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Wow, we made Apple blink. I did not see that coming. People like me who sold their iPhone and cancelled all services probably are a drop in the bucket, but it l

Wow, we made Apple blink. I did not see that coming. People like me who sold their iPhone and cancelled all services probably are a drop in the bucket, but it looks like the general public and the news picked up on this enough to get the ball rolling to make them step back. So now the question is in what 15.X update do they just sneak it in.

azalemeth 5y ago
Part of me wonders if the calculus includes either (a) the open letter signed by (effectively) ~10k verified developers [1], (b) the complaint letters from groups like the EFF [2, 3], or (c) expert and qualified input from their (presumably huge) marketing department... [1] https://appleprivacyletter.com/ https://appleprivacyletter.com/ [2] https://act.eff.org/action/tell-apple-don-t-scan-our-phones https://act.eff.org/action/tell-apple-don-t-scan-our-phones [3] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/apples-plan-think-different-about-encryption-opens-backdoor-your-private-life https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/apples-plan-think-diff...
- judge2020 5y ago
  Or D) employees who weren’t part of the discussions heard about it the day before the official announcement, and made a stink about it internally.
  - haswell 5y ago
    E) All of the above
    - lumost 5y ago
      F) They received requests to scan for other forms of content from various governments.
      - sslayer 5y ago
        G) Secret Pedo BoardMembers/Investors/Mutual Fund Manager threaten to dump all Apple Stock.
      - valkmit 5y ago
        Underrated comment right here
      - marcan_42 5y ago
        G) Turns out they can't know if they're scanning for other forms of content, since they delegate computing the hash lists of banned content to government organizations like NCMEC anyway.
        darwingr 5y ago
        So a hash for a public key used to encrypt something could be in there? Banned books? A video of unsavoury evidence to an institution?
        dave7 5y ago
        Yes indeed.
  - jtbayly 5y ago
    E) Their promise that they would only include scanning of images that appeared in multiple countries' databases. As of right now, is there even a database other than the one NCMEC has? I suspect they are waiting for the NCMEC to spin up its European branch.
    - josefx 5y ago
      They are probably just waiting for several countries to spin up their databases of gay porn and blasphemous / regime critical memes. Shouldn't be too hard to find two of those countries working on a shared "child abuse" database now that the feature has been widely publicized.
      - camgunz 5y ago
        Honestly, maybe that happened and they went "oh. shit." and now they're "delaying".
      - Animats 5y ago
        There's so much censorship now worldwide, and it's increasing. Russia doesn't allow promotion of the gay agenda. Parts of the Islamic world view criticism of Islam as a killing offense. China won't tolerate the flag of Taiwan, Falun Gong, or criticism of the Party. Afghanistan no longer allows music. A decade ago, all those things were on the Internet worldwide.
        ilamont 5y ago
        China is also cracking down on LGBTQ groups: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57759480 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57759480 Many of the closed WeChat accounts display messages saying that they had "violated" Internet regulations, without giving further details. The account names have also been deleted and just read "unnamed". "After receiving relevant complaints, all content has been blocked and the account has been suspended," the notice said. The crackdown is the latest example of what some call growing intolerance toward the LGBT community. Last year, Shanghai Pride week, modelled on Pride events in the West, was cancelled without explanation after 11 years of it going ahead. In 2019, the Oscar-winning Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody was released in Chinese cinemas, but references to the Queen singer's sexuality and AIDS diagnosis were censored. In 2018, Weibo said all posts related to homosexuality would be taken down, although it backtracked after massive outrage.
- koheripbal 5y ago
  More likely D) The regulatory threats from the EU.
  - gambiting 5y ago
    Wasn't the feature meant to be US only - at least for now anyway?
    - Mindwipe 5y ago
      Apple said themselves, there's only one iOS ROM, so it was there on everyone else's devices regardless.
      - FabHK 5y ago
        But enabled only for the US region initially. That is bad in itself, though, I think, insofar as it signals that the system can be switched on and off, and thus maybe configured, on a per-region basis, which does seem to open the door for government pressure and abuse.
  - threatofrain 5y ago
    The EU's mood is cloudy here, as there's also legislative pressure against child porn coming up this year.
- jug 5y ago
  The cite even researchers as leading to the decision. Maybe flaws with perceptual hashes? It took a mere day to discover a hash collision after reverse engineering the system. Granted, the colliding image looked like a grey mess, but I wonder how far a malicious party might get after a year.
