What changed, really?
For me it’s sad because I have literally always stood by them and they make amazing hardware and software. However at the end of the day I’d rather have the nature of my device be one where it is under my control, than all the wonderful apple tech.
I just don’t know what to use instead.
If you reprogram my computer to scan my images stored on my computer… different thing entirely. I don't have a problem with checking them for child abuse (in fact, I'd give up quite a bit of freedom to stop that), but nothing about this tech makes it specific to child abuse. I don't want my computer ratting me out for stuff that I have the right (or, possibly, the obligation) to be doing, just because the powerful don't want me doing it. At the moment, it doesn't.
This tech makes Apple-controlled computers untrustworthy. It will probably lead to the deaths of political dissidents; these things always do. Is that worth it?
For me, the big concern is how it could be expanded. This is a real and valid problem but it’s certainly not hard to imagine a government insisting it needs to be expanded to cover all photos, even for people not using iCloud, and we’d like you to add these signatures from some images we can’t show you. Once the infrastructure is there it’s a lot easier to do that.
Think about all the startups that can't deploy software without being taxed most of our margin, the sign in with apple that prevents us from having a real customer relationship, and the horrible support, libraries, constant changes, etc. It's hostile! It's unfair that the DOJ hasn't done anything about it.
A modern startup cannot succeed without Apple's blessing. To do so would be giving up 50% of the American market. When you're struggling to grow and find traction, you can't do that. It's so wildly unfair that they "own" 50+% of computer users.
Think of all the device owners that don't have the money to pay Apple for new devices or upgrades. They can't repair them themselves. Apple's products are meant to go into the trash and be replaced with new models.
We want to sidestep these shenanigans and use our own devices? Load our own cloud software? We can't! Apple, from the moment Jobs decreed, was fully owned property. No alternative browsers, no scripting or runtimes. No computing outside the lines. You're just renting.
This company is so awful.
Please call your representatives and ask them to break up the biggest and most dangerous monopoly in the world.
> I bet you, after the next election in the US your device will be reporting you for spreading far right or deep state lies, depending on who wins.
The US is becoming less stable, sure [1], but there is still a very strong culture of free speech, particularly political speech. I put the odds that your device will be reporting on that within 4 years as approximately 0. The extent that you see any interference with speech today is corporations choosing not to repeat certain speech to the public. Not them even looking to scan collections of files about it, not them reporting it to the government, and the government certainly wouldn't be interested if they tried.
The odds that it's reporting other crimes than child porn though, say, copyright infringement. That strikes me as not-so-low.
[1] I agree with this so much that it's part of why I just quit a job that would have required me to move to the US.
In my opinion, that culture has been rapidly dying, chipped away by a very sizable and growing chunk that doesn't value it at all, seeing it only as a legal technicality to be sidestepped.
Liberal values are liberty/freedom, consent of the governed, and equality before the law. All other liberal values build off of these three as a base. This implies that Non-liberal (or illiberal) values are the opposition of liberal values through censorship, gun control, etc like you mentioned.
Liberals in the modern US political sense refers to Neo-liberals. Neo-liberal and liberal are two very different things which is why the term liberal value doesn't necessarily correspond to neo-liberal beliefs.
Additionally, "the left" by and large does not support neo-liberalism. "The left" is violently against the aforementioned censorship, gun control, etc. Reading any socialist or communist literature will make this abundantly clear.
Examples:
- George Orwell on the Right to bear Arms: "The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do, they cannot give the factory worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see it stays there."
- George Orwell on Freedom of Speech: "Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen."
- Karl Marx on the Right to bear Arms: "Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary"
- Karl Marx on Freedom of Speech: "The absence of freedom of the press makes all other freedoms illusory. One form of freedom governs another just as one limb of the body does another. Whenever a particular freedom is put in question, freedom in general is put in question"
- Karl Marx on Freedom of Speech: "Censorship has outlived its time; where it still exists, it will be regarded as a hateful constraint which prohibits what is openly said from being written"
- Karl Marx on Freedom of Speech: "You cannot enjoy the advantages of a free press without putting up with its inconveniences. You cannot pluck the rose without its thorns!"
