so again
| we'll be gaining nothing from client-side scanning aside from
| normalization of a dubious practice.
|
| OR
|
| C) The client-side solution will end up way more invasive than
| what even Apple believes it would be.
|
| ---
|
| Lets look at the worst scenarios. One or more pedos is actively
| molesting in order to record CSAM on a iPhone. The iPhone soon
| syncs to the iCloud, while the pedos distribute the CSAM. This is
| the scenario we all want to stop most and ASAP.
|
| 1) Apple's is a hash-based approach, not an AI based one. So the
| original upload must be marked as 'clear' by the iPhone, since
| NCMEC can't yet know about the CSAM.
|
| 2) Hopefully, sometimes later NCMEC does find the CSAM and marks
| it appropriately.
|
| 3) In the 'naive' server-side approach, Apple could scan iCloud
| and find the original CSAM and then the uploaders. This is not
| what we're doing. This is a client-side approach, and if certain
| rumors are right Apple will eventually do end2end encryption and
| so will not even be able to scan server-side. So do we do?
|
| 4) One option is for NCMEC to give up and let Apple do a worse
| solution than server-side scanning where the original
| perpetrators not only go free but can use iCloud for storage
| without being detected. That's our option A above.
|
| This is undesirable and unlikely. Even if NCMEC were so
| compromised, Apple can't want to get all this fire and then
| implement an non-working solution. Even if Apple were to do that,
| eventually pressure will force them to implement a working
| solution.
|
| 5) The other option is for the iPhone client to receive regular
| hash updates, and then periodically rescan any picture that was
| at one time uploaded to the iCloud (option C). Since the
| incriminating files may well not even exist anymore on the phone
| (the pedos in our scenario have good motivation to eventually
| delete the CSAM to save space even without the issue of client-
| side scanning), Apple will have to store the hashes of deleted
| images on the phone in order to periodically rescan them.
|
| _So to implement effective client-side scanning, iPhone owners
| will not be able to ever truly delete an image if it was ever
| synced to iCloud, even if the owners deleted it from the cloud
| and their phone_. The hash will be stored, and not only that - a
| rough facsimile of the image should be restorable from the hash*.
| I can 't see any other way to do it, and Apple and NCMEC must
| want the client-side solution to work. In a world where Pegasus
| and things like it exist, this is.. not optimal.
|
| 6) Of course, Apple could avoid all this by storing the hashes in
| their iCloud (option B), but what would be the point of client-
| side scanning than, aside from a dubious precedent?
|
| Am I missing something?
|
| * AFAIK the ability to make a rough facsimile of the original
| image from the hash is a property of visual hashes required for
| them to work even on manipulated images, and also required for
| the manual review system. Apple can't avoid this on a client-side
| solution - it's either the original image or something close
| enough so it can be manually reviewed if later found to be CSAM.
| yyyk wrote:
| Thinking about it, another client side solution would be to
| also scan images when _downloading_ from iCloud. That way pedos
| will have difficulty using iCloud, since the hash will be
| rescanned when downloading and the hash might be up to date
| this time. Would this allow Apple to not store the deleted
| image data on the client? This would still catch significantly
| less perpetrators than the server-side approach, would NCMEC
| etc. agree to this, or would pressure force Apple to go even
| further?
|
| Either way, a workable client-side solution has to end up more
| encompassing than what Apple has done.
| cycop wrote:
| Sounds like a great way to attack a target and destroy their
| life. Most people have no idea how many or what photos are on
| their devices.
|
| 1) Either get photos on their phone with the correct HASH, or get
| some photos that are already on their phone into the HASH list.
| 2) FBI will be quietly informed by Apple. 3) FBI shows up one day
| at the targets home or work. They confiscates all electronic
| devices and ruins that persons life.
| 6502nerdface wrote:
| This makes me appreciate the tough spot that Apple is in:
|
| > both the UK and the EU are moving forward on bills that mandate
| online service companies proactively look for and report CSAM.
| Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if this were the most important
| factor behind Apple's move: the company doesn't want to give up
| on end-to-end encryption -- and likely wants to expand it --
| which leaves on-device scanning as the only way to satisfy
| governments not (just) in China but also the West.
| mbauman wrote:
| Even without a requirement to proactively scan, Apple is surely
| expanding its ML stack on photos to categorize and describe
| photos and persons in them.
|
| Is that not the simpler explanation for this?
| acdha wrote:
| They can already do this now for every iCloud photo and the
| protocol described is elaborately protecting a small number
| of hashes. It seems unlikely that the PR brushfire from this
| is better than simply pointing that classifier on all of the
| photos already on Apple's servers.
| mbauman wrote:
| That's not what I'm saying. Apple is required by law to
| report images if they have "actual knowledge" of CSAM.
| Courts aren't too kind about superficial technicalities
| like "that output label wasn't trained" when Apple is doing
| on-device ML classification of pictures to identify
| content. By proactively scanning for selective hashes they
| can say they're doing something without being required to
| report a less-accurate ML output.
|
| That's also why this only applies if connected to iCloud;
| otherwise they don't have "knowledge" of it.
| josephcsible wrote:
| If Apple really cared about privacy, they'd instead have spent
| some money to lobby against those bills.
| davewritescode wrote:
| There is no company on Earth who is going to take the side of
| child pornographers.
|
| Most of the arguments against this ignore the fact there is a
| legitimate chance that this type of technology will only be
| used to combat child abuse and not more nefarious purposes.
| tiagod wrote:
| What about terrorism, hate speech, etc?
|
| Most people would agree these are very bad things. Problem
| is there is no objective definition of what constitutes it.
| bzbarsky wrote:
| What makes you think they didn't? (I don't know whether they
| did or not, but I would absolutely expect such lobbying to
| (1) be happening and (2) be kept very quiet because it's too
| easy to spin it as "Apple supports pedophilia" or some such.)
| lolsal wrote:
| I really did not expect this from Apple. Perhaps I am too naive.
| It makes me think Apple is doing this as a sort of litmus test or
| as a way to force another issue:
|
| - Government says Apple has to do it
|
| - Apple announces they will do it
|
| - Apple brand suffers immensely
|
| - Apple cites suffering as a reason to not do it?
|
| Seems like there would be a word/term/phrase for this kind of
| thing.
|
| I'm so optimistic I'm hoping there is an ulterior motive here or
| some sort of outside coercion.
| villgax wrote:
| Apple literally went 1984 at this point
| crookshanked wrote:
| full circle! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I
| backtoyoujim wrote:
| Apple new ad strategy: "Either buy and use Apple iPhone, or you
| are predator."
| angry_octet wrote:
| This is a great example of people being in a tech bubble. In a
| short while nobody except techies and molesters will remember
| that this is happening. Some significant number of KP men will be
| caught, but not the clever ones. Most iPhone users will put it
| out of their minds and continue using iCloud.
|
| The bigger authoritarian countries (China, India) will demand,
| and receive, the ability to match against illegal images and
| memes, like Tank Man, Winnie the Pooh, illicit tweet screencaps,
| etc. No one with power in the West will really care.
|
| The slippery slope is actually iMessage scanning, not iCloud
| Photos. Real time, ML based, it is fully capable of scanning for
| keywords, the same way as NSA analysts used X-KEYSCORE (in the
| ancient historical period, before they switched to ML).
| (Fortunately, NSA (or others) probably won't let it's ML
| classifiers be distributed, because they could be reverse
| engineered to see how much NSA knows.)
| intricatedetail wrote:
| I was considering getting M1 laptop, but now that's off the
| table. I am looking for a performant fanless laptop that will run
| Linux. Any suggestions?
| h4x0r12345 wrote:
| Donate a few dollars monthly to https://asahilinux.org on
| Patreon. We'll get Linux running smoothly on the M1 within a
| year or so.
| briefcomment wrote:
| I may consider getting a stand alone camera now.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Apple is going to scan images you download too, not just ones
| you take with your camera. Leaving their ecosystem is way more
| important than just getting a standalone camera.
| briefcomment wrote:
| Do you mean this would apply to Macs too? So if I used some
| non-Apple photo app, and uploaded photos from a camera, they
| would be similarly monitored?
| rvz wrote:
| > Do you mean this would apply to Macs too?
|
| From [0]
|
| _' These features are coming later this year in updates to
| iOS 15, iPadOS 15, watchOS 8, and macOS Monterey.'_
|
| So yes.
|
| Also by the OP:
|
| > iMessage encrypts messages end-to-end by default;
| however, if you have iCloud backup turned on, your messages
| can be accessed by Apple (who has the keys for iCloud
| backups) and, by extension, law enforcement with a warrant.
|
| So if you use iMessage and iCloud Photos then they will be
| scanned by Apple. Won't be surprised to see the on-device
| scanning feature more prevalent on M1/M1X Macs.
|
| [0] https://www.apple.com/child-safety/
| jeromegv wrote:
| So if you use iMessage and iCloud Photos then they will
| be scanned by Apple--> it is a lie. This is definitely
| not the case.
|
| Yes, with iCloud backup turned on, messages can be
| accessed by Apple, that hasn't changed, has been the case
| for a decade. It is specifically written in the technical
| document that they are not scanning the iMessages photos
| in the cloud the same way that they would scan your
| iCloud photos.
| briefcomment wrote:
| Ah thank you.
| robertoandred wrote:
| No, they wouldn't. It's only scanning photos you're
| uploading to iCloud Photo Library via Apple's Photos app.
| [deleted]
| ulzeraj wrote:
| One thing that might happen is that they could MITM your
| internet connection by default while maskerading it as a
| privacy feature.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/22573519/apple-private-relay-
| icloud...
| sylens wrote:
| Even if it did, iCloud is less of a necessity with a Mac
| than it is with an iOS device. I have a little more agency
| and utility on Macs.
| ulzeraj wrote:
| Oh... you just reminded me of the upcoming VPN service that
| will act as a proxy of sorts for internet browsing. If they
| do MITM HTTPS then they will basically scan evertything about
| you and your internet habits.
|
| When did it became like that? Their only saving grace was
| that they were okay-ish with user privacy.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| If we are going to be totally paranoid then a lack of pictures
| on your mobile phone could be seen as an indication that you
| have something to hide!
| briefcomment wrote:
| Sure, then let them play their authoritarian hand in
| attempting to follow through on that. Maybe at some point, it
| gets ridiculous enough that some critical mass of people get
| fed up and we are able to reverse course.
| ulzeraj wrote:
| Nothing to hide right? As an otaku who collect figurines I
| can't wait to have the police knocking at my door because of
| a false positive triggered by a 1/8 scale statue of Megumin
| casting a fireball.
| 1-6 wrote:
| Cameras in the future are not immune to what we may see on
| upcoming smartphones. For example, Sony revealed an image
| processing sensor with compute capabilities built-in. It's able
| to not only send photon measurements but send metadata on
| what's being captured in the image.
| https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/14/sony-shows-off-first-combi...
| angst_ridden wrote:
| Remember when scanners would allow you to scan banknotes,
| even those with a Eurion code?
|
| I suspect we'll be seeing more of this kind of thing in
| digital stand-alone cameras. GPS-enabled? You just lost the
| ability to photograph demonstrations. Trademarked logos i the
| background? Maybe the shutter won't click.
| 1-6 wrote:
| Scanners with banknotes remind me of my kid's LeapFrog
| book. It's basically a book and a pen which can read
| whatever you tap against. It has an optical sensor at the
| tip of the pen and the print just has a bunch of
| microscopic dots barely visible to the naked eye.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LeapFrog_Tag
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| The way it works is people report CP to a third party
| organization that fights CP. A hash of some sort is recorded in
| a central repository that is used by many services including
| every major social media company. Those companies then use it
| to delete/ban/etc users who post images matching those hashes.
| Generally, they also work with law enforcement.
|
| In the current iteration they are not using AI or anything to
| identify "bad" content. They are matching hashes for files on
| on your device against known bad hashes/content.
|
| I'm not trying to convince you one way or another about it,
| just clarifying what is happening.
| tiagod wrote:
| > In the current iteration they are not using AI or anything
| to identify "bad" content. They are matching hashes for files
| on on your device against known bad hashes/content.
|
| This is misleading as these are not what most technical
| people would think of as a hash. These are "perceptual
| hashes" that can compute a distance, instead of a boolean
| equal/different, leaving space for false-positives instead of
| extremely rare hash collisions.
|
| https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/929-On.
| .. https://rentafounder.com/the-problem-with-perceptual-
| hashes/
| aeoleonn wrote:
| Many of the biggest lies ever sold, such as the Operation Iraqi
| Liberation, started with "We must do it for The Children(tm)!"
|
| Yet we have widespread evidence that political/financial elites
| engage in Child Sexual Abuse in a Cult-like way, as a condition
| for their assumption of political/financial power.
|
| When Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Bill Richardson, many other
| politicians and financial elites (the majority are still in the
| shadows, not yet exposed to the public) have been jet setting
| with decades-known child sexual abusers such as their good friend
| Jeffrey Epstein, it really makes me question the ACTUAL motive.
|
| Ruling elites do not care about CSAM-- many of them engage in it,
| as part of unbeknownst or beknownst honey pot schemes, whereby
| blackmail is gathered on them as collateral that they will follow
| the political and financial dictates of their [ultimately]
| Israeli Intelligence handlers.
|
| This is merely an excuse to exercise power. And why now? Because
| you know qui are afraid that they've played their hand too
| sloppily-- forbidden knowledge on their true colors has spread
| too fast & they can't keep a lid on it-- and now populaces around
| the world are rioting against their satanic organization.
|
| Hence, this is likely to find and eliminate their political
| opponents from effecting their mission to centralize financial
| control.
|
| One way to centralize financial control: Demoralize and Destroy a
| capitalist society. Introduce communism. The massive revolution
| will cause real estate and capital prices to fall in relative
| value (such as thanks to massive inflation), making it all the
| easier to buy up by elites to further centralize their control.
| When you're happy with your level of control, re-implement
| Capitalism (but not before selling the most important state
| controlled infrastructure assets to your cronies) and the cycle
| begins a new. Such is the Capitalist-Communist dialectic that
| we've all been exposed to for the last ~120 years.
|
| Actual solution: Eliminate Israeli intelligence agents across the
| US Government & Economy. Hold Israel accountable.
|
| (Rather inconvenient to do when they're holding blackmail
| material on you as a politician)
| nolawi89 wrote:
| why are you only calling out BILL's - coincidence I don't think
| so. You have a Bills only bias. :)
| [deleted]
| sloshnmosh wrote:
| As the recent NSO/Pegasus scandal has proved, there is no need to
| add backdoors into our cellphones.
|
| If someone is suspected of a crime a warrant can be issued by a
| judge and the suspects phone compromised under lawful control of
| law enforcement.
|
| What Apple is wanting to do is pre-crime where everyone is
| considered suspect until proven otherwise.
| [deleted]
| Kharvok wrote:
| This is just a side-step away from complying with regimes that
| will want to use this capabilty to attack political speech or
| outlawed literature.
| davewritescode wrote:
| Apple is a company that has gone completely out of it's way to
| protect their users from end-to-end encryption and refusing to
| introduce backdoors into their products to get data from
| suspected terrorists.
|
| These slippery slope type arguments tend to assume that there
| is no middle ground between sides of this argument.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| "Unreasonable search and seizure" in the US has traditionally
| meant you needed a warrant from a judge stating specifically
| where you are going to search and what you are searching for.
| We now seem to be just tossing that out of the window. The
| government can't do it, but it can deputize a private
| organization to do it and that makes it now ok?
| mirkules wrote:
| I have been saying this for years now. The gov't is
| basically outsourcing violating the constitution to
| companies. Free speech? Just have Twitter, Facebook and
| Google censor unacceptable speech. 4th amendment? Have the
| private sector violate it. Easy peasy.
| yuy910616 wrote:
| On somewhat of a side note, has anyone stopped their subscription
| to Stratechery in the past year?
|
| I've been a paid sub to Stratechery since the Amazon acquiring
| Wholefood article - I think Ben's thinking is really unique and
| valuable.
|
| But - I've recently stopped my subscription, partly because of
| change in my own finance, partly because I am no longer
| interested in what Ben wants to cover - namely privacy, policy,
| and anti-competitive. I miss the days where companies like Stitch
| Fix could earn a email. I think Ben is covering important topics
| - but it's not something that I'm really interested in.
|
| Plus the fact that each post seems to require a large amount of
| prior knowledge - manifested by the large amount of quotes in
| each email.
|
| What do you think? Have you found other blogs worth subscribing
| to?
| schaefer wrote:
| This whole business makes me want to return my iPhone and iPad
| for full refund. The terms of ownership have changed
| significantly since time of purchase, and frankly it feels like a
| privacy bait-and-switch.
|
| I'm curious if there any possibility of a small claims case
| forcing such a return.
| acdha wrote:
| When you signed up for iCloud, did you read the terms of
| service? They specifically require you to not to use them for
| illegal purposes and I'm sure they'd argue that everyone in the
| industry scans cloud storage and this change is only shifting
| when they make this check. I would really not expect that claim
| to go very far.
| [deleted]
| ursugardaddy wrote:
| well now they can argue everyone in the industry already
| scans locally on device for illegal content, not a huge step
|
| a few years from now: "it's been such a success we're going
| to do it everywhere for everything now"
| throwaway98797 wrote:
| Apple,
|
| That winnie the pooh with text over it sure does look like a
| problem. Can I haz alert to whoever has that?
|
| k. thx.
|
| -- Xi Jinping
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Not an unreasonable request, and don't be surprised if it
| affects phones outside of China too.
| https://www.wired.com/story/apple-china-censorship-bug-iphon...
| samatman wrote:
| That ship has sailed.
|
| iCloud in China is controlled _de facto_ by the CCP.
|
| Apple is taking something from its users in the West which its
| users in China never had.
|
| I walk by an iPhone billboard fairly frequently, all it says is
| "Privacy".
|
| I can come to only one conclusion as to why Apple is doing
| this, and it isn't because they're acting on their own free
| will in the interest of their business and users.
| throwaway98797 wrote:
| Fair point. The sad part is that all the bad things need to
| happen for the populace to revolt.
|
| Most will forget about this intrusion and move on with their
| lives. And yet, i cant help but shed a tear for the liberity
| we all, in the _good_ countries, are losing.
|
| bit by bit. rung by rung.
|
| but at least the phones keep getting better...
| samatman wrote:
| I'm optimistic, but only because things are getting so bad,
| so quickly, that I expect catastrophic change before the
| decade is out.
| ComodoHacker wrote:
| FYI, all Chinese phones have a mandatory app installed for
| years, which scans everything on device for these "problems"
| (as well as CSAM).
| ychompinator wrote:
| There is no scanning by Apple taking place, they are not reaching
| in to your phone, your phone is checking whether the binary data
| of your photos matches the data in a database of known bad
| images. This is much more secure than Apple having access to scan
| your files or messages in the cloud. If you use cloud storage
| services you are trusting your provider with a lot more data than
| you are giving up by allowing your phone to check MD5 hashes of
| images don't match offending hashes. Windows added Smart Screen,
| this checks your apps against known bad apps to protect you from
| malware and virus, this is very similar and not unusual at all.
| Well the internet loves to be outraged so crack on I guess...
| _sigh_
| arbirk wrote:
| Recent stories from the world of child porn rings have shown,
| that members are very coordinated. If iPhones are deemed the safe
| platform they will migrate there.
|
| This is a compromise to rid them from or at least threaten a
| potential safe space. All real compromises are bad compromises.
| This seems to be just that
| asaddhamani wrote:
| > These efforts will evolve and expand over time.
|
| I have no doubt they will. Pandora's box has been opened, and
| okay, today the scanning is only for images uploaded to iCloud,
| and only for CSAM. But that is not auditable and subject to
| change at any time without notice.
|
| And today it is only looking at known hashes but the devices
| already have a capability to analyse images and even run OCR on
| them, this is not a matter of of these things will be weaponised
| but when.
|
| Can't believe this is the same Apple that publicly defended the
| right to privacy for known terrorists by using the slippery slope
| argument themselves. The mind boggles.
| comfymatrix wrote:
| > today the scanning is only for images uploaded to iCloud, and
| only for CSAM
|
| This, to me, would be exponentially less privacy invasive as
| I've come to assume all major cloud hosting providers implement
| something like this (look at Google Drive), but Apple has said
| that the scanning is done on-device, meaning whether or not you
| upload your photo library to iCloud, your local photos _will_
| be scanned with an on-device database of hashes.
|
| Essentially iOS photos now implement a direct API call to the
| feds with some vague "human verification" layer if you go above
| an unknown threshold
| bzbarsky wrote:
| > but Apple has said that the scanning is done on-device
|
| Yes, but only for images being uploaded to iCloud.
|
| > meaning whether or not you upload your photo library to
| iCloud, your local photos will be scanned
|
| Not in the currently proposed implementation, if I understand
| correctly.
|
| Disclaimer: All my information about this thing is from news
| articles; I might be misunderstanding the details.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| So child molestors will disable iCloud upload and innocent
| people will have their privacy violated?
| bzbarsky wrote:
| That is one plausible outcome here, yes.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > I've come to assume all major cloud hosting providers
| implement something like this
|
| They have, for the past decade.
|
| >The system that scans cloud drives for illegal images was
| created by Microsoft and Dartmouth College and donated to
| NCMEC. The organization creates signatures of the worst known
| images of child pornography, approximately 16,000 files at
| present. These file signatures are given to service providers
| who then try to match them to user files in order to prevent
| further distribution of the images themselves, a Microsoft
| spokesperson told NBC News. (Microsoft implemented image-
| matching technology in its own services, such as Bing and
| SkyDrive.)
