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I've been maintaining a spare phone running lineage os exactly in case something like this happened - I love the apple watch and apple ecosystem, but this is su

by trangus_1985 5y ago

I've been maintaining a spare phone running lineage os exactly in case something like this happened - I love the apple watch and apple ecosystem, but this is such a flagrant abuse of their position as Maintainers Of The Device that I have no choice but to switch. Fortunately, my email is on a paid provider (fastmail), and my photos are on a NAS, I've worked hard to get all of my friends on Signal. While I still use google maps, I've been trialing out OSM alternatives for a minute. The things they've described are in general, reasonable and probably good in the moral sense. However, I'm not sure that I support what they are implementing for child accounts (as a queer kid, I was terrified of my parents finding out). On the surface, it seems good - but I am concerned about other snooping features that this portents. However, with icloud photos csam, it is also a horrifying precedent that the device I put my life into is scanning my photos and reporting on bad behavior (even if the initial dataset is the most reprehensible behavior). I'm saddened by Apple's decision, and I hope they recant, because it's the only way I will continue to use their platform.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
>While I still use google maps 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.
- trangus_1985 5y ago
  That's not really the issue. The issue is that for google maps to work properly, it requires that the Play services are installed. Play services are a massive semi-monolithic blob that requires tight integration with Google's backend, and deep, system-level permissions to operate correctly. I'm not worried about my search history.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
    Ahhh, gotcha. Did not realize that. Makes sense.
  - boring_twenties 5y ago
    Last I checked (about a year ago), the Google Maps app did work with microG (a FOSS reimplementation of Google Play Services).
    - trangus_1985 5y ago
      I use maps on my phone on a regular basis - I would vastly prefer to have something less featured and stable versus hacking the crap out of my phone. But that's good to know.
      - andrepd 5y ago
        OsmAnd is an absolutely brilliant map app for android. Very fully featured but also pleasant to use (though I dislike some of the defaults).
      - d110af5ccf 5y ago
        Have you tried either of these? https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.osmand.plus/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.osmand.plus/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/app.organicmaps/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/app.organicmaps/
  - brundolf 5y ago
    One workaround is to use the mobile web app, which is surprisingly pretty decent for a web app. And because it's a web app, you can even disable things like sharing your location if you want to
  - techrat 5y ago
    People need to remember that most of Android got moved into Play Services. It was the only way to keep a system relatively up to date when the OEMs won't update the OS itself. Yeah, it's a dependency... as much as the Google Maps APK needing to run on Android itself.
  - yosito 5y ago
    There is a Google Maps website that works on mobile. No need for the app.
  - commoner 5y ago
    I've just tested Google Maps on an Android device without Google Play Services or microG. The app works fine, although every time you cold-start it, the app shows an alert (which can be dismissed but not disabled) and a notification (which can be specifically disabled) that Google Play Services is unavailable. On an Android device with microG, Google Maps works without showing the alert or the notification about Google Play Services.
- opan 5y ago
  In addition to F-Droid, you can get Aurora Store (which is on F-Droid) which lets you use an anonymous login to get at the Play Store. I use it for a couple free software apps that aren't on F-Droid for some reason.
  - C19is20 5y ago
    What are the apps?
    - opan 5y ago
      Both are for marking anime. One for MAL[0], one for Kitsu[1]. [0] https://github.com/Drutol/MALClient https://github.com/Drutol/MALClient [1] https://github.com/hummingbird-me/kitsu-mobile https://github.com/hummingbird-me/kitsu-mobile
  - sunshineforever 5y ago
    I also recommend Aurora Store as a complete replacement for the Play store. The one thing is that I've never tried using apps that I paid for on it but it works very well for any free apps. There is an option to use a Google account with Aurora but I've only ever used the anonymous account. 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.
_red 5y ago
Yes, my history was Linux 95-04, Mac 04-15, and now back to Linux from 2015 onwards. 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.
- ursugardaddy 5y ago
  you make that sound like a bad thing, I'd love to live in a world without child abuse spreading rampant on the internet and not having to suffer though what passes for political speech (memes) these days. maybe once we detect and stop stuff like this from happening before it gets very bad, we can grow as a society and adjust our forms of punishment accordingly too
  - withinboredom 5y ago
    I don’t think anyone is arguing that making it harder to abuse children is a bad thing. It’s what is required to do so that is the bad thing. It’d be like if someone installed microphones all over every house to report on when you admit that you’re guilty to bullying. No one wants bullying, but I doubt you want a microphone recording everything and looking for certain trigger words. Unless you have an Alexa or something, then I guess you probably wouldn’t mind that example.
    - jcrites 5y ago
