[HN Gopher] Apple Delays Rollout of Child Safety Features
___________________________________________________________________
Apple Delays Rollout of Child Safety Features
Author : nycdatasci
Score : 1347 points
Date : 2021-09-03 13:13 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.macrumors.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.macrumors.com)
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I wonder how such a feature could even distinguish legitimate
| use. What if I want to take pic pictures of a strange vaginal
| discharge to send to my child's pediatrician? Am I now on a list?
| What if I want family photos of my happy naked baby playing?
| CubsFan1060 wrote:
| What feature are you talking about? The iCloud photo scans for
| known photos, it doesn't detect random images. The iMessage
| feature only allows parents to see images that their children
| are sharing.
|
| As you described, nothing would flag that at all.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Really? Can you point me to a better description than in the
| article?
|
| >The planned features include scanning users' iCloud Photos
| libraries for Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM),
| Communication Safety to warn children and their parents when
| receiving or sending sexually explicit photos
|
| This description seems to cover scanning original content.
| Database comparison seems to be one tool of many, and
| insufficient to meet the core functionality of stopping OC.
|
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/09/03/busi.
| ..
|
| Edit: after looking around, The CSAM hash compare is one of
| two tools. The other is using on-device machine learning to
| analyze message image attachments and determine if a photo is
| sexually explicit
|
| https://www.apple.com/child-safety/
| CubsFan1060 wrote:
| Yup, I think you found it. The on-device one only applies
| to people under 13, and only reports to parents. And, IIRC,
| lets the child know that it'll be reported to parents
| before the child views it.
|
| https://www.macrumors.com/2021/08/05/apple-communication-
| saf...
| Klonoar wrote:
| This comment is proof that the discourse surrounding this is so
| badly misunderstood that Apple couldn't possibly hope to fight
| it. ;P
| tzs wrote:
| What I find most interesting is that they have apparently delayed
| _both_ the iCloud photo upload scanning _and_ the Messages
| parental control scanning which uses a completely different
| mechanism.
|
| The latter when it flags something in a message to the child
| warns the child and asks if they want to view it. If the child
| says "yes" and is 13+ it shows it to them and that is the end of
| it. If the child is 12 or under, they are warned again and told
| that if they view it their parents will be notified. If they say
| "yes" again they are shown the image and their parents are
| notified.
|
| Note that no one is notified unless the recipient is an under 13
| child and the child explicitly decides to allow their parents to
| be notified.
|
| I've seen much fewer objections to this. I don't see why they
| seem to be tying this and the iCloud scanning together in one
| release.
| Klonoar wrote:
| Likely because they made the mistake of doing them together to
| begin with - there's no world where the public untangles it.
| codezero wrote:
| It helps them conflate the feature as "for the children" and
| not as a privacy violation, a general confusion about the
| coupling of these features is desirable for their marketing.
| alliao wrote:
| honestly, brand breaking.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| I've been using Apple hardware for so long now and have been a
| huge fan. They killed almost all the goodwill they had with me.
| I no longer trust them, and since their operating systems are
| closed source, trust is critical. This has been a wake up call.
| If it's not open source, I don't know what's happening on my
| devices.
| musha68k wrote:
| Same here. I installed arch on my x86 MBP and I'm honestly
| shocked how smooth it went and how well it runs. Definitely a
| good time to get back to open source desktop experiences
| (after ~17 years for me). Now I'm waiting to do the same
| thing with my M1 MBP which is still on Big Sur for now (Asahi
| linux looking very promising though!).
| hughrr wrote:
| Delay is not the word I want to see.
|
| It's too late anyway. Their reputation is shot now. I don't trust
| them.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| I personally think one of the best things you can do is turn off
| icloud and automatic updates. No doubt they collect that
| telemetry. That sends a bigger "vote" than complain on HN,
| although both are welcome. I turned it all off and set idrive as
| my backup for now. Not optimal but the best I could do on short
| notice.
| subdane wrote:
| Seems like the unspoken story here isn't really about Apple, it's
| that the govts of the world want access to your phone data and
| its backups. They're already getting some of it from exploits,
| telcos and the cloud. They'll be back and will keep coming and
| it's hard to imagine any company will have the ability to stand
| up to them without seriously impacting their business.
| skinkestek wrote:
| ok folks, like I told you it was possible to get Apple to turn
| around.
|
| Maybe now is the time for the American part of HN to start
| applying the same pressure towards your politicians.
|
| We have an election coming up and I've been quite vocal to the
| people on stand about how my people (the conservatives) sold us
| out by rubber stamping the surveillance bill last year.
|
| I've also sent email and have sent one and will be sending one or
| more tweets the next few days.
| robertwt7 wrote:
| Delay is a strong word here. The question is until when? It's
| like a time bomb. Apple is giving us mixed feelings here starting
| by the privacy features, giving option for app not to track us,
| then this.
|
| Damn I'm still confused why person like Tim who has earned
| everyone's respect for privacy is doing this kind of thing. It's
| hard to move from apple honestly at this point and it's annoying
| tehjoker wrote:
| Why would macrumors characterize this unsafe and highly prone to
| nation state abuse security system on Apple's terms? Could they
| be protecting their institutional arrangement with Apple's PR arm
| and leakers?
|
| Anyone reading that headline alone will think, man that's crazy.
| Why would Apple delay something that protects children?
| intricatedetail wrote:
| They want people to buy new Macs that will be coming soon and
| then they'll switch the feature. I hope I am wrong.
| CubsFan1060 wrote:
| While looking up something, I came across this article (I believe
| from before Apple's original announcement):
| https://www.wired.co.uk/article/whatsapp-encryption-child-ab...
|
| It's interesting in that it talks about both server and client
| side scanning, and some of the things that WhatsApp does.
|
| An interesting fact from the article: in 2020, Whatsapp made
| 400,000 reports to the NCMEC. Apple: 265
| jliptzin wrote:
| And Facebook: 20 million reports last year. That is an
| astounding number.
|
| Does anyone really think we're only another 20 million reports
| a year away from solving the CSAM problem?
| CubsFan1060 wrote:
| I have no idea what the right answer is, however "solving"
| implies that the states are "huge problem" and "no problem".
|
| I might say that it's possible there are actions that can
| reduce, but not eliminate, the problem. What if another 20
| million reports saved one child from exploitation? 10
| children? 1000 children?
|
| At some level, this boils down to a society question. We all
| agree CSAM is evil. How does it stack up against other things
| we think are evil? I fear that, in the end, there is no
| middle ground that includes eliminating CSAM and keeping 100%
| privacy.
| cwizou wrote:
| Yep, Apple currently only scans iCloud Mail attachements (I
| believe they confirmed this, don't have the source at hand
| though), which explains the discrepancy.
|
| There's a big difference though between scanning a library
| (which is closer to what DropBox/OneDrive are doing) and when
| it's messaging platform whose ultimate goal is communication
| between people. It does make sense that those catch way more.
|
| If Apple had roll those scans on iMessage attachements (which
| they didn't planned to, though the feature looked to be
| designed for it way more than it was for a library scan), you
| would probably see comparable numbers (modulo those platforms
| relative marketshares).
|
| One big problem though is are those large numbers actually
| actionable ? I think I remember seeing a quote from Swiss (?)
| law enforcement that complained that the reports they got from
| NCMEC were nearly all of the time unactionable.
|
| There are possibly many reasons from this, it could be
| differences in local laws, algorithms that wrongly report
| things, or other factors (maybe not enough to identify the user
| of the acount, etc).
|
| This is where one feature of Apple's design was a bit better:
| they didn't plan to report every single occurence, but would
| only if 30 such images were detected. Part of the reason they
| did was because of the imperfections of the NeuralHash
| mechanism, sure, but in the end it doesn't matter.
|
| One can argue doing this would at least generate more
| actionnable reports. It shouldn't be a numbers game.
| CubsFan1060 wrote:
| The article touched on the actionable parts. "They say it is
| "highly unlikely" that a search warrant could be made from a
| tip that does not include content "and instead only includes
| IP data and an indication from an algorithm that there is a
| high probability of suspicious or anomalous activity"."
|
| It sounds like simply being able to say "This user was
| messaging with 4 known offenders,and sending something the
| size of images" is unlikely to be helpful to law enforcement.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Boy do I have a bridge to sell you. Search warrants get
| signed for far, far less all the time.
| leptoniscool wrote:
| Apple is required by law to do this correct?
| __warlord__ wrote:
| According to them, no.
|
| Source: https://youtu.be/OQUO1DSwYN0?t=398
|
| Side note, I like the quote:
|
| Interviewer: Who owns this phone?
|
| Craig Federighi: I think our customers own their phones... aaah
| for sure
|
| :P
| bigger_inside wrote:
| calling it "child safety features" in a report ON it is its own
| kind of propaganda collaboration
| vagrantJin wrote:
| I can't help but laugh at the good faith Apple Inc has. The less
| obvious questions about the company are never asked because
| anyone who does is attacked by fans, who in a manic state of self
| righteousness never asked why were _child safety features_ not a
| concern for Apple Inc for the last 20+ years.
|
| That's the blind good faith of which I speak. It makes Apple Inc
| is a mouthwatering target. So good, there's no need to rush. No
| need to be splashy. The intrinsic trust its users have on its
| integrity is mindblowing. People trust it more than they trust
| their own children and their ability to raise them.
|
| And no good can come from such blind faith.
| stetrain wrote:
| The reason they care now is because they have been trying to
| increase privacy and encryption of their services, and the
| powerful political flag that gets waved in opposition is CSAM.
| (second place is Terrorism but that engenders more political
| debate)
|
| Even if the real government motives for wanting decryption
| backdoors or no encryption at all are less pure in motivation,
| CSAM investigation and prosecution is something that nobody
| wants to argue against politically.
|
| That's the only explanation, sinister or benevolent, that makes
| sense to me for why Apple wanted to do this with all of the
| rube goldberg steps they created to make it inconvenient as a
| direct surveillance tool. . Given the priors that they want to
| avoid decrypted dragnet scanning of user data on their servers,
| limit who at Apple has access to user data on their servers
| (even when compelled by govt warrant), and that they can't
| continue down their road of device and cloud privacy without
| addressing CSAM, this is a solution that attempts to fit those
| measures.
|
| I don't think that makes it a good thing. There is a clear
| ethical boundary for most people between "I uploaded this to
| your server and you scan it" versus "I'm about to upload this
| to your server so you run a scanner on my device, and that scan
| can result in a human at Apple seeing some kind of
| censored/thumbnail version of my personal photos."
|
| Apple tried to find a clever work around to the above
| assumptions but their solution is something that feels like a
| worse privacy violation than just scanning everything server
| side.
| least wrote:
| > ...never asked why were child safety features not a concern
| for Apple Inc for the last 20+ years.
|
| This is remarkably disingenuous and can be applied to any
| company who hasn't done any number of things to help prevent
| any number of criminal or immoral activities on their
| platforms. Did we have the need or the technology to implement
| such features in 2001? I wasn't using cloud services to store
| photos in 2001. Were servers, let alone devices powerful enough
| to generate the hashes? Did NCMEC have the capability to
| generate these hashes or even have a database from which they
| could help create these technologies? PhotoDNA's development
| didn't start until 2009.
|
| Capability has expanded because the devices we carry around are
| super computers with built-in ML chips to enable these sorts of
| technologies. This would not have been possible with a feature
| phone in 2001. Advancements in machine learning have also
| enabled these sorts of technologies.
|
| Concerns have expanded because our use of third party platforms
| for cloud storage has significantly expanded which creates a
| liability for all these platforms. E2EE would of course remove
| their liability since they would have no idea what was being
| hosted on their platforms but the problem of ensuring that
| people don't lose access to their photos in the case of losing
| their device or password remains.
|
| If Apple's users had intrinsic trust in the company then Apple
| wouldn't be concerned about the push back against this tech.
| All you're doing here is outing yourself as the opposite of the
| "apple sheep."
| vagrantJin wrote:
| > All you're doing here is outing yourself as the opposite of
| the "apple sheep."
|
| Fair point. I feel its a deflection from the point though.
| Nothing about this whole saga has much to do with tech.
| Understandbly since this is an engineering medium - fair
| play.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > This would not have been possible with a feature phone in
| 2001.
|
| Perceptual hashes (photoDNA) can be executed on pretty much
| any device, the requirements for it are quite low as far as I
| understand it. Probably not a great idea to run it on a 40mHz
| Nokia, but it would actually be rather viable with devices
| swinging past the 1gHz threshold.
| noirbot wrote:
| I am very confused what you're trying to imply here? That Apple
| was intentionally not implementing child safety features before
| now and that's suspect but no one was questioning them?
|
| They've had various levels of parental control features around
| app and website blocking for a while. CSAM scanning aside, I
| think the other features around checking/blurring for
| unsolicited lewd images is ahead of most other companies in the
| space?
|
| What blind faith are you referring to? "Apple Inc is a
| mouthwatering target" to whom? The CSAM features that are being
| pushed back aren't about if people "trust their own children".
| vagrantJin wrote:
| > aren't about if people "trust their own children".
|
| The trust their own children but isn't about CSAM itself. Its
| about a previous comment I made where a parent made a claim
| about airtagging their kids so they knew where they are. I
| pointed out the hypocrisy of buying an iphone for better
| privacy while blatantly denying their own kids that same
| privilege. It should be in my comment histroy.
| noirbot wrote:
| How is that possibly Apple's fault? Some people are
| hypocrites. Some people trust themselves more than their
| children. You're just stringing together random arguments
| you've had with people who happen to own Apple products and
| then trying to blame Apple for it somehow?
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Came here to post this.
|
| It is VERY uncharacteristic of Apple to pause or walk back policy
| changes, so I wasn't very hopeful about this one. I'm glad
| they're at least re-evaluating.
| smoldesu wrote:
| They aren't re-evaluating, they're just postponing the rollout
| until after the holiday season.
| thehappypm wrote:
| I used to work on a system with a heavy amount of UGC (gaming
| network). We had a big team of people doing moderation of
| reported content, and the amount of stuff they had to deal with
| was monstrous. Lots of death threats, racism, evil images, SWAT-
| ing. They'd invite people to do ride-alongs to see the types of
| things that were reported, and it was brutal. A very tough job. A
| lot of those folks were ex-military, we needed really tough
| people.
|
| They were kind of a weird org, the police of the network, and
| they kind of kept to themselves but carried a ton of weight. When
| they were looped into a meeting for a new feature -- for example,
| "Should we let users send videos to each other?" -- they'd list
| out the evil ways people would use them, and then list out the
| various CSAM scans we'd be obligated to do if we hosted the
| content on our servers. They didn't have the means to block
| features, but they did put a healthy fear-of-God into us, and
| made it so we didn't have a lot of big public debacles of kids
| seeing porn on the home screen of the device, or things like
| that.
|
| I can imagine that Apple has a similar group. I can imagine they
| went to some executive, told them that this would be their best
| way to comply with the law, of course you don't need to access
| the images themselves, that would be a privacy violation and we
| don't do that! We just need the hashes, may we remind you this is
| CSAM we're talking about? Then it went up the chain and people
| were excited to "protect the kids" and protect the brand, hashes
| != user data, everyone wins!
|
| I'm guessing this move was mostly misaligned priorities, and
| possibly some genuine incompetence or perhaps people not speaking
| up when they saw the potential here.
| mmcnl wrote:
| I have no idea wat UGC is. Can you please not use abbreviations
| that serve no purpose other than confuse the reader?
| [deleted]
| jackson1442 wrote:
| User generated content. It's a pretty standard term in the
| game dev community.
| toqy wrote:
| It's a standard term for the audience of this site, can you
| please not be so self important?
| kzrdude wrote:
| Not for me, and my account is 10 years old. Just a single
| data point, though.
| pensatoio wrote:
| Never heard of it. I doubt the gaming industry makes up a
| sizeable portion of HN.
| thehappypm wrote:
| My apologies, I hear it so much I just assume everyone on HN
| does too.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _I used to work on a system with a heavy amount of UGC (gaming
| network)_
|
| And here we have it, a situation where the content a user
| generates on what's ostensibly "their machine" is being treated
| more and more, by companies and the state as being equivalent
| to "UGC", user generate content - stuff explicitly being
| shared. Obviously, the insidious thing is that no one will be
| able to create anything without even the creation process
| falling under someone's "terms of use".
| thehappypm wrote:
| It's a different ball game when the content is being shared
| on a network, I think.
| [deleted]
| belter wrote:
| So this group of good hardened souls...That from the
| description could exist at Apple...and went to speak to their
| management about all the good thinks they need to do. Do they
| also speak up to their management about all the activities
| Apple is complicit with, so as to keep their presence in the
| Chinese market?
| spicybright wrote:
| I doubt it. If they did apple would just find "stronger"
| people.
| thehappypm wrote:
| No, because that's not in their wheelhouse.
| shantara wrote:
| I was wondering how Apple would handle their imminent iPhone 13
| announcement event in light of the public outcry over the photo
| scanning. Now we know the answer, they will pretend to listen
| until everyone buys a new shiny, and then quietly slip in the
| changes without making much noise after everyone forgets about
| them.
| bitigchi wrote:
| "Good Morning!" (Grinning like a Cheshire Cat).
| neop1x wrote:
| It may be easy to hide that as part of an update, after
| mainstream focus settles down. It could be part of "Various
| privacy improvements" changelog line and it may not be easily
| noticable. And if some security researcher discovers it many
| years later, they will say "we told everyone in 2021 we cared
| about children and that we would implement this".
| uptownfunk wrote:
| I completely cancelled apple Icloud as a result..
| balozi wrote:
| What's the point of delaying anything, the damage is already
| done.
|
| I can only imaging all the yelling and recrimination happening in
| executive meetings at Apple Spaceship. Oooff!
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| In the news tomorrow: "Apple allowing child porn on their
| phones".
| jliptzin wrote:
| Here's my take on this
|
| I think this was Apple calling the US government's bluff. I don't
| think they ever wanted to do anything like this because they know
| it destroys their claims of superior privacy. I think they have
| internal plans to roll out E2E iCloud encryption so that in
| addition to not being able to provide law enforcement the code to
| unlock any phone, they also won't be able to help law enforcement
| decrypt anything stored in iCloud, including those phone backups.
| So Apple sees the incoming fight where government cries foul to
| the public, making the same tried and true "think of the
| children" arguments, saying now all pedophiles will be free to
| save their CSAM on Apple servers. It's the government's way to
| try to get the public against Apple on this, and this is how
| Apple neuters that argument.
|
| But I don't think anyone in the government really cares about the
| CSAM. What they really want is backdoor access to the devices for
| the high-value targets that they actually care about, or just to
| make their jobs a lot easier in other investigations, but that's
| a lot harder to sell to the public. Look at Facebook alone. They
| made 20 MILLION CSAM reports last year ALONE. That number was
| astounding to me. I haven't heard anyone discuss the sheer
| numbers yet. Think about that for a second. That's one company,
| making 55,000 CSAM reports PER DAY. The equivalent of a medium
| sized city being reported for CSAM materials every day! I don't
| know how many people work in government handling those reports,
| but I'd imagine the process of taking in reports, evaluating
| them, forwarding them to appropriate authorities, and then making
| arrests is not one that can possibly be automated away to deal
| with that kind of volume. And Apple would generate at least as
| many reports as Facebook I'd imagine, not to mention all the
| other sources of CSAM reports that are out there. Do we really
| think there's anyone in law enforcement who is saying "oh gee, if
| only we had an ADDITIONAL 55,000 CSAM reports coming in PER DAY
| then we'd really be able to get a handle on the problem." If
| anything, that just provides even more noise, making it harder to
| find real signals.
|
| So now that they've shown they're willing to call law
| enforcement's bluff, I think law enforcement predictably has now
| said to them ok, it's not really about the CSAM, we still want
| backdoor access for other reasons, and now Apple is reevaluating
| their response.
|
| The issue for Apple though is that even if they're legally
| allowed to say no to law enforcement requests to open up
| backdoors, they're probably being extorted by law enforcement
| threatening to come down on them for antitrust issues if they
| don't go along with it. Smaller companies that don't have
| antitrust issues to worry about would be able to put up a much
| more resilient fight.
| nullc wrote:
| I'd like to believe that, but the investment into this faulty
| system was clearly millions of dollars. That is an awful lot of
| money for a feint.
|
| Re: facebook the tiny number of court cases in the face of an
| astronomical number of reports is an indication that we really
| don't understand what is going on there or or the motivations.
| jliptzin wrote:
| Millions of dollars to Apple is like pennies to us, though.
| numair wrote:
| For everyone who is saying that the technical community "won"...
| Nobody's been fired. Rather, Apple's senior execs _publicly
| doubled down_ and basically labeled those of us who thought this
| scheme to be insane, as a bunch of uninformed idiots...
|
| You can change a product decision in a day, but it takes a LONG
| time to change a culture that thinks these sort of insane product
| decisions make any sense whatsoever. Making a long-term bet on
| Apple has become precarious at best.
| chaz6 wrote:
| Perhaps they need to be reminded of what happened when RSA/NSA
| backdoored Dual EC. Eventually a foreign power discovered it
| and used it for their own intentions.
| chrononaut wrote:
| > but it takes a LONG time to change a culture that thinks
| these sort of insane product decisions make any sense
| whatsoever
|
| Assume Good Faith. If there's one thing I learned about
| sensationalist stories or situations, it's that the position of
| "the other side" / reality is far more nuanced than the story
| tellers would like to make you believe. The result still may be
| poor, but the steps that brought people there are not nearly as
| insidious as it's normally presented.
| hughrr wrote:
| Yeah the thing that really got me was the double down. They are
| not on my side.
| livueta wrote:
| Yeah. I think some celebration is warranted, but the "disaster
| averted, my iPhone is back to being a trustworthy user agent"
| take seems to be a bit myopic when the core problem is that
| Apple possesses enough control over the devices it sells to be
| able to implement something like this by fiat. Sure, Apple
| backed down today, but until users are able to exercise the
| four essential freedoms they're living under the sword of
| Damocles.
| amelius wrote:
| "Trust is gained drop by drop, but lost by the bucketful."
| zekrioca wrote:
| The technical community was labeled the "screeching voices of
| the minority".
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Not by Apple, much as the media would love to have you think
| otherwise. The 'screeching' description comes from Marita
| Rodriguez, executive director of strategic partnerships at
| the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, in a
| memo to Apple employees.
|
| [Edit, since I can't reply anymore because I'm "posting too
| fast"] I didn't say you thought that personally; in a sub-
| thread about Apple senior execs applying negative labels to
| people, and this being one of the most insulting labels
| applied, I think it's important to note that this label came
| from somewhere else. (and maybe important to note "the
| technical community" were not labelled "screeching voices";
| the memo said "the air will be filled with the screeching
| voices of the minority". It didn't say "everyone who
| disagrees is a screeching voice").
|
| [1] https://www.howtogeek.com/746588/apple-discusses-
| screeching-...
| simondotau wrote:
| > _[Edit, since I can 't reply anymore because I'm "posting
| too fast"]_
|
| This means you've had your account sanctioned by Dang. You
| might want to send him an email and offer him your most
| profuse and sincere apology for whatever it is you did to
| anger him.
| zekrioca wrote:
| It is interesting how you thought that I thought the label
| came from Apple, even though I did not mention it.
|
| The _key_ point is that the label did come from the
| collaboration that Apple engaged in.
| SheinhardtWigCo wrote:
| An Apple software VP forwarded the memo to engineers,
| saying:
|
| > I wanted to share this note that we received today from
| NCMEC. I found it incredibly motivating, and hope that you
| will as well.
|
| https://9to5mac.com/2021/08/06/apple-internal-memo-icloud-
| ph...
| justinzollars wrote:
| Still on the fence about this brand now. Privacy is the last
| thing I think about when I think apple.
| stevenalowe wrote:
| "Child safety features" because only a monster would be against
| such a thing.
|
| I seem to recall gun trigger locks being pushed with the exact
| same phrase (because "self-defense obstacles" would be too
| accurate)
|
| "For the children" is the last refuge of politicians and conmen.
|
| So what's the bottom line?
|
| i'm guessing that scanning (for many things) is mandated by
| multiple governments, and on-device scanning is orders of
| magnitude cheaper than server-side scanning.
|
| I hope this PR nightmare for Apple continues until the full
| extent of mandated surveillance is exposed
|
| But it probably won't - Apple's mistake was in thinking that
| people would blindly accept this as a desirable feature, instead
| of just quietly implementing it.
|
| Or, maybe Apple did it this way on purpose to expose the issue to
| public scrutiny.
| mulmen wrote:
| Honestly the trust damage is already done. They announced it, the
| genie is out of the bottle. I can never trust Apple as much as I
| did before. They are no longer the benevolent dictator of the
| walled garden. They have proven their judgement is fallible. They
| have proven that their customers interests do not matter to them
| as much as their own agenda. I'm not sure how they can ever fully
| recover from this, or even promote themselves as a privacy
| focused brand. That will always ring hollow.
|
| This reminds me a bit of the DNS-over-HTTPS hand wringing as
| well. DoH points out that applications can run their own DNS and
| you can't easily control that behavior at a network level like
| with conventional DNS. That is pretty troubling from a
| technically literate user perspective but it's not actually
| _new_. Applications could always hard-code DNS. DNS-over-HTTPS
| just made us think about it.
|
| Similarly Apple has complete control of your device. They always
| have, it's actually part of the value proposition. There has been
| a lot of debate about what Apple should or shouldn't do here but
| the fact is they could have pushed this out silently and it could
| be scanning your entire device right now, we just don't know. We
| have to trust Apple at their word and after their announcement
| that they would push this kind of capability I'm not sure how we
| can ever trust them again.
| eric__cartman wrote:
| As many have been saying for decades, the only way to have
| privacy when computing is by using publicly auditable open
| source software. No amount of pinky promises made by the
| marketing department can change that.
|
| It doesn't matter if the end user doesn't audit everything
| themselves, that's impossible to do in a reasonable manner, but
| the constant auditing and testing by many independent entities
| gives, in my opinion, a better assurance of privacy than some
| marketing material saying they deeply care about me.
|
| Somehow a large subset of the general public doesn't seem to
| understand this. And act all surprised when Apple, Google,
| Microsoft or whatever screws them over.
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| You don't deserve this personally, and I'm genuinely interested
| if you have more insight, but I feel the need to vent:
|
| Really? What the fuck did Apple do, that you gave them total
| control to dictate _your_ walled garden in the first place?
|
| I just don't get it. My best guess is Sunk-cost-color glasses,.
| From the moment they launched itunes (which is 15y old for me)
| I understood their value was a walled garden as a platform.
| Users as a commodity. Valuation as overlords.
|
| What ever gave you a different idea?
| [deleted]
| TedShiller wrote:
| Apple doing this to users' phones is like the police entering
| every house in the city (or in this case, the COUNTRY), just in
| case someone has something illegal in their basement. Nothing to
| worry about if you have nothing to hide, right?
|
| The presumption of guilt is the problem. Freedom means that I
| shouldn't even be suspected, and certainly not searched or
| monitored, unless there is a clear reason.
|
| If there is a reason to suspect me, all of these tactics are fair
| game. But not before that.
| mikehearn wrote:
| This analogy doesn't accurately represent the technology, at
| least as I understand it.
|
| In Apple's implementation, the device never knows if a
| particular picture is a CSAM match. That determination is made
| in iCloud when the server attempts to decrypt the safety
| voucher. Until that point, it's just an encrypted payload that
| the device can't interpret one way or the other.
|
| In your analogy, where "your home" is the equivalent of "your
| device", the police never enter the home to determine whether
| you have anything illegal. Instead, there's some process that
| boxes up all your stuff into nondescript, anonymous boxes that
| can only be opened if someone has the key.
|
| To determine illegality, you'd have to voluntarily send them
| off to the police (police = iCloud), where they only have a
| handful of keys - they have a "gun" key, a "knife" key, and a
| few other keys for boxes containing illegal items. But the
| boxes are nondescript, so the police don't know whether you
| have anything illegal until they insert the key and turn it. If
| the "gun" key successfully opens the box, the box contains a
| gun, and you are reported. If all the police's keys fail on a
| particular box, then whatever is inside must not be illegal and
| the police never learn its contents.
|
| Needless to say, this analogy is tortured because it's hard to
| apply Apple's tech to a physical process, but the point is that
| whether something is "illegal" isn't able to be determined
| until you voluntarily ship it off to an entity that has the
| keys to unlock it.
| noptd wrote:
| >In Apple's implementation, the device never knows if a
| particular picture is a CSAM match.
|
| That's a distinction without a difference w.r.t the end
| result but I'll offer a more apt analogy regardless.
|
| A better analogy would be the police installing a device in
| your house that's capable of seeing or hearing anything that
| happens and then claiming there's nothing to worry about. The
| device is only watching a specific door in your house and
| forwarding a hash of that information to their servers.
| Nevermind that it would only take a policy change and an OTA
| update that you have no visibility into, or chance of
| blocking, before it's watching your entire house in real-
| time.
|
| But hey, you have several other doors to enter or exit your
| house from, and it's not like the camera actually knows
| anything, only the people on the other end do, so what's the
| big deal right?
|
| Would you trust the police in that scenario?
| pshirshov wrote:
| Well, I personally feel that the trust was broken.
|
| I've migrated to a self-built Android (that was quick and mostly
| painless, I would recommend CalyxOS and/or Graphene to anyone)
| and have a long-term plan to completely pull myself out of Apple
| ecosystem.
|
| Also it was a good reminder to degoogle myself, so I did.
| midrus wrote:
| I was going to buy an iPhone before they announced this, because
| I'm tired of all the Google tracking stuff.
|
| If they finally roll this out, I think my next phone will be a
| Nokia 1100. I don't have anything to hide, but I'm tired of
| everyone trying to track and sneak into your personal stuff, for
| whatever reason.
| mrtksn wrote:
| In my opinion, Apple will break its brand if they actually go
| ahead and release "self-reporting to the authorities" device
| features.
|
| Even if they somehow manage to make it do exactly the thing it is
| supposed to do and not slide into a feature for mass governmental
| control, I think a lot of people will loose trust into the
| devices they own.
|
| Automatically scanning your stuff and reporting the bad things to
| the police is like the concept of God always watching. Even if
| you don't do anything wrong and you agree that the stuff they are
| watching for is bad and should be prevented, there is something
| eerie about always being watched and controlled.
|
| The iPhones should mind their own business and leave the police
| work to the police.
|
| That being said, I would be O.K. if the scan is performed on the
| device upon physical access by the authorities. You caught
| someone, You have enough evidence to investigate the person, you
| are allowed to search his/her home then maybe it can be O.K. to
| run a fingerprint scan on the phone to look for evidence.
| Lamad123 wrote:
| this whole thing just made me wake up to how much control that
| company has over something that's supposed to belong to those
| who buy it!!
| lm28469 wrote:
| > company has over something that's supposed to belong to
| those who buy it!!
|
| If it's not written in the law nothing is "supposed to"
| slg wrote:
| I don't know why more people didn't come to this conclusion.
| The choice between scanning the files before upload to the
| cloud or after upload to the cloud is largely a policy
| decision and not a technical one since Apple already controls
| both ends of that process.
|
| If you don't trust them to scan things on your device why are
| you trusting them to scan things in the cloud and why are you
| trusting them with both the hardware and software you run?
| wizee wrote:
| 1. They own their cloud, you own your device. Having your
| own device work against you is more problematic in
| principle than having another party you give your data to
| working against you. I don't like the concept of devices
| that I own betraying me.
|
| 2. When scanning is done locally, it's easier for them to
| secretly or openly modify the software to scan everything
| on your device, rather than just what's just uploaded to
| iCloud. If they tried scanning everything (including non-
| iCloud images) in the cloud, the network traffic of
| uploading every image on your device to the cloud would be
| observable.
| slg wrote:
| You seemed to have missed my point. They control the
| entire ecosystem. If you are worried about them doing
| something secretly to violate your trust, you should
| assume they are already compromised because the only
| thing stopping them is a policy decision and not a
| technical limitation.
| fsflover wrote:
| The difference is, they _promised_ not to look at
| personal files. If you are using their devices you trust
| their promises. Now, they broke their promise and a lot
| of people are loosing the trust.
| slg wrote:
| >they promised not to look at personal files
|
| Where was this promise stated in these explicit terms,
| especially the definition of "personal files"? Because
| Apple is also promising that this only applies to file
| that are set to be uploaded to iCloud and the expectation
| of privacy is different for files uploaded to the cloud.
|
| Either Apple's promises can be trusted or they can't. And
| if they can't, you can't trust anything about their
| devices.
| dschuessler wrote:
| I think this comes pretty close to what you're asking
| for: https://www.maclife.de/media/maclife/styles/tec_fron
| tend_lar...
|
| Of course it is not an explicit promise and doesn't refer
| to "personal files" but I think it shows where OP is
| coming from. You can reasonably understand this message
| in the way they do.
| ohazi wrote:
| > They own their cloud, you own your device.
|
| They push arbitrary software updates to your device at
| their whim, therefore _they_ own your device.
| Terretta wrote:
| Arguably, we are still collectively asleep that the real
| problem needing solving is client-side SDKs.
| spicybright wrote:
| Can you expand on that?
| godelski wrote:
| > Automatically scanning your stuff and reporting the bad
| things to the police is like the concept of God always
| watching.
|
| What I find interesting is how our perspectives shifted over
| time. 1984 was considered a dystopian nightmare and within that
| world Big Brother wasn't always watching but rather _could_
| watch at any time. The simple ability to be able to tune in was
| enough to create the fear and have people report others. We're
| well past that to be honest and interestingly our
| interpretations have shifted as well to Big Brother _is_ always
| watching and that being the dystopian nightmare. In this sense
| we're there in some areas of our lives and it has shifted to "I
| have nothing to hide" or "what can I do?"
|
| So it is interesting to see that essentially the window shifts
| further and further in that direction and as long as the shift
| is sufficiently slow the general public seems not to care. I
| wonder if there is a turning point.
| skoskie wrote:
| I think it's critical to understand that a single law can
| shift that window drastically. If Apple can allow for a small
| shift in that direction - however distasteful - it may
| prevent the larger shift caused by anti-privacy legislation.
|
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/12/senate-judiciary-
| commi...
| robertoandred wrote:
| It of course does not self-report to any authorities.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| So how would you describe the actions of this system when it
| think it's detected illicit pictures?
| oreilles wrote:
| If your phone were to detect illicit pictures, nothing
| would happen unless you send them those files to Apple, in
| which case they would have know that you had them anyway.
| There is nothing even remotely close to the truth with
| saying that your phone `self reports` to the authorities.
| Not only Apple has no idea about what photos you have on
| your phone nor what they are scanned against unless _you_
| send them your photos with iCloud, but it also isn 't your
| phone reporting to the authorities but Apple, once they
| know for sure that you have illegal content on _their_
| servers.
| robertoandred wrote:
| If the phone and the server agree that enough CSAM matches
| have been detected, the matches get reviewed by Apple. If
| Apple agrees with the phone and the server, the matches get
| reviewed by the NCMEC. If the NCMEC agrees with Apple and
| the phone and the server, the NCMEC may get law enforcement
| involved.
|
| Bad-faith actors want people to think that taking a picture
| of your baby in the tub will bring a SWAT team to your door
| the next day.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| You just described reporting to authorities.
| turdnagel wrote:
| I guess we're splitting hairs over "reporting" and "self-
| reporting." I think the idea is that there is a layer -
| yes, a fallible, human one - between detection and
| reporting.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| There is nothing "bad faith" about pointing out the
| mentality behind this of total device surveillance. Most
| people who are angered about this aren't worried about
| false positives of baby's first bath. They are worried
| about Apple scanning stuff on your phone as a proxy for
| police. What's next? Copyright infringement? combing
| through texts for drug activity? thought crimes against
| the CCP? It's not slipery slope as all through history
| governments have Always wanted more power over their
| citizens and to not even have your phone be safe from
| arbitrary scanning is just too damn far.
