I'm not so bugged by this. Uploading data to iCloud has always been a trade of convenience at the expense of privacy. Adding a client-side filter isn't great, but it's not categorically unprecedented--Apple executes search warrants against iCloud data--and can be turned off by turning off iCloud back-ups.

The scanning of childrens' iMessages, on the other hand, is a subversion of trust. Apple spent the last decade telling everyone their phones were secure. Creating this side channel opens up all kinds of problems. Having trouble as a controlling spouse? No problem--designate your partner as a child. Concerned your not-a-tech-whiz kid isn't adhering to your house's sexual mores? Solved. Bonus points if your kid's phone outs them as LGBT. To say nothing of most sexual abuse of minors happening at the hands of someone they trust. Will their phone, when they attempt to share evidence, tattle on them to their abuser?

Also, can't wait for Dads' photos of their kids landing them on a national kiddie porn watch list.

That's not how it works, unless you control your partner's Apple ID and you lie about their DOB when you create their account.

I created my kids Apple IDs when they were minors and enrolled them in Family Sharing. They are now both over 18 and I cannot just designate them as minors. Apple automatically removed my ability to control any aspects of their phones when they turned 18.

> Dads' photos of their kids landing them on a national kiddie porn watch list.

Indeed, false positives is much more worrying. The idea that my phone is spying on my pictures... like, what the hell.

Rather than reassuring me, this sounds like an achievable set of steps for an abuser to carry out.

There’s a repository built from seized child porn.

Those pictures and videos have hashes. Apple wants to match against those hashes.

That’s it.

That’s it for now.

I don't know how most people feel about this, but even a false positive would seem hazardous. Does that put you on some permanent watch list in the lowest tier? How can you even know? And besides, it's all automated.

We could of course massively shift society towards a no-photo/video policy for our kids (perhaps only kept on a non-internet connected camera and hard drive), and tell grandma to just deal with it (come back after the lockdown granny, if you survive). Some people do.

And don't think that normal family photos won't get classified as CEI. What is titillating for one is another's harmless family photo.

Previous times down this slope:

* UK internet filters for child porn -> opt out filters for regular porn (ISPs now have a list of porn viewers) + mandatory filters for copyright infringment

* Google drive filters for illegal content -> Google driver filters for copyrighted content

* iCloud data is totally protected so it's ok to require an apple account -> iCloud in China run by government controlled data centers without encryption

* Protection against malware is important so Windows defender is mandatory unless you have a third party program -> Windows Defender deletes DeCSS

* Need to protect users against malware, so mobile devices are set up as walled gardens -> Providers use these walled gardens to prevent business models that are bad for them

That was the first sin of the internet era.

Discussing slippery slopes does nothing.

Edit: It is frustrating to see where we are going. However - conversations on HN tend to focus on the false positives, and not too much on the actual villains who are doing unspeakable things.

Perhaps people need to hear stories from case workers or people actually dealing with the other side of the coin to better make a call on where the line should be drawn.

My problem is that these lists have already been used for retaliation against valid criticism. Scope creep is real, and in case of this particular list, adding an item is an explicit, global accusation of the creator and/or distributor for being a child molester.

I also wrote some less commonly voiced thoughts yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28071872

But just to highlight one aspect, the list of maintained hashes has a known, non-negligible fraction of false positives.

> That’s it for now.

If this is an attempt at "first they came...", we're not biting.

My statement was to clarify incorrect statements of the issue. Someone was worried about incorrect DoBs entered by jilted lovers would get people flagged.

I just outlined what the actual process is. I feel that discussing the actual problem leads to better solutions and discussions.

Since this topic attracts strong viewpoints, I was as brief as possible to reduce any potential target area, and even left a line supporting the slippery slope argument.

If this was not conveyed, please let me know.

Matter of fact, your response pointing out the false positive issues is a win in my book! Its better than what the parent discussion was about.

But what I am truly perplexed by, is when you talk about "firs they came..." and "we're not biting".

Who is we, and why wouldn't YOU agree with a position supporting a slippery slope argument?

You seem to disagree with the actions being telegraphed by Apple.

Could you clarify what you mean?

Trying to frame the question along the usual slippery slope arguments implicitly sets up anyone critisicing the mechanism as a supporter of fundamentally objectionable content.

This thread however was where I was making a separate point that helps this discussion by removing confusion or assumptions on how Apple’s proposal works.

Perhaps you may have misread what I was saying ?

Your original post posited a reasonable question, but I felt the details were somewhat muddled. The reason I reacted and answered was that I have seen this style of questioning elsewhere before. The way you finished off was actually a little alarming: it'd be really easy to drop in with a followup that in turn would look like the other person was trying to defend the indefensible.

With my original reply I attempted to defuse that potential. The issue is incendiary enough without people willingly misunderstanding each other.

