6 ms·

Not to mention, this neural hashing can't be a cheap operation. Better to use the processors paid for by your customers than ones you have to pay for in the clo

by 015a 5y ago

Not to mention, this neural hashing can't be a cheap operation. Better to use the processors paid for by your customers than ones you have to pay for in the cloud!

eropple 5y ago
I would like to see tests wrt this before I assume it--Apple puts a pretty hefty premium on battery life for customer devices, and while that would probably not win out when placed against this kind of liability minimization, they've got a lot of sharp folks there who crunch this stuff in their sleep.
- pdimitar 5y ago
  I have been noticing increased background activity on my phone after it reached 100% during charging, for years now. Pretty sure they can infer your normal sleep schedule and, after your phone has fully charged (1h to 3h after you fall asleep) they can freely use it as a P2P computing device. Nothing new really. And they can still keep their promise of a good battery life -- which is quite justified by the way, I am using iPhones for 4 years now and they've consistently won over any of the 13 Android devices that I've used in the years before (and sometimes during). There are ways to achieve both -- good observable battery life plus ability to use your phone for P2P computation -- and it's IMO obvious that Apple has succeeded in that for several years now.
  - Xylakant 5y ago
    Pretty sure they can infer your normal sleep schedule and, after your phone has fully charged (1h to 3h after you fall asleep) they can freely use it as a P2P computing device. They already do, the feature is called “Optimized Batter Charging”. It charges the battery to 80% and only does the full charge a bit before you usually start using the phone. You’ll find the setting in the battery health section.
    - edgyquant 5y ago
      Optimized Battery Charging isn’t the same as being a node in a bot net.
  - jsight 5y ago
    > which is quite justified by the way, I am using iPhones for 4 years now and they've consistently won over any of the 13 Android devices that I've used in the years before (and sometimes during). I find this a bit shocking. Were all of these Android low battery devices? I don't have a good point of comparison, as I've only used Android on phones, but there are a lot of Android devices with really large batteries and very long battery life. It'd be pretty amazing if iOS were beating them in the real world.
    - pdimitar 5y ago
      There's no magic in iPhone's batteries, they are basically identical to all others. The secret sauce ingredient is the idle battery life. The Android devices I used -- all 13 of them, without exception -- routinely lost anywhere from 15% to 40% battery when I was out and about without me picking them up even once. We're talking anywhere from 2 to 5 hours with them being in my pocket or a backpack, in the middle of a big city, with excellent 4G coverage, so it should not be a constant radio antenna activity (although if their antennas were of lower quality that might just be it). I installed all sorts of root apps to try and pinpoint the culprit and inevitably hit a brick wall when all the apps can do is point at a system service without any way to drill down further. In contrast, the iPhones that I've used -- 6S Plus, 8 Plus and 12 Pro Max -- are all extremely frugal on using battery when the device is idle. I've grown used to picking the phone from my bed at 100% battery in the morning on days where I had to do a lot of stuff outside, be out and about for 4-5 hours and only pick up the phone once or twice, and then get back home and find the phone at 98% battery.
      - 015a 5y ago
        As someone with an iPhone 12 Pro and a Galaxy S21 Ultra, swapping my SIM between each every ~two months; this situation has absolutely changed sometime in the past couple years. Android's idle power draw, at least on the S21 Ultra, is fantastic. I'll sometimes leave this phone on, with no SIM in it but connected to WiFi, sitting on my desk, using it every once in a while for Tik Tok or whatever, and it'll last a week or more. The iPhone is pretty similar. But display-on time, apples to apples; the iPhone has fallen behind. With the 12 Pro, most days I'll end at 5-10%. At least once every couple weeks, the day will end with the iPhone having already shut down. In comparison, on the S21 Ultra: I give it ~20-40 minutes of charge every day while I'm working, just unplug my USB-C laptop and plug it into the phone, and that's it. I don't charge it at night. Its battery life is ungodly; by the time I go to bed, its at 50-60%. Wake up, plug it in while I'm showering and making coffee, good to go.
