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I want to ignore most of this article to complain about an inaccuracy that keeps coming up. > More broadly, they said the change will break end-to-end encrypti

by kemayo 5y ago

I want to ignore most of this article to complain about an inaccuracy that keeps coming up. > More broadly, they said the change will break end-to-end encryption for iMessage, which Apple has staunchly defended in other contexts. But... it wouldn't. The iMessage feature doesn't expose the contents of your message to anyone else under any circumstance. If you're a child under 13 and your parents have opted in to this feature, you get a choice of seeing naked-pictures sent to you and having your parents be notified that you chose to, and bypassing it with no notifications of anything. (But once you're 13+, no notifications would occur.) There are potential issues with this, mostly relating to abusive families being controlling. They'd have to do weird things like forcing their teenaged children to keep making new under-13 accounts to actually take advantage of it like that, though. And none of these issues impact the e2e status of iMessage in any way. Apple really screwed up PR by launching the iMessage feature alongside the scanning-and-reporting iCloud Photos feature. There's so much confusion out there about this. (The breaking-e2e aspect does exist with the iCloud Photos scanning... not that it's currently e2e, of course.)

joshstrange 5y ago
Let's also not pretend that some of this confusion done is 100% willfully by some of the news organizations reporting on this because it benefits them to conflate the two. We even see it a little from places like EFF who appear to believe their ends justify the means.
- blitzar 5y ago
  There are plenty of comments on HN that claim there are no details of what has been proposed while simultaneously claiming to have read the white paper. This is rapidly becoming a topic not worth reading more about due to the misinformation and shilling from all sides.
- robertoandred 5y ago
  The more fear and confusion the EFF can spread, the more donations they get.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    I agree, sadly. This prompted me to unsubscribe from them. In some ways it reminds me of the ACLU. Similar fixation on donations above all else, to the point of dark patterns. I still haven't managed to fully extricate myself from their pleas.
    - websites2023 5y ago
      I’m in the same boat. Unfortunately, I don’t see myself continuing to donate to them, given the terrible job they’ve done on this topic. I trusted them to bring nuance and clarity —- really liked what they did in response to the cash bail discussion in California —- but this was too much of a miss for me. I’m still a fan of the ACLU, even with their spotty record on gay rights, but it might just be a matter of time.
      - rootusrootus 5y ago
        I generally support the ACLU mission, but they have antagonized me ever since I started a recurring donation a few years ago. For reasons, I decided to stop the recurring donation, but ACLU is just like the NY Times and many other places -- easy to sign up, damn near impossible to get them to stop. E-mails, phone calls, nothing. Ultimately I just declared the card stolen and had it reissued with a new number. On top of that, at some point they must have asked if it was okay to contact me, and I must have inadvertently said yes, and now I get regular text messages from random people across the country asking if I will help out. About half the time it's for something in a state (like Georgia during the election) which is several thousand miles from where I live. No amount of begging has gotten this flow of unsolicited text messages to stop.
    - BTCOG 5y ago
      It's not fear though. Just watch how within the next five years or so encryption gets back doored. Mass surveillance is fully instated. Social credit score is implemented, and only state authorized programs may be installed upon approval to mobile devices and proprietary operating systems. Soon we will see The Ministry of Truth implemented. The past couple years the state is only after more power. Or, you can ignore reality and keep acting like everything is just normal and ok. Just as the continuous Middle-Eastern wars are designed, inflation will continue to increase to push all the middle class and lower into abject poverty and despotism is not very far away after that. Continuing to do these things slowly while dividing and confusing the mass of the public. This is no conspiracy whatsoever because this is exactly what is happening right this very moment. The most state power can be grabbed today via surveillance programs like that of the NSA/CIA and these false CSAM implementations "for the protection of the children." This is what the state has wanted, in every state, for 2,000 years. Increased government power and watch only goes one direction. What is very sad for me to see the past 20 years in