If you want I can dig up more quotes but those are the ones that were easy to fetch and any more risks turning this into even more of a wall of text.
My point being, your issues with "the left" are misdirected and are better focused towards Neo-liberalism and/or Neo-conservatism. "The left" does and has always been one of the primary guardians of liberal ideology. Hell "the left" is where a significant portion of the liberal ideology that the United States is founded on originated from.
- Mao Zedong
Marxism prescribes the atrophy of the state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withering_away_of_the_state
The left as it stands in its current dominant form, is a hypocrisy of incompatibles.
True liberalism as you describe it, doesn't exist in any first world country. It's been bundled into larger and larger government creep which inevitably tramples on individual rights.
A tip: These are not chips.
Owning a laptop is perhaps a very tiny investment in capital, arguably, but it certainly won't provide enough passive income to replace your job.
If you own the means of production and receive the full fruits of your labour, you are part of the bourgeoisie.
Self employed programmers are bourgeoisie, employed ones are not. And of those that are part of the bourgeoisie, there are levels and not all of them are bad (even in the scope of socialist theory).
- The petite bourgeoisie are your small self employed shopkeepers, artisans, and tradesmen. These are the people who live by their own means and without exploiting anyone else's labour. Rising the proletariat to this level is the entire point of socialism.
- The moyenne bourgeoisie maintain largely the same lifestyle as the petite bourgeoisie but with strong financial establishment. They are effectively the upper end of the petite bourgeoisie and whether they are considered part of the problem or part of the end goal depends almost entirely on whether they are supported solely by their own labour or if they are unduly exploiting the labour of others. This class may lend money in some capacity however normally if they are doing so, they are doing it collectively.
- The grand bourgeoisie are largely where the problems with the bourgeoisie begin. These people have an established financial status from a few generations of wealth. This class is the one running larger businesses and their wealth is almost entirely derived from the work of others rather than their own.
- The haute bourgeoisie are the "true" bourgeoisie. You can only make it to this class through generations of wealth aggregation (unless you ride an industrial revolution) and once you are here, it is almost impossible to lose your financial status regardless of spending or financial failings. These are the eternally rich and their existence is only sustained by exploiting the labour of others.
Socialist theory considers the petite and moyenne bourgeoisie to be the "end goal" for society. They are nearly entirely sustained by their own labour and may use their excess funds to invest in the community (normally with some expectation of return but not any life sustaining amount). Marx warned that through the natural progression of capitalist society, these classes (primarily the petite but also the moyenne in some capacity) would wither while the wealth collected in the hands of the grand and haute bourgeoisie.
---
Additionally, many socialist and communist nations have strict gun control not because they are socialist or communist, but because they are authoritarian. Gun control is a sign of authoritarianism more than anything else and any nation that falls towards it is going to see the population disarmed.
How can you seriously believe that these corporations (who are not subject to the first amendment, and cannot be challenged in court) won't extend and abuse this technology to tackle "domestic extremism" but broadly covering political views?
It's laughable that a man who can call a press conference at a moment's notice and get news coverage for anything he says can be "silenced" because private companies no longer choose to promote his garbage.
Even Fox has stopped running his events: https://deadline.com/2021/06/donald-trump-rally-networks-ski...
The largest pro-Trump network has seen major declines in ratings: https://www.thewrap.com/newsmax-fox-news-six-months-ratings/
Free speech didn't seem so important recently when the SJW crowd started mandating to censor certain words because they're offensive.
That was true of private spaces long before HN existed. If you're a jerk at a party, you might get thrown out. I'm sure that's been true as long as there have been parties.
The only thing "the SJW crowd" has changed is which words are now seen as offensive.
Well, that, and also bullying thousands of well-meaning projects into doing silly renamings they didn't want or need to spend energy on. Introducing thousands of silly little bugs and problems downstream, wasting thousands of productive hours.
[1] e.g.: https://www.wired.com/2017/06/diversity-open-source-even-wor...
It’s not like they have a curated App Store for apps they like; there’s literally no other way to add software to the device.