To do a factory reset or otherwise get it back into a state where the spyware the abuser installed is not present, the manufacturer requires the authorization of the abuser. If you can't root your own device then you can't e.g. spoof the spyware and have it report what you want it to report instead of what you're actually doing.

Apple should be ashamed. I see this as Apple paying the tax of doing business in many of the worlds most lucrative markets. Apple has developed this feature to gain access to markets that require this level of surveillance if their citizens.

Consider Sally sending a picture of a bee that Apple’s algo determines with 100% confidence is a breast while Tom sits in another room. One could iterate ad infinitum.

Well, as a parent, I can tell you that some 16/17 year olds are responsible and worthy of the trust that comes with full independence. Others have more social/mental maturing to do yet and need some extra guidance. That's just how it goes.

Register your kids with a corporate behemoth! Why not!? Get them hooked on Apple right from childhood, get their entire life in iCloud, and see if they'll ever break out of the walled garden.

This is an argument for me to not start using iCloud keychain. If Apple flags my account, I don't want to lose access to literally all my other accounts.

Also, a father would only land in a national registry of their child’s photos are known to be CSAM. Simply taking a photo of your child wouldn’t trigger it.

The most annoying thing about Apple Family sharing is that in order to create accounts for people you must specify that they are under 13 (source: https://www.apple.com/lae/family-sharing) - otherwise the only other option is for your "family member" to link their account to the Apple Family which is under your purview, which understandably many people might be hesitant to do because of privacy concerns (as opposed to logging into the child account on a Windows computer exclusively to listen to Apple Music - which doesn't tie the entire machine to that Apple ID as long as it's not a mac).

And so in my case, I have zero actual family members in my Apple Family (they're more interested in my Netflix family account). It begs the question, why does Apple insist on having people be family members in order to share Apple Music? We have five slots to share, and they get our money either way. They also don't let you remove family members - which may be the original intent for insisting on such a ridiculous thing - as if they're trying to take the moral high ground and guilt trip us for disowning a family member when in fact it simply benefits them when a fallout occurs between non-family members, because there's a good chance that the person in question will stop using the service due to privacy concerns, and that's less traffic for Apple.

It's actually kind of humorous to think that I still have my ex-ex-ex-girlfriend in my Apple Family account, and according to Apple she's 11 now (in reality, she's in her 30s). I can't remove her until another 7 years pass (and even then it’s questionable if they’ll allow it, because they might insist that I can’t divorce my “children”). And honestly, at this point I wouldn’t even remove her if I could, she has a newborn baby and a partner now, and I’m happy to provide that account, and I still have two unused slots to give away. I’ve never been the type of person who has a lot of friends, I have a few friends, and one girlfriend at a time. But the thing is she’s never been a music person and I assume that she isn’t even using it - and so even if I made a new best friend or two and reached out to her to let her know that I wanted to add them, Apple currently wouldn’t let me remove her to make room for those theoretical friends. While I'm a big fan of Apple hardware, it really bothers me that a group of sleazy people sat around a table trying to figure out how to maximize income and minimize network traffic, and this is what they came up with.

I'm confused, how am I trying to get them to provide anything for free? I pay for the service, and that service has a limited number of account slots, and the people using those slots have their own devices. What am I missing?

Are you under the assumption that child accounts don't occupy a slot, and are free-riding? If so, that's not the case. Child accounts occupy a slot all the same, the only difference is that by providing child accounts to my adult friends, they aren't required to link their existing Apple accounts to the service that's under my control.

Until they push a small change to the codebase...

  @@ -7637,3 +7637,3 @@
  -if (photo.isCloudSynced && scanForIllegalContent(photo)) {
  +if (scanForIllegalContent(photo)) {
       reportUserToPolice();
   }

  -if (photo.isCloudSynced && scanForIllegalContent(photo)){
  +if (photo.isCloudSynced & scanForIllegalContent(photo)) {
       reportUserToPolice();
   }

So it would be better to say "this has been a risk by using modern technology".

Even if everything is imperfect, some things are more imperfect than others. If each component that makes you vulnerable has a given percent chance of being used against you in practice, you're better off with one than six, even if you're better off with none than one.

Moreover, having a personal route to digital autonomy is nearly worthless. To protect democracy and freedom, practically all users need to be able to compute securely.

http://cs.bell-labs.co/who/ken/trust.html

It's a fantastic concept.

For example the only closed source component that I use is the NVIDIA driver, but I could use Nouveau, with lower performance.

The real problem is caused by the hardware backdoors that cannot be controlled by the operating systems and which prevent the full ownership of the devices, e.g. the System Management Mode of Intel/AMD, the Intel ME and the AMD PSP.

The real problem is that most people don't have the knowledge to compile a distro and load it onto a phone. Most people don't even know that's a possibility or that the distro on their phone isn't open source.