| oreilles wrote:
| It's not Apple scanning your device. It's your device
| scanning itself, and _you_ sharing the results of those
| scans to Apple with iCloud if you decide to use it. Don
| 't want Apple to see your data ? Just don't send it to
| them, it's that simple.
| stale2002 wrote:
| What's even more simple than your solution, is to
| pressure Apple politically to change this.
|
| And it looks like that worked, and apple got rid of this
| self reporting feature.
| mikeiz404 wrote:
| > It's your device scanning itself, and you sharing the
| results of those scans to Apple with iCloud if you decide
| to use it.
|
| While technically correct, there is much power in the
| defaults that are set. iCloud photo sharing is on by
| default and provides some useful features, especially if
| you have multiple apple devices. Also apple doesn't
| provide a good automatic way to do backups outside of
| iCloud.
|
| And realistically speaking how many "normal" people will
| even be aware of how to turn this off and be willing to
| go to the effort? Will they have a choice? Sure,
| technically. Practically though the majority of people
| stick to the defaults.
| skoskie wrote:
| I fully admit to being a bit pedantic here, but you are
| not logged into iCloud on a device by default. Once
| logged in, then yes, iCloud photos is enabled, but that
| seems like a fair assumption if you are using iCloud
| services.
|
| > And realistically speaking how many "normal" people
| will even be aware of how to turn this off and be willing
| to go to the effort? Will they have a choice? Sure,
| technically. Practically though the majority of people
| stick to the defaults.
|
| I fully agree with your point here, but also, how many
| "normal" people deal in CSAM? The vast majority of people
| just won't be affected by this in any noticeable way.
| malwrar wrote:
| Look, I'll just say it directly because (slippery-slope
| fallacy aside) we all know this is how things will play
| out in a few years after this gets rolled out:
|
| gov: "hey Apple, pedophiles are rampant rn, do you really
| need to wait before the devices upload photos to icloud
| before you use that on-device scanning? here's some cool
| proposed legislation to motivate the conversation. oh
| also here's some more images that are illegal."
|
| This conversation will happen behind closed doors with
| much better wording and probably with real stakes for
| Apple. They've built a dream technology for control
| freaks in government across the world, something that we
| in the technology sphere have traditionally fought
| against for decades. All it just needs is a honest day's
| work to scan all the time vs on upload.
|
| This is the fight to fight if you'd rather just not deal
| with a future when, surprise, the scope creeped but now
| its too normal to oppose. People will get vanned by less
| benign government who interpret things far more mundane
| than pedophilia as undesirable.
| oreilles wrote:
| If Apple wanted to make the iPhone a sandwich, we could
| eat it. But until then you can't.
|
| Apple could read your whole phone content and send it to
| governments without your consent if they wanted to, on
| device-scanning or not. Util they do, there is no breach
| of privacy.
|
| If you believe Apple can implement one-party consent
| snitching on iPhone without telling anyone, then you
| shouldn't use closed source software in the first place,
| because there is zero reason to believe that they haven't
| already implemented this.
| malwrar wrote:
| > Apple could read your whole phone content and send it
| to governments without your consent if they wanted to, on
| device-scanning or not. Util they do, there is no breach
| of privacy.
|
| This misses the point. Apple has repeatedly assured its
| customers (I'm waiting for my Pinephone to get here so I
| no longer need to be one) that the devices they buy are
| theirs. This is how things always have been, and although
| you're right they could _in theory_ slip some law
| enforcement update on my phone, they're publicly refused
| to do so before and I trusted them as a result.
|
| They're not secretly slipping in a government backdoor
| though, they're backpedaling on their promises and openly
| installing a backdoor on my phone for no reason. Why let
| this slide like it's normal, or pretend like this isn't a
| betrayal? They refused to unlock an iPhone owned by a
| mass shooter!
|
| Plus, for many people, Apple and Android are basically
| the only options for modern computing. Their decisions in
| this market normalize stuff like this. I don't want
| future devices to be forced to implement easily-abused
| crap like this because Apple convinced people this is a
| solvable problem with machine accuracy. We're already
| seeing this for open questions like moderation and
| copyright enforcement, with horrific results that are now
| just normal.
| oreilles wrote:
| > Apple has repeatedly assured its customers that the
| devices they buy are theirs
|
| That is definetly not true. Apple has always been anti-
| ownership. By making the OS closed source, preventing
| installation of other OS, preventing sideloading
| applications, preventing self repair, preventing parts
| distribution etc etc.
|
| What they used to say is that what's on your device stays
| on your device, and that you decide what you share. And
| they stay true to that promise. If you don't want to
| share you pictures with Apple, you don't use iCloud
| photos, end of the story.
|
| > openly installing a backdoor on my phone
|
| A backdoor is defined by two characteristics: one, the
| user do not know the existence of the backdoor. Two, the
| backdoor allows the attacker to bypass device security in
| order to gain access. You know the existence of the
| scanning feature, and this feature does not allow Apple
| nor anyone to gain access or information about what's on
| your phone without your consent. It is not a backdoor in
| any way you can think of it.
| skoskie wrote:
| I think you make the perfect point, with one exception.
| Rather than future tense, it should be past tense.
|
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/12/senate-judiciary-
| commi...
|
| > This conversation will happen behind closed doors
|
| It did.
|
| > with much better wording and probably with real stakes
| for Apple.
|
| Pretty much. Quote from the infamous Lindsay Graham
| (2019): "My advice to [big tech] is to get on with it,
| because this time next year, if we haven't found a way
| [to get at illegal, encrypted material] that you can live
| with, we will impose our will on you."
| pope_meat wrote:
| Someone should throw an iphone at Lindsey like that guy
| did with his shoes at Bush. It'll probably do little, but
| at least it will be satisfying.
| Piskvorrr wrote:
| And learned-from-history actors think of all the previous
| "think of the kids" campaigns, and their subsequent scope
| creep: Oh, we sorta kinda extended the hash database to
| also include, say, Bitcoin. Because we can. No, there's
| nothing really wrong with it, and anyway, the innocent
| have nothing to fear, right? And also Winnie the Pooh and
| the tankman; the Chinese government asked very nicely.
| Oh, and the Afghan government also had some requests on
| what hashes they need reported. Yeah, that's the Taliban,
| but if you're innocent, you have nothing to fear, right?
| Brb, there's an email from Lukashenka asking for
| detections of anything white-red-white...
| robertoandred wrote:
| Expand the hash database to include Bitcoin? What? I
| really don't think you understand how this works.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _And learned-from-history actors think of all the
| previous "think of the kids" campaigns, and their
| subsequent scope creep:_"
|
| You say, and then go on to give as examples /things which
| haven't happened, but you fantasised might happen/. That
| isn't learning from history.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| So if a creep amasses a database of those even though
| individually they aren't "illegal", what do you do? You
| can't call it CP for one but not for the other.
| Especially if they're made publicly available on
| facebook. It's a lame slippery slope argument but it's
| gonna get hashed out in criminal defense cases where
| Apple is calling someone a pedophile.
| jmull wrote:
| Excuse me, but that is reporting to the authorities.
|
| You're simply describing some of the details of how it
| happens.
|
| It's nice that there are some manual review steps, but
| that hardly changes what's happening. Especially since
| the human reviewers are almost surely going to pass the
| case through to the next step if there is any ambiguity.
| robertoandred wrote:
| It absolutely changes what's happening. The phone is not
| self-reporting to the authorities. Simply false.
| noptd wrote:
| Let's not be pedantic. In the parent's example, this is a
| distinction without a difference.
| genewitch wrote:
| That's just self-reporting to the authorities with a
| bunch of extra fallible human steps
| robertoandred wrote:
| No, it's self-reporting to Apple.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| lol who are at this point just a proxy for the police
| intelligence.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| In what ways do you think those human steps can fail?
|
| The method only returns positive on a hash-match with a
| known piece of CSAM from NCMEC.
|
| The human process is looking at a picture somebody has
| already been convicted of child abuse for having, and
| comparing it with yours to see if they're the same.
| YLYvYkHeB2NRNT wrote:
| > loose trust into the devices they own.
|
| I already did and have moved on. And I was with them for a long
| time. Thousands of dollars, also. Thousands.
| oreilles wrote:
| > "self-reporting to the authorities"
|
| That's 100% not what the feature is about. People need to stop
| spreading this nonsense. Apple only get the result of the scans
| when the files are send to them via iCloud, _then_ they, Apple,
| not your device, would report to the authorities. Also, they
| already were looking for CP in your iCloud content and report
| to the authorities anyway, as was shown recently with the
| doctor that was caught with 2k images. So whether you were or
| weren 't using iCloud, privacy-wise on-device scanning makes
| literally 0 difference.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| It makes all the difference in the world on whether Apple
| scans their own servers for content they don't want versus
| your phone snitching on you.
|
| I can choose to not upload things to Apple.
|
| If my iPhone decides to scan my photos just because, I can do
| nothing.
|
| I won't accept my device being a snitch under someone elses
| control. Companies change values and Apple already brazenly
| allows the CCP to snoop on Chinese iCloud data.
| oreilles wrote:
| Except your phone is not a snitch. Snitching is sending
| informations to a third party, which your phone doesn't do,
| unless you explicitly accept it by using iCloud syncing.
|
| You're basically upset that your operating system can read
| your files. Well good luck finding an operating system that
| cannot read your files.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Apple is a third party.
|
| Right now Apple says they only scan iCloud uploads. We
| can't verify that, but let's assume they aren't lying.
|
| Why not scan your whole library? They can, they could
| make the argument it's to fight CSAM. I mean if you
| aren't uploading to iCloud because you're a pedophile,
| obviously we should scan your whole phone just in case.
| Think of the children!
| skoskie wrote:
| You seem to be contradicting yourself. You have the
| option to turn off iCloud photos in which your phone will
| not scan the photos because there is no point.
|
| > Why not scan your whole library?
|
| That may very well be the case in the future, but nobody
| can say for sure. But even if they do scan other files on
| your phone, it's unlikely they will do that for files
| that don't sync to iCloud. If this bothers you, you can
| always just sign out of iCloud completely. You can still
| retain access to the app store and music subscriptions
| separately.
| noptd wrote:
| In that example, you phone is still a snitch but it's
| snitching to Apple in order for them to then snitch to
| the "appropriate" authorities.
| oreilles wrote:
| No it is not, as zero information is sent to Apple unless
| you use their cloud service. Now if you consider that a
| cloud syncing service is spyware because it sends
| information to the provider, I don't know what to say.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >That being said, I would be O.K. if the scan is performed on
| the device upon physical access by the authorities.
|
| Why? You have physical access to the device. Just look at the
| data. The CSAM scan will only ID known imagery. What if this
| person has new content that is unknown to the database? This is
| a non-sensical justification.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I want my data to stay encrypted no matter what however I
| accept that there are people who can do bad things and access
| to their data could be valuable.
|
| So it is a compromise, the data stays encrypted but the
| authorities can get an idea about the nature of the data.
|
| Then it is up to the person to reveal their data as a part of
| a cooperation agreement. If there's a CSAM material match,
| the person can prove innocence by revealing the data(false
| positives) or the judges can increase the severity of the
| penalty for not cooperating.
|
| Milage may vary depending on your jurisdiction however I
| think it is a good way to look at someones stuff for
| offensive material without actually looking at unrelated
| stuff. So no match, no reason to try to get into the device.
| hfsh wrote:
| > the person can prove innocence
|
| Yeah...
|
| That's not a thing many people are really comfortable with
| in societies that are nominally non-authoritarian.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Innocence over credible suspicion.
| dylan604 wrote:
| What are you on about? The comment stated that the
| authorities have physical access to the device. That means
| that they can see whatever data you have because it's your
| device showing it to them.
|
| Also, this idea is even more dystopian than the original
| concept. The original idea was only going to scan content
| the user chose to push to Apple servers. This current
| suggests scanning the entire device just because johnny law
| has the device. That is soooo much worse of an idea.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Physical access doesn't mean access to a meaningful data
| if it is properly encrypted.
|
| I didn't say anything about Apple servers. They can
| implement a protocol that works over a wired connection
| only, gives the device the instruction to match all the
| files on the device against the given list of
| fingerprints and returns the results. No match, no
| results. If there's a match, return just enough to tell
| what fingerprints matched and nothing more.
| skoskie wrote:
| This is almost how the new scanning system works.
| mrtksn wrote:
| The difference is huge. Apple's proposed system scans
| everyone's(who uses iCloud) photos and reports them to
| the authorities(with Apple being a proxy). It's a
| snitch/God system.
|
| On my proposal, all photos on the device are scanned,
| scan results(hashes) are stored on device but no attempts
| to pin you down are made. Once there's a reason to
| suspect that you might be a criminal, only then the scan
| results are evaluated by the phone upon the request of
| the authorities to check on you as part of the
| investigation. This is blackbox system.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >Physical access doesn't mean access to a meaningful data
| if it is properly encrypted
|
| And what is properly encrypted if you can take advantage
| of 0-day vulns to unlock the phone so you have access to
| the data in an unencrypted state. You're not playing this
| through to the end of what physical access to the device
| means.
| mrtksn wrote:
| These risks are valid for any device, it has nothing to
| do with Apple or the feature in question. The police can
| have a physical access to your devices with or without
| implementation of this feature.
|
| I don't understand what are you arguing for, physical
| access is not a software thing and it is guarded by
| exactly the same mechanism that guard the access to you
| apple(the fruit) in your fridge.
| Exuma wrote:
| LOSE. The word is LOSE. LOOSE and LOSE do not even look
| remotely similar phonetically. LOOSE. GOOSE. MOOSE. NOOSE.
| CABOOSE. ... lose... which of these do not belong?
|
| I see this mistake once a day and it literally makes no sense
| to me, for the love of god stop plleeeasseeeeee
|
| Can you imagine watching a movie called FootLose?
| count wrote:
| Don't loose your mind over a grammatical error.
| Exuma wrote:
| Yes I get it, grammar nazi blah blah blah. I don't normally
| ever correct people's grammar (because who cares), but this
| one error is just so mindblowing to me, and the SHEER
| amount of times I see it makes me go absolutely nuts,
| because if you've spoken english for any length of time,
| you know about 1000 words with long-o soft-s that end in
| "oose", yet I see people saying "lose" as "loose" about....
| 2 times a day, 1 if I'm lucky, and it makes no sense
| whatsoever.
| [deleted]
| oehpr wrote:
| It's just a typo that doesn't get corrected. People just
| arn't super duper proof reading, they're just watching
| for the red squiggles that indicates a typo.
|
| You wouldn't be really mad if you spotted an "an" instead
| of an "and" in the wrong place, right? Because it's the
| same accident.
|
| If you think about it in these terms, you wouldn't of had
| as much of a reaction ;)
| Exuma wrote:
| No it's definitely not a typo lol, it's people who are
| reading it wrong in their head. The sheer amount of time
| that specific mistake is made very strongly leads me to
| believe it's most definitely not a typo.
|
| Watch, now that I pointed it out you will see it
| everywhere.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&
| que...
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Areddit.com+%22loos
| e+m...
|
| This is only one combination of words for example, but
| you get the idea
|
| While super rough/anecdotal... "loose my" has 38,000
| results and "lose my" has 900,000 results. Literally 1
| out of 25 times the word is used it's used wrong (if
| google is including roughly the same amount of items in
| its index)
| krona wrote:
| _The sheer amount of time that specific mistake is made_
|
| Don't you mean the shear _number_ of _times_ that mistake
| is made? I 'm sure you have no insight in to the
| aggregate duration of time all these people took to
| incorrectly press 'o' on their keyboard.
| Exuma wrote:
| You're making a point that I'm not ("someone is
| correcting someone else's spelling therefore ill dig
| through every single word to find a mistake they make and
| call them a hypocrite").
|
| I just said above I don't correct people's grammar
| because a) it doesn't matter and b) I make mistakes all
| the time.
|
| This on the other hand is if you see someone making the
| mistake (2 * 2 = 6). Even the most basic/out-of-the-math-
| loop person should not make this mistake. Or at the very
| least, it shouldn't be a common mistake made 1 out of ~25
| times
|
| These are 2 very common words, that sounds completely
| different, and there's nothing tricky about them. That's
| why it makes no sense to me, and each time I see it it's
| maddening. It's one thing to mess up something
| like....... "if I was____" (improper subjunctive mood), I
| see that mistake all the time, but who cares because how
| is anyone going to remember that? But lose and loose is
| just so fundamental to know the difference between when
| to use hard/soft "S" when preceeded by "oo". Furthermore,
| how many words are there that precede a soft "s" that
| only has one "o"... ? I can't think of any other than
| "dose".... but there are tons that fit the bill
| otherwise: hose, lose, nose, pose, rose..............
| Toutouxc wrote:
| > because if you've spoken english for any length of
| time, you know about 1000 words with long-o soft-s that
| end in "oose"
|
| > it's people who are reading it wrong in their head
|
| After speaking english (which is my second language and
| has nothing common with the slavic language I usually
| speak) for over 15 years, I learned TODAY that those
| words are supposed to sound different.
|
| Thank you and next time please consider that people like
| me exist.
| Exuma wrote:
| Interesting, so when you said the following 2 sentences:
|
| The team will lose the game.
|
| The lid on the jar is loose.
|
| How did you pronounce lose/loose up until now (either out
| loud or in your head)?
| gusmd wrote:
| Another ESL speaker here. To me they are pronounced
| exactly the same. The best way I can describe how I
| pronounce it to you is "loose" :)
| Exuma wrote:
| Lol hmmmm... very interesting.
|
| So how do you pronounce "nose" (like on your face)?
|
| Second question: how do you pronounce "bulldozer" (like
| the heavy machinery)
| spicybright wrote:
| Please stick to the discussion and keep the hissy fit to
| youself.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| They already collect as much information about you as possible.
| Whenever you turn on a Mac, you're essentially agreeing to a
| ton of data collection. It is naive to think that they will
| never share it with anyone.
| sneak wrote:
| They share data on 30,000 users per year with the US govt
| _without a search warrant_.
|
| There are even more when it comes to actual search warrants.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > There are even more when it comes to actual search
| warrants.
|
| Probably not much, since there is very little that would be
| within third-party custody that they would need a search
| warrant rather than one of various forms of subpoena
| (including administrative ones like NSLs) for, and the
| latter would already be counted in the "without a search
| warrant" count.
| sneak wrote:
| NSLs and FISA orders are a small fraction of the data
| that US cloud providers turn over. The majority is in
| response to actual search warrants.
| mulmen wrote:
| > That being said, I would be O.K. if the scan is performed on
| the device upon physical access by the authorities. You caught
| someone, You have enough evidence to investigate the person,
| you are allowed to search his/her home then maybe it can be
| O.K. to run a fingerprint scan on the phone to look for
| evidence.
|
| This was an unreasonable and unnecessary capability, no amount
| of comprise makes it a good idea.
|
| I don't want my devices to tattle on me. They exist to serve
| me, not the state.
|
| Don't negotiate with terrorists.
| alatkins wrote:
| Not to mention the potential severe consequences of the
| inevitable false positives, given the target subject matter.
| FabHK wrote:
| > Automatically scanning your stuff and reporting the bad
| things to the police is like the concept of God always
| watching.
|
| ... like all cloud providers scan your stuff and report the bad
| things (and Apple has not been doing it, but now proposed doing
| it in a more privacy preserving manner).
| CydeWeys wrote:
| There's a big difference though between cloud providers
| scanning files stored on their hardware that they own and
| Apple scanning files on _your_ hardware that you own.
| FabHK wrote:
| Is there? It's just running a blinded hashing and private
| set intersection locally, doesn't even know on device
| whether something has matched or what.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| It's a difference between police officer on the street
| and in your home.
| mrtksn wrote:
| It is your own device actively checking on you for
| misbehaving. Completely different from cloud providers
| checking on renters for misbehaving in their
| infrastructure.
|
| Your phone will listen to instructions from 3.rd parties
| to check on you and report you to the police(with Apple
| as a dispatcher).
| FabHK wrote:
| Well, no... the cloud provider (Apple in the case of
| iCloud) will check on you and potentially report you
| (just like all the other cloud providers do), but without
| scanning all your files in the cloud (unlike all the
| other cloud providers).
|
| As I said, your phone doesn't even know if anything
| matched.
| mrtksn wrote:
| The point is, your phone follows instructions from 3rd
| parties on scanning your data and reporting back the
| results. It's processing your files accordingly, with the
| intent to to make sure you are not doing anything wrong
| according to those 3rd parties. Your own device is
| policing you according to the requirements of those 3rd
| parties.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _That being said, I would be O.K. if the scan is performed on
| the device upon physical access by the authorities._
|
| Let me call Yet Another Insideous Concession (YAIC). It seems
| like this has the sell that "this has safe search built in so
| in the event of seizure, authorities won't have to do a full
| search". But actual situation is authorities would never be
| satisfied with things limiting their search on seizure but
| would be happy for this to be added where they'd wind-up using
| it primarily through some automatic mechanism.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| Yet Another Insidious Combinator sounds like a cool name for
| a startup incubator.
| skoskie wrote:
| I really wish the people - especially those on HN - would take
| a broader look at what Apple is proposing and better understand
| the forces at play before being so critical of the tech. I
| understand the initial knee-jerk anti-privacy response, but
| since there has been some time for people to learn all the
| facts, I remain amazed that they never come up in these
| threads.
|
| First, you hear a lot of people, including Snowden (while
| contradicting himself), say this isn't really about CSAM. That
| point is absolutely correct. This is ALL two things, each
| addressed here:
|
| 1. Legal liability, and the cost of processing as many
| subpoenas as they do.
|
| Ultimately, Apple has the keys to the data they store on their
| servers. They could easily encrypt all the data using on-device
| keys, before uploading to ensure they can't actually see
| anything. But this would cause a huge backlash from law
| enforcement that would cause congress to pass legislation
| mandating backdoors. In fact, Apple (big tech) has been trying
| to hold off that legislation since at least 2019, when they met
| with the Senate Judiciary committee [1].
|
| Quote from EFF article:
|
| > Many of the committee members seemed to arrive at the hearing
| convinced that they could legislate secure backdoors. Among
| others, Senators Graham and Feinstein told representatives from
| Apple and Facebook that they had a responsibility to find a
| solution to enable government access to encrypted data. Senator
| Graham commented, "My advice to you is to get on with it,
| because this time next year, if we haven't found a way that you
| can live with, we will impose our will on you."
|
| Apple is doing exactly what Graham told them to do. They have
| come up with a system that manages to increase security for
| most users by ensuring that nobody - not even Apple - has the
| decryption keys for your data, while also satisfying law
| enforcement to the degree necessary to prevent really harmful
| anti-privacy legislation. They managed to do it in a really
| creative way.
|
| It's not perfect of course. There are plenty of people with
| valid concerns, such as the potential for hash collisions and
| how a country like China might try to abuse the system and
| whether Apple would give into that pressure (as they did in the
| past). All of that is valid, and I'm glad to see Apple stop and
| examine all the complaints before pushing the release. But
| strictly on the topic of privacy, the new system will be a
| massive improvement.
|
| 2. User privacy. Yes, everyone thinks this is an invasion of
| privacy, but I just don't see how. The proposed on-device
| scanning solution provides MORE privacy than either the current
| iCloud system (in which Apple can be compelled to decrypt
| nearly all of your data) or the proposed [2] legislation - MORE
| privacy even for people found to meet the CSAM threshold!
|
| It seems to me there must be a lot of misunderstanding
| surrounding the encryption mechanisms Apple has proposed. But
| having read the technical documents, my view (again, strictly
| from a privacy standpoint) is that it appears to be extremely
| sound.
|
| Essentially, there are currently two parties that can decrypt
| your iCloud data with master keys - you and Apple.
|
| In VERY greatly simplified terms the new system will set one
| master decryption key on your device. But Apple will now
| instead use shared key encryption, which requires ALL of the
| ~31 keys to be present to decrypt the photos. Apple will have
| one of those keys. The other 30 (the "threshold") keys will be
| generated by a hash (of a hash of a hash) of the match found in
| the CSAM database. If no match is found, then the shared key
| needed to decrypt that image is never generated. It doesn't
| exist.
|
| One way to look at this is that it's the CSAM images that are
| the keys to unlocking the CSAM images. Without them, Apple
| _cannot_ comply with a subpoena (for photos ... for now). Even
| people who meet the CSAM threshold, can only have the CSAM
| images decrypted. All other photos that have no match in the
| CSAM database cannot be decrypted without access to the suspect
| 's phone.
|
| On the flip side, Apple is bending to congress's demands by
| voluntarily sharing information with law enforcement. I can
| absolutely understand how this behavior could make even
| perfectly innocent people feel uncomfortable. But in the
| context of the understanding that you have more privacy for
| yourself, while exposing those who deal in CSAM (and are dumb
| enough to store it in their iCloud account), I have to push my
| logical understanding to overcome my natural but unwarranted
| discomfort. Anything that prevents the government from getting
| universal backdoor into everyone's phone is a win, in my
| opinion.
|
| [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/12/senate-judiciary-
| commi...
|
| [2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/senates-new-anti-
| encry...
| Copernicron wrote:
| A great many people have attempted to explain why they are
| against this particular mechanism for detecting CSAM. I agree
| with you that Apple's implementation is technically
| impressive and probably the most private way to performing
| this action on device. However, I disagree that it's more
| private than the current cloud scanning. If the scanning
| happens client-side, then I have absolutely no control over
| what gets scanned and when. If the scanning is server-side,
| then I can simply not upload anything to the cloud and no
| scanning happens. I can't avoid client-side scanning like I
| can avoid server-side scanning.
|
| I realize this is a simplification of the actual method Apple
| has implemented and as it currently stands it would only scan
| photos that are destined to be uploaded to the cloud. If it
| were guaranteed that would never change then I think a lot
| more people wouldn't have a problem with it. But it will be
| abused. Every[1] single[2] time[3] this sort of system is
| implemented "for the children" it gets abused. The slippery
| slope here is real and well-demonstrated in various countries
| around the world.
|
| For my part I have come across an imperfect analogy that I
| feel accurately captures how I feel about Apple's solution.
| My phone is like my diary. There's nothing illegal in there.
| But there is stuff that is deeply personal, private, and even
| some that would be terribly embarrassing if the wrong person
| saw it. As long as I keep my diary to myself and don't let
| anyone see it I have nothing to worry about. If I were to
| send my diary off to someone else known to read diaries then
| it's my own fault as much as anything else if it gets read
| and intimate details of my life known.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_
| Uni...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Aust
| ral...
|
| [3]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Russia
| Lamad123 wrote:
| I am seeing a lot of these contrived tedious comments
| shilling for this company.
| polote wrote:
| > In my opinion, Apple will break its brand if they actually go
| ahead and release "self-reporting to the authorities" device
| features.
|
| I'm always astonished that some (random) people feel more
| confident on their brand analysis than the best people at this
| specific topic paid thousands of dollars at Apple to do just
| that. Or maybe I'm the one who is wrong
| eitland wrote:
| > I'm always astonished that some (random) people feel more
| confident on their brand analysis than the best people at
| this specific topic paid thousands of dollars at Apple to do
| just that. Or maybe I'm the one who is wrong
|
| I'm afraid you are wrong.
|
| I'm also astonished that Google has allowed search to
| detoriate to a point where competition actually has a chance.
|
| I'm astonished that Microsoft cheapest their brand by serving
| me ads on my Windows with Professional license.
|
| and probably a few other things.
| mrtksn wrote:
| What makes you think that I am random, I did brand analysis,
| that I am confident , that confidence is over the confidence
| of the people Apple paid, and those highly paid people
| concluded differently?
|
| That comment looks like partly uneducated guess, partly a
| fallacy to refer to the "authorities of branding". I'm always
| amazed to see people who assume that employees of large
| companies cannot make mistakes or that they have unlimited
| power over the decision making.
| polote wrote:
| You are probably not random, I just added the word to make
| the message clear.
|
| There is no authorities of branding, it is just that there
| are people who are paid for that, and it is very unlikely
| that shareholders will let Apple do things that decrease
| the market value over a long period of time.
| jorl17 wrote:
| How do you explain, among many other things, for example,
| the Digg fiasco? Could they not have seen it coming?
|
| People make mistakes everywhere. Teams make mistakes
| everywhere.
|
| Of course it's much more likely that they know what they
| are doing and that they have weighed the pros and cons.
| But, then again, even if they still go forward with it,
| they have changed their course slightly. Do you believe
| it was part of their plan? (genuine question)
|
| Do you trust that the code written by experts has no
| flaws? How about teams of experts? Do rockets not
| sometimes have bugs which cause them to fail? If a team
| of highly skilled programmers in N-version controlled
| critical systems can fail, why can't someone or some team
| in such unpredictable topics such as market analysis and
| brand perception fail as well?
|
| Again: I share your sentiment that surely they have
| thought about this. It's just that I'm not so sure that
| they were as competent as you might think -- maybe
| because fundamentally it's a very reactive and
| unpredictable market!
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| The brand is ultimately in the minds of consumers, and if you
| followed discussions, many of them (and press) had the same
| impression that it is inconsistent with Apple positioning
| wrt. privacy.
|
| While household analysts get things wrong all the time,
| companies are not infallible, including Apple.
| polote wrote:
| You can make a mistake once or two, but if a company like
| Apple keep pushing for something ( that can hypothetically
| kill its brand) it is unlikely that it will actually kill
| the brand.
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| Unlikely, sure, but its happened countless times. Its not
| useful or interesting to say "you're probably wrong
| because you're not head of apple".
| pope_meat wrote:
| How could a big bank like Lehman Brothers with their
| highly paid risk analysis people fail?
|
| How could Rome fall?
|
| The sun never set on the British Empire.
|
| Both me and my partner were very close to joining the
| apple eco system because we felt completely betrayed by
| G, now I'm researching alternative OS to flash my phone.
| We both abandoned Google search and browsers. The only
| FAANG I'm not actively avoiding is Netflix.
| NoSorryCannot wrote:
| If you have to be an insider to pontificate, then we can
| discontinue HN comments since meetings inside Apple already
| exist.
| torstenvl wrote:
| > _That being said, I would be O.K. if the scan is performed on
| the device upon physical access by the authorities._
|
| In the U.S., due to how the rules of evidence work, this would
| be of limited utility. You want the results of the scan to come
| from a trustworthy expert who can testify, who uses equipment
| and software that is tested and calibrated frequently. Because
| the suspect's own device won't have those calibration records,
| trying to use the results from such a scan would raise issues
| of foundation and authenticity.
|
| If I were a prosecutor and I had a case like that come in, I
| would still send the device in to the lab for an expert
| forensic extraction.
|
| (Edit to reply to a response below: Yes, theoretically, such an
| on-device scan could be used to establish probable cause, but
| that seems circular, since the authorities wouldn't be able to
| seize the phone in the first place unless they already had
| probable cause or consent from the owner, either of which would
| obviate the need to establish probable cause via the on-device
| scan.)
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| It would be used to get a warrant to trace the persons online
| activities and get his/her phone as evidence. This isn't
| going to be used to send out a SWAT team upon notice from
| apple.
| Piskvorrr wrote:
| [citation-needed], and Apple's pinky swear doesn't count.
| skoskie wrote:
| The argument made in several comments that this will
| result in SWATing isn't cited because it's an opinion on
| potential future events. A counter opinion, therefore,
| also would not need citation.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Thanks, interesting details.
|
| I guess the legislators and the tech companies can work
| something out on the practical issues instead of turning
| people's devices into always watching policemen.
| saltedonion wrote:
| I bet this had something to do with #AppleToo and the company
| didn't want to fight 2 PR battles at once. My bet is this is just
| a delay tactic.
| raylad wrote:
| EFF petition here. Numbers do count.
|
| https://act.eff.org/action/tell-apple-don-t-scan-our-phones
| kf6nux wrote:
| I bet people would have had no problem with the CSAM on-device
| scanning if it involved neither Apple employees snooping on your
| photos nor government reporting.
|
| e.g. if they made it so their software simply refused to upload a
| photo and inform the user why it refused to upload it, then
| there's no privacy issue (at least not until they do add a
| backdoor later on).
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| I respectfully disagree. In my mind, the fact that Apple
| employees do first level filtering is a minor problem.
|
| The main problem is the precedent this sets: on device scanning
| is now possible.
|
| Before this, if a government asked Apple to scan all the phones
| for something, Apple could say "we're sorry but we don't have
| the capability " and they could not be compelled by legal
| means.
|
| Now, a large part of that argument has been eroded. Apple may
| have added in a few hurdles, but the first crucial step of on-
| device surveillance capability has been installed and is on
| path to being normalized.
|
| It doesn't matter that they don't do this yet. We are
| undeniably closer to direct phone surveillance than we have
| been before.
| kf6nux wrote:
| The supposition was that, if the scanning had no reporting
| capability, then Apple could still claim a lack of
| capability. They could respond to government demands with,
| "Sorry, our software only blocks uploads. We have no ability
| to get telemetry on what uploads are blocked or how often."
|
| That proposal probably wouldn't work for a lot of reasons
| though. The largest blocker being that (IIUC) the NCMEC won't
| share a DB of offending signatures without NDA, so Apple
| probably can't load it onto consumer devices.
| CubsFan1060 wrote:
| Wouldn't this make it simply a way for the people who trade in
| these sorts of things to get more information about how to
| avoid them?
|
| i.e. my iphone told me this photo was in the database, so I'll
| start adjusting it until it 'passes', and them I'm free to
| share it without detection.
| kf6nux wrote:
| Since Apple shared the algo, people who trade in these things
| already know how to get around it (just adjust the image so
| the fingerprint changes). People who trade in these things
| will probably turn off icloud too.
|
| Similarly, governments could take a known image they want
| banned (say of a national embarrassment), grab some CSAM,
| tweak the signature on the CSAM to match the photo they want
| banned, and add the tweaked photo to the CSAM DB.
| Zenst wrote:
| So a feature for child safety, delayed due to public peer-
| pressure. How much of the public pee-pressure was from children?
| An odd question but equally, does highlight how many things are
| done in the "think of the children" vein that never even asks a
| single child for their thoughts. Whilst we all admit there are
| many things to protect children from and even some questions, but
| imagine if Apple countered with an advert showing lots of
| children saying how it's good how Apple is protecting their
| safety. How would that sit with public opinion then?
| klipklop wrote:
| A child's choice or thoughts (within reason) we rarely take
| into consideration because they do things like shove raisins up
| their noses. Kid's should be allowed to be kids and not be
| dragged into this discussion.
|
| This is a complex issue and there is a good reason why we don't
| let children consent to various things or sign legally binding
| contracts. Kid's are not just "little adults."
|
| I will admit if apple did that it would be a pretty effective,
| but really sleazy.
| aborsy wrote:
| The idea of a vendor scanning your device is terrifying, to say
| the least.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| And, I might add, they've created the infrastructure that
| allows governments to scan for other 'questionable content'.
| How long until they begin to scan for hate-speech? What if you
| download files from Wikileaks? Or a journalist gets their hands
| on classified materials? The government could know about this
| before they have a chance to release it.
| gremloni wrote:
| Why bring up specifically hate-speech as some sort of paragon
| that needs to be protected? I agree with you but put hate-
| speech in its place, it's vile.
| danlugo92 wrote:
| This is obviously the end plan.
|
| I support all measures against child abuse, but child abuse
| is always the trojan horse.
| SergeAx wrote:
| See what you did? Chirdren will not be safe now.
|
| (it is not a sarcastic rant, just a heads up on Apple's PR
| wording)
| opnac wrote:
| We are likely a week and a bit away from new iPhone releases--a
| good bit of damage control at play here.
| concinds wrote:
| I think it's just sad that Apple will now likely be forced to
| switch to server-side scanning, which they've explained is
| strictly inferior to their client-side proposal (and which I
| wrote about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28176418).
| Irrational fears and (some) misinformation (which I won't accude
| HN of, for the purposes of this discussion, just reddit, Twitter,
| and the "tech NGOs") will result in worse outcomes for consumers.
|
| This backlash (including these NGOs) also protested the iMessage
| changes by equating "putting a nudity warning" with "breaking E2E
| encryption". I'm not a parent yet, but why prevent tech companies
| from adding this obvious (and desirable to many) feature?
|
| It'll be interesting if they walk back their fears of "non-CSAM
| hashes being added" when that problem is still present with
| cloud-scanning. They didn't protest Google, Microsoft, and others
| using PhotoDNA, which presents identical risks. Will they now
| still complain about Apple if they propose cloud-scanning? They'd
| be hypocritical not to, since their current arguments would still
| apply. But then why haven't they complained when everyone else
| did it?
