5 ms·

All of the PR out of Apple seems to assume that people simply do not understand how it works and if they did they would feel better. Everyone understands well

All of the PR out of Apple seems to assume that people simply do not understand how it works and if they did they would feel better. Everyone understands well enough how it works and understands how trivially it could be changed to search for other kinds of content.

Animats 5y ago
Right. At some point, the back story behind this will leak out. That will be interesting. This has to be something Apple was asked/pressured/ordered to do. As a business activity it makes no sense. Bear in mind that over the last week, people in Afghanistan have been frantically trying to erase any evidence of doing things the Taliban doesn't like, such as women playing sports.
- jjcon 5y ago
  I’m inclined to believe it was a quid-pro-quo (or a play at it). Apple inserts a little back door, in exchange the antitrust case against them will be eased.
  - unityByFreedom 5y ago
    That sounds too corrupt to be believed. If someone came out with evidence of that it would completely blow such a deal.
  - hughrr 5y ago
    Based on the letter by NCMEC describing opponents to the technology as “screeching voices of the minority”, I suspect this is some kind of variant of being guilted into doing something by either lobbying, marketing or internal proponents. This resulted in a tone deaf death march and now they’re trying to work out how to spin it. This is a fairly typical corporate failure mode. Sometimes the best thing is to do nothing as they have found out because now they’re stuck in a position where the two exits are either piss off everyone by writing off their privacy stance or piss off everyone else for canning child porn scanning. What a complete fuck up.
  - michelb 5y ago
    I'm convinced none of these conspiracy theories hold up. This is a typical Apple thing. Thought long and hard about something in a mostly isolated setting and then missing some obvious things.
    - hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
      You might be right. On the other hand, all their past controversial ideas were reasonable from the financial point of view: introduce non-standard connectors, remove the minijack, make the hardware non-upgradeable and so on. All these things were bad for consumers, but good for Apple's bottom line. This one is bad for everybody. Apple's management is not stupid, they must have a good reason.
- unityByFreedom 5y ago
  > This has to be something Apple was asked/pressured/ordered to do. As a business activity it makes no sense. I firmly believe we'll never discover who applied that pressure, or how. And it's hard for me to imagine the US government doing that without some court battle with serious risk of leaks to journalists. I mean, it makes no financial sense, so Apple would fight that. The only thing I can imagine is pressure from a private interest whose market is big enough for Apple to care. And if it is that market, then I think we're in for a tough ride until we can build our own devices.
  - red_admiral 5y ago
    I think there's some strong hints in apple's implementation that they were under external pressure. If you read the documentation on how it's implemented, there's some fairly advanced crypto - private set intersection, threshold secret sharing - that only makes sense if Apple took the line "we have to do this, but we're willing to do it in a really expensive way so that we ourselves have as little access as possible". They went to the effort of running the NeuralHash on the client device, as far as I understand. The standard implementation on other cloud providers is that the provider has access to your data on the server if they really need it - much cheaper, and makes it technically possible in future to easily change the T&C to "we may use this for market research and to improve our products". I view Apple's client-side implementation as drawing a very big line in the sand saying we will not do that and we are willing to put our money where our mouth is by writing this crypto protocol. But that certainly raises the question, why would Apple do anything like that at all, unless there's some (current or anticipated) external threat that forced them to? As to whether we'll ever discover it - I wouldn't have predicted the Snowden revelations, maybe this will come out the next time something like that happens. If it does, I also predict we'll be shocked to discover just how big the market and distribution network for child abuse online is, and how many people are involved.
    - unityByFreedom 5y ago
      > I also predict we'll be shocked to discover just how big the market and distribution network for child abuse online is, and how many people are involved. I don't think it is big compared to what authoritarian states would like to use this for. You're talking about, at the very least, putting everyone in non-democratic states under even more pressure to obey than they're already under. And in democratic states this invites bad actors both in and outside the government. There is no net-gain in justice here. It's wrong across the board. Welcome back to HN after taking 5 months off, btw. You're a SSC fan?
kgwxd 5y ago
Gaslighting is the term. From the first instance any one/entity uses it, trust should be over, forever, never to be regained.
ilogik 5y ago
can someone please explain to me what is this scary scenario where this is being misused? Am I the only one that isn't seeing it?
- zimpenfish 5y ago
  The scanning matches against CSAM hashes provided by NCMEC - the fear is that NCMEC will be pressured into including hashes of non-CSAM material that USGOV want to track as well (say MAGA images for the current administration.) (One counterpoint to this is that PhotoDNA has been used for scanning cloud images using NCMEC-provided hashes for a decade now and this slippery slope doesn't seem to have happened yet.)
  - ilogik 5y ago
    this is a very weak argument. The MAGA crowd has been posting images all over social media. My understanding is that there is a threshold that needs to be met, and then an Apple employee with a very difficult job will need to confirm the image. So even if NCMEC get pressured, I don't see what the result can be.
    - tjpnz 5y ago
      That Apple employee (assuming the role doesn't get contracted out) has no incentive to protect you or me. But they'll absolutely err on the side of caution to protect their own livelihood.
      - ilogik 5y ago
        and what's the next step? FBI breaks down my door because I said something bad about Biden?
        umanwizard 5y ago
        Something like that is unlikely to happen because the US is not — for now — an authoritarian state. Replace “FBI” and “Biden” with their equivalents in various other countries and yes, it’s absolutely plausible.
varispeed 5y ago
> Everyone understands well enough how it works and understands how trivially it could be changed to search for other kinds of content. I think it's not really a problem of what is being looked for, but the mere fact that it will be done without a warrant on a personal device.