  - mlac 5y ago
    I don't really understand the argument that was thrown out by many people: "Attackers will frame people by planting hash collisions on their phones!" So... a) a bad actor is going to target someone, and have the resources to generate enough collisions that(b) look like CP, but aren't CP? but are close enough (c) to pass human review and cause an investigation so (d) they need the hash collisions to look like CP, but not be real CP? or ???? If a bad actor wants to frame someone, it's easy to do this today - hack their system or home network, open it to the internet, place the photos, call the FBI and report an anonymous tip, with the URL where it is hosted and open to the internet. Don't need hash collisions. Hacking someone's iPhone (How do you get the photos on there without forensic logs that they were added?) or iCloud so that you can place hash collisions that look like crap and fail to pass the review doesn't make sense and leaves too much of a trail. Oh? And someone won't notice thousands of photos just added to their phone? A bigger threat would be deepfake CP. When that becomes a reality, it will be a mess, because an attacker could theoretically generate an unlimited amount of it, and it will be extremely difficult to tell if it is authentic. Those hashes wouldn't be in the CSAM database, but if the attacker put them out on a server to be taken down, they would get added eventually and then show up in a scan elsewhere. But I'd be pretty horrified (and definitely call my attorney, Apple, and local FBI field office) if thousands of CSAM images just showed up in my iPhone photo stream. Edit: Downvotes are fine, and I completely understand other arguments against this, but this one has just not made sense to me...
    - gunapologist99 5y ago
      This is a very simple attack to pull off; email someone with the colliding image embedded in the MIME document. Set height and width equal to zero or one pixel. Even if the user never actually sees it or marks it as spam, it's still on their device and in their email. For bonus points, spoof the "From" as from Apple. At the very least, they're getting SWATted.
- newbamboo 5y ago
  They ruined their reputation for being relatively secure devices. I’m done with them, for good. Anybody who cares about security has likely jumped ship now too. Normies will eventually ditch them when they realize most tech people have bailed. Unfortunately the best alternative, google, is even worse. Hopefully the loss of demand causes a decrease in device sales across the board. Landlines still work. Smartphones and their consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
Bud 5y ago
Apple doesn't "sneak in" stuff like this. That's complete bullshit. Could we at least discuss in good faith?
- post_break 5y ago
  Well I don't mean by doing it without telling everyone. I mean wait until it dies down, then just be like oh btw 15.X includes CSAM scanning as a change log bulletin.
  - haswell 5y ago
    Given the uproar on this change, and the fact that the uproar was big enough to cause this delay, can you imagine the bad press if they come back later and roll this out quietly? Editing to add: I think this will play out more like the butterfly keyboard debacle. They won’t ever really acknowledge how bad the original thing was, but they’ll return to a solution the community finds palatable (server side scanning), and wrap it up in a bow like they did with the “magic keyboard, now on our laptops”.
    - vxNsr 5y ago
      They just need to time it right.
- api 5y ago
  Google or (worse) Facebook would have just put this in with no press release. My read is that Apple is trying to placate governments by throwing them a bone without totally abandoning their privacy stance, hence the drive to put the scanning on the actual device so all your photos don't have to be shared as-is with Apple. That way they can encrypt iCloud but still keep the feds from accusing them (in bad faith) of being a child porn trading platform. The alternative is to keep iCloud unencrypted and scan in the cloud, which is what they and everyone else already does. One of the pieces of feedback they got though is that people are more okay with that than with scanning on the device. People expect that things that go to the cloud are no longer private unless you run some kind of local encryption that you control. The reason they don't care about photos not sent to iCloud is the trading platform angle. It's one thing to let people store shit on their own devices. It's another thing to be a large scale and easy to use secure channel that people can use to share CP. The nightmare scenario for Apple would be to become a de-facto standard in the CP underworld for sharing content. Sure people can use Tor, private VPNs and mesh networks, PGP, or many other things, but that requires a level of technical knowledge that greatly reduces the size of the audience. Maybe a better alternative for Apple would be to add iCloud encryption but to stipulate that any sharing of content disables encryption for the shared content. That way they could scan shared content only. For unshared content iCloud is basically just an encrypted backup.
teitoklien 5y ago
> People like me who sold their IPhone are a drop in the bucket I doubt it , they will bring this up again very soon , if they cancel it, they’ll get very bad press too. And second, a company that once shows its intention to breach your personal privacy while disregarding its user’s best interests altogether. Wont hesitate to do it again.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Apple could lose a million customers over this, but they still sold >200m a year in 2018 and beyond. https://www.statista.com/statistics/276306/global-apple-iphone-sales-since-fiscal-year-2007/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/276306/global-apple-ipho...