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| How is scanning on My Phone better than on server side? Either
| you trust apple with your data or you don't, supposedly only
| they have the keys to open the data on their servers in case it
| gets into 3rd party hands. I trust that far more than I trust
| Apple acting as a government spy on my own phone. Sure there
| are trade offs, but this one is well worth it. Your data isn't
| sitting unencrypted on apple servers. They have a key to open
| it but hackers who might steal that don't. I assure you it's as
| good as any encryption you would have applied to it.
| erikpukinskis wrote:
| Because, with the proposed system in place, if law
| enforcement wants to decrypt your data they have to subpoena
| you, not Apple.
|
| As long as Apple can't do this client-side scanning scheme,
| they have to keep the keys to your data on their servers,
| which means law enforcement can subpoena them without you
| even being aware of it.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| ...So they're still doing it. Yeah no thanks. I've seen what the
| Stasi and KGB did. We don't need a tech company like Apple to
| tattle on our behalf for what their AI interpreted as illegal but
| was not. The last thing the average American wants to do is to
| talk to police and lawyers.
| lugged wrote:
| Between this and the docker desktop bs we're talking about moving
| around a thousand apple laptop purchases a year over to Linux.
| neom wrote:
| Just as a reference point. Apple sells approx 2,200 macs an
| hour.
| lugged wrote:
| I get it, but we're not going to do it to make them sad.
| We'll be doing it because their product sucks.
| neom wrote:
| For sure, I wasn't taking a swipe at you, it's fair! I was
| just giving the reference point.
| pshirshov wrote:
| Yes, sure. Probably they won't notice anyone leaving.
|
| That's not a reason not to leave though.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| That seems crazy from the production side. Think of what it
| would look like to manufacture 2,200+ macs per hour
| (19,000,000 year).
| propogandist wrote:
| don't worry, they're offsetting environmental harm by
| excluding chargers and other accessories from your
| purchase. You can pay more to get these items, because
| that's Apple's commitment to the 'environment'.
| dharmab wrote:
| Pre-pandemic, Ford sold a pickup truck on average once
| every 30 seconds.
| frockington1 wrote:
| off topic but post-pandemic my Bronco still doesn't have
| a build date, this chip shortage is out of hand
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| You have no idea. I just got a 100 week factory lead time
| for a cortex m4 ARM chip... it's not a super rare chip.
| godelski wrote:
| A year later and Ampere GPUs are still near impossible to
| get. So much for my home ML machine... (literally only
| waiting on a GPU and been that way for a year)
| katbyte wrote:
| apple sold 18 million macs in 2018
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| Apparently they sold 6 million Macs in Q2 [1]
|
| 6M/91d/24h is about 2700 units per hour, if those numbers
| from statista are true.
|
| 1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/263444/sales-of-
| apple-ma...
| mnd999 wrote:
| Docker desktop for Linux is coming. They've already said so.
| Your boss is going to end up paying for Docker. Giving your
| security department the ability to restrict what images you can
| pull is going to become a checkbox in your infosec audit.
| nickjj wrote:
| > Docker desktop for Linux is coming. They've already said
| so.
|
| I can't officially say how Docker will implement DD on Linux
| but I have a hunch it will be optional.
|
| If it's not optional then it means you will need to install
| DD on your servers to run Docker which I can't realistically
| see happening. I'm guessing DD on Linux will just provide a
| few quality of life enhancements that exist on Windows and
| Mac, such as the host.docker.internal address and a UI for
| certain things for the folks who prefer that.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| You can just run Docker natively on Linux, no need for Docker
| Desktop.
| dharmab wrote:
| On Linux you don't need Docker at all. You can use containerd
| directly (or via alternative tooling such as CRI-O or
| Podman). Kubernetes has already deprecated the Docker APIs
| and uses OCI APIs to spawn containers.
|
| https://opencontainers.org/
| mnd999 wrote:
| Of course you can, Docker's play here is not about what's
| technically possible. It's about what they can convince
| your IT / infosec team to block.
| ulzeraj wrote:
| Just proxy or mirror a curated list of docker images to your
| internal registry?
| xrobledo84 wrote:
| What is going on with Docker?
| headmelted wrote:
| Just going to assume this is due to how the hypervisor on
| macOS won't allow dynamic memory allocation to the runtime.
|
| On a Mac, you need to allocate a fixed amount of RAM to
| Docker, which isn't the case on other platforms where it can
| dynamically allocate and release as much as your containers
| demand.
|
| It's very painful in workloads that need Docker. Especially
| on MacBooks where you can't upgrade the RAM to compensate.
| dharmab wrote:
| Your assumption is incorrect. This is about Docker Inc
| starting to charge money for Docker Desktop:
| https://www.docker.com/blog/updating-product-subscriptions/
| headmelted wrote:
| It certainly was. Yikes.
| codys wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28369570
|
| (while on linux one can use the docker command line tool
| without any docker desktop thing, on mac docker desktop wraps
| together running a linux vm to run the docker daemon &
| containers inside, making it the most straight forward way of
| running docker on mac)
| istingray wrote:
| Hell yes!!!! Consider System76, one of the few Linux-focused
| vendors. Their tech support is great. Not sure the scale is a
| match for them, 1,000 is a lot of laptops.
|
| But Linux is a side project for Dell and Lenovo. They put up
| with it but don't really support it. Support a vendor who is
| all in on Linux.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| How's fit and finish on those?
|
| Build quality is a big deal. I feel like the midline for PC
| makers is pretty low -- Dell has mostly been kinda trashy,
| though the XPS machines have a good feel to them (it's a
| shame they've been kind of lemony for us).
|
| Absent the keyboard kerfluffle, Apple's build quality has
| traditionally been very high -- IME, on par with the IBM-era
| ThinkPads in the sense that the hardware lasts longer than
| technical viability. How is S76 here?
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| I've not used a System76 laptop, but I had a coworker who
| used them for a long while. He never had particularly kind
| things to say about the polish. I'm overall not too
| impressed by what I see on their website; I really want a
| higher-res display at least.
|
| The coworker did eventually move to a Mac, but has recently
| expressed dissatisfaction and may move back to Linux. Not
| sure if that'll be with a System76 machine, though.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Did s/he say what was annoying about the Mac to them?
|
| (I'm not trying to argue. I'm always curious.)
| istingray wrote:
| Lemur Pro: Fit and finish is a A- for PCs (B compared to a
| Mac) Solid build, no super weird stuff on the Lemur Pro.
| The silkscreen for one of the USB ports says 3.1 but it's
| 3.2. The webcam has a little lip. Trackpad is pretty
| clickey (ive been used to apple synthetic click)
| infogulch wrote:
| Maybe consider the Framework laptop which has made the rounds
| here a couple times recently. They made good hardware choices
| for a productivity laptop (3:2 screen, good keyboard), is
| easily reconfigurable with USB4 modules for a custom array of
| ports, is designed to be easily upgraded and repaired, and is
| sold for a fair price. There's an argument to be made that a
| device designed for upgradability and repairability can
| reduce TCO. Mine is shipping this month.
|
| https://frame.work/
| AHappyCamper wrote:
| Facebook also "delayed" their surveillance plan for WhatsApp....
| and eventually implemented it. Apple is now copying Facebook.
| Apple must abandon this feckless, evil plan, or face losing their
| user-base. This contradicts Apple's core values.
| mlindner wrote:
| Good! Now expose fully how it works and open it up to bug
| bounties for people to show how easy it is to insert a backdoor
| image into the system.
| sebiw wrote:
| What do you think are the chances we'll see a server-side
| implementation instead of the so far proposed client-side one?
| JohnFen wrote:
| Personally, I wouldn't object to a server-side implementation
| at all. My objection is that it's client-side.
| nowherebeen wrote:
| If server-side implementation, you mean they will scan images
| that I manually upload to iCloud, then I don't have a problem
| with it. As long as its off my personal device, and it is
| through my own action and not theirs. My device is my property,
| not theirs.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I guess the trade off here is that your data is still stored
| in (essentially) plain text on Apple's servers, and they (or
| whatever authorities) can still rifle through it at any time
| without telling you.
| nowherebeen wrote:
| iCloud is encrypted but Apple has the private keys so it's
| only slightly better than plain text. You should not expect
| you data to be anything more whenever you post anything
| online. The only exception is E2EE but Apple will never
| offer it.
| erikpukinskis wrote:
| The whole point of this hashing thing everyone complained
| about was to enable E2EE.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Just to be clear - that's pure speculation. There's no
| evidence (apart from this local CSAM detection) or other
| reports to back that up.
| nowherebeen wrote:
| Agreed. If they really planned to enable E2EE, they would
| have announced it with the CSAM detection. It makes no
| sense to have all this backlash only to enable E2EE at a
| later date.
| matwood wrote:
| Which ironically, is less transparent, less open, and less
| private than Apple's original plan.
| ByteWelder wrote:
| The main issue with privacy is not necessarily the
| initial implementation, but the sliding scale that it
| permits. Apple's statement that they will ignore
| "government requests" for broadening the scope is almost
| funny, because the government wouldn't request: it would
| demand. Just like how China has control over the crypto
| keys for the iCloud data in Chinese data centers.
|
| So you're right that the initial plan is indeed more
| privacy-friendly, but it has some major future privacy
| implications that are much worse.
| alibert wrote:
| Is there any other way? The way I see it, the scanning is
| coming either fully server side or with a bit more
| privacy with the proposed client side system so is there
| something better?
|
| Others providers do it and I don't expect Apple to sit
| and do nothing about it (governments, ngo pressure,
| etc.). Something worse is that the Apple brand could be
| labeled as a "CP enabler" which would very much hurt
| Apple way more than the current backslash.
| ByteWelder wrote:
| Yes: E2EE and not having the ability to scan is a legit
| alternative. Apple has lost its credibility as a privacy-
| enabler. That's a real consequence, as opposed to a
| potential consequence of being targeted by propaganda.
| yyyk wrote:
| There's a good chance we'll have a server-side implementation
| _and_ a client-side implementation. The currently proposed
| client-side implementation has obvious holes and there 's no
| way Apple doesn't know that.
|
| They can expand client-side scanning massively or implement
| server-side scanning too. The latter will cause less
| objections, because 'Apple will not provide E2E' isn't a news
| item if they keep silent, while the client-side expansion will
| be.
| CubsFan1060 wrote:
| My prediction, based on zero evidence whatsoever. They'll
| implement it server side, and eventually introduce encrypted
| iCloud photos. But your choice is to allow this scheme (scan on
| device before upload) and have E2EE, or to not have E2E
| encryption and have it scanned on the server side.
| cwizou wrote:
| Interesting thought but Apple never gives choice on much
| (well except Safari UI now!), and I don't see them giving an
| explicit choice on this. If they really had for a goal to
| implement E2EE, I could maybe see this now that you are
| mentioning it.
|
| However if I had to make a guess, they'll go server-side
| scanning only, and E2EE backups/Photos will never happen.
|
| To me it's a pipe dream to believe they would offer E2EE,
| there's too much international pressure from governments
| around the world to keep iCloud backups open and going E2EE
| would trigger unpalatable retaliations.
| rjvir wrote:
| I think it's plausible that they'd offer E2EE for all of
| iCloud.
|
| They already do it for iMessage, and it makes it easier to
| turn down subpoenas if they can credibly claim that they
| can't even access the data themselves.
|
| Likewise, offering an explicit choice also seems plausible.
| The full E2EE flow might have UX downsides (for example,
| the user might need to write down a recovery seed phrase on
| paper), so they might not force all users into that flow.
| [deleted]
| cwizou wrote:
| But that's the thing, they have reached a compromise
| regarding iMessage being "E2EE" by keeping all those
| avenues (iCloud backups and iMessage on iCloud) that
| essentially trade E2EE for the convenience.
|
| Most users opt-in to the convenience for iMessage making
| it, for all purposes, no longer E2EE.
|
| I don't see them removing that precisely because of
| iMessage.
| [deleted]
| sebiw wrote:
| Huh, I never really thought about the possibility that Apple
| would implement both schemes. I don't think they will go down
| that path, though. Why: Cost and complexity for Apple would
| be somewhat higher and the surrounding discussion about
| capabilities (abuse of the client-side system for other
| things than CSAM scanning) would persist just because of the
| existence of client-side scanning. Let's see how this story
| continues.
| jpxw wrote:
| I highly doubt they'd offer a choice like this. 99% of their
| customers won't know what these terms mean.
| derefr wrote:
| I'm guessing that rather than a choice, it'd be one or the
| other depending on the market, with most countries getting
| the server-side version, while totalitarian countries where
| people are already used to being spied on get the client-
| side one.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Is there an alternate where they upload, scan, encrypt only
| non-offending data? Is there a way to share a public key that
| only allows for encrypting but not decrypting that would make
| this a viable option?
| [deleted]
| blacktriangle wrote:
| Assuming they become very clear about advertising what they are
| doing and whether your data is stored locally or in their
| cloud, I might be okay with this. Having a vendor scanning my
| own personal device is downright terrifying to the point of
| walking away from iOS full stop. However the same logic can be
| applied to Apple's servers, and I think has serious
| implications for how we view cloud services going forward. If a
| company signs up to host my content, doesn't it make sense they
| would like to examine that content to make sure they are not
| breaking any laws simply by being in possession of said
| content?
|
| The real answer is the same it's always been, we need to
| abandon the cloud in favor of going back to self-hosting and
| bring back the fully distributed internet, the problem is just
| getting technology to the point where doing so is easy enough
| for non-technical users.
| CubsFan1060 wrote:
| This is already done by quite a few places. Take a look at
| PhotoDNA. I believe at least OneDrive and Gmail have been
| confirmed to do this same scanning.
|
| For reference, from 2014:
| https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/06/why-the-gmail-scan-that-
| le...
| jliptzin wrote:
| They scan material already on servers they own, I don't
| think anyone is surprised about this. If you don't want
| anyone seeing or scanning your data, don't push it to the
| cloud. Apple's new policy of analyzing your data before it
| even gets to their cloud would break that paradigm.
| simion314 wrote:
| >What do you think are the chances we'll see a server-side
| implementation instead of the so far proposed client-side one?
|
| If Google, Microsoft and Facebook are doing this for years then
| the question is why is Apple not doing it? Did they not think
| about the children until last month?
| superkuh wrote:
| "Apple Delays Rollout of Security Compromising Backdoor"
| q-rews wrote:
| "...in Order to Implement It Silently Once the Uproar Quieted"
| Macha wrote:
| I'm pleasantly surprised Apple backed down on well... anything.
| Especially this.
|
| However, macrumors has probably the most user-hostile gdpr modal
| I've encountered.
|
| 1. I used it on my android device. The modal popped up, I gave it
| several seconds to load in, everything seemed stable, I go to tap
| the settings dialog and... up jumps the modal and registers a
| click on the accept button.
|
| 2. Want to go fix it after the fact? Go to the footer, find the
| privacy link, find the link in the middle of the policy, now you
| get the desktop modal on the site.
|
| 3. Everything shows consent default off, so all good right? Nope.
| Expand out the toggles and you'll see under the "Personalised
| ads" a set of more granular toggles.
|
| 4. So toggle them off and you're good, right? Nope, each of them
| you need to tap into and get to a new screen. This new screen has
| two modals, one for consent, and one defaulted in for legitimate
| interest. One screen per sub modal, and the only way to go back
| to get to the others is to click "Back" in the top left, which
| leaves you at the root of the flow.
|
| I have seen this particular modal on or two other sites, and
| finding yet another layer to bury the controls in seems to be a
| new "innovation" in this regard. Hopefully they're one of the
| sites targeted by noyb's enforcement complaints.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| A new job recently sent me a Mac after I've been using Linux for
| the last 5+ years. I couldn't believe all the things that I had
| to agree too. I don't think Apple has ever been about privacy. It
| is one thing to say you support privacy, but another thing to
| actually do it. Apple appears to only say they do, but their
| actions show otherwise.
| tlynchpin wrote:
| Apple is well regarded for their strategy. I don't find it very
| credible that Apple is reacting here, it seems apparent that they
| would anticipate substantial negative reception.
|
| So this delay is preordained in the strat, right?
|
| But Apple is only human and has had its share of monumental wtf,
| so this is just a huge gaffe? The spyware team didn't know about
| iphone 13 launch? This seems incredible.
|
| There is some n-dimensional chess at play here. I feel like a
| popcorn munching audience member who is actually a pawn in
| another dimension.
| BugWatch wrote:
| It's a corporation, not a human.
|
| (Corporations should never have been given "bodies" at all,
| IMO.)
| cletus wrote:
| [Insert Picard meme of "Mild Shock"]
|
| This is good but not good enough. Why? Because delayed means it
| might still happen. What we're aiming for is "cancelled".
|
| Scanning your phone and your content is a terrible capability to
| exist and precedent to set. It's a small step to extend that
| system to, say, scanning for DMCA violations, pirated content,
| etc. And those will be justified by those activities supporting
| terrorism.
| akomtu wrote:
| Translating this to plain English using the corp/gov lingo:
|
| Child = authoritarian Safety = control/censorship (depends on
| context) Features = restrictions
| walshemj wrote:
| Mac rumors has really drunk the cool aid with that headline and
| not actually call out what apple was trying to do.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| So, Apple choosing to endanger children to avoid bad PR
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Do you sincerely believe the situation is _that_ simple? It 's
| not like they are disabling a feature that has already been
| around, so how is keeping the status quo 'endangering
| children'?
| concinds wrote:
| It's quite commonly accepted that stopping the spread of CSAM
| reduces demand, which has an effect on supply, and directly
| saves some children's lives from trafficking.
| snovv_crash wrote:
| Ah, but what about the children oppressed by authoritarian
| governments? If we give those governments better tools for
| oppression, does that harm more children than CSAM
| reduction helps?
| burnished wrote:
| This is a spicy hot take. I could see an element of valid
| criticism here, maybe something along the lines of questioning
| how their equivocation now lines up with their previous
| 'spirited' defense of this project (this would genuinely make
| an interesting case study). Placing Apple in the active role of
| endangering children though! Seems like the blame is in the
| wrong place.
| [deleted]
| musha68k wrote:
| Bad actors will just skip any of these technologies anyways:
| recording with old camera gear, sending hard disks by mail,
| meeting IRL to exchange USB sticks, etc
|
| Security theatre.
|
| Back in 2013 Snowden thankfully gave us good insight into why
| these efforts are made.
| erikpukinskis wrote:
| Some bad actors are stupid and lazy.
|
| The fact that people can still get away with crimes given a
| protection scheme is not, in itself, reason to skip the
| scheme. The relevant question is: will it catch some people?
| musha68k wrote:
| No, the relevant question is: who gets to decide that we
| end up having this discussion?
|
| Mass surveillance is not an option.
|
| Even if it were, it would eventually expose a wrong
| approach. Mitigating (systemic) child abuse does not
| necessitate flashy "crypto surveillance". It asks for well
| educated and vigilant societies and correspondingly smart
| and industrious investigation work.
|
| At best this is aimless activism. Either way trust has been
| broken. Big time.
|
| With great power comes great responsibility.
| [deleted]
| beezischillin wrote:
| I fully expect them to eventually go ahead with it, I just wonder
| if they'll turn this on via a flip of a switch when the device
| phones home or it will be a software update. So basically: will
| upgrading to iOS 15 be safe for now?
| post_break wrote:
| Wow, we made Apple blink. I did not see that coming. People like
| me who sold their iPhone and cancelled all services probably are
| a drop in the bucket, but it looks like the general public and
| the news picked up on this enough to get the ball rolling to make
| them step back. So now the question is in what 15.X update do
| they just sneak it in.
| azalemeth wrote:
| Part of me wonders if the calculus includes either (a) the open
| letter signed by (effectively) ~10k verified developers [1],
| (b) the complaint letters from groups like the EFF [2, 3], or
| (c) expert and qualified input from their (presumably huge)
| marketing department...
|
| [1] https://appleprivacyletter.com/
|
| [2] https://act.eff.org/action/tell-apple-don-t-scan-our-phones
|
| [3] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/apples-plan-think-
| diff...
| koheripbal wrote:
| More likely D) The regulatory threats from the EU.
| gambiting wrote:
| Wasn't the feature meant to be US only - at least for now
| anyway?
| Mindwipe wrote:
| Apple said themselves, there's only one iOS ROM, so it
| was there on everyone else's devices regardless.
| FabHK wrote:
| But enabled only for the US region initially. That is bad
| in itself, though, I think, insofar as it signals that
| the system can be switched on and off, and thus maybe
| configured, on a per-region basis, which does seem to
| open the door for government pressure and abuse.
| threatofrain wrote:
| The EU's mood is cloudy here, as there's also legislative
| pressure against child porn coming up this year.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Or D) employees who weren't part of the discussions heard
| about it the day before the official announcement, and made a
| stink about it internally.
| haswell wrote:
| E) All of the above
| lumost wrote:
| F) They received requests to scan for other forms of
| content from various governments.
| valkmit wrote:
| Underrated comment right here
| sslayer wrote:
| G) Secret Pedo BoardMembers/Investors/Mutual Fund Manager
| threaten to dump all Apple Stock.
| marcan_42 wrote:
| G) Turns out they can't know if they're scanning for
| other forms of content, since they delegate computing the
| hash lists of banned content to government organizations
| like NCMEC anyway.
| darwingr wrote:
| So a hash for a public key used to encrypt something
| could be in there? Banned books? A video of unsavoury
| evidence to an institution?
| dave7 wrote:
| Yes indeed.
| jtbayly wrote:
| E) Their promise that they would only include scanning of
| images that appeared in multiple countries' databases.
|
| As of right now, _is_ there even a database other than the
| one NCMEC has? I suspect they are waiting for the NCMEC to
| spin up its European branch.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| Yes, the IWF database.
|
| Indeed, the NCMEC database does not have an especially
| good reputation, much like MCMEC themselves.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| There is International Centre for Missing and Exploited
| Children) (ICMEC), Child Exploitation and On-line
| Protection (CEOP), Parents and Abducted Children Together
| (PACT), Missing Children Europe (MCE), and more just in
| Europe.
|
| ICMEC is a fork of NCMEC.
| josefx wrote:
| They are probably just waiting for several countries to
| spin up their databases of gay porn and blasphemous /
| regime critical memes. Shouldn't be too hard to find two
| of those countries working on a shared "child abuse"
| database now that the feature has been widely publicized.
| camgunz wrote:
| Honestly, maybe that happened and they went "oh. shit."
| and now they're "delaying".
| Animats wrote:
| There's so much censorship now worldwide, and it's
| increasing. Russia doesn't allow promotion of the gay
| agenda. Parts of the Islamic world view criticism of
| Islam as a killing offense. China won't tolerate the flag
| of Taiwan, Falun Gong, or criticism of the Party.
| Afghanistan no longer allows music.
|
| A decade ago, all those things were on the Internet
| worldwide.
| ilamont wrote:
| China is also cracking down on LGBTQ groups:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57759480
|
| _Many of the closed WeChat accounts display messages
| saying that they had "violated" Internet regulations,
| without giving further details.
|
| The account names have also been deleted and just read
| "unnamed".
|
| "After receiving relevant complaints, all content has
| been blocked and the account has been suspended," the
| notice said.
|
| The crackdown is the latest example of what some call
| growing intolerance toward the LGBT community. Last year,
| Shanghai Pride week, modelled on Pride events in the
| West, was cancelled without explanation after 11 years of
| it going ahead.
|
| In 2019, the Oscar-winning Freddie Mercury biopic
| Bohemian Rhapsody was released in Chinese cinemas, but
| references to the Queen singer's sexuality and AIDS
| diagnosis were censored.
|
| In 2018, Weibo said all posts related to homosexuality
| would be taken down, although it backtracked after
| massive outrage._
| totetsu wrote:
| WeChat seems like a pretty big part of life in China and
| with the know your customer requirements I imagine those
| accounts are links to individuals. It must be a nightmare
| to have one canceled.
| noduerme wrote:
| And most recently, China wants to censor less masculine
| men: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/china-bans-sissy-men-
| tv/
|
| I have a theory about this that isn't politically
| correct, but here goes. This has nothing to "conservative
| values" or homophobia or whatever you call sexual
| repression in places like Arkansas and Afghanistan. It's
| not based on religion or culture. It's just the CCP
| running an actuarial table.
|
| The CCP is a blunt force instrument. It realized some
| time ago that the one-child policy had left it holding
| the bag on taking care of a rapidly aging population
| without enough young people to power the economy in 10-20
| years. Not only that, you couldn't easily just repeal the
| policy and expect a baby boom. They took a look at Japan
| and realized they were about to hit a demographically
| driven, deflationary wall. So the party planners moved
| from repealing the 1CPolicy to actually offering cash
| bonuses for second children. This volte-face happened
| within a few short years. But it didn't work as well as
| expected. Their sudden magnanimous gesture didn't bump
| their 5-year plan's crop of new Han for a few reasons: A
| shortage of women (unexpected consequence of the 1CP),
| more women in the workforce who don't want to have
| children, _video game culture_ which makes young men stay
| home instead of going out and impregnating girls -- which
| is why they 're now limiting screen time, _gender
| fluidity / queerness_ which suppresses baby-generation,
| and of course _western individualism_ , the great bugbear
| of "harmony," which encourages people to wait for love
| and financial stability before having children. At the
| end of 5 years of encouraging people to have babies, they
| don't have enough babies. So now they have to get harder
| on the edge cases.
|
| It's probably safe to assume that gays and lesbians
| represent at least 10% of the Chinese population as they
| do in most countries. So that's what, 120 million people?
| Let's say half of whom are young enough to have at least
| one child? So we're talking about an extra 30-60 million
| children if you can somehow get a replacement rate.
|
| _That 's_ what I believe all these recent moves by the
| CCP have been about. And banning test study programs?
| Same thing. No point having more babies if you're also
| getting overproduction of elites. They need construction
| workers and factory workers. And someone was told, we
| ain't gonna become Germany by bringing them in from
| Tajikistan, so take this data and figure out how to
| squeeze as much Han production as possible out of it in
| the next 5 years.
| erosetthanatos wrote:
| I 100% agree with your assessment. I've thought the same
| thing for a while. The downfall of the West is already a
| foregone conclusion purely from demographics. CCP's
| hardline on reversing the inverted pyramid trend will
| catapult it as indisputable leader within the next 20-30
| years.
| [deleted]
| noduerme wrote:
| I don't think their attempts at upping the birthrate are
| going to succeed. The CCP is fighting against the larger
| trend of decreasing fertility rates in all post-
| industrialized nations, while trying to promote
| stability... they started later and they got to the wrong
| side of the inverted pyramid _faster_ than the west. Now,
| if they do have success with a baby boom it may come with
| unintended consequences. The party leadership is aging,
| worse, ossifying. It 's going to get less and less easy
| to put down youth protests the more Xi starts to look
| like Fidel Castro. Maybe their technological cage can
| keep citizens too afraid to talk to each other, but
| they're too well connected to the rest of the world to
| not know what's going on. And you can't cut the cord.
| That's why the laws against video games, and the
| censorship of LGBTQ media, have to be pushed as a
| nationalistic marketing campaign rather than forced as
| Maoist dictats. (Although the idea of Mao banning video
| games is kinda funny). China will never be a superpower
| _unless_ they have a liberal French-style democratic
| revolution. Then all bets are off. A democratic China
| might take over the world. Other than that, the worst the
| west has to fear from that quarter is losing our own
| souls in the process of doing business with a genocidal
| government. It hasn 't stopped us from buying toasters on
| Amazon yet.
| tg180 wrote:
| Highly agree with you.
|
| In the West we have already tried to force LGBTQ people
| to accept the behavior of their assigned sex. Result?
| Increased suicides, depression and drug use.
|
| Obviously, after decades/centuries of failure we finally
| decided to recognize the reality of the facts: you cannot
| force people into a heteronormative life, nor to make
| children.
|
| They are in for a hard failure.
| suifbwish wrote:
| The French Revolution actually marked the end of France
| ever being considered a super power again. The entire
| western world mocks their pathetic legal system
| ldargin wrote:
| You can add U.S. states banning "Critical Race Theory" to
| that list.
| klipklop wrote:
| You left out the "in public schools" part. You can still
| look at all the CRT stuff you want on the internet in the
| US. Stuff like White Fragility are top sellers in the US.
|
| This is not even remotely the same as the Taliban banning
| music or China cracking down on LGBTQ stuff.
| jandrese wrote:
| Which was extra silly because CRT wasn't being taught in
| public schools unless you are also including public
| universities.
| miles wrote:
| _Yes, critical race theory is being taught in public
| schools_ [1]
|
| > Christopher Rufo reported[2] that 30 public school
| districts in 15 states are teaching a book, _Not My Idea_
| , that tells readers that "whiteness" leads white people
| to make deals with the devil for "stolen land, stolen
| riches, and special favors." White people get to "mess
| endlessly with the lives of your friends, neighbors,
| loved ones, and all fellow humans of color for the
| purpose of profit," the book adds.
|
| > There are plenty of other examples that prove racial
| essentialism and collective guilt are being taught to
| young students. In Cupertino, California, an elementary
| school required[3] third graders to rank themselves
| according to the "power and privilege" associated with
| their ethnicities. Schools in Buffalo, New York, taught
| students[4] that "all white people" perpetuate "systemic
| racism" and had kindergarteners watch a video of dead
| black children, warning them about "racist police and
| state-sanctioned violence." And in Arizona, the state's
| education department sent out[5] an "equity toolkit" to
| schools that claimed infants as young as 3 months old can
| start to show signs of racism and "remain strongly biased
| in favor of whiteness" by age 5.
|
| [1] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/yes-
| critical-race...
|
| [2] https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/141329288126
| 4005126
|
| [3] https://www.city-journal.org/identity-politics-in-
| cupertino-...
|
| [4] https://www.city-journal.org/buffalo-public-schools-
| critical...
|
| [5] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/arizona-
| education-ba...
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Christopher Rufo defines critical race theory as
| everything he doesn't like, so of course he'd see phantom
| CRTs lurking behind every shadow and around every corner.
|
| From here[1]:
|
| > _Christopher Rufo, a prominent opponent of critical
| race theory, in March acknowledged intentionally using
| the term to describe a range of race-related topics and
| conjure a negative association._
|
| > _"We have successfully frozen their brand -- 'critical
| race theory' -- into the public conversation and are
| steadily driving up negative perceptions," wrote Rufo, a
| senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative
| think tank. "We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put
| all of the various cultural insanities under that brand
| category. The goal is to have the public read something
| crazy in the newspaper and immediately think 'critical
| race theory.'"_
|
| [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/05/29/c
| ritical...
| miles wrote:
| > of course he'd see phantom CRTs lurking behind every
| shadow
|
| When it comes to teaching children _Not My Idea_ ,
| definitely seems to be more to the concern than just
| shadows:
|
| _The fallacy of 'whiteness'_
| https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/08/08/opinion/fallacy-
| white...
|
| > According to recent reports, public and private
| elementary schools across the United States have used, as
| part of racial equity education, an illustrated
| children's book called "Not My Idea," in which a devil
| with a pointy tail offers the young reader a "contract
| binding you to whiteness." The contract promises "stolen
| land," "stolen riches," and "special favors"; in
| exchange, whiteness gets "your soul" and power over "the
| lives of your friends, neighbors, loved ones, and all
| fellow humans of COLOR."
| kgarten wrote:
| CRT is something taught in law school, not in elementary
| schools. You have an indoctrination problem in the US but
| it definitely does not come from CRT.
|
| I looked at some of the illustrations of "Not My Idea"...
| it's a bit wired and cringe worthy sometimes. Still
| compare that to the indoctrination that is in some of the
| schoolbooks:
|
| Slavery was just "black immigration"
| https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/aug/12/right-
| wing...
|
| The kkk was not morally wrong ... ??
| https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/texas-
| senate-...
|
| Banning of Black and Latino Authors
| https://www.mcall.com/news/pennsylvania/mc-nws-pa-banned-
| boo...
|
| Teaching creationism:
| https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2021/apr/08/house-
| advanc...
|
| Are you as outraged about that as you are about a fringe
| law theory?
| kgarten wrote:
| Downvotes, but no counter?
|
| Can you name numbers comparing how many books with
| problematic woke content are used versus the books
| mentioned from the guardian?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Is he actually wrong? Seems like it should be possible to
| judge the citations he's posted independently of his own
| (admittedly obvious) biases.
| josephg wrote:
| Critical race theory is a mythic story - the sort Yural
| Harari describes as a religion. It sits alongside
| replacement theory, humanism, environmentalism, crypto
| anarchism, liberalism, rand's objectivism, and so on.
|
| These stories are lenses through which you can describe
| the world. They're like software for the mind. And like
| software, they aren't objectively right or objectively
| wrong. Each of these stories (dubiously) explain and
| obsesses over some aspects of the world, and ignores
| other aspects completely.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Critical race theory is a mythic story -
|
| No, its not.
|
| Though there is a mythic anti-"Critical Race Theory"
| story created by the American Right, and the thing within
| it called "Critical Race Theory" is a (particularly
| incoherent, because a number of unrelated and opposing
| things from the real world that share only that they
| concern race, and they are disliked by the American
| Right, and they are _not actually Critical Race Theory_ ,
| are jammed into it) mythic story.
|
| > These stories are lenses through which you can describe
| the world. They're like software for the mind. And like
| software, they aren't objectively right or objectively
| wrong.
|
| Actual critical race theory (like critical legal studies,
| from which it stems) holds the existence of objective
| features of social structures, with tangible, material,
| effects.
|
| Like many hypothesized social phenomenon, the complexity
| of the systems involved may make falsification difficult
| on a practical level, but the claims it makes are fact
| claims which are objectively true or false.
| kgarten wrote:
| It seems he is. I see a much bigger push to prevent any
| type of critical discussion about issues of slavery etc.
|
| I'm also always surprised how little US citizens know
| about their own history. Ask somebody about "Birth of a
| Nation" and see what they can tell you about it.
|
| Ask them if they know about the "Pro American Rally" in
| 1939 and see what they say.
|
| These things are not taught in school and it's a shame. I
| know what I'm talking about I'm German and I hated our
| history education in school as we were discussing the 3rd
| Reich nearly every year. Yet, reflecting on it and seeing
| that the same stupid ideas get a hold today again, it was
| not nearly enough. We should have taught more. The same
| holds for the German colonial history (that was not
| covered and is changing slowly).
|
| If you don't know your past, you are condemned to repeat
| it.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/150-years-
| lat...
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/aug/12/right-
| wing...
| romwell wrote:
| So what's the data?
|
| 30 school districts (out of how many?) use a book Rufo
| doesn't like.
|
| Any reason why anyone, aside from Rufo, should care?
|
| Half of the nation doesn't teach sex ed because skyperson
| doesn't like when people bang without signing an
| exclusive banging agreement in public first. Half the
| nation teaches kids that the Confederacy was formed to
| protect "states' rights", carefully omitting that the
| right in question was to own black people as
| livestock[1]. But hey, 30 districts use a white-people-
| bad, and that's the real problem.
|
| And what does the last part of your comment (about AZ)
| have to do with anything? Telling educators that 5-year-
| olds can absorb shitty beliefs is now a cOnTrOvErSiAl
| tHeOrY?
|
| I don't even know where to start here, let's set this one
| aside.
|
| So, let's focus on this question first: assuming the book
| you mentioned is bad, which percentage of pubic schools
| use it, and in which way?
|
| [1] TX is my go-to example. They were teaching that
| slavery was a "side issue" in the Civil War when I was
| living there in 2010-2017.
|
| I'm not even going to bother dissecting the bullshit they
| peddle these days. Feel free to dig in.
|
| Texas oversees 1,247 school districts. Tell me more about
| the problem of CRT in schools though.