  - crooked-v 5y ago
    > they can freely use it as a P2P computing device Do you have any evidence of this, or are you just making up something that sounds good to you? More likely it's doing the background on-device work that Apple has actively advertised for a long time, like analyzing photos to attach metadata to them. (There's a lot more to this than is obvious at first glance - I can text "penguin" or "sunset" in my Photos.app library and get a set of matching pictures back, for example.)
    - pdimitar 5y ago
      You reckon I would know of a way to gather an exact evidence unless I work for Apple? (In which case I'll likely be convicted and thrown in jail as well.) Obviously I can't know for a fact. I also thought they likely analyze photos and that's my chief suspect even now. But critical thinking demands to keep an open mind -- and that's how I suspect they might use fully-charged iDevices (that are expected to sit on the charger for several more hours) for unsolicited and non-advertised P2P computations. I don't claim it, I merely suspect it.
      - crooked-v 5y ago
        > You reckon I would know of a way to gather an exact evidence unless I work for Apple? Monitor your network traffic. Lots of people do this already for various reasons and haven't noticed anything like this going on.
        pdimitar 5y ago
        Yeah, sure, I can brute force encrypted traffic by eyeballing it in my router's dashboard UI. Come on, dude. You seem to have an axe to grind here and I refuse to participate. I even objectively admitted that I can't know and that I only suspect yet you (a) offer a non-solution and (b) likely downvote a comment because you don't like it. Sheesh. Fine. You do you.
  - datavirtue 5y ago
    I have owned nearly every premium phone on the market and none of them come close to the Sony Xperia for battery life. I try new iPhones every other model or so...battery life has never been outstanding.
    - pdimitar 5y ago
      Do you disable Background App Refresh? First thing that I do on every iDevice. That feature being on is hugely overrated, you absolutely don't need it because you enter an app and manually refresh it; what's the big deal with that, are people that lazy?... Gods! (The only useful application of that feature is email apps, I suppose; you do want to have your messages downloaded when you unlock your phone because Apple Mail takes ages to sync with Gmail... and it only gets worse with time.) With that option set to "on" the idle battery life might quickly take a nose dive if you have stuff like Facebook / TikTok / Snapchat et. al. installed.
brandon272 5y ago
I honestly wonder if the privacy/intrusion backlash wasn't even considered because they were focused on this from the perspective of "isn't this great that these phones now have enough power to do this computation on-device", the same way they were proud to be able to announce that Siri processing would begin to happen on-device.
- YokoSix 5y ago
  I thought about that as well. They rushed to publish some unpolished PR pieces and FAQs right after the announcement and at very unusual times (3am in Cupertino) trying to damage control so my guess would be as well that they didn't even consider the backlash. Maybe they were really proud about the technology they implemented. It's a little bit sad if you think about it.
  - nicce 5y ago
    If you think about this, this is a really great innovation, which is left behind bad PR. There was a leak about their system before release (which got a lot of publicity, and was heavily missleading), so that might be a reason for their hurry. I have been browsing their technical papers for couple of days now, and they have managed to innovate a system which has "kind of" end-to-end encryption, but enables access for specific (and only this kind of) content. They have managed to make encrypted system where they can lock themselves out, and can't answer for example the demands of FBI to show all images of specific user. On the context of CSAM, this is an improvement for privacy, but being able to understand that, it requires great understanding of different technologies.

