I remember when they put a fucking U2 album on everyone's phone. Remember that? Many found that suspicious, but I recall people like you saying "oh Apple can write, who cares, but they'd never read, you're being ridiculous".

I remember when an Apple auth server went down and no one could launch non-Apple applications because Apple needed to see the hashes of the things people ran on their computers.[0]

When will the slope be inclined enough for you?!

[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/llanga/status/1326989724704268289

The U2 album was a marketing tactic gone horribly wrong. But the same basic tactic was used to automatically upgrade people's movies to 4K versions. It's just assigning a right to an asset by a given account. It was not an invasion of privacy or some new technical advance that gave Apple some advanced privacy invading features.

Apple said "Hey everyone owns this U2 album now". And if your phone had automatic downloads turned on it downloaded the album.

The idea that even belongs on the slope is … you're not a serious person and you're not making a serious argument.

>Apple said "Hey everyone owns this U2 album now". And if your phone had automatic downloads turned on it downloaded the album.

It wasn't that simple. The usual functionality of slide-to-delete didn't work at all, because of iCloud, or something. A week after they foisted it on everybody, they decided to implement a dedicated page to allow frustrated users to delete it, because of how different it was from a mere purchase authorization from the iTunes Store. [0]

"The slope", in this case, as far as I understand the root-level ancestor comment, refers to the idea that Apple is increasingly paternalistic about its powers over the device you ostensibly own:

>>>>"We're going to scan your photos, on your encrypted device, to look for badness. Right now, we're going to claim that's only for the really icky people that nobody is going to defend, but, hey, once the tech is in place, who's to say we can't scan for dank memes and stuff?"[1]

I think bringing up the U2 album is entirely within scope re paternalistic overreach. I assume your arbitrary goalpost movement to "invasion of privacy or some new technical advance" is considered by you to be indicative of your personal and argumentative seriousness?

[0] https://www.eonline.com/news/1071481/remember-when-apple-for...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28078435

It was actually that simple.

Apple gave everyone the album. It just assigned that album to everyone's library. It could be deleted from the device, but it stayed attached to your account. So it showed up in your library when you searched even if you didn't have it downloaded, because that's how Apple's library worked.

I'm not sure how that's "paternalistic" in any sense of the word.

I didn't move the goalpost. This article, and commentary, is specifically about how Apple is adding technology that can be used to invade our privacy or be abused by state actors.

A bad marketing tactic from seven years ago that amounted to a free gift no one wanted is an absolutely ridiculous example.

The OCSP example is stupid and people should stop using it. Apple was following an RFC written specifically because PKI sucks.

I'm sure I'll be revealing my ignorance here, but what does revoking certs have to do with Apple needing to know who's running youtube-dl or tor or anything else? Was the revocation of something somehow contingent on the specific application being run, or vice versa?

Apple requires signing of code that's going to run on MacOS. You can disable this, but it is a nice little security feature that allows Apple to quickly react if a virus starts spreading on their devices. They revoke that certificate and OCSP (which is a standard way of checking for revocation) blocks that software from running.

Apple's design was fail closed, so if OCSP is down, assume the application has had its key revoked.

Unfortunately that's just how OCSP is, your browser (if you're using Firefox) does this with CAs. The unfortunate thing is, due to the nature of desktop applications, OCSP stapling doesn't really work when you're not the one serving content.

>Unfortunately that's just how OCSP is

Uh, sure, fine. But Apple decided they needed to see the hashes of the things people ran on their computers, to possibly block execution if they decide that's necessary, and they don't have to. I'm kinda shocked that you're framing this as if it's innocent, and therefore a bad example of Apple's increasingly paternalistic control. I don't particularly care what sort of RFC they're following or which alternative implementation sucks or which fig-leaf covers their true intent; Apple chose to have the ability to see what people are running in real time. If you're a regular of this forum, and can't immediately imagine how this sort of information might be used to harm users, rather than help them, now or in the future, I don't know what to tell you.