      Alexa and iPhones with Siri enabled, and Android phones, are all continuously listening with their microphones for their wake word, unless you've specifically turned the feature off. 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.
rasengan 5y ago
Your original post said postmarketOS. That is weird that you changed it to lineage (and misspelled that).
- trangus_1985 5y ago
  Yeah, sorry, I mixed them up in my head. I'm currently running Lineage on a PH-1, not Postmarket. I would not consider what I have set up to be "production ready", but I'm going to spend some time this weekend looking into what modern hardware can run Lineage or other open mobile OSes
  - hsousa 5y ago
    Lineage OS is 100% production ready, it's been my daily driver for almost 2 years and I've been Google and apple - free since.
    - trangus_1985 5y ago
      Sorry, wasn't ripping on Lineage. It's more the entire ecosystem. I mentioned in prior comments, but I think that in a few years we'll have a practical, open source, third party in the mobile phone os wars - one that has reasonable app coverage. I don't care if I use google or apple services, btw, I just want the data flow to be on my terms.
- trangus_1985 5y ago
  Oh hey wait you're the freenode guy. While we're on the topic of hostile actions by a platform provider...
  - rasengan 5y ago
    Doesn’t change that you’re a liar.
  - noasaservice 5y ago
    He's uh, a prince, or something. (Probably got the crown out of a cereal box.) But from the looks of his numbers ( https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/IRC_top_10_networks_2021.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/IRC_top_... ) he's doing a real bang-up job!
Saris 5y ago
I think no matter what devices you use, you've nailed down the most important part of things which is using apps and services that are flexible, and can be easily used on another platform.
- trangus_1985 5y ago
  I knew that eventually it'd probably matter what devices I used, I just didn't expect it to be so soon. But yeah, I could reasonably use an iphone without impact for the foreseeable future with some small changes.
threatofrain 5y ago
What is your home NAS setup like?
- trangus_1985 5y ago
  Freenas, self-signed tightly-scoped CA installed on all of my devices. 1TBx4 in a small case shoved under the stairs. tbh, i would vastly prefer to use a cloud based service with local encryption - I'm not super paranoid, just overly principled
  - voltaireodactyl 5y ago
    If you haven’t already heard of it, cryptomator might be just what you’re after.
  - quest88 5y ago
    What do you use to sync phone photos to your NAS? I like Google Photos' smartness, but I also want my photos on my Synology NAS.
    - antgiant 5y ago
      I personally am a fan of Mylio for that. https://mylio.com/ https://mylio.com/
    - neolog 5y ago
      Syncthing
  - _arvin 5y ago
    Take a look at https://internxt.com https://internxt.com. Been using them for a couple weeks and am incredibly impressed. Great team, great product, just great everything. It was exactly what I was looking for
lcfcjs 5y ago
Found the paedo.
Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
Signal is still a centralised data silo where by default you trust CA to verify your contacts identify.
- trangus_1985 5y ago
  Yeah, but it's also useful for getting my friends on board. I think it's likely that I eventually start hosting matrix or some alternative, but my goal is to be practical here, yet still have a privacy protecting posture.
  - Sunspark 5y ago
    Your friends aren't going to want to install an app to have it connect to trangus_1985's server. Be happy just getting them on Signal.
    - trangus_1985 5y ago
      My friends are significantly more technical (and paranoid) than the average user. We've already discussed it. 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.
      - Sunspark 5y ago
        Well said, as I like to point out sometimes, Signal is a privacy app not an anonymity app.
  - playguardin 5y ago
    What is matrix?
- chimeracoder 5y ago
  > Signal is still a centralised data silo where by default you trust CA to verify your contacts identify. 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.
LazyR0B0T 5y ago
Organic Maps on Fdroid is a really clean osm based map.
- JackGreyhat 5y ago
  Nearly the same as MagicEarth...I use it all the time.
- crocodiletears 5y ago
  Does it let you select from multiple routes? I've been using Pocketmaps, but it only gives you a single option for routing, which can lead to issues in certain contexts
- Sunspark 5y ago
  I'm impressed, it actually has smooth scrolling unlike OsmAnd which is very slow loading tiles in. 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.
- m-p-3 5y ago
  And I also invite everyone to contribute to OSM through StreetComplete, it's quite intuitive and it adds something to look for when taking a walk.
alksjdalkj 5y ago
Have you found any decent google maps alternatives? I'd love to find something but nothing comes close as far as I've found. Directions that take into account traffic is the big thing that I feel like nobody (other than Apple, MS, etc.) will be able to replicate. 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.
- manuelmagic 5y ago
  I'm using since many years HERE Maps https://wego.here.com/ https://wego.here.com/
- krobbn 5y ago
  I really like Here WeGo, and it allows you to download maps for specific countries too to have available offline.
- nickexyz 5y ago
  Organic maps is pretty good: https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps
- beermonster 5y ago
  OsmAND
cle 5y ago
Unfortunately with SafetyNet, I feel like an investment into Android is also a losing proposition...I can only anticipate being slowly cut off from the Android app ecosystem as more apps onboard with attestation. 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...