GoodReader has optional app-level file encryption with a password that is not stored in the iOS keychain. In theory, those encrypted files should be opaque to device backups or local filesystem scanning, unless iOS or malware harvests the key from runtime memory, https://goodreader.com/

I'm not a parent but the other child protection features seem like they could definitely be abused by some parents to exert control/pry into their kids private lives. It's a shame that systems have to be designed to prevent abuse by bad people but at Apple's scale it seems like they should have better answers for the concerns being raised

It would be easy to extend this to scan for 'wrongthink'.

Next logical steps would be to scan for: confidential government documents, piracy, sensitive items, porn in some countries, LGBT content in countries where it's illegal, etc... (and not just on icloud backed up files, everything)

This could come either via Apple selling this as a product or forced by governments...

Next it’s Covid misinformation

Then eventually they’re coming for your Bernie memes

Well the obvious response is that these systems don't have to be designed. Child abuse is a convenient red herring to expand surveillance capabilities. Anyone opposing the capability is branded a child molester. This is the oldest trick in the book.

I mean the capability to spy on your kid can easily be used to abuse them. Apple could very well end up making children's lives worse.

It seems the only way to opt-out is to get out of the Apple ecosystem.

https://www.golem.de/news/hamburg-polizei-nutzt-corona-konta...

https://www.ccc.de/de/updates/2021/luca-app-ccc-fordert-bund...

That's the irony in this: This move arguably improves privacy by removing the requirement that images be decrypted on the server to run a check against the NCMEC database. While iCloud Photo Library is of course not E2E, in theory images should no longer have to be decrypted anywhere other than on the client under normal circumstances.

And yet – by moving the check to the client, something that was once a clear distinction has been blurred. I entirely understand (and share) the discomfort around what is essentially a surveillance technology now running on hardware I own rather than on a server I connect to, even if it's the exact same software doing the exact same thing.

Objectively, I see the advantage to Apple's client-side approach. Subjectively, I'm not so sure.

Google drive does not scan for child porn if the user uploads a user encrypted file. They literally can’t.

Personally, I don’t think E2EE photos is coming.

It’s a huge move, and a big change in the presumptions of how their platform works.

I’m heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem and it’ll take a years work to get off it.

I’m thinking of the prevailing principles of whatever I do best, and one of them is, excise integrated platforms as much as possible.

But most consumers will probably not care, and this road will get paved for miles to come.

That is good, but unless a system like this is fully open source and runs only signed code there really aren't many protections against abuse.

eg. Anyone with a "Feel the Bern" marketing material -> arrest them under suspicion of CSAM. Search their device and find them as dissidents.

This will be the statement they increase the scope the next time.

Hard to imagine that Tim Cook would have scanned Epsteins photos...

And let's not forget the minor detail that this is now public knowledge. It's like telling your teenage son you're going to be searching his closet for marijuana in the future.

This is way too much work to gain hardly anything. It's just as easy to just log into another device with their iCloud password and literally read everything they send. Less work, more result.

There’s two functions here. Both client side.

First, machine learning to detect potentially inappropriate pictures for children to view. This seems to require parental controls to be on. Optionally it can send a message to the parent when a child purposefully views the image. The image itself is not shared with Apple so this is notification to parents only.

The second part is a list of hashes. So the Photos app will hash images and compare to the list in the database. If it matches then presumably they do something about that. The database is only a list of KNOWN child abuse images circulating.

Now, not to say I like the second part but the first one seems fine. The second is sketchy in that what happens if there’s a hash collision. But either way it seems easy enough to clear that one up.

No father is going to be added to some list for their children’s photos. Stop with that hyperbole.

"But it only impacts iCloud Photos". Valid! So why not run the scanner in iCloud and not on MY PHONE that I paid OVER A THOUSAND DOLLARS for? Because of end-to-end encryption. Apple wants to have their cake and eat it too. They can say they have E2EE, but also give users no way to opt-out of code, running on 100% of the "end" devices in that "end-to-end encryption" system, which subverts the E2EE. A beautiful little system they've created. "E2EE" means different things on Apple devices, for sure!

And you're ignoring (or didn't read) the central, valid point of the EFF article: Maybe you can justify this in the US. Most countries are far, far worse than the US when it comes to privacy and human rights. The technology exists. The policy has been drafted and enacted; Apple is now alright with subverting E2EE. We start with hashes of images of child exploitation. What's next? Tank man in China? Photos of naked adult women, in conservative parts of the world? A meme criticizing your country's leader? I want to believe that Apple will, AT LEAST, stop at child exploitation, but Apple has already estroyed the faith I held in them, only yesterday, in their fight for privacy as a right.