  - darksaints 5y ago
    The developer mindshare really matters to apple. As long as they are on apple devices, some significant fraction of them will be creating software for apple devices. Without 3rd party software, apple is toast.
    - defaultname 5y ago
      Do you believe that most developers are up in arms about this, ready to abandon the platform? I doubt more than a tiny fraction really care about this at all, and the hysterics on HN (threads brigaded by a small percentage of HN users) are not representative. Predictions of some massive sales drop -- or even a sales drop at all -- are deluded nonsense. Apple is delaying this, I suspect, because it confuses the privacy message: If every time they talk about privacy someone can make them look like hypocrites by pointing out the on-device scanning, well that's just ugly for Apple. I suspect the on-device scanning element is going to be removed and it'll be on ingress to iCloud, which is what I said on my very first post to this. It was ill-considered to do it on device given Apple's privacy push.
      - darksaints 5y ago
        Most? Probably not. But developers are more sensitive to privacy issues in general, because they work in the most privacy invasive industry that ever existed. They know how much corporations dig into your stuff, and they might have even implemented some of it. At least speaking personally, I know my purchasing behavior changed on Amazon when I worked for them and realized how much they tracked me. More importantly, there is an oligopoly in tech and up until now, only one of the manufacturers of tech devices cared about privacy. And to that extent, I wouldn't be surprised if vast majority of developers who care about privacy have biased themselves towards apple. And now they have a reason to treat apple like every other privacy invading company.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
headmelted 5y ago
Apple didn't blink. They just don't want the bad press hurting iPhone 13 sales. It'll go live around December when the Christmas sales push for iPhones is winding down and people are distracted with everything else going on.
- haswell 5y ago
  A more charitable take is that both are true. Apple blinked, and one of several large contributing factors (probably a very big one) is the upcoming iPhone launch. When the tech news cycle is dominated by bad press about a move like this, and every tech nerd community is discussing this topic almost daily, it would be insane for Apple not to take some notice. I know many are pessimistic about this, but Apple has learned from bad mistakes before. They rarely directly admit they're wrong, but conceding to pressure from the community is not unprecedented: see the return to the "Magic Keyboard" in their laptops. Edit: removed the word “never” and replaced it with “rarely directly”.
  - Bud 5y ago
    Could we please not say silly, easily-disproven things like Apple "never admit[s] they're wrong", when 10 seconds of Googling instantly gives the lie to that assertion? It might not happen every day, but it happens frequently enough that it's easy to find a lot of examples.
    - Bud 5y ago
      I expected the knee-jerk lazy downvotes from the usual suspects, so: Apple admits mistake, says it’s back in EPEAT https://channeldailynews.com/news/apple-admits-mistake-says-its-back-in-epeat/10691 https://channeldailynews.com/news/apple-admits-mistake-says-... Apple Admits the Mac Pro was a mess https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/4/15175994/apple-mac-pro-failure-admission https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/4/15175994/apple-mac-pro-fai... Apple Admits iPhone 7 Manufacturing Fault https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/feb/11/apple-iphone7-loop-disease-repair-fault https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/feb/11/apple-iphone7-... I could go on for pages, but I trust the point is made.
yyyk 5y ago
>Wow, we made Apple blink. Did we? I suspect the real issue the original client-side proposal had a lot of holes. What if the bad guys upload CSAM which hasn't been tagged by NCMEC yet? What if they then delete it from the device (but keep it on iCloud)? Or what if they zip the CSAM images and backup that? In order to be even semi-effective, the client-side scanning has to be more invasive, or they have to implement server-side scanning too. Apple may well be looking whether they can implement this scanning without even more backlash.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  I don't think you're right. Apple didn't care about CSAM policing, it's just they weren't opposed to it and throwing governments a little bit of what they wanted to make them shut up. They thought this through very thoroughly. I read the whitepapers they put out on it. Clearly this wasn't done overnight by a confederacy of dunces. I think they thought they were picking a middle ground on surveillance and privacy (clearly they weren't as they broke the 4th wall of "this is my damn iphone you're scanning on!") . Anyway, they didn't want to be the police and they aren't going to be doing more to police your device as you are pointing out. They never cared if they caught anyone, just trying to make the US government a bit happier.