Speech not happening because Apple didn't go out of it's way for it to create a route for it to happen without Apple being involved, isn't really that shocking or similar to Apple scanning private files. (Apple being allowed to prevent you from installing what you want on your phone is shocking from an anti-trust perspective, but not from a speech perspective).
If you want some concrete examples:
- Trump's attempted coup, the range of support it received, the lack of condemnation it received.
- Law's allowing things like running over protestors
- Law's with the transparent goal of suppressing voters
- Widespread support (not unjustified IMO) for stacking the supreme court
- Police refusing to enforce certain laws as a political stance (not because they legitimately think they're unlawful, just that they don't like them)
- (Justified) lack of trust in the police quickly trending higher
- (Justified?) lack of trust in the military to responsibly use tools you give it, and support for a functional military
- (Justified?) lack of faith in the border guards and the ability to pass reasonable immigration laws, to the point where many people are instead advocating for just not controlling the southern border.
Generally these (and more) all speak towards the institutions that make the US a functional country failing. The institutions that make the rules for the country are losing credibility, the forces that enforce the rules are losing credibility. Neither of those are things that a country can survive forever.
The support for packing the supreme court is mostly at the fringes of the party, and there’s always been some support.
There are almost no laws with any kind of support that have transparent goals of suppressing voters. Election security laws are clearly necessary after the doubt the democrats had it was secure in 2016, and the doubts the republicans had in 2020.
Laws absolving drivers of hitting protesters don’t exist. Laws absolving drivers of driving through violent rioters do, and such laws are necessary. I saw a a riot with my own eyes where a half dozen cars were flipped and destroyed, and anyone trying to drive through the intersection had people jumping on their car and smashing the windows. These laws are good.
>That’s very different from authorities taking a sneak peek into my stuff.
To be very blunt:
- The opt out of this is to not use iCloud Photos.
- If you _currently_ use iCloud Photos, your photos are _already_ hash compared.
- Thus the existing opt out is to... not use iCloud Photos.
The exact same outcome can happen regardless of whether it's done on or off device. iCloud has _always_ been a known vector for authorities to peek.
>I’m big Apple fanboy, but I’m not going to carry a snitch in my pocket.
If you use iCloud, you arguably already do.
Today it's only geared toward iCloud and CSAM. How many lines of codes do you think it will take before it scans all your local pictures?
How hard do you think it will be for an authoritarian regime like China, that Apple bends over backwards to please, to start including other hashes that are not CSAM?
iCloud is opt-out. They can scan server-side like everyone does. Your device is your device, and it now contains, deeply embedded into it, the ability to perform actions that are not under your control and can silently report you directly to the authorities.
If you don't see a deep change there, I don't know what to say.
I live in a country that is getting more authoritarian by the day, where people are sent to prison (some for life) for criticizing the government, sometime just for chanting or printing a slogan.
This is the kind of crap that makes me extremely angry at Apple. Under the guise of something no-one can genuinely be against (think of the children!), they have now included a pretty generic snitch into your phone and made everyone accept it.
- You are running a closed source proprietary OS that you cannot verify is not already doing anything.
- This could theoretically already be weaponized (with the existing server-side implementation) by getting someone to download a file to a folder that iCloud automatically syncs from.
>iCloud is opt-out.
Yes, and that's how you opt out of this scanning. It's the same opt-out as before.
>Under the guise of something no-one can genuinely be against (think of the children!) they have now included a pretty generic snitch into your phone and made everyone accept it.
I dunno what to tell you. I think the system as designed is actually pretty smart[1] and more transparent than before.
If you used iCloud before, and you're putting photos up that'd be caught in a hash comparison, you've already got a snitch. Same with any other cloud storage, short of hosting your own.
[1] I reserve the right for actual bona-fide cryptographers to dissect it and set the record straight, mind you.
We actually had the anti terror department arrest a popular, left-leaning YouTube influencer for harassment while physically assaulting his mum (all on video).
That's something that is literally unprecedented in Hong Kong just 3 years ago.