This isn't an issue you can hold a middleground position on. Encryption doesn't only kinda-sorta work in a half-ass implementation; it doesn't work at all.

I am wondering what hashes are now and will be in this database. Or combine Pegasus exploit , put a few bad images on the journalist/politician iPhone, cleanup the tracks and wait for Apple and FBI destroy the person.

I kept the lineage phone in my back pocket, confident that it would be a good 4-5 years before they shipped something that violated their claims. I figured, the alternatives would be stable and widespread.

My timing was off.

This of course gets into 'what even is harm?' since that's a very subjective way of classifying something, especially when you try to do it on behalf of others.

For CSAM you could probably assume that "everyone this code takes action against would consider doing so harmful", but _consequences in general are harmful_ and thus you could make this same argument about anything that tries to prevent crime or catch criminals instead of simply waiting for people to turn themselves in. You harm a burglar when you call for emergency services to apprehend them.

> This isn't an issue you can hold a middleground position on. Encryption doesn't only kinda-sorta work in a half-ass implementation; it doesn't work at all.

This is the exact issue that the U.S. has been entrenched by - thinking that you can't disagree with one thing someone says or does and agree with other things they say or do. You can support Apple deciding to combat CSAM. You can not support Apple for trying to do this client-sided instead of server-sided. You can also support Apple for taking steps towards bringing E2EE to iCloud Photos. You can also not support them bowing to the CCP and giving up Chinese citizens' iCloud data encryption keys to the CCP. This is a middle ground - and just because you financially support Apple by buying an iPhone or in-app purchases doesn't mean you suddenly agree with everything they do. This isn't a new phenomenon - before the internet, we just didn't have the capacity to know, in an instant, the bad parts of the people or companies we interfaced with.

I've seen the "right to unreasonable search and seizure" Americans hold quoted a bit during this discussion. Valid, though to be clear, the Constitution doesn't apply for private company products. But more interestingly: what about right against self-incrimination? That's what Apple is pushing here; that by owning an iPhone, you may incriminate yourself, and actually it may end up happening whether you're actually guilty or not.

The biggest issue with this is, of course, that Apple's accusation is most certainly going to be enough evidence to get a search warrant, meaning a search and seizure of all of your hard drives they can find.

0: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2252A#:~:text=(d)...

Um. No?

I would be very surprised if more than 10% of people in possession of sexual images of under 18s molested (pre-pubecent) children.

However, this is NOT the use case being applied for here. Holding those images, which are not part of known CP, will not be an issue, brining it up is a red herring. ~The issue most people have fruitfully started discussing is the scanning of content on your own phone.

Secondly - the correlation between holding known CP and child molestation IS, sadly, high.

I prefer not having my door busted in at 6 am and my dog shot in the head because of a hash collision

https://www.aclu.org/gallery/swat-team-blew-hole-2-year-old-...

PS. On a personal note, Apple is done for me. Stick a fork in it. I was ready to upgrade after September especially since I heard touch-ID is coming back and I love my iPhone 8. But sure as hell this sad news means i8 is my last Apple device.

This seems fine as it's (a) being done on iCloud-uploaded photos and (b) replacing a server-side function with a client-side one. If Apple were doing this to locally-stored photos on iCloud-disconnected devices, it would be nuts. Once the tool is built, expanding the database to include any number of other hashes is a much shorter leap than compelling Apple to build the tool.

> it seems easy enough to clear that one up

Would it be? One would be starting from the point of a documented suspicion of possession of child pornography.

Ive actually witnessed someone go through this from someone else getting caught with these types of images and attempting to bring others with him. It’s not easy. It took him over a year of his life calling constantly asking when the charges will be dropped. They even image your devices on the spot yet still take them and stuff them in an evidence locker until everything is cleared up. You’re essentially an outcast to society while this is pending as well as most people assume if you have police interest related to child pornography you must be guilty.

I’d be happier if Apple wasn’t doing this at all. I’m not defending them necessarily but I am calling bullshit on your scare tactics. It’s not necessary.

I think many queer people have a completely different idea of the concept of "why do you want to hide if you're not doing anything wrong" and the desire to stay private. Especially since anything sexual and related to queerness is way more aggressively policed than hetero-normative counterparts.

Anything "think of children" always has a second order affect of damaging queer people because lots of people still think of queerness as dangerous to children.

It is beyond likely that lots of this monitoring will catch legal/safe queer content - especially the parental-controls focused monitoring (as opposed to the gov'ment db of illegal content)

For example, YouTube does this with some LGBT content. YouTube has demonitized LGBT content and placed it in restricted mode, which screens for "potentially mature" content[1][2].

YouTube also shadowbans the content[1], preventing it from showing up in search results at all.