  - yyyk 5y ago
    Apple may have thought this thorough technically, but politically I find it very unlikely the proposed method is a sufficiently effective scanning. Sooner or later government and NCMEC will push them to complete the feature (understandably so from their POV), and when they do, Apple will have to expand scanning. Apple may have already been pressured to do so. Sometimes choosing the middle ground is like choosing to drive on the white line in the middle of the road as a 'compromise' between the lanes.
brundolf 5y ago
It was a torpedo to the heart of the privacy marketing campaign they've spent who-knows-how-much-money building up over the past several years. That translates directly to wasted dollars, which they do care about.
- echelon 5y ago
  Well done, screeching voices!
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  But isn't their privacy marketing: we will protect you from abusive surveillance capitalists, not we will protect you from state level actors?
  - xvector 5y ago
    privacy is privacy, you can't pretend to care about it while at the same time pushing something like this through
    - wintermutestwin 5y ago
      >privacy is privacy Are you asking Apple to come out and say that they are supporting privacy against state-level actors? After snowyD, why would anyone believe that anyway? I'm not advocating against or for - I'm only wanting to add more clarity to the discussion because I think it is an important distinction that is often left out.
  - lrem 5y ago
    Wasn't there a very public "no, FBI, you cannot get the shooter's phone contents"?
jimbob45 5y ago
>People like me who sold their iPhone and cancelled all services probably are a drop in the bucket Yeah, very few have the financial independence to be able to do something like that. However, over the next few years when everyone gets their free upgrades, I imagine we'll see some slower, yet more robust, switching.
- rconti 5y ago
  Financial independence to... spend less money?
  - post_break 5y ago
    Most people finance their phones. To sell them means to pay them off which is extremely hard for most people. I had the luxury of paying off my phone, and buying another while waiting to sell my current phone. In that timeline it was about $2,000 in cashflow. So yeah, I'm blessed to be able to do so at the drop of a hat.
    - rconti 5y ago
      Gotcha, yeah, I was focusing on the "sell phone / cancel services" side and didn't even think of the prerequisite to be able to sell the phone. (and, i guess, buy a new one before you ship your old one off!)
- Grustaf 5y ago
  Just like people stopped using google and facebook because they also scan for CSAM?
istingray 5y ago
Congrats on selling your iPhone so fast. I managed to purchase a System76 laptop in the meantime, typing from it now. The cat is out of the bag. You and I have realized Apple can make these type of changes whenever they want. I'm disappointed to report that Linux needs a lot of improvement to be viable for most people. I'm forging ahead, donating to open source software and hardware projects, filing bug reports, and generally bringing the Mac spirit to Linux. "It just works." What phone did you switch to?
- pshirshov 5y ago
  Buy a Pixel and install Calyx or Graphene with sandboxed Play Services.
  - RussianCow 5y ago
    How does sandboxing Play Services compare with using microG?
    - pshirshov 5y ago
      Well, push notifications are lot more reliable, safetynet passes basic check and app do not complain about play services issues. But network location provider doesn't work, that's an issue.
  - istingray 5y ago
    Is Pixel open hardware? I'm assuming not but props to them if so.
    - pshirshov 5y ago
      It's not. Unfortunately there is little open hardware around. Though proprietary hardware plus mostly open OS is better than proprietary everything.
- rconti 5y ago
  > I'm disappointed to report that Linux needs a lot of improvement to be viable for most people. I'm continually surprised that people are continually surprised by this. I'm sure this post will get a lot of anecdotal replies; of course it can work fine for many people, but that's not the point. I used it exclusively on the desktop from 1995 to 2002. I could make it work for me, today, if I wanted to. > You and I have realized Apple can make these type of changes whenever they want. Was this not obvious? I'm pretty shocked that, for example, Docker can decide to change their license, and now in a few months a bunch of companies owe them money for every single user they have, even if the users don't do anything different. If they opened the license agreement and chose NOT to upgrade. If they never use the software again. But bam, terms changed, now you owe us money.
tyingq 5y ago
I have to wonder if the sequence was somewhat deliberate on Apple's part. Like: - The government is pressuring us to do things that don't fit with our "privacy is good" sales pitch - Let's propose something, but in a ham-handed enough way that it gets a ton of public push back - Now we can argue our point with the government in a way that has already has more public support and existing discourse/debate Somewhat risky though, since it hurt their public image.