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/technolog/your-cloud-drive-really-
| pr...
| [deleted]
| asaddhamani wrote:
| Right, this is what all the articles on this matter are
| getting wrong, unknowingly or otherwise. It'll be one flag
| switch to change from scanning uploaded images to scanning
| local images.
|
| This is an erosion of fundamental human rights under the
| guise of "think of the children" so that anyone who stands up
| against this tyranny can be labelled a "pedophile". 1984
| wasn't like 1984 but 2021 is surely looking that way.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| It's a delayed concern for us in the West. First the bait
| and switch will happen in all parts of the third world,
| autocratic, and dictatorial governments. After all, our
| list of hashes will be different from what their agencies
| will provide. Across the globe Apple will assist in this.
|
| Then one day we get another Trumpian President who adds
| more categories of hashes in a place like America.
|
| What Apple is not willing to do is have that philosophical
| and ethical discussion with its customers. It has simply
| made the decision.
| nyx-aiur wrote:
| The only problem is that you think a private cooperation and
| not the government YOU elect should be in charge of your
| privacy. Insanity this whole discussion is symptomatic with the
| whole tech bro movement. Everyone expects that the government
| THEY elect have the worst for them in mind. If you are really
| scared of your government you have to change the people that
| govern you and not build arbitrary tools to "secure" your
| privacy.
| least wrote:
| In the United States there exists a slim majority for much of
| the country's legislative houses. That indicates at least
| that there's a good chance if you don't have to right now
| that in your lifetime you will have to treat the government
| as adversarial.
|
| In all honesty I think everyone should treat the government
| as an adversarial force when it comes to respecting your
| privacy or rights. Much of bill of rights was introduced as a
| response to the concerns of the government's overreach. Built
| in protections to impede totalitarianism.
|
| In that regard, you can't simply rely on the government to
| legislate towards your interests and assuming that they will
| is foolish. Creating tools to secure your privacy is
| essential, not arbitrary.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > Everyone expects that the government THEY elect have the
| worst for them in mind.
|
| In basically every election, almost half of the voters voted
| for the loser.
| asaddhamani wrote:
| The government has already done plenty of things without our
| knowledge, PRISM and the Snowden revelations. No matter who
| you elect the government will keep doing these things and
| will only expand the scope, and 99% of people won't care, and
| the rest are labelled "the screeching voices of the
| minorities".
|
| Apple made privacy their selling point (Privacy. That's
| iPhone), and that set the expectations of privacy people have
| with their products.
|
| "Tech bro movement" what?
| nyx-aiur wrote:
| Holy shit these topics really show how delusional most of
| Hackernews is. If you think technology can change the world
| arbitrary from your government you are living in a dream
| that will falter fast.
| [deleted]
| syshum wrote:
| Everyone should be at all times scared of government power,
| and no saying "just elect better people" is not a solution.
|
| Government should be limited in power and scope, never
| allowed to expand beyond that power and scope, unfortunately
| since the 1930's we have allowed the US government to expand
| to a size that is untenable and is at odds with the concept
| of liberty itself
| shakna wrote:
| Australia has already moved to make legislation [0] that is
| basically an expanded version of it, with incredibly vague
| terms ("material... may be harmful"). Weaponising it has
| already begun.
|
| [0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/canberra-asks-big-tech-to-
| intr...
| dont__panic wrote:
| Makes you wonder if this is a case of the creator getting
| ideas from the uproar about Apple's CSAM implementation. Or,
| optimistically viewed, perhaps someone trying to prove just
| how slippery the slow is?
| kfprt wrote:
| So it took about a day for the slippery slope to kick in a
| slide right off a cliff.
| noirbot wrote:
| I mean, Australia has been putting forward insane tech
| bills to outlaw E2EE and demand backdoors for everything
| for years now. I don't think they're doing this because of
| the Apple news.
| nabakin wrote:
| Where does it say OCR is used?
| niea_11 wrote:
| the gp comment doesn't say that OCR is used. It says that the
| devices have the capability. Which is the case for recent
| iPhones : https://9to5mac.com/2021/06/10/how-iphone-live-
| text-ocr-work...
|
| _There is so much rich information in your photos, from
| memorable places you've visited to handwritten family
| recipes. iOS 15 uses secure on-device intelligence to help
| you discover more in your photos, quickly find what you're
| looking for, and relive special moments._
| cycop wrote:
| I am sure the product people at Apple are seeing $$$
|
| 1) Scan devices for copyrighted music, to play your music you
| need to have it purchased on Apple 2) Scan devices for
| copyrighted videos, to play your video you need to have it
| purchased on Apple 3) Scan devices for copyrighted photos,
| purchase an Apple license to use this photo 4) Scan devices for
| copyrighted text, purchase an Apple license to use this text
|
| Apple - Think Licensing
| bob33212 wrote:
| It is interesting how quickly people jump to the worse case
| scenario. Obviously, it is possible this power could be abused
| and someone like Trump would have no problem using to steal an
| election, but it is also possible Apple is going to put tight
| controls in place and only use it for the states purpose. Keep an
| open mind please.
| ratww wrote:
| The problem is that not even Apple can guarantee it's not gonna
| be used for anything nefarious, since they won't have (and
| probably don't want!) access to the source of the PhotoDNA
| hashes to inspect them.
|
| Not only we have to blindly trust Apple, we also have to trust
| a (government?) institution that most of us had never heard
| about before.
| hoops8 wrote:
| I keep seeing Apple take a beating. But I can't help but think
| this is politically motivated. I've seen private-government
| collusion first hand; create paranoia, goto government with a
| solution, get some custom legislation or exec order; profit.
|
| Politicians began hating on tech corp and promising changes.
| We've seen attacks on section 230 in the press and bills popping
| up.
|
| This is not going away. My guess is it's a hedge against
| government who decided to pass some messages along.
|
| "Why won't Apple help us fight this?" being suggested by
| political grifters in both parties. Cable news will hassle them.
|
| They'll do this to avoid that.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| > it ended up betraying the fulcrum of user control: being able
| to trust that your device is truly yours.
|
| The more opaque proprietary services a device runs, the less
| yours it can be. I'm surprised it took this long to remember this
| concept.
| somenewaccount1 wrote:
| > . Yes, you can turn off iCloud Photos to disable Apple's
| scanning,
|
| so, Apple now has the ability to reach into _every_ law abiding
| citizens personal phone - report them to the FBI when the
| algorithm makes mistakes (and it will - nothing is 100%,
| particular in image recognition), AND THEN THE PERPETRATORS CAN
| STILL GET AWAY BY JUST TURNING IT OFF??!??!?!
|
| My goodness, I couldn't imagine a stupider way to fight CSAM.
|
| > Facebook made 20.3 million reports of Child Sexual Abuse
| Material (CSAM) in 2020.
|
| Were there 20.3 million arrests of offenders? I don't think so. I
| doubt they caught 20 perps from that data. While it may be a
| better algorithm, it should be a good warning of how often your'
| very legitimate and non-CSAM data will be leaked to a "verifier",
| and worse, to the authorities.
|
| Take a look at how often YouTube channels are taken down by "auto
| triggers" that are then "reviewed" and you will get a good idea
| of how often the government is going to screw law abiding
| citizens. It's not zero, and imho, it will be well above a range
| of "acceptable fallout".
| recroad wrote:
| That YouTube example hits home. I uploaded my daughter's videos
| on there when she was little to share with family. Then my
| account got flagged for a copyright notice and the channel got
| suspended. Been trying to get YouTube/Google to re-instate the
| channel - it's been six years, no luck. I keep trying. I hate
| it.
| mayankkaizen wrote:
| There are lots of googlers here on HN. Message all of them.
| Message them all the time. I am sure you'll get your issue
| resolved.
|
| I know it would be rude to keep messaging them but in the end
| they represent Google and they are suppose to help you, at
| least morally.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> My goodness, I couldn 't imagine a stupider way to fight
| CSAM._
|
| That's the point. It satisfies the letter of the demands from
| the crazies, while not actually accomplishing anything, and
| creating discourse in the rest of the population to work
| towards realizing that we shouldn't be bending to the whims of
| the crazies at all.
| zionic wrote:
| But that doesn't work, because the crazies will simply take
| this victory and move the goalposts forward. They'll do so
| emboldened by your capitulation and shame you for not
| acquiescing earlier.
|
| The only winning move is not to play.
| randomdata wrote:
| It was becoming clear that the goalposts were going to move
| forward towards outlawing end-to-end encryption entirely.
| This provides malicious compliance to prevent worse.
| pas wrote:
| Not really. Without not playing eventually any Big Tech
| Corp that sticks to its guns will face opposition.
|
| What Apple should do is educate people. (Of course then we
| have the problem with corporate propaganda.)
| JoshTko wrote:
| The on device software is not an algorithm, it compares hashes
| of an image vs a known list of hashes.
| monkeyfacebag wrote:
| I'm unclear how this is distinct from an algorithm. Can you
| clarify?
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| Apple's goal is not to fight all CSAM on iPhones; Their goal is
| to keep it out of their servers. A criminal could bypass the
| iCloud-related checks, but they still have to contend with
| similar measures taken by video- and file-sharing services.
| soziawa wrote:
| > Were there 20.3 million arrests of offenders?
|
| I don't know of any data from the US but in Switzerland the
| Federal Police pre sorts all reports from the NCEMC and around
| 90% are unusable [1] and cannot be acted upon. The remaining
| 10% are then forwarded to local authorities. There is no data I
| know of what the final conviction rate looks like. But from
| what I have gathered from local news paper these departments
| are usually short staffed.
|
| I suspect that the situation is similar in the US.
|
| [1]: https://fedpol.report/en/fedpol-in-figures/fight-against-
| pae...
|
| Edit: Fix typo: persorts to pre sorts.
| jptech wrote:
| > AND THEN THE PERPETRATORS CAN STILL GET AWAY BY JUST TURNING
| IT OFF??!??!?!
|
| Not trying to defend Apple here, but we should keep in mind
| that the goal for Apple is to prevent such photos from being
| uploaded to iCloud and detecting those that do. If someone
| turns off iCloud sync, then Apple would argue that it's not
| their concern to scan photos saved on devices (and thank god it
| doesn't otherwise the repercussions would have been much more
| significant).
| swiley wrote:
| From what I've heard Facebook is one of the better places to go
| to groom children.
|
| Better would be educating people: don't use your real name or
| upload pictures of yourself to the internet, be very careful
| talking to strangers. Don't let younger children use social
| media services.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| Hasn't the ship sailed already. What is TikTok but everyone's
| little kid dancing around. We are here for a reason I think,
| we let rampant exhibitionism go so far via social media that
| teenagers and preteens are mimicking the compulsive sharing
| of the adults who first seeded these platforms.
|
| Now they literally need to check _everyone's_ phone for
| illegal content.
|
| Man, have I become my parents or what.
| swiley wrote:
| I don't know about your parents but mine _signed me up_ for
| Facebook when I was a preteen (thankfully I never used it
| and stuck to forums /IRC/wikis that all used psuedonyms.)
| smoldesu wrote:
| It's automated, weaponized doxxing. We used to worry about
| teenagers calling the FBI on us, now we have to worry about
| someone AirDropping you a photo album that will get you
| arrested.
| Klonoar wrote:
| Given that it's already scanned server side, you could
| literally do this to someone now. Both cases (client or
| server side checking) simply require getting a user to
| download it to a location that auto syncs to iCloud.
|
| If this was as big an issue as people think, we'd have seen
| more of it.
| npteljes wrote:
| Not sure why the downvotes - the more automation like this we
| have, the more one can make another's life a hell, fighting
| the false positives, and then the resulting checkered history
| of it.
| tdfx wrote:
| I think people underestimate the black mark of even being
| _investigated_ , much less charged by the police. Even if
| they find you didn't do something wrong, even if they drop
| charges, even if you are found innocent after a trial, the
| mere record that you were ever suspected of something can
| follow you the rest of your life.
|
| The standard is supposed to be that criminals are those
| "convicted" of crimes, but in reality the nature of risk
| mitigation for most people and organizations means that
| they will avoid anyone with any type of history with the
| criminal justice system. No one will care that there was an
| overzealous prosecutor, corrupt cops, etc. The burden falls
| on you to prove you're innocent and even with convincing
| evidence it may not be enough.
| npteljes wrote:
| I agree. Even being considered of doing something bad can
| easily be life-changing - going by the example of
| celebrities, for one. One of the secrets of the nothing
| to hide argument is, I think, that people haven't
| experience a thorough search on them, by some authority.
| The situation where one "lives or dies" according to what
| they find, and especially, on _how they interpret it_. If
| not exposed to this, it 's much easier to think that it
| won't happen to them, that they're not the type to be
| exposed to things like this.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| When I saw that - 20.3 million reports - I was like... hold on.
| Apple's smaller reported numbers are probably almost completely
| accurate, whereas that 20 million number is almost guaranteed
| to be mostly wrong.
|
| Who really made the mistake? The one reporting cases that are
| almost definitely true? Or the one reporting so many false
| cases that authorities are buried in false reports?
| michaelmrose wrote:
| For any population you test wherein the true positive rate is
| very low even a very low false positive rate will produce
| overwhelmingly false positives.
|
| Also you could trivially have 1 bad guy with thousands of
| photos being accounted as 5,000 reports instead of 1 report
| listing 5000 images.
| [deleted]
| nullc wrote:
| > Apple's smaller reported numbers are probably almost
| completely accurate
|
| Where are the hundreds of prosecutions resulting from apple's
| reports? I can't find them: https://courtlistener.com/
| fistynuts wrote:
| Listen to the story of any former Facebook content filtering
| employee and you would not be surprised by that figure. They
| have horrific jobs that leave them with PTSD and drive some
| to suicide. Also it's worth mentioning that 20 million
| flagged images does not mean 20 million unique offenders.
| mycall wrote:
| > JUST TURNING IT OFF
|
| Or just apply image filters to the data, that will kill any
| neural network detection (since there is an infinite number of
| filters, specially the deep fake ones).
| deckard1 wrote:
| It's the general problem that if the violations and negative PR
| hurt more than false positives, then they will err on the side
| of being wrong. Which means more people demonetized/banned.
| We're all just collateral damage.
|
| As for the 20.3 million reports, Facebook probably decided it
| was better to bury the authorities in a massive pile of
| paperwork than to see a day in court. Plus they get to claim
| they are doing something.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| ab_testing wrote:
| I think the real test would be the sales of the upcoming iPhone
| 13 . If Apple sees a material difference in their sales, they
| might consider changing that policy.
|
| However as things stand now, with Apple trying to move more of
| their revenue to services and the general stickiness of the
| Apple's platform, this change would be palatable to most users.
| frickinLasers wrote:
| > If Apple sees a material difference in their sales, they
| might consider changing that policy.
|
| I think the problem is that it's too late; they expended the
| effort to build the engine into iOS 15. As far as we know the
| FBI couldn't compel them to write code like this (see the case
| with the San Bernardino shooter), but it's easy to believe they
| could compel Apple to maintain this backdoor in the future.
| Skunkleton wrote:
| I probably won't buy another iPhone at this point. I'm in a
| tough position because I have said the same about Android for
| other reasons.
|
| In the end, all I can say for sure is that I have lost my
| enthusiasm for consumer technology.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| I dont blame you. After all this change is retroactive to all
| iPhones, and you might see the iPhone 14 removes the
| scanning. But then iPhone 15 re-adds it. You're at their
| mercy.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Yeah I hear you.
|
| I started playing with computers in the early 80s. It was so
| much fun I made it my career. Computers and the internet were
| what was exciting and what I spent my time and energy with.
|
| Now I'm retired, and the exciting promise of all this
| technology has taken such a dark turn that I'm honestly less
| and less involved with it all. Better to spend time in my
| garden, or in nature, or eating and drinking with friends.
| Tycho wrote:
| Brilliant guerrilla marketing move, really: anyone who chooses
| Android over iPhone now implicitly has some very unsavoury
| reasons for doing so. And if it was really a broader surveillance
| initiative pushed by the government, the same implication
| neutralises any protest.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| They're all a bunch of commies who want to repair their stuff
| and... own? it.
| coolspot wrote:
| Private property is the opposite of communism.
| briefcomment wrote:
| As long as false positives are a thing, there are very
| practical reasons for switching, especially for those who have
| kids.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if a completely innocent false positive
| gets you put on a list indefinitely, with little recourse.
| whisps wrote:
| False positives of the kind you're thinking of aren't
| possible--it's checking for hashes that match known bad
| images, not running machine learning/image detection to
| detect if the photo you just took contains bad content. The
| issue is that there's nothing stopping Apple/the government
| from marking _anything_ it finds objectionable--like anti-
| government free speech--as a Bad Image, beyond CSAM.
| thekyle wrote:
| False positives are possible. Apple states that their hash
| function has about a 1 in 1 trillion chance of producing
| one.
| simion314 wrote:
| The thing is Apple uses some custom hash thing with
| parameters generated by AIs. As some other article shows
| you can get conflicting hashes if some color patterns and
| shadows match. Also the threshold they mentioned is secret
| so it could be 1 or 2 or it could change in future.
| briefcomment wrote:
| Really, hashes are sufficiently unique? The objections I
| saw for this news were along the lines that random images
| could be manipulated to have hashes that match the flagged
| cases, in a way that was undetectable by the naked eye.
| watt wrote:
| Once the policy decision is made that it can run some kind
| of scanning, it opens the doors for any kind of scanning.
| Today it's that "neural hash", tomorrow it's going to do
| something even more invasive.
| acuozzo wrote:
| > it's checking for hashes that match known bad images
|
| Many of the hashes provided by the NCMEC are MD5. There are
| going to be false positives left and right.
| [deleted]
| throwprvcyaway wrote:
| Doesn't the hash change by exporting a photo as a new file
| type or by changing a few pixels in photoshop?
|
| If this was the FINAL solution to catch every last child
| pornographer in one glorious roundup MAYBE it would be
| worth the massive risk of authoritarian abuse but this
| algorithm sounds stupidly easy to get around for the
| deviants while still throwing our collective privacy under
| the bus.
| ratww wrote:
| This is a PhotoDNA hash, not a file-content hash. It is a
| bit more powerful than a normal hash:
|
| _> In the same way that PhotoDNA can match an image that
| has been altered to avoid detection, PhotoDNA for Video
| can find child sexual exploitation content that's been
| edited or spliced into a video that might otherwise
| appear harmless_
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoDNA
| sharken wrote:
| It is not a surveillance initiative yet, but it will be trivial
| to expand upon the scanning capabilities once established.
|
| You have more trust in Apple, something i don't. So we see this
| change in a different light.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| In reality, these devices are so complex, we really have no clue
| what they're already doing, and we've only found out about some
| of the more recent absurd things they're doing due to flaws with
| their implementations, such as MacBooks calling out to Apple
| before you can login after wake causing abnormally long wake
| times when network conditions are less than ideal or you're
| connected over international VPN, or calling out to their servers
| every time you launch an app.
|
| They could have not told us this at all, and we wouldn't have
| found out until some hacker playing around with network
| interfaces noticed unusual traffic going to Apple's iCloud
| servers from the bird daemon.
|
| What Apple is doing is distasteful to me, but I'm afraid the
| market is so poor in comparison, I don't know what else you could
| purchase besides Dell XPS systems running Ubuntu.
|
| But there's no phone version of that, to my knowledge.
| ZekeSulastin wrote:
| If you don't mind custom ROMs etc, Pixels with GrapheneOS or
| similar?
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Yeah, my thought was the latest Pixel, flashed with
| something. But I'm not up-to-date on that world. I've never
| had an Android device as a personal device.
| intrasight wrote:
| I recently got a new iPhone for the better camera. Did this
| rather than getting a camera. Now I'm wondering how long it'll be
| before cameras will also have CSAM scanning.
|
| It also leads me to this question about CSAM. If it only
| recognizes existing photos, then it's of no use for photos that I
| take. So perhaps CSAM on a dedicated camera will never be a
| thing, and people will gravitate back to such cameras.
|
| Also leads to this question. If Apple isn't scanning my photos (
| for which there is no CSAM fingerprint), what photos are they
| scanning? Things that showed up in my browser?
| baggy_trough wrote:
| There is little difference between Apple's proposal and a
| continuously running AI snitch examining your display output for
| forbidden thoughts and images.
| chovybizzass wrote:
| Coming soon. Illegal meme hash scanning
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Copyright scanning. Show us you legitimately bought and have a
| license to this content. Worry not if you don't, the fines are
| automatic with Apple Pay.
| ezekg wrote:
| Also on the roadmap: scanning for images of illegal firearms.
| [deleted]
| robertoandred wrote:
| Scanning for arbitrary subjects is wildly impractical. There
| are, what, trillions of photographs of guns in the world?
| nuclearnice1 wrote:
| Scanning photos for images of suspects in crimes. Checking
| location info on photos for evidence for investigation.
|
| Scanning texts for online bullying and sexual harassment.
|
| Searching bank statements for tax compliance and money
| laundering.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| This entire analysis is based off a flawed assumption - that it's
| a matter of proactiveness and not a nature of platform
| differences that causes the reported CSAM numbers disparity.
|
| A social networking site/platform is one where previously created
| media is shared. iMessage pictures are not uploaded to iCloud
| Photos by default (they are part of the usually E2E content with
| the standard online backup caveat), only photo albums or photo
| rolls are - and those are overwhelmingly first or second party
| just-created content.
|
| This means that if comparing against known CSAM hashes, it's
| extremely likely for Apple to find orders of magnitude less
| content in the first place. The only thing that their system can
| catch is first-party images that end up being distributed and
| registered with the various hash databases.
|
| Regardless of whether we are talking CSAM or anything else, it is
| the norm for the amount of content "created" to be significantly
| (as in several orders of magnitude) less than the material
| consumed.
|
| I don't think scanning on the device vs scanning in the cloud is
| going to change any of that.
| bloopernova wrote:
| Will a neural hash of every picture be uploaded to Apple?
|
| If so, any abusive pictures that are discovered during
| pedophile ring arrests could be traced back to the phone that
| took them.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| I don't believe any non-matching hashes are uploaded (that's
| part of the crypto work that has been done) but the device
| will periodically rescan previously ingested content, as I
| understand it.
| tehnub wrote:
| All are uploaded but only when the secret sharing threshold
| is met are any of them decryptable, and then it's only the
| ones that were a match that can be decrypted.
| snyp wrote:
| But isn't apple just hashing the image and then matching it with
| the CSAN database on the cloud? Thats how the feature works no?
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| This article has what I would consider a major error. It
| attributes Facebook's CSAM reporting to "scanning."
|
| In truth, the issue is that photos are put on Facebook to share
| with others and other people will be looking at them and
| reporting them. Facebook does look at content as well, but the
| reporting numbers are guaranteed to be vastly different simply
| because one is a sharing platform and the other is a means to
| back up your private data.
| sharken wrote:
| This is shaping up to be a monumental mistake for Apple, which by
| now should result in scrapping all client-side scanning.
|
| If not, it will be an interesting test of how many users Apple
| will lose over this.
|
| Those Apple devices i might upgrade will now be put on hold, it
| is simply unacceptable what Apple is doing.
| cageface wrote:
| Even if Apple decides to roll this back they've made it clear
| to me that I can't afford to be too locked into their
| ecosystem. With more open platforms you have options if you
| disagree with decisions made by any one vendor. With Apple you
| have no other options.
| websites2023 wrote:
| >If not, it will be an interesting test of how many users Apple
| will lose over this.
|
| Lose.. to whom? PinePhone? Not trying to be flippant, but...
| there is no longer any option for the common user.
|
| No, my elderly mother is not going to download and flash a
| custom de-googled ROM for her OnePlus 9 Pro. Pure fantasy that
| Apple will lose users because of this. This is a nonstory to
| everyone who lives and works east of Tahoe.
| sharken wrote:
| As far as I know Android devices do not implement the scheme
| that Apple is considering.
|
| But you're right that some users absolutely do not care (or
| can only use Apple devices), they will now give up their
| right to privacy.
|
| But you don't have to look that far to see that a lot of
| users disagree with what Apple is doing here.
| websites2023 wrote:
| >As far as I know Android devices do not implement the
| scheme that Apple is considering.
|
| No, instead they just scan everything you upload to their
| service: https://support.google.com/transparencyreport/answ
| er/1033093...
| robertoandred wrote:
| It's interesting how everyone used to be all in favor of
| Apple's strategy of doing all photo analysis on the device
| instead of on some remote server, and now it's reversed.
| Suddenly Google's approach is better?
| josephcsible wrote:
| The advantage of doing analysis on your device was supposed
| to be that your data never left your device. Now you get the
| worst of both worlds, with your device doing the analysis but
| your data leaving anyway.
| robertoandred wrote:
| iCloud photos always left your device.
| ratww wrote:
| Nothing changed. The issue is the same for both situations:
| possible communication with remote servers.
|
| If the scanning here was happening and merely notifying the
| user, there wouldn't be a problem. Or course, it would be
| completely useless to catch criminals.
| PostThisTooFast wrote:
| This is such a stupid argument. Apple is not comparable to
| Facebook because Apple is NOT PUBLISHING YOUR MEDIA.
|
| Anyone too dumb to make that distinction should not be weighing
| in on the matter.
| gmac wrote:
| _It's truly disappointing that Apple got so hung up on its
| particular vision of privacy that it ended up betraying the
| fulcrum of user control: being able to trust that your device is
| truly yours._
|
| This is it. Of course I'd like child pornographers to be caught.
|
| But right now my expensive phone will be using up valuable charge
| looking for photos that aren't there.
|
| And in future I can't be sure it won't be searching for evidence
| of support for the political opposition. (This is not only China
| or Gulf states: democracy seems on pretty shaky ground in the US,
| UK and elsewhere right now).
| Klonoar wrote:
| What makes you think this will churn battery? It's one extra
| processing step that's run before a photo syncs and then
| cached. You don't sync every photo every time.
|
| Out of all the arguments on this site against this feature, the
| battery bit is by far the most unfounded one and super odd to
| see repeated on a technical forum.
