Saying goodbye to an old friend

Re:Saying goodbye to an old friend by bdowling on Wednesday December 22, 2021 @11:41PM (#29658721)

It's about Apple's plan to add content-scanning to phones and reporting to the government if content matches images in the database. The concern is that it will be used by governments to identify political enemies who share memes, which is exactly the point. Apple's excuse to the world is that they want to protect children by identifying people who receive known CSAM and reporting them. There's no money in that, however, so the most obvious explanation is that Apple wants to keep operating in various countries whose governments want the feature.

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Re:Saying goodbye to an old friend by quitit on Thursday December 23, 2021 @06:13AM (#29660729)

Quick question: How is Apple reporting you to the government, and Google not? When they both report to the exact same entity? (The NCMEC.)

Also how do you rationalise Apple bad, everyone else Good. If Apple are actually the only company to have public consultation about the new feature - while the others implemented theirs silently and have been running for years?

One last one: Why do you think political memes uploaded to an iCloud Photo Library are the target of governments, if such memes are trivially detected when posted online? Why do you think Apple would comply here if Google(et.al.) don't? If referencing China, are you not aware who runs their social media? Also why do you think that new memes can't be created on the fly - ones that wouldn't match a set of hashes used by nefarious governments.

Side note: Are you aware Google uses hashes to detect CSAM imagery too? Better still, are you aware Google use AI to guess at what might be a CSAM image and report those as well?

https://support.google.com/transparencyreport/answer/1033093... https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni...

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Re:Saying goodbye to an old friend by Tom4hawk on Thursday December 23, 2021 @06:53AM (#29660971)

If I put something not encrypted on internet I expect it to be scanned/leaked etc. I don't want my device (with my battery...) to spy on me.

Signed ~(Mostly)Happy google-less LineageOS user

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Re:Saying goodbye to an old friend by runjake on Thursday December 23, 2021 @03:09PM (#29665913)

Right, but the Apple paper I read [1] said that if you did not have iCloud Photos (iow, "put it on the Internet") turned on, CSAM scanning would not occur.

So, how is it different, again?

1. I can't link the paper, because apparently, Apple took it offline. But it was widely-reported on.

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Re:Saying goodbye to an old friend by quitit on Thursday December 23, 2021 @06:57AM (#29660988)

Generating a encrypted voucher based on a known CSAM image is not spying anymore than the device cataloguing images by descriptions.

For a technical forum the lack of willingness of individuals to read into the system is perplexing. So far most of the arguments I've read are entirely based on creating a strawman then beating that to death.

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Re:Saying goodbye to an old friend by BostonEnginerd on Thursday December 23, 2021 @07:10AM (#29661069)

Is there anything which prevents non-CSAM images from being added into this catalogue? As I understand it, the only thing stopping that is a promise from Apple - which can be steamrolled by a government request.

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Re:Saying goodbye to an old friend by ziddoap on Thursday December 23, 2021 @09:48AM (#29662316)

>For a technical forum the lack of willingness of individuals to read into the system is perplexing.

Admittedly, I may have missed it... But can you point out to me where this system cannot be expanded to non-CSAM material?

As a totally wild example, is this technology restricted, in some technical manner, from scanning for images which display a certain political leader as Winnie the Pooh?

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Re:Saying goodbye to an old friend by MrQuincle on Thursday December 23, 2021 @10:21AM (#29662638)

What can happen:

+ Approximate matching. They might want to have images almost similar also to be flagged. + Scope creep. Particular images of people who are wanted or areas where they might live or shots of joints etc. + Mistakes. Accidentally flagging honest citizens and the bureaucracy that will follow. "Innocent until proven guilty..." That's not preemptively scanning someone's personal devices.

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Re:Saying goodbye to an old friend by dncornholio on Thursday December 23, 2021 @06:33AM (#29660856)

Does Google only scan images you send them or does it also scan every image you take, store or receive on your phone?

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Re:Saying goodbye to an old friend by quitit on Thursday December 23, 2021 @06:54AM (#29660974)

Are you using Google's cloud services? Then all of the above with exception to "receive" - just like Apple's messages, merely receiving a message doesn't add it to your library (even if it's surfaced there for convenience.)