- labcomputer 5y ago
  Then why wouldn't they say, "the government asked us to do this"? Apple is taking all the negative publicity this way. My favorite theory is this: Apple wants to create a chilling effect on reverse engineering iOS. They're starting to catch regulatory attention and lost their recent suit against Corellium. By putting neural hashes in the encrypted OS image, they can accuse anyone who reverse engineers iOS of: 1. Being in cahoots with child abusers 2. Knowingly possessing CSAM I would hope that most courts would see through that paper thin logic, but the idea would be simply to introduce enough doubt that most reverse engineers don't want to risk it.
  - mackrevinack 5y ago
    they could be under a gag order which would mean if they did mention anything about the government they could get into deep shit
    - upbeat_general 5y ago
      I can't imagine how the gag order would allow Apple to announce a CSAM scanning system but not announce that the government forced them to. What basis could there be for that? And I'd be even more skeptical if this originated from a single case of abuse.
    - labcomputer 5y ago
      Sure, but look at the context. The hypothesis was that Apple was doing this to create negotiating leverage with some three letter agency. How does Apple get leverage if Apple gets all the negative publicity, and can't even say "TLA made us do it"?
sneak 5y ago
The fact that they are going to sneak this backdoor in the back door later against the wishes of their customers is sufficient for me to decide that Apple has abandoned any values they may have once had. I won't be purchasing any more iPhones, and I've had every one.
A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
Just before everyone starts high-fiving each other, even the release itself brands it as a delay. I accept that it is a positive development, but do not read as anything but that: a temporary delay to let the furor die.
albertop 5y ago
Are you sure they did? Or it’s just a doge to avoiding bad press at the time they getting ready to introduce new devices.
rajacombinator 5y ago
Yep they’ll just quietly backdoor it in next time.
gojomo 5y ago
A "blink", or the iterative strategy of a skilled manipulator/abuser/groomer? Push to the level of their target's discomfort, then back off – without respecting the "no!", pretending to hear only "not now". Come back later from a superficially-different angle, when the victim's defenses are down. Couch the next attempt, or the next, or the next, in some combination of feigned sweetness ("but I waited & changed things for you"), or esteem-attacks ("you're so nasty you deserve this"), or inevitability ("this is going to happen whether you like it or not, so stop fighting").
- float4 5y ago
  Yeah, this has been done many times before by other tech companies. Facebook being the prime example.
- delaaxe 5y ago
  Don't forget public safety matters ("but COVID!")
  - gojomo 5y ago
    "We're sorry to inform you that Apple iCompliance AI Eyes, as of last night's updated version 16.4.2, has identified the following violations of laws & emergency edicts in your recent local photo roll: • Unmasked proximity with non-household member • Unlicensed gathering of more than 6 people • Association with unidentifiable individuals (no faceprints on record) These are your 2nd, 3rd, and 4th strikes so your phone has been disabled and you are now under arrest. Do not leave your immediate vicinity. As always, keep your phone on, charged, and in your personal possession at all times. Due to large violation volumes, we are currently experiencing long physical arrest team hold times. Your arresting agents should arrive at your location in approximately... 5... hours. Thank you for using Apple products, the leaders in Social Safety. 'Better Safe – Or You'll Be Sorry!'™"
- new_realist 5y ago
  Wow, this is unhinged.
5faulker 5y ago
Hmm... this is getting more serious with potential ramifications many years down the line.
ak391 5y ago
also check out the neural hash demo here to test it out on your own images https://huggingface.co/spaces/aliabd/generate-neural-hash-collision https://huggingface.co/spaces/aliabd/generate-neural-hash-co...
hutzlibu 5y ago
"So now the question is in what 15.X update do they just sneak it in." I think they cannot really sneak it in. Some people do read updated TOS. And I think a "featurechange" like this, requires one. And yes, the question will be, if the broad attention to the topic can be brought back on to it, if that happens. And they clearly say it will come, only with some "improvements" (but I cannot think of any improvements, that can be made, without abondoning the basic concept): "we have decided to take additional time over the coming months to collect input and make improvements before releasing these critically important child safety features"
- Zak 5y ago
  > I cannot think of any improvements, that can be made, without abondoning the basic concept The concept of scanning for CSAM during the upload process, or the concept of making the user's device do it? Apple could do the former on their own servers and essentially nobody would be upset.