| gmac wrote:
| I agree it's probably not very much battery at all. But it's
| not going to be none either, so the principle remains: it's
| my phone using my electricity to check up on me without my
| consent. I really don't like that.
| GiorgioG wrote:
| I've likely bought my last Apple device.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| This invasive capability on the device level is a massive
| intrusion on everyone's privacy and there will be no limits for
| governments to expand it's reach once implemented. The scope will
| always broaden.
|
| From the article:
|
| Apple's choices in this case, though, go in the opposite
| direction: instead of adding CSAM-scanning to iCloud Photos in
| the cloud that they own-and-operate, Apple is compromising the
| phone that you and I own-and-operate, without any of us having a
| say in the matter. Yes, you can turn off iCloud Photos to disable
| Apple's scanning, but that is a policy decision; the capability
| to reach into a user's phone now exists, and there is nothing an
| iPhone user can do to get rid of it.
|
| A far better solution to the "Flickr problem" I started with is
| to recognize that the proper point of comparison is not the
| iPhone and Facebook, but rather Facebook and iCloud. One's device
| ought be one's property, with all of the expectations of
| ownership and privacy that entails; cloud services, meanwhile,
| are the property of their owners as well, with all of the
| expectations of societal responsibility and law-abiding which
| that entails. It's truly disappointing that Apple got so hung up
| on its particular vision of privacy that it ended up betraying
| the fulcrum of user control: being able to trust that your device
| is truly yours.
| endisneigh wrote:
| This is an interesting comment. If you had an Apple device it
| was never truly yours to begin with.
| pdimitar wrote:
| If you own a device with builtin software that synchronizes
| part of the data on it to the cloud then it was never truly
| yours to begin with**
|
| Fixed it for you. I hope you are not implying that Google,
| whose bread and butter has been selling personal information,
| has resisted the temptation for all these years?
|
| I use Apple and it's an informed choice. I am pretty
| realistic about their practices. And realistically we don't
| have a choice. Either you use a smartphone and it's a Swiss
| cheese of security vulnerabilities -- worst of which are
| embedded in the device on purpose! -- or you don't use a
| smartphone at all. This is the era we're living in.
|
| I hope that custom ROM Android communities can win and give
| us back some freedom but I am skeptical. Still, I am open to
| try some of the de-bloated Xiaomi ROMs at one point. Or maybe
| put LineageOS / PostmarketOS on them.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I didn't mention Google at all, not sure why you brought it
| up
| pdimitar wrote:
| Because I dislike the implication that only Apple is
| doing it. No. Everybody is doing it. Apple was just the
| first to publicly admit it. Doesn't make it better, sure,
| but let's not delude ourselves at least. No company can
| resist using all that valuable personal data on the
| smartphones.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I didn't imply only Apple is doing it either
| pdimitar wrote:
| Let's not argue over this all day. :)
|
| The fact that you only mentioned Apple makes it a safe
| assumption that you only meant Apple. I chimed in to
| specify that I believe everyone is doing it, and let's
| stop at that. There's no prize to fight over here.
| endisneigh wrote:
| It's an article about Apple so I only mentioned Apple
| lol. While we're at it we should mention Microsoft
| probably does this too. Probably Snap as well.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Pretty sure they do, yeah. :)
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| The thing no one seems to be discussing here as this topic
| arises again and again is that the problem being addressed is
| Apple's problem, not the problem of anyone who purchases an
| Apple computer. Apple's "solution" is to create a new problem
| for all Apple purchasers.
|
| The majority of Apple hardware purchasers are probably not
| engaged in illegal activity. Yet all Apple purchasers are being
| forced to pay the price for Apple's mistake. Apple's hands are
| not clean.
|
| No Apple purchaser ever intentionally requested that Apple copy
| their files to servers in Apple datacenters, or that Apple
| perform encryption intsead of the user, store and forward the
| user's personal messages through servers in Apple datacenters.
| Those were business decisions that Apple made to benefit Apple.
|
| Technology allows, all computer users are quite capable of
| storing their files on their own portable media, and many are
| capable of encrypting and then sending messages directly to
| others, peer-to-peer, without leaving a copy with a third
| party. Technology allows, Apple has choices. No purchaser ever
| demanded that device storage capacity be reduced or ports for
| removable media be removed. Nor did any purchaser ever demand
| that her message be stored with Apple. Those are choices made
| by Apple, not users. Users should have choices too. Instead
| they are corralled into a user-hostile vision of personal
| computing that props up the world's wealthiest companies who
| horde money offshore while their domicile country falls into
| chaotic decline.
|
| As the parent comment states, "One's device ought to be one's
| property..." Apple has actively and aggressively sought to
| overcome this basic tenet of common sense. As people online
| argue about "misinformation" please stop and consider the
| "lies" that Apple and the companies they compete with are
| telling the public about what exactly it is they do. Apple has
| taken Jobs' idea of the "Reality Distortion Field" too far.
|
| Computer users need quality hardware. Apple can design and
| assemble it and be the best at what they do. Users do not need
| to be manipulated by a hardware vendor after purchase. Where
| did that idea come from. The sad fact is the "new" Apple is not
| competing with other hardware vendors. No other vendor even
| comes close. Apple has set its sights on competing with "tech"
| (middleman) companies that do nefarious things and cover up the
| truth. Apple wants user data after purchase. Why. To compete
| with "tech" (middleman) companies. Bad decision. Users pay the
| price.
|
| The easiest way Apple could have fixed this problem with
| storing illegal files would be to stop storing user files and
| messages! Be a hardware company. Let purchasers use portable
| storage or arrange their own "cloud storage" with a more
| "competent" provider (let another company deal with the
| inherent flaws of the "cloud" concept^1). Let users discover
| how to encrypt their own data and use peer-to-peer
| transmission. Let them use the Apple computer to write programs
| without needing "permission" from Apple. Apple has only tried
| to hide these basic capabilities and competencies from the
| majority of new computer users, strengthening the "Reality
| Distortion Field".
|
| A long line of bad decisions from a hardware company we once
| admired. They just keep getting worse. And all for what. Greed.
| Immense untaxed cash reserves held offshore. Why not be a
| hardware company and stop trying to compete with "tech"
| (middleman) company surveillance. Why keep dumbing down and
| locking down what a former CEO once called a "bicycle for the
| mind".
|
| 1. "Cloud" is a synonym for "someone else's computer." "Cloud
| storage" is another way of saying "storing files on someone
| else's computer". Perhaps "Apple" is also a synonym for
| "someone elses's computer". If Aple can exercise control over a
| computer after they sell it, how it is not still theirs.
| Purchasers are just "users", not owners.
| caconym_ wrote:
| > It's truly disappointing that Apple got so hung up on its
| particular vision of privacy that it ended up betraying the
| fulcrum of user control: being able to trust that your device
| is truly yours.
|
| Well said.
|
| It's very easy to understand that content on a physical disk I
| own will not be scanned by some government-friendly
| surveillance program, and content I upload to somebody else's
| servers will. I am comfortable with [subsets of] my files
| existing on both sides of this distinction, but only because I
| understand it.
|
| Now Apple is letting the surveillance apparatus reach into my
| own physical hardware, blurring the lines with some
| overwrought, proprietary crypto-gobbledygook solution. Given
| the details they've provided, I get why they might have thought
| this was in line with their general privacy ethos of keeping
| everything on-device, but the fact is that it is too
| complicated to build a reliable understanding of in my mental
| model of my own data privacy--and that's for somebody (me) who
| is quite technical and has even dabbled in crypto.
|
| Now that I no longer understand Apple's practices as a steward
| of my private data, I can no longer trust them with it. It's a
| real shame.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >It's very easy to understand that content on a physical disk
| I own will not be scanned by some government-friendly
| surveillance program, and content I upload to somebody else's
| servers will. I am comfortable with [subsets of] my files
| existing on both sides of this distinction, but only because
| I understand it.
|
| According to Apple, the only content being scanned are the
| images you are storing in iCloud. So how is this breaking
| your rule?
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > According to Apple, the only content being scanned are
| the images you are storing in iCloud
|
| Thats the whole point of this debate. TODAY (if you trust
| apple is honest) it's only stuff being stored in icloud.
| But there is no technical reason for this to be true - just
| a "policy" reason. The scanner is already deployed to
| devices, we already let in the trojan horse. Tomorrow, the
| rules could change (and we might not know)
| caconym_ wrote:
| This is breaking my "rule" because the detection is being
| moved device-side as part of a complicated scheme I don't
| believe it's realistically possible for an outsider to have
| a complete and persistently correct understanding of. Thus,
| I do not trust myself to fully understand the attack
| surface I'm exposing, and that is something I'm not
| personally comfortable with.
|
| I thought this was fairly clear from the later parts of my
| comment.
| Clubber wrote:
| "The USA PATRIOT act will only be used against terrorist
| threats." 12 years later, Edward Snowden proved otherwise.
|
| The world is a much different place than when I grew up in
| the 80s. I can't imagine what it would look like in another
| 40 years. I hope I'm dead by then, because it doesn't seem
| like it's going to a place I want to live in.
| dpkonofa wrote:
| I feel like there's a third option here, though, in that
| Apple is very likely trying to get ahead of what's likely to
| be requests from the government that they won't be able to
| just not abide by. This already happens to every hosting and
| storage provider and it's entirely plausible that politicians
| will start publicly wringing their hands to try and justify
| an actual invasion of privacy where "the government" will be
| able to scan devices (and even require it from manufacturers)
| in the interest of "saving the children". This (and I realize
| it assumes good intentions on behalf of the actors involved)
| seems to be an attempt to get ahead of that kind of situation
| by saying "we'll scan things if we're 99% sure they're
| breaking the law" but we don't want to violate people's
| privacy. The iCloud vs Facebook comparison is great and noble
| and all but how long do we honestly think that'll stand up
| before the politicians move past that argument and onto the
| next one.
|
| When it stops being about the children, it'll be about the
| terrorists. When it stops being about the terrorists, it'll
| be about whatever the next excuse is. This seems like a
| compromise between those unfortunate scenarios - upholding
| privacy (we don't see the content) while still attempting to
| solve for the problems that privacy inherently allows for (we
| can still identify CP).
| fossuser wrote:
| Yeah - my read of this is Apple wants to increase their e2e
| adoption while still handling CSAM in a way that gets them
| an okay from the regulators.
|
| Ben Thompson's suggested approach for them in this article
| is to just do the unencrypted iCloud model with normal CSAM
| reporting like FB does and make that the tradeoff.
|
| Apple actually wants things to be _more_ secure by
| encrypting everything e2e with this CSAM hash approach to
| still fulfill that obligation (and protect themselves from
| future regulatory requirements that are more broad).
|
| Reasonable people can disagree on these approaches to
| policy, but it's not obvious that Apple's move here is
| strictly worse for end users - if they do make moves to e2e
| then it's arguably better for user privacy to do it the way
| they're doing it.
| aborsy wrote:
| Yeah, good cop, bad cop, game.
|
| Bad cop: I want access to all your information.
|
| Good cop: Oh, these guys are after you. Let me see if I
| can intervene for you. I can implement a selective
| limited search, that make these bureaucrats happy and at
| the same time will protect you. I am on your side, I hate
| them too. This is the best practical solution.
| feanaro wrote:
| It's been said elsewhere, but it bears repeating: E2EE is
| useless if the ends are compromised.
|
| Furthermore, since the end is compromised, it's no longer
| a true end. The true end is the user and a system
| compromised in this way doesn't offer any guarantees to
| the user.
| bigfudge wrote:
| I don't agree with apples approach. But it's worth being
| clear that the hash scanning they propose doesn't
| fundamentally break e2e, except for files which match the
| hash. Yes it might be possible to adversarially create
| collisions, but that is an edge case.
|
| What is actually bad about their plan is the potential
| for scope creep and might wider scanning in the future.
| Your own, handwritten messages and personal photos can be
| secure even while this destroys many freedoms and lives.
| dpkonofa wrote:
| Why are you assuming the end is compromised? What makes
| you say it is in the first place?
| nullc wrote:
| > Apple is very likely trying to get ahead of what's likely
| to be requests from the government that they won't be able
| to just not abide by
|
| No. Don't make that excuses for them. If it were true it
| would be a shocking revelation which might result in
| thousands of cases being overturned.
|
| If the NCMEC searches by providers are being done as a
| result of government coercion then the fourth amendment
| requires there be a search warrant. Since there isn't one,
| these searches would all be _unlawful_ if there was
| coercion.
|
| Thus far, tech companies like Google and AOL have gone out
| of their way to testify that there is no coercion (I
| haven't found a case involving Apple).
|
| If there were coercion it would be a _shocking_ conspiracy.
| I wouldn 't argue that it's impossible: The USG has done
| some shockingly unethical and illegal things in the past
| but it fails occams razor.
|
| Moreover, the excuse doesn't actually make apple look
| better: Instead of being a corporation compromising user
| privacy and security for commercial gain, they'd be an
| active participant in a conspiracy to violate the US
| constitution.
|
| Apple is doing this because they believe they'll make more
| money this way, and because they believe the complaints
| raised here about people rejecting devices betraying their
| trust are fundamentally inconsequential.
|
| Show them otherwise, don't make excuses. Don't blame the
| government. The government may well be to blame too, but
| Apple's actions are apple's fault.
| simonh wrote:
| > If the NCMEC searches by providers are being done as a
| result of government coercion then the fourth amendment
| requires there be a search warrant. Since there isn't
| one, these searches would all be unlawful if there was
| coercion.
|
| Not a US citizen, so I'm not familiar with this argument.
| As I understand it the government isn't searching
| anything themselves so would the requirement for a search
| warrant apply?
|
| I think what the US government is requiring is that if a
| service provider comes across CSAM they must report it.
| Since I don't see why searching your own service would be
| anything to do with search warrants either, is it
| constitutional to make such a requirement for other
| reasons?
|
| Finally even if Apple could avoid this requirement, which
| they seem to have largely been doing until now, was it
| viable for them to continue like that? Even without a
| legal mandate to actively search for CSAM, knowing there
| must be millions of unreported CSAM images on their
| service can't have been a comfortable position to be in.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _Not a US citizen, so I'm not familiar with this
| argument. As I understand it the government isn't
| searching anything themselves so would the requirement
| for a search warrant apply?_
|
| There's a difference between cops paying someone to break
| into a suspect's house to steal evidence without a
| warrant, and a 3rd party that, while doing business,
| comes across material that might be criminal evidence.
|
| The former case, in the US, falls under the doctrine of
| the "fruit of the poisonous tree"[1]. Evidence collected
| illicitly won't be allowed in court, and any evidence or
| argument based on the tainted evidence can be thrown out,
| as well.
|
| I think the line is blurred with the system in the OP,
| where it seems like it kind of fits the latter case. It's
| fuzzy to me when parties are working in tandem with law
| enforcement, even going as far as running law
| enforcement's own systems voluntarily, or collecting or
| giving up information without a warrant when simply
| asked. To me, that seems a lot more like former case,
| where the government persuades someone to collect
| evidence on their behalf without warrants or subpoenas.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree
| nullc wrote:
| > voluntarily
|
| In the US, that is currently where we've drawn the line.
|
| They can cooperate, but it has to be voluntarily and the
| private party can't be government-by-another-name (e.g.
| not NCMEC which has a special legislative permission to
| handle child porn and is overwhelmingly funded by the
| government), but an actual private party.
| nullc wrote:
| If the government requires or otherwise coerces someone
| to perform the search, then the searching party is acting
| as an agent of the government and is equally subject to
| the fourth amendment. Similarly, the government can't
| create a privileged entity like NCMEC and allow it to
| search without a warrant and pretend it's not the
| government doing.
|
| What is permitted is that if a private entity of their
| own free will and self interest searches and then finds
| something, the government can require them to make a
| report when they found something. Just as you say.
|
| But the government cannot require them to search in the
| first place, not without extending the fourth amendment
| protection against search.
|
| Apple can decide that the commercial value of reducing
| the risk that they're accused of helping perverts is
| greater to them than the commercial value of respecting
| the customers privacy. Indeed. But lets call that what it
| is, and not make excuses that they're forced to search:
| They're not. They are choosing to search.
| dpkonofa wrote:
| Take your argument one step further - the government
| knows this and starts issuing warrants for exactly these
| situations. Now, Apple is in a position where they have
| to violate their user's privacy _and_ share content in
| order to comply with the search warrants. The new system
| allows them to comply with warrants without ever knowing
| or needing to know what the contents of users' phones are
| and only in cases where it's _known_ that illegal content
| exists. Apple can't divulge any other content from the
| users' devices because it doesn't have it or know what it
| is in the first place.
| nullc wrote:
| A warrant must name the specific persons/places/things to
| be searched. A automatic dragnet search isn't required
| with a warrant.
|
| > it's known that illegal content exists
|
| A point of clarification: The system divulges the
| encryption keys to content when the content's "perceptual
| hash" matches one in the database the specific user is
| being tested against. Apple claims that the hashes are
| provided by NCMEC "and other parties". It is already
| known that the NCMEC databases has at least some hits for
| non-illegal content. Who knows what these databases might
| contain in the future. There is certainly no structural
| requirement in the system that the content is illegal or
| some specific kind of illegal.
|
| For users in Thailand the apple database could just as
| well be full of hashes of cartoons insulting to the
| monarch (which are illegal there, as I understand it) and
| no one would be able to tell, at least not before apple
| users started being rounded up and summarily executed.
| dpkonofa wrote:
| Yes but the criteria for a warrant can be nothing more
| than reasonable suspicion. So a warrant could be issued
| for access to someone's entire device regardless of
| whether objectionable content exists on it or not.
| Theoretically, a government could issue a warrant for
| every single person's phone and get what they want. This
| prevents anything even close to that from happening
| because users aren't required to provide the keys and
| Apple won't have them unless that content matches what's
| on the list.
|
| On your second point, yes... that's a very real
| possibility and one that I'm sure Apple has already
| considered and has responded to.
| usaman wrote:
| >> If there were coercion it would be a shocking
| conspiracy.
|
| This comment is as if the 2001-2010 decade never
| happened. Secret wiretaps. Secret Evidence. Overseas
| torture facilities. Imprisonment without charges. What
| makes you think that checks and balances would
| miraculously appear after having disappeared for over a
| decade.
|
| NOTE: this is a USA-centric viewpoint
| strken wrote:
| Those are examples of shocking conspiracies that got
| uncovered. Illegal wiretapping and Guantanamo Bay ended
| up in the news and we're still talking about them now.
| bigfudge wrote:
| But nobody apologies for them or went to prison. There is
| little to believe the don't continue.
| nullc wrote:
| I would not argue that the conspiracy is impossible, but
| if it exists then it makes Apple's actions _less_
| excusable instead of more excusable.
|
| If the conspiracy exists Apple is an active participant
| in secretly and illegally undermining the constitutional
| rights of well over a hundred million Americans. If the
| conspiracy does not exist, then they're simply lawfully
| invading people's privacy in order to improve their
| profits.
| dpkonofa wrote:
| I'm not making excuses. The government can mandate that
| Apple monitor content uploaded to its services. All the
| other major hosting providers do this already. The only
| difference here is that Apple is trying to maintain
| encryption while also giving an out. They can't give more
| information to the government if they don't have it.
| nullc wrote:
| > The government can mandate that Apple monitor content
| uploaded to its services.
|
| In the US, if the Government were to mandate Apple search
| the users content, then Apple would be acting as an agent
| of the government and the searches would require a
| warrant per the fourth amendment. This is the unambiguous
| case law.
|
| If Apple is being forced they should say so explicitly
| rather than secretly participating in an unlawful
| conspiracy to violate their customer's fourth amendment
| rights.
|
| Other providers, such as google, have been unambiguous in
| their testimony in court that they are not being coerced,
| for example quoting US v. Miller (6th Cir. 2020):
|
| > Companies like Google have business reasons to make
| these efforts to remove child pornography from their
| systems. As a Google representative noted, "[i]f our
| product is associated with being a haven for abusive
| content and conduct, users will stop using our services."
| McGoff Decl., R.33-1, PageID#161.
|
| > Did Google act under compulsion? Even if a private
| party does not perform a public function, the party's
| action might qualify as a government act if the
| government "has exercised coercive power or has provided
| such significant encouragement, either overt or covert,
| that the choice must in law be deemed to be that of the"
| government. [...] Miller has not shown that Google's
| hash-value matching falls on the "compulsion" side of
| this line. He cites no law that compels or encourages
| Google to operate its "product abuse detection system" to
| scan for hash-value matches. Federal law disclaims such a
| mandate. It says that providers need not "monitor the
| content of any [customer] communication" or
| "affirmatively search, screen, or scan" files. 18 U.S.C.
| SS 2258A(f). Nor does Miller identify anything like the
| government "encouragement" that the Court found
| sufficient to turn a railroad's drug and alcohol testing
| into "government" testing. See Skinner, 489 U.S. at 615.
| [...] Federal law requires "electronic communication
| service providers" like Google to notify NCMEC when they
| become aware of child pornography. 18 U.S.C. SS 2258A(a).
| But this mandate compels providers only to report child
| pornography that they know of; it does not compel them to
| search for child pornography of which they are unaware.
| dpkonofa wrote:
| I think you're missing the point. If the only thing
| stopping the government is a warrant (which the
| government itself can authorize) then there's nothing
| stopping the government from just issuing those warrants.
| It may take slightly longer to do so but they will get it
| and all they need is reasonable suspicion to make that
| happen. This system makes it impossible for Apple to
| provide anything to the government outside of anything
| that is already criminal. If the government entity gets a
| warrant, they can simply get access to the whole device.
| This, in theory, prevents that situation because
| everything is encrypted and only things that are
| confirmed as being CSAM are provided. They literally
| can't provide something they don't have.
| caconym_ wrote:
| I don't necessarily disagree with the "getting ahead of it"
| thing, and I do see the benefits of this strategy wrt.
| keeping data private in the face of escalating govt
| overreach, but I'm simply not comfortable with the
| surveillance happening on my own physical device. It means
| trusting proprietary software to work exactly the way it
| claims to, which in my own experience is often not the
| case.
| dpkonofa wrote:
| I share that concern and completely understand. My only
| response to that concern, though, is that what you're
| asking for is not possible without submitting the content
| in question to Apple and I would rather they not have it
| at all and therefore not even have the ability to go down
| that route.
|
| It's like a double airlock. If your content never leaves
| your device, there's no way for them to provide it to
| someone upon request. It's definitely a complicated
| situation but I have yet to see someone provide a
| solution for how to achieve what Apple has while never
| transferring your data to them in the first place.
| feanaro wrote:
| > problems that privacy inherently allows for
|
| I wonder how we ever survived with the level of privacy we
| had before the advent of the internet. It must've been a
| living hell. /s
|
| Privacy is not a problem, it is necessary in order for
| freedom from tyranny to be possible. Even if all the
| governments of the world mandate that all communication
| devices must be compromised like this, criminals will
| _still_ be able to have private communication channels, but
| lawful citizens won 't.
| dpkonofa wrote:
| I never said privacy was the problem, so your argument is
| irrelevant. What I said is that privacy (true privacy)
| introduces problems that we may want to solve for. You
| can simultaneously be an advocate for user privacy while
| agreeing that CSAM is bad and should be minimized. The
| question is how do you maintain privacy while still being
| able to act (especially if mandated by a government) on
| known illegal actions. In the past, that wasn't possible.
| Apple is suggesting that this is possible but with the
| giant caveat that you have to be willing to put trust in
| the way the system is developed.