I also don't quite understand how this even helps with the stated goal of virus-corralling. Does the hypothetical virus that they're trying to guard us against change an executable? If so, then the hash is immediately different, but presumably no longer matches its signed checksum, and so could be rejected at the OS level without needing the whole 'real-time seeing what people run' aspect. Does the hypothetical virus run independently? How could it, given the prohibition against non-signed code? I guess the idea is 'prevent a once-legit app from pushing a malicious update and turning several nations worth of Macs into a botnet', style of thing?

Apple doesn't go and check every application thats being signed basically. The idea is that all applications get signed but if apple notices something it can revoke them and basically make them unusable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Certificate_Status_Prot...

They're just following basic pki. Again, Firefox does this with https certs. The CA knows who went to what website.

>Apple doesn't go and check every application thats being signed basically

...uh, then how did the failure of the auth server mean that nothing (except Apple apps) could run? My understanding was that the auth server checked the hash of every application that was being run, and the absence of that auth server meant nothing could run.

Moreover, I don't care about the fact that they're just using plain ol' certs, just like Firefox. They could be using screen recording software and Mechanical Turk to decide whether users can execute some third-party software -- the point is that they are deciding whether users can execute some third-party software. The technical implementation is unimportant, it's a bad thing.

Yes, Apple chose to add technology to its system which identifies application developers and allows them to tell your machine that specific developers or applications cannot be trusted.

You can turn that feature off.

Sure, I can. You can, too! But most people can't...

They never should have picked that RFC.

Code revocation checking should be local.

Exactly. Reaching out over the network like that is an invitation to, if not a revelation of, malfeasance of some kind. Apple intentionally chose to implement this "feature" in a suspect way, and specious comparisons of an OS and a browser [0] don't strike me as justification, or even explanation. Maybe it's just me, but I like my machine to stay as mine as possible.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28080107

Yes one way is to do CRLs and that has a lot of problems too.

The "slippery slope" argument is not a fallacy. If you were in 2001 and told people what the state of data collection and privacy would look like in 20 years, they'd call you an absolute conspiracy nutjob. It was a national news story then that a printer driver phoned home. Now look at where we are at, and every loss of privacy has had some seemingly reasonable excuse.

It's absolutely a fallacy according to any course on logic because it is impossible to refute.

https://www.txstate.edu/philosophy/resources/fallacy-definit...

For the narrow formal definition in your link, that being an assertion without evidence, then yes, it's a fallacy.

In the colloquial language we are using here, there is absolutely evidence, tons of it, that this will take the same downward trend of previous infractions.

Slippery slope has almost always meant a fallacy, because it typically invokes "the sky is falling" examples that have no evidence to support it coming to pass - even here.

While I see the point, "slippery slope is a fallacy" seems to have been abused far more than "slippery slope" on HN over the decade I've hung around here.

That's because nobody makes an argument by starting with "I'm making a slippery slope argument" - it's always identified by someone else. Same with whataboutism, no true scotsman, etc. by their nature.

No, it is because people invoke slippery slope fallacy for actual, real slippery slopes.

The slippery slope fallacy us real - but so are the slippery slopes.

Are you under the impression that people who teach logic are unaware of real world evidence that "things change and some of the those end up being bad"?

No, I am under the impression that in this thread we are using the term "slippery slope" to mean something else that the one you provided in the link.

Also your characterization of "things change and some of the those end up being bad" is not the nature nor specificity of the evidence in this case.

Lastly, perhaps you should remain consistent and not utilize the "appeal to authority" fallacy.

A slippery slope is a logical fallacy. There's not a colloquial version of that term that means something different. It's a style of argument, where you asset that one action will lead to another action without any evidence of a direct casual link between the two.

Second, I'm not appealing to authority. You said a slippery slope isn't a fallacy. I provided a link which makes the case as to why a slippery slope is considered a fallacy.

We are not using "slippery slope" in any way which is different from the examples given.

That one thing has lead to a bad thing in the past is not evidence that this thing will lead to this specific bad thing in the future.

Yes, sometimes, slippery slopes end up being slippery, and sloped.

But that doesn't mean anyone has to take it as a given that any other specific slope will be slippery, nor slippery in some specific way which leads to some specific outcome.