  - hutzlibu 5y ago
    The basic concept of Apple running private pictures through an KI algorithm to detect something worthy of investigation. The algorithms never work 100% right. That means there will be always humans in the loop, sorting through false positives etc. which means probably very private pictures here in this context. And to the end user it does not matter, whether this happens on the server or on their device. The message is: your pictures are not private with apple.
    - Zak 5y ago
      It matters very much with regard to the distinction between yours and theirs. I strongly believe the operating system of your device should never actively work against your interests, and checking whether you're using the device to commit a crime, then reporting it to the device manufacturer who will tell the government is potentially strongly against your interests. If that's too abstract, it matters in that it's a foothold for further scanning of data on your device. Without this system, if a state wanted to pressure Apple to create spyware and add it to their operating system to look for something else, that would have been easy to refuse. With this system, the spyware is already there, and despite Apple's protests to the contrary, it's just a matter of a few tweaks to repurpose it.
sharken 5y ago
Generate enough bad press for long enough works wonders for creating change. The battle is not over though, as you say Apple might include the feature unchanged in a later release. If they do, should come as no surprise that they will lose a lot of business. The correct business decision will be to cancel the feature and double down on the privacy angle.
spacebear 5y ago
My bet is they wait a few months and quietly announce that they’ll do the scanning on the iCloud servers instead. That would be relatively uncontroversial in the tech press and probably never make it to the mainstream press.
babypuncher 5y ago
I think the internal backlash helped a lot. The initial move was very contrary to the culture Apple has cultivated over the years and it did not go over well with them.
- bobbytit 5y ago
  Yeah their orig mac ad was 1984 will not be like 1984. They were just out by 37 years.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
"So now the question is in what 15.x update do they just sneak it in." It would be nice if the general public and the news therefore now picked up on the issue of opaque "automatic updates". To date, they have been trained to always every update without question. Conventional wisdom: Never, ever question any particular automatic update. Don't think, just enable. All updates are created equal. Assumptions: Every update is for users benefit. Software companies never operate out of self-interest. There are no trade-offs. Whats good for them is good for users and vice versa. Theres no reason for end users to trial updated versions of software ("A/B test") before deciding to use them "in production". Thought experiment: User installs Software from Company to perform "Function #1". Company makes changes to Software, described as "Fixes and other changes." Software now performs Function #1 plus Function #2. User allows new software to be installed automatically. (Automatic updates enabled per "expert" advice.") When user downloaded and installed Software she based her desicion to use Software on its ability to perform Function #1; however, did she have any interest in Function #2. Did she agree to Function #2. Company says yes. Developers say yes. What does User say. The license agreeement places no limits on what might comprise Function #2. It could be anything. It could have no benefit whatsoever for User. Moreover, Company is under no oblgation to disclose Function #2 to User. With automatic updates, Company is free to keep changing Software. User originally chose Software for Function #1 but Software may look very different after many "automatic updates". Would she choose it again in its current state. Segue to discussion of "lock-in".
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  s/always/& accept/
gjs278 5y ago
enjoy being a green bubble in people’s texts now
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ksec 5y ago
I posted on HN [1] that I really wish they stand ground, it makes decision on Apple a lot easier. Now they wont. Half of the people will forgive them, the rest will most likely forget about it in a few years time. But to me, it did at least look like this scared the shit out of Apple PR. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28221869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28221869

azalemeth 5y ago

Part of me wonders if the calculus includes either (a) the open letter signed by (effectively) ~10k verified developers [1], (b) the complaint letters from groups like the EFF [2, 3], or (c) expert and qualified input from their (presumably huge) marketing department... [1] https://appleprivacyletter.com/ https://appleprivacyletter.com/ [2] https://act.eff.org/action/tell-apple-don-t-scan-our-phones https://act.eff.org/action/tell-apple-don-t-scan-our-phones [3] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/apples-plan-think-different-about-encryption-opens-backdoor-your-private-life https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/apples-plan-think-diff...

judge2020 5y ago
Or D) employees who weren’t part of the discussions heard about it the day before the official announcement, and made a stink about it internally.