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| I don't claim to have an ideal solution here, but to your
| point: There weren't highly-effective global distribution
| networks for CSAM "before the advent of the internet"
| either. This capability has created a market for these
| people to produce/obtain this material, and thus creates
| financial incentives for people to abuse children in this
| way more than in pre-internet times. There needs to be
| some way of combating this that can keep up with this
| growth curve, and that answer can't simply be to throw up
| our hands and say "the criminals will always win, so
| there's no solution worth doing".
| dpkonofa wrote:
| This is a great response and covers what I think the crux
| of the issue is. Technology has exacerbated a problem
| and, rather than simply bow to that, they tried to come
| up with a solution. Whether that solution addresses the
| negatives of the problem without introducing other, worse
| negatives is to be seen. On paper, it feels like they
| have addressed the problem in a reasonable way if you
| trust that they want to make money while absolving
| themselves of liability. They can't violate users'
| privacy if they don't have the ability to do so.
| bigfudge wrote:
| We should tackle this from the other end though. That
| there are children so abused and isolated whilst ignored
| by society is shameful. We need solutions that treat
| children as humans rather than a product or contraband.
| dpkonofa wrote:
| This makes it sound like there aren't entities out there
| who are interested in such solutions. If you have one
| that fulfills that need, I'm sure Apple and others are
| open to hearing it.
| Aperocky wrote:
| > now exists
|
| Is this true? I've always assumed apple can always do that (if
| they somehow needed to).
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| They always had the potential, but now the code is there and
| running.
| zionic wrote:
| It's like your spouse's communication has broken down,
| they're doing things that don't make sense, and they just
| randomly went out and bought a gun without telling you.
|
| Sure, they haven't killed you in your sleep _yet_ ... but
| they sure are acting weird and recently acquired the means
| to do so
| kumarsw wrote:
| It's an unfortunate choice because my understanding is that
| it's possible to match encrypted files on the cloud with CSAM,
| assuming that Apple has the public key, and this has done
| before in a court case as evidence leading to a conviction.
| Maybe it's computationally prohibitive?
| danudey wrote:
| The files that iCloud Photos stores are encrypted to your
| account and Apple can't access them. Apple scans the images
| on your phone so that this can continue to be the case, but
| they're doing a _perceptual match_ - i.e. determining if this
| image looks like a modified version of the original image
| (e.g. if it 's just been resized or re-encoded or something).
|
| This way Apple can scan for CSAM without having to actually
| violate privacy by scanning a user's images themselves.
| kumarsw wrote:
| I recall a court case where a police officer was convicted
| of possessing CSAM on his computer. The files were
| encrypted so the prosecution was not able to view them, but
| they were able to demonstrate that the encrypted files
| contained known images, I believe by encrypting a known
| image with the same public key and demonstrating that the
| result was binary identical. Obviously this wouldn't work
| except for unmodified files including cropping, scaling and
| editing metadata.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _The files that iCloud Photos stores are encrypted to
| your account and Apple can 't access them._
|
| This is false[1]. Apple can decrypt them, and they can
| decrypt them and send them to law enforcement should they
| get subpoenas. They're encrypted at rest with keys that
| Apple has.
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51207744
| danudey wrote:
| This article is about iCloud backups. It doesn't say
| either way whether or not iCloud Photos are encrypted.
| aborsy wrote:
| Apple's website clearly states what components are e2e
| encrypted. iCloud photos is not one of them:
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303
| zzyzxd wrote:
| > Yes, you can turn off iCloud Photos to disable Apple's
| scanning
|
| To me, it is such a weird implementation. The feature is about
| scanning on-device data, not data in iCloud, but for some
| reason disabling iCloud is the way to opt out? Did I miss any
| technical details?
|
| Apple is always pretty OK with handing over iCloud data to
| authorities. Not only that they have already stored Chinese
| users iCloud data in state controlled entity, this was their
| whole argument regarding the San Bernardino case -- on-device
| data is user's sacred privacy, but if the shooter's phone
| uploaded data to iCloud, they were willing to send a copy to
| FBI in a heartbeat.
|
| This makes me wonder, is iCloud the underlying technical
| boundary for privacy?
| leokennis wrote:
| The feature is because it's illegal for Apple to
| host/have/posses CSAM (in iCloud).
|
| But Apple doesn't want to know what they host for you on
| iCloud.
|
| So they need to be sure that before something is uploaded to
| iCloud, it's not CSAM.
|
| So if you don't intend to upload to iCloud (i.e. you disable
| iCloud on your phone), then Apple doesn't care anymore if you
| have CSAM or not.
| snarf21 wrote:
| The one thing that occurred to me is that this is almost seems
| like this is a cya, Section 230 protection in disguise. There
| has been more discussions about Big Tech and 230, and this is
| one way to say "Look, we are compliant on our platform. Don't
| remove our protections or break us up, we are your friend!" It
| also shouldn't be too surprising given how Apple has behaved in
| China. They will only push back against the government up until
| the point it starts to affect profits.
|
| I'm also curious and I don't mean this in a judging way, but
| are all the people who are planning to sell their iDevices also
| going to divest all their retirement holdings from Apple? Stock
| price is the thing that actually applies pressure. Everyone's
| comp is based on it. What would happen if enough people
| divested from these rent-seeking companies? We can't expect the
| government (though they should) or companies to behave in a way
| that is pro-consumer, but if we can align incentives we have a
| chance.
| ksec wrote:
| I think a lot of people are either stuck with images of Apple
| under Steve Jobs or Apple under Tim Cook's marketing.
|
| It is at still nice to see people are finally asking these sort
| of questions.
| ohazi wrote:
| > It's truly disappointing that Apple got so hung up on its
| particular vision of privacy that it ended up betraying the
| fulcrum of user control: being able to trust that your device
| is truly yours.
|
| Disappointing, sure, but not surprising.
|
| Since the introduction of the iPhone, Apple has made it clear
| that one of their core beliefs is that they alone know better
| than their users. They have repeatedly demonstrated that they
| are happy to remove user control wherever possible. Their
| decision here fits that pattern perfectly.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > This invasive capability on the device level is a massive
| intrusion on everyone's privacy
|
| I am a user uploading a photo to the cloud.
|
| Google's servers scan photos after they are uploaded to the
| cloud, and have done so for the past decade.
|
| >a man [was] arrested on child pornography charges, after
| Google tipped off authorities about illegal images found in the
| Houston suspect's Gmail account
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/06/why-the-gmail-scan-that-le...
|
| Apple wants the device to scan the photo before it is uploaded
| to the cloud.
|
| Both are equally invasive and both can only be avoided by
| refusing to use the cloud.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I don't use the cloud. I don't even sign in an email address
| on my android phone. That makes all the difference to me.
| meterplech wrote:
| There are many photos one could take without uploading or
| saving them in the cloud. The question is can I safely store
| things locally on my device without a multi-national
| corporation being able to set the policy of what's allowed
| there. The article cites examples of banned memes/images by
| the Chinese government.
|
| There is also the risk of algorithm mistakes. Without the
| trust + safety team or any cloud verification, does this just
| get immediately forward to the FBI?
|
| What is the process to be made non-guilty if the Apple
| algorithm thinks you have something illegal and you don't if
| there is no human in the loop involved before it's forwarded
| to authorities?
|
| At least if you upload to a service someone on the trust +
| safety team can verify the algo worked properly. I would be
| very nervous building this kind of system of the risk of
| false positives! Maybe even so nervous to introduce many more
| false negatives - which is in itself terrible in the case of
| something like CSAM.
| danudey wrote:
| Here's how it works, in short:
|
| 1. Images which are going to be uploaded to iCloud are
| matched against known hashes. A match has to be very close
| in order to actually be flagged as a match. The results are
| uploaded to iCloud Photos along with your image. 2. If your
| account hits a sufficient threshold of matches (i.e. you
| have to have multiple/many images matched) then Apple is
| alerted and they are able to decrypt low-resolution
| versions of the relevant stored images. 3. Apple's team
| performs a manual review of the images to ensure that they
| are in fact inappropriate images and not false positives.
| 4. If any of the matched images are actually illegal, then
| Apple reports you to the authorities.
|
| In other words, there are several safeguards in this
| process:
|
| 1. Only if you're uploading files are the files matched. 2.
| Only if the matches are very close are they considered
| matches. 3. Only if you have multiple very close matches is
| Apple able to decrypt the low-res versions of the images
| themselves. 4. Only if a human reviewer discovers any of
| the decrypted low-res images to be illegal content is any
| of your information shared with anyone else.
|
| In my opinion, this is a vastly better system than
| literally any other cloud provider at the moment; it allows
| Apple to find and report even more CSAM with effectively no
| risk of reporting false-positives to law enforcement, while
| also preserving your privacy through encryption in transit
| and at rest.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > The question is can I safely store things locally on my
| device without a multi-national corporation being able to
| set the policy of what's allowed there.
|
| Didn't Microsoft just start removing people's torrent
| clients from their computer without permission and announce
| that you wouldn't be allowed to use your own PC running
| Windows 11 Home without using an online Microsoft account
| to log in?
| Clubber wrote:
| >Both are equally invasive and both can only be avoided by
| refusing to use the cloud.
|
| Technically Apple can do a scan regardless of wether or not
| you posted it to iCloud if they so desired to, or were
| ordered to.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Technically, Google can sell the entire trove of data they
| have collected about you to anyone willing to write them a
| check.
|
| Do you think it's likely they will do so?
| Clubber wrote:
| The difference is you don't put your data in Google's
| cloud, they can't sell it. With this Apple change on your
| local device, you don't have any recourse other than get
| a different phone.
|
| Also, Google sells your data already don't they? Probably
| not a great counterpoint.
|
| https://www.tampabay.com/news/2021/05/07/google-selling-
| user...
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Again, the only thing different here is that when you
| upload a photo to the cloud, Apple scans it on device
| before the file is uploaded, while Google scans it on
| their server after it is uploaded.
|
| Nothing is happening to files you don't attempt to upload
| to the cloud.
|
| Also, if Google is selling everyone's data to third party
| data brokers, it's news to me.
| Clubber wrote:
| >Nothing is happening to files you don't attempt to
| upload to the cloud.
|
| I am aware, but because the scanner now exists on the
| device, they have the capability of scanning images on
| your device regardless of whether or not you upload it to
| the cloud if they so choose to _OR ARE ORDERED TO_. Do
| you not see the difference in capability?
| shuckles wrote:
| "Google has the capability to upload images from your
| device and could choose to upload every image IF ORDERED
| TO."
| GeekyBear wrote:
| By that logic, Google is every bit as vulnerable to being
| ordered to scan all files on Android devices.
| NewLogic wrote:
| This is classic what-aboutism, yes they are both equally
| bad scenarios. Apple is just one-step closer with
| capability already deployed.
| Clubber wrote:
| So you are saying Google can access your device at any
| time and pull all data from it, even if you didn't upload
| it to their servers!? No thanks on either. I'm not sure
| "other companies can do it too," is a great counterpoint
| either.
| gigel82 wrote:
| A webpage does authentication by downloading a list of
| usernames and passwords and comparing your inputs in
| JavaScript in your browser. Another sends a hash out to an
| endpoint in the cloud.
|
| To the user - using your line of reasoning - they're both the
| same, right?
|
| This isn't supposed to be a technical comparison, I just want
| to point out that the implementation matters as much (or
| more) than the customers' experience.
| hef19898 wrote:
| But only Apple can, at least for now, scan content or your
| phone. Google cannot. Yet. Small, bit crucial difference.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Frankly, it's more of a problem for my data to be flagged
| after Google has it than it would be for it to never leave
| my device at all.
|
| People have certainly run afoul of the law when the data
| Google has about them is misused.
|
| >Innocent man, 23, sues Arizona police for $1.5million
| after being arrested for murder and jailed for six days
| when Google's GPS tracker wrongly placed him at the scene
| of the 2018 crime
|
| https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7897319/Police-
| arre...
|
| We are only talking about what happens when you try to send
| the data to the cloud, after all. Not about all the data on
| the device.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| Really? Apple and Google have been able to scan content on
| your phone as long as they have sold phones. They control
| the OS, therefore they have access to the content. The
| ability has always been there. The only difference is that
| Apple has now openly announced what they are going to do
| and how. If governments wanted to pressure Apple (or
| Google) to scan content they could have done that anytime
| in the last few years. If Apple and Google resisted that
| before, why is now different?
| stickfigure wrote:
| From a legal perspective, there is a significant chasm
| between "you are hereby ordered to develop a whole new
| surveillance feature for devices you build" and "you are
| hereby ordered to add these new (potentially unrelated to
| CSAM) signatures to your existing surveillance network".
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Under what legal basis are certain corporations immune to
| government demands while others are not?
|
| Google does reporting on how many National Security
| Letters requesting information about it's users that it
| responds to annually.
|
| Why doesn't it just ignore them?
| stickfigure wrote:
| I don't understand your question. Google, Apple, Facebook
| et al comply with their legal obligations.
|
| Apple does not have a legal obligation to install spyware
| on your phone (at least not in the US, not yet).
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _Google does reporting on how many National Security
| Letters requesting information about it 's users that it
| responds to annually._
|
| So does Apple[1]. Apple gave data on over 31,000
| users/accounts based on National Security Letters in the
| first half of 2020 alone[1].
|
| > _Why doesn 't it just ignore them?_
|
| In the first half of 2020, Apple provided data to the US
| government (non-FISA or NSL) about 9,000 times, and
| responded to requests for data with the data about ~85%
| of the time, and 92% in cases of "emergencies"[1].
|
| [1] https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/us.html
| artursapek wrote:
| Apple can already find photos of my cat, of ice cream, and
| of the sky directly on my phone using AI
| veratwiger wrote:
| My understanding is they only scan for content if it's
| being uploaded to iCloud. Scanning on the phone, yes, but
| only if the image is to be sent over the network.
| handrous wrote:
| And they seem to be doing that because they both 1) want
| to enable e2e encryption for iCloud images, soonish, and
| 2) don't want to become the world's most popular child
| porn storage and sharing platform.
|
| I get the arguments for why the fix for #2 is too
| dangerous to be worth it, but also get why they'd be
| inclined to choose it.
| aj3 wrote:
| On the other hand, Google can run arbitrary queries over
| your data (published to their cloud) while Apple uses the
| same algorithm and hash database for everyone (which
| probably will get reverse engineered and audited by next
| BlackHat).
| jdiez17 wrote:
| What makes you think that Apple will use the same
| database for everyone?
| michaelmrose wrote:
| You can't realistically reverse engineer a hash to source
| image.
| duped wrote:
| I think so too but from a different angle. It sounds like
| the federal government is strong arming Apple to spy on
| their users. Apple would rather use on-device hashing to
| preserve some amount of privacy rather than give unfettered
| access to the feds to their cloud.
| migueldeicaza wrote:
| Apple's approach opens the door to get full end-to-end
| encryption for other assets that are currently stored on
| iCloud, that currently are not.
|
| It is not a guarantee, but it leaves that door open, which
| currently would face very strong headwinds to get rolled out.
| exhilaration wrote:
| That's mentioned in TFA, Apple relented to the FBI's request
| that iCloud backups would not encrypted. I can't see that
| changing since scanning for CP won't help the FBI in the vast
| majority of their investigations (terrorism, drug
| trafficking, fraud).
| shuckles wrote:
| Google could've announced the same solution for Google Photos
| as a 3rd party app. I don't understand what privileged position
| Apple as OS maker has used to build this solution. It's a
| feature of their Photos application when used with their cloud
| photo service.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| To be installed by default and not removable on one of the
| most used devices in the world.
| threeseed wrote:
| You can remove the Photos app and disable iCloud Photos.
|
| At no point are you forced to use either.
| exhilaration wrote:
| Are you suggesting that people who want to opt out of
| this should stop taking photos on their iPhones?
| shuckles wrote:
| It's a pretty weak argument to say that a clearly
| communicated change in behavior of a single application
| compromises trust in the entire operating system. You'd
| basically need to argue that Apple should not be allowed to
| install any default applications or services.
|
| The Photos application can't be removed, but this behavior
| can be turned off.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| It does because they control the entire os, ecosystem,
| now and in the future, and have demonstrated with PRISM
| and this they don't play for our team.
| vb6sp6 wrote:
| > they don't play for our team
|
| I'm no apple apologist but apple must follow the laws of
| the countries they operate in. They can't advocate for
| _us_ because we are not the ones setting the rules.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Sure. If the law tell them to locate all gays so that
| they can be jailed in the emirates, would you agree with
| that ?
|
| I could do worse, but Godwin called.
| vb6sp6 wrote:
| Of course not. I even said "i am not an apple apologist"
| so these lame "gotcha" questions are kinda silly
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| The lame gotcha question is to underline than for many,
| the immorality of the choice they make override the
| legality of it.
|
| But the previous comment was more fun.
| vb6sp6 wrote:
| I think the bar is a little higher here on HN. save it
| for facebook
| amznthrwaway wrote:
| HN is a site where "slippery slope", which is actually a
| logical fallacy, is instead used as an argument against
| anything that HN users don't like.
|
| It's nonsensical to treat this site as anything other
| than a complete trash fire, meant to get engagement from
| a very specific audience.
| danudey wrote:
| It's more accurate to think of it as a feature of the iCloud
| Photos client software (which is built into the OS). If you
| don't use iCloud Photos, you don't use the client software,
| so nothing changes.
| jlpom wrote:
| > there will be no limits for governments to expand it's reach
| once implemented. The scope will always broaden
|
| Speculating it is slippery slope arg.
| https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
| howaboutnope wrote:
| As the article says:
|
| "The strength of such an argument depends on whether the
| small step really is likely to lead to the effect."
|
| > It is true that a computer, for example, can be used for
| good or evil. It is true that a helicopter can be used as a
| gunship and it can also be used to rescue people from a
| mountain pass. And if the question arises of how a specific
| device is going to be used, in what I call an abstract ideal
| society, then one might very well say one cannot know. But we
| live in a concrete society, [and] with concrete social and
| historical circumstances and political realities in this
| society, it is perfectly obvious that when something like a
| computer is invented, then it is going to be adopted will be
| for military purposes. It follows from the concrete realities
| in which we live, it does not follow from pure logic. But
| we're not living in an abstract society, we're living in the
| society in which we in fact live. If you look at the enormous
| fruits of human genius that mankind has developed in the last
| 50 years, atomic energy and rocketry and flying to the moon
| and coherent light, and it goes on and on and on -- and then
| it turns out that every one of these triumphs is used
| primarily in military terms. So it is not reasonable for a
| scientist or technologist to insist that he or she does not
| know -- or cannot know -- how it is going to be used.
|
| -- Joseph Weizenbaum,
| http://tech.mit.edu/V105/N16/weisen.16n.html
|
| To pretend it's inherently unknowable right up to the point
| until it's "too late" is kinda getting old.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| From Wikipedia[1]:
|
| > _Argument from fallacy is the formal fallacy of analyzing
| an argument and inferring that, since it contains a fallacy,
| its conclusion must be false._
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| I've been thinking carefully about this situation.
|
| I just don't see the intrusion.
|
| Firstly, you are syncing your photos to iCloud. It's equivalent
| to developing your photos at an old timey film shop.
|
| iCloud happens to have lots of security guarantees, much like
| the film shop.
|
| But the moment you develop CP, all bets are off. I think most
| of us lead pampered, selfish lives. Perhaps this is a "think of
| the children" cry, and perhaps this has been used for many
| evils over time.
|
| If Apple were to get their lists of hashes from China (a
| situation they've opened themselves up to in the future), then
| sure, that's awful. Or if they were doing these checks and
| alerting law enforcement _without iCloud sync_ , then that's
| awful too.
|
| But this doesn't seem to be a slippery slope, yet. They are
| targeting a specific case: you uploading your photos, and your
| photos being of _known_ child sexual abuse.
|
| Yes, there are false positive photos in the database. Maybe
| there's even a flower in there. But if you got flagged as a
| false positive, the moment law enforcement looks at your photos
| (which, remember, you've surrendered to iCloud), you sexually
| abusing a flower won't cause any problems.
|
| Or will it? Please, my mind is open. I'd love to change it.
| wobblykiwi wrote:
| This is about Apple scanning the pictures on your phone, not
| the pictures that have been synced to iCloud.
| danudey wrote:
| Do you have any general objection to client software
| scanning content it uploads before it uploads it, rather
| than afterwards? Scanning it on your phone means that
| unencrypted versions of your data don't have to leave your
| phone, which IMHO gives _more_ privacy than any other
| option.
|
| Do you have an objection even though it means that the
| content (in a form readable by anyone else) never leaves
| your device? Would it be preferable if Apple scanned files
| that were synced to iCloud, but no longer encrypted them in
| transit/at rest, or encrypted them in a way that they are
| able to decrypt?
| camillomiller wrote:
| A good point to keep in mind, there is no "scanning". There
| is a hashing, then a check of the hashes - not the pictures
| - and if a hash matches the on-device NCMEC hashes list a
| "security voucher" is generated. Said voucher will be
| uploaded to iCloud photos along with the picture it refers
| to, without anyone in the chain being able to know that it
| happened.
| 0x000000001 wrote:
| they already scan all the images on your phone. that's how
| i can search for "dog" or "flowers" and find results in my
| photo library.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| Local scanning/indexing is fine. It's reporting the
| results of the scan to Apple that people have a problem
| with.
| danudey wrote:
| I'm not sure that's true. A lot of people seem to have
| less of a problem with Apple scanning for CSAM and more
| of a problem that they're doing it on the phone (and
| looking for specific images, I guess?).
| idle_zealot wrote:
| It's the fact that the phone is scanning your images and
| relaying the results to Apple that's the issue. If this
| feature were just an extension of existing on-device
| scanning and stayed on the device, perhaps informing the
| owner "Hey, it appears a few of your images may be CSAM.
| Would you like to review them?" then I don't think people
| would be very upset.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Do they do device local scanning for this purpose? Apple's
| original announcement said that it was to give law
| enforcement answers about photos synced to iCloud.
|
| If so, then I'll immediately change my mind and join the
| protest. Device local scanning is equivalent to someone
| checking your personal possessions at your home.
| wobblykiwi wrote:
| Yes, you can find more information here:
| https://www.apple.com/child-
| safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni...
|
| From the overview:
|
| > Apple's method of detecting known CSAM is designed with
| user privacy in mind. Instead of scanning images in the
| cloud, the system performs on-device matching using a
| database of known CSAM image hashes provided by NCMEC and
| other child-safety organizations. Apple further
| transforms this database into an unreadable set of
| hashes, which is securely stored on users' devices.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Yes, but my understanding was that they do this for
| iCloud-synced photos.
|
| If iCloud is off, do they still do this? Your quote
| actually doesn't contradict that, which is my main
| hangup. If you turn on iCloud, you forfeit certain
| expectations.
|
| I'll read through it carefully now.
|
| EDIT: It was the very first sentence of the intro:
|
| > CSAM Detection enables Apple to accurately identify and
| report iCloud users who store known Child Sexual Abuse
| Material (CSAM) in their iCloud Photos accounts.
|
| I don't get it. It's their platform. Other image
| platforms do this matching. Old film shops used to do
| this matching. Why is this evil?
| dmitrygr wrote:
| If you scan in the cloud, photos not synced to the cloud
| are 100% not going to be scanned - they are JUST NOT
| THERE. If you can on device, you are one "if(" condition
| away from "Accidentally "scanning other photos. See the
| issue now?
| idle_zealot wrote:
| The sticking point is that the matching happens on-
| device, not on their servers. Sure, it only happens for
| photos that will be synced, but it's still your device
| doing the matching and snitching.
|
| There's also the fact that the "only scans local photos
| marked for upload to iCloud" is a technically thin
| barrier. A switch that could very easily and quietly be
| flipped in the future.
| camillomiller wrote:
| >But this doesn't seem to be a slippery slope, either. Any
| photos you're worried about can trivially circumvent the
| hashing system: adjust their brightness. Boom, done.
|
| I've been briefed about it. Apple says explicitly that this
| is not the case. They mention that cropping, transforming, or
| even desaturating an image won't result in a hash that's so
| different from the matching one. The similarity will be high
| enough to detect the photo anyway. They don't seem eager to
| explain in detail how that actually works, though.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Sorry, I edited that part out one minute after commenting.