See my explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28084044

Do you trust your government to not abuse "But they could?" types of capabilities?

I don't. I've seen what the FBI claims, that they then magically find ways around the "impenetrable encryption" they claim they can't break (but then do), and I don't trust them to not require Apple to add hashes of "things they find problematic," and include a gag order with it so Apple can't report it.

I've worked computer security long enough to know that it's always worse than advertised, always will be abused, etc.

If you've worked in computer security long enough, you know that Apple could already have added a backdoor into every build of iOS that allows the government to read any material on your device they chose to read.

My contention isn't that I trust my government, but instead that this specific technology is no more threatening than the technology already present on my phone and the trust I've already placed in the vendor.

> If you've worked in computer security long enough, you know that Apple could already have added a backdoor into every build of iOS that allows the government to read any material on your device they chose to read.

Yes. They could. However, getting caught doing that, from Apple, would be an absolute disaster for them, and they've both made the right statements and made the right actions in terms of things like physical device security (moving more and more into the secure enclave to protect against demonstrated attacks).

It's entirely possible they've done this for specific cases, with a gag order, and nobody knows. However, it cannot be widespread, or it would end up known.

This, however, is adding a blackbox image matching algorithm (we know it's not matching image file data based on statements about how it's robust against cropping/rotation/resizing/etc), and a blackbox database of "Stuff claimed to be Really Bad." There is no way to audit the database and see what's in it, because of the one way nature of hash functions, and there's almost certainly not a pile of the source material laying around for audit reasons (because that would be a really nasty legal problem). So you've got a "Trust us, this stuff is bad" database, and a "Trust us, it matches images accurately" hash function.

And, if those find enough matches (also unspecified), you get yourself reported directly to the various authorities.

It's guilt by algorithm, across every single Apple device (running the latest OS, etc... handwave as needed).

That's very, very different from a customized backdoor deployed to a small number of phones.

Dumb question: do we know from what they've released publicly if it will be possible for security researchers to snag a copy of the database, perform the same perceptual hash algorithm on a given image, and determine if there's a "hit", without violating some kind of license term?

Perhaps the community could run a crowdsourced "keep them honest" service web service -- upload the latest illegal-in-China Winnie-the-Pooh meme, oh hey look at that, it's in the China-only version of the database, isn't that weird, etc etc. (Obviously you wouldn't want people "testing" images that are in the database for the actual stated purpose...)

Yeah, image files.

The scanner that can be fooled by embedding the images into some document is going to get useless fast. Therefore, PDFs and office formats have to be checked, too. Well, and archives, without doubt, should be unpacked on-the-fly. What if someone embeds the base64-encoded image into HTML? And so on, and so on.

You can't just look at media files, you naturally need to scan everything, and the working thing is likely to be antivirus-like, with many file format filters, heuristics, and extended description language.

Do you have the Collateral Murder video? Abracadabra, and now you don't have it.

So, your argument is that Apple couldn't have implemented a wide-scale backdoor because people would know about it but Apple could use this new technology in a nefarious way at scale and no one would know about it.

Just the other day in the Netherlands it came out that cameras placed with the strictest promise that they would only record license plates and only trigger when it matched with a known license plate now also capture persons in the car. And before that the systems were changed to store pictures for 28 days in order to look back. It also came out that the deletion doesn’t always work and that the obfuscation that is supposed to happen also doesn’t always happen.

The reaction of the police seems to be “why do you care about this? We have the data let’s use it. And we could use it to find those ~killers~ these people that allegedly just killed the most popular crime news reporter. So let us do our work.”

Just like software expands to eat cpu/memory/disk resources and people start living up to their salaries: whatever is possible will happen.

To me the slippery slope argument is perfectly valid.

I look forward to the day that marrying your hamster is legal.

You're right in one sense. In another, isn't this exactly what people said about intelligence agencies ("they could but they don't") and then... Snowden.

That he demonstrated that those agencies were actually doing the things people said they would do, while being defended by people who used arguments quite like gp comment.

I used the word "Snowden" not to refer to him, but to the event. Why? Because I didn't want to type the three letter keyword into my comment. Which is an example of the chilling effect these activities cause.