- trangus_1985 5y ago
  I don't think it's implausible that I carry around a phone that has mail, contacts, calendars, photos, and private chat on it. And then, have a second, older phone that has like Instagram and mobile games. It's tragic.
  - sodality2 5y ago
    Unfortunately a big bulk of the data they profit off of is simply the ads and on-platform communication and behavior. Doesn't really matter if you use a different device if you still use the platform. Sure, it's slightly better, but it really isn't a silver bullet if you're still using it. And this is coming from someone who does this already.
    - trangus_1985 5y ago
      I don't really mind if they make a profit off of the free things I use. 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.
- techrat 5y ago
  Loosing sight of the forest for this one tree. 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.
new_realist 5y ago
The argument from reactionary HN neckbeards is basically, "can't you see that this _could_ be used for great evil?" No shit. That's obvious to just about... everyone on the planet. Many things in this world can be used for great evil: knives, gasoline, guns, TNT, cars--even most household items when used with creativity. It is quite impossible to create something which can't be abused in some form. But society still allows them, because it judges that the good outweighs the bad, and systems exist to manage the risk of evil use. In this case, I have every expectation that this scanning will be auditable, and society will eventually work out most of the imperfections in systems like these, and strike the right balance to make the world a better place.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
artimaeis 5y ago
It's not the device that's less secure or private in this context, it's the services. There's no reason you couldn't just continue using your NAS for photo backup and Signal for encrypted-communications completely unaffected by this. 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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- adriancr 5y ago
  So they should do that scanning server side at their boundary instead of pushing software to run on phones with potential to extend scope later if no push back.
  - gowld 5y ago
    They don't want to do it serve side because they don't want to see your unencrypted data!
    - adriancr 5y ago
      Well good thing they're looking at it anyway client side...
    - dustyharddrive 5y ago
      Apple already holds the key to iCloud Photos content, and regularly responds to search warrants.
- trangus_1985 5y ago
  That's not the issue. The issue is that they have shipped spyware to my device. That's a massive breach of trust. 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
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> with icloud photos csam, it is also a horrifying precedent 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.
- mojzu 5y ago
  If The Verge's article is accurate about how/when the CSAM scanning occurs then I don't have a problem with that, sounds like they're moving the scanning from server to client side, the concerns about false positives seem valid to me but I'm not sure the chance of one occurring has increased over the existing icloud scanning. Scope creep for other content scanning is definitely a possibility though so I hope people keep an eye on that 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
  - SquishyPanda23 5y ago
    > sounds like they're moving the scanning from server to client side 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.
    - 5y ago
bambax 5y ago
> probably good in the moral sense 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.
- tekknik 5y ago
  > Will they start taking pictures of your house to see if you store drugs under your couch? Or cook meth in your kitchen?? How many people have homepods? When will they start listening for illegal activity?
  - pjerem 5y ago
    No worries, it's totally local voice recognition ! We'll only send samples when you speak about herbs.
OJFord 5y ago
> While I still use google maps 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.
biztos 5y ago
I’ve been thinking about switching my main email to Fastmail from Apple, for portability in case the anti-power-user trend crosses my personal pain threshold. 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.
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  unfortunately, self hosting is a pretty clear alternative. Not much else seems to be.
- dustyharddrive 5y ago
  I think self-hosting email has too many downsides (spam filtering, for example) to be worth it; I’m more concerned about losing my messages (easily solved with POP or mbox exports while still using a cloud account) than government data sharing. Email is unencrypted in transit anyway, and it’s “industry standard” to store it in clear text at each end.
- mackrevinack 5y ago
  there's always protonmail which is supposedly e2e, so they shouldn't be able to scan your mail
- trangus_1985 5y ago
  > if your worry is governments reading your mail 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.
- neop1x 5y ago
  I have been self-hosting email for 7 years successfully. But it required a physical server in a reputable datacenter, setting up Dovecot, Exim, SpamAssasin, reverse-DNS, SPF, DKIM. It took a bit of time to gain IP reputation but then it has worked flawlessly since. Occasionally some legit mail is flagged as spam or vice versa but it is not worse than any other mail provider. So it can be done! But my first attempts to do that on a VPS failed as IP blocks of VPS providers are often hopelessly blacklisted in major email providers.
vineyardmike 5y ago
> as a queer kid, I was terrified of my parents finding out 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)