From here[1]:

> Filmmaker Sal Bardo started noticing something strange: the views for his short film Sam, which tells the story of a transgender child, had started dipping. Confused, he looked at the other videos on his channel. All but one of them had been placed in restricted mode — an optional mode that screens “potentially mature” content — without YouTube informing him. In July of that year, most of them were also demonetized. One of the videos that had been restricted was a trailer for one of his short films; another was an It Gets Better video aimed at LGBTQ youth. Sam had been shadow-banned, meaning that users couldn’t search for it on YouTube. None of the videos were sexually explicit or profane.

There are more examples like that here[2].

[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/lgbtq-...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/14/youtube...

Then there is tumblr, which is all but dead - explicitly for a "think of the children" concern from apple.

Tumblr had their porn ban decided 6 months before the snafu with the app and CSAM. It's nothing to do with Apple.

I find it intensely ironic that Apple's CEO is openly gay.

How, how is it even morally good?? Will they start taking pictures of your house to see if you store drugs under your couch? Or cook meth in your kitchen??

What is moral is for society to be in charge of laws and law enforcement. This vigilante behavior by private companies who answer to no one is unjust, tyrannical and just plain crazy.

How many people have homepods? When will they start listening for illegal activity?

We've collectively handed control of our personal computing devices over to Apple and Google. I fear the long-term consequences of that will not be positive...

1) Google doesn't release devices without unlockable bootloaders. They have always been transparent in allowing people to unlock their Nexus and Pixels. Nexus was for developers, Pixels are geared towards the end user. Nothing changed with regards to the bootloaders.

2) Google uses Coreboot for their ChromeOS devices. Again, you couldn't get more open than that if you wanted to buy a Chromebook and install something else on it.

3) To this day, app sideloading on Android remains an option. They've even made it easier for third party app stores to automatically update apps with 12.

4) AOSP. Sure, it doesn't have all the bells and whistles as the latest and greatest packaged up skin and OS release, but all of the features that matter within Android, especially if you're going to de-Google yourself, are still there.

Any one of those points, but consider all four, and I have trouble understanding why people think REEEEEEEE Google.

So you can't play with one ball in the garden (SafetyNet), you've still got the rest of the toys. That's a compromise I'm willing to accept in order to be able to do what I want to and how I want to do it. (Eg, Rooting or third party roms.)

If you don't like what they do on their mobile OS, there's nothing that Google is doing to lock you into a Walled Garden to where the only option you have is to completely give up what you're used to...

...Unlike Apple. Not one iOS device has been granted an unlockable bootloader. Ever.

True but misleading. If you unlock your bootloader, you can no longer use a lot of apps, including Snapchat, Netflix, Pokemon Go, Super Mario Run, Android Pay, and most banking apps. And before you say this isn't Google's fault, know that they provide the SafetyNet API, which has no legitimate, ethical use cases, and is what allows all of the aforementioned apps to detect whether the device has been modified, even if the owner doesn't want that.

This really depends on the apps. I have used over 10 banking apps on an Android phone with an unlocked bootloader without ever encountering any issues. On a device rooted using Magisk, the MagiskHide masking feature successfully bypasses the apps' root checks in my experience.

Sure, the protection currently isn't bulletproof. But wait until it becomes mandatory for TrustZone to participate in the attestation.

I'm hoping that Microsoft's support for Android apps and integration with Amazon Appstore in Windows 11 will hedge against Google's SafetyNet enforcement by making an alternative Android ecosystem (with fewer Google dependencies) more viable. Apps that require SafetyNet would most likely not work on Windows 11.

You have 10 accounts at different banks? I thought I was bad with 4

Using Magisk and Magisk Hide. Though oddly enough, none of my banking/credit card apps make an issue of being rooted, so they're not even in the Magisk Hide list.

If you wanted to do a WSL but for Android, SafetyNet guarantees many apps won't work.

It also puts alternative Linux-based mobile operating systems, like SailfishOS or postmarketOS, at a disadvantage because they won't be able to run certain Android apps for no real technical reason other than the protection of Google's money firehouse.

I shouldn't have to choose between keeping full control over my device and being able to use it to access the modern world.

(For the record, I don't think SafetyNet should exist at all, but if Google is pretending it's for the user's security and not just to allow developers to make it harder to reverse engineer their fast food apps, they should at least set some boundaries.)

It's frustrating that Google has fostered an ecosystem where not all "Android apps" work on vanilla Android.

[1] https://twitter.com/topjohnwu/status/1277683005843111936

Instead, what Google has done is allowed app developers to check that the user isn't doing anything surprising - especially unprofitable things like blocking ads or spoofing tracking data. Since Google profits from ads and tracking, I must assume a significant part of their motivation is to make unprofitable behavior inconvenient enough most people won't do it.

This is not accurate. Pixels that come from Verizon have bootloaders that cannot be fully unlocked.