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/texas-will-
| finally...
| nyolfen wrote:
| > this isn't happening
|
| > this is happening and it's good
| jandrese wrote:
| 30 public school districts out of 13,800[1]. About 0.2%.
|
| Rufo is trying to create the world's biggest molehill.
|
| [1] https://ballotpedia.org/Public_school_district_(Unite
| d_State...
| hanselot wrote:
| Ironically I agree. You should be exposed to every
| religion after learning how to think critically. That way
| you can train your propaganda filter instead of falling
| prey to sophistry.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The canary will be when the dissident Winnie the Pooh
| starts being disappeared.
| jug wrote:
| The cite even researchers as leading to the decision. Maybe
| flaws with perceptual hashes? It took a mere day to discover
| a hash collision after reverse engineering the system.
| Granted, the colliding image looked like a grey mess, but I
| wonder how far a malicious party might get after a year.
| chillfox wrote:
| The colliding images stopped looking like a grey mess
| within the week and just looked like a normal low quality
| image.
| mbesto wrote:
| They also could have had a legitimate claim to non-
| technical people (at the FBI/NSA/blah) that "you sure you
| want this? this system will be abused...someone could write
| a hash collision". The Gov't agency scoffed because they
| didn't believe it.
|
| So Apple called them out on it by letting the market
| decide. They now have that evidence.
| notriddle wrote:
| Never attribute to 4D chess what can be adequately
| explained by knee-jerk reaction.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| This is an excellent and perceptive Hanlon corollary.
| ksm1717 wrote:
| Never attribute credence to an argument because it has a
| name
| gfodor wrote:
| Razors are inherently self-identifying as heuristics -
| not rules. So no need to add more disclaimers.
| ZainRiz wrote:
| Never attribute credence to an argument because it was
| stated confidently
| mlac wrote:
| I don't really understand the argument that was thrown out
| by many people: "Attackers will frame people by planting
| hash collisions on their phones!"
|
| So...
|
| a) a bad actor is going to target someone, and have the
| resources to generate enough collisions that(b) look like
| CP, but aren't CP? but are close enough (c) to pass human
| review and cause an investigation so (d) they need the hash
| collisions to look like CP, but not be real CP? or ????
|
| If a bad actor wants to frame someone, it's easy to do this
| today - hack their system or home network, open it to the
| internet, place the photos, call the FBI and report an
| anonymous tip, with the URL where it is hosted and open to
| the internet. Don't need hash collisions.
|
| Hacking someone's iPhone (How do you get the photos on
| there without forensic logs that they were added?) or
| iCloud so that you can place hash collisions that look like
| crap and fail to pass the review doesn't make sense and
| leaves too much of a trail. Oh? And someone won't notice
| thousands of photos just added to their phone?
|
| A bigger threat would be deepfake CP. When that becomes a
| reality, it will be a mess, because an attacker could
| theoretically generate an unlimited amount of it, and it
| will be extremely difficult to tell if it is authentic.
| Those hashes wouldn't be in the CSAM database, but if the
| attacker put them out on a server to be taken down, they
| would get added eventually and then show up in a scan
| elsewhere.
|
| But I'd be pretty horrified (and definitely call my
| attorney, Apple, and local FBI field office) if thousands
| of CSAM images just showed up in my iPhone photo stream.
|
| Edit: Downvotes are fine, and I completely understand other
| arguments against this, but this one has just not made
| sense to me...
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| This is a very simple attack to pull off; email someone
| with the colliding image embedded in the MIME document.
| Set height and width equal to zero or one pixel. Even if
| the user never actually sees it or marks it as spam, it's
| still on their device and in their email. For bonus
| points, spoof the "From" as from Apple. At the very
| least, they're getting SWATted.
| mlac wrote:
| I would expect the human review ("Swatting") to be
| transparent, unless it was actually CP or looked like CP,
| at which point the person would be taken for a ride...
| But this is a real threat with actual CP now.
|
| And again, there is the whole fact that you received the
| email and there is a log that you received it.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| "Human review" here means basically minimum wage person
| who's looking through a lot of abuse images on a daily
| basis & has significant fatigue. I view it more as a CYA
| thing than any meaningful protection mechanism.
|
| Additionally, the images sent to review are significantly
| downscaled versions of the original & could easily be
| made to be ambiguous.
|
| The most difficult challenge in this SWAT story is that
| Apple has a secret secondary hash that's checked on a
| collision. That's the part of the SWATting story that
| feels difficult on a technical level. However, there are
| also really smart people out there so it wouldn't
| surprise me if a successful attack strategy is developed
| at some point given time.
| mlac wrote:
| Sure. I mean, my main concern would be people planting
| actual illegal images. Not just colliding hashes. If
| anything, a handful of images that have hash collisions,
| once they made it to the authorities, would then be
| reviewed in detail and shown as a false positive, and
| then ignored in the future / whitelisted. Or investigated
| because someone is generating images to directly tamper
| with the program / frame people.
|
| No one is going to be prosecuted on "significantly
| downscaled ... ambiguous" versions of original fake
| images with a hash collision that flagged a review and
| was handed to the FBI accidentally because a "minimum
| wage" fatigued person passed it on.
|
| I get the counter-arguments, but the hash collision thing
| is just, sort of... weird? I even get the argument that
| an innocent hash collision may have your personal and
| private images reviewed by some other human - and that's
| weird. But I can't really see it going further (you'll be
| arrested and sentenced to life in prison from the HASH
| COLLISIONS!).
|
| It's just using technical terms to scare people who don't
| understand hashes and collisions and probability, and not
| really founded on reason.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| > once they made it to the authorities, would then be
| reviewed in detail and shown as a false positive, and
| then ignored in the future / whitelisted
|
| Which typically will be a court case, or at least
| questioning by police. This can be quite a destructive
| event on someone's life. Also, there's no mechanism for
| whitelisting outlined in the paper, nor can I imagine a
| mechanism that would work (i.e. now you've got a way to
| distribute CP by abusing the whitelisting fingerprint
| mechanism or you only match exact cryptographic hashes
| which is an expensive CPU operation & doesn't scale as
| every whitelisted image would have to be in there).
|
| Also, your entire premise is predicated on careful and
| fair review by authorities. At scale, I've not seen this
| actually play out. Instead either the police will be
| underworked & not investigate legitimate cases (too many
| false positives) or they'll aggressively police all cases
| to avoid missing any.
| tyingq wrote:
| Going down a rabbit hole, but a colliding image could be
| an adult that doesn't look like an adult.
| misnome wrote:
| How does this theoretical attack get them to save the
| attached image to iCloud?
| newbamboo wrote:
| iCloud is trivial to hack. Recall the massive leak of
| celebrity nudes a few years back. As long as iCloud is
| forced on users (you cannot apply security updates to an
| apple device without an Apple ID and an attached iCloud
| account) these attacks will be simple to do in mass, with
| very little risk to the perpetrators. Terrible security
| model, with a long history of spectacular and avoidable
| breaches which go totally unsolved.
| misnome wrote:
| Let's ignore the fact that you just shifted the goalposts
| from "emailing a 1 pixel image SWATs them" to an
| extremely wide scope for a minute -
|
| Even assuming that is true that iCloud is trivially
| "hackable" - and as I understand it, that was never clear
| how those leaks happened - how does uploading to iCloud
| help when it specifically needs to be uploaded from the
| users phone along with the scanning metadata.
|
| In fact, isn't apples proposed implementation here the
| _only_ cloud service that protects against your proposed
| attack - while other clouds scan stored data and can be
| triggered by your attack, Apple's requires you to upload
| specifically from a registered phone on their account;
| data stored on-cloud is never scanned.
| newbamboo wrote:
| You can choose to use an iPhone. Most people will never
| be targeted. Hell you could use a phone with no security
| at all and odds are you'll be safe. But if you have
| enemies or are a high profile target, apple has made you
| easy to destroy. iPhones themselves can be hacked with no
| click attacks and we know this because macron's phone was
| one of many that was listed in the recent fiasco. Icloud
| can be hacked because legions of celebrities had their
| nudes published. If the device is not secure, even for
| the president of France, and iCloud is not secure for
| legions if celebrities, then people can and will be hit
| with this attack and have their lives permanently
| destroyed. Worse than having you sex photos leaked, worse
| than having all you calls and communications intercepted,
| you'll become known as a pedo. You can't undo that. To be
| sure, that probably won't happen to most people, but
| political figures, those with enemies working in infosec,
| etc.... I want a secure phone, and iPhone no longer meets
| that need for me and many others. You can do you.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| The described attack is completely unnecessary. Just send
| colliding images to people on WhatsApp. They go right
| into Photos, and then to iCloud if that's enabled.
| There's no reason most people would assume that this is
| what was happening if somebody sent them some slightly
| weird looking images.
|
| The response to this is "yeah but then a human will
| review it and nothing will happen to the victim of the
| attack, because it's just some slightly blurry ordinary
| images". But it ignores to entirely likely harms that
| could result from that.
|
| 1) Law enforcement use it as the basis of getting a
| search warrant, but conveniently leave the bit about the
| alerts being false alarms off the warrant application.
|
| 2) The list of people who have had CSAM alerts is
| inevitably leaked to the public, and the victim has to
| spend the rest of their lives explaining to people like
| employers why Apple flagged them as possessing child
| sexual abuse material.
|
| At the end of the day, all the gaslighting about "no
| potential for inadvertent harm" is bs, because it's my
| device, so get lost. Go run your anti-privacy software
| somewhere else, imo.
| misnome wrote:
| As I understand it;
|
| - Law enforcement doesn't get _anything_ unless it
| triggers a large number of images that match the
| perceptual hash
|
| - It also needs to match a -private- perceptual hash,
| that isn't distributed to devices, and so we don't have a
| reliable way of generating collisions for or even knowing
| that collisions are generated
|
| I mean this whole thing is bad enough on its own without
| having to artificially manufacture extremely specific
| scenarios and extrapolating from there to invent hysteric
| conclusions.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| Well if you think a tech giant that's partnered in a
| surveillance program with the NSA isn't going to share
| anything they feel like with the government, then go
| ahead as use that as the basis of coming up with your own
| opinions.
|
| But you're right though, the possibility of the list
| being leaked and ruining countless innocent lives is the
| much more likely of the two scenarios I described.
| misnome wrote:
| > if you think a tech giant that's partnered in a
| surveillance program with the NSA isn't going to share
| anything they feel like with the government
|
| In that case, nothing is stopping them from scanning
| everything already uploaded anyway, and nothing is
| stopping them pushing code to your device to scan it
| without telling you about it. Nothing is stopping them or
| the government from making these "lists" anyway.
|
| I'm not saying you (or anyone) should trust Apple, but if
| you already don't - then this changes literally nothing.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| By my own personal assessment it changes the way I view
| them, because this is the most overtly anti-user, anti-
| privacy thing they've ever done. Perhaps I should have
| never had any level of trust for them, but you live and
| learn I guess.
|
| Feel free to respond to my point about the alert catalog
| inevitably being leaked and ruining lives. Or you could
| just have a go at gaslighting me a little more if you
| prefer.
| misnome wrote:
| Gaslighting? Your proposed scenario is:
|
| - Send colliding images
|
| - image gets uploaded to icloud automatically
|
| - image _also_ collides with private hash <- completely
| unclear how this happens
|
| - Only the colliding images are looked at by apple and
| are determined to be innocent
|
| - user goes on a list (This is an imagined scenario)
|
| - User is reported to law enforcement even though the
| images are innocent (This is an imagined scenario)
|
| - Law enforcement uses this hypothetical report to file a
| warrant (This is an imagined scenario)
|
| - Law enforcement uses the hypothetical warrant to
| extract images that are completely innocent, and somehow
| build a case around this
|
| - The "List", which is entirely a hypothetical of yours,
| "leaks" (This is an imagined scenario)
|
| Which also requires:
|
| - Apple does not counter the meaning of "the list"
|
| - Apple is not sued for vast quantities of money
|
| I expect the first argument is that none of this matters
| as long as "the idea" is out there, the reputational
| damage is already done. Except if that's true, then none
| of this is necessary at all, just make the accusation.
|
| So, sure, continue to thread the needle between "They are
| automatically sending all information to the government,
| so promises are meaningless" and "This new process, on
| top of them potentially sending all information to the
| government, somehow makes it worse".
|
| I mean, this is all a million times more difficult and
| less likely than just, like, sending them CP in the first
| place. Or uploading it to their Gmail or any other cloud
| they use. Or just send a report that they have it to the
| police without actually doing anything.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| That's absolutely not an accurate representation of what
| I've said, or how this system works.
|
| All it requires is somebody to send somebody else a
| colliding image.
|
| This will send an event to Apple. There is nothing
| imaginary about that, it is exactly how the system works.
|
| Now that Apple has this information, the only thing left
| is for it to be leaked or compromised in some way.
|
| This is much simpler than the scenario you've described,
| because they require the attacker to first commit the
| crime of possessing CP. Its also possible to do without
| tipping off the victim in any way.
|
| Apple, in case you didn't know, is a company that had
| already been the source of a couple of the most notorious
| data breaches ever (and has somehow managed to so far
| avoid getting "sued for vast quantities of money" for
| them).
|
| What you're trying to do here is quintessential
| gaslighting.
| skoskie wrote:
| I think there's an unspoken assumption that photos are
| only the first part of this scanning exercise. IMO, Apple
| will likely end up scanning all content you choose to put
| on their servers.
|
| Tangentially, I think keeping their servers clear of
| illegal material is actually Apple's main motivation.
| This, in turn, supports claims made by nay-sayers that
| Apple could scan for other types of images/content in
| more repressive countries (but not necessarily report the
| people who did it). However, this assumption also
| contradicts arguments that Apple will start scanning for
| pictures of (e.g.) drugs, or weapons. Such images are not
| inherently illegal and therefore of no interest to Apple.
| dwaite wrote:
| > IMO, Apple will likely end up scanning all content you
| choose to put on their servers.
|
| Even if that was a goal (and I would argue they have a
| hard stance against it), this system as built is not
| usable for that.
|
| While they can scan locally, every step of recording,
| thresholds, and subsequent automated/manual auditing is
| built to require content to be uploaded to iCloud Photos.
| skoskie wrote:
| I agree that the current photo scanning system won't work
| for other types of files. Further, I don't think they
| really even need to scan text files except to see if it's
| actually a filetype that should be scanned. And they can
| already easily scan music and such, but have shown no
| interest in it from a legal standpoint. Video seems like
| a prime candidate for the next generation of this tech.
| And I very much think they will be able to do that before
| the decade is over.
| misnome wrote:
| > Tangentially, I think keeping their servers clear of
| illegal material is actually Apple's main motivation
|
| My guess about this whole debacle is that - with pressure
| from the government to scan their cloud storage - that
| this is the alternate scenario to avoid giving up (or
| being forced to) the "encryption" guarantees of their
| cloud. I'm not sure what technical process they have in
| place to "only decrypt with valid law enforcement
| requests" or allow account rescue, but it seems likely
| that not just any employee can view whatever they want,
| before or after this system.
|
| Saying that I can maybe see a way the pressures are on
| this doesn't mean that I'm saying this is a good solution
| though. Clearly technically implementing this is opening
| a can of worms that can't really be closed again and
| makes a lot of other scenarios "closer".
|
| Also, evidently, people are a lot more comfortable with
| the idea of them actively scanning stuff people store in
| the cloud than transmitting the information in a side
| channel so they don't even need to handle decrypted data
| without a hit.
| skoskie wrote:
| > My guess about this whole debacle is that - with
| pressure from the government to scan their cloud storage
| - that this is the alternate scenario to avoid giving up
| (or being forced to) the "encryption" guarantees of their
| cloud.
|
| This is exactly the case.
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/12/senate-judiciary-
| commi...
|
| > I'm not sure what technical process they have in place
| to "only decrypt with valid law enforcement requests" or
| allow account rescue, but it seems likely that not just
| any employee can view whatever they want, before or after
| this system.
|
| They have master keys that can be used to decrypt
| _almost_ everything you upload. They can be compelled to
| decrypt and turn over information on anyone. Another
| (unsourced) comment in this thread indicated they do so
| 30,000 times per year. The new encryption scheme will
| effectively stop this for photos, and no doubt other
| files in the future.
|
| Apple's side will begin using shared key encryption,
| which will require ALL ~31 keys to decrypt the offending
| images.
|
| The decryption keys are only generated on-device, and
| only from a hash that results from a CSAM match. The
| other photos, simply won't have the decryption keys
| generated, so they don't even exist.
|
| As an interesting side note, this means that a person who
| surpasses the CSAM threshold will still only reveal the
| images that actually match the CSAM database. Every other
| image, including those that have CSAM unknown to
| authorities remain encrypted. This is hardly a big win
| for the big scary government. They now have far less
| ability to search for evidence of any other crimes. You
| could upload video of your bank robbery to iCloud, and as
| long as your personal device remains secure, nobody will
| know.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > email someone with the colliding image embedded in the
| MIME document. Set height and width equal to zero or one
| pixel.
|
| (I think) the complaint is: how is that different from
| just using CSAM images, no collision required?
| FabHK wrote:
| Apple's proposed system does not scan all the pictures on
| the device, only images about to be uploaded to iCloud. A
| picture in an email would not be uploaded (whether
| visible or not).
|
| Even if uploaded to iCloud (such as pictures sent via
| WhatsApp by default), and above the threshold, they would
| still be scanned by a second algorithm and subject to
| human review. So, your "very simple" attack fails on at
| least three counts.
| sweetheart wrote:
| If this were a reasonable vector, it'd already be an
| issue, at least if you use large email clients like
| Gmail, which already scan for CSAM.
|
| Edit: Downvotes because?...
| speeder wrote:
| Because it IS already an issue.
|
| For example when CIA/NSA tools leaked, one of them had
| precisely this purpose.
| cmsj wrote:
| Downvotes because nerds love to construct a super super
| unlikely corner case to argue against something ;)
| sweetheart wrote:
| I'd call that out as totally unfair... if I haven't found
| myself doing that many times before hahaha.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| We, the nerds, only have to be wrong once in order to
| allow immense harm to occur. Apple voluntarily put itself
| in that position.
|
| Conversely, the governments of the world get to keep
| trying, over and over.
| brigade wrote:
| Those use a different perceptual hash that's intended to
| be kept secret.
|
| It's significantly harder to develop collisions for an
| algorithm you cannot inspect or obtain the output of.
|
| (well also, emailing actual CSAM is way easier and mostly
| just gets the sender reported)
| foldr wrote:
| Surely the sender is also likely to get reported if they
| email the image with the perceptual hash collision. Lots
| of companies run these scans. E.g. if you send the image
| via gmail it will most likely be scanned by Google.
| cherioo wrote:
| Apple also uses a second, different perceptual hash
| that's intended to be kept secret, on server side.
| therealjumbo wrote:
| Then why have a client side scanner in the first place?
|
| You're exposing the hashes to the world, you're not able
| to E2E encrypt anything if you need to server side scan,
| which you probably do since trusting the client no matter
| what is generally bad in potentially adverserial
| situations, and you get all this negative press and loss
| of reputation and potentially pressure from governments
| around the world to use this for other ends. Cui Bono?
| nicce wrote:
| I think you have misunderstood the system.
|
| The second scan applies only for those images which are
| flagged as positive, which are then accessible by Apple.
| This is applied to detect adversarial hashes. The rest of
| the images stays encrypted. So, indeed on-device scanning
| is the only way to enable at least partial E2EE with CSAM
| detection.
|
| Yes, this was PR failure Apple. They rushed the
| announcement because of the leaks, and secondly they
| thought that people will understant the system when they
| did not. There is too much misundersting. That scanning
| for example is built-in so deep into the iCloud pipeline,
| that one does not simply change the policy for scanning
| the whole phone.
| therealjumbo wrote:
| >I think you have misunderstood the system.
|
| On a technical level I think you're correct. As a
| holistic approach to the problem, I still disagree. This
| is too cute for its own good. The PR misunderstanding is
| a symptom of that.
|
| >The second scan applies only for those images which are
| flagged as positive, which are then accessible by Apple.
|
| In the end, Apples software is scanning all of the
| images, why is it any more privacy respecting to do it
| this way? I guess reasonable people can disagree on that,
| personally I wasn't fully aware of the cloud side
| scanning either, and I don't think the public was either.
| This is similar to Snowden's revelations, if you were
| paying attention you probably already knew a lot of that,
| but the incident made everyone aware of it in a very
| blunt way.
|
| >The rest of the images stays encrypted
|
| I think this is unclear, Apple can still decrypt those
| other images, how else could you view them in a browser?
|
| This goes back to what Stratechery said about capability
| vs policy.
| nicce wrote:
| > I think this is unclear, Apple can still decrypt those
| other images, how else could you view them in a browser?
|
| Obviously there is change coming to iCloud. Otherwise
| whole PSI protocol is pointless.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| At least we know that secrets never leak out.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| Assuming the system works as Apple's described it, then
| this attack doesn't work. The image needs to be added to
| the Photos library _and_ the Photos library needs to be
| syncing with iCloud. Images in email aren 't scanned, and
| an image that's zero or one pixel can't even be clicked
| on to be added to the library.
|
| And, to at least respond to two obvious counter-arguments
| I've looked into:
|
| "But it's just one line of code to change it to scan
| images (that aren't uploaded to iCloud) (that are
| anywhere on the device)!" No, it isn't; if you read the
| technical documentation and the more technically-oriented
| interviews Apple's given on this, there isn't just _one_
| hash that needs to be matches, there are _two_ hashes,
| one on the device and one on the server. (I think Apple
| did a very poor job of communicating this to a general
| audience; it certainly wouldn 't have alleviated all the
| concerns, but if it was understand as "client-server
| scanning" rather than "client-only scanning" it might
| have at least changed the tenor of the conversation.)
| That doesn't mean they can't do a combination client-
| server scan on every single image or even file on the
| device, but it makes it both more difficult to do and
| more difficult to _hide._
|
| "But what if the system doesn't work as Apple's described
| it?" Well, if you don't trust Apple to some degree, all
| bets are off. They already do ML-based image analysis of
| all photos in your photo library regardless of iCloud
| status and they've literally demoed this on stage during
| iPhone keynotes, so if Apple was going to secretly give
| government access to on-device scanning, a different
| technology -- one that works (questionably well) on _all_
| images, not just already-learned ones -- is literally
| already there. The only way you "know" what Apple is
| doing with your data on or off device comes from a
| combination of what they tell you and what third-party
| security researchers discover.
| jackTheMan wrote:
| That is a huge-huge difference if they do it secretly, or
| if they do it announced.
|
| If they get caught doing secretly this in China that
| would be a big blow. But if they are doing openly and it
| is known that the government provides the hash, they can
| wash their hands.
| sweetheart wrote:
| I also don't understand the vector everyone seems worried
| about. Also considering that perceptual hashing isn't
| new, as far as I'm aware, and it hasn't seemingly yet led
| to any sort of wave of innocent folks being screwed over
| sham illicit images.
|
| I think there _is_ an argument to be made about a system
| like this being used to track the spread of political
| material, and it's easy to see how such a system would be
| terrible for anyone trying to hide from an authoritarian
| power of some type, but that'd already require Apple is
| absolutely and completely compromised by an authoritarian
| regime, which isn't high on my list of concerns.
| azalemeth wrote:
| The main issue is that the system is basically a bit of
| snitching spyware dolled up with cryptographic magic to
| make it _only work with really bad stuff, honest_.
|
| As recently posted on HN [1] one should be _very_ wary of
| backdoors, no matter how much one believes only the
| _right guys_ could _ever_ use them. Once they 're there,
| they're there: it's arrogant beyond believe to think that
| opponents of yours _won 't_ exploit them.
|
| I won't use an apple product with this feature. I've been
| using apple's ecosystem since about 1994.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/1433470109
| 7425182... and
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28404219
| mlac wrote:
| I understand your points on backdoors, but I don't
| understand people trying to argue that the "Cryptographic
| Magic" is the bad part that will send people to prison
| due immediately upon "HASH COLLISIONS", in my view, takes
| away from the actual concerning points.
| Zak wrote:
| What most people are focused on is that this is spyware
| built in to the operating system. The fact that
| perceptual hashes have some weak points could also lead
| to problems, but that's not the main focus of most
| opposition to this system.
| FabHK wrote:
| > there _is_ an argument to be made about a system like
| this being used to track the spread of political material
|
| How so? Unlike other cloud providers, which do scan all
| uploaded images server side, this system is specifically
| designed to prevent this.
|
| (As you say, if Apple is entirely compromised, then all
| bets are off anyway.)
| Griffinsauce wrote:
| > Apple is absolutely and completely compromised by an
| authoritarian regime
|
| I don't understand this, they can just be legally
| compelled.
| sweetheart wrote:
| Yeah sorry, I was a little vague. I consider that
| willingness to comply as already having been compromised.
| And I think, to be fair, if companies like Apple are ever
| in the position of using technologies like this to track
| individual dissidents of an authoritarian regime, we are
| already royally screwed.
|
| But, to be clear, you make a legitimate point.
| cmsj wrote:
| And they already are, Apple (and indeed all companies)
| have to follow all sorts of rules in all sorts of
| countries. Some of those rules are fairly harmless, some
| of them are about radio power levels, some of them are
| "don't show the Taiwanese flag in China".
| mlac wrote:
| And I also understand the concerns with this (and the
| potential downsides of the technology).
|
| But a motivated bad actor has a lot easier time just
| putting an image of the Taiwanese flag or propaganda on
| someone's phone than trying to make it a hash collision
| that triggers... If an attacker is really after someone,
| I would expect them to put the _actual_ material on that
| person 's phone...
|
| ... It's like trying to frame someone for drugs in their
| car and going through the hassle of synthesizing a
| chemical that triggers drug dogs to react, but it isn't
| actually the drug. Wouldn't they just... buy drugs and
| stick them in the car?
| zzo38computer wrote:
| > Wouldn't they just... buy drugs and stick them in the
| car?
|
| Maybe they want to create too many false positives
| deliberately, or maybe they do it just because they want
| to see if and how synthesizing such a chemical can be
| done.
|
| When putting pictures on someone's phone or computer,
| there are ways to add false positives as well as maybe
| doing false negatives sometimes (e.g. by encrypting the
| picture or using an uncommon file format so that it must
| be converted, or using complicated HTML/JS/CSS to render
| it instead of just a picture file).
|
| Also, if someone has the picture or drug or whatever to
| find if it is what they are, can you accuse them (maybe
| they are the police) of liking pictures and drugs, too?
| newbamboo wrote:
| They ruined their reputation for being relatively secure
| devices. I'm done with them, for good. Anybody who cares
| about security has likely jumped ship now too. Normies will
| eventually ditch them when they realize most tech people have
| bailed. Unfortunately the best alternative, google, is even
| worse. Hopefully the loss of demand causes a decrease in
| device sales across the board. Landlines still work.
| Smartphones and their consequences have been a disaster for
| the human race.
| headmelted wrote:
| Apple didn't blink. They just don't want the bad press hurting
| iPhone 13 sales.
|
| It'll go live around December when the Christmas sales push for
| iPhones is winding down and people are distracted with
| everything else going on.
| haswell wrote:
| A more charitable take is that both are true. Apple blinked,
| and one of several large contributing factors (probably a
| very big one) is the upcoming iPhone launch.
|
| When the tech news cycle is dominated by bad press about a
| move like this, and every tech nerd community is discussing
| this topic almost daily, it would be insane for Apple not to
| take _some_ notice.
|
| I know many are pessimistic about this, but Apple has learned
| from bad mistakes before. They rarely directly admit they're
| wrong, but conceding to pressure from the community is not
| unprecedented: see the return to the "Magic Keyboard" in
| their laptops.
|
| _Edit_ : removed the word "never" and replaced it with
| "rarely directly".
| Bud wrote:
| Could we please not say silly, easily-disproven things like
| Apple "never admit[s] they're wrong", when 10 seconds of
| Googling instantly gives the lie to that assertion?
|
| It might not happen every day, but it happens frequently
| enough that it's easy to find a lot of examples.
| Bud wrote:
| I expected the knee-jerk lazy downvotes from the usual
| suspects, so:
|
| Apple admits mistake, says it's back in EPEAT
| https://channeldailynews.com/news/apple-admits-mistake-
| says-...
|
| Apple Admits the Mac Pro was a mess
| https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/4/15175994/apple-mac-pro-
| fai...
|
| Apple Admits iPhone 7 Manufacturing Fault
| https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/feb/11/apple-
| iphone7-...
|
| I could go on for pages, but I trust the point is made.
| dhosek wrote:
| Or the changes to the new version of Safari in response
| to user feedback.
| FabHK wrote:
| But that was GP's point: They listen to feedback and
| improve things, but typically quietly, rather than
| admitting a mistake. Exceptions do prove the rule.
| dwaite wrote:
| What was the mistake for this example though that they
| would admit to? Iterating aggressive UX changes in a
| beta?
| haswell wrote:
| Ok, Apple _rarely_ admit they are wrong, and when they
| do, they tend to spin it heavily. I don't think this
| meaningfully changes the primary message of my comment
| though.
| ksec wrote:
| Every single one of them was to the point Apple could no
| longer hold the bad press or damaging to sales figure
| they admit they were wrong. Or more like they didn't,
| they just accept defeat.
|
| Mac Pro was a mess when one of their largest customer
| told them they will switch their whole studio away from
| Apple right in front of Eddy's Cue face before some thing
| was being done.
| karmakaze wrote:
| I wondered if Apple would ever say that you want more
| than one mouse button. They started having an option to
| use each side of the mouse as a separate button (even if
| it looked like a single one and defaulted that way), but
| I've never heard that two buttons are better than one
| from Apple. With Steve gone, who even cares now?
| ksec wrote:
| When Apple was designing Mac as personal computer for
| everyone, a single button mouse is truly godzillion times
| better than two button. There used to be an Apple
| guideline on how to move a mouse and not to _lift_ the
| mouse up into the air, but mapping the horizontal plane
| of the mouse to the vertical plane on the screen. Even
| that was difficult for some people.
|
| People just dont realise how normal people have problem
| with mouse. Of course as we progress I think Two Button
| mouse could make sense as default. The role of PC also
| changed. The PC for everyone is now an Smartphone.
| the_other wrote:
| One button is better than two, for people who don't know
| how to use two. I imagine the number of such users is
| higher than most of us here assume.
| unityByFreedom wrote:
| > One button is better than two, for people who don't
| know how to use two.
|
| It's like the three seashells. They don't know how to use
| them.
| karmakaze wrote:
| In the early days of Macintosh they tried hard to make
| this true. The excessive and inconsistent use of click vs
| double-click in apps even then was confusing.
|
| These days it's hard to find an app that can get by
| without Cmd+click which is harder than click on the right
| button, which would be even easier if the right button
| was physically distinguishable. Long-press is super
| annoying as well as force click--I never want the action
| that comes up when I accidentally force-click. With the
| prevalence of touch phones, the two-finger-tap might be
| the easiest of them to remember (if not as precise).
| setpatchaddress wrote:
| The primary input device to Apple hardware is the
| trackpad, so it's kind of irrelevant. But two button mice
| have been well-supported since classic Mac OS circa
| 1997-1998.
| FabHK wrote:
| > A more charitable take
|
| No, no, GP clearly has direct insight into the values,
| ulterior motives, and decision process of Tim Cook and
| other top brass at Apple.
| noptd wrote:
| Exactly, it's (sadly) a temporary victory at best.
|
| Ten bucks says they take a page out of our politicians'
| handbooks and sneak it in as a small, vague footnote in a
| much larger, unrelated announcement once the initial bad
| press blows over.
| darwingr wrote:
| Honestly, that's what I assumed they did in MacOS 11.5.2
| where they refused to give details of the change. It's
| likely the last update for many intel devices.
| godelski wrote:
| Your description sounds like a blink to me.
| caeril wrote:
| This is the most likely outcome. Moreover, they won't even
| announce it.
|
| Apple learned a valuable lesson here. Roll the panopticon out
| in secret, and don't announce it. They've done a very good
| job locking down their modern devices, enough that security
| researchers would have an exceptionally difficult time
| proving that they're doing it anyway.
|
| GrapheneOS is still a viable option until Google ends
| upstream security updates in 2023. That's a solid two years
| for Purism, PinePhone, and anyone else working on linux
| phones to bring their performance and feature set up to
| modern standards.
|
| The correct course of action is to buy a Pixel 5, run
| GrapheneOS for the next couple years, while donating to the
| main privacy-focused linux phone projects, and make the
| switch again in 2023.
| farmerstan wrote:
| > Moreover, they won't even announce it.
|
| That's a terrible idea. Apple knows that researchers are
| going through every bit of assembly code on the phone.
|
| If all of a sudden they say "Hey we found some code that
| scans all your photos and sends information up to the
| cloud" how bad would that look? It's better to explain
| upfront rather than get found, because they will get found.
| caeril wrote:
| Is this still possible? My lay understanding is that the
| SEP decrypts kernelspace on-demand, loads the opcodes on
| a very temporary (and randomly allocated) basis, and
| makes dumping any meaningful amount of the contents out
| of RAM very difficult.
|
| Not a jailbreaker at all, so happy to be completely wrong
| on this.
| dwaite wrote:
| The default for images is signed, not encrypted. A new
| section of self-modifying or encrypted kernel code would
| probably trigger some red flags.
| Hackbraten wrote:
| > The correct course of action is to buy a Pixel 5, run
| GrapheneOS for the next couple years, while donating to the
| main privacy-focused linux phone projects, and make the
| switch again in 2023.
|
| Alternatively, get a Linux phone right now and donate time
| by contributing bugfixes.
| thehappypm wrote:
| The bad press led to them blinking.
| gojomo wrote:
| A "blink", or the iterative strategy of a skilled
| manipulator/abuser/groomer?
|
| Push to the level of their target's discomfort, then back off -
| without respecting the "no!", pretending to hear only "not
| now".
|
| Come back later from a superficially-different angle, when the
| victim's defenses are down.
|
| Couch the next attempt, or the next, or the next, in some
| combination of feigned sweetness ("but I waited & changed
| things for you"), or esteem-attacks ("you're so nasty you
| deserve this"), or inevitability ("this is going to happen
| whether you like it or not, so stop fighting").
| float4 wrote:
| Yeah, this has been done many times before by other tech
| companies. Facebook being the prime example.
| orangepurple wrote:
| It's also known as shifting the Overton window.
|
| It's a way to inch toward the unthinkable by obtaining
| concessions. You propose the unthinkable and after extreme
| push-back, the concession seems completely reasonable.
| However, if the concession would have been proposed alone
| instead of the unthinkable, it would have been rejected. It's
| an absolute deceptive manipulation technique.
|
| Another example of manipulative Overton window shift at play:
| You may also recall deep state puppet Kathy Griffin showing
| Trump's severed head as the deep state testing the waters of
| a possible coup or assassination. _The more you expose the
| public to the unthinkable, the more it becomes acceptable._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
|
| See also the Door-in-the-face technique and Foot-in-the-door
| technique
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door-in-the-face_technique
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot-in-the-door_technique
|
| The door-in-the-face (DITF) technique is a compliance method
| commonly studied in social psychology.[1][2] The persuader
| attempts to convince the respondent to comply by making a
| large request that the respondent will most likely turn down,
| much like a metaphorical slamming of a door in the
| persuader's face. The respondent is then more likely to agree
| to a second, more reasonable request, than if that same
| request is made in isolation.[1][2] The DITF technique can be
| contrasted with the foot-in-the-door (FITD) technique, in
| which a persuader begins with a small request and gradually
| increases the demands of each request.[2][3] Both the FITD
| and DITF techniques increase the likelihood a respondent will
| agree to the second request.[2][3]
|
| Foot-in-the-door (FITD) technique is a compliance tactic that
| aims at getting a person to agree to a large request by
| having them agree to a modest request first.[1][2][3]
|
| This technique works by creating a connection between the
| person asking for a request and the person that is being
| asked. If a smaller request is granted, then the person who
| is agreeing feels like they are obligated to keep agreeing to
| larger requests to stay consistent with the original decision
| of agreeing. This technique is used in many ways and is a
| well-researched tactic for getting people to comply with
| requests. The saying is a reference to a door to door
| salesman who keeps the door from shutting with his foot,
| giving the customer no choice but to listen to the sales
| pitch.
| new_realist wrote:
| Wow, this is unhinged.
| scubbo wrote:
| Yes, it is terrifying that companies behave this way.
| orangepurple wrote:
| I suppose it is no surprise we hear about so many sexual
| complaints lodged against blue chip tech execs. They are
| experts in grooming.
| delaaxe wrote:
| Don't forget public safety matters ("but COVID!")
| gojomo wrote:
| "We're sorry to inform you that Apple iCompliance AI Eyes,
| as of last night's updated version 16.4.2, has identified
| the following violations of laws & emergency edicts in your
| recent local photo roll:
|
| * Unmasked proximity with non-household member
|
| * Unlicensed gathering of more than 6 people
|
| * Association with unidentifiable individuals (no
| faceprints on record)
|
| These are your 2nd, 3rd, and 4th strikes so your phone has
| been disabled and you are now under arrest. Do not leave
| your immediate vicinity. As always, keep your phone on,
| charged, and in your personal possession at _all_ times.
|
| Due to large violation volumes, we are currently
| experiencing long physical arrest team hold times. Your
| arresting agents should arrive at your location in
| approximately... 5... hours.
|
| Thank you for using Apple products, the leaders in Social
| Safety. 'Better Safe - Or You'll Be Sorry!'(tm)"
| beckman466 wrote:
| > A "blink", or the iterative strategy of a skilled
| manipulator/abuser/groomer?
|
| Exactly. Note this description of the cycle of abuse:
|
| _" [The abuse] cycle involves four stages:
|
| 1) building tension
|
| 2) an incident of abuse
|
| 3) reconciliation
|
| 4) calm
|
| Rinse and repeat."_
|
| Source:
| https://www.healthline.com/health/relationships/cycle-of-
| abu...
| sneak wrote:
| The fact that they are going to sneak this backdoor in the back
| door later against the wishes of their customers is sufficient
| for me to decide that Apple has abandoned any values they may
| have once had.
|
| I won't be purchasing any more iPhones, and I've had every one.
| 5faulker wrote:
| Hmm... this is getting more serious with potential
| ramifications many years down the line.
| Bud wrote:
| Apple doesn't "sneak in" stuff like this. That's complete
| bullshit. Could we at least discuss in good faith?