- haswell 5y ago
  E) All of the above
  - lumost 5y ago
    F) They received requests to scan for other forms of content from various governments.
    - sslayer 5y ago
      G) Secret Pedo BoardMembers/Investors/Mutual Fund Manager threaten to dump all Apple Stock.
    - valkmit 5y ago
      Underrated comment right here
    - marcan_42 5y ago
      G) Turns out they can't know if they're scanning for other forms of content, since they delegate computing the hash lists of banned content to government organizations like NCMEC anyway.
      - darwingr 5y ago
        So a hash for a public key used to encrypt something could be in there? Banned books? A video of unsavoury evidence to an institution?
        dave7 5y ago
        Yes indeed.
- jtbayly 5y ago
  E) Their promise that they would only include scanning of images that appeared in multiple countries' databases. As of right now, is there even a database other than the one NCMEC has? I suspect they are waiting for the NCMEC to spin up its European branch.
  - josefx 5y ago
    They are probably just waiting for several countries to spin up their databases of gay porn and blasphemous / regime critical memes. Shouldn't be too hard to find two of those countries working on a shared "child abuse" database now that the feature has been widely publicized.
    - camgunz 5y ago
      Honestly, maybe that happened and they went "oh. shit." and now they're "delaying".
    - Animats 5y ago
      There's so much censorship now worldwide, and it's increasing. Russia doesn't allow promotion of the gay agenda. Parts of the Islamic world view criticism of Islam as a killing offense. China won't tolerate the flag of Taiwan, Falun Gong, or criticism of the Party. Afghanistan no longer allows music. A decade ago, all those things were on the Internet worldwide.
      - ilamont 5y ago
        China is also cracking down on LGBTQ groups: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57759480 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57759480 Many of the closed WeChat accounts display messages saying that they had "violated" Internet regulations, without giving further details. The account names have also been deleted and just read "unnamed". "After receiving relevant complaints, all content has been blocked and the account has been suspended," the notice said. The crackdown is the latest example of what some call growing intolerance toward the LGBT community. Last year, Shanghai Pride week, modelled on Pride events in the West, was cancelled without explanation after 11 years of it going ahead. In 2019, the Oscar-winning Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody was released in Chinese cinemas, but references to the Queen singer's sexuality and AIDS diagnosis were censored. In 2018, Weibo said all posts related to homosexuality would be taken down, although it backtracked after massive outrage.
koheripbal 5y ago
More likely D) The regulatory threats from the EU.
- gambiting 5y ago
  Wasn't the feature meant to be US only - at least for now anyway?
  - Mindwipe 5y ago
    Apple said themselves, there's only one iOS ROM, so it was there on everyone else's devices regardless.
    - FabHK 5y ago
      But enabled only for the US region initially. That is bad in itself, though, I think, insofar as it signals that the system can be switched on and off, and thus maybe configured, on a per-region basis, which does seem to open the door for government pressure and abuse.
- threatofrain 5y ago
  The EU's mood is cloudy here, as there's also legislative pressure against child porn coming up this year.
jug 5y ago
The cite even researchers as leading to the decision. Maybe flaws with perceptual hashes? It took a mere day to discover a hash collision after reverse engineering the system. Granted, the colliding image looked like a grey mess, but I wonder how far a malicious party might get after a year.
- mlac 5y ago
  I don't really understand the argument that was thrown out by many people: "Attackers will frame people by planting hash collisions on their phones!" So... a) a bad actor is going to target someone, and have the resources to generate enough collisions that(b) look like CP, but aren't CP? but are close enough (c) to pass human review and cause an investigation so (d) they need the hash collisions to look like CP, but not be real CP? or ???? If a bad actor wants to frame someone, it's easy to do this today - hack their system or home network, open it to the internet, place the photos, call the FBI and report an anonymous tip, with the URL where it is hosted and open to the internet. Don't need hash collisions. Hacking someone's iPhone (How do you get the photos on there without forensic logs that they were added?) or iCloud so that you can place hash collisions that look like crap and fail to pass the review doesn't make sense and leaves too much of a trail. Oh? And someone won't notice thousands of photos just added to their phone? A bigger threat would be deepfake CP. When that becomes a reality, it will be a mess, because an attacker could theoretically generate an unlimited amount of it, and it will be extremely difficult to tell if it is authentic. Those hashes wouldn't be in the CSAM database, but if the attacker put them out on a server to be taken down, they would get added eventually and then show up in a scan elsewhere. But I'd be pretty horrified (and definitely call my attorney, Apple, and local FBI field office) if thousands of CSAM images just showed up in my iPhone photo stream. Edit: Downvotes are fine, and I completely understand other arguments against this, but this one has just not made sense to me...
