Today it's child pornography. What about tomorrow? Let me make a case. First, let me make something clear at the outset. I am 100 percent against child pornography. For all I care, castrate all the adults involved, when you catch them.

Now, with that made clear, let's take a look at how bad, comparatively, pornographic photos of underage individuals on a person's phone is—and my apologies to those who cannot stomach the following discussion.

The photos have already been taken. The harm here is indirect. The harm is that possession of photos means that you have become part of the market for child pornography, and provide incentive for the production of future materials. The direct harm occurs when the materials are being produced, and the direct harm is categorically worse than dissemination and possession of the photos.

Compare that to something like terrorism. Recruiting terrorists and planning terrorist activities is, I would argue, a greater and more direct harm than mere possession of child pornography. (Leave aside the production.) So, how can someone accept that this is okay for child pornography and not terrorism? And once we've accepted it's okay for terrorism, who is the "potential" terrorist? What is terrorist contraband?

And now that we've accepted sniffing for terrorists, what's next? Election "manipulation" that "threatens" our democracy? Public health "misinformation"?

This is the Panopticon.

Our latest Antipope.org post (discussed here yesterday), suggested we extend the child-pornography treatment to possession of unauthorized cryptocurrency.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28145918

https://www2.palomar.edu/anthro/animal/animal_3.htm

How could anybody be against criminalizing it!

Interesting. I’m not familiar with a criminal justice system with a false positive rate lower than NCMEC’s perceptual hashes.

I doubt it would suffice. Chemical castration, perhaps.

Is this a viable option when governments are pushing them to do something? To give governments access, etc?

Ie why should Apple fight governments here. They seem to have next to no incentive to do that, in the capitalist sense. Our society doesn't typically financially support moral stances, so is fighting the government, which "doing nothing" surely is, a realistic stance? It seems insanely hopeful to me.

Implement encryption and say the same to the FBI the last time they wanted apple to unlock something: Sorry, we can't.

It's not like encrypted cloud storage without holding the keys or client-side scanning would be new ground. Providers for that already exist and have existed for years.

I don't really agree with this system either but I, at least, appreciate the sentiment that they're trying to solve this problem while also providing E2E encryption (assuming that the internal info is correct and the end goal is full E2E encryption).

Or activists, journalists, doctors, lawyers, victims of police overreach, etc. If this is a question of framing then shouldn't apple be more than qualified to handle it?

Honest question, were are you going that has less privacy issues than this?

I _want_ to support some Linux-only phone, completely off of Google/etc. However, i suspect that will be too poor of a UX, lacking basic functionality that i deem essential. I may still buy them to support them, but i think i'm going to have to buy a Android-based phone and then heavily de-google it. I don't like this option because it still supports the Google ecosystem, but it may be a necessary evil while the Linux-phone market hopefully grows, and while i continue to buy the Linux-phone market to "do my part".

https://gitlab.com/CalyxOS

I've flashed mine 2 weeks ago and I am very pleased. Without the Google Services Framework you are restricted to the F-Droid store though (not a problem for me personally). And there are several Apps that won't work even if you install the GSF and the Aurora-Store: Banking-Apps, Online-Check-In for Flights, etc. -- again not a problem for me personally, I fly maybe once every 5 years and use Online-Banking from my browser...

HN is a weird crowd, so this obviously isn't a solution for +99% of people. But I'm choosing to opt out entirely. Living in the 90s is annoying when coordinating with unreliable people, but this isn't some kind of impossible feat. I don't even think about it anymore, it's a non-issue. Just get on with it.

They are sitting on ~$200B in cash. If they want to continue to be viewed as protecting users data and privacy, that is exactly what they should do. Spend some of that money in court, defending the privacy of their users. But they won't, and they will lose the thing that differentiates them for some subset of their users.

Yes, it's hard, cumbersome, and not "there yet" for a long time to come on a lot of fronts, but it's the only way out of the corporate multiverses.

Years ago it was something that only nerds and techy people would use and now one can easily install it for any family member and never look back.

How about not moving forward with this system?

Corporations have to obey the law, but they don't need to be zealous and build spying infrastructure when they aren't required to.

(and all of that would be before I even consider false positive rates)

But even if that was the case, the tool will now exists for any dictatorial government to spy on "troublemakers". The Chinese government, which has already gotten full compliance from Apple, would be foolish not to use it.