As long as you buy a Pixel directly from Google or one of a few authorized resellers, it is unlockable. (I recommend B&H, they help you legally evade the sales tax.) You can also use a Pixel you buy from Google with Verizon.

Back when contract pricing was a more regular thing, I ended up doing the math on the plan rate after I requested for the device contract subsidy to be removed as I didn't want to upgrade the device. I had a Droid DNA at the time.

The monthly rate dropped by $25 just to keep the same device. (Nevermind that I had to ASK for them to not continue to charge me the extra $25/mo after 2 years)

$25 a month for 24 months is $600.

The device on contract was $199.

Full retail price if you didn't opt in for a 2 year contract when getting it? $699.

So I ended up paying an extra $100 for the device than if I had just bought it outright.

Even if the offerings/terms are different now... Verizon, regardless of how they market anything, absolutely makes you pay full price (and then some) for the device you get at 'discount.'

It's funny now that we're seeing people being able to BYOD to Verizon these days and AT&T is the one engaging in aggressive whitelisting.

And 10%/yr simple interest is a reasonable price for a retail loan.

Carriers might provide a network unlock -- these are 2 VERY different things.

In many cases you have to get an authorization code from the carrier that sold the device in order to unlock the bootloader. That may or may not involve retrieving a code from your device, and it may or may not also involve interacting with the OEM. It depends on the details negotiated between the carrier and the OEM.

For example, T-Mobile sells devices that are both bootloader and network locked but (for some devices) provides a process to unlock both of those once certain criteria have been met (length of device ownership, account standing, etc). To be perfectly clear, for devices sold by T-Mobile they generally have to authorize you somehow before the OEM will send you a bootloader unlock code.

> Verizon

again.

> Verizon

Google didn't sell you that device. Verizon did.

Except, uh, GPS. Even for third party navigation apps.

Yes, I know about microG, but the fact that there had to be a third party reimplementation of what should be a standard system API is still a problem.

AOSP does support GPS without needing any additional software, but does not have built-in support for Wi-Fi and cell tower triangulation. As you mentioned, UnifiedNlp (bundled with microG) optionally supports triangulation using a variety of location providers (including offline and online choices) for a faster location lock.

Hey now, the operating system and app distribution cartels include Microsoft, too.

The only real way to avoid this is to sandbox all Windows and macOS systems and only run them from Linux hosts, but you're still taking a performance hit when you do this and sometimes usability just isn't up to par with the other two.

It's not very user friendly, but it might be a bit more intuitive than apple's special dance of click right -> open to bypass said controls.

---

[0] For example, the Prometheus exporter for windows x64 is not signed and doesn't trigger the alert. I can download it (no alert) click open (no alert) and it runs . The x32 version does have a "this may damage your computer" alert in the browser (edge).

https://github.com/prometheus-community/windows_exporter/rel...

But with it stuck on IE11...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1649963

What I mind is when my personal life, the stuff that _actually_ matters, is being monitored or has a backdoor that allows ANY third party easy access to monitor it.

Its been clear Tim Cook was going to slowly harm the brand. He was a wonderful COO under a visionary CEO-type, but he holds no particular "Tech Originalist" vision. He's happy to be part of the BigTech aristocracy, and probably feels really at home in the powers it affords him.

Anyone who believes this is "just about the children" is naive. His chinese partners will use this to crack down on "Winnie the Poo" cartoons and the like...before long questioning any Big Pharma product will result in being flagged. Give it 5 years at max.

The difference is that the Alexa connects to your wifi, so if you wanted to, you could trivially tell if it's communicating when it shouldn't be. When I worked at Amazon, I was given the impression that the system that handles detecting the wake word was implemented in hardware, and the software system that does the real speech recognition doesn't "wake up" or gain access to the audio channel unless the wake word is detected by that hardware system -- and it's very obvious when you've woken it up (the colored ring lights up, it speaks, etc.)

Echo devices also sit in one room. If you're like most people you take your phone everywhere, which means that if it's spying on you, it could literally have a transcript of every word you spoke the entire day, as well as any people you've been around. To make matters worse, it would be difficult to tell if that was happening. Unless you're an uber-hacker who knows how to root an iPhone, or a radio geek who knows enough to monitor their device's cellular transmissions, good luck figuring out whether Siri is listening to and passing on audio that it shouldn't. The problem is that phones have so many apps and responsibilities -- given that they are essentially full computers -- these days that nonstop data transfer on a wifi network from my phone wouldn't be alarming: it might be backing up pictures to a cloud, or syncing the latest version of apps, etc.

I think the dedicated devices like Echo/Alexa are what you should buy if you're the most privacy-sensitive, since they have zero reason to be uploading to the Internet unless you're actively talking to them, and they have zero reason to be downloading unless they're receiving a software patch, which should be very rare. And because they're on your wifi (not cell) you can monitor their network traffic very easily.

