I'm not a fan of Louis Rossmann and his constant Apple bashing at all. I've spoken out against him in the past, but have to give credit where credit is due. Spot on, bravo!
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Apple's iPhone scanning scandal and the Mac
- Thread starter Blue Quark
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Yep. You nailed it. Your friend and helper — your phone — has now been turned into a surveillance device to use against you. On-device scanning feels like betrayal by a friend (as Judas did).
People need to realize that folks like RR and everyone else invested in the Apple eco-system of commentary cannot allow Apple to fail, because it is their money-maker. They have a conflict of interest. It's always about the money. It's like the network sports commentators struggling to talk around the bottom falling out of viewership and attendance due to "wokeness." Their livelihoods as commentators DEPEND on those sports being viable, so they will happy talk all around the real issue. Same with mainly Apple commentators. It will be interesting to see what Brownlee says. He is not as completely invested in Apple, but he may go the same route.
From this standpoint, I really appreciated Ben Thompson's piece.
Obviously he's not dependent upon Apple - at all - to your exact point.
I agree about MKBHD - he's shown a willingness to speak is mind that I find very refreshing given how most of his peers are so deep in the Apple bag they can't even see daylight anymore.
As far as I can tell it doesn’t really *look* at your photos, merely matches them to known abuse images. So unless you’re sharing known child abuse images from the web then I don’t see what the issue is? I get the larger picture- but as it stands atm it seems to be a fairly robust system. Open to abuse of course, but also liable to be blown out of proportion
To get in the details, it matches the hash of your photos with the hash of the abuse photos. And, when a threshold of matches is reached, a human manually reviews your photos to check. I'm guessing you knew all that but wanted to clarify for others.
Exactly that. So unless you’re sharing known pedo stuff you’re out of the loop. It’s definitely not the mass survey as suggested. More like finding and sharing child abuse photos will get you in trouble.
Ah so that's the part where the details matter for folks that are saying they don't like it. There's a risk of your own innocent photos accidentally matching Apple's database, and then those photos would be seen by a human.
Apple says it's one in a trillion chance of a mismatch. With 1.4 trillion photos taken in the last year, that means 1-2 people who had their private photos viewed by Apple this year. It's also possible Apple overestimated and it's more like one in a billion, in which case there would be 1,000-2,000 people who will have their private photos viewed by a stranger each year.
Those photos accidentally pulled into the system are private - intimate moments with a partner for example.
How's that sound to you?
Bitwarden offers self-hosting as well and it is free unless you want a few extra perks and then it is $12 a year. It is excellent software.I saw somethjng related to this the other day - 1Password looking into self hosted options:
1password is considering a self-hosted option to store vaults | Hacker News
news.ycombinator.com
You misunderstand. It is illegal for the Bank to inform the customer that they have reported them to the government.
this, unfortunately, isn’t new. Edward Snowden himself detailed the extent of the spying by the U.S. Gov a decade ago. We’re going on two decades worth of surveillance now.
If you sent them over a non-encrypted channel at all, then they have already been seen by another human.
Temporary fix, at best. If governments mandate backdoor access, which they are clearly intending to do, then using open source won't help. It will simply become illegal to own or use any OS or program that does not have an approved backdoor, with no doubt some very stiff penalties to encourage your cooperation on this matter.
The potential for mission creep on this is so profound, and will be so costly to undo if it happens. The thugs of this world will simply be unable to resist exploiting the extraordinary power of surveillance it offers, and good luck getting that power back off them. This stuff is an authoritarian's wet dream.
Getting difficult to see how genuine privacy anywhere can survive for much longer, if this keeps up.
That said, I am not actually particularly down on Apple about this. I mean, I don't like it one little bit, it scares me more than almost anything else. But this problem basically has nothing to do with Apple. They didn't create it, they are just responding to it emerging in a certain legal-political environment. We can disagree about their response to it. But if Apple didn't exist, the exact same problem would still be here to deal with.
I certainly think Apple, and any other IT based company, have the right to ensure their servers are free of criminal activity. Question is how?
So, save your energies for the real fight, folks, which is with governments, not Apple or the IT industry.
To those being so dismissive of these concerns, I say you clearly have yet to learn the price of your glibness.
At which point I’d like to point out that renting a van and buying a couple of drums of diesel and fertilizer would be cheaper than buying a new device.
The point you're missing is Apple has to have access to your phone to be able to do stuff on your phone. Also, if iCloud accounts are supposed to be encrypted and keep people's stuff secure, this also means they have built a back-door into their encryption system.
Then there's going to be a heck of a lot of arrests made out there, I guess, since I don't see the Linux community laying down and giving up. Just sayin'.
No disrespect at all to the Linux and open source communities, I love 'em. But we shall see how brave they are when a few hardcore examples have been made of them by the government in the courts.
The Linux distributions will be fine. It’s those businesses providing cloud storage services that uses Linux that will be affected, like how Apple has been affected. They will have to ensure that they are not storing materials deemed unlawful by local laws.
The Clipper Chip idea was defeated in the days of GHW Bush. There's no way the present topic won't provoke an uproar and hopefully end the careers of politicians who were in favor of it.
Better read up on how a forum works. Yeah, I know, that damn reading again.
Government/courts have no jurisdiction over Linux. Worst case, US mirrors will be shut down or ordered to remove it and it will be banned that way. And then what? It's free, download it from Canda, Australia or really any other free country on this planet (yes I did that intentionally
).
Would it be difficult to create innocent images with the same hash?
That's where people should look when this ever takes off. Render their methods ineffective.
That's where people should look when this ever takes off. Render their methods ineffective.
Define difficult. It's possible. Lots of papers available on that topic, run a search on Google Scholar for "adversarial attacks" or "adversarial examples" and include "hash".
So, y'all know that the term "slippery slope" is literally used to describe a logical fallacy right.