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  > 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. 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-youtube-lawsuit-censorship-877919/ https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/lgbtq-... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/14/youtube-discriminates-against-lgbt-content-by-unfairly-culling-it-suit-alleges/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/14/youtube...
  - vineyardmike 5y ago
    And it's not just YouTube. Most platforms are at least partially guilty of this. Then there is tumblr, which is all but dead - explicitly for a "think of the children" concern from apple.
playguardin 5y ago
You and your morality can suck it.
_arvin 5y ago
I'm really loving fastmail. Thanks for the heads up!
samstave 5y ago
What I am reminded of is all of the now seemingly prophetic writing and story telling in a lot of cyber-punk-dystopian anime about the future of the corporate state, and how mega corps rule EVERY THING. 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.
- m4rtink 5y ago
  Interesting! But actually this is not the singly thing with an "interesting" name in Singapore - well at least as long as you speak Czech. ;-) 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 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. ;-)
  - samstave 5y ago
    Wow. Thanks for that. 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.
gowld 5y ago
> I'm not sure that I support what they are implementing for child accounts (as a queer kid, I was terrified of my parents finding out) 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?
ekianjo 5y ago
Signal is next on the list since it's a centralized solution - you can expect they will come for it next.
- trangus_1985 5y ago
  I'm just trying to buy time until open source and secure alternatives have addressed these problems. Apple doing this has moved my timeframes up by a few years (unexpectedly).
forgingahead 5y ago
This can happen only because whenever any slippery-slope action was taken previously, there is an army of apologists and "explainers" who rush to "correct" your instinctive aversion to these changes. It's always the same - the initial comment is seemingly kind, yet with an underlying menace, and if you continue to express opposition, they change tack to being extremely aggressive and rude. 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.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  This is typical obedient behavior. Some abused spouses get through lengths to come up with excuses for their partners. Since I don't own an iOS device, I don't really care about this specific instance. 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.
GeekyBear 5y ago
> with icloud photos csam, it is also a horrifying precedent 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-led-to-a-mans-arrest-for-child-porn-was-not-a-privacy-violation/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/06/why-the-gmail-scan-that-le...
- trangus_1985 5y ago
  cloud versus local device is a massive distinction imo. or maybe im a dinosaur ;)
  - d110af5ccf 5y ago
    No, you're not a dinosaur. It is entirely reasonable for a hosting provider not to want certain content on their servers. And it is also quite reasonable to want to automate the process of scanning for it. My physical device, on the other hand, is (supposed to be) mine and mine alone.
    - GeekyBear 5y ago
      The data is only scanned when you attempt to upload it to the cloud in either case. Apple scans the data on device before it is sent. Google scans it on it's own servers after it is sent.
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taurath 5y ago
If my parents had the feature to be alerted about porn their kid’s device while I was a teen they would have sent me to a conversion camp, and that is not an exaggeration. Apple thinks the appropriate time for queer kids to find themselves is after they turn 18.
- neop1x 5y ago
  Maybe Apple will decrease child abuse cases but increase cases of child suicides..
- mrtranscendence 5y ago
  If you're just downloading and looking at porn, no problem. It only becomes an issue if you're sharing porn via Messages or storing it in iCloud. And to be fair, I don't think they're alerted to the nature of the pornography, so you might be able to avoid being outed even if you're sharing porn (or having porn shared with you). 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.
  - taurath 5y ago
    Sure, but the parents can then unlock and go thru the phone and out the poor kid.
rStar 5y ago
> it is also a horrifying precedent that the device I put my life into is scanning my photos and reporting on bad behavior 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.
SOMA_BOFH 5y ago
how does apple protect againat hash collisions?
- jeromegv 5y ago
  It doesn't trigger for a single match, I guess that's the first line of defence.
peakaboo 5y ago
I also use Fastmail but being fully aware that Australia where its hosted is part of the 5 eyes spy network, and also one of the countries acting extreamly oppressive towards its citizens when it comes to covid restrictions. So I don't actually expect my mail to be private. But at least it's not Google.
- robjan 5y ago
  Fastmail is hosted in New Jersey. If it was hosted in Aus the user experience would be pretty bad for most of its users.
qwerty456127 5y ago
> While I still use google maps, I've been trialing out OSM alternatives for a minute. 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.
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TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
> I hope they recant This is very much like driving a car through a crowd of protestors. They will slowly, inexorably, eventually push through.
paulcarroty 5y ago
> Fortunately, my email is on a paid provider Paid doesn't mean more secure, it's popular mistake.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