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| They were trying to make a small press release about it and
| be done hoping no one would notice. Instead everyone got mad
| and called them out on it. That is where they attempted to
| sneak it in. Not everything is black and white and the
| terminology is sufficient to describe the situation.
| azinman2 wrote:
| A press release is the exact opposite of sneaking something
| in.
| djrogers wrote:
| Wait a sec - this wasn't a 'small press release', it was a
| huge one, made several months in advance of the feature
| launching, accompanied by a bunch of interviews with execs.
|
| If you look at the tone of all of it, they also honestly
| felt this was the most privacy preserving way to do CSAM
| scanning - likely so they can enable E2EE on everything
| iCloud.
|
| What they got very very wrong was the public reaction to
| it.
| Zak wrote:
| What they got very very wrong is the idea that spyware
| running on the user's device is the most privacy
| preserving way to scan for illegal content hosted on
| their servers.
|
| Apple has not announced E2EE for files stored on iCloud.
| If that _is_ their intent, they likely would have had a
| somewhat improved public response by announcing it at the
| same time as the on-device spyware.
| sneak wrote:
| > _likely so they can enable E2EE on everything iCloud._
|
| Refers to facts not in evidence.
|
| Additionally, they have previously voluntarily declined
| to enable e2e on systems to aid government surveillance.
|
| This is baseless speculation, and, given what we know
| about Apple's history with e2e, not only baseless but
| actually unlikely.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| > What they got very very wrong was the public reaction
| to it.
|
| What they got very wrong is that this fundamentally
| changes the nature of iPhones -- they are no longer _user
| agents_ ; in fact, they're actively scanning user data on
| behalf of another party. That change doesn't just make
| people _feel_ uncomfortable, it opens the door for untold
| myriads of abuses.
|
| It's one thing if iCloud servers scan user data - those
| servers never were assumed to be _user agents_. It 's
| entirely different when user-owned devices do this.
| npteljes wrote:
| I think OP referred to the finding that Apple already rolled
| out parts of the detection thing
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/p6hsoh/p_a.
| ..
| mlindner wrote:
| Yeah but no one's found any evidence that any code calls
| it. (At least not that I've seen.)
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| Black box closed source systems sorta make verification
| of what the device is doing rather difficult.
| djrogers wrote:
| Not really - there are a ton of ways to profile and
| monitor a Mac to determine what processes are calling
| into what, and spotting something activating this code
| oth would be trivial if it were happening.
| cwkoss wrote:
| It may be trivial to look under a given rock, but when
| there are hundreds of thousands of rocks, the likelihood
| of someone noticing something left under a rock is low.
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| You say that, but there are also tons of ways to hide
| such things (there is an entire field dedicated to side-
| channel leakage). The point is you don't know unless you
| have the source code (and can compile it yourself, I'm
| ignoring the trust of compilers at the moment). You can
| try to reverse engineer and analyse all you want, but it
| doesn't mean you know what the system is really doing...
| Piskvorrr wrote:
| "Yeah, we have this really suspicious code here, sure,
| but we have not started calling it. Pinky swear."
|
| The issue here is not the trustworthiness of the pinky
| swear...
| mlindner wrote:
| I'm not saying it's a good situation, but it's not
| terrible yet.
| Piskvorrr wrote:
| I am reminded of the joke "an optimist falls from a
| skyscraper. At second floor, he thinks: 'so far, so
| good.'"
|
| In other words, a situation that seems to be a feature
| toggle away from becoming terrible is terrible in itself.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Isn't this the bad part? Like... it being there is the
| problem, not apple specifically using it for child porn
| detection. Right?
| macksd wrote:
| Correct. If we could magically end the rape of children
| and stop the propagation of images of such, I think we'd
| all be on board. But when a system would realistically
| just push most of it elsewhere and violate a bunch of
| innocent people's privacy, people get nervous.
|
| It's like being asked to have an invasive, detailed scan
| of your body shown to TSA personnel (and recorded) when
| you fly. The motive is apparently to prevent violence.
| But there were still incidents on flights when that was
| being done. It wouldn't have caught the box cutters on
| 9/11. The stated motive ceases to be part of the equation
| for me.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Pushing it elsewhere is still a win. You don't want this
| to have easy cover. Keep in mind FB reported close to 17M
| pieces of CSAM last year. So if having the ability to
| detect it was such a deterrent, why are their numbers so
| high?
| sbuk wrote:
| Because the don't tell anyone what they are scanning?
| azinman2 wrote:
| They literally publicize these numbers. It's not like I
| somehow know this FB secret. Every cloud provider scans,
| except Apple.
| sbuk wrote:
| Apple currently do scan for CSAM in their cloud.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Their reported numbers were like 350 last year, compared
| to almost 17M for Facebook. You could theorize Apple has
| little CP, except in the Epic lawsuit we saw exec emails
| released that said the exact opposite. So clearly not
| much scanning has been going on.
| dwaite wrote:
| For email only
| mlindner wrote:
| I think it's actually impossible to use an AI to
| determine this type of thing. Even courts of humans
| sometimes rarely get it wrong sometimes with images that
| are open for debate (for example missing context) on
| whether it was abusive or not (parents bathing their
| kids, as one example). Then you have the whole can of
| worms that pedophiles will find sexual interest in images
| taken in non-abusive contexts but will use them none the
| less. How is an AI supposed to determine that. Even our
| laws can't handle that.
|
| There's also images that can be abusive if made public
| but non-abusive if kept private. For example what about a
| kid taking pictures of themselves nude (many kids don't
| have parental moderated accounts) and putting them on
| icloud (iphone does this automatically with default
| settings).
|
| It's a complete nuthouse and there's no way to do it.
|
| (Also don't get me started on drawn artwork (or 3D CG)
| that people can create that can show all sorts of things
| and is fully or partially legal in many countries.)
| Grustaf wrote:
| Since the threshold is 30 images, and those images are
| matched to a curated database of abusive material, what
| you write here simply doesn't apply.
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| They're not using an AI for that purpose. They're just
| sending a hash of the image and sending it along with
| iCloud uploads. The hashes are of images that have been
| identified by humans as containing child pornography.
| godelski wrote:
| They're not hashes in the way md5sum or sha256 is a hash.
| They are _neural_ hashes. Which is not trying to
| fingerprint a specific image, but tag any image that is
| deemed sufficiently similar to the reference image.
| Hashes are unique, neural hashes aren't.
|
| To add, there are natural neural hash collisions in
| ImageNet (a famous ML dataset). Images that look nothing
| alike to us humans.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| No, the hashes are visual hashes. It is completely
| possible that a clean shaven adult taking pictures of
| themselves could get flagged.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| It's also possible that a picture of an avocado will get
| flagged. A nude photo of someone who's shaved themselves
| is unlikely to look so much like an actual CSAM photo
| that it'll get flagged. It's certainly _possible_ , but
| again, so's the avocado.
| vmladenov wrote:
| Apple already does virus scanning on device and has for a
| decade. I fail to see how you trust one proprietary
| binary file scanner to stay in its lane and not spy on
| you, but fear a different one with a different stated
| purpose.
| behnamoh wrote:
| > Could we at least discuss in good faith?
|
| I'm afraid good faith is not gonna protect your privacy.
| post_break wrote:
| Well I don't mean by doing it without telling everyone. I
| mean wait until it dies down, then just be like oh btw 15.X
| includes CSAM scanning as a change log bulletin.
| haswell wrote:
| Given the uproar on this change, and the fact that the
| uproar was big enough to cause this delay, can you imagine
| the bad press if they come back later and roll this out
| quietly?
|
| _Editing to add_ : I think this will play out more like
| the butterfly keyboard debacle. They won't ever really
| acknowledge how bad the original thing was, but they'll
| return to a solution the community finds palatable (server
| side scanning), and wrap it up in a bow like they did with
| the "magic keyboard, now on our laptops".
| vxNsr wrote:
| They just need to time it right.
| [deleted]
| api wrote:
| Google or (worse) Facebook would have just put this in with
| no press release.
|
| My read is that Apple is trying to placate governments by
| throwing them a bone without totally abandoning their privacy
| stance, hence the drive to put the scanning on the actual
| device so all your photos don't have to be shared as-is with
| Apple. That way they can encrypt iCloud but still keep the
| feds from accusing them (in bad faith) of being a child porn
| trading platform.
|
| The alternative is to keep iCloud unencrypted and scan in the
| cloud, which is what they and everyone else already does.
|
| One of the pieces of feedback they got though is that people
| are more okay with that than with scanning on the device.
| People expect that things that go to the cloud are no longer
| private unless you run some kind of local encryption that you
| control.
|
| The reason they don't care about photos not sent to iCloud is
| the _trading platform_ angle. It 's one thing to let people
| store shit on their own devices. It's another thing to be a
| large scale and _easy to use_ secure channel that people can
| use to share CP. The nightmare scenario for Apple would be to
| become a de-facto standard in the CP underworld for sharing
| content.
|
| Sure people can use Tor, private VPNs and mesh networks, PGP,
| or many other things, but that requires a level of technical
| knowledge that greatly reduces the size of the audience.
|
| Maybe a better alternative for Apple would be to add iCloud
| encryption but to stipulate that any _sharing_ of content
| disables encryption for the shared content. That way they
| could scan shared content only. For unshared content iCloud
| is basically just an encrypted backup.
| nick__m wrote:
| If it was the trading platform angle, could they just scan
| on share or am I missing something ?
| simion314 wrote:
| >My read is that Apple is trying to placate governments by
| throwing them a bone
|
| You would believe this if you only read/watch Apple PR and
| ignore reality. The actual reality is that Apple always
| collaborates with all governments. The reality is that
| Apple did not announce any new end to end encryption that
| would use this feature and did not promise such a feature.
| api wrote:
| Apple isn't altruistic, but I do think they want to have
| strong privacy. They cooperate with governments to what
| seems to be the minimum extent required to do business in
| a given country. They can't change governments.
|
| In China and other more authoritarian nations that means
| cooperating a lot. If you don't you do no business in
| China. In the USA they seem to be looking for a new
| minimum level of cooperation, or trying to enhance
| privacy a little without moving the needle.
|
| In any case this particular strategy looks like a failure
| in the market. They might re-engineer it or backpedal or
| just toss the whole idea of encrypting iCloud.
| simion314 wrote:
| >Apple isn't altruistic, but I do think they want to have
| strong privacy.
|
| Maybe if you define privacy that Google and FB do not
| track you and only Apple do. You open an application on
| your Mac and the event was sent insecure to Apple , find
| a definition of privacy that is not contradictory with
| what Apple was doing.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| what apple are trying to do is minimise damage to their
| bottom line from bad PR. At the end of the day, more people
| must realise that corporations are beholden to one thing -
| money.
|
| Morality barely matters and legality is something easily
| skirted around with the right legal argument. Apple, google
| etc with continue working with governments so long as their
| profit can flow from those countries.
| yummypaint wrote:
| Their practice of suripticiously pushing updates to older
| phones to kill the battery life would seem to fit that bill.
| Their updates aren't open either, people just take them at
| their word. If the law or EULA doesn't ouright prohibit them
| from doing something it's prudent to assume they already are.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "So now the question is in what 15.X update do they just sneak
| it in."
|
| I think they cannot really sneak it in. Some people _do_ read
| updated TOS. And I think a "featurechange" like this, requires
| one.
|
| And yes, the question will be, if the broad attention to the
| topic can be brought back on to it, if that happens. And they
| clearly say it will come, only with some "improvements" (but I
| cannot think of any improvements, that can be made, without
| abondoning the basic concept):
|
| "we have decided to take additional time over the coming months
| to collect input and make improvements before releasing these
| critically important child safety features"
| Zak wrote:
| > _I cannot think of any improvements, that can be made,
| without abondoning the basic concept_
|
| The concept of scanning for CSAM during the upload process,
| or the concept of making the user's device do it? Apple could
| do the former on their own servers and essentially nobody
| would be upset.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| The basic concept of Apple running private pictures through
| an KI algorithm to detect something worthy of
| investigation.
|
| The algorithms never work 100% right. That means there will
| be always humans in the loop, sorting through false
| positives etc. which means probably very private pictures
| here in this context.
|
| And to the end user it does not matter, whether this
| happens on the server or on their device. The message is:
| your pictures are not private with apple.
| Zak wrote:
| It matters very much with regard to the distinction
| between _yours_ and _theirs_. I strongly believe the
| operating system of your device should never actively
| work against your interests, and checking whether you 're
| using the device to commit a crime, then reporting it to
| the device manufacturer who will tell the government is
| potentially strongly against your interests.
|
| If that's too abstract, it matters in that it's a
| foothold for further scanning of data on your device.
| Without this system, if a state wanted to pressure Apple
| to create spyware and add it to their operating system to
| look for something else, that would have been easy to
| refuse. With this system, the spyware is already there,
| and despite Apple's protests to the contrary, it's just a
| matter of a few tweaks to repurpose it.
| yyyk wrote:
| >Wow, we made Apple blink.
|
| Did we? I suspect the real issue the original client-side
| proposal had a lot of holes. What if the bad guys upload CSAM
| which hasn't been tagged by NCMEC yet? What if they then delete
| it from the device (but keep it on iCloud)? Or what if they zip
| the CSAM images and backup that?
|
| In order to be even semi-effective, the client-side scanning
| has to be _more_ invasive, or they have to implement server-
| side scanning too. Apple may well be looking whether they can
| implement this scanning without even more backlash.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| I don't think you're right. Apple didn't care about CSAM
| policing, it's just they weren't opposed to it and throwing
| governments a little bit of what they wanted to make them
| shut up. They thought this through very thoroughly. I read
| the whitepapers they put out on it. Clearly this wasn't done
| overnight by a confederacy of dunces. I think they thought
| they were picking a middle ground on surveillance and privacy
| (clearly they weren't as they broke the 4th wall of "this is
| my damn iphone you're scanning on!") . Anyway, they didn't
| want to be the police and they aren't going to be doing more
| to police your device as you are pointing out. They never
| cared if they caught anyone, just trying to make the US
| government a bit happier.
| yyyk wrote:
| Apple may have thought this thorough technically, but
| politically I find it very unlikely the proposed method is
| a sufficiently effective scanning.
|
| Sooner or later government and NCMEC will push them to
| complete the feature (understandably so from their POV),
| and when they do, Apple will have to expand scanning. Apple
| may have already been pressured to do so.
|
| Sometimes choosing the middle ground is like choosing to
| drive on the white line in the middle of the road as a
| 'compromise' between the lanes.
| albertop wrote:
| Are you sure they did? Or it's just a doge to avoiding bad
| press at the time they getting ready to introduce new devices.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "So now the question is in what 15.x update do they just sneak
| it in."
|
| It would be nice if the general public and the news therefore
| now picked up on the issue of opaque "automatic updates". To
| date, they have been trained to always every update without
| question.
|
| Conventional wisdom: Never, ever question any particular
| automatic update. Don't think, just enable. All updates are
| created equal.
|
| Assumptions: Every update is for users benefit. Software
| companies never operate out of self-interest. There are no
| trade-offs. Whats good for them is good for users and vice
| versa. Theres no reason for end users to trial updated versions
| of software ("A/B test") before deciding to use them "in
| production".
|
| Thought experiment: User installs Software from Company to
| perform "Function #1". Company makes changes to Software,
| described as "Fixes and other changes." Software now performs
| Function #1 plus Function #2. User allows new software to be
| installed automatically. (Automatic updates enabled per
| "expert" advice.") When user downloaded and installed Software
| she based her desicion to use Software on its ability to
| perform Function #1; however, did she have any interest in
| Function #2. Did she agree to Function #2. Company says yes.
| Developers say yes. What does User say. The license agreeement
| places no limits on what might comprise Function #2. It could
| be anything. It could have no benefit whatsoever for User.
| Moreover, Company is under no oblgation to disclose Function #2
| to User. With automatic updates, Company is free to keep
| changing Software. User originally chose Software for Function
| #1 but Software may look very different after many "automatic
| updates". Would she choose it again in its current state. Segue
| to discussion of "lock-in".
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| s/always/& accept/
| ksec wrote:
| I posted on HN [1] that I really wish they stand ground, it
| makes decision on Apple a lot easier. Now they wont. Half of
| the people will forgive them, the rest will most likely forget
| about it in a few years time.
|
| But to me, it did at least look like this scared the shit out
| of Apple PR.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28221869
| [deleted]
| teitoklien wrote:
| > People like me who sold their IPhone are a drop in the bucket
|
| I doubt it , they will bring this up again very soon , if they
| cancel it, they'll get very bad press too.
|
| And second, a company that once shows its intention to breach
| your personal privacy while disregarding its user's best
| interests altogether. Wont hesitate to do it again.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Apple could lose a million customers over this, but they
| still sold >200m a year in 2018 and beyond.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/276306/global-apple-
| ipho...
| darksaints wrote:
| The developer mindshare really matters to apple. As long as
| they are on apple devices, some significant fraction of
| them will be creating software for apple devices. Without
| 3rd party software, apple is toast.
| poetaster wrote:
| Hmm, having experienced the influx of 1.5 million people
| into an area smaller than Alberta, and the social
| consequeces in the last 5 years, i'd say you are being
| very glib. Thr shit show is just starting.
| adventured wrote:
| > The developer mindshare really matters to apple.
|
| The developers are going nowhere so long as the money is
| there to be made from iOS.
|
| Did they all quit when it was revealed that Apple was
| part of PRISM? Of course not. They barely blinked.
|
| It doesn't matter if a billion developers sign a
| petition. It's empty. The vast majority of them will
| promptly capitulate if Apple goes forward. By vast
| majority I mean 99%.
|
| Did you see all the people desperately fleeing from
| Australia due to the rise of the extremist police state
| there? Nope. Did you see the tens of millions of people
| flee from the US when the Patriot Act was passed or PRISM
| was revealed? Nope. Did you see everyone rapidly flood
| over to mainland Europe as Britain became a police state?
| Nope. How about the hundreds of millions of people
| fleeing out of China over the past decade with the rise
| of Xi and the entire demolition of all human rights in
| China? Nope. Perhaps you're spotting a predictable human
| nature trend in all of this.
|
| All the tech employees of Google, Facebook, Amazon,
| Microsoft, Apple, etc. They've all quit in droves over
| the past decade over human rights abuses - including vast
| privacy abuses - and concerns for what these companies
| are doing? Whoops, no, the exact opposite. There was a
| price for their integrity as it turns out, and they
| grabbed the money, which is what most people do.
|
| The iOS developers are going nowhere, either. Besides the
| fact that their livelihoods depend on it, there's no vast
| green field to run to from what's happening. Sure, some
| might change jobs, or switch industry segments, it will
| be a small group though. It's going on in just about
| every liberal democracy simultaneously. What huge
| platform are developers going to flee to that's better
| and is never going to feature forced on-device scanning
| spyware? It's coming for Android too, bet on it.
| cmsj wrote:
| Not sure why you're getting downvotes.
|
| iOS is where all the profitable users are. While that
| holds true, developers will be there to sell things to
| the profitable users.
|
| The principled indie developers might leave in protest,
| and that would be a terrible loss for the platform's
| soul, but realistically the vast bulk of money flowing
| through the App Store is not going to the indie
| developers.
| defaultname wrote:
| Do you believe that most developers are up in arms about
| this, ready to abandon the platform? I doubt more than a
| tiny fraction really care about this at all, and the
| hysterics on HN (threads brigaded by a small percentage
| of HN users) are not representative. Predictions of some
| massive sales drop -- or even a sales drop _at all_ --
| are deluded nonsense.
|
| Apple is delaying this, I suspect, because it confuses
| the privacy message: If every time they talk about
| privacy someone can make them look like hypocrites by
| pointing out the on-device scanning, well that's just
| ugly for Apple. I suspect the on-device scanning element
| is going to be removed and it'll be on ingress to iCloud,
| which is what I said on my very first post to this. It
| was ill-considered to do it on device given Apple's
| privacy push.
| FabHK wrote:
| > Predictions of some massive sales drop -- or even a
| sales drop at all -- are deluded nonsense.
|
| I remember, when that recalcitrant dentist was dragged of
| a United plane, endless predictions of United's imminent
| demise, people would never fly United again, yada yada
| yada. Needless to say, nothing much happened.
|
| > I suspect the on-device scanning element is going to be
| removed and it'll be on ingress to iCloud, which is what
| I said on my very first post to this. It was ill-
| considered to do it on device given Apple's privacy push.
|
| Not sure about that. Apple's approach (private set
| intersection run on half client, half server) preserves
| more privacy than scanning it in the cloud, and leaves
| the door open for E2EE.
| darksaints wrote:
| Most? Probably not. But developers are more sensitive to
| privacy issues in general, because they work in the most
| privacy invasive industry that ever existed. They know
| how much corporations dig into your stuff, and they might
| have even implemented some of it. At least speaking
| personally, I know my purchasing behavior changed on
| Amazon when I worked for them and realized how much they
| tracked me.
|
| More importantly, there is an oligopoly in tech and up
| until now, only one of the manufacturers of tech devices
| cared about privacy. And to that extent, I wouldn't be
| surprised if vast majority of developers who care about
| privacy have biased themselves towards apple. And now
| they have a reason to treat apple like every other
| privacy invading company.
| [deleted]
| wallacoloo wrote:
| > And now they have a reason to treat apple like every
| other privacy invading company.
|
| That's right. I like the idea that on android, I can use
| stock tools like rsync to manage the photos/music on my
| phone. With Apple it's been a constant battle against
| iTunes to do those basic things. The only reason I chose
| Apple last time I bought a phone is because I'm willing
| to sacrifice a bit of convenience for the perception of
| better security/privacy. If they lose on that front, then
| I'll hop to whichever phone is easiest for me to use the
| way I want to.
| digisign wrote:
| What does Amzn do besides tracking your purchases?
| spacebear wrote:
| If the million customers they lose also happen to be people
| who build apps and influence the tech buying decisions of
| everyone they know, that could be a very big problem over
| time.
| Lamad123 wrote:
| They've already lost my trust!!
| jimbob45 wrote:
| >People like me who sold their iPhone and cancelled all
| services probably are a drop in the bucket
|
| Yeah, very few have the financial independence to be able to do
| something like that. However, over the next few years when
| everyone gets their free upgrades, I imagine we'll see some
| slower, yet more robust, switching.
| rconti wrote:
| Financial independence to... spend less money?
| post_break wrote:
| Most people finance their phones. To sell them means to pay
| them off which is extremely hard for most people. I had the
| luxury of paying off my phone, and buying another while
| waiting to sell my current phone. In that timeline it was
| about $2,000 in cashflow. So yeah, I'm blessed to be able
| to do so at the drop of a hat.
| rconti wrote:
| Gotcha, yeah, I was focusing on the "sell phone / cancel
| services" side and didn't even think of the prerequisite
| to be able to sell the phone. (and, i guess, buy a new
| one before you ship your old one off!)
| Grustaf wrote:
| Just like people stopped using google and facebook because
| they also scan for CSAM?
| sharken wrote:
| Generate enough bad press for long enough works wonders for
| creating change.
|
| The battle is not over though, as you say Apple might include
| the feature unchanged in a later release.
|
| If they do, should come as no surprise that they will lose a
| lot of business.
|
| The correct business decision will be to cancel the feature and
| double down on the privacy angle.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Just before everyone starts high-fiving each other, even the
| release itself brands it as a delay. I accept that it is a
| positive development, but do not read as anything but that: a
| temporary delay to let the furor die.
| brundolf wrote:
| It was a torpedo to the heart of the privacy marketing campaign
| they've spent who-knows-how-much-money building up over the
| past several years. That translates directly to wasted dollars,
| which they do care about.
| echelon wrote:
| Well done, screeching voices!
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| But isn't their privacy marketing: we will protect you from
| abusive surveillance capitalists, not we will protect you
| from state level actors?
| xvector wrote:
| privacy is privacy, you can't pretend to care about it
| while at the same time pushing something like this through
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| >privacy is privacy
|
| Are you asking Apple to come out and say that they are
| supporting privacy against state-level actors? After
| snowyD, why would anyone believe that anyway?
|
| I'm not advocating against or for - I'm only wanting to
| add more clarity to the discussion because I think it is
| an important distinction that is often left out.
| lrem wrote:
| Wasn't there a very public "no, FBI, you cannot get the
| shooter's phone contents"?
| [deleted]
| istingray wrote:
| Congrats on selling your iPhone so fast. I managed to purchase
| a System76 laptop in the meantime, typing from it now.
|
| The cat is out of the bag. You and I have realized Apple can
| make these type of changes whenever they want.
|
| I'm disappointed to report that Linux needs a lot of
| improvement to be viable for most people. I'm forging ahead,
| donating to open source software and hardware projects, filing
| bug reports, and generally bringing the Mac spirit to Linux.
| "It just works."
|
| What phone did you switch to?
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| > I managed to purchase a System76 laptop in the meantime,
| typing from it now.
|
| If I could just get a decent higher-than-1080 panel from
| System76, I might consider it for my next laptop. I've been
| spoiled by Macs. As it is I might go with a Framework laptop
| instead.
| istingray wrote:
| Email them and say that! We need to be more vocal as
| customers so vendors don't waste time.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| > I'm disappointed to report that Linux needs a lot of
| improvement to be viable for most people. I'm forging ahead,
| donating to open source software and hardware projects,
| filing bug reports, and generally bringing the Mac spirit to
| Linux. "It just works."
|
| IMO it would go a long way if we taught computer literacy and
| specifically Linux literacy to everyone in school. Microsoft
| and Google have all the school contracts and they bring
| people up on systems that "just work" (actually they have
| paid system administrators). If we taught people from a young
| age to use Linux and handle problems, then the small problems
| that often come up with open source need not be barriers to
| adoption. Even if every regular person can't always solve
| every linux problem, if they were familiar enough to use it
| and had at least one expert friend, they'd be fine.
|
| That's not to say we shouldn't strive to make Linux "just
| work" for most people, but we can attack the problem from
| other angles as well.
| istingray wrote:
| I agree more tech literacy is needed. The learning curve
| for Linux seems so steep. For what it's worth, I took UNIX
| classes in high school, and know how to get around.
|
| But Linux is just far more than I can handle, even just to
| install apps and configure settings. For example just
| trying to get my mouse not to stutter, I dig and find a
| solution. I copy and paste it into the terminal. It doesn't
| work and I try 3 different solutions. I'm curious about
| solutions but it wears my curiosity out pretty fast. I need
| to get work done.
|
| In the sense that computers are like cars, I'm okay not
| knowing how exactly it works under the hood.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Yes this kind of thing is frustrating. And I may be very
| wrong, but I have been wondering, what if this is what
| open source is always going to be like. I am 100% pro
| open source and I think everything (cars, trucks, washing
| machines, factory machines) should be open source. But I
| guess if we got to that point, where the people producing
| the computers and the people writing the code were all on
| the same side, maybe things wouldn't break so often.
|
| Also FWIW I have learned, even though I run debian, to
| check the Arch Wiki for tips on problems like that. One
| more place to check in addition to stack overflow.
| rconti wrote:
| > I'm disappointed to report that Linux needs a lot of
| improvement to be viable for most people.
|
| I'm continually surprised that people are continually
| surprised by this. I'm sure this post will get a lot of
| anecdotal replies; of course it can work fine for many
| people, but that's not the point. I used it exclusively on
| the desktop from 1995 to 2002. I could make it work for me,
| _today_ , if I wanted to.
|
| > You and I have realized Apple can make these type of
| changes whenever they want.
|
| Was this not obvious? I'm pretty shocked that, for example,
| Docker can decide to change their license, and now in a few
| months a bunch of companies owe them money for every single
| user they have, _even if the users don 't do anything
| different_. If they opened the license agreement and chose
| NOT to upgrade. If they never use the software again. But
| bam, terms changed, now you owe us money.
| istingray wrote:
| Yeah what a bad deal. What can we so about this?
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| > I'm sure this post will get a lot of anecdotal replies
|
| I tried Ubuntu last year, briefly. Almost everything worked
| fine, except ... OK, I'm a trackpad user. I have a couple
| Apple Magic Trackpads and I prefer to use those over a
| traditional mouse.
|
| It worked fine for, like, a day? And then out of nowhere it
| just stopped responding. Reset or reinstalled everything I
| could think of and it still failed to work. OK, whatever, I
| bought a traditional bluetooth mouse. Which went to sleep
| every time it remained still for more than a split second,
| rendering it basically unusable (not a problem on Windows
| on the same machine).
|
| Maybe a whiz could have fixed one or both issues, but
| googling completely failed me. This was pretty basic stuff,
| surely? And yet I couldn't even get bluetooth mice to work
| on the most mainstream distro.
|
| (Now, admittedly, the trackpad doesn't work properly out of
| the box in Windows either, since Apple doesn't provide
| drivers that work outside of Boot Camp. But at least there
| are paid drivers that work really well.)
| kaladin-jasnah wrote:
| Anecdotally, I have installed Linux on older MacBooks and
| have had the Magic Mice working fine without any issues.
|
| Anyway, I don't know. People have all sorts of annoying
| issues with Linux that end up being things that I have
| never encountered before. I usually use wireless mice
| with USB transceivers, which have never had problems and
| I feel like not everyone has such a bad experience
| (although I know many people who do). Perhaps it's
| because it's Apple hardware or something, but,
| admittedly, I have had MacBooks work perfectly on Linux
| before.
|
| I think that, however, you use Linux on a desktop rather
| than a laptop, you will find that the hardware experience
| is quite pleasurable and does not have nearly the same
| number of issues. Between the two, Linux does manage to
| shine decently on desktops.
| abnercoimbre wrote:
| Is the System76 experience worthwhile so far? I'm about to
| invest in a Pangolin [0] this Labor Day weekend and could use
| an honest review from a fellow HN ex-Mac user.
|
| [0] https://system76.com/laptops/pangolin
| istingray wrote:
| see my comments above in this thread. specific comments are
| welcome. i love talking about this thing :) As a Mac user,
| the build is about what you would expect from a PC. It's
| not one of those nightmare shit PCs. It does its job.
|
| Get that Pangolin before they sell out! Is there a Labor
| Day sale or something?
| abnercoimbre wrote:
| I'm _hoping_ there 's a Labor Day sale :) Thanks for the
| comments, I'm motivated to take the plunge now!
| Raineer wrote:
| I ordered a Pangolin yesterday as I've been waiting for an
| AMD laptop forever. This is my third System76 laptop, and
| the first two are still great.
|
| My first was a Galago Pro, and my only complaint was that I
| went HiDPI. That was just a bad choice on my part. The
| software supports it fine, I just don't prefer it in a
| laptop unless it's literally a Mac-level Retina-quality
| panel. It wasn't, but it's half the price point.
|
| My other is a Gazelle 15", which dual-boots Arch and
| Windows. I use it primarily as a gaming box when I travel
| (remember those days?). I spent a lot of raid nights on
| various MMOs from hotel rooms. It works great.
|
| Really looking forward to the Pangolin. Mine is still in
| "building" status.
|
| I see a lot of sh*t written about System76 because they are
| just rebranded Clevos. Well...yeah? They are, and they are
| fine. I would rather give money to a company like System76
| a thousand times over than someone dripping with anti-
| consumer behavior like Dell.
| istingray wrote:
| System76 is incredible. I have nothing but good things to
| say. They are the future of Linux.
|
| Re: Clevo - obligatory copy pasta from System76 Chief
| Engineer right here on HN [1]
|
| "System76 UX architect here! This vastly trivializes the
| work System76 does for months and sometimes years leading
| up to a product release. We don't simply take an off-the-
| shelf product that already exists, throw an OS on it, and
| sell it.
|
| System76 works with upstream manufacturers (like, yes,
| Clevo for laptops) to determine what types of products to
| develop, including their specifications, design, etc. for
| months up to a release. These products do not exist
| before we enter into these conversations.
|
| Once that has been determined, designed, and goes into
| production, we start on firmware. We ensure all
| components are working together and with the Linux kernel
| (often requiring changes to the components' low level
| interactions with the OS, since the upstream components
| themselves are often manufactured with the assumption
| they will be used by Windows).
|
| Once that is complete, we test with Ubuntu and Pop!_OS
| specifically, ensuring the OS is working perfectly with
| the hardware. If there are any OS-specific changes to be
| done, we write that behavior into Pop!_OS and/or our
| "driver" which is preloaded on all machines (and
| available in any Ubuntu-based distro, Arch, Fedora,
| etc.), with the intent to upstream that into Ubuntu,
| GNOME, and/or Linux itself as quickly as possible. When
| this is more generic like ensuring HiDPI works great out
| of the box, this actually ends up benefiting competitors
| like Dell's XPS 13 probably as much as it benefits us,
| but we put in the effort to file the bugs, track them,
| write the code, and get it upstreamed.
|
| Once all of that is complete, we finally offer it for
| purchase and market it with all of our pretty
| photographs, sales pages, etc.
|
| What ends up happening, then, is Clevo offers a machine
| with a similar-looking chassis for sale as a barebones
| laptop. This is the result partially of the decision
| making System76 has made for what to produce in the first
| place. These products, however, do not contain any of the
| firmware or driver work that System76 has invested in.
| They do benefit from the nice photography and advertising
| System76 has done, and since they look similar, people
| assume they're going to get the same machine for cheaper
| "directly from the manufacturer."
|
| Edit: regardless, this is a bit beside the point of the
| linked blog post, and is also becoming less and less true
| as we work on designing and manufacturing our products
| completely in-house."