tech is that if this is done slowly over decades and via confusion it seems very easy to get the mass of the non-thinking public to agree to illegal search and seizure, and to give up all freedoms and rights under a false guise of security. "Regardless of popular sanction, war is mass murder. Conscription is slavery, and taxation is robbery. The libertarian in short, is almost completely the child in the fable, pointing out insistently that the emperor has no clothes. Throughout the ages, the emperor has had a series of psuedo-clothes provided for him by the nation's intellectual caste. In past centuries, the intellectuals informed the public that the state or it's rulers were divine. Or at least, clothed in divine authority and therefore what might look to the naive and untutored eye as despotism, mass murder, and theft on a grand scale, was only the divine working it's benign and mysterious ways in the body politic. —Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty"
- aj3 5y ago
  Honestly, I’m starting to think that this is deliberate attack by opponents of e2ee that want to prevent iCloud going dark (right now Apple holds the keys just like every other cloud storage provider but after implementing these CSAM features they could transition to true e2ee).
- BTCOG 5y ago
  Division and confusion, and mixing of terms are direct strings of state and corporate control.
- tzs 5y ago
  The odd thing is that it doesn't benefit the EFF to conflate the two. The EFF's first article objecting to these features objected to the parental control on the grounds that if, say, I send your 12 or under kid a sex photo and your kid elects to continue after being warned the image might be harmful, and then elects to still continue after receiving a warning that if they do so their parent will be notified and see the image too, it is violating my privacy because I did not consent for the parents to see the sex pictures I'm sending to their kid. Now their objection seems to be that if I'm, say, a 12 or under gay kid who is not out to my parents, receive a sex image on my phone that might reveal I'm gay, and I elect to view that image after being explicitly told my parents will see it too and confirming that I still want to view it, I might get outed to my parents. Note that in both these scenarios the child knows their phone has parental controls enabled, has to go through two full screen dialogs that try to discourage them from viewing the image to view it, both of those have rejecting the photo as the highlighted option, and the second explicitly reminds them that if they view the photo their parents will be notified and shown a blurred version of the photo. And note that if they choose to reject the photo rather than view it, there is no parental notification. For years, privacy advocates (including the EFF) have said when governments wanted to legislate controls server side or at the ISP level to provide a safer net environment for young children that the right approach is to give parents the tools to ensure a safe net environment for their children. So now we are getting a parental control that goes out of its way to not notify parents or share a blurred photo with them unless the child explicitly chooses to view it knowing that this will happen--and they are objecting to that. After this it is hard to imagine any parental control system that the EFF would approve of and that is actually even remotely effective. It makes them look like an organization that is just going to raise knee jerk reactions to every proposed solution, nor matter how reasonable. When an organization raises objections to every attempt to solve real problems at some point policy makers stop caring what they have to say, and the EFF has either reached that point or is real close to it. They need to start suggesting alternate solutions to those problems if they want people that matter to listen to them.
hartator 5y ago
> But... it wouldn't. The iMessage feature doesn't expose the contents of your message to anyone else under any circumstance. It does if it contains the flagged content. When we say end-to-end, we mean that even Apple cannot know what is on the wire which won't be the case anymore.
- kemayo 5y ago
  No it doesn't. You're thinking about the iCloud Photo Library reporting. The Messages feature literally never sends any of your content to anyone, no matter how much CSAM you're sent.
wutbrodo 5y ago
> Apple really screwed up PR by launching the iMessage feature alongside the scanning-and-reporting iCloud Photos feature. There's so much confusion out there about this. It's possible that they determined that dealing with the backlash in one go would be easier than having two separate blowups. Most consumers have only fuzzy, vague senses of brands based on a poorly-understood game of Telephone linked to each news cycle. This only counts as "one" privacy ding against Apple for most people, whereas two separate news cycles would do much more damage to their reputation around privacy.