You're really scared of typing NSA?

I think we've learned from experience that tech companies will happily exploit anything they’re capable of exploiting, and this new capability has plenty of potential for exploitation.

Searching everyone's media for evidence of criminal wrongdoing, but setting only one example of the kind of wrongdoing you're looking for is very susceptible to an actual slippery slope, given that there are plenty of other criminal activities they could start looking for should they decide that it's part of their mission.

The only thing that makes CSAM so attractive to go after is how disgusting society feels that it is. Up next could be reporting drug-related texts of known convicts to parole officers. Next could be drug-related texts of everyone to police officers. Next could be letting the police officers make their own searches, where they find everyone talking about a certain kind of political organizing.

We should refuse to accept even the first instance of this kind of thing.

Prior to this change, they couldn't. Now they could.

It's much easier to change the policy than to add a new mechanism. Governments, including the US government have previously attempted to force Apple to break into users' devices, and often apply gag orders to such attempts.

Now they could, and that's enough for me to be unwilling to keep sensitive information on an iOS device.

You do not seem to understand what was actually implemented.

It is my understanding that Apple implemented a program that generates a hash of a file and compares it to a blacklist, and notifies Apple in the event of a match. It's not clear, but it appears this is only run when uploading to iCloud.

The blacklist itself is not maintained by Apple, but by the US government or a third party like NCMEC, which means Apple can't be sure content that isn't child abuse imagery hasn't made it onto the list. Perceptual hashes probably can't be abused to target non-image/video content because they're an inherently image-oriented technology.

Apple could, however cause such a program to match on different criteria with a simple update, and such a change would likely be difficult to detect. Most of us assume Apple wouldn't voluntarily do such a thing, but it's very probable that they would do it involuntarily. The US government has already attempted to compel Apple to create a tool to compromise the security of an iPhone, and might have eventually succeeded in court if they hadn't gained access by other means. That fight took place in public, but the next one might well take place in secret.

In what way does the OP not understand what was implemented? This gives apple the ability to monitor any file on your device. Not only that, but all we have is the government's pinky promise that the database contains only CSAM. There is no verification. How do we know that it isn't going to end up filled with gay pornography involving consenting adults when the "feature" is rolled out in Saudi Arabia?

How do you know that the image classifier on your iPhone, that exists today, and detects faces, isn't also detecting whether the photo has a gun in it?

We don't know, but a photo of a gun isn't going to break your marriage, make you lose your job, make your friends hate you and get you thrown into jail for weeks.

Someone finding a way to plant this kind of material on your phone does that.

Besides, the fact that something that can be misused exist isn't a very good defense for creating something else that widens the opportunity for abuse significantly.

Slippery slope? What they already announced is abhorrent. Scanning all of our photos against our wishes?

Who cares what it's for? The fact that they are even doing this at all is a huge infringement to their customer's autonomy.

You're right, but isn't the rapid expansion of censorship and surveillance the past year evidence that we are currently slipping down the slope?

It is a slippery slope argument, but wouldn't you agree that it's been proven by the past decade of events (e.g. Snowden) that we can expect governments to try (and succeed) to abuse originally well intentioned technologies to spy on anyone?

Considering that Chinese iPhone users already do not enjoy the same privacy features as non-Chinese iPhone users, I would not be at all surprised if Chinese iPhones are going to have a lot more "child porn" hashes to check against.

All data in China is already stored on servers that the CCCP has access to. Why would they need to invoke a convoluted hash match scheme when they can just perform broad checks on the data they can access?

Yep. Good point.

But this will further open possibilities for abuse not only in China but everywhere else as well.

Edward Snowden's revelations provide very solid evidence that what can be done is being done.

Slippery slope is a shockingly predictive heuristic.

It very, very rarely is.

If anything, the last decade has been a huge slippery slope.

If you haven't noticed jokes is on you.

Well, there's not really any slope here. Apple plans to have a target database of BAD FILES!!1! that will get your name handed to the government.

It's not subtle. No expansion to the program is necessary to violate your privacy or endanger dissidents.