There are without doubt enough privacy bogeymen to go around, trying to derail a valid argument over its use of the Chinese as the placeholder bogeyman detracts from the discussion pointlessly.
We're talking about China taking advantage of this integrated technology to increase control over its population through backdoors like these.
China already imposes that all data from Chinese users be located in China and readily accessible and mined by the authorities[1].
Apple is willing to bow to these regimes because it has substantial supply-chain interests there and it sells hundred of millions of devices. A boon to both Apple and the local government.
[1]:https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-ce...
But still: Secondary. The main effect of even mentioning it is to deflect attention away from Apple.
And is it really unfathomable that the US government could use this sort of thing for evil? I mean, wind back the clock to something like the Red Scare. If they had iPhones back then, they totally would have pressured Apple to add hashes for communist imagery, and use that to persecute people (or worse).
(Before anyone brings this up: I do categorically reject the notion of "that was in the past; that couldn't happen today". If you truly believe that, I have a bridge you might be interested in purchasing...)
Apple has announced they'll be doing this check?
What exactly do you think is the same as before?
>The exact same outcome can happen regardless of whether it's done on or off device. iCloud has _always_ been a known vector for authorities to peek.
That's neither here, nor there. It's another thing to peak selectively with a warrant of sorts, than to (a) peak automatically in everybody, (b) with a false-positive-prone technique, especially since the mere accusation on a false match can be disastrous for a person, even if they eventually are proven innocent...
>That's neither here, nor there. It's another thing to peak selectively with a warrant of sorts, than to (a) peak automatically in everybody, (b) with a false-positive-prone technique, especially since the mere accusation on a false match can be disastrous for a person, even if they eventually are proven innocent...
I do not believe that iCloud CSAM server side matching ever required a warrant, and I'm not sure where you've gotten this idea. It quite literally is (a) peak automatically in everybody.
Regarding (b), with this way - thanks to them publishing details on it - there's more transparency than if it was done server side.
>especially since the mere accusation on a false match can be disastrous for a person
As noted elsewhere in this very thread, this can happen whether client or server side. It's not unique in any way, shape or form to what Apple is doing here.
The same checking when you synced things to iCloud. As has been repeated over and over again, this check happens for iCloud Photos. It's not running arbitrarily.
Your photos were compared before and they're being compared now... if you're using iCloud Photos.
Who said it's running "arbitrarily"? Who said it's not about iCloud Photos?
>Your photos were compared before and they're being compared now... if you're using iCloud Photos.
They weren't always compared, they started being compared a few years ago, and they moved to comparing them with a new scheme now.
Both are bad, and not the responsibility of a company selling phones - and also a bad precedent (now it's "think of the children", tomorrow "think of the country", then "think of those with wrong ideas", then "think how much money insurance companies can save" and what have you).
As for your suggestions to just "stop using iCloud Photos", how about we get to enjoy the features we bought our devices for, without stuff we didn't ask for and don't want?
Apple is not just a hardware company and there is no obligation for them to host offending contents on their servers - just as Dropbox, Google, and so on would maintain with theirs.
>As for your suggestions to just "stop using iCloud Photos", how about we get to enjoy the features we bought our devices for, without stuff we didn't ask for and don't want?
It's odd to say that a business shouldn't be allowed to police what's on their platform, given we're on a forum explicitly enabling entrepreneurs.
It's odd to say that a business should be allowed to police private user content, given we're on a forum with the name "Hacker" on it, built by ex-hackers, and with part of its member's interests heritage not in and "enabling enterpreneurs" but in hacking (in the MIT sense of yore).
What if the post office announced they were installing a man with a scanning machine in your home who would scan your letters before they left your house?
It's the same outcome. The same process. Just inside your house instead of out in the mail system. They're exactly the same, except somehow it's not.
If that scanning machine didn't reveal the contents of my mail, and then ensured that it wasn't able to be given out in-transit? Yeah, I'd potentially be fine with it - but I'll leave this answer as a hypothetical since it's all theory anyway.