As to the wake word point, I agree. I don't think alexa/siri/etc are currently bad or disrespecting privacy. I actually have a smart home with a voice assistant.

However, my smart home is all local mesh network (zwave and zigbee) based through a FOSS bridge that doesn't talk to the internet. All lights are through smart switches, not bulbs. The end result is such that if the voice assistant service ever pisses me off, I can simply disconnect from it.

If you read my comments in this article, I think I come off as a tin foil hat wearing lunatic, to some degree at least.

But actually, I'm not a super privacy paranoid person. Telemetry, voice recognition datasets, etc... I think those are a reasonable price to pay for free stuff! I just want to have my thumb on the scale and a go-bag packed for when/if these services become "evil" ;)

The final model is just a series of vectors that are typically pretty fast to run on the local machine.

You want to not suffer through political memes? And jump to scanning private messages for dissent, by authoritarian governments being okay!?

What?!

there's a good chance that if we continue to improve surveillance law enforcement agencies and justice departments could begin to focus on rehabilitation and growing a kinder world.

right they are like firemen trying to put out fires after the building has been ruined

if it doesn't work we're doomed anyway, so what's the problem?

the way the laws go good or bad is going to be up to everyone

See the comment threads around this topic, and look back to other related events (notably the tech giants censoring people "for the betterment of society" in the past 12 months).

Boiling a frog may happen slowly, but the water continues to heat up even if we pretend it doesn't. Very disappointed with this action by Apple.

But I don't want these people normalizing deep surveillance and fear that I have to get rid of my OSX devices when this trend continues.

But... yeah. Yeah. Which is why I got as many people on Signal as I could. Baby steps. The goal here, right now, is reasonable privacy, not perfection.

You can verify the security number out-of-band, and the process is straightforward enough that even nontechnical users can do it.

That's as much as can possibly be done, short of an app that literally prevents you from communicating with anyone without manually providing their security number.

Also, the Signal does not give any warnings or indication that chat partner identify is manually verified. Users are supposed to trust Signal and not ask difficult questions

I'm not sure what else you'd expect. The alternative would be for Signal not to handle key exchange at all, and only to permit communication after the user manually provides a security key that was obtained out-of-band. That would be an absolutely disastrous user experience.

> Also, the Signal does not give any warnings or indication that chat partner identify is manually verified

That's not true. When you verify a contact, it adds a checkmark next to their name with the word "verified" underneath it. If you use the QR code to verify, this happens automatically. Otherwise, if you've verified it manually (visual inspection) you can manually mark the contact as verified and it adds the checkmark.

Ahem. I'd expect something that most xmpp clients could do 10+ years ago with OTR: after establishing an encrypted session the user is given a warning that chat identify of a partner is not verified, and is given options on how to perform this verification.

With CA you can make a mild warning that identity is verified by Signal, and give an options to dismiss warning or perform off-the-band verification.

Not too disastrous, no?

> That's not true. When you verify a contact, it adds a checkmark next to their name with the word "verified"

It has zero effect if the user is given no indication that there should be the word verified.

It is not true what you say. This [1] is what a new user sees in Signal - absolutely zero indication. To verify a contact user must go to "Conversation settings* and then "View safety number". I'm not surprised nobody ever established a verified session with me.

[1]: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ab1bvazg4y895f6/screenshot_2021080...

And it does warn about the contact being unverified directly in the chat window, until you go and click "Verify". The problem is that people blindly do that without understanding what it's for.

[1]: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ab1bvazg4y895f6/screenshot_2021080...

[1]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28081152

Aside: Signal data never touches iCloud Backup (https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Ba...). That’s an improvement over a lot of apps.

Apple thinks the appropriate time for queer kids to find themselves is after they turn 18.

Edit: I'm wrong in one respect: if the kid under 13 chooses to send a message with an explicit image despite being warned via notification, the image will be saved to a parental controls section. This won't happen for children >= 13.

Critical points I'd make about Organic Maps, I'd want a lower inertia setting so it scrolls faster, and a different color palette.. they are using muddy tones of green and brown.

You can still use Google Maps without an account and "incognito". I wish they'd allow app store usage without an account though- similar to how any Linux package manager works.

I'm not worried about my search history.

Yeah, it's a dependency... as much as the Google Maps APK needing to run on Android itself.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.osmand.plus/

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/app.organicmaps/

The only slight dowbside is that I haven't figured out how to auto update appd, so your apps will get out of date without you being notified and you have to manually do it. This problem might literally be solved by a simple setting thay I haven't bothered to look for, IDK.

On the plus side it includes all the official play store apps, along side some that aren't allowed by play store.

For examples, Newpipe, the superior replacement YouTube app that isn't allowed on play store due to it subverting advertisements and allowing a few features that are useful for downloading certain things.