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17040293
| Raineer wrote:
| Thank you for the quote, I hadn't seen that. I certainly
| didn't mean to trivialize their work (obviously? since
| I've voted with my wallet 3 times)
|
| Their work on both the firmware front and with Pop!_OS
| should not be overlooked. And, it should be mentioned, if
| one is familiar with their whole product line - they now
| go far beyond just laptops for the open source community.
| And their powerhouses are absolutely not from some other
| OEM.
| istingray wrote:
| Also, what pushes you to get a Pangolin (AMD) instead of
| Lemur (Intel)? I'm curious because I don't really
| understand the meaningful difference and bought the Lemur
| when it was in stock.
| abnercoimbre wrote:
| For APUs there's no beating AMD Ryzen, especially if
| you're into gaming. Also my Windows laptop has a Ryzen
| and I'm just used to it now.
| Jayschwa wrote:
| I've been using an Oryx Pro (v5) for a few years. It's
| mostly fine.
|
| My main disappointment is that it doesn't "just work" with
| the kernels shipped by Ubuntu. System76 provides their own
| kernel packages, but they sometimes cause weird conflicts
| with other low level packages, and it can't hold its charge
| when suspended. I haven't attempted to debug the issue
| because I usually stay plugged in when I'm working, but I
| suppose I ought to engage tech support. They have been
| helpful in the past.
|
| At the end of the day, I'll probably still give them my
| first look if I'm shopping for another laptop.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I also have had an Oryx Pro for several years. I stuck
| with System76's branded Linux, just do updates as they
| are available, and so far all has been well. I like that
| they keep CUDA working with very few hassles.
|
| Compare this to my migration to a M1 MacBook Pro: I love
| it, but it is rough doing deep learning on it.
| inpdx wrote:
| "I'm disappointed to report that Linux needs a lot of
| improvement to be viable for most people."
|
| Evergreen.
| nbzso wrote:
| As a designer, the only thing that I miss on Linux is
| graphical software at least on a level of Affinity
| Designer. Everything else is more than viable. Blender.
| Resolve. BitWig Studio. RawTherapee, Krita. For web
| development is perfect, my engineers run ARCH/Manjaro over
| soon to be abandoned Apple hardware. Even my old MacBook
| Air is supported, Pop!_OS is working perfectly with
| properly mapped keyboard keys (keyboard backlit controls,
| audio, playback, etc). The only thing that I have done is
| to plug thunderbolt/ethernet adapter, clicked on popshop
| update, restarted and wifi started working flawlessly.
| digisign wrote:
| I ordered the pine64 but it still has not arrived.
| pshirshov wrote:
| Buy a Pixel and install Calyx or Graphene with sandboxed Play
| Services.
| RussianCow wrote:
| How does sandboxing Play Services compare with using
| microG?
| pshirshov wrote:
| Well, push notifications are lot more reliable, safetynet
| passes basic check and app do not complain about play
| services issues.
|
| But network location provider doesn't work, that's an
| issue.
| istingray wrote:
| Is Pixel open hardware? I'm assuming not but props to them
| if so.
| pshirshov wrote:
| It's not. Unfortunately there is little open hardware
| around.
|
| Though proprietary hardware plus mostly open OS is better
| than proprietary everything.
| Hackbraten wrote:
| Not GP but I took a leap of faith and ordered a Librem 5.
| It's supposed to ship early 2022 but I'm not holding my
| breath.
| post_break wrote:
| S21 ultra. Out of one place into another I know. But it's
| also the principle of the thing. I don't share my location
| data with the bare minimum, and sideload stuff. I don't see
| hardware good enough to go completely off-grid from Google
| yet so this was my compromise.
| istingray wrote:
| Understandable. I suggest donating to open source options
| as part of your compromise. Purism, PinePhone, Ubuntu
| Touch....or buying something from them if it's not an
| option.
| post_break wrote:
| Unpopular opinion but I mostly donate to charities that
| are confirmed to spend the money on more than
| administrative people. Open source donations I make for
| software I use. If an open source thing comes around that
| can replace my Samsung phone I'd buy in a heartbeat.
| istingray wrote:
| Yes! And because of this, this means you need to donate
| _ahead_ of time so things can be built to replace your
| Samsung phone. After it 's built well...what would they
| spend your money on? Donate early, donate often.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| I mean I already have accepted the fact that they allow
| Signal type apps because if the FBI or whoever requests it
| they can just access your display driver layer and see what
| you're typing locally, no need to ban encrypted messaging. I
| just keep remembering how Lavabit shut down because he
| refused to comply and otherwise had no choice in the matter.
| Computers and software should not be easily trusted.
| babypuncher wrote:
| I think the internal backlash helped a lot. The initial move
| was very contrary to the culture Apple has cultivated over the
| years and it did not go over well with them.
| bobbytit wrote:
| Yeah their orig mac ad was 1984 will not be like 1984.
|
| They were just out by 37 years.
| ak391 wrote:
| also check out the neural hash demo here to test it out on your
| own images https://huggingface.co/spaces/aliabd/generate-
| neural-hash-co...
| gjs278 wrote:
| enjoy being a green bubble in people's texts now
| rajacombinator wrote:
| Yep they'll just quietly backdoor it in next time.
| spacebear wrote:
| My bet is they wait a few months and quietly announce that
| they'll do the scanning on the iCloud servers instead. That
| would be relatively uncontroversial in the tech press and
| probably never make it to the mainstream press.
| tyingq wrote:
| I have to wonder if the sequence was somewhat deliberate on
| Apple's part. Like:
|
| - The government is pressuring us to do things that don't fit
| with our "privacy is good" sales pitch
|
| - Let's propose something, but in a ham-handed enough way that
| it gets a ton of public push back
|
| - Now we can argue our point with the government in a way that
| has already has more public support and existing
| discourse/debate
|
| Somewhat risky though, since it hurt their public image.
| labcomputer wrote:
| Then why wouldn't they say, "the government asked us to do
| this"? Apple is taking all the negative publicity this way.
|
| My favorite theory is this:
|
| Apple wants to create a chilling effect on reverse
| engineering iOS. They're starting to catch regulatory
| attention and lost their recent suit against Corellium. By
| putting neural hashes in the encrypted OS image, they can
| accuse anyone who reverse engineers iOS of:
|
| 1. Being in cahoots with child abusers
|
| 2. Knowingly possessing CSAM
|
| I would hope that most courts would see through that paper
| thin logic, but the idea would be simply to introduce enough
| doubt that most reverse engineers don't want to risk it.
| xvector wrote:
| > Then why wouldn't they say, "the government asked us to
| do this"?
|
| NSLs are routinely issued to silence companies.
| labcomputer wrote:
| Oh, you're so close... what was the rest of the context?
|
| It was that Apple somehow gets negotiating leverage with
| a three letter agency.
|
| So how does Apple get negotiating leverage in a context
| with a TLA when they can't say "they made us do it"?
| mackrevinack wrote:
| they could be under a gag order which would mean if they
| did mention anything about the government they could get
| into deep shit
| upbeat_general wrote:
| I can't imagine how the gag order would allow Apple to
| announce a CSAM scanning system but not announce that the
| government forced them to.
|
| What basis could there be for that? And I'd be even more
| skeptical if this originated from a single case of abuse.
| labcomputer wrote:
| Sure, but look at the context. The hypothesis was that
| Apple was doing this to create negotiating leverage with
| some three letter agency.
|
| How does Apple get leverage if Apple gets all the
| negative publicity, and can't even say "TLA made us do
| it"?
| istingray wrote:
| The big takeaway for me: Linux isn't a viable alternative yet for
| most people.
|
| We have no alternative to being stuck with Apple. I had always
| thought I chose Apple. But it wasn't a choice really because
| there are no other viable alternatives.
|
| I'm typing this from a new Linux machine I purchased in response
| to Apple's surveillance announcement. The hardware and support is
| terrific. But Linux falls short.
|
| - For a casual user, Linux doesn't support bluetooth headphones,
| and the mic is basically impossible to get it to work. That means
| I can't have video calls.
|
| - To get my mouse to work I have to clone a github from some
| random person.
|
| - To install Brave I have to use the CLI and copy and paste a
| blob of commands I don't understand (https://brave.com/linux/).
|
| I'm not a developer. I need to work. I just need a computer to
| work on and have video calls with a bluetooth mic. Not doable on
| Linux after spending $1500 on a new computer.
|
| That said, open source, end to end encryption is the only path
| forward. Linux _must_ be viable.
|
| If you work on Linux, thank you. Please continue to be empathetic
| to users who have no idea what a CLI is and have no interest in
| learning and just want to work using open source systems.
|
| If you are a regular person who wants to use Linux, be vocal
| about it. Donate money, file bug reports, complain and let people
| know what you need. Buy from companies leading the way like
| System76 and Purism. (I bought from System76, highly recommended)
|
| Linux has been built and used by brilliant mechanics, but it is
| time for Linux to be used by all.
| geophile wrote:
| What OS?
|
| I have a 2+-year old Darter Pro, running Pop OS 20.10, which
| has been wonderful. Bluetooth just works (as long as there is
| only one user attempting to use it), the mic just works, the
| mouse just works. Also, System76 support is the best I've
| encountered since I bought my first computer in the 80s.
| istingray wrote:
| It's a Linux/bluetooth issue not a computer vendor issue.
|
| Yes support is terrific. What mic/headphones do you use?
|
| I eventually got the Sony XM3s to play sound after a bunch of
| CLI commands and random Linux threads. But bluetooth mic
| never worked.
|
| Support recommended getting a wired mic. I figured they would
| know, having talked to all sorts of users.
| [deleted]
| pkulak wrote:
| Well, to add to the anecdata, I set my Dad up with a System76
| machine years ago and he's been chugging alone with zero
| complaints.
| istingray wrote:
| Zero complaints...to you. I can see giving up on asking other
| Linux users for help if they're so dismissive. Users aren't
| wrong. Apple gets that. If you have a problem getting
| something basic to work, it's Apple's fault, not the user's
| fault.
|
| This will be a hard cultural shift to make for Linux culture
| given their starting point today.
| pkulak wrote:
| System76 takes full responsibility for their machines. My
| Dad has a number to call if something doesn't work... and
| it's not mine.
| geethree wrote:
| The Linux Bluetooth experience may not be as slick as apple's,
| but it certainly works as expected.
|
| Bluemon + pulseaudio + pavucontrol has served me well for
| years.
| istingray wrote:
| I'm not a developer, I don't understand CLI, and I can copy
| paste stuff to the best of my ability.
|
| I spent 4 hours getting my Sony XM3 headphones to connect.
| They finally played sound. I never got the mic to work at
| all.
|
| Linux is not ready for mainstream adoption. The fact that you
| need to mention 3 packages needed is proof.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I guess it's a matter of what you think of as "as expected."
|
| Pairing events, and switching between devices, is a dead easy
| with Apple gear. Non-Apple peripherals work very very
| smoothly, too, though when there's an Apple option I tend to
| pick that because of the additional ease of use.
|
| Windows is materially worse. Linux lags Windows.
| wallacoloo wrote:
| > Linux doesn't support bluetooth headphones for example.
|
| That's not true. I've been using Bluetooth on Linux since 2015,
| on at least 3 different machines. I hate to be a Linux trope,
| but you probably haven't set it up right. Finding the right
| distro will be key to your Linux experience, because the good
| distros make these things easy. The right distro won't require
| anything beyond a GUI to pair with your BT device, if that's
| what you want.
| istingray wrote:
| Does the microphone work in your headphones? Let me know what
| model I'll check it out.
| skarz wrote:
| wow. what distro are you using? mint cinnamon is pretty modern
| (especially after you theme it) and bluetooth headphones have
| worked quite well for a long time. never had a mouse not
| work...there's even a small program to pair logitech devices. i
| guess this dell 7470 works better with linux than sys76. only
| driver i've had to install was for my gpu and there's even a
| program for that!
| NexRebular wrote:
| And here I am, in process of purging linux from all the servers
| and workstations replacing them with BSD and illumos. Linux is
| not the only option and in fact, should never be the only
| option.
| driverdan wrote:
| Are you sure you didn't get a lemon? I haven't heard of others
| complaining about System76 BT issues. On the other hand I've
| heard of many people having BT issues with Apple laptops. BT
| never worked on one of my work Macbooks.
|
| I'm running PopOS on a Surface Pro 3 and it's nearly flawless,
| including BT.
| istingray wrote:
| It's a Linux problem, not computer hardware problem.
|
| Does the mic in your headphones work? Let me know the model,
| I'll check it out for myself.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| >Linux has been built and used by brilliant mechanics, but it
| is time for Linux to be used by all.
|
| it will be very hard for Linux to be used at home/corporate PC.
|
| Apple/Microsoft started out in the home/corporate PC. Apple
| with Apple 1 and Microsoft's DOS. They are too entrench in the
| PC industry. Linux shine in server, mobile, IoT and embedded
| devices.
| fouc wrote:
| > I had always thought I chose Apple. But it wasn't a choice
| really because there are no other viable alternatives.
|
| Looking back, that seems accurate. Though it was perhaps not
| entirely about viability but more about sheer convenience,
| sheer joy of shit just working, etc.
|
| Unfortunately it seems we ended up sacrificing freedom at the
| altar of convenience..
| istingray wrote:
| Doh! It's true.
|
| For me it boils down to trading freedom for bluetooth
| headphones/mic that just work.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Ironically, I suspect Apple is the reason end-user Linux isn't
| dramatically farther along on the adoption curve.
|
| I feel like story of my move the Mac is not at all uncommon: in
| the very late 90s, when I was doing mostly consulting and not
| really any coding, my work life revolved around emails and
| office docs. Windows on laptops of the era was AWFUL -- long
| boot times, unstable/unusable device sleep, frequent crashes,
| etc.
|
| I had a coworker using a G3 PowerBook, and his actual user
| experience was drastically better than mine by every metric
| (except, I guess, in that his Powerbook was significantly
| heavier than my super-sleek ThinkPad). Crashes were rare. Boot
| time was fast, but it mattered less because sleep actually
| worked.
|
| I switched. Then the dot-com crash happened, and our company
| failed, and I hung my own shingle out -- and right about that
| moment, OS X happened.
|
| My Mac went from being difficult to work on (for a LAMP-stack
| person) to being the IDEAL platform. I had a real bash prompt,
| on a machine that shipped with all the tools I wanted, and on
| which I could easily install most anything else (even if, early
| on, I had to build from source) -- and this same machine ran
| true Office, and had a host of really well-designed other
| applications and utilities that made my more productive and
| happier. It was a total win. And now, 20+ years later, I'm
| still here, typing on a Mac.
|
| If OS X hadn't happened, then the work I had after the dot-com
| crash would've pushed me and a lot of other people like me to
| full-time Linux.
| istingray wrote:
| I like the idea of Apple as a bridge to the global awakening
| of Linux :)
| sswastioyono18 wrote:
| same with me. Tried mac once 7 years ago, didnt work out so I
| sold my macbook pro. 4 years later, my new workplace gave me
| mac and topd me windows laptop is moatly only for QA. Then I
| realized its actually a good thing and I learnt a lot by just
| using mac and get myself familiar with linux as well.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| What model? I was shipped an Oryx Pro for work and it's given
| me exactly zero problems in 11 months. I've got a wireless USB
| mouse, wireless USB keyboard, USB smart card reader plugged in
| through a hub, and an external monitor connected via HDMI in
| extend the screen mode. Even with an NVIDIA discrete GPU, every
| single thing has worked plug and play on the first try. I use a
| bluetooth headset for all meetings and it also works perfectly
| fine, paired in exactly the same way as it does on any other
| platform. The Linux bluez stack definitely supports headphones.
|
| Ironically, the only gotcha moment I have ever had was when
| plugging my iPhone in to charge it, I kept noticing my network
| connection would get wonky, and I eventually realized Apple
| puts code injection into its USB cables that include a setting
| to automatically tether a device an iPhone get plugged into to
| use Ethernet over USB, so I was being disconnected from my WiFi
| access point and then being tethered through the iPhone back to
| the same WiFi access point, except mediated through the iPhone
| as a relay. Yet another user-hostile, annoying on by default
| Apple setting I had to discover by accident and then turn off.
| istingray wrote:
| It's a Linux + bluetooth problem, not a computer vendor
| problem. Bluetooth microphones are basically impossible to
| get working on Linux. That's what I was told by vendor
| support as well, just get a wired mic as bluetooth
| headphones+mic are unreliable.
|
| I was attempting to use Sony XM3s.
|
| Glad to hear you have some headphones that work, what model?
| Macha wrote:
| - Bluetooth headphones
|
| I've never had that much to do to get them to just work.
|
| I have done some Bluetooth tinkering to:
|
| (A) Get them to use high quality codecs, something which also
| requires tinkering for a Mac: https://medium.com/macoclock/how-
| to-enable-aptx-on-mac-osx-b... - that's with pulse. With newer,
| Pipewire using, systems, even that is not needed which for my
| use case puts Linux ahead of Mac OS for Bluetooth headphone
| support.
|
| (B) my previous headphones would get super confused if I paired
| them on Linux and windows on my dual boot device as they'd see
| different keys on the same host and that broke them so copied
| my keys from my Linux config files to my windows registry so
| both would use the same keys. My newer headphones seem to "just
| handle" this situation though. This is a dual boot issue and
| not specifically a Linux issue. My Linux only devices are fine.
|
| - Mouse. I have since 2005, never had any issues with any mouse
| on Linux ever. Not even for all the extra buttons on my current
| Logitech mouse where they just happily show up as mouse button
| 5-9 and I can bind them in games.
|
| - Brave: Honestly I'm surprised Pop is not setting up a GUI
| package manager with proprietary software able to be installed
| from it with their target market, but I'll take your word for
| this one.
| istingray wrote:
| Does the microphone in your bluetooth headphones work?
|
| Brave: Just to clarify, it's Brave.com itself that only has
| CLI instructions
|
| From https://brave.com/linux/ ---
|
| sudo apt install apt-transport-https curl
|
| sudo curl -fsSLo /usr/share/keyrings/brave-browser-archive-
| keyring.gpg https://brave-browser-apt-
| release.s3.brave.com/brave-browser...
|
| echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/brave-browser-
| archive-keyring.gpg arch=amd64] https://brave-browser-apt-
| release.s3.brave.com/ stable main"|sudo tee
| /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brave-browser-release.list
|
| sudo apt update
|
| sudo apt install brave-browser
| Macha wrote:
| > Does the microphone in your bluetooth headphones work?
|
| Yes. I had to go into the audio settings to change between
| Headphones (high quality audio) and Headset (mic enabled)
| modes which is a bluetooth thing. But it works, and is a
| thing I need to do on Windows also.
|
| (Actually on Windows I go out of my way to disable the
| headset device, because it just makes everything bad by
| being enabled - communication programs mute my everything,
| the audio playback becomes bad, and the microphone quality
| on my headphones is just worse than on my webcam, never
| mind my desk mic, so I never want to use it)
|
| ---
|
| Yeah, that's a Brave thing. They probably (rightly to be
| fair) assume most current Linux users understand the
| command line enough to follow those steps and Brave would
| prefer users get the browser from their repos so they don't
| have to deal with users having potentially out of date
| browsers in support requests.
|
| But you can get Brave in a snap, which to my understanding
| means you can get it in software center on Ubuntu, Manjaro,
| etc. And you can probably install the snap store on Pop
| also.
|
| Chrome on the other hand just serves you a package you can
| double click to install, if you'd rather get it from them
| rather than your package manager/app store:
| https://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/chrome/
| bamboozled wrote:
| You're individual experience isn't universal.
|
| Running Fedora 34 on X1 Carbon. Bliss.
|
| Linux is community driven, if somethings not working, try fix
| it?
| Espressosaurus wrote:
| > I'm not a developer. I need to work. I just need a computer
| to work on and have video calls with a bluetooth mic. Not
| doable on Linux after spending $1500 on a new computer.
|
| > Linux has been built and used by brilliant mechanics, but
| it is time for Linux to be used by all.
| istingray wrote:
| Replying here to say I agree with the other posters.
|
| I'm not a developer. I need a system to do my work. I need to
| do video calls using a bluetooth headset with a microphone.
|
| I'm not in a position to spend time "fixing". But I am in a
| position to pay. But Linux seems to have few options
| available to pay for polish. I would pay $500 this instant to
| have the ease of connectivity that Apple has on this Linux
| machine.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Some days I spend 5 hours on the phone with my Bluetooth
| headset, I have no issues with it at all.
| selykg wrote:
| His point is that it's not ready for the average person. I
| would not expect the average person to switch from something
| that works out of the box to having to fiddle with trying to
| find an answer just to get where they were before.
|
| OP is 100% correct. I also love how you basically say "well
| it works for me" which is a common answer I seem to hear from
| so many Linux users. It's like customer support responding
| "well, I can't recreate the issue."
| bamboozled wrote:
| I can honestly say that in recent times (last 2 years) I
| never had to fiddle with Fedora to get it working.
|
| It just works.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Linux is community driven, if somethings not working, try
| fix it?
|
| That works if you're 20 and studying at university. After
| wasting over half my awake day at work, the last thing I have
| energy left for is dealing with random bullshit and tracing
| down bugs.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Also, most people don't have great time management skills
| (myself included) so never really have any slack time.
| devwastaken wrote:
| What version of pop os? My PC wouldn't even work with Ubuntu 20
| because the kernel drivers were not there yet until 21.04.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Use a distro that adopted Pipewire for good BT headset support.
|
| In my experience, if a Chromebook can fit a user's use case,
| than so can desktop Linux.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Then* not than.
| sho_hn wrote:
| > Linux doesn't support bluetooth headphones for example.
|
| This is not generally correct. I've been using bluetooth
| headphones with my Linux desktop computer at work all day, and
| probably over a decade in total. Closer to two.
|
| I don't doubt your negative experience or that it's an
| interesting data point, but let's not stick to factually
| incorrect things, either.
| plandis wrote:
| I've had similar experiences across multiple different
| Bluetooth chipsets in several different motherboards.
|
| I've never been able to get AirPods to work and it took
| several hours and some custom code to get my Bose headphones
| to work. It's not what I would consider to be even close to
| similar to macOS/Windows
| [deleted]
| istingray wrote:
| ^ this. Custom code to get headphones to work is exactly
| the type of thing that is only viable for developers. Linux
| needs to move beyond this "for mechanics only" mindset for
| it to succeed.
|
| Same, could not get Airpods to connect AT ALL. They would
| show up, "connect" for a second then disconnect.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| I have Airpods as well as Jabra Elite 65t, Samsung Galaxy
| Buds Pro, and various Plantronics. The Apple are the only
| ones that are wonky. There seems to be some other
| protocol for them that needs to be enabled, but I didn't
| bother and just switched to the Galaxy Buds Pro (the
| Jabras are excellent as well.)
|
| The very first DDG result for "airpods linux bluetooth"
| is this one:
| https://askubuntu.com/questions/922860/pairing-apple-
| airpods...
| istingray wrote:
| Does the mic work in any of these? I found it to be
| impossible
|
| Re: airpods linux bluetooth -- CLI commands to get
| bluetooth headphones just to play sound is not viable for
| Linux to take off.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| You have to change the profile from "headphones" (high
| quality audio) to "headset" to have a microphone. It's a
| matter of a few clicks.
|
| I'm just pointing out that Apple was doing something
| different. As far as that being not viable for Linux to
| take off... well, I respect your opinion.
| istingray wrote:
| The instructions you linked state that to connect Airpods
| one needs to:
|
| Set ControllerMode = bredr or ControllerMode = dual by
| editing /etc/bluetooth/main.conf file using sudo nano
| /etc/bluetooth/main.conf command (or another text editor
| of your choice)
|
| sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth restart
|
| Try to pair again.
| sho_hn wrote:
| I've done nothing special to use Bluetooth headphones
| with my Linux computers (a Dell laptop, a Lenovo
| workstation and a Lenovo laptop, running either Fedora or
| Ubuntu) and I use a variety of them regularly:
|
| - Samsung Galaxy Buds Live that came with my last
| smartphone
|
| - Some fancy Jabra-brand headset we get from work
|
| - My wife's Sennheiser Momentum Wireless when I don't
| bring my own
|
| - Not headphones per-se, but in the office meeting rooms
| we have Logitech desk mics I connect to all the time
|
| No config or installing additional software needed beyond
| pairing.
|
| Based on my own samples the above makes me suspect
| "AirPods don't comply well with standards" or something
| along those lines.
| istingray wrote:
| Does your mic work in the headphones?
|
| These were Sony XM3 in particular. After installing a
| bunch of software through the CLI I got them to play
| sound.
|
| But the mic never worked. I saw similar stories online of
| everyone just saying "stick with wired mics".
| sho_hn wrote:
| Yep, mic works for me. My main mic is actually wired, too
| (a RODE NT-USB), but just for audio quality reasons. I
| use the Galaxy Buds Live for meetings when I'm in the
| living room because my wife needs our office room for
| something, and I use the Logitech desk mics in the
| office, and those work. I can't remember about the Jabra
| off-hand.
| istingray wrote:
| Thanks I'll check those Galaxy Buds out.
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| Blame manufacturers.
| resfirestar wrote:
| Of course it's not as good as MacOS + Apple headphones but
| I think more recent Linux distros that use PipeWire as the
| audio backend are ahead of Windows. On Windows, A2DP
| support is so limited that headsets like the Sony XM4s
| suffer from worse latency and sound quality, particularly
| terrible mic quality, while on Kubuntu everything works out
| of the box with the same quality you get when paired with a
| phone. There's still the issue of unstable drivers that
| break out of nowhere and require rebooting for Bluetooth to
| work again, but Windows has the same problem on my laptop.
| istingray wrote:
| Does the mic in your headphones work?
|
| Edited to clarify that while 3 pairs of headphones required
| fiddling to get 1 connected, the microphone was basically
| impossible to get working. The majority of threads I've found
| online have said basically not to bother with getting
| bluetooth headphones+mic, use a wired one or something else.
| adamtulinius wrote:
| I have two different Jabra bluetooth headsets, both work on
| Linux with a microphone, but you have to change to the
| headphone profile (using something like pavu) to enable the
| microphone.
| thebruce87m wrote:
| I'll add to this - I can generally hack away at Linux, build
| my own yocto for custom SBCs etc but I gave up trying to get
| my QC35s paired with my Linux box
| istingray wrote:
| Thanks for saying this. I'm a Mac user. I don't know jack
| about this stuff. It's easy for Linux users to say "it
| works for me dummy!". But it doesn't work for me. I had to
| run CLI commands just to install Brave, are you kidding me?
| (https://brave.com/linux/)
|
| I can't imagine less computer savvy people putting up with
| this.
| c0nfused wrote:
| If your distribution offers synaptic it helps immensely
| as a gateway drug to apt/rpm.
|
| https://www.nongnu.org/synaptic/
|
| But to install it you still need the cli. After that you
| get a GUI interface to search and install packages
| Macha wrote:
| A lot of the "beginner friendly" distros will install a
| GUI frontend in the default install and label it
| "software center" or "app store" or similar.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Only certain ones -- not AirPods, for example.
|
| They work as headphones, but not as a headset with microphone
| (for reasons that are not really Apple's fault)
| booleandilemma wrote:
| That's the problem though isn't it? Imagine if some people
| just weren't able to get their mouse or airpods working with
| their laptop. Of course, airpods work for everyone's iphone,
| and I've never had a bluetooth mouse that didn't work with
| Windows.
|
| Until Linux works out of the box _for everyone_ it's not
| going to see mainstream adoption.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| While this is not correct, and I do use my BT headphone with
| Ubuntu 20.04, it's is almost true for any casual user.
|
| Indeed, the number of glitches and irritating workaround I
| have to use to make something else than a mouse work with BT
| is something most people don't want to put up with their
| $1000 laptop.
|
| Yes, BT is a shitty tech. But their phone works out of the
| box. Their Mac OS and Windows as well.
|
| The fact we still get BT not pairing randomly (or wifi stop
| working, or sleep mode never awaking) is a huge problem in
| 2021.
|
| We should not ignore that as a community.
|
| That's why I report bugs, give money and help people online.
|
| But it will not be enough if we close our eyes on the work
| yet to be done.
| istingray wrote:
| Thank you for saying this. As someone new to Linux, it's
| easy to be intimidated by Linux users saying "but it works
| for me!".
|
| Where do you give money? I've looked into a few projects
| but it's pretty fragmented. Donating money to Ubuntu was a
| trip...required digging through forums and finally
| "Downloading" Ubuntu to trigger the "donate money" pop up.
|
| Linux needs more options for people like me to pay for
| polish.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I have a list of FOSS projects I rotate and donate to
| regularly, including Ubuntu and the FSF. So many projects
| need help, VLC, libreoffice, firefox, python, ublock
| origin...
|
| It's not just about the money, it's also a way for devs
| to feel that their work matters.
| sho_hn wrote:
| > But it will not be enough if we close our eyes on the
| work yet to be done.
|
| I very much agree with your sentiment, but I simply don't
| have any issues with BT headphones on Linux desktops
| specifically I could work on today.
|
| Bluetooth is a very a complex set of standards - I work as
| a system architect for a well-known celestial car brand,
| and implementing Bluetooth and BLE is the bane of our
| existence; truly disastrous technology - and I'm sure
| things to improve are aplenty, though. In terms of desktop
| biz logic, the roll-out and maturation of the PipeWire
| stack is one ongoing effort to watch for.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Yes, and then you have Wifi, touchpads, graphic cards,
| web cams... It's amazing that we even have a working OS
| honestly.
| istingray wrote:
| Thanks for saying this, it gets to the root of the
| problem being Bluetooth.
|
| What should we support instead? Is there another wireless
| standard?
|
| I've noticed there are models that use some kind of non-
| Bluetooth USB dongle for example.
| throwdecro wrote:
| For an end user who isn't a Linux enthusiast, generally
| working headphones aren't sufficient. They have to _almost
| never not work_.
|
| I record music on Linux, and one of the reasons that I never
| recommend it is that I can imagine people dropping real money
| on a sufficiently powerful laptop and finding things don't
| work without a lot of configuration, or perhaps not at all.
| That doesn't cut it for the average user.
| istingray wrote:
| Thank you for saying this. Yes, it doesn't cut it for the
| average user.
|
| Have you thought about donating to open source projects to
| support them along?
|
| Linux _is_ the only viable option. It _must_ improve.
| throwdecro wrote:
| Yes I've donated to some :)
| okl wrote:
| I use them regularly as well, never had a problem, not even
| when setting them up the first time.
| istingray wrote:
| microphone too? What model, I'll get it.
| jwommack wrote:
| The thread following this is a great example of Linux's fatal
| issue. 5 different people have 5 different user stories.
|
| Public uptake requires ease of use and consistency.
| CubsFan1060 wrote:
| And, at least with some people, almost a dismissal of someone
| else's problem.
|
| "It does too work, you're wrong. All I had to do was write
| some code, install a few things, and recompile the kernel and
| my headphones work most of the time. Have you tried writing a
| new driver for your headphones?"
| istingray wrote:
| It would be funny if this weren't true right in this
| thread. The best example I can point to is Brave's only
| option to install on Linux involves a blob of CLI commands:
| https://brave.com/linux/
|
| Linux has to grow beyond being built by and for mechanics.
| CubsFan1060 wrote:
| Looking at it, those commands are not horrible, or
| unreasonable.. for a developer or someone comfortable
| with the command line.
|
| However, the 'average user' is going to be annoyed and
| lost with those commands.
| istingray wrote:
| The average user is going to use Firefox instead.
| Advanced users who know to open "Terminal" will attempt
| to just copy and paste the blob of code and hope it
| works. Training new users to do this is a bad habit that
| will bite the Linux community in the ass later.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > - Linux doesn't support bluetooth headphones well
|
| FTFY: "Everyone except macOS doesn't support bluetooth well".
|
| The Windows situation is a horrid mess - it was with w7 and at
| least three different _commercial_ stacks, and my s /o can't
| use her brand new Sony headphones on her three year old w10
| Lenovo laptop as it ends up in stuttering audio. Linux isn't
| better. Audio stacks are a mess (even independent of
| Bluetooth), BTLE is an _even worse_ mess, and I have no idea
| why Android is relentlessly buggy. And the Nintendo Switch
| doesn 't support _anything_ except compatible controllers, you
| need an external, third party adapter that blocks the docking
| port for decent wireless capability.
|
| The only ones who have managed something decent with Bluetooth
| are Apple, where everything you ordinarily need (headphones,
| mice, keyboards) just works (tm).
|
| The core problem is that Bluetooth _itself_ is an old, ugly,
| grown standard with lots of different stuff bolted on, not much
| in terms of interoperability testing and closed binary blobs
| everywhere.
| istingray wrote:
| Good context. Given that Bluetooth is the issue, what should
| we do instead? Some new standard? I've seen some headphones
| that offer a non-Bluetooth USB wireless dongle (Corsair)
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Some new standard?
|
| Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927/
|
| I'm not sure. From an implementation POV, re-starting wUSB
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_USB) again would be
| an easy way out - for a lot of things that can be done over
| Bluetooth there are USB device classes and drivers already,
| so all that would be required on the OS side is support for
| a discovery/secure pairing mechanism.
| browningstreet wrote:
| Well, nothing about this announcement yet changes the fact that I
| still won't be buying the next iPhone or Macbook this fall, like
| I'd intended.
|
| Without knowing what their refinements actually do, it's too
| uncertain.
| iyn wrote:
| > "[...] we have decided to take additional time over the coming
| months to collect input and make improvements before releasing
| these critically important child safety features."
|
| Seeing how this situation was handled by Apple so far, my cynical
| take on this is that they want to wait for the storm to pass/get
| smaller and then will continue deployment of this tech but with
| better PR strategy. I hope to be wrong but the latest moves by
| Apple completely evaporated the remaining trust I had for them.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| The same cynic could also say that they are postponing it
| indefinitely, but can't say so.
| kristofferR wrote:
| That's not really a cynic, that's an optimist.
| wl wrote:
| It's being cynical about the idea that PR departments tell
| the straightforward truth.
| e-clinton wrote:
| Why not trust Apple? I get that you dislike their plan but
| consider three things:
|
| * they do want to help keep your children safe * they told you
| in detail how the system would work * they are holding off on
| releasing after the world gave them feedback
|
| Who else is doing better? I get that you don't like the system,
| but how do you solve it? Is it not worth solving? Too easy to
| nix ideas without contributing to the conversation.
| iyn wrote:
| > "Why not trust Apple?"
|
| Due to their actions, it's that simple.
|
| On this particular issue, I don't trust them, because they've
| built a capability to surveil private data of millions of
| people, on their private devices. Basically, to default to
| "you're the criminal and we want to verify that you're not".
| They presented this capability as a "safety measure". With
| that, you can consider:
|
| 1. If they weren't aware of the potential consequences of the
| system they've built, it's just foolish and shows that their
| decisions/predictions can't be trusted. (I don't believe they
| weren't aware of the potential of the system to be abused)
|
| 2. They were aware of the potential negative consequences
| (massive at scale) and yet decided to use PR tactics to hide
| that. If that's the case, they can't be trusted due to
| misdirection and lying.
|
| If you want other example, the first that comes to mind is
| their actions related to the butterfly keyboard fiasco. No
| (real) acknowledgement of the mistake, no apology but using
| PR to spin that into a new feature of the next model. Another
| is their monopolistic, rent-seeking behavior with App Store
| policies.