Animats 5y ago

Right. At some point, the back story behind this will leak out. That will be interesting. This has to be something Apple was asked/pressured/ordered to do. As a business activity it makes no sense. Bear in mind that over the last week, people in Afghanistan have been frantically trying to erase any evidence of doing things the Taliban doesn't like, such as women playing sports.

jjcon 5y ago
I’m inclined to believe it was a quid-pro-quo (or a play at it). Apple inserts a little back door, in exchange the antitrust case against them will be eased.
- unityByFreedom 5y ago
  That sounds too corrupt to be believed. If someone came out with evidence of that it would completely blow such a deal.
- hughrr 5y ago
  Based on the letter by NCMEC describing opponents to the technology as “screeching voices of the minority”, I suspect this is some kind of variant of being guilted into doing something by either lobbying, marketing or internal proponents. This resulted in a tone deaf death march and now they’re trying to work out how to spin it. This is a fairly typical corporate failure mode. Sometimes the best thing is to do nothing as they have found out because now they’re stuck in a position where the two exits are either piss off everyone by writing off their privacy stance or piss off everyone else for canning child porn scanning. What a complete fuck up.
- michelb 5y ago
  I'm convinced none of these conspiracy theories hold up. This is a typical Apple thing. Thought long and hard about something in a mostly isolated setting and then missing some obvious things.
  - hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
    You might be right. On the other hand, all their past controversial ideas were reasonable from the financial point of view: introduce non-standard connectors, remove the minijack, make the hardware non-upgradeable and so on. All these things were bad for consumers, but good for Apple's bottom line. This one is bad for everybody. Apple's management is not stupid, they must have a good reason.
unityByFreedom 5y ago
> This has to be something Apple was asked/pressured/ordered to do. As a business activity it makes no sense. I firmly believe we'll never discover who applied that pressure, or how. And it's hard for me to imagine the US government doing that without some court battle with serious risk of leaks to journalists. I mean, it makes no financial sense, so Apple would fight that. The only thing I can imagine is pressure from a private interest whose market is big enough for Apple to care. And if it is that market, then I think we're in for a tough ride until we can build our own devices.
- red_admiral 5y ago
  I think there's some strong hints in apple's implementation that they were under external pressure. If you read the documentation on how it's implemented, there's some fairly advanced crypto - private set intersection, threshold secret sharing - that only makes sense if Apple took the line "we have to do this, but we're willing to do it in a really expensive way so that we ourselves have as little access as possible". They went to the effort of running the NeuralHash on the client device, as far as I understand. The standard implementation on other cloud providers is that the provider has access to your data on the server if they really need it - much cheaper, and makes it technically possible in future to easily change the T&C to "we may use this for market research and to improve our products". I view Apple's client-side implementation as drawing a very big line in the sand saying we will not do that and we are willing to put our money where our mouth is by writing this crypto protocol. But that certainly raises the question, why would Apple do anything like that at all, unless there's some (current or anticipated) external threat that forced them to? As to whether we'll ever discover it - I wouldn't have predicted the Snowden revelations, maybe this will come out the next time something like that happens. If it does, I also predict we'll be shocked to discover just how big the market and distribution network for child abuse online is, and how many people are involved.
  - unityByFreedom 5y ago
    > I also predict we'll be shocked to discover just how big the market and distribution network for child abuse online is, and how many people are involved. I don't think it is big compared to what authoritarian states would like to use this for. You're talking about, at the very least, putting everyone in non-democratic states under even more pressure to obey than they're already under. And in democratic states this invites bad actors both in and outside the government. There is no net-gain in justice here. It's wrong across the board. Welcome back to HN after taking 5 months off, btw. You're a SSC fan?

kgwxd 5y ago

Gaslighting is the term. From the first instance any one/entity uses it, trust should be over, forever, never to be regained.

ilogik 5y ago

can someone please explain to me what is this scary scenario where this is being misused? Am I the only one that isn't seeing it?

zimpenfish 5y ago
The scanning matches against CSAM hashes provided by NCMEC - the fear is that NCMEC will be pressured into including hashes of non-CSAM material that USGOV want to track as well (say MAGA images for the current administration.) (One counterpoint to this is that PhotoDNA has been used for scanning cloud images using NCMEC-provided hashes for a decade now and this slippery slope doesn't seem to have happened yet.)
- ilogik 5y ago
  this is a very weak argument. The MAGA crowd has been posting images all over social media. My understanding is that there is a threshold that needs to be met, and then an Apple employee with a very difficult job will need to confirm the image. So even if NCMEC get pressured, I don't see what the result can be.
  - tjpnz 5y ago
    That Apple employee (assuming the role doesn't get contracted out) has no incentive to protect you or me. But they'll absolutely err on the side of caution to protect their own livelihood.
    - ilogik 5y ago
      and what's the next step? FBI breaks down my door because I said something bad about Biden?
      - umanwizard 5y ago
        Something like that is unlikely to happen because the US is not — for now — an authoritarian state. Replace “FBI” and “Biden” with their equivalents in various other countries and yes, it’s absolutely plausible.

varispeed 5y ago

> Everyone understands well enough how it works and understands how trivially it could be changed to search for other kinds of content. I think it's not really a problem of what is being looked for, but the mere fact that it will be done without a warrant on a personal device.