[0] https://github.com/Drutol/MALClient

[1] https://github.com/hummingbird-me/kitsu-mobile

Apple seems to not have interest in users devices, which makes sense -- they're not liable for them. They _do_ seem interested in protecting the data that they house, which makes sense, because they're liable for it and have a responsibility to remove/report CSAM that they're hosting.

I suspect that this time next year, I'll still be on ios, despite my posturing. I'm certainly going to address icloud in the next few weeks - specifically, disusing it. However, I would be surprised if I'm still on ios a year or two after that.

What Apple has done here isn't horrible in the absolute sense. Instead, it's a massive betrayal of trust with minimal immediate intrusiveness; and yet, a giant klaxon that their platform dominance in terms of privacy is coming to an end

That precedent was set many years ago.

>a man [was] arrested on child pornography charges, after Google tipped off authorities about illegal images found in the Houston suspect’s Gmail account.

Microsoft’s “PhotoDNA” technology is all about making it so that these specific types of illegal images can be automatically identified by computer programs, not people.

PhotoDNA converts an image into a common black-and-white format and size the image to a uniform size, Microsoft explained last year while announcing its increased efforts at collaborating with Google to combat online child abuse.

https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/06/why-the-gmail-scan-that-le...

My physical device, on the other hand, is (supposed to be) mine and mine alone.

Apple scans the data on device before it is sent. Google scans it on it's own servers after it is sent.

But yeah, I could reasonably use an iphone without impact for the foreseeable future with some small changes.

What I always thought was interesting was that the Police Security Services in Singapore were called "CISCO" -- and you used to see these swat-APV-type vans driving around and armed men with CISCO emblazened on their gear/equip/vehicles...

I always was reminded of Cyberpunk Anime around that.

You see, the mass transit company in Singapore is handled by the Singapore Municipal Rapid Transit company, abbreviated SMRT. There is also a SMRT corporation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMRT_Corporation), SMRT buses, the SMRT abbreviation is heavily used on train, stations, basically everywhere.

Well, in Czech "smrt" means literarily death. So let's say for Czech speakers riding the public transport in Singapore can be a bit unnerving - you stand at a station platform and then a train with "DEATH" written on it in big letters pulls into the station. ;-)

Imagine if you were a Czech child who was old enough to read but not old enough to disassociate the locality of the spellings... that would be odd.

But if your worry is governments reading your mail, is an email company any safer? I’m sure FM doesn’t want to scan your mail for the NSA or its Australian proxy, but do they have a choice? And if they were compelled, would they not be prevented from telling you?

“We respect your privacy” is exactly what Apple has been saying.

complicated. As long as they require a reasonable warrant (ha!), I'm fine. Email is an inherently insecure protocol and ecosystem, anyways.

I haven't used email for communication that I consider to be private for a while - I've moved most, if not all, casual conversation to signal, imessage. Soon, I hope to add something like matrix or mattermost into the mix.

My goal was never to be perfect. My goal is to be able to easily remove myself from an invasive spyware ecosystem, and bring my friends along, with minimal impact.

Have you tried using the website? I've had some luck with that on postmarketOS, and it means you don't need to install Play services to use it.

I use Citymapper simply because I find it better (for the city-based journeys that are my usual call for a map app) - but it not being a Google ~data collection device~ service is no disadvantage.

At least, depending why you dislike having everything locked up with Google or whoever I suppose. Personally it's more having everything somewhere that troubles me, I'm reasonably happy with spreading things about. I like self-hosting things too, just needs a value-add I suppose, that's not a reason in itself for me.

Is there a way to set up Android to handle shared locations without Google Maps?

Every time someone shares location with me (in Telegram) it displays as a tiny picture and once I click it it says I have to install Google Maps (I use an alternative for actual maps and don't have Google Maps installed). So I end up zooming the picture and then finding the location on the map manually.

apples new customers are the various autocratic regimes that populate the earth. apples customers used to be human beings. there exist many profiteers in mountain view, cupertino menlo and atherton in the service of making our monopolies more capable of subjugating humanity.

So I don't actually expect my mail to be private. But at least it's not Google.

This is very much like driving a car through a crowd of protestors. They will slowly, inexorably, eventually push through.

Paid doesn't mean more secure, it's popular mistake.

tbh, i would vastly prefer to use a cloud based service with local encryption - I'm not super paranoid, just overly principled

But from the looks of his numbers ( https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/IRC_top_... ) he's doing a real bang-up job!

I don't care if I use google or apple services, btw, I just want the data flow to be on my terms.

If you don't want your parents to look at your phone, you shouldn't be using a phone owned by your parent's account. The new feature doesn't change this calculus.

As a queer kid, would you enjoy being blackmailed by someone who tricked you into not telling your parents?