>While I still use google maps 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.

trangus_1985 5y ago
That's not really the issue. The issue is that for google maps to work properly, it requires that the Play services are installed. Play services are a massive semi-monolithic blob that requires tight integration with Google's backend, and deep, system-level permissions to operate correctly. I'm not worried about my search history.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  Ahhh, gotcha. Did not realize that. Makes sense.
- boring_twenties 5y ago
  Last I checked (about a year ago), the Google Maps app did work with microG (a FOSS reimplementation of Google Play Services).
  - trangus_1985 5y ago
    I use maps on my phone on a regular basis - I would vastly prefer to have something less featured and stable versus hacking the crap out of my phone. But that's good to know.
    - andrepd 5y ago
      OsmAnd is an absolutely brilliant map app for android. Very fully featured but also pleasant to use (though I dislike some of the defaults).
    - d110af5ccf 5y ago
      Have you tried either of these? https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.osmand.plus/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.osmand.plus/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/app.organicmaps/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/app.organicmaps/
- brundolf 5y ago
  One workaround is to use the mobile web app, which is surprisingly pretty decent for a web app. And because it's a web app, you can even disable things like sharing your location if you want to
- techrat 5y ago
  People need to remember that most of Android got moved into Play Services. It was the only way to keep a system relatively up to date when the OEMs won't update the OS itself. Yeah, it's a dependency... as much as the Google Maps APK needing to run on Android itself.
- yosito 5y ago
  There is a Google Maps website that works on mobile. No need for the app.
- commoner 5y ago
  I've just tested Google Maps on an Android device without Google Play Services or microG. The app works fine, although every time you cold-start it, the app shows an alert (which can be dismissed but not disabled) and a notification (which can be specifically disabled) that Google Play Services is unavailable. On an Android device with microG, Google Maps works without showing the alert or the notification about Google Play Services.
opan 5y ago
In addition to F-Droid, you can get Aurora Store (which is on F-Droid) which lets you use an anonymous login to get at the Play Store. I use it for a couple free software apps that aren't on F-Droid for some reason.
- C19is20 5y ago
  What are the apps?
  - opan 5y ago
    Both are for marking anime. One for MAL[0], one for Kitsu[1]. [0] https://github.com/Drutol/MALClient https://github.com/Drutol/MALClient [1] https://github.com/hummingbird-me/kitsu-mobile https://github.com/hummingbird-me/kitsu-mobile
- sunshineforever 5y ago
  I also recommend Aurora Store as a complete replacement for the Play store. The one thing is that I've never tried using apps that I paid for on it but it works very well for any free apps. There is an option to use a Google account with Aurora but I've only ever used the anonymous account. 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.

_red 5y ago

Yes, my history was Linux 95-04, Mac 04-15, and now back to Linux from 2015 onwards. 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.

ursugardaddy 5y ago
you make that sound like a bad thing, I'd love to live in a world without child abuse spreading rampant on the internet and not having to suffer though what passes for political speech (memes) these days. maybe once we detect and stop stuff like this from happening before it gets very bad, we can grow as a society and adjust our forms of punishment accordingly too
- withinboredom 5y ago
  I don’t think anyone is arguing that making it harder to abuse children is a bad thing. It’s what is required to do so that is the bad thing. It’d be like if someone installed microphones all over every house to report on when you admit that you’re guilty to bullying. No one wants bullying, but I doubt you want a microphone recording everything and looking for certain trigger words. Unless you have an Alexa or something, then I guess you probably wouldn’t mind that example.
  - jcrites 5y ago
    Alexa and iPhones with Siri enabled, and Android phones, are all continuously listening with their microphones for their wake word, unless you've specifically turned the feature off. 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.

rasengan 5y ago

Your original post said postmarketOS. That is weird that you changed it to lineage (and misspelled that).