| I realized it was a weakness in the argument.
|
| Thank you for pointing that out though. I had no idea.
| danudey wrote:
| The reason they don't explain how it works is that the CSAM
| hash matching is an algorithm from NCMEC, which was
| apparently originally designed by Microsoft.
|
| If you want to learn about the algorithm/hashes, you have
| to, among other things, sign an NDA about it, so it's
| likely that Apple, legally, cannot go into detail about how
| it actually works.
|
| Microsoft has a page on it here if you're interested:
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/photodna
|
| For obvious reasons, they don't go into a whole lot of
| detail.
|
| I've learned a lot about how the process works from this
| blog post:
| https://hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/929-One-
| Ba...
|
| He gets a few facts about Apple's approach wrong, but it's
| an incredibly interesting read.
| migueldeicaza wrote:
| Apple designed a new system, which is different than
| PhotoDNA - they call it neural hash, and the specifics
| are not disclosed.
| x2r wrote:
| Apple used to be able to say 'we don't have that capability'
| if, for example, a Turkish judge ordered them to scan phones
| for a certain picture of Erdogan. What are they going to say
| now?
| WA wrote:
| I guess we all now just realize the truth: you don't control
| your iPhone. Apple does. You merely use it.
|
| In a way, nothing changed. Apple _could 've_ done on-device
| scanning forever. In another way, everything changed.
|
| I'm not sure what I'm going to do about it. Problem is that the
| devices are really really good.
| danudey wrote:
| I think what you mean is that you don't control the iCloud
| Photos client, Apple does. Your photos are scanned by the
| iCloud Photos "client" (which is built into the OS) before
| uploading them to the cloud.
|
| Would it be any different if Dropbox was scanning files
| before it uploaded them rather than afterwards? It already
| computes hashes of your files on your device so that it
| doesn't have to re-upload existing content, so I honestly
| don't understand the objection to doing image scanning on
| your device before uploading your content.
| jdiez17 wrote:
| The point is that if the capability for "the iCloud Photos
| client" to scan your photos before uploading them to the
| cloud exists, it's only Apple's policy that stops it from
| scanning all of your photos.
| tpush wrote:
| That capability obviously already exists independent from
| this CSAM-scanning system.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Yes, they were already doing facial recognition of my
| photos, which I didn't ask for and can't turn off.
| Osiris wrote:
| You can uninstall Dropbox. You cannot uninstall Photos.
| Aperocky wrote:
| phone's are just phones. At this point multiple companies and
| potential governments are monitoring or have the capability
| to monitor it.
|
| But computers are another story. So far we still maintain
| some privacy there thanks to Linux.
| spacebear wrote:
| Unfortunately, phones are most people's primary computer.
| howaboutnope wrote:
| > If people could understand what computing was about,
| the iPhone would not be a bad thing. But because people
| don't understand what computing is about, they think they
| have it in the iPhone, and that illusion is as bad as the
| illusion that _Guitar Hero_ is the same as a real guitar.
|
| -- Alan Kay, https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-
| alan-kay-thinks-ab...
| lupire wrote:
| Nce theory. And yet smartphones have delivered far more
| real world computing to users than the "real computing"
| ever did.
| kuratkull wrote:
| Phones have delivered social networks, cat pictures and
| mobile games to the masses, that's about it, really.
| dijit wrote:
| There is no formal definition of computing which is
| furthered by iPhones.
|
| I have an iPhone, and pythonista is the only potential
| thing which fulfils the criteria of "computing",
| everything else is convenience.
|
| Smartphones have done an incredible amount at bringing
| the consumption of the internet, audio, video and rich
| communication via social media.
|
| But they have not brought "real world computing", because
| "real world computing" is any goal-oriented activity
| requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing
| machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of
| algorithmic processes and development of both hardware
| and software. It has scientific, engineering,
| mathematical, technological and social aspects.
|
| You might want to read the wikipedia page.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computing
| JAlexoid wrote:
| ACM tried to define it:
|
| >"In a general way, we can define computing to mean any
| goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or
| creating computers. Thus, computing includes designing
| and building hardware and software systems for a wide
| range of purposes; processing, structuring, and managing
| various kinds of information; doing scientific studies
| using computers; making computer systems behave
| intelligently; creating and using communications and
| entertainment media; finding and gathering information
| relevant to any particular purpose, and so on. The list
| is virtually endless, and the possibilities are vast."
|
| I basically would half agree that iPhone brought more
| computing. Based on practical applications, iPhone has
| not brought radically more computing. iPhone replaced
| some stationary computing with ultra-mobile computing.
|
| Cheap feature phones, that allowed people in Africa to
| make cashless payments, brought more computing to
| ordinary people... than expensive iPhone - that is owned
| by people who have/had other computers.
|
| People who formally require computing - engineers(all
| kinds, incl software and structural), data collectors,
| music professionals and so on - still rely on other forms
| of computing. Some have shifted to iPad, which made
| computing more fun. But then all of the heavier forms of
| computing - they are still done on a "computer", not a
| phone or iPad.
| fsflover wrote:
| > phone's are just phones
|
| > But computers are another story.
|
| Librem 5 and Pinephone smartphones are computers running
| GNU/Linux.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Yeah I think the distinction is more with OS than the
| form factor.
|
| With a close garden and close sourced apps, there are
| basically nothing you can do (to make sure you're not
| being monitored). Completely at whim, true for regular
| computers too, but a lot more choices exist for the
| latter group.
| dTal wrote:
| One of the most pernicious sins of the smartphone
| revolution was to rebrand the "computer". We'd evolved
| expectations as to what we were entitled to on our own
| machines - yes, even those with a proprietary OS - and then
| with one weird trick, it all went in the trash.
| Advertising, surveillance, inability to install whatever
| you want - before smartphones, this sort of thing used to
| be unequivocally malware.
|
| The worst part is that now the dam's broken, it's all
| bleeding back into "computers".
| lupire wrote:
| You're blaming smartphones for problem that exists
| because of the Internet. If smartphones didn't render
| computers irrelevant to most people, all this "bad app"
| stuff would have happened on computers.
|
| And the computers that don't have "bad apps" are hacked
| and encrypted by ransomware. Is that better?
|
| Spyware is older than smartphones.
| dTal wrote:
| Spyware is older than smartphones, but back then we
| called it "spyware", not "ooh, the latest Android!".
| JAlexoid wrote:
| Apple is literally going to spy on you... and then report
| you to the authorities.
|
| I'd rather give all of my DNA to an advertising company.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Android is also Linux. Yet some manufacturers don't allow
| any kind of boot unlocking or root access.
|
| Open source doesn't guarantee we have any type of control
| over it if the hardware is locked down. The reason is more
| that the industry hasn't bothered selling locked-down
| computers yet by default. The tech is there, Secure Boot +
| TPM. They just give us the options to override in the BIOS.
| _For now._
| Zambyte wrote:
| > Open source doesn't guarantee we have any type of
| control over it if the hardware is locked down
|
| It can though. See: GPLv3.
|
| IMO the greatest failure of Linux was not upgrading from
| GPLv2.
| btdmaster wrote:
| This is a case of lack of enforcement, not a case of lax
| licensing. You do have this right under GPLv2 according
| to Conservancy:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27937877.
| hbtsbuss wrote:
| Linux has many more stakeholders than you. It's a failure
| for you, but extremely important to many others
| (including me). I'd go further and allege you are in the
| minority among users of Linux, because think about what a
| user of Linux is. Linus made the absolutely correct call
| and Linux would be on the decline if he hadn't; the money
| in Linux is in embedding (and SaaS), not people dabbling
| with free software who by definition don't pay for it,
| and until the FSF and its adherents conquer the concept
| of "an economy" they're still fighting an uphill, losing
| battle against the same economic forces they despite.
|
| More than half of YC's hardware startups, not to mention
| Android and probably Teslas in their current form,
| probably would have never happened were they not able to
| embed Linux in a controlled manner without having to
| invest in catering to the four total users who will want
| to build a system image and reflash the firmware on their
| whatever. (Android has some means to do so and an
| audience much more interested in doing so but the point
| stands.)
|
| I'm also interested in the legal framework around a
| software license that's able to dictate the architecture
| and design of components _around_ the software, and I
| suspect it will not survive if challenged, particularly
| in Europe.
|
| The greatest failure of free software, to me, is thinking
| in absolutes and not studying how the world actually uses
| computers as time goes on. The concepts, ideas, and
| demands are stuck in 1991 and are basically "man shakes
| fist at capitalism," while writing capitalist exceptions
| into the very Tivoization clause in question under
| pressure.
| api wrote:
| Open source also doesn't guarantee any type of control if
| it's SaaS or anchored to a closed source SaaS system.
| There's a ton of "but it's open source!" SaaS companies
| that I shall not name that leverage open source but in
| reality are lock-in walled gardens. The code is open but
| the data and network effect are not.
| aj3 wrote:
| Meh. Dropbox and Google Drive can run arbitrary queries over
| your files stored there. iCloud (assuming they finish e2ee
| transition) will have to push the same hashes to everyone.
| It's not transparent and we don't have a way to inspect what
| exactly are they searching for, but at least there's a way in
| principle to reverse engineer the algorithm and to monitor
| how often hash database gets updated.
|
| In my book that's a step in the direction of privacy,
| compared to old status quo.
| feanaro wrote:
| Huh? You can choose not to use any cloud service if you
| want. If you buy an iPhone, you can't... Choose not to use
| the iPhone you just bought.
|
| This isn't a step towards privacy and it sounds (to me at
| least) like quite the logical contortion to argue that it
| is.
| wiremine wrote:
| This is a better way to frame the discussion, IMHO.
|
| The conversation is around Apple, which is critical, but we
| need to compare them to the rest of the industry, and
| discuss the government/citizen tradeoffs in that light.
| I.e., holistically, not per company.
| [deleted]
| kbenson wrote:
| That is indeed what the article does, does it not? It
| makes the case that storing online with a decryption key
| that can be used with a search warrant is probably the
| right trade off, and the way other companies sometimes
| implement this.
|
| Then you get to choose whether to push your data to the
| third party or not, given the risks involved.
|
| The author even notes they were opposed to Facebook's
| end-to-end encryption previously, I assume because as for
| defaults it sets a precedent and makes it unsearchable,
| but I'm not sure the specific tradeoffs they weigh and
| points they consider since it's behind a paywall (and I'm
| not sure I agree).
|
| > discuss the government/citizen tradeoffs in that light.
| I.e., holistically, not per company.
|
| Right now the differences are essentially per-company,
| since we've let our experiences be controlled almost
| entirely by a small subset of companies. To abstract the
| implementation from the primary implementer is to
| obfuscate some of the cause and effect here. We _should_
| discuss this as a societal tradeoff, as you note, but we
| should not ignore that this was spurred by a company
| running out in front of what was required of it and
| implementing this system which many see as at the expense
| of their users privacy.
| zepto wrote:
| > Then you get to choose whether to push your data to the
| third party or not, given the risks involved.
|
| You get to choose whether to push your data to Apple and
| trigger the scanning with their solution too.
|
| The key escrow option is strictly worse.
| kbenson wrote:
| > You get to choose whether to push your data to Apple
| and trigger the scanning with their solution too.
|
| That's purely an implementation detail, and subject to
| change at any time. That's why people are upset.
|
| One solution is limited to you actually pushing your data
| off your private device, the other is limited to a list
| of items you say you want to push off your device, but
| actually happens on your device.
|
| That's the difference between someone searching a large
| warehouse you and many others have stored belongings, and
| someone coming into your house and searching through your
| items freely as long as they're on the list.
|
| Beyond the difference in privacy that search entails
| fundamentally, people are very worried that the list
| itself is limited only by policy, and truly, the search
| of items on that list has full access to your private
| details but for the grace of those performing the search
| and controlling the list.
|
| The key escrow option is strictly worse than the current
| implementation, but it is also naturally constrained and
| the exposure is entirely user controlled. If you do not
| put data online in that situation, there is no way for
| them to process it without first exfiltrating it, which
| we already have laws and systems in place to hamper.
| zepto wrote:
| > That's purely an implementation detail, and subject to
| change at any time.
|
| That's an evergreen complaint. If they want to introduce
| a general purpose scanning mechanism they can do so at
| any time. This is not that.
|
| > That's why people are upset.
|
| I don't think so. I think they are upset because they
| don't like the fact that Apple has _any_ power over them
| and this remind them of that _even though it is not in
| fact an abuse_.
|
| I actually agree with this, but I don't think that
| claiming Apple's implementation to be something it is not
| is helpful.
|
| The key escrow solution is strictly worse in _any_
| future. If key escrow becomes established as a norm
| between cloud providers and law enforcement, then _no_
| free alternative will _ever_ be possible.
| iratewizard wrote:
| True. The constant migration of everything to the cloud
| has lots of consequences just like this. If the false
| positive are as common as the fotoForensics guy states,
| this could also become a new weapon for corporate
| warfare. A small competitor to a market Apple wants to
| control happens to have assets stored in an apple cloud?
| Guess who's offices are getting raided today?
| miles wrote:
| > Meh. Dropbox and Google Drive can run arbitrary queries
| over your files stored there.
|
| However, unlike with Apple's invasive on-device scanning,
| you can encrypt files before storing them at Dropbox or
| Google Drive. There are even simple turnkey solutions like
| Sookasa:
|
| "Sookasa acts as a transparent layer over Google Drive to
| encrypt your sensitive files on the cloud and across
| connected devices..." https://www.sookasa.com/GD
|
| "Sookasa protects data both on devices and in the cloud,
| and decouples the data from the encryption keys, meaning
| your data stays secure no matter where it goes."
| https://www.sookasa.com/dropbox-security/
| endisneigh wrote:
| How do you know Sookasa isn't doing the same thing? It
| doesn't appear to be open source.
| Miraste wrote:
| Open source software like rclone can do something
| similar.
| commoner wrote:
| A free and open source alternative to Sookasa is
| Cryptomator.
|
| https://cryptomator.org
|
| https://github.com/cryptomator
| shuckles wrote:
| You can irreversibly transform the image data of photos
| added to the Photos app as well.
| aborsy wrote:
| Rclone and gocryptfs are other options for cloud
| encryption.
| bmarquez wrote:
| Cryptomator is another encryption software which can
| encrypt files before they're uploaded to the cloud, and
| it's open source.
|
| https://github.com/cryptomator/cryptomator
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| I don't keep child porn on my phone (or any where else. I
| also don't keep smallpox in my freezer or nuclear weapons
| on my basement. Noninvasive scans for these things probably
| make the world a better place in some ways.
|
| The part I object to having my life disrupted by having my
| personal accounts unilaterally deleted by a fucking buggy
| bot. Our phones are too important to us to just have them
| shut off without notice. That's bullshit.
| hfsh wrote:
| >Noninvasive scans
|
| Scans on a _local_ device feel quite invasive to me.
| Phones have become an extension of our person, let 's not
| kid ourselves.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| Is a picture of a naked kid going to trigger this
| algorithm?
|
| In a few places taking pictures of your child naked while
| swimming is considered child pornography. Other places
| having children run around naked on the beach is the
| norm. (I have a few pictures of me, at 3y/o, naked on the
| beach)
|
| In the world of remote medicine, can a parent take
| pictures of their naked child to send to a doctor?
|
| How are they going to fit their cultural specifics to the
| world?
|
| Knowing how Facebook dealt with it - they are going to
| apply the strictest rules, so no naked child photos are
| allowed on your iPhone anymore. For no reason.
| treesknees wrote:
| Apple has said multiple times that accounts are not shut
| off with any automated system, that portion of the
| process is handled by humans.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| So... They will have humans looking at pictures to
| determine if it's child pornography? Well... That's a
| dream job for a pedo
| giantrobot wrote:
| Who do I call (and how do I call them) if the person
| agrees with the automated false positive and disables my
| account/phone and reports me to the police? Just being
| _accused_ of having CSAM is ruinous. What 's my recourse
| if there's an innocent bug in their system that reports
| me to the police?
|
| I was at Apple for more than a decade and a half. I saw
| an untold number of Michael Bolton bugs [0]. It's one
| thing when a bug causes a dropped frame in a video or a
| menu takes a tenth of a second too long to appear. It's
| another when it ruins your life and bankrupts you
| defending yourself.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnPBSy5FsOc&t=02m24s
| chimen wrote:
| Good! Because I trust those even less. If possible, once
| banned, no one to answer on any of the communication
| channels, Google style.
| [deleted]
| mcherm wrote:
| > iCloud [...] will have to push the same hashes to
| everyone
|
| Why?
|
| What's to prevent them from pushing specific hashes to a
| specific phone?
| shuckles wrote:
| There are three primary sources stating that the database
| will be embedded in iOS. Remote hash updates introduces
| privacy risk.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| This entire scheme introduces privacy risk.
|
| There is no technical reason why they could not push
| individual hashes to individual phones, only policy ones.
| shuckles wrote:
| In an alternative universe where they built a remotely
| updated database, yes. But that's not this universe.
|
| I'm going to go further and say that people are doing a
| very bad job articulating why the incremental privacy
| risk of the scheme is significant, over the always-
| existent privacy risk of a proprietary vendor updating
| software they entirely control to scan data uploaded to a
| cloud service which guarantees no protection from vendor
| access. A later software update to include more hashes or
| whatever could always regress privacy.
| feanaro wrote:
| One is a proprietary third-party, optional service acting
| against you, the other is your own device acting against
| you. That's the difference and it should be pretty easy
| to understand.
| shuckles wrote:
| So if you could delete the Photos app, you'd believe
| there is no longer any fundamental privacy risk?
| YokoSix wrote:
| They also could embed the whole database into iOS and
| activate certain hashes only for certain iCloud accounts.
| No one would know because the database is encrypted
| multiple times.
| shuckles wrote:
| They could do a lot of things. They've told us what they
| do. It's not this. The FAQ released yesterday
| specifically says that users cannot be targeted.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| They've told us what they do today.
| YokoSix wrote:
| > _The same set of hashes is stored in the operating
| system of every iPhone and iPad user, so targeted attacks
| against only specific individuals are not possible under
| our design._
|
| The problem with this sentence is that Apple assumes that
| they can't target specific individuals because every
| iPhone and iPad user has the exact same database in their
| iOS device.
|
| But what if they have a hash in the database where they
| know that only one person has this exact image on their
| device? This way you could single out one individual with
| the same database.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Not for people that didn't trust the cloud and didnt out
| their life in there in the first place.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| While there is certainly truth to this, this is also a
| defeatist position. Of course Apple _could_ do anything, with
| or without telling us. And they do some fairly indefensible
| things, though I would argue those have mostly to do with the
| App Store.
|
| But this is not the time to throw our hands up and say there
| was nothing we could do all along. That the situation was
| never ideal does not preclude there being something worth
| fighting for.
| amelius wrote:
| > I'm not sure what I'm going to do about it. Problem is that
| the devices are really really good.
|
| The devices are good, but still Apple has a weak value
| proposition.
|
| Also, handing them your money probably isn't going to make
| things better in terms of alternatives.
| iso1210 wrote:
| RMS has been saying this stuff for decades, but people ignore
| him.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| Agreed and a great example of why his message on free
| software is so important. I would never have been as
| cognizant of the topic if not for his laser-focused and
| committed work.
| jaredklewis wrote:
| This sentiment gets repeated all the time and it drives me
| crazy.
|
| I've read a lot of stuff by RMS and am certainly aware of
| his concerns.
|
| I have an iPhone and Mac so I guess you would consider that
| I "ignored" him. This is a ridiculous conclusion. I
| considered the risks and trade-offs of non-FOSS software,
| and regrettably accepted them, because the FOSS
| alternatives had trade-offs that cumulatively (for me) were
| much worse. Unlike RMS, I am not a one-dimensional person
| that only evaluates tech on the single dimension of
| freedom. Tech is not a religion for me; it's just a tool.
|
| RMS pontificating about FOSS does not magically bring
| iPhone comparable FOSS software and hardware into
| existence. If the FOSS community wants consumer adoption,
| ratio of pontificating about to building consumer products
| needs to be much lower.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| TL;DR: You understood the trade-off, and chose to become
| a product for the convenience. The majority of us here
| have done the same, because becoming a product is part of
| the modern life. Nowadays choosing digital purity is like
| becoming a digital Amish.
| lupire wrote:
| No one takes you seriously when you describe an
| interdependent mutually beneficial bur imperfect
| relationship as "become a product"
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| I think people don't like to think themselves as a
| product, but that's what we are. We're a potential source
| of income, and companies will want to know how's your
| health, where do you go, what do you buy, how you use
| your time, etc., in order to realize as much of that
| income as possible.
|
| It's a mutually-beneficial trade-off, it's just that one
| party gains individually, and the other gains by
| quantity. Advertisers wouldn't care a lot what
| restaurants you like, but they care a lot about what
| restaurants people in your city like.
| jaredklewis wrote:
| Bingo. RMS is not being ignored. People are just making
| informed decisions that FOSS purists don't like.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| Informed decision is a high bar.
|
| I'm pretty sure that most go with habit and convenience.
| I mean.... Apple could lock MacOSX down tomorrow and
| charge you $100 for terminal access and "informed
| decision" people would still argue how good MacBooks are
| (they aren't that good)
| judge2020 wrote:
| MacOS personally looks nice and functions in a logical
| way - so I consider MacBooks good. It's a personal choice
| while weighing negatives like how MacOS is not 'free
| software' that anyone can fork, change, and sell on their
| own.
| pessimizer wrote:
| This is a very solipsistic way to look at the world. FOSS
| has no duty to try to appeal to you personally, and if
| you accept the end of your privacy over UI niggles,
| that's your choice to make. The reason Apple can spend so
| much on UI is because of your willingness to eat whatever
| they serve you.
|
| After emancipation, there were plenty of slaves who
| wouldn't leave the plantation, and became slaves-by-
| another-name in the sharecropping system. I don't think
| any of them were so up their own asses that they blamed
| the slaves who left for not making it easier to leave.
|
| Also, RMS didn't talk about "FOSS." He talked about the
| inevitable future if we continued our trajectory, and
| suggested Free Software as the solution.
|
| I'm also not going to make lowering your carbon emissions
| just as easy and convenient as using all of the carbon
| you want. Take responsibility for yourself, or at least
| _don 't actively denigrate people for being right._
| syshum wrote:
| You have hit on one of the problem permeating modern
| society. No one wants to take personal responsibility for
| anything.
|
| it always some one else that is to blame, the rich, the
| evil corporation, the right wing, the left wing,
| china,.... etc etc etc
| bigfudge wrote:
| This is easy to say, but it's clear from decades of
| cognitive science that people find it extremely hard to
| avoid the affordances and incentives in their
| environment. Blaming the victims of a concerted corporate
| and political effort to constrain individual liberties
| seems churlish. This is a tragedy of the commons and the
| only solution is cooperation and dialogue to set common
| standards and norms.
| behnamoh wrote:
| > Tech is not a religion for me; it's just a tool.
|
| Ok, it is a "tool", but it's like an axe controlled by
| another person, not you. Maybe you trust that person with
| such a tool; I don't.
| judge2020 wrote:
| That much was known upon purchasing the axe - maybe it
| cuts trees 50% quicker and thus was worth the tradeoff,
| but now you can re-evaluate your options and purchase a
| different axe.
| jaredklewis wrote:
| You are doing the exact thing I am complaining about. I
| DON'T trust Apple and never said I did; I quite
| explicitly elaborated on this above.
|
| Not trusting Apple doesn't magically bring a trustworthy
| iPhone competitor into existence.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| > Not trusting Apple doesn't magically bring a
| trustworthy iPhone competitor into existence.
|
| But spending your money on Apple products certainly won't
| either.
| pshirshov wrote:
| > magically bring a trustworthy iPhone competitor into
| existence
|
| Well, purchase a Pixel 5, install CalyxOS or Graphene,
| lock bootloader again. Job done. Probably you'll lose
| some convenience, but you know, you may always ask some
| FOSS dev to bake a feature for you and pay for it.
| Fnoord wrote:
| Trust in this discussion isn't a binary 1/0. You _do_
| trust Apple in some regards, else it 'd be impossible to
| use their devices for anything. There's a tradeoff being
| made, that Apple does not do 'certain evil things'. This
| one's crossing the boundary for some, opening the
| floodgate for others. That's the issue at hand.
|
| For example, say US government. I trust the US government
| not to kill me (Dutch citizen, not a terrorist, not a
| criminal, etc etc). Does that mean I trust the US
| government with my personal data? No, that's a different
| discussion. And if I were to trust them with my personal
| data, does that mean I believe the US government has
| integrity? No. I've been very disappointed with the US
| government with regards to a recent war (I'll refrain
| from details as its irrelevant), so they need to earn
| back credibility. In my language there's a saying
| 'vertrouwen komt te voet, maar vertrekt per paard' which
| translates to something akin to 'trust comes on foot and
| goes on horseback'.
| behnamoh wrote:
| > Not trusting Apple doesn't magically bring a
| trustworthy iPhone competitor into existence.
|
| I'm afraid that'll never happen, at least, until most
| people don't care about their privacy and are willing to
| accept one-sided tradeoffs with phone vendors. BUT, there
| are alternatives like LineageOS that do a pretty good
| job. They only need more acceptance by public to be able
| to compete at the level of a trillion-dollar company like
| AAPL.
| jaredklewis wrote:
| Right. And I think projects like LineageOS are super
| interesting.
|
| My beef is just with statements like "people ignore RMS,"
| as I have yet to see any evidence of this. Everything I
| have observed is that anyone who has heard of RMS is
| fully aware of his concerns, but most of those people
| just have different priorities.
| pshirshov wrote:
| > If the FOSS community wants consumer adoption, ratio of
| pontificating about to building consumer products needs
| to be much lower.
|
| Actually it's not like FOSS community is fighting for
| your adoption, you know? It's you who should do something
| in order to make good things happen.
| zaphar wrote:
| He did. He bought Apple products. That's the whole point.
| pessimizer wrote:
| They didn't buy Apple products for any ethical reason,
| and didn't claim to have done. They bought Apple products
| because RMS didn't personally make the UI of Free
| Software polished enough for them.