If using Whatsapp - turn off autosave on images.

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Re:Saying goodbye to an old friend by 1vuio0pswjnm7 on Thursday December 23, 2021 @02:20AM (#29659494)

https://ar.al/2020/03/25/apple-just-killed-offline-web-apps-...

He is interested in the protection of user privacy. Author of "Better Blocker", an ad bocker for iOS/macOS.^1 Apple's decisions are making user privacy increasingly more difficult if not impossible when using an Apple computer.

1. https://web.archive.org/web/20211219053624if_/https://better...

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Re:Saying goodbye to an old friend by acomjean on Wednesday December 22, 2021 @11:38PM (#29658704)

Better Blocker was a privacy plugin for apple browsers.

https://better.fyi/

It is no longer a thing as of Dec 15, 2021

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Re:Saying goodbye to an old friend by mthld on Thursday December 23, 2021 @02:50AM (#29659620)

To be honest it wasn’t a thing anymore since some years already. I was a client of them and I stopped using Better facing too many issues and no help from the maintainers…

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Re:Saying goodbye to an old friend by stjohnswarts on Thursday December 23, 2021 @02:30AM (#29659533)

Is that in retaliation for his criticism of apple?

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Re:Saying goodbye to an old friend by endymi0n on Thursday December 23, 2021 @02:53AM (#29659647)

As an industry insider, it sounds much more like ITP (by now in version 2.3) is just the far superior approach to privacy protection — and Apple killed off third party plugins as a result (and further security risk).

Can understand he's salty about it, but looks like he's trying to use that fact as well as lots of unrelated stuff as leverage to pitch his foundation.

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Re:Saying goodbye to an old friend by donohoe on Wednesday December 22, 2021 @11:27PM (#29658654)

Same. I read it and have no idea what he’s talking about.

I can to the comments hoping someone has context.

Otherwise it’s just a rant, and not a very lucid one at that.

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Re:Saying goodbye to an old friend by stjohnswarts on Thursday December 23, 2021 @02:38AM (#29659565)

It is very straightforward in that he has been using Apple for a while and made concessions on his idea of software freedom to use the "convenience of Apple products". however, with Apple's recent attempt to slip in on device scanning and reporting to police agencies and setting a precedent that this is acceptable it has pushed him over the edge. Even though apple backed off, they did just add the scan for nekkid pictures on your imessage if you're a kid and report it to your parents. He assume this is just step 0.1 of a multistep process to reinstate the scan all the things on your phone and report back to 3rd parties. He may be right, and it certainly wasn't hard to follow if you read it rather than scan it.

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Re:Saying goodbye to an old friend by WesolyKubeczek on Thursday December 23, 2021 @06:53AM (#29660970)

I've heard HN was big on this concept called "empathy".

A dude's project died of a thousand paper cuts.

The dude's observations about Apple made him notice an emergent pattern of Apple being all but openly hostile towards any independent efforts of assuring one's privacy in a way the person themselves sees fit, as opposed to privacy as Apple sees fit, and all but openly hostile toward small developers in general.

Think for a moment how lucid would you yourself be after a couple years or more of those things grating on your nerves. Read the thing again through this lens.

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Re:Saying goodbye to an old friend by vanusa on Thursday December 23, 2021 @12:26AM (#29658946)

It was a rant, sure. But I found it perfectly straightforward, and it was pretty clear at the very top what the main concern was, actually.

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Re:Saying goodbye to an old friend by annadane on Thursday December 23, 2021 @03:14AM (#29659757)

For every legitimate article that gets posted on HN you can guarantee someone comes along and says "I don't understand what this is all about". Come on, read.

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Re:Saying goodbye to an old friend by h0h0h0h0111 on Thursday December 23, 2021 @09:32AM (#29662147)

I clicked through to the author's article on "small web" and also couldn't understand particularly what it was: "The Small Web, quite simply, is the polar opposite of the Big Web." ?!?!?

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