trangus_1985 5y ago
Yeah, sorry, I mixed them up in my head. I'm currently running Lineage on a PH-1, not Postmarket. I would not consider what I have set up to be "production ready", but I'm going to spend some time this weekend looking into what modern hardware can run Lineage or other open mobile OSes
- hsousa 5y ago
  Lineage OS is 100% production ready, it's been my daily driver for almost 2 years and I've been Google and apple - free since.
  - trangus_1985 5y ago
    Sorry, wasn't ripping on Lineage. It's more the entire ecosystem. I mentioned in prior comments, but I think that in a few years we'll have a practical, open source, third party in the mobile phone os wars - one that has reasonable app coverage. I don't care if I use google or apple services, btw, I just want the data flow to be on my terms.
trangus_1985 5y ago
Oh hey wait you're the freenode guy. While we're on the topic of hostile actions by a platform provider...
- rasengan 5y ago
  Doesn’t change that you’re a liar.
- noasaservice 5y ago
  He's uh, a prince, or something. (Probably got the crown out of a cereal box.) But from the looks of his numbers ( https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/IRC_top_10_networks_2021.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/IRC_top_... ) he's doing a real bang-up job!

Saris 5y ago

I think no matter what devices you use, you've nailed down the most important part of things which is using apps and services that are flexible, and can be easily used on another platform.

trangus_1985 5y ago
I knew that eventually it'd probably matter what devices I used, I just didn't expect it to be so soon. But yeah, I could reasonably use an iphone without impact for the foreseeable future with some small changes.

threatofrain 5y ago

What is your home NAS setup like?

trangus_1985 5y ago
Freenas, self-signed tightly-scoped CA installed on all of my devices. 1TBx4 in a small case shoved under the stairs. tbh, i would vastly prefer to use a cloud based service with local encryption - I'm not super paranoid, just overly principled
- voltaireodactyl 5y ago
  If you haven’t already heard of it, cryptomator might be just what you’re after.
- quest88 5y ago
  What do you use to sync phone photos to your NAS? I like Google Photos' smartness, but I also want my photos on my Synology NAS.
  - antgiant 5y ago
    I personally am a fan of Mylio for that. https://mylio.com/ https://mylio.com/
  - neolog 5y ago
    Syncthing
- _arvin 5y ago
  Take a look at https://internxt.com https://internxt.com. Been using them for a couple weeks and am incredibly impressed. Great team, great product, just great everything. It was exactly what I was looking for

lcfcjs 5y ago

Found the paedo.

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago

Signal is still a centralised data silo where by default you trust CA to verify your contacts identify.

trangus_1985 5y ago
Yeah, but it's also useful for getting my friends on board. I think it's likely that I eventually start hosting matrix or some alternative, but my goal is to be practical here, yet still have a privacy protecting posture.
- Sunspark 5y ago
  Your friends aren't going to want to install an app to have it connect to trangus_1985's server. Be happy just getting them on Signal.
  - trangus_1985 5y ago
    My friends are significantly more technical (and paranoid) than the average user. We've already discussed it. 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.
    - Sunspark 5y ago
      Well said, as I like to point out sometimes, Signal is a privacy app not an anonymity app.
- playguardin 5y ago
  What is matrix?
chimeracoder 5y ago
> Signal is still a centralised data silo where by default you trust CA to verify your contacts identify. 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.

LazyR0B0T 5y ago

Organic Maps on Fdroid is a really clean osm based map.

JackGreyhat 5y ago
Nearly the same as MagicEarth...I use it all the time.
crocodiletears 5y ago
Does it let you select from multiple routes? I've been using Pocketmaps, but it only gives you a single option for routing, which can lead to issues in certain contexts
Sunspark 5y ago
I'm impressed, it actually has smooth scrolling unlike OsmAnd which is very slow loading tiles in. 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.
m-p-3 5y ago
And I also invite everyone to contribute to OSM through StreetComplete, it's quite intuitive and it adds something to look for when taking a walk.

alksjdalkj 5y ago

Have you found any decent google maps alternatives? I'd love to find something but nothing comes close as far as I've found. Directions that take into account traffic is the big thing that I feel like nobody (other than Apple, MS, etc.) will be able to replicate. 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.

manuelmagic 5y ago
I'm using since many years HERE Maps https://wego.here.com/ https://wego.here.com/
krobbn 5y ago
I really like Here WeGo, and it allows you to download maps for specific countries too to have available offline.
nickexyz 5y ago
Organic maps is pretty good: https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps
beermonster 5y ago
OsmAND

cle 5y ago

Unfortunately with SafetyNet, I feel like an investment into Android is also a losing proposition...I can only anticipate being slowly cut off from the Android app ecosystem as more apps onboard with attestation. 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...