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| Well your sentiment drives me crazy, especially for
| techies. It is up to us whether a non-feudal digital
| society will exist or not. It's true that FOSS will never
| be as good as the monopolists' who are able to pour
| billions of dollars into polish while tightening their
| grip over our lives. But if we are unwilling to make
| sacrifices in this fight then the battle is already lost.
| echelon wrote:
| > I've read a lot of stuff by RMS and am certainly aware
| of his concerns.
|
| > RMS pontificating [...]
|
| Uh, no. RMS was right all along and you're still not
| getting it.
|
| You bought devices you can't upgrade, you can't run
| software on, that oppress indie devs, that tax 30% of the
| market, that sell out freedom fighters in oppressive
| regimes, and that now spy on you. And now you realize the
| problem.
|
| The only way out of this madness is to get the sensible
| representatives in Congress to move forward with an
| antitrust case. Breaking up the power monopoly will
| perhaps get us back to a place where we have rights. The
| way it is now, Apple is a central point of failure.
|
| Again, everything RMS spoke was truth, and it's here
| again rearing its ugly head.
| lupire wrote:
| The real-world alternative to Apple is Microsoft, Google,
| and Blackberry, not GNU. Because almost no one and no
| money cares about GNU.
| echelon wrote:
| The real world alternative is healthy competition.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| Which is definitely absent in mobile phone space.
| zaphar wrote:
| The funny thing is that you are failing to recognize the
| value of devices that can render web pages, give
| navigation instructions that won't get me lost, run
| games, have long battery life, great screen quality, and
| a bunch of other things.
|
| I have yet to see a phone with the build quality and
| value add that I need a mobile phone to have from Free
| Software endeavors. These are the table stakes for the
| majority of people. Not the list you just rattled off.
| You aren't even in the running to compete on the other
| value adds if you can't do the above.
| notJim wrote:
| > The only way out of this madness is to get the sensible
| representatives in Congress to move forward with an
| antitrust case
|
| What are you looking for out of this anti-trust case?
| Apple is not a monopoly. There are numerous privacy-
| focused phones and Android distros available. I think
| there just isn't a huge market for a privacy-focused
| phone (no, 1000 people on a HN and twitter is not a huge
| market.)
| kelnos wrote:
| It's weird that people seem to trust Congress with this.
| This is the same Congress that is considering banning
| end-to-end encryption, remember?
| echelon wrote:
| Congress isn't wholly incompetent, despite the fun we
| have poking at it. The US has a functioning democracy and
| leads the world in so many good and important metrics.
|
| Our government isn't one person or one party, and that's
| a strength.
|
| One of my local reps is leading the big tech breakup
| movement, and I'm incredibly proud to have her
| representing me.
| Clubber wrote:
| >leads the world in so many good and important metrics.
|
| Can you help me with a few? Maybe 5? I'm pretty low on
| the US government at the moment. I can name quite a few
| things we lead in that are horrible.
|
| >One of my local reps is leading the big tech breakup
| movement, and I'm incredibly proud to have her
| representing me.
|
| I think that's great but I doubt that will ever be
| allowed to happen. Too much money will be thrown at
| congress and they will either do nothing, or do nothing
| in a way that makes them look like they did.
| echelon wrote:
| Innovation, science, technology, art (music, film, game,
| etc.), athletics (Olympics, etc.), space exploration,
| economy (by multiple metrics), energy production,
| military power, property value, ...
|
| I might agree with parts of your list, but I think that
| people are way too down on the US and its
| accomplishments. I wouldn't want to live elsewhere.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Congress is trash, but they're the institution that runs
| your life, and you at least get a nominal say about who
| is in it. If you're arguing for revolution, I won't
| disagree, but what it really sounds like is the
| traditional "we can't do this one thing until we do
| everything else first."
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| Quite literally: https://youtu.be/Ag1AKIl_2GM?t=57
| usaman wrote:
| who is RMS?
| lightsighter wrote:
| Richard M Stallman:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman
| SilverRed wrote:
| They don't ignore him, they just don't have the same
| priorities. Having privacy with a phone means giving up a
| lot of other things which people value.
| danudey wrote:
| RMS is a hypocrite though, in a lot of ways, which kind of
| undermines his message, and in a lot of other ways he's
| just wildly out of touch with the realities of the internet
| and technology in general.
|
| That's why people ignore him. He's so wildly out there so
| often, and so... _problematic_ (defending /implicitly
| supporting pedophilia, eating gunk off his feet, refusing
| to bathe, etc) that it's difficult to take him seriously
| when he is actually saying something relevant about
| something important.
| tucosan wrote:
| You make a grave accusation without even backing it up.
|
| Are you sure you fully understand the definition of
| hypocrisy?
| lupire wrote:
| HN loves throwing around accusations of "ad hominem", but
| dismissing someone's ideas on IP because he picks his
| toes is a quintessential ad hominem attack.
| markozivanovic wrote:
| Saying that it's problematic to take RMS seriously
| because of the things you mentioned is in my opinion one
| of the problems that led us to the hellish things we're
| exposed to today.
|
| It's the well dressed, well socially adjusted people with
| their silver tongues that convinced the masses that
| giving up privacy is in their interest. People like that
| are the people responsible for the shitshow we're now
| observing.
|
| RMS is strongly opinionated, and without that kind of
| strong conviction, we would be far worse off. I do agree
| he's taking an extreme position, but when you're standing
| against giants with money and power, being extreme is
| sometimes the only way to stand a chance.
| jjav wrote:
| > RMS is a hypocrite though
|
| For whatever failing RMS has, hypocrite is obviously not
| one. There are few people on the world who are so
| consistent in their message and actions as RMS.
| mehrdada wrote:
| "Hypocrisy is the practice of engaging in the same
| behavior or activity for which one criticizes another or
| the practice of claiming to have moral standards or
| beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform."
|
| RMS is as close to the opposite of hypocrite as it gets.
| He definitely practices what he preaches to the degree
| that he used a slow Loongson when he couldn't get an
| Intel machine with free BIOS, for example.
|
| He might not act diplomatic, be way outside social norms,
| or not people-please, but that does not make him a
| hypocrite.
| danudey wrote:
| He refuses to own a cell phone, because they're all
| closed-down, closed-source systems and that goes against
| his principles, but he's totally fine with _using_ one
| when he needs to make a phone call. This comes across as
| startlingly performative.
|
| I thought I remembered other instances, but none of them
| come to mind and obviously googling has turned up a ton
| of opinion pieces without a lot of actual substantative
| points made, so I'll leave it at that; not enough to
| argue that he is, by his nature, a hypocrite, but also
| not 100% pure to his principles in every circumstance.
| Y_Y wrote:
| He played Age of Empires II at a friend's house once. Is
| that enough?
|
| I think he makes a pretty big tradeoff that nobody else
| would, without completely shooting himself in the foot.
| Even if he had a fully FOSS phone, the people he called
| probably wouldn't. He's drawn the line far enough out
| that I don't doubt his sincerity.
| mehrdada wrote:
| My point is you have to understand his principles first
| before calling him a hypocrite: in your cell phone
| example, the phone call he is making with someone else's
| phone is not depriving him of his freedom/privacy, but
| its owner's. He would likely advise and nudge the owner
| not to carry a cellphone for the owner's own benefit, in
| his capacity as an advocate, but if they have made the
| choice to carry one anyway, his use of someone else's
| cellphone for making a call is no different to him than
| utilizing a landline phone in his capacity as a user.
|
| In fact, he has stated his principles/policies publicly
| and clearly, and someone posted it here as well. He never
| says " _You_ are not supposed to use someone else 's
| cellphone, but it's okay when _I_ use it. " That would
| make him a hypocrite.
|
| Thus your example is a strawman here, with the implicit
| assumption that he has said "you ought not to use any
| cellphone" which he never said.
|
| I think most misunderstandings of RMS come from the fact
| that people project on him what they think he would say
| and how he would act, not what he actually says and how
| he actually acts; while assuming he is merely some sort
| of activist engaging in civil disobedience and boycott,
| just trying to make a point and show the world a pure
| example of how to live. The way he should actually be
| thought of is he is fighting a war against people
| building proprietary software that, based on his theory,
| inevitably will lead to unjust power over users' lives
| through control over their devices. He is very pragmatic
| in that sense and willing to take any strategic advantage
| he can get in that fight, not deprive himself of that
| just to make a point. My understanding is at the
| beginning he used proprietary UNIX compilers to build
| GCC, for example.
| Osiris wrote:
| Everything has software. If he follows his ideology that
| everything he uses be open source then he can't do
| anything except live off completely off grid without
| anything that has a semi conductor in it.
|
| No electric meter at his house, no internet (even if his
| router is running open source, the ISP he's connected to
| certainly isn't), no transportation of any kind, no
| entertainment of any kind, no shopping of any kind
| (inventory management, cash registers, logistics). The
| equipment used to manufacture all the pieces of his
| precious decade old laptop was running proprietary
| software (not to mention all the small firmwares like
| wifi and Ethernet controllers).
|
| You cannot escape it.
|
| So, we should be pragmatic about it. We should push for
| it, but realize that it's impossible to live in society
| without interacting with closed source software.
| commoner wrote:
| Richard Stallman's positions are actually more pragmatic
| than that. Here is how he describes them:
|
| > I firmly refuse to install non-free software or
| tolerate its installed presence on my computer or on
| computers set up for me.
|
| > However, if I am visiting somewhere and the machines
| available nearby happen to contain non-free software,
| through no doing of mine, I don't refuse to touch them. I
| will use them briefly for tasks such as browsing. This
| limited usage doesn't give my assent to the software's
| license, or make me responsible its being present in the
| computer, or make me the possessor of a copy of it, so I
| don't see an ethical obligation to refrain from this. Of
| course, I explain to the local people why they should
| migrate the machines to free software, but I don't push
| them hard, because annoying them is not the way to
| convince them.
|
| > Likewise, I don't need to worry about what software is
| in a kiosk, pay phone, or ATM that I am using. I hope
| their owners migrate them to free software, for their
| sake, but there's no need for me to refuse to touch them
| until then. (I do consider what those machines and their
| owners might do with my personal data, but that's a
| different issue, which would arise just the same even if
| they did use free software. My response to that issue is
| to minimize those activities which give them any data
| about me.)
|
| > That's my policy about using a machine once in a while.
| If I were to use it for an hour every day, that would no
| longer be "once in a while" -- it would be regular use.
| At that point, I would start to feel the heavy hand of
| any nonfree software in that computer, and feel the duty
| to arrange to use a liberated computer instead.
|
| > As for microwave ovens and other appliances, if
| updating software is not a normal part of use of the
| device, then it is not a computer. In that case, I think
| the user need not take cognizance of whether the device
| contains a processor and software, or is built some other
| way. However, if it has an "update firmware" button, that
| means installing different software is a normal part of
| use, so it is a computer.
|
| https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
| dylan604 wrote:
| >no transportation of any kind
|
| How do you figure this. Cars did not always have
| computers in them, and you can still find older cars
| available.
|
| >The equipment used to manufacture all the pieces of
|
| Who actually cares about this? The consumer should only
| care about the thing produced.
| Osiris wrote:
| He never talks about running open source CPU microcode.
| That's the ultimate attack vector.
| mehrdada wrote:
| With all due respect, I don't believe you are familiar
| with RMS positions. I'd argue most people who have not
| followed him closely and haven't carefully listened to
| what his PoV is, have a very hand-wavy understanding of
| the nuances of what he stands for. The fact that you talk
| about _open source_ is the tell. The term "open source"
| was deliberately invented to de-emphasize what RMS cares
| about in favor of a business-friendly justification for
| why it benefits businesses to share source code with
| others. Open Source philosophy is not about emphasizing
| the user rights and ownership over their computers.
|
| And yes, he is concerned about microcode--he still uses a
| Core 2 Duo laptop that can work without the microcode
| blobs in firmware, as opposed to more modern processors,
| for that exact reason.
| jtbayly wrote:
| He borrows people's mobile phones and uses them.
|
| Like the Amish.
|
| Both condemn certain tech, but then use it. Both are not
| being honest, but hypocrites.
| mehrdada wrote:
| To portray RMS as "against tech" is a very misleading
| characterization of him (he is an OS developer after
| all). To judge someone as a hypocrite, you have to first
| understand (1) what they say, (2) how they act, and then
| (3) compare the two. I don't think he ever said "don't
| use tech". You are vastly mischaracterizing what his
| position is.
| jtbayly wrote:
| Both condemn _certain_ tech.
|
| You are vastly mischaracterizing the few sentences I
| wrote.
|
| In the case of RMS it is non-free software tech. In the
| case of the Amish it is many kinds of tech and depends
| (as the child comment mentions) on the community. One
| community I lived among they weren't allowed to own
| phones, but they would borrow them all the time.
|
| To call everybody to stop using non-free software phones
| while depending on thise same people to own them and let
| you borrow them in order to live is hypocritical. Sorry
| if that bothers you.
| ska wrote:
| > To portray RMS as "against tech" is a very misleading
| characterization of him
|
| It's also a poor characterization of the anabaptists, for
| that matter - they are not in general against technology
| but against the impacts of particular technology (nothing
| to do with RMS's concerns, theirs are about community).
|
| For example, some anabaptist communities disallow cars,
| some allow them in limited ways, some allow them
| completely - but this is decided based not on a doctrine
| but on their communities evaluation on the impact of
| peoples housing spreading apart...
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I really don't see Amish as hypocritical when they hire a
| car or take the train. They are using the absolute
| minimum of tech that lets them get on with their life, I
| suppose Stallman is doing the same when he borrows a
| phone, otherwise avoiding them to the best of his
| ability.
| mdoms wrote:
| Maybe he'd get more traction if he'd stop publicly eating
| the gunk on the bottom of his foot.
| iso1210 wrote:
| He probably would. He's his own worst enemy.
|
| Doesn't make him wrong.
| pgt wrote:
| Every year RMS sounds less crazy.
| jandorn wrote:
| Unfortunately that is accurate for every property software,
| not only that but you can easily make a case that all
| software that you personally don't maintain including open
| source has same problem.
| 8note wrote:
| Apples selling point is that they decide what should be
| running on your phone. From the various app store
| monopolization threads, people like that apple controls your
| iphone, and wouldn't buy one if the owner controlled it.
| petra wrote:
| The iPhone is a status symbol. That's why most people buy
| it.
| kuratkull wrote:
| Exactly, it's easy with phones - you can have the same
| phone your favorite celebrity has! Not so with almost
| anything else. People have just the weirdest reasons.
| It's also funny to me because I will never ask anything
| about a persons phone, laptop or other tech gadget if I
| recognize it from a distance (for example Apple
| products), but I will ask and converse about
| brands/devices that I have not seen much of. Not sure why
| people think Apple products give them any credit
| whatsoever.
| feanaro wrote:
| On the other hand, I'm not buying an iPhone due to control
| issues. If I _were_ able to fully control it, I 'd probably
| buy one.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| Why would you choose apple over anyone else at that
| point?
| idle_zealot wrote:
| > people like that apple controls your iphone, and wouldn't
| buy one if the owner controlled it.
|
| My guess is that this applies to about as many people as
| the opposite "wants to control their device" stance. Which
| is to say approximately nobody. Most users probably don't
| think about these things much if at all. They want a
| smartphone that runs the expected smartphone apps and has
| the expected smartphone features, and do not care whether
| or not some nerd can install and run some apps they've
| never heard of on his own device.
|
| I imagine, though, that most people would have an opinion
| one way or the other about phones snitching on their
| owners.
| vb6sp6 wrote:
| Steve Jobs received a standing ovation when he showed how the
| new iOS would finally let you change your wallpaper. This
| broke the RDF for me.
| dpkonofa wrote:
| Why is that wrong? I also applauded (internally) when
| notifications were added because it was a feature that I
| wanted and I didn't care that Android had it before because
| I wasn't using an Android phone. I bought all of the
| Google-branded Android phones when they came out and I
| still preferred iOS and the iPhone so having that feature
| was worthy of applause for me. I don't see how the
| wallpaper thing is any different. As much as I would like
| to have had the ability to change wallpaper before then,
| that wasn't as important as all the other things I cared
| about more.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I've never been to one of Apple's events, but as a viewer
| of their videos some of those applause breaks have me
| convinced there are giant "Applause Now" signs. I imagine
| them being on more than they are off by how over the top
| their dialog is written. Or they fill the air in the room
| with some sort of gas that makes the attendees very
| susceptible to the RDF.
|
| Those are much more fun explanations than just realizing
| they probably have plants to start the cheering in a room
| full of fanboys
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| There's not much you can do about it if you want a decent
| smartphone. On Android Google also can do on-device scanning
| since forever.
| kuratkull wrote:
| The problem is _not_ on-device scanning, it's on-device
| scanning and then sending incriminating results to the
| device maker.
| nicce wrote:
| Well... the final result is better than before, because
| scanning applies only into targets which will end into
| the cloud. Content was plaintext in the cloud before, now
| they are encrypted and Apple can decrypt them only if
| CSAM treshold is reached. If we leave all speculation,
| this is a great improvement for privacy.
|
| You can opt-out from scanning by not using iCloud.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| Buying an iPhone (and increasingly Mac) is like going to
| Disneyland: You pay a lot of money to be allowed in so you
| can pay them even more money. The experience is highly
| curated and controlled. At the end of the day, you are just a
| guest there and what you are or aren't allowed to do is
| determined by the company.
|
| EDIT: And they have CCTV and undercover security officers
| everywhere. More than you can possibly imagine.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| A Mac is very different from an iPhone. I am writing this
| in Firefox, I have development tools and commandline
| scripts installed.
| tgvaughan wrote:
| Are you sure? I have a Mac too, and earlier this year all
| of my non Apple-approved software stopped working because
| some random Apple server went down.
| judge2020 wrote:
| And Disney is one of the most well-known global brands - at
| least when people think about entertainment and
| vacationing.
| reificator wrote:
| > _Buying an iPhone (and increasingly Mac) is like going to
| Disneyland: You pay a lot of money to be allowed in so you
| can pay them even more money._
|
| Bought the latest SE over a year ago at considerably less
| than my last comparable Android device. Have spent under
| $100 in the App Store since.
|
| Phone does everything that I want it to do including some
| fairly complex multi-app automations 15 minutes before I
| leave, when I get an SMS, etc...