|
| The problem with CSAM is definitely worth solving but spying
| on everybody's data is not the right level to look for
| solutions. I imagine it would make executives feel better
| about themselves but - as far as I understand - it doesn't
| meaningfully address the root of the issue.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >they are holding off on releasing after the world gave them
| feedback
|
| They did not state that they are changing things to address
| the concerns. Deploy it now, or deploy it later, it's the
| same thing being deployed.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > They did not state that they are changing things to
| address the concerns.
|
| The full title (was cut from HN...)
|
| > Apple Delays Rollout of Controversial Child Safety
| Features to Make Improvements
|
| And the actual page with Apple's words:
|
| > Update as of September 3, 2021: Previously we announced
| plans for features intended to help protect children from
| predators who use communication tools to recruit and
| exploit them and to help limit the spread of Child Sexual
| Abuse Material. Based on feedback from customers, advocacy
| groups, researchers, and others, we have decided to take
| additional time over the coming months to collect input and
| make improvements before releasing these critically
| important child safety features.
|
| https://www.apple.com/child-safety/
| haswell wrote:
| > _we have decided to take additional time over the coming
| months to collect input and make improvements_
|
| They explicitly stated that they plan to make improvements.
| Only time will tell if those improvements are meaningful.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > * they do want to help keep your children safe
|
| CSAM is more or less a documention of the crime. Isn't too
| late for keeping the children safe by that point? It should
| be a police matter and I don't think they are very much
| helped by some flawed automatic report system spamming them.
| aspaceman wrote:
| > Why not trust Apple?
|
| Where do people get this idea I should trust a company? I
| should never trust a company. That's nonsense. It's like
| trusting a lawnmower to watch your hamster.
| ByteWelder wrote:
| > * they do want to help keep your children safe
|
| Well-meaning intentions are irrelevant to what's effectively
| happening on the bottom line.
|
| > * they told you in detail how the system would work
|
| This is great though. In any normal situation, this would
| build trust. Not so much in this case, because of the impact
| on privacy and potential for abuse.
|
| > * they are holding off on releasing after the world gave
| them feedback
|
| The crucial part is that they still intend to continue with
| their plan. They'll possibly modify it, but we'll have to see
| what that means. Well-intentioned backdoors are still
| backdoors.
|
| > Who else is doing better?
|
| That's completely irrelevant to the discussion. Just to
| humour the question: Android (AOSP), Pine (from PinePhone),
| Librem, CalyxOS and GrapheneOS are some products and
| operating systems that I could think off that respect the
| users' privacy better.
|
| > I get that you don't like the system, but how do you solve
| it? Is it not worth solving? Too easy to nix ideas without
| contributing to the conversation.
|
| Customers don't have any responsibility to solve this. It's
| totally in the customers' right to complain and say "we don't
| want this feature". For good reasons, as shown by all the
| experts and privacy advocacy groups.
| akie wrote:
| I would like some substantiation for your claim that
| Android is doing better in terms of privacy. Everything
| I've seen more or less points to the opposite.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| Android doesn't scan the files on our phones against a
| government ban list with the intent to upload said files
| to and alert law enforcement. We can confirm this because
| Android is open source. This makes Android objectively
| more secure and more private.
| ByteWelder wrote:
| Please note the "AOSP" mention: I was referring to
| Android Open Source Project, not the variants with
| Google's apps and Play Services installed.
| [deleted]
| wyager wrote:
| > they do want to help keep your children safe
|
| Wow, I love trillion dollar corporations now!
| danaris wrote:
| > Who else is doing better?
|
| I think this is the part that far, far too many people are
| ignoring.
|
| Do I, personally, think this is a good thing for Apple to add
| and do? Ehh....not at all sure. I do have concerns about both
| the precedent set by it doing the scanning on everyone's
| iPhones, and the potential technical issues I've seen raised
| about the actual functioning of the system.
|
| But seriously, * _who is doing better*_??
|
| Firstly: Is there _anyone_ out there who has a better, more
| user-respectful method of scanning for CSAM? A method that
| doesn 't essentially say "as soon as you give us any access
| to your photos, we will use them for _any_ purpose we deem
| worthwhile to us "? Because despite all the brouhaha, that is
| absolutely _not_ the attitude Apple has taken in this. They
| have made abundantly clear that they have no intention of
| ever using systems of this nature for anything other than
| scanning for CSAM.
|
| And secondly: _Even if_ Apple implemented this today, exactly
| the way it 's been described, is there _anyone_ who has a
| better track record on user privacy? Is there _any_ device or
| OS manufacturer that has openly expressed and followed
| through on a commitment to protecting users ' data?
|
| I'm not aware of any.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > They have made abundantly clear that they have no
| intention of ever using systems of this nature for anything
| other than scanning for CSAM.
|
| Then they're either lying or delusional; creating the
| capability guarantees that someone will pass a law forcing
| them to use it in other ways.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| I agree completely. In military parlance it's called
| "softening the blow". People who say "this is a slippery
| slope fallacy" simply aren't paying attention. Look at
| Europe and Australia passing all kinds of laws to have
| social media spying on everyone. It can happen. In the
| USA Texas just passed a law to spy on women who are
| getting abortion and trying to limit free speech about it
| in an attempt to push most of the policing off to private
| citizens like in Handmaid's Tale. It's insane that people
| can't see threats on democracy and liberty from all these
| angles.
| [deleted]
| poetaster wrote:
| Maybe librem? Haven't audited yet but I believe they are
| more privacy centric by far.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Google is doing better as they are not actively scanning my
| phone for CSAM data (and eventually other data) as a USA
| policing agent without a warrant. That's what google is
| doing better. As is windows. They don't scan for material
| on your phone either. If you have something to prove that
| they do scan for illegal stuff for reporting to police
| forces without a warrant then please show us.
| owlbite wrote:
| No, they're just uploading it to their servers, scanning
| it to form a comprehensive profile of you and selling the
| results to the highest bidder.
| kook_throwaway wrote:
| I've never signed into google, are they really uploading
| my pictures to their servers?
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| They never wanted to "keep your children safe" as this "plan"
| has a hole in it big enough to drive a semi through. As in
| the criminals know it's there and can avoid it. No this was
| to please the government a little bit and so they can say
| "look we're thinking of the children". Governments want this
| so they can eventually add more scanning On Your Phone in the
| future for anything and everything. Just look at what's going
| on in Australia right now with authoritarian type
| surveillance getting passed in 24 hour session. Western
| nations aren't safe from the Stasi mentality if we don't
| fight back. Donate to EFF and ACLU today please.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Like, you know, whatsapp........
| cannabis_sam wrote:
| I genuinely hope that Apple will eventually realize that they
| have burned decades of goodwill on this evil fascist idiocy..
|
| I've been buying Macs exclusively for 15 years, but sadly it's
| apparently time to change..
|
| Every single executive at Apple should be figuratively "raked
| over the coals" by shareholders for pushing this kind of insane
| totalitarianism under a vague veil of "protecting children".
| tremoloqui wrote:
| Sadly, the cats out of the bag and Apple, Google and the rest of
| us will no longer have the plausible deniability that kept this
| sort of thing in check.
|
| Soon enough every tinpot dictator in the world will be demanding
| their particular flavour of device scanning inside and outside of
| their jurisdiction.
| buildbot wrote:
| I don't think the timing of this is an accident - or at least I'd
| like to imagine it's not.
|
| iCloud subs renew at the end of the months; I bet they were maybe
| surprised at the number of people not paying them money anymore
| for iCloud...
| kmlx wrote:
| > I bet they were maybe surprised at the number of people not
| paying them money anymore for iCloud
|
| I bet you are overestimating how many people care about this
| kind of stuff.
| ziml77 wrote:
| That doesn't make much sense. People would have cancelled their
| subscriptions during the month of August. There's no need to
| wait until the end of the month to know how many people are
| cancelling.
| cwkoss wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if the suits only look at the numbers
| once a month.
| buildbot wrote:
| Exactly - someone looked at the September vs. August iCloud
| numbers, and went, "oh shit!"...
| LeSaucy wrote:
| I cancelled my recurring iCloud subscription because of this,
| switched to self-hosting photo prism for storage.
| buildbot wrote:
| Yep, I did too, and set up a local+remote self hosted
| solution instead. Probably not going back now, it was very
| convenient for the iPhone upgrade program with a new phone
| each year, but I no longer really want use Apple services...
| m0zg wrote:
| Really makes you think why a trillion dollar corporation would
| want to severely undermine its most important asset, its brand,
| over something like this. It ain't "children" I can tell you
| that.
| least wrote:
| I hope this is a case of Apple delaying it long enough to
| silently cancel the feature or completely change it to not be on-
| device scanning rather than Apple delaying it long enough to be
| well out of the news cycle and silently enable it at a later
| date. Both features mentioned have potential for abuse and create
| an adversarial relationship with ones own device so I'm not sure
| what they do to implement them without these remaining concerns.
|
| A delay in either case is welcome.
| pwned1 wrote:
| The modus operandi of the surveillance state is to back off
| something newly intrusive just long enough for the outcry to
| die down and then slip it in when no one is looking. I'd expect
| this not to be canceled, but to find its way in to an update on
| a holiday weekend when no one is checking the news.
| least wrote:
| Well the day they announced it was also just a largely
| unremarkable day towards the start of a weekend but it still
| turned into a fiasco, so hopefully not.
| dusing wrote:
| I'd say very likely canceled quietly. Otherwise they are just
| taking the punishment twice, there isn't a change they could
| make that would allow them to go live with this kind of thing
| at a later date and not get raked over the coals.
| TillE wrote:
| Yeah, if they implement it in the future, the whole cycle of
| news coverage repeats.
|
| I think/hope they'll just move to the simple compromise of
| scanning stuff on iCloud like everybody else, which is far
| less of an intrusion.
| [deleted]
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| Apple's brand is tarnished in my eyes. I already got rid of my
| iPhone and won't be returning. The fact that they even announced
| this is proof that they only ever cared about providing a facade
| of privacy.
| 88840-8855 wrote:
| I can imagine that the following is going to happen.
|
| 1. Apple announces the scanning feature (done)
|
| 2. People dislike it; backslash (happened)
|
| 3. Apple is worried about the brand, publishes statement that
| they are going to delay (happened)
|
| 4. People say "great", "wonderful" (ongoing)
|
| 5. Apple waits 5 months, release this crap feature anyway
|
| 6. People moved on, media does not want to repeat the same
| messages again, not many people care anymore
|
| 7. DONE.
|
| This is the same thing that Facebook did with its TnC. People
| complained, Facebook took it back, re-introduced it 3 months
| later. Nobody cares anymore.
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| Most people don't care even at step 2. It's only technical
| people with concerns about privacy and corporate overreach
| behind this backlash. Most of that group will continue using
| iPhones no matter what out of convenience and unwillingness
| to stand up for their principles.
|
| I stood my ground and actually took some action when
| something made me unhappy. This is the only way things
| change.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| Just curious, what did you switch to? All the truly open source
| phones still have a lot of work that needs doing, which means
| the only real competitors are android devices with a custom
| rom, and that doesn't really fix privacy either.
| busymom0 wrote:
| Not op but I started moving away from Apple a few months ago,
| much before this Apple CSAM debacle. This is a pretty big
| move for me because I am a developer who makes apps for both
| iOS and MacOS, so I pretty much need Apple software for work.
|
| No longer buying iPhones or Macs. I was planning on upgrading
| to the Mac Mini with M1 chip later this fall but now I plan
| on building a hackintosh instead. I also no longer recommend
| Apple devices to friends/family.
|
| I got myself a cheap android phone which I have de-googled
| myself. I got this Android phone ($190 USD for a very good
| phone - 8GB ram, 12gb space):
|
| https://www.amazon.com/UMIDIGI-Unlocked-4150mAh-Capacity-
| Sma...
|
| I use Firefox for YouTube on it with the following add-ons:
|
| 1. uBlock Origin
|
| 2. Video Background Play Fix add-on
|
| This allows me to use YouTube as a background playback music
| player. And if needed, I use YouTube-dl to get the audio
| files and put them on the phone.
|
| You can check out several tutorials to de-google an android
| phone.
| xena wrote:
| The hackintosh is still going to have the ability to do
| CSAM scanning fwiw.
| busymom0 wrote:
| I am aware. What I meant was that I don't want to support
| Apple with my dollars directly. Since I need MacOS for
| work (app development), I will use a hackintosh. That way
| I can run Ubuntu on the side if needed. Might look into
| how MacOS operates in virtualbox.
| smoldesu wrote:
| If you're hosting on a Linux machine then you can use
| QEMU for a surprisingly sturdy Mac virtualizationb setup.
| I've heard legends on IRC of people with meticulously-
| picked hardware who get perfect GPU-acceleration working,
| but ymmv.
| smoldesu wrote:
| KDE Connect[0] has a MacOS implimentation that will restore
| some of your 'magic' to your ecosystem. If you find
| yourself missing AirDrop, Continuity Clipboard, or synced
| media controls, give it a try and see if it feels right.
| Even the earlier builds of this were a lifesaver when I was
| still hackintoshing, and it made it a snap when I was ready
| to switch to Linux. Best of luck to you in the future!
|
| [0] https://kdeconnect.kde.org/download.html
| busymom0 wrote:
| Oh wow thanks! I currently use AirDrop quite often so
| this is very helpful!
| davidinosauro wrote:
| Wasn't aware of Video Background Play Fix add-on, thanks
| for mantioning it!
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Android phones don't scan the data on your phone looking to
| notify the authorities that you aren't complying.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| Yes but there are other tradeoffs that are introduced.
| Carrier-specific ROMs, difficulty upgrading to new android
| versions, generally more malware found in the Play store
| [1] and non-privacy-centric defaults [2] aren't really
| great to see either.
|
| I'm not looking to start another android vs iOS debate
| here. There's plenty of that online that I and others can
| reference. I'm more interested in seeing how people are
| finding alternatives or what privacy tradeoffs they are
| willing to accept to avoid Apple's recent photo scanning
| move.
|
| [1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.10088.pdf (PDF WARNING)
|
| [2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/16/how-to-stop-google-
| maps-from....
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| I switched to a Pixel 5 running GrapheneOS. It does a good
| job of reducing the chat to Google, but it would be an
| outright lie to say that it's completely detached from
| Google. I'm comfortable with the measures GrapheneOS has
| taken and the way it sandboxes Play Services seems quite
| clever.
|
| The battery life is really good, not sure if that's just the
| hardware or whether the debloated OS means less power is
| consumed.
| colordrops wrote:
| You can also run without Google Play, but there are
| tradeoffs you will make to do so.
| meowtimemania wrote:
| Was Apple pressured by some government to add the photo
| scanning software? It seems like a weird feature to add given
| apple's messaging on privacy
| pcurve wrote:
| Since they weren't scanning icloud, there had to have been a
| ton of pressure from the government, despite their claims
| otherwise.
| kerng wrote:
| Strange that they do this delay so late... the damage is already
| done, so why bother now?
|
| Apple's leadership must be quite confused.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I wonder if the issue isn't that they've been living in their
| own insular world for so long that they really thought they
| were doing something that would pass muster in the real world.
|
| There does seems to be an increasing tendency of FAANG
| companies to do that.
| spfzero wrote:
| "Critically important features" Well,I guess if they can wait a
| few months, were they really "critical"? I mean, maybe use a word
| like "important"? Can Apple please stop using max adjective in
| every situation? It just waters down the meaning of these words
| to the point that we no longer have a word that means "critical"
| anymore.
| ekianjo wrote:
| "Delays", not cancel.
| nickjj wrote:
| Does anyone have a success story of using a non-Android / non-iOS
| smartphone as their main phone?
|
| I've been on a flip phone and never owned a smartphone but a
| recent role I'm taking requires having a smartphone for email /
| Slack access.
|
| I know it's a matter of picking between 2 lesser evils but has
| anyone avoided both and went with an open Linux based phone that
| has a really nice user experience and decent battery life? All of
| the research I've done leads to Linux / open phones just not
| being there yet, even phones that cost $900 like the Purism
| Librem 5. The Librem 5 looks like it came a long way in the last
| year and I am really rooting for them to succeed, but is anyone
| using a current one as of today or know of a viable alternative?
| unixfg wrote:
| I say don't change your setup for them; get a dedicated
| device... consider a tablet. Having two devices is a pain, but
| it'll improve your work-life balance when you have to actively
| decide to carry it. You'll also never accidentally send
| something personal to a coworker.
|
| I use an older iPhone in airplane mode. I get over a week of
| battery life. I forward calls to my personal if I'm away from
| wifi and on-call, and they do not get my personal phone number.
| nickjj wrote:
| I was considering "upgrading" my existing phone instead of
| carrying 2 devices. They said I can use a personal phone and
| I wouldn't have to install anything company specific or have
| random audits done. In return they would pay half the monthly
| phone cost. Since I would be on-call a tablet might be too
| bulky to carry around, the idea with the smartphone from
| their POV would involve being able to respond by email or
| Slack in case a downtime event happens. Probably wouldn't
| technically need a phone number tho.
|
| But yes, the above has flaws in that there's always a 0.01%
| chance I send something to the wrong person if my contacts
| co-exist in 1 app. I'm dumb when it comes to smart phone
| capabilities, maybe there's a way to 100% silo off 2 sets of
| contacts or profiles? It's something I'll need to research.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I've considered trying, since I'm buying a second line as a
| "distraction-free tool" for the daytime hours.
|
| I think the easiest thing to do (aka the #1 method of de-
| Googling) is to run certain versions of Android that have the
| play store removed, that has a version of android built from
| the AOSP with an alternate store like F-Droid enabled.
|
| If you search "AOSP phone" or "de-google android" you could get
| places.
|
| The other thing I have thought about is getting a Pine phone.
| livueta wrote:
| "AOSP Treble GSI" is another good top-of-the-rabbit-hole
| search term.
|
| tldr if you have an even somewhat recent unlock(ed)/(able)
| android device, you can probably drop a very pure AOSP build
| on it pretty easily.
| CubsFan1060 wrote:
| The best way to root for them to succeed would be to support
| them.
| ModernMech wrote:
| I had a Microsoft Lumia and used it into the ground until the
| screen died. It was a good phone, lacked some critical app
| support, but otherwise was a very solid smartphone alternative
| to iOS and Android. And you could even replace the battery! I
| can't say that is MS were still in the game, things would be
| markedly better, but at least there would be a decent, if
| distant, 3rd place smartphone platform.
| viktorcode wrote:
| We all have had, but in the past. it isn't feasible now.
|
| I mean, you can buy "safe" smartphone, but first you can't
| prove beyond reasonable doubt that it is actually safe and
| private, and second, you attract more attention because the
| same phones are being bough by the criminals.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I've been heavily considering getting a PinePhone, when a new
| iteration comes along. I only need my phone for calling and
| texting, anything on top of that is just icing on the cake. If
| I can run all my favorite GTK apps on it, then I'll consider it
| a slam dunk.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Get a pixel 4a and put CalyxOS on it and you're good. Only use
| it for work and keep your flip phone for personal stuff for
| maximum security I guess. Going from a flip phone to ANY smart
| phone is going to be a massive upgrade in terms of capability,
| even the librem phone, so I don't really know what you're going
| on about there.
| rdiddly wrote:
| I'm still waiting for my Librem 5, ordered in early 2019.
| Although to be fair, I chose to be in a later release group, in
| order to benefit from design iterations, bugs being worked-out
| etc.
| twodave wrote:
| Man, they really stepped in it didn't they? Who would have
| thought "safe for kids" and "respectful of my privacy" could be
| enemies? But this is the position Apple has put itself in. There
| isn't really a graceful way out of this.
| viktorcode wrote:
| The on-device CSAM scan must be canceled, not delayed. It is a
| dangerous payload, future backdoor if you will, bundled with more
| friendly offline opt-in features and wrapped in "think of the
| children" paper
| arrty88 wrote:
| Must have taken an act of congress. Imagine that. Powerful people
| dont want their photos analyzed. Hmmm
| adventured wrote:
| That's not how it works.
|
| One group of powerful people, better positioned to take
| advantage, want to analyze the personal contents of other
| powerful people. The more well positioned group always thinks
| they can be spared from their own creations, that they're in
| control of it. The politicians that passed the Patriot Act
| didn't personally fear it, they viewed themselves as the
| masters of it; it was to be applied to the other people.
|
| For example, that's how you build an illegal dragnet spying
| operation against an inbound, democratically elected President.
| You do it courtesy of having the loyalty of the intelligence
| community top to bottom. And you avoid that illegal activity
| becoming a punished criminal deed by controlling at least half
| or more of the government. One power group targeting another
| power group, that's how Washington DC has always worked, and
| will always work (as well as most governments throughout
| history, it's endemic to politics/politicians).
| leetrout wrote:
| "child safety features" ... forced invasion of privacy more like
| it
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| It's not clear if this means it's coming in iOS 15.2 or
| something, or if it's being delayed to iOS 16.
|
| If it's the former, it may be best to stick with iOS 14.
| amelius wrote:
| Apple still monitors executable files when you try to run them.
|
| Who says they aren't using this as a fingerprint, or worse, as a
| way to correlate your behavior with that of a CP offender, or
| other types of criminal.
| ithkuil wrote:
| It never ceases to astonish me how people keep reacting to this
| while apparently not really caring to understand how the thing
| actually works and how it fits into the existing workflows and
| thus what are the alternatives.
|
| I mean, I'm not surprised this whole thing backfired and that
| there was a strong uncanny valley reaction to the prospect of
| having parts of the workflow happening in your device ("a
| policeman in my pocket" I read somewhere).
|
| I am surprised though that it seems impossible to resolve the
| issue (or at least making progress in the framing of) this with a
| honest and nuanced conversation.
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| I don't want a conversation. I don't want it, and I don't want
| to compromise.
|
| Plenty of people think the same.
| ithkuil wrote:
| How can you be sure to know what is it what you don't want if
| you want to have a conversation?
| gigel82 wrote:
| I don't want any functionality capable of scanning photos
| on my device for "illegal" content; I simply don't want
| that code living on my device no matter how restricted its
| (initially planned) use is.
| ithkuil wrote:
| Fair enough. Framing it like that it seems like a small
| step from a dystopia.
|
| But let's face it, we're feet deep in it already: unless
| you control what code runs on your device you're never
| safe from code that scans data on your device.
|
| I not sure I really buy the slippery slope argument. If
| in the future Apple wanted to be more intrusive, they
| would just be more intrusive and scan your photos on your
| device for real, not with a convoluted and probabilistic
| fingerprint method.
|
| What is the weak point? To get people accustomed to being
| scanned? Aren't people already? Your content is already
| scanned the moment it reaches to the cloud.
|
| What does this extra client-side scanning add to the
| dystopia that we're not already experiencing?
| gigel82 wrote:
| It's the opening of Pandora's box. Scanning your device
| is a huge paradigm shift; we all know the cloud is
| "someone else's computer" and untrustworthy but thus far
| one's device was sacred and no one dared touch it.
|
| The floodgates are open now; politicians and other
| "interested parties" have watched this unfold very
| carefully and gleefully noted the majority didn't care as
| much as everyone expected, so they'll definitely be
| pushing for it now.
|
| Imagine Windows Defender (an antimalware / antivirus
| distributed with all versions of Windows and enabled by
| default) starts scanning one's hard drive (and attached
| external drives) for image files (it already scans
| documents and executables and even uploads samples of
| malicious binaries to Microsoft for analysis): how would
| you / the world react?
| ithkuil wrote:
| > Scanning your device is a huge paradigm shift
|
| But that's not what they want to do. They want to perform
| a client side fingerprint of a subset of images before
| they get uploaded to the cloud.
|
| You can argue that they _could_ in the future turn this
| into a scan of everything on the device. But you can also
| argue that if that 's what they want to do in the future
| they'll do it in the future. It's all about trust. If you
| don't trust Apple to not push nefarious code on your
| devices, stay away from Apple, and that's true even
| before all this.
| onethought wrote:
| It's really not a compromise. They found a way to scan your
| photos for illegal stuff without during upload without
| compromising encryption. Meanwhile all the major competitors
| just openly inspect All your photos.
|
| This is equivalent getting up set with Signal because it
| spell checks your text as you write it: "you are scanning
| what I write!!!!"
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _without compromising encryption._
|
| Apple holds the keys to all iCloud backups and regularly
| uses them in order to serve customers' data in response to
| data requests from the government.
|
| Apple gives up US customer data for about 150,000
| users/accounts a year[1].
|
| [1] https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/us.html
| onethought wrote:
| As do all the competitors... but they can also access
| your photos for random data mining. Which no one has
| shown Apple do that. We know 100% google do it...
| gremloni wrote:
| No conversation. Just fucking no. The kids are protected
| enough.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| I don't want a honest and nuanced conversation on whether
| Holocaust was ok or whether rape is good. This is way past any
| point for a nuanced conversation.
| onethought wrote:
| That's not at all close as an analogy.
|
| So the alternative that everyone is happy with, is companies
| openly scan all your images as much as they want... but we
| are outraged at the company trying to improve the status quo
| on privacy... and we don't want to talk about it. Just stop
| improving!
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| Just stop trying to encroach on my privacy. I don't care
| whether it is done by a government or an international
| company with a capitalization of over two and half trillion
| dollars.
| onethought wrote:
| Right... so Apple is trying to not encroach and is
| punished for it. That's kind of my point.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| The whole point of the feature is to analyze images that
| you possess.
| onethought wrote:
| No. The whole point is to avoid scanning all your images
| on their servers and instead only scan when there is a
| suspicion. Ie Hash match.
|
| You will not have any of your images scanned at all, if
| you don't load a certain number of images that's metadata
| match known CSAM. That's a superior position, than:
| everything you upload is scanned for visual features.
| [deleted]
| tibyat wrote:
| ok you're astonished. but you also haven't moved the
| conversation forward at all. you're just talking down on the
| field, "I understand everything about this topic and people's
| reactions to this topic, and I am disappointed in all of you."
|
| turns out it takes a lot more effort to actually make an
| impact, and comment sections are typically full of low effort
| gut reflexes. It doesn't help that every comment section starts
| over, progress is harder this way.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Apple already tried the "critics don't understand our system!"
| deflection a while ago.
|
| It's a deflection because critics' objections don't necessarily
| hinge on the technical implementation details of the system,
| they object to it based on its value proposition to the user,
| and on principle.
|
| Once we move past the core of those objections, then yes, some
| critics _also_ object to the system 's technical
| implementation, and some of them are correct in their analysis
| and some are less so.
| ithkuil wrote:
| > they object to it based on its value proposition to the
| user, and on principle.
|
| Not sure everybody is on the same page what the value
| proposition to the user is. That's intimately tied on the
| "how the system works" which is not merely an implementation
| detail.
|
| I'd like to talk about that. Most of the threads about this
| topic I found are full of flames without much content.
| Hopefully I found somebody who can help me clarify what is it
| that bothers so much.
| ece wrote:
| I think it's hilarious that for as long as iOS has existed,
| there have been people pointing out it's pitfalls in nuanced
| ways, and almost nobody listened. Now that everything they've
| said has pretty much come to pass about user freedoms, instead
| of accepting personal responsibility and admitting iOS flaws,
| people want more nuanced conversations. Utter cowardice.
| totetsu wrote:
| Snappy phrases move culture. While us nerds were having our
| Long honest and nuanced conversation the world moved on
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| I absolutely do not want this on any devices I own.
|
| I'm preparing to destroy any Apple devices in my possession
| (thankfully old and due for replacement) when my pine64
| arrives. Don't care about any details. How's that for nuanced?
| nbzso wrote:
| Honest and nuanced conversation? I am dealing with Apple
| righteousness and arrogance for far too long. 20 + years to be
| exact. And I ended removing macOS workflow of my company
| because of this "privacy innovation" for the children.
|
| This corporation died long time ago, people just like the Idea
| of old Rebel Apple for creative minds and individuals.
|
| People actually understand how this will work. A lot of
| educated and high level professionals reacted with vigor.
|
| Spinning this towards "people don't understand" is blasphemy
| coming from serious self-delusion, no excuses given.
|
| Resolving the issue is simple: Break Big Tech monopolies and
| create a climate for change. AT&T break up comes to mind. It is
| time to wake up. User data is the petrol of the world of
| tomorrow. Access to user data and implementation of solutions
| based on it must be regulated not towards some three letter
| agencies wet fantasy but towards respecting individual privacy
| and existing laws and democratic principles.
|
| Even if Apple cancels this intrusion on user space, which I
| heavily doubt, and implements CSAM only on iCloud servers (as
| every one else), the image of Apple as an guardian of user
| privacy (false or not) is gone forever.
|
| People are talking about alternatives and "moving off-cloud to
| NAS" which is actually the right thing to do in this situation.
|
| Oh and Apple will continue to be loved. But this love will be
| more than biter-sweet, it will become dangerous. Some of us are
| old enough to know when to leave a sinking ship.
| shrimpx wrote:
| The most botched and nonsensical feature announcement ever.
|
| > Here's an extremely sophisticated mechanism that has insane
| negative potential ramifications for our users and our brand, but
| that's ok because it's all in the name of catching pedos.
|
| > PS: And pedos can turn off this mechanism with one toggle.
|
| Since this sounds too idiotic to be real, people conclude it must
| be evil, by Occam's Razor.
|
| I have a deeper fear: That it's actually that idiotic.
| foxfluff wrote:
| Critically important? Really?
|
| A system that is trivial to circumvent and which only catches
| people sharing pics that have already been added to a database is
| not going to move the needle on actual physical abuse of
| children.
| Joeri wrote:
| You would think that, but facebook detects 20 million shares of
| this material per year. Presumably at least part of that group
| that shares the known material are also abusing children and
| creating new material, so this does look like an effective
| detection method for finding some of the people who abuse
| children.
|
| https://www.missingkids.org/content/dam/missingkids/gethelp/...
| jrockway wrote:
| I'm not convinced that's a good argument. Shouldn't every bag
| of coffee you buy include a camera that reports any illegal
| activity to the government? A lot of criminals drink coffee,
| after all!
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| We must mandate speed monitoring devices for every car
| sold. Each time the vehicle speed exceeds the speed limit
| we will deduct 100 social credit points from the owner's
| balance.
|
| Hundreds of thousands of people die each year due to filthy
| criminals driving too fast. Introducing this measure will
| save lives.
|
| If you are uncomfortable with this measure, you drive too
| fast.
| jrockway wrote:
| Very good point. Actually, the next version of iOS should
| include a feature to make sure that you don't roll
| through a stop sign at 1MPH at 3 o'clock in the morning.
| STOP means stop, not kind of look both ways and carefully
| evaluate the situation! An Authorized Phone Receipticle
| built into your car will ensure that the phone's camera
| is facing forward so our Machine Learning Artificial
| Intelligence can detect stop signs, and the
| accelerometers will detect whether or not you stopped
| completely. If you didn't, your device will do some
| bullshit with bitcoins or something eventually leading to
| it sending a report to the Apple Safe Driving
| Headquarters ("ASDHQ") where totally trained technicians
| that definitely have health insurance and get paid more
| than $1/hour will check the data to see if it's a false
| positive. If it's not a false positive, and BTW, from
| exactly zero hours of real world testing we have
| determined that the false positive rate is less than 1 in
| 1 trillion, we'll report you to our government partners
| who will take care of your reeducation from there.
| Driving is a privilege, not a right!!!
|
| Over ONE HUNDRED people die per year from people not
| coming to a complete stop at stop signs, and at Apple, we
| care!!!!!! We'll never let the screeching voices of the
| minority stop us from invading your privacy for no good
| reason. We like the screeching, it makes us feel
| important and relevant. As the inventors of a small
| computer with a battery in it, we consider ourselves
| better than God.
| alexashka wrote:
| You joke but if everyone had a tag, the speed limit could
| adjust itself in real time, enabling you to go faster
| when it is safe to do so and go slower when it isn't.
|
| In other words, we could improve the driving experience
| _and_ save lives with a little bit of work if we had
| folks with a working brain in government and elsewhere.
| jrockway wrote:
| I think this exists already. It's just an LED sign where
| there is normally a speed limit sign, and it adjusts up
| and down depending on conditions.
| foxfluff wrote:
| I have read Facebook's report on this. It's not 20 million
| shares of kids getting raped by adults.
|
| https://about.fb.com/news/2021/02/preventing-child-
| exploitat...
|
| "We found that more than 90% of this content was the same as
| or visually similar to previously reported content. And
| copies of just six videos were responsible for more than half
| of the child exploitative content we reported in that time
| period."
|
| "we evaluated 150 accounts that we reported to NCMEC for
| uploading child exploitative content in July and August of
| 2020 and January 2021, and we estimate that more than 75% of
| these people did not exhibit malicious intent (i.e. did not
| intend to harm a child). Instead, they appeared to share for
| other reasons, such as outrage or in poor humor"
|
| So a lot of this is memetic spreading, not pedos and child
| abusers sharing their stash of porn. And people don't react
| to child porn by spreading it like a meme on Facebook, so
| what are _these_ pictures that get shared a lot? What 's
| happening is people find a funny/hilarious/outrageous picture
| and share that. Funny moments might happen when kids play
| with pets, for example.
|
| The other part is consenting teens sexting their own photos.
| And then there's some teens (e.g. 17-year-olds, which by the
| way is old enough to consent in some countries) getting
| accidentally shared along with adult porn by people who don't
| know the real age.
|
| https://research.fb.com/blog/2021/02/understanding-the-
| inten...
|
| "Unintentional Offenders: This is a broad category of people
| who may not mean to cause harm to the child depicted in the
| CSAM share but are sharing out of humor, outrage, or
| ignorance.
|
| Example: User shares a CSAM meme of a child's genitals being
| bitten by an animal because they think it's funny.
|
| Minor Non-Exploitative Users: Children who are engaging in
| developmentally normative behaviour, that while technically
| illegal or against policy, is not inherently exploitative,
| but does contain risk.
|
| Example: Two 16 year olds sending sexual imagery to each
| other. They know each other from school and are currently in
| a relationship.
|
| Situational "Risky" Offenders: Individuals who habitually
| consume and share adult sexual content, and who come into
| contact with and share CSAM as part of this behaviour,
| potentially without awareness of the age of subjects in the
| imagery they have received or shared.
|
| Example: A user received CSAM that depicts a 17 year old,
| they are unaware that the content is CSAM. They reshare it in
| a group where people are sharing adult sexual content."
|
| So there's reason to think that the vast majority of this
| stuff isn't actually child porn in the sense that people
| think about it. It might be inappropriate to post, it might
| be technically illegal, but it's not what you think. And if
| it's not child porn, you can't make the case that it's
| creating a market for child abuse. By reporting it, you're
| not catching child rapists.
|
| I don't have a reference handy but I recall reading about the
| actual child porn that inevitably does get shared on every
| platform, much of it is posted by bots over VPNs or tor. So
| its volume isn't representative of the amount of child
| abusers on the network, and reporting these accounts is not
| likely to lead to anything.
|
| Also: In May 2019 the UK's Independent Enquiry into Child
| Sexual Abuse heard that reports received by the National
| Crime Authority from the United States hotline NCMEC included
| large numbers of non-actionable images including cartoons,
| along with personally identifiable information of those
| responsible for uploading them. According to Swiss police,
| _up to 90% of the reports received from NCMEC relate to
| innocent images_. Source:
| https://www.article19.org/resources/inhope-members-
| reporting...
|
| Out of those remaining 10%, how much leads to convictions?
| Very little. Sorry can't dig up a source right now. Point is:
| millions of reports lead to mostly nothing. Meanwhile,
| children continue to be abused for real, and the vast
| majority of those who want to keep producing, sharing, and
| storing such imagery surely have heard the news and will find
| a different way to do it.
|
| Platform operators are incentivized to report everything, if
| they're playing the reporting game. Tick box "nudity or
| sexual conduct", tick box "contains minors"? Report it.