by 015a 5y ago

Not to mention, this neural hashing can't be a cheap operation. Better to use the processors paid for by your customers than ones you have to pay for in the cloud!

eropple 5y ago

I would like to see tests wrt this before I assume it--Apple puts a pretty hefty premium on battery life for customer devices, and while that would probably not win out when placed against this kind of liability minimization, they've got a lot of sharp folks there who crunch this stuff in their sleep.

pdimitar 5y ago
I have been noticing increased background activity on my phone after it reached 100% during charging, for years now. Pretty sure they can infer your normal sleep schedule and, after your phone has fully charged (1h to 3h after you fall asleep) they can freely use it as a P2P computing device. Nothing new really. And they can still keep their promise of a good battery life -- which is quite justified by the way, I am using iPhones for 4 years now and they've consistently won over any of the 13 Android devices that I've used in the years before (and sometimes during). There are ways to achieve both -- good observable battery life plus ability to use your phone for P2P computation -- and it's IMO obvious that Apple has succeeded in that for several years now.
- Xylakant 5y ago
  Pretty sure they can infer your normal sleep schedule and, after your phone has fully charged (1h to 3h after you fall asleep) they can freely use it as a P2P computing device. They already do, the feature is called “Optimized Batter Charging”. It charges the battery to 80% and only does the full charge a bit before you usually start using the phone. You’ll find the setting in the battery health section.
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    Optimized Battery Charging isn’t the same as being a node in a bot net.
- jsight 5y ago
  > which is quite justified by the way, I am using iPhones for 4 years now and they've consistently won over any of the 13 Android devices that I've used in the years before (and sometimes during). I find this a bit shocking. Were all of these Android low battery devices? I don't have a good point of comparison, as I've only used Android on phones, but there are a lot of Android devices with really large batteries and very long battery life. It'd be pretty amazing if iOS were beating them in the real world.
  - pdimitar 5y ago
    There's no magic in iPhone's batteries, they are basically identical to all others. The secret sauce ingredient is the idle battery life. The Android devices I used -- all 13 of them, without exception -- routinely lost anywhere from 15% to 40% battery when I was out and about without me picking them up even once. We're talking anywhere from 2 to 5 hours with them being in my pocket or a backpack, in the middle of a big city, with excellent 4G coverage, so it should not be a constant radio antenna activity (although if their antennas were of lower quality that might just be it). I installed all sorts of root apps to try and pinpoint the culprit and inevitably hit a brick wall when all the apps can do is point at a system service without any way to drill down further. In contrast, the iPhones that I've used -- 6S Plus, 8 Plus and 12 Pro Max -- are all extremely frugal on using battery when the device is idle. I've grown used to picking the phone from my bed at 100% battery in the morning on days where I had to do a lot of stuff outside, be out and about for 4-5 hours and only pick up the phone once or twice, and then get back home and find the phone at 98% battery.
    - 015a 5y ago
      As someone with an iPhone 12 Pro and a Galaxy S21 Ultra, swapping my SIM between each every ~two months; this situation has absolutely changed sometime in the past couple years. Android's idle power draw, at least on the S21 Ultra, is fantastic. I'll sometimes leave this phone on, with no SIM in it but connected to WiFi, sitting on my desk, using it every once in a while for Tik Tok or whatever, and it'll last a week or more. The iPhone is pretty similar. But display-on time, apples to apples; the iPhone has fallen behind. With the 12 Pro, most days I'll end at 5-10%. At least once every couple weeks, the day will end with the iPhone having already shut down. In comparison, on the S21 Ultra: I give it ~20-40 minutes of charge every day while I'm working, just unplug my USB-C laptop and plug it into the phone, and that's it. I don't charge it at night. Its battery life is ungodly; by the time I go to bed, its at 50-60%. Wake up, plug it in while I'm showering and making coffee, good to go.
- crooked-v 5y ago
  > they can freely use it as a P2P computing device Do you have any evidence of this, or are you just making up something that sounds good to you? More likely it's doing the background on-device work that Apple has actively advertised for a long time, like analyzing photos to attach metadata to them. (There's a lot more to this than is obvious at first glance - I can text "penguin" or "sunset" in my Photos.app library and get a set of matching pictures back, for example.)
  - pdimitar 5y ago
    You reckon I would know of a way to gather an exact evidence unless I work for Apple? (In which case I'll likely be convicted and thrown in jail as well.) Obviously I can't know for a fact. I also thought they likely analyze photos and that's my chief suspect even now. But critical thinking demands to keep an open mind -- and that's how I suspect they might use fully-charged iDevices (that are expected to sit on the charger for several more hours) for unsolicited and non-advertised P2P computations. I don't claim it, I merely suspect it.
    - crooked-v 5y ago
      > You reckon I would know of a way to gather an exact evidence unless I work for Apple? Monitor your network traffic. Lots of people do this already for various reasons and haven't noticed anything like this going on.
      - pdimitar 5y ago
        Yeah, sure, I can brute force encrypted traffic by eyeballing it in my router's dashboard UI. Come on, dude. You seem to have an axe to grind here and I refuse to participate. I even objectively admitted that I can't know and that I only suspect yet you (a) offer a non-solution and (b) likely downvote a comment because you don't like it. Sheesh. Fine. You do you.
- datavirtue 5y ago
  I have owned nearly every premium phone on the market and none of them come close to the Sony Xperia for battery life. I try new iPhones every other model or so...battery life has never been outstanding.
  - pdimitar 5y ago
    Do you disable Background App Refresh? First thing that I do on every iDevice. That feature being on is hugely overrated, you absolutely don't need it because you enter an app and manually refresh it; what's the big deal with that, are people that lazy?... Gods! (The only useful application of that feature is email apps, I suppose; you do want to have your messages downloaded when you unlock your phone because Apple Mail takes ages to sync with Gmail... and it only gets worse with time.) With that option set to "on" the idle battery life might quickly take a nose dive if you have stuff like Facebook / TikTok / Snapchat et. al. installed.

brandon272 5y ago

I honestly wonder if the privacy/intrusion backlash wasn't even considered because they were focused on this from the perspective of "isn't this great that these phones now have enough power to do this computation on-device", the same way they were proud to be able to announce that Siri processing would begin to happen on-device.

YokoSix 5y ago
I thought about that as well. They rushed to publish some unpolished PR pieces and FAQs right after the announcement and at very unusual times (3am in Cupertino) trying to damage control so my guess would be as well that they didn't even consider the backlash. Maybe they were really proud about the technology they implemented. It's a little bit sad if you think about it.
- nicce 5y ago
  If you think about this, this is a really great innovation, which is left behind bad PR. There was a leak about their system before release (which got a lot of publicity, and was heavily missleading), so that might be a reason for their hurry. I have been browsing their technical papers for couple of days now, and they have managed to innovate a system which has "kind of" end-to-end encryption, but enables access for specific (and only this kind of) content. They have managed to make encrypted system where they can lock themselves out, and can't answer for example the demands of FBI to show all images of specific user. On the context of CSAM, this is an improvement for privacy, but being able to understand that, it requires great understanding of different technologies.