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| That's just like going to Disneyland, but packing your
| own luch and not going on any of the rides. :)
| enos_feedler wrote:
| Yes, and the price these companies can charge is determined
| by the market. If what they are doing no longer serves a
| large market, their business will shrink. And if there
| actions expose a new opportunity for someone else, that
| company will form and business will grow.
| lancesells wrote:
| I really don't Apple Hardware is a lot of money. I buy the
| cheapest MacBook Airs with a ram upgrade and they last me
| around ~6 years. Same with the phone I buy (iPhone SE).
| Outside of the battery needing replaced they last me a
| long, long time.
|
| Everything else with I agree. The eco-system of all these
| companies is never-ending (cars, food, cities, etc.). It's
| like those sci-fi movies where one corporation owns
| everything. The only difference is it's 5 or 6 companies
| because they haven't yet started to merge.
| alerighi wrote:
| You can buy an Android phone with better specs (except
| the camera, where the iPhone objectively the best) for
| 200$, while an iPhone is minimum 500$ (and for an SE 2
| that is an old iPhone 8 with a newer SOC).
|
| For a computer you can buy for the same money that you
| spend for a MacBook Air a computer with better specs and
| hardware that you can upgrade. Apple tends not to upgrade
| the oldest computers, leaving you with an insecure OS
| where you can't run the latest software. I have my battle
| Thinkpad that with Linux runs better than most Macbook
| and we are talking about a PC that has more than 10 years
| and I bought used on Ebay for 100$.
|
| Really Apple is not that great. I once used to buy their
| product thinking they were superior, and maybe once they
| were, nowadays they are just the other crap made in China
| but sold at (at least) twice the price because they have
| the Apple logo on it.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| > Problem is that the devices are really really good
|
| their devices are really good, but they come with so much
| crippling for the sake of the walled garden that their
| goodness is wasted in some fronts.
|
| There's a large list of things they are (or can be with
| minimal effort) perfectly capable for, but are forbidden for
| reasons, like reverse wireless charge of other iphones /
| airpods.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| It's hard to argue they did this for a vision of privacy.
|
| They did this because they want YOUR phone to be a liability
| not THEIR servers.
| aNoob7000 wrote:
| To make it even worse they extended the functionality to Mac
| OSX. WTF???
| freeopinion wrote:
| How is this worse? Any Apple device you thought you owned
| and controlled was never under your control. You were
| wrong.
|
| Perhaps your understanding of the situation has changed so
| that you better understand how bad it is. But the situation
| isn't worse.
| cassianoleal wrote:
| Do you have references for this? I must have missed this
| part.
| Xylakant wrote:
| https://www.apple.com/child-safety/, at the bottom lists
| macOS as target platform.
| cassianoleal wrote:
| It's unclear exactly what this means to be honest. Which
| is not less scary but more.
|
| This sentence:
|
| > Next, iOS and iPadOS will use new applications of
| cryptography to help limit the spread of CSAM online
|
| seems to suggest that the hash-matching happens only on
| iOS and iPadOS.
|
| The rest of the text OTOH suggests many things happen
| across all types of devices and OSs.
|
| Regardless, this seems very bad.
| YokoSix wrote:
| My guess is that they're going to put it into the macOS
| Photos app. Those images are already scanned for people,
| animals and objects so it should be easy for them to
| implement the child protection database there.
| aethertron wrote:
| Won't implementing this on macOS make it too easy to
| reverse engineer? Think the hashes are supposed to be
| secret.
|
| ETA: Apple quote: "unreadable set of hashes that is
| securely stored on users' devices". Unreadable,
| unleakable, no doubt uninterpretable... unless someone
| reverses them to get a blurry 'visual proxy' collection.
| syops wrote:
| That's an interesting point. Do you know I'd this is the
| case? That is, by putting this in the phone then Apple's
| liability is lessened.
| 015a wrote:
| Not to mention, this neural hashing can't be a cheap
| operation. Better to use the processors paid for by your
| customers than ones you have to pay for in the cloud!
| brandon272 wrote:
| I honestly wonder if the privacy/intrusion backlash wasn't
| even considered because they were focused on this from the
| perspective of "isn't this great that these phones now have
| enough power to do this computation on-device", the same
| way they were proud to be able to announce that Siri
| processing would begin to happen on-device.
| YokoSix wrote:
| I thought about that as well. They rushed to publish some
| unpolished PR pieces and FAQs right after the
| announcement and at very unusual times (3am in Cupertino)
| trying to damage control so my guess would be as well
| that they didn't even consider the backlash. Maybe they
| were really proud about the technology they implemented.
| It's a little bit sad if you think about it.
| eropple wrote:
| I would like to see tests wrt this before I assume it--
| Apple puts a pretty hefty premium on battery life for
| customer devices, and while that would probably not win out
| when placed against this kind of liability minimization,
| they've got a lot of sharp folks there who crunch this
| stuff in their sleep.
| pdimitar wrote:
| I have been noticing increased background activity on my
| phone after it reached 100% during charging, for years
| now.
|
| Pretty sure they can infer your normal sleep schedule
| and, after your phone has fully charged (1h to 3h after
| you fall asleep) they can freely use it as a P2P
| computing device.
|
| Nothing new really. And they can still keep their promise
| of a good battery life -- which is quite justified by the
| way, I am using iPhones for 4 years now and they've
| consistently won over any of the 13 Android devices that
| I've used in the years before (and sometimes during).
|
| There are ways to achieve both -- good observable battery
| life plus ability to use your phone for P2P computation
| -- and it's IMO obvious that Apple has succeeded in that
| for several years now.
| Xylakant wrote:
| Pretty sure they can infer your normal sleep schedule
| and, after your phone has fully charged (1h to 3h after
| you fall asleep) they can freely use it as a P2P
| computing device.
|
| They already do, the feature is called "Optimized Batter
| Charging". It charges the battery to 80% and only does
| the full charge a bit before you usually start using the
| phone. You'll find the setting in the battery health
| section.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Optimized Battery Charging isn't the same as being a node
| in a bot net.
| datavirtue wrote:
| I have owned nearly every premium phone on the market and
| none of them come close to the Sony Xperia for battery
| life. I try new iPhones every other model or so...battery
| life has never been outstanding.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Do you disable Background App Refresh? First thing that I
| do on every iDevice. That feature being on is _hugely
| overrated_ , you absolutely don't need it because you
| enter an app and manually refresh it; what's the big deal
| with that, are people _that_ lazy?... Gods!
|
| (The only useful application of that feature is email
| apps, I suppose; you do want to have your messages
| downloaded when you unlock your phone because Apple Mail
| takes ages to sync with Gmail... and it only gets worse
| with time.)
|
| With that option set to "on" the idle battery life might
| quickly take a nose dive if you have stuff like Facebook
| / TikTok / Snapchat et. al. installed.
| jsight wrote:
| > which is quite justified by the way, I am using iPhones
| for 4 years now and they've consistently won over any of
| the 13 Android devices that I've used in the years before
| (and sometimes during).
|
| I find this a bit shocking. Were all of these Android low
| battery devices?
|
| I don't have a good point of comparison, as I've only
| used Android on phones, but there are a lot of Android
| devices with really large batteries and very long battery
| life. It'd be pretty amazing if iOS were beating them in
| the real world.
| pdimitar wrote:
| There's no magic in iPhone's batteries, they are
| basically identical to all others.
|
| The secret sauce ingredient is the idle battery life. The
| Android devices I used -- all 13 of them, without
| exception -- routinely lost anywhere from 15% to 40%
| battery when I was out and about without me picking them
| up even once. We're talking anywhere from 2 to 5 hours
| with them being in my pocket or a backpack, in the middle
| of a big city, with excellent 4G coverage, so it should
| not be a constant radio antenna activity (although if
| their antennas were of lower quality that might just be
| it).
|
| I installed all sorts of root apps to try and pinpoint
| the culprit and inevitably hit a brick wall when all the
| apps can do is point at a system service without any way
| to drill down further.
|
| In contrast, the iPhones that I've used -- 6S Plus, 8
| Plus and 12 Pro Max -- are all extremely frugal on using
| battery when the device is idle. I've grown used to
| picking the phone from my bed at 100% battery in the
| morning on days where I had to do a lot of stuff outside,
| be out and about for 4-5 hours and only pick up the phone
| once or twice, and then get back home and find the phone
| at 98% battery.
| 015a wrote:
| As someone with an iPhone 12 Pro and a Galaxy S21 Ultra,
| swapping my SIM between each every ~two months; this
| situation has absolutely changed sometime in the past
| couple years.
|
| Android's idle power draw, at least on the S21 Ultra, is
| fantastic. I'll sometimes leave this phone on, with no
| SIM in it but connected to WiFi, sitting on my desk,
| using it every once in a while for Tik Tok or whatever,
| and it'll last a week or more. The iPhone is pretty
| similar.
|
| But display-on time, apples to apples; the iPhone has
| fallen behind. With the 12 Pro, most days I'll end at
| 5-10%. At least once every couple weeks, the day will end
| with the iPhone having already shut down. In comparison,
| on the S21 Ultra: I give it ~20-40 minutes of charge
| every day while I'm working, just unplug my USB-C laptop
| and plug it into the phone, and that's it. I don't charge
| it at night. Its battery life is ungodly; by the time I
| go to bed, its at 50-60%. Wake up, plug it in while I'm
| showering and making coffee, good to go.
| pdimitar wrote:
| I think you are aware that 4G radio can draw a lot of
| energy so that might be an unfair comparison with the
| iPhone.
|
| A more objective test would be for both to have SIM, or
| both to not have a SIM. Then again, iPhones have
| objectively weaker batteries compared to a lot of
| Androids (as in, less mAh).
|
| I am not claiming that there are no better Android
| devices nowadays btw; not at all. I'd be happy if the
| OEMs finally caught up with this nasty problem! I am only
| saying that back in 2017 -- when I finally lost patience
| with Android -- things were looking pretty bad for it and
| for me that was the tipping point that made go for
| iPhones.
| jsight wrote:
| > I am only saying that back in 2017 -- when I finally
| lost patience with Android -- things were looking pretty
| bad for it and for me that was the tipping point that
| made go for iPhones.
|
| I'll respond to your earlier post too, but this is
| actually the answer that I was looking for. The Android
| world was a very different place back in 2017. The best
| battery life that I got out of an Android back then was
| an LG G2. I think that it was competitive with the
| iPhone, but many other Android devices of the era were
| not.
| 015a wrote:
| Both the iPhone 12 Pro and S21 Ultra have 5G radios
| (though their usage here is probably 80% on wifi, 20% on
| non-UWB 5G most days).
|
| My point is comparing their battery lives when they have
| the SIM in them. So, not which one lasted the longest
| yesterday, one with the SIM and one without, but rather
| comparing across time, how did the S21 (my current phone)
| fair today, versus how did the iPhone generally fair a
| few weeks ago when the SIM was in it. Not exactly
| scientific; just what I've observed and felt.
|
| And the unscientific conclusion I've drawn is that the
| idle time is pretty similar between the iPhone 12 Pro and
| S21 Ultra, but the "active" radios-on SIM-in screen-
| being-used-all-day time definitely favors the S21 Ultra.
|
| > I am only saying that back in 2017 -- when I finally
| lost patience with Android -- things were looking pretty
| bad for it and for me that was the tipping point that
| made go for iPhones.
|
| You're 100% right; Android's track record has been pretty
| darn bad when it comes to standby time. But, I think its
| actually gotten a lot better. There are some reports that
| Samsung's Android flavors, specifically, are very
| aggressive when it comes to background app killing; that
| may be it (and, frankly, I don't notice any negative
| side-effects from it. if its happening, its transparent).
| Or maybe it was something more general in a later version
| of Android. Or maybe just huge batteries. But; something
| has changed.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Thank you, those are very valuable anecdotes to keep in
| mind for the future!
| tomc1985 wrote:
| > I've grown used to picking the phone from my bed at
| 100% battery in the morning on days where I had to do a
| lot of stuff outside, be out and about for 4-5 hours and
| only pick up the phone once or twice, and then get back
| home and find the phone at 98% battery.
|
| Is this true when the device is a year or two old? I've
| always found iPhone battery life impressive... but only
| until its about a year old or so. My iPhone 11 plus now
| requires nightly charging, or I will inevitably hit a Low
| Battery situation
| pdimitar wrote:
| I held on to my 8 Plus for little over two years and it
| remained excellent most of the time -- although I had to
| replace the battery before reselling it because it was at
| 83% capacity.
|
| I also always charge my phone overnight even if it's at
| 70% (which it routinely is) because I've been bitten by
| going out and about with 60% charge and having to spend
| 12h outside and my phone died. So I just started
| conservatively charging it each night no matter what I
| expected for the next day.
|
| But yes, for most people an iPhone can easily last two
| full days and still be at 15-20% when you finally plug it
| in on the second day's end.
| dont__panic wrote:
| iPhone batteries are only rated for 500 cycles of 100% ->
| 0%. Or, to look at it differently: You can charge 1
| percent of your battery 50,000 times on your iphone
| before Apple no longer guarantees under warrantee that
| your battery will hold 80% of its original capacity.
|
| Caveat: every percent is not equivalent. Charging above
| 90% is harder on your battery than charging from 40-50%.
| Charging and even just using your battery while it is
| very hot (90 degrees or above) or very cold (below
| freezing) is also very hard on it. Apple defines
| operating temperatures as:
|
| > Use iOS devices where the ambient temperature is
| between 0o and 35o C (32o to 95o F)
|
| and claims that using the phone outside those temperature
| ranges can _permanently shorten_ battery life. Bit silly
| when you live someplace like I do where 60% or more of
| days are outside of that operating range, but I guess
| Apple is really just designing for Cupertino
| temperatures.
|
| Basically after just 365 days of phone ownership, you're
| probably already over 50% of your way through your
| battery and capacity might be reduced by over 10%, up to
| 19% is still OK under warrantee. I've had a 2016 iPhone
| SE for over 5 years now, and I've replaced the battery
| twice in that time. Seems to be essentially required once
| every two years.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Yes, I agree with that. The two iPhones I had before the
| 12 Pro Max -- 6s Plus and 8 Plus -- seem to have needed a
| battery replacement at about the 20th month mark because
| the capacity was at ~85% at that point. And you being to
| notice. So yes, doing a battery replacement anywhere
| inbetween the 1.5 and 2.0 years mark for iPhones is quite
| expected IMO.
| iso1210 wrote:
| I've used my (original) SE for over 5 years, running it
| down to the 20% region (often way lower) and back up
| overnight at least 2000 times. Battery still seems
| reasonable - health on 79%.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Before I had an 11 I had an SE, and by year 2 or 3 the
| battery was so weak that I had to carry around an
| external charging pack for it. This got really awkward
| (and a little scary) for traveling and was part of the
| reason I upgraded to a newer model.
|
| Right before I sold that SE to my friend I checked the
| battery health, and it was in the high 80s. Yet I could
| not get a full day's use on a single charge. This led me
| to conclude that that Battery Health measurement was
| bullshit.
| iso1210 wrote:
| I haven't looked at it before.
|
| Apparently if I enable analytics I will get a report
| saying how many cycles my batter has lasted. Unless I use
| my phone for several hours of playing spotify and youtube
| I don't notice the battery dying during the day.
| pier25 wrote:
| > _The Android devices I used -- all 13 of them, without
| exception -- routinely lost anywhere from 15% to 40%
| battery when I was out and about without me picking them
| up even once._
|
| That hasn't been my experience.
|
| My current (very crappy) Mi A1 still lasts 3-4 days with
| moderate use.
| pdimitar wrote:
| I agree Xiaomi's devices are better. I used one for a few
| months before I switched to Apple and liked them best of
| all Androids before.
| jsight wrote:
| > The secret sauce ingredient is the idle battery life.
| The Android devices I used -- all 13 of them, without
| exception -- routinely lost anywhere from 15% to 40%
| battery when I was out and about without me picking them
| up even once.
|
| I think Android and newer chips have mostly fixed this.
| The Pixel 5 on my desk right now has gone from 100% to
| 81% in the last 7.5 hours with 1.25 hours of screen on
| time during that period. Last week, I had a session of 18
| hours with screen on of 4.5 hours that went from 100% to
| 34%. IMO, idle draw is likely still a little higher, but
| then again I run a lot of little background apps (eg,
| tasker, the pebble app, wear os connectivity and others).
|
| Most of my previous Android devices wouldn't have fared
| nearly so well, even back when I cared enough to spend
| time trying to find wakelock culprits. Thankfully, I
| haven't needed to do that in years either. :)
| pdimitar wrote:
| It's really good to hear that wakelock hunting is no
| longer an expected practice. ^_^
|
| I'm super interested in getting a Xiaomi (and modifying
| it enough so I can be reasonably sure that it doesn't
| stream all noise around it 24/7) at some point so hearing
| about how Android got better in this regard is exciting.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Yeah this. I'll leave my iPad on my bed for 10+ hours and
| when I come back it's lost maybe a percent or two of
| battery life. With my Android tablet I had it had to be
| on the charger constantly. My phones battery lasts about
| a day with all my apps on it, where my old android I had
| to charge mid day.
| handrous wrote:
| The ha-ha-only-serious joke when I was at a place
| developing for iOS and Android, so had tons of test
| tablets for both, was that the Android tablets would be
| completely dead after a long weekend (or sometimes just a
| normal weekend...) in a drawer, and the iPads would still
| have enough charge to do something useful, and still wake
| up effectively instantly, if you forgot about them for a
| month.
|
| As for the phones, I find I get 2-day charge out of a new
| iOS device. After 2-3 years it's about as bad as a new
| Android. 10% low-battery warning, and put in low-power
| mode right at bed time? It'll still have enough juice for
| the morning alarm and some morning HN reading. I mean, I
| try not to rely on that, but it _does_ work. Difference
| has got to mostly be the software & firmware.
| cmurf wrote:
| I've got an older Moto X4 and it consumes 2% per hour
| when in my backpack. I guess the only remarkable thing
| about the configuration is no social media apps.
| soperj wrote:
| Same answer for me. No social media apps.
| soperj wrote:
| I'm sorry, this is ridiculous. I don't even lose 15% of
| my battery life in 2 hours on my galaxy S3 without using
| it, and it is nearly a decade old at this point.
| pdimitar wrote:
| There are likely other factors that I can't account for
| because I was only using those phones in a single city --
| with rare exceptions going to a rural area for 1-2 days.
|
| Still, your anecdotal evidence does not nullify mine.
| soperj wrote:
| No, but from your multiple posts on this article, I don't
| know that I can take your android posts in good faith.
| pdimitar wrote:
| You might be biased? I have no axe to grind with any
| company. I am looking for what serves me best.
|
| We don't have a perfect option, sadly. I evaluated
| Android quite fairly, for about 5 years, and found it
| lacking. I find the iPhone lacking as well, but in
| departments that I care less about.
|
| Do with my posts what you will, I'll only say once that I
| have no bias either way. IMO both sides of the duopoly
| suck... but I do need a smartphone. I picked what served
| me better at the time.
| jsight wrote:
| I don't think its fair to say your are speaking in bad
| faith either. I had similar experiences with some older
| devices (Nexus One, Galaxy S2, etc). There was a long
| period of time when Android devices were really bad on
| battery, even with relatively large (for the time)
| batteries on board.
| soperj wrote:
| I'm currently using an S3, have for nearly a decade. It
| has never dropped 15% with no use in 2 hours.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Does the expression "anecdotal evidence" ring a bell to
| you?
|
| I am glad that you got lucky. I had both a Galaxy S4 and
| Note 4 and both were completely awful on idle battery
| life; both barely lasted a day in the office with 30
| minute commutes in both directions, and no more than 2h
| of active screen time, if even that. And I had like
| Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr installed at the time. And
| Gmail. That was literally all I had installed on top of
| the stock ROM.
|
| I don't get why are you coming here insisting that your
| experience somehow nullifies mine. _That_ is what I 'd
| call not arguing in good faith. I didn't do anything more
| except share my bad experience with Android (which is now
| severely outdated because it ended in 2017) and never
| claimed anything more than that.
|
| What's your goal here?
| soperj wrote:
| I'm not even talking with you any more.
|
| > Does the expression "anecdotal evidence" ring a bell to
| you?
|
| Read the guidelines.
|
| > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation;
| don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't
| sneer, including at the rest of the community.
| crooked-v wrote:
| > they can freely use it as a P2P computing device
|
| Do you have any evidence of this, or are you just making
| up something that sounds good to you?
|
| More likely it's doing the background on-device work that
| Apple has actively advertised for a long time, like
| analyzing photos to attach metadata to them. (There's a
| lot more to this than is obvious at first glance - I can
| text "penguin" or "sunset" in my Photos.app library and
| get a set of matching pictures back, for example.)
| pdimitar wrote:
| You reckon I would know of a way to gather an exact
| evidence unless I work for Apple? (In which case I'll
| likely be convicted and thrown in jail as well.)
|
| Obviously I can't know for a fact. I also thought they
| likely analyze photos and that's my chief suspect even
| now. But critical thinking demands to keep an open mind
| -- and that's how I suspect they might use fully-charged
| iDevices (that are expected to sit on the charger for
| several more hours) for unsolicited and non-advertised
| P2P computations.
|
| I don't _claim_ it, I merely _suspect it_.
| crooked-v wrote:
| > You reckon I would know of a way to gather an exact
| evidence unless I work for Apple?
|
| Monitor your network traffic.
|
| Lots of people do this already for various reasons and
| haven't noticed anything like this going on.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Yeah, sure, I can brute force encrypted traffic by
| eyeballing it in my router's dashboard UI. Come on, dude.
|
| You seem to have an axe to grind here and I refuse to
| participate. I even objectively admitted that I can't
| know and that I only suspect yet you (a) offer a non-
| solution and (b) likely downvote a comment because you
| don't like it.
|
| Sheesh. Fine. You do you.
| ursugardaddy wrote:
| Apple's just really weird when it comes to the control they
| exert over devices.
|
| they do it with 'privacy' in mind and what they come up with
| is usually better than the worst case but it can still be
| pretty iffy
|
| eg. a few months back when their notarization/entitlement
| verification system was being discussed
|
| it's all just their vision of computing (which has some
| merits), hyper-controlled, locked down and "safe" it's not
| going to change if you're not comfortable with it you really
| shouldn't be using their products
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Hate Apple's philosophy personally but I recommend my mom a
| Mac every single time.
|
| Not everyone needs freedom, she's not downloading fitgirl
| repacks.
| edgyquant wrote:
| This is a weird mindset. Either you care about privacy or
| you don't: what a person does on their device shouldn't
| matter. If you only care about privacy when doing illegal
| things you don't actually care about privacy you're just
| a criminal not wanting to be caught.
| [deleted]
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| I've heard it argued that this allows Apple to move iCloud
| toward end-to-end encryption (which would be a good thing for
| privacy, right?). It seems like the current US government
| position is "we'll let tech giants use end-to-end encryption
| for user data as long as they put measures in place to catch
| CSAM."
|
| _by "US government position" I'm including negotiations and
| proposed/threatened legislation, not just the current laws on
| the books._
| nicce wrote:
| Feels like nobody here has bothered to read the actual
| technical specifications.[1]
|
| This already adds new level of encryption into iCloud
| stored images. They have essentially created E2EE system
| with a specific access (or backdoor), while preventing the
| use of backdoor for other purposes than CSAM (so nobody can
| ask randomly to decrypt something else). They can only
| decrypt images, when user's account reaches the treshold of
| CSAM hash count:
|
| > Only when the threshold is exceeded does the
| cryptographic technology allow Apple to interpret the
| contents of the safety vouchers associated with the
| matching CSAM images.
|
| While this is not perfect end-to-end encryption solution,
| it is better than only server side encryption. Now there
| are two levels of encryption. If someone breaches Apple's
| servers and they have also access for server side private
| keys, they still need matching NeuralHash value to decrypt
| the images.
|
| [1]:https://www.apple.com/child-
| safety/pdf/Expanded_Protections_...
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| I think the argument here is that (1) the model is going
| to have false positives (e.g. revealing pictures of you
| and your spouse, your beach photos, etc.) that will
| permit access for non-CSAM (or at the very least, mark
| your account as suspicious in the eyes of authorities),
| and (2) the model itself can be updated/replaced for any
| reason and potentially at any government's demand, so the
| limits on scope are effectively moot
| nicce wrote:
| For argument (1), they are only looking matches from
| existing database of hashes what NCMEC is providing. They
| are not developing general AI to identify new pictures,
| they only try to stop redistribution of known files.
| Because of that, their claim for 1/1 trillion false
| postives might be actually close to be correct since it
| is easily validated on development phase.
|
| For argument (2), this might be valid, but yet again, all
| we can do is to trust Apple, as we do all the time by
| using their closed source system. Model can be changed,
| but it is still better option than store everything
| unencrypted? In case you mean forging hashes to decrypt
| content.
|
| For the sake of surveillance, it is not strong argument
| because again, system is closed and we know only what
| they say. Creating such model is trivial, and is not
| stopping government for demanding if Apple would want to
| allow that. System would be identical for antivirus
| engines which have existed since 1980s.
|
| This is such a PR failure for Apple, because all their
| incoming features are improving privacy on CSAM area,
| everything negative comes from speculation which was
| equally already possible.
| mindslight wrote:
| > _move iCloud toward end-to-end encryption (which would be
| a good thing for privacy, right?)._
|
| "End-to-end" encryption is nothing to strive for if you're
| destroying the _ends_. With this change, the "ends" become
| the users themselves. By embedding an agent acting on
| behalf of Apple/government, the device in front of end
| users is no longer a tool but rather an adversary. This is
| computational disenfranchisement.
| headmelted wrote:
| Hey if the ends justify the means.
|
| I'll show myself out.
| babesh wrote:
| If you really believe that, then I have a bridge to sell
| you. The exact same safety argument can and will be applied
| to ALL data whether on your device or Apple's servers.
|
| Why limit to iMessage and photos? Why not Signal on your
| device?
|
| Why not your backups on Apple servers? Oh wait, already
| happens.
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| I think Apple would rather put this CSAM-scanning system
| in place (which allows them to implement end-to-end
| encryption for iCloud in the future) than deal with the
| EARN-IT Act or similar becoming law, which could
| effectively make all e2e-encrypted services illegal
| (require a government backdoor).
|
| >The bill also crafts two addition changes to Section
| 230(c)(2)'s liability, allows any state to bring a
| lawsuit to service providers if they fail to deal with
| child sexual abuse material on their service, or if they
| allow end-to-end encryption on their service and do not
| provide means to enforcement officials to decrypt the
| material.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EARN_IT_Act_of_2020
| babesh wrote:
| If that were the case, wouldn't this CSAM scanning system
| be insufficient to meet those EARN-IT requirements?
|
| You have other Apple services and third-party apps that
| host material on Apple's servers.
|
| For example, if a user turns on iCloud backups, then
| every third-party app's Documents directory is backed up
| to iCloud. Would it be a violation to not CSAM scan that
| content? What if the contents are encrypted? Would they
| be required to be decrypted so that they are CSAM-
| scanned?
|
| iCloud drive is another Apple service that backs up to
| Apple's servers. Wouldn't its absence from the list be a
| violation? What if a user hosts encrypted files on iCloud
| drive? Would the user be required to decrypt them so that
| Apple can scan them?
|
| It seems that the real intention is to eliminate end-to-
| end encryption.