|
| It doesn't help the discussion at all that everything
| involving nudity and minors (even _cartoons_ ) gets lumped
| together as "CSAM" with actual child porn produced by adults
| who physically abuse kids.
| pvarangot wrote:
| > Very little. Sorry can't dig up a source right now.
|
| I don't think the NCMEC shares numbers about how many of
| their reports result in actions by law enforcement
| agencies. They probably also don't really know, its kind of
| like a dragnet.
|
| Also under the current "I'll know it when I see it" CSAM
| doctrine in US courts cartoons can actually be illegal and
| cartoons depicting the abuse of children are usually banned
| on most big media sharing platforms in the US, and most
| companies in the US won't host you or let you serve ads if
| you have that material. So yeah, it's not only muslim
| totalitarians that are ok with banning cartoons and
| punishing people for drawing them or sharing them, Uncle
| Sam may also send you to jail and deprive you of your
| rights if you draw the wrong thing.
| noptd wrote:
| >I don't think the NCMEC shares numbers about how many of
| their reports result in actions by law enforcement
| agencies.
|
| I'm not surprised. Quantifiable accountability can be
| extremely problematic if you aren't actually making
| meaningful impact on the problem that you are claiming to
| help solve.
| tzs wrote:
| You (and quite a few others) seem to be making some implicit
| assumptions that are not at all obvious to me:
|
| 1. There is not much overlap between people sharing pictures
| from the database and people sharing new child porn that is not
| in it.
|
| 2. People sharing child porn are a lot more smarter or security
| conscious than the average person.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Are you objecting to the general concept of CSAM scanning,
| something every online storage provider does?
|
| I think it's important to note that Apple is late to this, and
| they're just playing catch-up in implementing this scanning.
| The only difference between Apple and others is that they do it
| completely (or partially) on-device rather than all on their
| servers. And they they explicitly told people exactly what and
| how they're doing it all.
|
| It's kind of a funny situation where in Apple being _more_
| transparent than any other implementer of this same process,
| they 've gotten themselves in more strife.
| foxfluff wrote:
| > Are you objecting to the general concept of CSAM scanning,
| something every online storage provider does?
|
| Not really. I'm just saying it's laughable to think that CSAM
| scanning in its current form is critically important. Maybe
| it's critically important for feelgood and PR but not for
| actually preventing child abuse. It's almost like saying
| scanning for catalogued images of violence stops violence. If
| it only were that easy, damn, the world would be a good
| place.
|
| Now as to what online providers should or shouldn't do, I
| can't say. But a part of me hopes that they continue the
| march towards egregious censorship and privacy violations so
| that people would eventually WAKE THE FUCK UP and realize
| that there's no way to have freedom and privacy when you're
| handing your life to corporations and proprietary software. I
| really do wish for a world that is de-facto free software and
| fully controlled by the user.
|
| As for iCould, I have no skin in the game. I've never used an
| Apple product.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| Unfortunately this clearly won't happen because of the
| staggering amount of people _even on HN_ who see nothing
| wrong with having on-device scanners reporting back to HQ.
| I 'm seriously baffled by the number of apologists and
| people who see nothing wrong with this or who flat out
| refuse to admit that this can lead to abuse.
|
| Once the on-device scanning Pandora's box is open, it's
| trivial for governments to request more stuff to be added
| to the databases and Apple can't claim the defense of "we
| have no such ability currently" anymore.
|
| If I was paranoid I'd wonder how much astroturfing is going
| on here.
| xpe wrote:
| > Unfortunately this clearly won't happen because of the
| staggering amount of people even on HN who see nothing
| wrong with having on-device scanners reporting back to
| HQ.
|
| This is a mischaracterization of many of the arguments.
|
| short_sells: My goal here is meta-goal: I am not trying
| to change your mind on this issue; rather I want you to
| acknowledge the strongest rational forms of disagreement.
|
| This is a complex issue. It is non obvious how to trade
| off goals of protecting kids, protecting privacy,
| minimizing surveillance, catching predators, and dealing
| with the effects of false positives.
|
| It is too simplistic (and self defeating) to think that
| just because people disagree with a particular conclusion
| that they are not allies with many of your goals.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| Yes, but we have seen in the past that privacy once lost
| is nigh impossible to regain, and it is also obvious that
| the scanning Apple is proposing is trivial to bypass.
|
| So what is it actually trying to accomplish?
|
| I really struggle to believe that they are trying to
| protect kids (out of the goodness of their hearts).
|
| The only explanation I can think of is that this is some
| attempt at appeasing government agencies.
| xpe wrote:
| > So what is it actually trying to accomplish?
|
| This form of question, as written is unnecessarily
| limiting ...
|
| (a) there doesn't have to be _one_ thing that Apple was
| trying to accomplish
|
| (b) there doesn't have to be _one_ motivation
|
| ... so I 'm going to respond to the spirit of the
| question with a set of explanations, all of which may be
| true (to some degree) at the same time.
|
| - parents are fearful of their kid's online activities;
|
| - parents are open to trying new ways to give their kids
| freedom with some guardrails;
|
| - yes, many people at Apple do want to protect kids out
| of the goodness of their hearts. This fundamental
| instinct is widely shared, particularly among parents.
|
| - putting the 'why' aside, many customers perceive value
| and will pay for it;
|
| - Apple executives are mostly profit-seeking (with
| certain constraints such as: mental models, brand
| constraints, regulations);
|
| - shareholders seek profits and generally have less
| loyalty to any particular company's 'values' -- meaning
| they will 'shop around' for the best performing
| companies;
|
| - as a group, shareholders see mostly upside and little
| downside -- don't perceive significant direct harm from
| these changes (at least, not until this became a public
| relations issue);
|
| - generally, corporations benefit from playing nice with
| the U.S. government;
|
| - Apple, in particular, has quite publicly pushed back on
| law enforcement's calls for decryption;
|
| - in particular, with heightened scrutiny of the large
| tech companies, olive branches are particularly useful;
|
| - some at Apple may prefer to lead with a proactive
| solution rather than wait for imposed regulations;
|
| - some at Apple see this as a proactive branding
| opportunity;
|
| - some Apple engineers are at the top of their field
| regarding encryption, security, etc and may have deemed
| their offering the best practical option available;
|
| - some at Apple certainly understand the risks but assess
| the balance of false positives and false negatives
| differently than you do;
|
| My hope is to make it a bit easier to recognize the
| complexity here. Though it may be true that organizations
| act as one entity, it is not true that they have singular
| intent. Attempts to claim a singular intent or goal are
| subjective interpretations.
|
| Note: the list above is presented sequentially, but I am
| not claiming any causal ordering. They would be better
| presented as a network/graph connected by topics and
| relationships.
| xpe wrote:
| Below, I'm going to push back on what I see as
| overconfident and overgeneralized claims. Both of these
| can inhibit understanding and listening.
|
| > but we have seen in the past that privacy once lost is
| nigh impossible to regain
|
| Yes, this is a key argument in the mix.
|
| Some follow up questions:
|
| 1. As I understand it, here on HN, we are an
| international audience of various ages. With that in
| mind, I don't know your contextual experience. Are you
| scoping this (a) to the internet era (roughly 2000 to
| present)? / (b) to particular countries?
|
| 2. The statement quoted above is stated as if it is a
| fact, but I hope you realize it is actually a prediction.
| What is the historical context for this prediction? How
| far out into the future are you predicting?
|
| 3. Can you pin down your prediction more precisely? What
| does "nigh" mean? (There is a lot of variation in what
| "approximately" means to different people. Often the
| 'exceptions' are quite informative.)
|
| 4. The argument, as written, is quite general, which
| makes it hard to discuss. Whose privacy and in what
| context? Chinese citizens searching the internet?
| Journalists doing investigative reporting? Americans
| shopping in surveilled supermarkets? (Think of this as an
| opportunity to explain)
|
| 5. Do you mean all of the above? If you do, yes, people
| say that online privacy has eroded in many senses. At the
| same time, the tools for encryption have become more
| powerful, understood, and used. My point: if you make a
| very general statement, it is only fair if you cover the
| full range here.
|
| In summary, with the above questions, I want to both
| better understand you -and- push back too. Unfortunately,
| I don't find the discussion chain above (the ~3
| ancestors) particularly persuasive. I say this even
| though I agree with some aspects of it.
|
| So you know where I'm coming from: in almost all
| situations, I've found it is more effective to
| understand, discuss, explain, persuade rather than
| 'writing off' a group of people because you don't really
| understand them.
|
| P.S. I've addressed your other points in a sibling
| comment.
| xpe wrote:
| > If I was paranoid I'd wonder how much astroturfing is
| going on here.
|
| Ah, good old apophasis:
|
| > a rhetorical device wherein the speaker or writer
| brings up a subject by either denying it, or denying that
| it should be brought up. -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophasis
|
| In relation to
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html :
|
| > Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing,
| shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It
| degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.
| noptd wrote:
| Ironic considering you posted this replying to a comment
| that you already replied to ten hours earlier.
|
| If one was paranoid, they might wonder if you forgot to
| switch accounts /s
| xpe wrote:
| > Ironic considering you posted this replying to a
| comment that you already replied to ten hours earlier.
|
| How so?
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| They're pretty obviously not.
|
| CSAM scanning stops common proliferation of already
| identified materials and can help keep those from casually
| entering new markets. It does not protect children from being
| newly exploited by people using these services unless the
| services are also doing things they claim not to be doing.
|
| In that case, Apple's claim of critical importance, if we
| interpret that as any more than rhetoric, doesn't mean what
| they imply it to mean.
|
| Edit: I replied before you edited your comment. Leaving this
| one as is.
| concinds wrote:
| These systems rely on the premise that catching p _dos and
| putting them out of circulation_ does* protect children,
| since many children are abused by relatives and such. I
| think it's a reasonable assumption!
| only_as_i_fall wrote:
| You'd have to actually have a reasonable chance of
| catching pedophiles though. If the system is as trivial
| to bypass as turning off photo sync it isn't a very good
| justification.
| pvarangot wrote:
| > It does not protect children from being newly exploited
| by people using these services unless the services are also
| doing things they claim not to be doing.
|
| While I only know about this through anecdotes people
| share, I understand this systems generate leads so that
| agents (usually federal) can infiltrate groups and catch
| people uploading new material, thus preventing them for
| further victimizing minors.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| That smacks of those harebrained terrorist entrapment
| plots where the federal and undercover agents are the
| only members of groups they've "infiltrated".
|
| Scaling up detection also makes it more tempting for bad
| actors to seed more content to fabricate the appearance
| of an epidemic. We already have inaccurate gunshot
| detection systems, field drug tests, and expert bite mark
| analysis being used to convict people. Would a jury even
| be able to examine the evidence if it involved CSAM?
| pvarangot wrote:
| Yeah it's pretty bad where this is headed. It also
| weaponizes digital images that are very easy to find.
|
| Not sure if you are honestly asking about the jury thing
| but judges do have the legal superpower to see illegal
| images and they will usually instruct the jury to vote
| based on what they saw.
|
| The US federal prison system being one of the biggest
| bullies on earth though, this cases rarely go to trial.
| [deleted]
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _Would a jury even be able to examine the evidence if
| it involved CSAM?_
|
| The prosecutor will hire expert witnesses who will
| explain that their extensive training and education has
| led them to believe that the evidence is certainly
| illegal material.
| newsbinator wrote:
| Other implementers don't scan on-device.
|
| It's not only a matter of Apple's openness about it. It's the
| fact of what they're announcing.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| So the only way to opt out of an intrusive, sloppy and flawed
| algorithm now is based on you hoping Apple sticks to their
| word? The same company that gives the CCP unfettered access
| to Chinese iCloud data?
| yyyk wrote:
| >It's kind of a funny situation where in Apple being more
| transparent than any other implementer of this same process.
|
| It isn't the same process, it's an on-device scanning process
| and Apple is the first to implement this. Had Apple said they
| were scanning iCloud directly nobody bat an eye (I, for one,
| assumed they already did).
| [deleted]
| alibert wrote:
| I would not say it is "scanning" as the device doesn't know
| the final result (match or not). If I had to summarize very
| broadly the thing to my understanding: it will be like
| doing a "loose" SHA on every photos in the Photos app and
| sending these to Apple (if iCloud is enabled). Server side,
| Apple checks if the hashes match or not. Isn't this like
| "scanning in iCloud" but without Apple needing to have a
| decrypted photos in their servers ?
| yyyk wrote:
| >I would not say it is "scanning" as the device doesn't
| know the final result (match or not)
|
| I don't think this is a relevant distinction. If the
| device had known the result and just sent Y/N to Apple,
| what would change in your argument? Nothing. Your last
| sentence would be just as arguable.
|
| >Isn't this like "scanning in iCloud" but without Apple
| needing to have a decrypted photos in their servers?
|
| Note that Apple right now already has the decrypted
| photos since they have the decryption key. There's no
| evidence they are even considering E2EE right now, and
| since there are other legal requirements for scanning
| (e.g. terrorist material) I'm not sure this allows them
| to implement E2EE.
|
| And I don't see how the client-side feature can remain as
| is. There are obvious cases that would be caught by the
| typical server-side scanning and won't be caught here, so
| once the door was opened, the government will pressure.
| For example:
|
| * What happens when the NCMEC database updates? It could
| be that the phone rescans all your images. Or that apple
| keeps the hash and rescans that. Note that the second
| case is identical to some server-side scanning
| implementations.
|
| * What happens when you upload something to iCloud,
| delete it from your phone and then the NCMEC database
| updates?
|
| If Apple keeps the hash, it's just server-side again. If
| Apple doesn't keep it but uses client side scanning, the
| phone has to keep the hashes so you can't ever truely
| delete an image you've taken. If there's no rescan, the
| bad guys get to keep CSAM on iCloud so long as they
| passed the original scanning with the older NCMEC
| database - surely the government wouldn't accept that.
|
| (I considered scanning _on download_ but I don 't know if
| Apple/the government would like this compromise, since
| with that approach CSAM can remain on iCloud undetected
| so long as it's not downloaded, anyway it's not in the
| original papers).
|
| Basically, either they scan on client-side more than they
| let on or we end up in a world with both server-side and
| client-side scanning. The latter is arguably worst of
| both worlds, the former has implications which need to be
| looked at.
| hfsh wrote:
| > I would not say it is "scanning" as the device doesn't
| know the final result (match or not).
|
| I would argue that 'scanning' is the process of
| collecting data, not necessarily of interpreting it.
| mikehearn wrote:
| Isn't the "interpreting" step the one that matters?
|
| Apple takes a photo, runs it through some on-device
| transformations to create an encrypted safety voucher,
| then it gets "interpreted" once it's uploaded to the
| cloud and Apple attempts to decrypt it using their secret
| key.
|
| Google uploads a raw photo, which itself is essentially a
| meaningless value in the context of identifying CSAM, and
| Google "interprets" it on the server by hashing it and
| comparing it against some database.
|
| In both cases, the values that are uploaded by the
| respective companies' devices don't mean anything, in the
| context of CSAM identification, until they are
| interpreted on the server.
| strogonoff wrote:
| It's just the continuation of the irony: Apple is also the
| only really popular consumer cloud provider with a proper
| e2e implementation, so they _can't_ scan photos in iCloud.
| It's why they had to implement this process in the first
| place.
|
| Some of Apple's management must ponder that _if only_ they
| didn't go to such lengths in denying themselves access to
| user data, they'd have it so much easier--given no other
| takers of such a challenge among mid- to high-end device
| manufacturers, we all would probably have settled for e2e
| just never being a feature of commonly available cloud
| services. I wonder how successful the privacy-focused
| promotion had been for Apple; they seemed pretty OK making
| people want their devices for all the other reasons.
| djbebs wrote:
| Yes, I am. I object to any and all forms of mass surveillance
| and spying.
|
| The fact that cloud providers aren't building their systems
| in such a way that they are unable of conducting such spying
| is cause for concern. The fact that they are conducting such
| spying is outrageous.
| Lamad123 wrote:
| You just said it!! Google is scanning its own servers.. This
| company is scanning something that is supposed to be yours!
| concinds wrote:
| I fail to see any difference, when your data is as much
| "yours" whether cloud backup is turned on or off. Google
| and others scan data stored in Drive (and other cloud
| storage) not just for CP, but for copyright infringement,
| etc; even files _not shared with anyone_. Someone here just
| yesterday complained that Google in 2014 kept deleting
| personal files of ripped DVDs from their Drive. Given that
| many people use GDrive /OneDrive/iCloud as their main
| storage, where most of their PC files are stored in the
| cloud, I fail to see any logic in making a cloud vs
| personal device distinction.
| yunohn wrote:
| Would you argue there's no difference between the police
| searching a safety deposit box (which is a bad example,
| since it's actually quite private) versus constantly
| going through and indexing the contents of your home,
| trying to find illegal objects?
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| When you hand it off to google it's now on their servers
| and as their user agreements point out your shit will be
| scanned and made available to law enforcement upon
| request and proper authority (whether that's a warrant or
| just Bill from computer forensics asking for it, I don't
| really know). When it's on your phone it is not being
| scanned. It's just like having to get a warrant to rifle
| through your house for evidence. The same should be
| required for personal devices. It being digital doesn't
| mean it should be any less safe than if it was on paper.
| Terretta wrote:
| Have you considered the number of client-side SDKs
| surreptitiously doing things on "your" mobile device?
|
| One of the most common is "scanning" your location
| constantly, feeding your daily routines to marketing data
| aggregators, which is arguably more invasive of the average
| person's privacy than CSAM flagging.
|
| I've posted in the past a list of a short-list of offending
| SDKs frequently phoning home from across multiple apps from
| multiple developers. Since weather apps sending your
| location surprised people, I thought this problem would get
| more traction.
|
| This Apple thing, where this is iCloud file upload client
| SDK doing a thing on upload, is an instance of this class
| of problem.
|
| It's not an Apple thing, it's a client SDK thing, and the
| problem of trusting actions on "your" end of a protocol or
| cloud service is not a solved thing.
| vultour wrote:
| Right before it's uploaded to their servers...
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| No other company is scanning for CSAM on your phone, if you
| have proof of that please bring it forward. I would love to
| see evidence of that on my Microsoft, Linux, and Android
| devices. We'll be waiting. Everyone and their uncle knows
| everything in the cloud is scanned unless it's encrypted
| before being uploaded.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _Everyone and their uncle knows everything in the cloud
| is scanned unless it 's encrypted before being uploaded._"
|
| And that's what Apple has announced. Comparing that to:
|
| > " _No other company is scanning for CSAM on your phone_ "
|
| Suggests that you think the Apple system is scanning more
| than what you upload to the cloud, which it isn't. Or, less
| charitably, suggests you /want people to think it is/. Your
| other comment here
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28405476 suggests the
| same. And your comment here
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28405502 the same
| again.
| kmlx wrote:
| > No other company is scanning for CSAM on your phone
|
| no, they're just doing it in the cloud, after everything
| was uploaded automatically :)
| fsflover wrote:
| It doesn't matter what the purpose of this move is. It's not
| "catch-up" at all. The scanning will happen on the devices
| using the users' resources, _before_ uploading. See also:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28309202.
| judge2020 wrote:
| It's catch-up in that Apple submits less than a thousand
| CSAM reports to NCMEC annually:
|
| > According to NCMEC, I submitted 608 reports to NCMEC in
| 2019, and 523 reports in 2020. In those same years, Apple
| submitted 205 and 265 reports (respectively). It isn't that
| Apple doesn't receive more picture than my service, or that
| they don't have more CP than I receive. Rather, it's that
| they don't seem to notice and therefore, don't report.
|
| > In 2020, FotoForensics received 931,466 pictures and
| submitted 523 reports to NCMEC; that's 0.056%. During the
| same year, Facebook submitted 20,307,216 reports to NCMEC.
|
| https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/929-O
| n...
| simondotau wrote:
| If I were a US citizen, and I accepted that scanning cloud-
| stored photos for CSAM was neccesary, I would greatly
| prefer Apple's approach because any such search coerced by
| Government are protected by the Fifth Amendment. Whereas if
| the search occurs in the cloud, Government can force Apple
| or Google to search for whatever they want, using whichever
| algorithm they want.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I understand people's objection with Apple's on-device
| implementation of this scanning, but that didn't seem to be
| parent's objection. I was just trying to clarify.
| jpxw wrote:
| Also, people are annoyed about the fact that the scanning is
| done client-side, which is ironic because Apple are doing
| that in order to increase the security/privacy of the system.
| I can see why people are uncomfortable about client-side
| scanning, but there's still some amusing irony in it.
| darksaints wrote:
| Nothing about this "feature" increases security or privacy.
| helen___keller wrote:
| If you compare it against the industry standard of in-
| cloud scanning, the privacy comes from the fact that an
| on-device model results in 0 Apple servers ever examining
| your photos (unless you have 30 CSAM flags on your iCloud
| account), whereas an on-server model results in Apple
| servers examining every single photo you upload.
|
| You can argue it's better to have neither type of
| scanning, but if Apple considers it a critical business
| issue that their cloud is the preferred hosting site of
| CSAM[0], then they presumably have to pick one or the
| other.
|
| You can also argue that on-device seems creepier or more
| invasive, even if it doesn't result in Apple examining
| your photos, which is a reasonable reaction. It certainly
| breaks the illusion that it's "your" device.
|
| But it's a fact that the on-device model, as described,
| results in less prying eyes on your iCloud photos than
| the on-server model.
|
| [0] I'm not claiming this is the case, just saying for
| example
| darksaints wrote:
| None of this is an increase in security or privacy. What
| you described is merely a _mitigation_ of a massive loss
| in security and privacy, when compared to other massive
| losses in security and privacy.
| helen___keller wrote:
| > What you described is merely a mitigation of a massive
| loss in security and privacy
|
| If we're looking at the end result, a mitigation of a
| loss of privacy is an increase in privacy compared to the
| alternative, no?
|
| I mean clearly what you're saying here is "scanning
| always bad!". I understand that, I really do. I'm saying
| that scanning was never not on the table for a large
| corporation hosting photos on their server. Apple held
| out on the in-cloud scanning because they wanted a
| "better" scanning, and GP's point is that it's ironic
| that the one cloud provider willing to try to make a
| "less bad" scanning option is the one most demonized in
| the media.
|
| None of this is to argue that scanning is anything less
| than a loss in security and privacy. Yes, yes, E2EE
| running on free and open source software that I
| personally can recompile from source would be the best
| option.
| darksaints wrote:
| > If we're looking at the end result, a mitigation of a
| loss of privacy is an increase in privacy compared to the
| alternative, no?
|
| I guess you could say that in the same way that you can
| say that a gambler who just won $10 is "winning", even
| though their bank account is down $100,000. It only works
| if you completely lose all perspective.
| helen___keller wrote:
| "winning" is subjective, but $10 > $0 is a fact. That's
| all I'm trying to say here.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > GP's point is that it's ironic that the one cloud
| provider willing to try to make a "less bad" scanning
| option is the one most demonized in the media.
|
| I think that may be because it's far from clear that
| Apple's solution is "less bad".
| JohnFen wrote:
| > the privacy comes from the fact that an on-device model
| results in 0 Apple servers ever examining your photos
| (unless you have 30 CSAM flags on your iCloud account),
| whereas an on-server model results in Apple servers
| examining every single photo you upload.
|
| Every single photo you upload is getting scanned -- it's
| just that Apple is doing the scanning on "your" device
| instead of their servers.
|
| From the point of view of the privacy of your photos, I
| fail to see what the difference between the two is. I
| mean, if they did the exact same type of scanning on
| their servers instead of your device, the level of
| privacy would be identical.
|
| In terms of general privacy risks, not to mention the
| concept that you own your devices, there is an enormous
| difference between the two, and on-device scanning is
| worse.
| helen___keller wrote:
| > From the point of view of the privacy of your photos, I
| fail to see what the difference between the two is.
|
| Good point. The question is privacy "from whom". For me,
| privacy "from apple" means mostly from malicious
| individuals working for Apple (indeed, if you have an
| iPhone running proprietary Apple software, you could
| never truly have privacy from Apple the corporation).
|
| There are documented cases of employees at various cloud
| services[0] using their positions of power to spy on
| users of said services. Performing on-server scanning
| implies that servers regularly decrypt users' encrypted
| data as a routine course (or worse, never encrypt it in
| the first place), which provides additional attack
| vectors for such rogue employees.
|
| On the other hand, taking the on-device scanning as
| described, the on-device scanning process couldn't be
| possibly used as an attack vector by a rogue employee,
| since Apple employees do not physically control your
| device. Maybe an attack vector here involves changing the
| code and pushing a malicious build, which is a
| monumentally difficult task (and already an attack vector
| today).
|
| [0]
| https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/12/exclusive-
| extrac...
| JohnFen wrote:
| > The question is privacy "from whom".
|
| For me, privacy means that I have control over who I
| disclose what to. But context matters. If I'm in my own
| house, I (should) have almost total control over
| disclosure. When I'm in someone else's house, I have very
| little control as I'm subjecting myself to their rules.
|
| A smartphone is probably the most intimate, personal
| device most people will ever own, and it's the equivalent
| of their house. However, if you're using cloud services,
| then you're in someone else's house and are subject to
| their rules.
|
| That's why, in my view, doing the scanning on-device is
| not only dangerous, but unethical. Doing the scanning on
| the servers is neither of those things.
|
| I get the argument about rogue employees, but I don't
| find it persuasive. I'm told that Apple keeps your data
| encrypted on their servers, although they hold the keys.
| If that's so, then "rogue employees" are something that
| Apple can, and should, control.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| That "only" is doing a huge amount of work in your comment.
| Turning my device into something that snitches on me is a
| huge difference from scanning my uploads.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| If you send any of those illegal photos to Facebook,
| Facebook will snitch on you. If you send them to iCloud
| (under this described system), Apple will snitch on you. It
| is no different to "scanning your uploads" because it /is/
| "scanning your uploads". That it's the CPU in the phone
| doing most of the work and iCloud servers making the
| connection, vs Facebook's CPU and cloud doing all the work,
| makes zero practical difference to anything.
|
| Arguing about where in the combined system the processing
| happens is shifting the deck-chairs on the Titanic, it's
| not making one part of the system more or less responsible
| than any other part.
| sneak wrote:
| Not only that, but identifying those storing existing, known
| CSAM means that, unless they have previously unknown CSAM also,
| no additional harm has been done, as it's just file sharing.
|
| It's only production of new/novel CSAM that harms children.
| Sharing of existing, known CSAM (what this system detects)
| doesn't harm anyone.
| burnished wrote:
| Regardless of the larger conversation, why do you think that
| adding friction wouldn't stop people from engaging in an
| activity? I mean, generally speaking A/B testing is used to
| find the path to most engagement and doesn't get this kind of
| pushback.. but as soon as you want to make something harder you
| get people saying "but that wont do anything". It demonstrably
| does! 'trivial to circumvent' in a world where people regularly
| have the experience of being called out to plug something in,
| when "have you checked the power button and power cord" has
| been a common trope for over two decades!
|
| I'm genuinely curious about your thoughts but to be clear my
| focus is on this very narrow, nigh nitpick tangent.
| foxfluff wrote:
| > Regardless of the larger conversation, why do you think
| that adding friction wouldn't stop people from engaging in an
| activity?
|
| See war on drugs or piracy, or alcohol prohibition for
| instance.
|
| Now there's a million ways to share pictures online in a
| manner that bypasses the few big platforms' interference, and
| you really don't need to be a genius to use (say) password-
| protected archives. That's how a lot of casual online piracy
| happens.
|
| This thing does _very little_ to prevent spreading CSAM
| pictures, and it does nothing to prevent actual child abuse.
| poetaster wrote:
| The password protecteded zip would be scanned? gog
| encrypted files decrygpted? I think you are missing
| parent's point.
| burnished wrote:
| Well, those things were actually pretty effective at
| stopping people. People clearly circumvented those
| restrictions, but from my perspective the number of people
| that smoke weed probably went up after it became easy to
| access in my state, and the quality and variety of products
| increased enormously. They weren't effective at achieving
| any broader aim, like stopping or slowing drug production
| but frankly that wasn't even the point. Regardless, I think
| we can both agree that these broad bans decreased the
| number of people participating in that behavior. I think
| the shift in our societies viewpoints on them came about as
| an awareness that they were ineffective at achieving any
| moral or justifiable aim. I think the correct criticism of
| them isn't that they failed to prevent or impede a given
| behavior, but that they weren't worth the negative
| externalities (if you'll forgive the understatement).
|
| Which brings me to your example of a password protected
| archive. I'm ignorant on specifics so I'm just going to
| sketch a broad argument and trust that you'll correct me if
| my premise is incorrect or my argument otherwise flawed.
| Essentially, if something is opt-in instead of opt-out, a
| non-trivial portion of the population won't do it.
| Especially if it is even slightly technical, there are just
| a lot of people who will just stop thinking as soon as they
| encounter a word they don't already know. So if the
| preventative measure is something that is not automatic and
| built in to whatever tool they are using to share images,
| then that preventative measure will not protect most of
| them. So to bring it full circle, I think it would do much
| to prevent the spreading of CSAM because other bans have
| been effective and I don't think most people have the
| technical literacy to even be aware of how to protect
| themselves form surveillance. As you say you don't have to
| be a genius, but I'd suggest you'd need to be above
| average, which gives you over half the population.
|
| Also thanks for responding, I hope I'm not coming across as
| unpleasantly argumentative, I mean all this in the most
| truth-seeking sense of a discussion (I was going to say
| 'sporting sense of a debate' when I realized I had never
| been part of a formal debate team and that might not mean
| what I thought it meant, heh).
| foxfluff wrote:
| Sorry I haven't had the time to write a thoughtful reply.
|
| Are you talking about a state where cannabis was de-
| criminalized?
|
| I agree that ease of access does have an effect on
| people, but the effect of iCloud scanning is so marginal
| in the grand scheme of things that it's almost like
| fighting drugs by installing surveillance cameras in
| malls. They just go trade and smoke elsewhere. The
| friction is virtually zero, but the privacy concern of
| scanning on half a billion Apple devices is much worse.
|
| It's worth keeping in mind that CSAM is already highly
| illegal and banned, whether Apple scans iCloud photos
| makes no difference on that front. So it's nothing like
| the difference between weed being de-criminalized or not.
|
| Also, fact is you already have to jump through hoops to
| obtain CSAM. It's _very_ rare to stumble upon it being
| casually shared online (I think the last I witnessed it
| must 've been around 15 years ago on 4chan, and somewhere
| between 5 and 10 years ago in a spam attack on freenode).
| Trying to search for it on the clearnet is mostly going
| to yield nothing.
|
| In general, people also tend to know when they're doing
| something highly illegal. And yet they still do it, just
| taking the steps to try avoid being caught. No difference
| with CSAM. They will jump through hoops, and "don't store
| child porn on iCloud" is the tiniest of hoops to jump for
| real.
|
| Password protected archives were meant to be _just one
| example_ of how to bypass scanning on cloud platforms,
| and one that happens to be widely used among casual
| pirates. Google drive might be one of the biggest pirate
| services around these days. The bigger point I was trying
| to make is just that there are countless ways to share
| files without exposing their contents to scanning.
| Nothing for people who are willing to jump through hoops
| to get CSAM.
|
| Finally, one point I've had to try make over and over
| again is that detecting the storage or distribution of
| old (catalogued) CSAM photos is only _very tangentially_
| related to actual abuse of childen. Unfortunately that
| keeps happening even if you destroy the internet and make
| sure no photo is ever stored in the cloud again.
|
| I've said it before: child abuse and violence existed
| before cameras and internet, and will continue to exist.
| Detecting images of abuse or violence is not going to
| stop abuse or violence.
|
| And if someone makes a system that is efficient at
| detecting all catalogued (=old) images of CSAM, then that
| might just create a larger market for "fresh"
| (uncatalogued) child abuse. Credit to nullc for realizing
| this.
|
| And on protecting-the-children front, there are much
| bigger problems than stashes of old CSAM. Like grooming,
| or chatrooms where child prostitutes are forced to stream
| for an audience..
| tgv wrote:
| I'm betting a sizeable group has images from the database. They
| don't know which images are known, I think. But the fact that
| it's nearly trivial to circumvent does make me wonder.
| Salgat wrote:
| I am so confounded on why they are burning through so much good
| will on something they don't even seem to really benefit from.
| Has anyone explained this?
| hannasanarion wrote:
| It might only help a little bit, but it also won't hurt
| anyone so there's not really a reason not to.
|
| Stupid child abusers who put known-pornographic images in
| their iclouds are still child abusers. The fact that fruit is
| low hanging isn't a reason not to pick it.
| Drew_ wrote:
| Pressure from governments of course. Apple would rather
| control how this works then cede control to
| governments/legislation. Problem is that this still doesn't
| stop governments from stepping in anyway. Apple has simply
| laid their own framework instead.
| threshold wrote:
| This technology could have led to the arrests of hardcore
| criminals and spared some poor children a very difficult life.
| Well now we know where this generations priorities and values
| stand.
| vnchr wrote:
| We could just imprison everyone and prevent all future crime...
|
| Valuing and prioritizing privacy is not advocating for crimes
| against children.
| threshold wrote:
| In this case it is. That's the choice today. Have a more
| private cell phone -or- take many serious offenders off the
| streets.
| yomly wrote:
| as a criminal you can just opt out of Apple hardware, and/or
| implement separately encrypted content. Better - maintain your
| facade of having an Apple device for your daytime phone and use
| a burner by night. Has DRM really stopped piracy?
|
| All this did was make it more annoying for criminals and maybe
| make it easier to catch dumb criminals - who would have been
| caught by other means anyway.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Not true. Those people would just have encrypted it before it
| ever hit their iphone. They're not stupid. This was a blatant
| attempt to soften the blow of apple acting as a spy for the
| government on your phone. If that isn't far scarier than "think
| of the children" then I don't know what is.
| threshold wrote:
| Actually they're pretty stupid. Look at what they're doing.
| Not exactly an intellectual pursuit. And if Apple implements
| their system it will catch many, many offenders and yes - it
| might save some children. When did taking care of our
| children become an afterthought? You're more worried about
| Apple looking through your phone than letting these nuts walk
| around the community?
| roamerz wrote:
| Privacy doesn't seem to matter to you.
|
| What happens when Apple adds brainwave detection to their
| Airpods? Now all I have to do is have a fleeting thought about
| something that is deemed unacceptable by the ruling class and
| the authorities show up and arrest me.
|
| So in your perfect little world where do you draw the line? Is
| it there or the next logical step where AI deems that based on
| it's algorithm you are going to break some law tomorrow and now
| they are going to preemptively take action?
|
| Privacy matters.
| threshold wrote:
| That's science fiction nonsense. You let us know when the
| shuttle lands then we'll talk about human trafficking.
| nullc wrote:
| Facebook makes 20 million reports a year, yet very few cases
| are filed.
|
| Worse-- this system only would detect old widely circulated
| images. Arguably, it may increase the incentive to create
| undetectable novel imagery for closed circulation, creating new
| instances of abuse in the process.
|
| Police making random nighttime sweeps of homes in your
| community would also likely catch some serious criminals. Our
| decisions have to be based on more than just the potential of a
| narrow benefit. It's not sufficient to reduce one ill in the
| world if the result is a world less worth living in overall.
| krsdcbl wrote:
| This reaks of "WhatsApp ToS update".
|
| Taking some time to let the news wave blow ove... errr reconsider
| and make improvements, i mean
| dehrmann wrote:
| Did they really announce this the Friday before a three-day
| weekend?
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| "critically important child safety features"? Heinous as those
| crimes may be, no numbers means no ground to stand on.
| roody15 wrote:
| Apple "Lets wait another 3-4 months and work on a better PR
| campaign"
|
| No plans to drop these features
| buu700 wrote:
| Great news! Now let's see if we can also get Google to reverse
| course on backdooring every new Android app:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27695486
| zzo38computer wrote:
| > The (unauditable) database of processed CSAM images will be
| distributed in the operating system (OS)
|
| How much disk space will this require?
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