The point here is that you're choosing to use the mail system and you're thus choosing to play by those rules. Given that these checks happen for iCloud you're effectively making the same agreement.
and deciding who gets reported to police based on their cultural views on nudity
And on a second note I think people are allowed to be freshly concerned at the idea of Apple scanning photo libraries given a government-provided hash list, even if it was already happening before now.
I'm just very tired of people (not necessarily you) spouting off as if the functionality is new. It dilutes an otherwise important conversation. So many of the threads on this site are just people privacy LARPing.
Even if the outcome is theoretically the same, the means are different and it feels different.
That is a totally bogus comparison.
The post office 100% does NOT can the content of every piece mail they handle.
Not even close to the same scenario as Apple/governments being able to continually and silently check your phone/photo library for images on their watch list.
I agree that data content scanning is more invasive than physical scanning. It was an intentionally simplistic example not meant to defend Apple.
I doubt the entire world has enough X-ray machines to scan even a vanishingly small percentage of the envelopes the postal service delivers every day.
If someone discovers a way to reliably generate adversarial images they can send such images to someone else to iSWAT them.
You could literally piggyback on the directories that Macs use to sync to iCloud Drive, get an image in there, and then it gets scanned by iCloud. This is not some new theoretical attack - and in fact, this would be the "hack" for the new one as well since it requires iCloud sync to trigger anyway.
Of course generating an adversarial image is not the final step, the hacker still need to place it in the victim's account somehow, but it's easier now because the image looks legit.
This is different. This is your own device doing that thing, out of your control. Alright sure, it's doing the same thing as the other server did and under the same circumstances* so maybe functionally nothing has changed. But the philosophical difference is quite huge between somebody else's server watching over what you upload and your own device doing it.
I'm struggling to come up with a good analogy. The closest I can really think of is the difference between a reasonably trusted work friend and your own family member reporting you to the authorities for suspicious behavior in your workplace and home respectively. The end result is the same, but I suspect few people would feel the same about those situations.
* There is no inherent limitation for your own device to only be able to check photos you upload to iCloud. There is however such a limitation for the iCloud servers. A very reasonably and potentially functional difference is the ability for this surveillance to be easily expanded beyond iCloud uploads in the future.
Now what's going to happen instead is the computer will report me to its real masters: corporations, governments. How is this acceptable in any way?
Far more likely Apple takes a bunch of hashes from a third party in the law enforcement side of things (ie cops) and trust that the third party is definitely giving them hashes to protect against the Very Bad Thing that Apple's customers are worried about.
Whereupon what you're actually trusting isn't Tim Cook, it's a cop. I'm told there are good cops. Maybe all this is done exclusively by good cops. For now.
Now, I don't know about the USA, but around here we don't let cops just snoop about in our stuff, on the off-chance that by doing so they might find kiddie porn. So it should be striking that apparently Apple expects you to be OK with that.
It _does_ make sense client side if you view it being done server side as a blocker for E2EE on iCloud. There is absolutely no world where Apple could implement that without keeping the ability to say "yes, we're blocking child porn".
Wasn’t yesterday’s version of this sorry about how Apple is implementing this as a client side service on iPhones?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068741
I don’t know if the implication there is “don’t use the stock Apple camera app and photo albums”, or “don’t store any images on yours Phone any more” if they are scanning files from other apps for perceptual hash matches as well…
Apple's explanation:
<quote> Before an image is stored in iCloud Photos, an on-device matching process is performed for that image against the known CSAM hashes. This matching process is powered by a cryptographic technology called private set intersection, which determines if there is a match without revealing the result. The device creates a cryptographic safety voucher that encodes the match result along with additional encrypted data about the image. This voucher is uploaded to iCloud Photos along with the image.
Using another technology called threshold secret sharing, the system ensures the contents of the safety vouchers cannot be interpreted by Apple unless the iCloud Photos account crosses a threshold of known CSAM content. The threshold is set to provide an extremely high level of accuracy and ensures less than a one in one trillion chance per year of incorrectly flagging a given account. </quote>
With the proviso that you have to trust the code they push onto your device actually does what they claim in the paper.