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| >wouldn't this CSAM scanning system be insufficient to
| meet those EARN-IT requirements?
|
| Yes. My point is that there's an ongoing dance between
| the tech companies and the government, and through their
| negotiations and government connections Apple probably
| views this CSAM-scanning move as making an EARN-IT-like
| law less likely to be passed. It's overall the less-
| invasive option. The US federal government is putting
| pressure on tech companies not to host CSAM, and if tech
| giants didn't agree to do stuff like this the government
| could respond by passing stricter laws to effectively
| make unbackdoored e2e encryption illegal.
|
| Apple has a lot of influence but at the end of the day
| they're a US-based company that has to follow US laws.
| Voluntarily implementing CSAM-scanning is in their own
| interest as a "pro-privacy" company if it prevents more
| draconian anti-encryption laws from being passed that
| could effectively outlaw e2e encryption.
|
| I don't view this as Apple singlehandedly trying to
| eliminate end-to-end encryption; that seems like a pretty
| radical view of the situation to me but of course you're
| free to hold that opinion.
| babesh wrote:
| I don't hold the view that Apple is trying to eliminate
| end to end encryption. I view this as a push by
| governments to do so and the increasing willingness of
| the tech industry to work with them.
|
| This is more like Apple giving way gradually and the
| government happy since in the long run they get
| everything they want.
|
| Examples: we don't unlock phones for the government...
| but we give them all the data if you back up your
| phone... but you have so much privacy!
|
| We don't read your messages, oh wait now we do, but only
| for child abuse, oh wait, we don't control what it looks
| for but let's not talk about that because it hurts our
| marketing
| feanaro wrote:
| It moves iCloud to end-to-end encryption by compromising
| the ends. Not really a reasonable outcome.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Hard to believe that a law limiting that would stand up in
| the supreme court, and Apple has previously indicated they
| would be willing to pay whatever legal costs are necessary
| to defend themselves from that sort of attack.
|
| It is weird that Apple would do this in the first place
| though, it certainly doesn't make me want to use their
| products.
| fay59 wrote:
| > One of the most powerful arguments in Apple's favor in the 2016
| San Bernardino case is that the company didn't even have the
| means to break into the iPhone in question, and that to build the
| capability would open the company up to a multitude of requests
| that were far less pressing in nature, and weaken the company's
| ability to stand up to foreign governments.
|
| I think that a crucial missing piece is the FBI's argument: Apple
| is fully capable of developing and signing a "law enforcement
| iBoot". IIRC, the FBI was even willing to have someone else
| develop the software and only ask Apple to sign it-which they
| definitely have the capability to do, and only policy of not
| signing other people's software stood in the way.
|
| If we agree that Apple was right in 2016, it stands to reason
| that Apple cannot be compelled to modify its CSAM filter to
| capture arbitrary contents, or report it at lower thresholds, or
| expand it beyond iCloud Photos (like to Messages itself). The
| amount of work they would have to do for it seems like it would
| be even higher. There are whole infrastructure pieces that just
| don't exist. What am I missing?
| 0x00000000 wrote:
| > If we agree that Apple was right in 2016, it stands to reason
| that Apple cannot be compelled to modify its CSAM filter to
| capture arbitrary contents
|
| The government or whoever will regularly add hashes to the
| list. Those hashes can be for anything and it's not like Apple
| has any way to verify what they are for. Apple doesn't really
| have oversight on what they're doing if I understand correctly,
| all the trust is in whoever creates the list of hashes
| fay59 wrote:
| The government will have to overcome the same issues
| compelling NCMEC to add pictures to its data set that it
| would have to overcome with Apple.
|
| Additionally, by compelling the NCMEC, the government cannot
| increase the scope of searching or lower the match threshold.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| It's a private nonprofit that appears to be wholly funded
| by the government. It's reasonable to expect that if they
| don't "play nice" with the DOJ, their funding could be
| affected. Incentives are important.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_for_Missing
| _...
| fay59 wrote:
| But it's not something that the NCMEC can do in secret.
| Apple gets the CSAM reports and decides whether something
| is worth sending as a tip to NCMEC.
| 0x00000000 wrote:
| I wouldn't think the government shares the images with
| NCMEC, wouldn't they just say "we captured some hard
| drives, add these hashes to the list"?
| fay59 wrote:
| My understanding is that the NCMEC actually has the
| pictures, and they're basically the only people in the US
| who can legally hold onto them.
| anonAndOn wrote:
| It's not hard to imagine that authoritarian regimes all over
| the world will soon have their own special list of hashes of
| "illegal" images. Seems like a great way to bury any
| photographic evidence of government abuse.
| mattnewton wrote:
| I think the biggest thing you are missing (from my perspective)
| is that to make those other policy changes from the San
| Bernardino case would require large investment from the company
| employees and would be externally visible.
|
| A change to the policy of what kinds of images are scanned is
| opaque by law, since none of the Apple employees involved can
| even have any access to the database of hashes they are using.
| There is also no realistic way for the consumer to understand
| the true false positive rate, no ability for a third party
| organization to distinguish false positives from true positives
| on non-csam images leaving the device.
|
| Additionally, these are just problems in the US. Other
| governments can and will mandate the use of this tool for other
| kinds of media they find objectionable in their borders.
|
| And there will be bugs that expose people to the results of
| these other governments, like the Taiwan flag emoji crashing
| case. https://www.wired.com/story/apple-china-censorship-bug-
| iphon...
|
| The large investment from this system is almost certainly the
| infrastructure to get it on phones, report the results, and run
| it in scenarios where it will minimize battery impact. What
| photos on device it is run on does not strike me as a technical
| challenge once the tool is built, only one with policy
| implications. And the easy answer to that will be just to check
| some flag if the phone is in a country that requires all
| pictures to be scanned.
| fay59 wrote:
| A change in policy regarding the pictures that are scanned is
| a change of NCMEC policy, which would be the same kind of
| high-level court dispute.
|
| I'm not knowledgeable enough to comment about other
| countries' policies, but the fact remains that no one has a
| law enforcement iBoot, as far as we know; and if one exists,
| CSAM filtering was never the opportunity that repressive
| regimes were waiting for.
| mattnewton wrote:
| My understanding, is that existing NCMEC policy includes
| non CSAM photos that were found alongside CSAM. I'm not
| talking about evil government attacks surreptitiously
| criminalizing your meme images in the US, I'm worried about
| boring dystopia where over time the false positive rate is
| much higher than anyone will admit and Apple employees are
| reviewing tens of millions of false positive photos at
| random from people's iPhones a year.
|
| And a more direct dystopia outside the US where they have
| already criminalized your memes. What stops China from
| saying we have our own database of images objectionable to
| the state that you must scan devices for?
| brandon272 wrote:
| This type of persistent, continuous, opaque scanning for
| "objectional material" makes prior discussion about
| whether law enforcement should have the ability to boot
| into a criminal's phone seem almost quaint by comparison.
| fay59 wrote:
| I hope that there will be a transparency report for how
| many reports happened and how many were found to be false
| positives.
|
| Regarding China, the answer is probably "nothing", but
| the system as it exists is not amenable to what I imagine
| their goals would be: only monitors the photo library
| (not messages) and requires a certain threshold of
| matches. The question is, I think, what today prevents
| China from requiring devices to attempt to match a
| database of pictures with a mandated match algorithm and
| a mandated reporting server. I believe (admittedly
| without any knowledge of the matter) that the same
| standard would apply to both.
| btown wrote:
| > to make those other policy changes from the San Bernardino
| case would require large investment from the company
| employees and would be externally visible.
|
| To that point - I generally think that engineers at
| ostensibly-privacy-minded companies like Apple are competent,
| well-intentioned, and good canaries. If I were to open
| Twitter and see a lot of people "seeking new opportunities"
| from Apple's security team and not able to give their
| reasons? It's very possible that a backdoor was built
| contrary to public statements, and they could not condone the
| discrepancy.
|
| But here, not only is the list of hashes editable with merely
| a configuration change, but it is _fundamentally_ a list of
| hashes that is designed to be secret and non-auditable and
| supplied by a non-auditable supply chain. In fact, the
| proponents of this program would argue "don't give the Apple
| engineers and product managers access to the hash list, nor
| access to whether test images are matched by the hash list,
| because it could be used for nefarious purposes if they
| themselves are perpetrators."
|
| So at any time a photograph commonly used to criticize a
| regime or commemorate a specific event could be added to the
| list, and there would be literally no way a well-intentioned
| engineer even inside Apple could even know about it. This
| isn't just a technology that could be applied with technical
| effort to make a backdoor, it's a deployed backdoor that
| opens up all our devices to supply chain attacks, plain and
| simple. A state level actor would simply need to convince
| someone at NCMEC to insert something into the un-auditable
| hash list (whose source images are never to be looked at in
| totality by design), then compromise any person or computer
| in the law enforcement-side reporting pipeline to exfiltrate
| the identity of anyone with the images in question. That's
| absurdly dangerous.
| fay59 wrote:
| Matches aren't automatically reported to authorities. They
| first go to Apple, and a match on an absurdly non-CSAM
| picture will be noticed. If it passes through, it will be
| reported as a tip to the NCMEC, which will also evaluate
| the pictures; and only then can it be forwarded to the
| government.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| > What happens when China announces its version of the NCMEC,
| which not only includes the horrific imagery Apple's system is
| meant to capture, but also images and memes the government deems
| illegal?
|
| This is the crucial part here. The means are there, apple can't
| say it's impossible to do so, the implementation is simple, and
| the consequences for individuals with winne-the-pooh photos are
| horrible.
| OzzyB wrote:
| So in short:
|
| Apple respected its Users' privacy and therefore only reported a
| low number CSAM cases since it didn't monitor and scan anything.
|
| Facebook, because it doesn't respect its Users' privacy, wants to
| monitor and scan everything so it _has_ to report large numbers
| of CSAM cases (in the millions).
|
| It seems to me that the "number of CSAM cases" is a nice
| (perverse?) corollary to how much a particular service respects
| its Users privacy.
| Geee wrote:
| This is just really sad. Apple used to be the beacon of hope.
| Maybe it was false hope all along.
|
| We must go full FOSS from hardware to software to preserve
| humanity. Everyone needs to get on board, not just the savvy
| minority. That's the goal.
| pm90 wrote:
| I agree with you. Ultimately though, we can't rely on
| Technology companies to make the right decisions. Businesses
| exist to make profits, if there aren't regulations against
| doing this someone was ultimately going to come up with a way
| to do it. Even with regulations many corporations fail to be
| compliant.
|
| I feel like we almost need a "Constitution for the Digital
| Age", which would eg guarantee privacy rights.
| mindslight wrote:
| I never thought of Apple as a beacon of hope, but I was willing
| to give them the benefit of the doubt that perhaps they could
| succeed at giving non-technical people the majority of their
| digital rights. Build systems that are secure from everybody-
| but-Apple, use top-down control to police bad actors, and allow
| privacy/security/freedom to flourish _within_ their walled
| garden.
|
| Sticking government spyware onto people's phones is a direct
| repudiation of this philosophy. I'm not surprised this would
| happen eventually, but I am surprised it has happened this
| quickly. It has been what, a mere 5 years since the San
| Bernardino affair? The authoritarian delusion is a strong siren
| call, but I had expected it to result in ever more App Store
| restrictions and perhaps a few breaks where the government
| compelled signing trojan horse targeted updates - not a full
| rejection of the very idea of user privacy by placing a
| government agent in every phone.
|
| With this development, Free Software is once again the only
| option if you'd like to preserve your own digital rights. Its
| story for mobile historically kind of sucks (Android with
| varying amount of bad bits stripped out), but that is changing
| with things like PinePhone. IMO inexpensive devices are a
| necessity to get iterations into many people's hands, as
| opposed to the waterfall-feeling model of OpenMoko (etc).
| theonlybutlet wrote:
| Has Apple or someone at Apple commented on the whole thing
| following the outcry? Any chance of them reneging?
| tummulfingur wrote:
| Maybe not what you were looking for, but some FAQs[0] were
| released by Apple today. I found them here [1].
|
| [0] https://www.apple.com/child-
| safety/pdf/Expanded_Protections_...
|
| [1] https://www.macrumors.com/2021/08/09/apple-faq-csam-
| detectio...
| theonlybutlet wrote:
| Thanks!
| firecall wrote:
| I was at an outdoor exhibition last week, and one of the staff
| called me out and said "No Digital Photography Allowed... it says
| so on your ticket"
|
| Meanwhile, it feels like almost everyone is taking photos, videos
| and live steaming the entire thing from high-end smartphones!
| aeoleonn wrote:
| When Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Bill Richardson, many other
| politicians and financial elites (the majority are still in the
| shadows, not yet exposed to the public) have been jet setting
| with decades-known child sexual abusers such as their good friend
| Jeffrey Epstein, it really makes me question the ACTUAL motive.
|
| Ruling elites do not care about CSAM-- many of them engage in it,
| as part of unbeknownst or beknownst honey pot schemes, whereby
| blackmail is gathered on them as collateral that they will follow
| the political and financial dictates of their [ultimately] Qui
| Intelligence handlers.
|
| This is merely an excuse to exercise power. And why now? Because
| you know qui are afraid that they've played their hand too
| sloppily-- forbidden knowledge on their true colors has spread
| too fast & they can't keep a lid on it-- and now populaces around
| the world are rioting against their satanic organization.
| cwkoss wrote:
| What does Qui mean in this context?
| aeoleonn wrote:
| It's... code for a meme which is... representative of a tight
| knit group... speaking any criticism against whom outlawed in
| many countries. Hence I can't even say.
|
| youtube search this: france qui interview
| samstave wrote:
| Well hot damn.
|
| THIS is so FN important. Its disgusting that there are many
| like yourself, and myself who have been aware of and been
| talking about it for DECADES and we were ridiculed and called
| "conspiracy theorists"
|
| CSAM blackmail is the bread-and-butter of Dark Intelligence
| Agencies.
|
| As a victim of abuse myself, where I lived on a Commune in
| Lafayette California in the 1970s, which was riddled with child
| sexual abuse - i was told by my father on his death-bed that
| the Commune (More University (The 'Purple People') was a
| "destination" and people, including rich and celebrities came
| there for "Experiences".
|
| There was a write up about it in Penthouse Magazine in the 80s
| - and it was known that the CIA played a role in putting Vic
| Baranco in the position he was in as head of that cult.
|
| My parents also knew Jim Jones when he was still in SF before
| the mass suicide..
|
| In talking with other kids from the commune, we found out just
| how bad the abuse was, and the fact that the CIA was closely
| monitoring it.
|
| I was involved in a study to follow a bunch of the kids from
| there , held by University of San Diego where they followed us
| as we grew up and interviewed us every few years to see what
| our life-path would turn out as based on our childhood
| situations... (it was a lot of different kids from all sorts of
| socio-eco backgrounds...)
|
| This was also at the same time the Michael Aquino abuse was
| happening to kids in the Presidio and other parts of San
| Francisco...
|
| Personally, I feel pedophilia should be a capital crime. and I
| would have no issues exacting it on people who abuse small
| children.
|
| One girl from the commune, Maria, was turned into a prostitute
| at the age of 4 years old by her father.
|
| We got out in 1978....
| kfprt wrote:
| This is a perfect example of the hypocrisy involved with such
| 'for the children' schemes. Elites are allowed to have massive
| birthday parties whereas plebs are not allowed to gather,
| elites are allowed to rape children while plebs are not.
| cannabis_sam wrote:
| The people who have written <<scientific papers>> on this
| absolute insane garbage should be laughed out of every serious
| conference on cryptography.
|
| And the people pushing this behind the scenes know that the
| majority of CSA happens in the home or with adults that the child
| trusts, so if we are to be fine with reaching into everyones
| private life, video surveillance in every kid's bedroom should be
| far more effective than attacking the distribution of CSAM
| alone...?
| devwastaken wrote:
| The decision shoots CSAM policing in the foot. Before, people
| trusted their iphone, and when a phone was conphiscsted as apart
| of an investigation orgs like the FBI had methods to break them
| due to their singular popularity. Now, those with actual intent
| to create and distribute are going to be far more cautious and
| use more secure systems. The actual perpetrators of abuse slip
| through the cracks once again while we pat ourselves on the back
| that we maybe will catch a few idiots that only consume it.
|
| Same happened with Fosta, same with the war on drugs. The actual
| perpetrators don't get caught, the abuse continues, but the
| metrics make it look good.
| sharikone wrote:
| I think HN readership is so used to live in the digital world
| that many forgot we can live without internet as humans.
|
| ANY connected digital media can become a 1984-style spying device
| if you don't have full access to it or even if you have that but
| you are not an experienced electrical engineer.
|
| The only defensible platforms are nondigital media and airgapped
| computing. I, for one, wouldn't shoot a nude with any digital
| device nowadays. Only exception would be a camera that gets
| connected only to airgapped computers.
|
| But we are losing that too. In a short time we won't even be able
| to pay for that Polaroid or to buy a Librephone without being
| traced in some digital form.
|
| We are losing all the battles but we need at least to prioritize.
| The cloud is lost, connected devices are lost. We need at least
| to keep cash payments, and to pressure the government to break up
| digital monopolies.
|
| I don't want to sound like desperate luddite but I really think
| that warrants requirements are unenforceable in the digital world
| and we really really need to keep important parts of our lives in
| the analog one.
| ccvannorman wrote:
| >we can live without internet as humans.
|
| Sorry, but I'm not going back to pre-internet days to
| accomplish my life goals. You might as well tell people in 1900
| that they could live just as well without electricity.
|
| If you want to be a monk or Amish, sure. If you want to be a
| normal human in pursuit of self-actualization and helping the
| world, internet is a de-facto critical piece of your life.
| npteljes wrote:
| The internet I think is critical nowadays, and therefore I'd
| like to see a part of it open, or having open alternatives.
| Email, for one, is still in a fine place, considering the
| myriad of proprietary and closed services.
|
| It's technically true what you write, that we can live life
| without the Internet. But we can live life in a million other
| sucky ways too, and that doesn't mean that we should. I find it
| arbitrary how people draw the line, and they are fun to argue,
| but no amount of good reasons make the line not arbitrary.
| Abuse has a long history and the older ways of living had their
| share too.
| fragmede wrote:
| Technically speaking, yes, _any_ thing with firmware can be
| corrupted. But I refuse to meekly accept that level of tech
| nihilism because smartphones are an invaluable tool in this
| modern era. I'm not going to stop having one, although the
| vendor may change, because the important things in my life are
| better stored as digital. Photos and videos of friends and
| family who have since passed. Physical photos will be lost in a
| fire but with cloud backups, they can be reprinted. Analog
| works, until, realistically, it's impractical. The cloud isn't
| lost yet. Don't give up. Please help us fight for it.
|
| Donate to the EFF.
| kevwil wrote:
| If I could go out and buy a Google-free Android phone today, I
| would. Now that I no longer trust Apple with privacy doesn't mean
| I trust Google. Even less so, actually.
|
| The alternative now is: no phone. Bye-bye Facebook and Instagram
| and Twitter and Snapchat and Candy Crush, etc. The mobile app
| market, and the advertising market, could fall apart if everyone
| did the same. The economy would be significantly impacted.
|
| What a huge mistake.
| camillomiller wrote:
| Apple was in a very bad damn if you do damn if you don't
| situation.
|
| Their CSAM reporting looked awful. They needed a solution. They
| came up with something that's definitely more elegant and more
| privacy-oriented than scanning all iCloud Photos.
|
| They went for the more complicated solution, which incidentally
| is one that less people will properly understand (or care about),
| therefore limiting the size of the inevitable dent on their
| privacy reputation.
|
| I think they are also preventing the consequences of some
| upcoming legislation in the US, UK and other parts of the world
| to make CSAM scanning mandatory in the Cloud, which would carry
| the risk of weakening Apple's privacy infrastructure even more.
|
| So, if you're given the choice to go for a haute cuisine gourmet
| sandwich with a side of shit salad, and a huge shit clam chowder,
| what would you rather go for? In Cupertino they picked the
| sandwich.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| > more privacy-oriented than scanning all iCloud Photos
|
| But they ll be scanning all icloud photos
| camillomiller wrote:
| They don't. It's technically not a scan, but a hashing of all
| content. It's a non trivial difference.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| is there any difference in effect?
| lolsal wrote:
| Scanning in this context implies understanding what is in
| the image. Hashing doesn't. A hash of a tree only tells
| apple "This is not a CSAM image", it doesn't say "there
| is a tree in this image."
| cblconfederate wrote:
| ok i thought we were talking about "scanning for CSAM
| images". I dont understand why we derailed to different
| image identification techniques. The point is, whatever
| apple is doing on the phone could be done exactly in
| their icloud servers
| rjakobsson wrote:
| I believe the difference is that on device they can do it
| prior to encrypting the image. On the cloud it is
| encrypted.
| klelatti wrote:
| Why are they 'preventing' the upcoming legislation?
| camillomiller wrote:
| Sorry, bad phrasing. Clarified.
| darwingr wrote:
| The canary died for Apple when they made it clear to all that
| they had developed a way to selectively bypass all device
| firewalls.
| jliptzin wrote:
| 20 MILLION reports just from Facebook alone in one year?? I am
| surprised there is no discussion of the sheer scale of the
| problem. Will we need to build more prisons once this new system
| is rolled out?
| y04nn wrote:
| The decision of Apple is bad for the simple fact that it assuming
| that everybody is suspected to be guilty until you have been
| scanned, inspected and proven clean. Until now you would have to
| be under an investigation for your data to be
| monitored/inspected. But now everybody is a suspect and has to be
| under scrutiny, this is really bad and will lead to abuse of the
| system in the future.
| nbzso wrote:
| These features are coming later this year in updates to iOS 15,
| iPadOS 15, watchOS 8, and macOS Monterey.
|
| The Elephant in the room is "this will be on Mac OS". So the fact
| that the user cannot have root access to an Apple mobile device
| is well established by now. But to have my desktop/laptop
| computer do things on behalf of third party, whatever the
| "logic", is total madness. This is not some SaaS app. When I buy
| a car I expect that I am in control. When I buy a computer I care
| about my control over my property.
|
| What is this madness? Is due process and innocent until proven
| guilty bed time stories now?
| selsta wrote:
| > Next, iOS and iPadOS will use new applications of
| cryptography to help limit the spread of CSAM online, while
| designing for user privacy. CSAM detection will help Apple
| provide valuable information to law enforcement on collections
| of CSAM in iCloud Photos.
|
| The CSAM scanning is only getting added to iOS and iPadOS. If
| it does getting added to Mac at some point it will be part of
| Photos.app, not the general OS.
| hosteur wrote:
| No one knows. They could make it part of the os. They could
| even hide the fact that it is there. Like the intel ME stuff.
| I am switching to Linux for desktop.
| zionic wrote:
| To be honest, this entire episode is starting to radicalize me.
|
| Everything stallman has said about proprietary software is
| slowly coming true, and I must admit that now I'm reevaluating
| a lot of the technology in my life.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| I also want to add that anyone that says "you can just turn off
| iCloud photos" can just see themselves out of the conversation.
| Apple iPhones ship with such low free space after OS and apps and
| they refuse to support SD cards (although it would be trivial for
| someone with their resources to abstract away the UX problems)
| and each photo is now 8+ MiB while videos quickly reach a GiB+
| that users really have no choice - especially given how badly
| iPhones double as mass storage USB devices to allow for manual
| curation - but to enable iCloud photos.
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