trangus_1985 5y ago
I don't think it's implausible that I carry around a phone that has mail, contacts, calendars, photos, and private chat on it. And then, have a second, older phone that has like Instagram and mobile games. It's tragic.
- sodality2 5y ago
  Unfortunately a big bulk of the data they profit off of is simply the ads and on-platform communication and behavior. Doesn't really matter if you use a different device if you still use the platform. Sure, it's slightly better, but it really isn't a silver bullet if you're still using it. And this is coming from someone who does this already.
  - trangus_1985 5y ago
    I don't really mind if they make a profit off of the free things I use. 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.
techrat 5y ago
Loosing sight of the forest for this one tree. 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.

new_realist 5y ago

The argument from reactionary HN neckbeards is basically, "can't you see that this _could_ be used for great evil?" No shit. That's obvious to just about... everyone on the planet. Many things in this world can be used for great evil: knives, gasoline, guns, TNT, cars--even most household items when used with creativity. It is quite impossible to create something which can't be abused in some form. But society still allows them, because it judges that the good outweighs the bad, and systems exist to manage the risk of evil use. In this case, I have every expectation that this scanning will be auditable, and society will eventually work out most of the imperfections in systems like these, and strike the right balance to make the world a better place.

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artimaeis 5y ago

It's not the device that's less secure or private in this context, it's the services. There's no reason you couldn't just continue using your NAS for photo backup and Signal for encrypted-communications completely unaffected by this. 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.

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adriancr 5y ago
So they should do that scanning server side at their boundary instead of pushing software to run on phones with potential to extend scope later if no push back.
- gowld 5y ago
  They don't want to do it serve side because they don't want to see your unencrypted data!
  - adriancr 5y ago
    Well good thing they're looking at it anyway client side...
  - dustyharddrive 5y ago
    Apple already holds the key to iCloud Photos content, and regularly responds to search warrants.
trangus_1985 5y ago
That's not the issue. The issue is that they have shipped spyware to my device. That's a massive breach of trust. 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

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

> with icloud photos csam, it is also a horrifying precedent 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.

mojzu 5y ago
If The Verge's article is accurate about how/when the CSAM scanning occurs then I don't have a problem with that, sounds like they're moving the scanning from server to client side, the concerns about false positives seem valid to me but I'm not sure the chance of one occurring has increased over the existing icloud scanning. Scope creep for other content scanning is definitely a possibility though so I hope people keep an eye on that 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
- SquishyPanda23 5y ago
  > sounds like they're moving the scanning from server to client side 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.
  - 5y ago

bambax 5y ago

> probably good in the moral sense 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.

tekknik 5y ago
> Will they start taking pictures of your house to see if you store drugs under your couch? Or cook meth in your kitchen?? How many people have homepods? When will they start listening for illegal activity?
- pjerem 5y ago
  No worries, it's totally local voice recognition ! We'll only send samples when you speak about herbs.

OJFord 5y ago

> While I still use google maps 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.

biztos 5y ago

I’ve been thinking about switching my main email to Fastmail from Apple, for portability in case the anti-power-user trend crosses my personal pain threshold. 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.

vineyardmike 5y ago
unfortunately, self hosting is a pretty clear alternative. Not much else seems to be.
dustyharddrive 5y ago
I think self-hosting email has too many downsides (spam filtering, for example) to be worth it; I’m more concerned about losing my messages (easily solved with POP or mbox exports while still using a cloud account) than government data sharing. Email is unencrypted in transit anyway, and it’s “industry standard” to store it in clear text at each end.
mackrevinack 5y ago
there's always protonmail which is supposedly e2e, so they shouldn't be able to scan your mail
trangus_1985 5y ago
> if your worry is governments reading your mail 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.
neop1x 5y ago
I have been self-hosting email for 7 years successfully. But it required a physical server in a reputable datacenter, setting up Dovecot, Exim, SpamAssasin, reverse-DNS, SPF, DKIM. It took a bit of time to gain IP reputation but then it has worked flawlessly since. Occasionally some legit mail is flagged as spam or vice versa but it is not worse than any other mail provider. So it can be done! But my first attempts to do that on a VPS failed as IP blocks of VPS providers are often hopelessly blacklisted in major email providers.

vineyardmike 5y ago

> as a queer kid, I was terrified of my parents finding out 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)

heavyset_go 5y ago
> 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. 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-youtube-lawsuit-censorship-877919/ https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/lgbtq-... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/14/youtube-discriminates-against-lgbt-content-by-unfairly-culling-it-suit-alleges/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/14/youtube...
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  And it's not just YouTube. Most platforms are at least partially guilty of this. Then there is tumblr, which is all but dead - explicitly for a "think of the children" concern from apple.

playguardin 5y ago

You and your morality can suck it.