by kemayo 5y ago

joshstrange 5y ago

Let's also not pretend that some of this confusion done is 100% willfully by some of the news organizations reporting on this because it benefits them to conflate the two. We even see it a little from places like EFF who appear to believe their ends justify the means.

blitzar 5y ago
There are plenty of comments on HN that claim there are no details of what has been proposed while simultaneously claiming to have read the white paper. This is rapidly becoming a topic not worth reading more about due to the misinformation and shilling from all sides.
robertoandred 5y ago
The more fear and confusion the EFF can spread, the more donations they get.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  I agree, sadly. This prompted me to unsubscribe from them. In some ways it reminds me of the ACLU. Similar fixation on donations above all else, to the point of dark patterns. I still haven't managed to fully extricate myself from their pleas.
  - websites2023 5y ago
    I’m in the same boat. Unfortunately, I don’t see myself continuing to donate to them, given the terrible job they’ve done on this topic. I trusted them to bring nuance and clarity —- really liked what they did in response to the cash bail discussion in California —- but this was too much of a miss for me. I’m still a fan of the ACLU, even with their spotty record on gay rights, but it might just be a matter of time.
    - rootusrootus 5y ago
      I generally support the ACLU mission, but they have antagonized me ever since I started a recurring donation a few years ago. For reasons, I decided to stop the recurring donation, but ACLU is just like the NY Times and many other places -- easy to sign up, damn near impossible to get them to stop. E-mails, phone calls, nothing. Ultimately I just declared the card stolen and had it reissued with a new number. On top of that, at some point they must have asked if it was okay to contact me, and I must have inadvertently said yes, and now I get regular text messages from random people across the country asking if I will help out. About half the time it's for something in a state (like Georgia during the election) which is several thousand miles from where I live. No amount of begging has gotten this flow of unsolicited text messages to stop.
  - BTCOG 5y ago
    It's not fear though. Just watch how within the next five years or so encryption gets back doored. Mass surveillance is fully instated. Social credit score is implemented, and only state authorized programs may be installed upon approval to mobile devices and proprietary operating systems. Soon we will see The Ministry of Truth implemented. The past couple years the state is only after more power. Or, you can ignore reality and keep acting like everything is just normal and ok. Just as the continuous Middle-Eastern wars are designed, inflation will continue to increase to push all the middle class and lower into abject poverty and despotism is not very far away after that. Continuing to do these things slowly while dividing and confusing the mass of the public. This is no conspiracy whatsoever because this is exactly what is happening right this very moment. The most state power can be grabbed today via surveillance programs like that of the NSA/CIA and these false CSAM implementations "for the protection of the children." This is what the state has wanted, in every state, for 2,000 years. Increased government power and watch only goes one direction. What is very sad for me to see the past 20 years in tech is that if this is done slowly over decades and via confusion it seems very easy to get the mass of the non-thinking public to agree to illegal search and seizure, and to give up all freedoms and rights under a false guise of security. "Regardless of popular sanction, war is mass murder. Conscription is slavery, and taxation is robbery. The libertarian in short, is almost completely the child in the fable, pointing out insistently that the emperor has no clothes. Throughout the ages, the emperor has had a series of psuedo-clothes provided for him by the nation's intellectual caste. In past centuries, the intellectuals informed the public that the state or it's rulers were divine. Or at least, clothed in divine authority and therefore what might look to the naive and untutored eye as despotism, mass murder, and theft on a grand scale, was only the divine working it's benign and mysterious ways in the body politic. —Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty"
aj3 5y ago
Honestly, I’m starting to think that this is deliberate attack by opponents of e2ee that want to prevent iCloud going dark (right now Apple holds the keys just like every other cloud storage provider but after implementing these CSAM features they could transition to true e2ee).
BTCOG 5y ago
Division and confusion, and mixing of terms are direct strings of state and corporate control.
tzs 5y ago
The odd thing is that it doesn't benefit the EFF to conflate the two. The EFF's first article objecting to these features objected to the parental control on the grounds that if, say, I send your 12 or under kid a sex photo and your kid elects to continue after being warned the image might be harmful, and then elects to still continue after receiving a warning that if they do so their parent will be notified and see the image too, it is violating my privacy because I did not consent for the parents to see the sex pictures I'm sending to their kid. Now their objection seems to be that if I'm, say, a 12 or under gay kid who is not out to my parents, receive a sex image on my phone that might reveal I'm gay, and I elect to view that image after being explicitly told my parents will see it too and confirming that I still want to view it, I might get outed to my parents. Note that in both these scenarios the child knows their phone has parental controls enabled, has to go through two full screen dialogs that try to discourage them from viewing the image to view it, both of those have rejecting the photo as the highlighted option, and the second explicitly reminds them that if they view the photo their parents will be notified and shown a blurred version of the photo. And note that if they choose to reject the photo rather than view it, there is no parental notification. For years, privacy advocates (including the EFF) have said when governments wanted to legislate controls server side or at the ISP level to provide a safer net environment for young children that the right approach is to give parents the tools to ensure a safe net environment for their children. So now we are getting a parental control that goes out of its way to not notify parents or share a blurred photo with them unless the child explicitly chooses to view it knowing that this will happen--and they are objecting to that. After this it is hard to imagine any parental control system that the EFF would approve of and that is actually even remotely effective. It makes them look like an organization that is just going to raise knee jerk reactions to every proposed solution, nor matter how reasonable. When an organization raises objections to every attempt to solve real problems at some point policy makers stop caring what they have to say, and the EFF has either reached that point or is real close to it. They need to start suggesting alternate solutions to those problems if they want people that matter to listen to them.

hartator 5y ago

> But... it wouldn't. The iMessage feature doesn't expose the contents of your message to anyone else under any circumstance. It does if it contains the flagged content. When we say end-to-end, we mean that even Apple cannot know what is on the wire which won't be the case anymore.

kemayo 5y ago
No it doesn't. You're thinking about the iCloud Photo Library reporting. The Messages feature literally never sends any of your content to anyone, no matter how much CSAM you're sent.

wutbrodo 5y ago

> Apple really screwed up PR by launching the iMessage feature alongside the scanning-and-reporting iCloud Photos feature. There's so much confusion out there about this. It's possible that they determined that dealing with the backlash in one go would be easier than having two separate blowups. Most consumers have only fuzzy, vague senses of brands based on a poorly-understood game of Telephone linked to each news cycle. This only counts as "one" privacy ding against Apple for most people, whereas two separate news cycles would do much more damage to their reputation around privacy.