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Seems like this CSAM tech could be super useful in China for detecting winnie the pooh or other evidence of thought crime against the regime. Even if Apple does
by umvi 5y ago
Seems like this CSAM tech could be super useful in China for detecting winnie the pooh or other evidence of thought crime against the regime. Even if Apple doesn't end up rolling it out, I'm sure Huawei is taking careful notes.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- WesolyKubeczek 5y agoWhy detect it, if you can plant it?
- vkou 5y agoYou plant it to catch problem people that you already know about, you detect it to catch problem people that you don't know about.
- WesolyKubeczek 5y agoYou also plant stuff to have a handle on people you’d like to use.
- vageli 5y agoWhy not both? Now you don't need to wait for your planted material to come to light, an automated system will surface it for you.
- ribosometronome 5y agoSeems like an authoritarian government wanting to quash Winnie the Pooh memes would be better suited to using ML to detect them rather than having to rely on a list of known memes.
- alfalfasprout 5y agoWhy? Labor is extremely cheap in China-- they can easily hire tens of thousands of people to manually flag memes they don't like and add them to a list... they can then rely on ML augmented proximity hashes to do the actual detection (WeChat does this).
- vineyardmike 5y agoI think i read on HN a while ago that WeChat uses a similar hashing technique to scan photos being sent.
- frashelaw 5y agoHave you considered that maybe china isn't the 1984 bogeyman dystopia the corporate media told you it is, and that it's just hysteria to distract you from the real issues at home, with legitimized mass surveillance, corporate censorship, and militarized police?
- nicce 5y agoSystems like these are not hard to implement. Huawei could have already taken notes from McAfee's first AV engine. It's all about the decision. Even Dropbox is using quite similar scanning to identify how to sync all of your files to the cloud, by not re-uploading the whole file at specific intervals.
- nullc 5y agoApple clearly has millions invested in this system. The sophisticated cryptography for the private set intersection which is needed to keep the hash database concealed and unaccountable is far from trivial. Neuralhash, faulty as it is, is far from trivial.
- nicce 5y agoWhat I mean, that surveillance system is trivial to implement. (What the most are using as argument in here) This system is genius in terms of maintaining the user privacy and locking Apple out of your files. That is something that most refuse to see. They have invested a lot.
- nullc 5y agoI disagree. E2E encryption of files is widely implemented. Apple is years late to the game. Apple's innovation here isn't privacy, it is to compromise privacy while simultaneously shielding themselves and their data sources from accountability at the expense of even more privacy and risk of abuse. If the objective was maintaining the user's privacy they could use industry standard end to end encryption. If the objective was to offer somewhat more privacy than nothing while still acting as a vigilante crime fighter, they could make the user's software use a cleartext hash database and report the user when there are matches, and otherwise use industry standard end to end cryptography. Only when you add the requirement that the vigilante crime fighting must occur behind a mask-- that it must be cryptographiclally impossible to hold apple and its sources to account for the content of the database do you actually arrive at the need for substantial new investment. Yes, anyone can implement surveillance. Apple's innovation is kleptography. A surveillance infrastructure (somewhat) successfully disguised as privacy protecting cryptography.