_arvin 5y ago

I'm really loving fastmail. Thanks for the heads up!

samstave 5y ago

What I am reminded of is all of the now seemingly prophetic writing and story telling in a lot of cyber-punk-dystopian anime about the future of the corporate state, and how mega corps rule EVERY THING. 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.

m4rtink 5y ago
Interesting! But actually this is not the singly thing with an "interesting" name in Singapore - well at least as long as you speak Czech. ;-) 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 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. ;-)
- samstave 5y ago
  Wow. Thanks for that. 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.

gowld 5y ago

> I'm not sure that I support what they are implementing for child accounts (as a queer kid, I was terrified of my parents finding out) 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?

ekianjo 5y ago

Signal is next on the list since it's a centralized solution - you can expect they will come for it next.

trangus_1985 5y ago
I'm just trying to buy time until open source and secure alternatives have addressed these problems. Apple doing this has moved my timeframes up by a few years (unexpectedly).

forgingahead 5y ago

This can happen only because whenever any slippery-slope action was taken previously, there is an army of apologists and "explainers" who rush to "correct" your instinctive aversion to these changes. It's always the same - the initial comment is seemingly kind, yet with an underlying menace, and if you continue to express opposition, they change tack to being extremely aggressive and rude. 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.

raxxorrax 5y ago
This is typical obedient behavior. Some abused spouses get through lengths to come up with excuses for their partners. Since I don't own an iOS device, I don't really care about this specific instance. 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.

GeekyBear 5y ago

> with icloud photos csam, it is also a horrifying precedent 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-led-to-a-mans-arrest-for-child-porn-was-not-a-privacy-violation/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/06/why-the-gmail-scan-that-le...

trangus_1985 5y ago
cloud versus local device is a massive distinction imo. or maybe im a dinosaur ;)
- d110af5ccf 5y ago
  No, you're not a dinosaur. It is entirely reasonable for a hosting provider not to want certain content on their servers. And it is also quite reasonable to want to automate the process of scanning for it. My physical device, on the other hand, is (supposed to be) mine and mine alone.
  - GeekyBear 5y ago
    The data is only scanned when you attempt to upload it to the cloud in either case. Apple scans the data on device before it is sent. Google scans it on it's own servers after it is sent.

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taurath 5y ago

If my parents had the feature to be alerted about porn their kid’s device while I was a teen they would have sent me to a conversion camp, and that is not an exaggeration. Apple thinks the appropriate time for queer kids to find themselves is after they turn 18.

neop1x 5y ago
Maybe Apple will decrease child abuse cases but increase cases of child suicides..
mrtranscendence 5y ago
If you're just downloading and looking at porn, no problem. It only becomes an issue if you're sharing porn via Messages or storing it in iCloud. And to be fair, I don't think they're alerted to the nature of the pornography, so you might be able to avoid being outed even if you're sharing porn (or having porn shared with you). 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.
- taurath 5y ago
  Sure, but the parents can then unlock and go thru the phone and out the poor kid.

rStar 5y ago

> it is also a horrifying precedent that the device I put my life into is scanning my photos and reporting on bad behavior 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.

SOMA_BOFH 5y ago

how does apple protect againat hash collisions?

jeromegv 5y ago
It doesn't trigger for a single match, I guess that's the first line of defence.

peakaboo 5y ago

I also use Fastmail but being fully aware that Australia where its hosted is part of the 5 eyes spy network, and also one of the countries acting extreamly oppressive towards its citizens when it comes to covid restrictions. So I don't actually expect my mail to be private. But at least it's not Google.

robjan 5y ago
Fastmail is hosted in New Jersey. If it was hosted in Aus the user experience would be pretty bad for most of its users.

qwerty456127 5y ago

> While I still use google maps, I've been trialing out OSM alternatives for a minute. 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.

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TheRealDunkirk 5y ago

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

paulcarroty 5y ago

> Fortunately, my email is on a paid provider Paid doesn't mean more secure, it's popular mistake.