But it does, on the face of it, prevent the "cops adding the latest cop on black person murder viral image to the CSAM content hashes and easily seeing who has it on their device and when it showed up there" concern. They are at least going to need to add enough _other_ hashes to the list to get everybody with their target image over the threshold, then get it past whatever Apple has in place for their manual review and "visual derivatives". And surely that sort of abuse of the system would set off alarms instantly at Apple when a big list of hashes of images that are common enough to all push BLM activists and sympathisers over the CASM count threshold.
(I also wonder what those "visual derivatives" they get are, and how well they are going to work to filter out false positives, and how Apple are going to take care of whoever ends up doing that review work. While I have a fairly positive impression of the care and effort Apple put into ensuring my privacy, I have a somewhat less positive impression of how they treat outsourced or low-skill workers. I won't be _too_ surprised to hear the same sort of horror stories about both the work, and the management overseeing the workers that do this sort of job at Facebook... I can't imagine a worse job description than "review images to check if they are real child sexual abuse images", and doing that for minimum wage and no benefits with supervisors threatening to fire you if you take toilet breaks or miss your 150 images an hour targets - is sadly something I totally expect to read about in a year or two's time.)
I wonder how this will hold up against 5th ammendment (in the US) covering self-incrimination?
Okay, but the users of said 3rd party are doing it under the assumption that it is encrypted on the 3rd party's system in a way that they cannot gain access to it. The unencrypted data is not what the user is giving to iCloud. So technically, the data this scan is providing to the authorities is not the same data that the user is giving to the 3rd parties.
Definitely some wiggle room on both sides for some well versed lawyers to chew up some billing hours.
I have a large user base on iOS. Considering a blackout protest.
Child pornography, Terrorism? Solve it the old way.
I don’t know why citizens are obligated to make their jobs easier.
We survived the times when phone calls were not moderated, we survived the times when signal intelligence was not a thing.
Public and political pressure is definitely an issue - but it's still soft-pressure so applying more pressure in the other direction will be compelling to Apple.
The are speculations about this being Apple’s solution to government demands so that they can continue migrating to E2E.
They are trying a solution where the device reports you to the authorities so that Apple gets out of the business of knowing your data.
In fairness, in the "old way" it was impossible for two random people to communicate in real-time between continents without the ability of authorities to observe/break it.
Privacy and security is quite important, but let's not lose track of the fact that there are many tools authorities have lost in the past few decades. In WWII major powers weren't able to have the same security of military communications as an idiot can today. And that's relative to codebreaking technology.
If I had a good solution, I'd tell you.
Now your device is actually watching you and reporting you. Today only for child porn but there’s no technical reason of it not being extended to anything.
This is also true, to some degree. I believe all calls to the USSR were monitored, for instance. But the dragnet is thrown much further these days.
But in the end of the day the only robust way to communicate privately is good old Linux with good old mutt with good old PGP
as this article points out, the positive matches will still need an observe to confirm what it is and is not.
lastly, the very reason you have this device exposes you to the reality of either accepting a government that regulates these corporate overreaches or accepting private ownership thats profit motive is deeply personal.
you basically have to reverse society or learn to be a hermit, or more realistically, buy into a improved democratic construct that opts into transparent regulation.
but it sounds more like you want to live in a split brained world where your paranoia and antigovernment stance invites dark corporste policies to sell you out anyway
That’s very different from authorities taking a sneak peek into my stuff.
That’s like the theological concept of always being watched.
It starts with child pornography but the technology is indifferent towards it, it can be anything.
It’s always about the children because we all want to save the children. Soon they will start asking you start saving your country. Depending on your location they will start checking against sins against religion, race, family values, political activities.
I bet you, after the next election in the US your device will be reporting you for spreading far right or deep state lies, depending on who wins.
I’m big Apple fanboy, but I’m not going to carry a snitch in my pocket. That’s “U2 Album in everyone’s iTunes library” blunder level creepy with the only difference that it’s actually truly creepy.
In my case, my iPhone is going to be snitching me to Boris and Erdogan, in your case it could be Macron, Bolsonaro, Biden, Trump etc.
That’s no go for me, you can decide for yourself.