  - gunapologist99 5y ago
    This is a very simple attack to pull off; email someone with the colliding image embedded in the MIME document. Set height and width equal to zero or one pixel. Even if the user never actually sees it or marks it as spam, it's still on their device and in their email. For bonus points, spoof the "From" as from Apple. At the very least, they're getting SWATted.
newbamboo 5y ago
They ruined their reputation for being relatively secure devices. I’m done with them, for good. Anybody who cares about security has likely jumped ship now too. Normies will eventually ditch them when they realize most tech people have bailed. Unfortunately the best alternative, google, is even worse. Hopefully the loss of demand causes a decrease in device sales across the board. Landlines still work. Smartphones and their consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

Bud 5y ago

Apple doesn't "sneak in" stuff like this. That's complete bullshit. Could we at least discuss in good faith?

post_break 5y ago
Well I don't mean by doing it without telling everyone. I mean wait until it dies down, then just be like oh btw 15.X includes CSAM scanning as a change log bulletin.
- haswell 5y ago
  Given the uproar on this change, and the fact that the uproar was big enough to cause this delay, can you imagine the bad press if they come back later and roll this out quietly? Editing to add: I think this will play out more like the butterfly keyboard debacle. They won’t ever really acknowledge how bad the original thing was, but they’ll return to a solution the community finds palatable (server side scanning), and wrap it up in a bow like they did with the “magic keyboard, now on our laptops”.
  - vxNsr 5y ago
    They just need to time it right.
api 5y ago
Google or (worse) Facebook would have just put this in with no press release. My read is that Apple is trying to placate governments by throwing them a bone without totally abandoning their privacy stance, hence the drive to put the scanning on the actual device so all your photos don't have to be shared as-is with Apple. That way they can encrypt iCloud but still keep the feds from accusing them (in bad faith) of being a child porn trading platform. The alternative is to keep iCloud unencrypted and scan in the cloud, which is what they and everyone else already does. One of the pieces of feedback they got though is that people are more okay with that than with scanning on the device. People expect that things that go to the cloud are no longer private unless you run some kind of local encryption that you control. The reason they don't care about photos not sent to iCloud is the trading platform angle. It's one thing to let people store shit on their own devices. It's another thing to be a large scale and easy to use secure channel that people can use to share CP. The nightmare scenario for Apple would be to become a de-facto standard in the CP underworld for sharing content. Sure people can use Tor, private VPNs and mesh networks, PGP, or many other things, but that requires a level of technical knowledge that greatly reduces the size of the audience. Maybe a better alternative for Apple would be to add iCloud encryption but to stipulate that any sharing of content disables encryption for the shared content. That way they could scan shared content only. For unshared content iCloud is basically just an encrypted backup.

teitoklien 5y ago

> People like me who sold their IPhone are a drop in the bucket I doubt it , they will bring this up again very soon , if they cancel it, they’ll get very bad press too. And second, a company that once shows its intention to breach your personal privacy while disregarding its user’s best interests altogether. Wont hesitate to do it again.

judge2020 5y ago
Apple could lose a million customers over this, but they still sold >200m a year in 2018 and beyond. https://www.statista.com/statistics/276306/global-apple-iphone-sales-since-fiscal-year-2007/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/276306/global-apple-ipho...
- darksaints 5y ago
  The developer mindshare really matters to apple. As long as they are on apple devices, some significant fraction of them will be creating software for apple devices. Without 3rd party software, apple is toast.
  - defaultname 5y ago
    Do you believe that most developers are up in arms about this, ready to abandon the platform? I doubt more than a tiny fraction really care about this at all, and the hysterics on HN (threads brigaded by a small percentage of HN users) are not representative. Predictions of some massive sales drop -- or even a sales drop at all -- are deluded nonsense. Apple is delaying this, I suspect, because it confuses the privacy message: If every time they talk about privacy someone can make them look like hypocrites by pointing out the on-device scanning, well that's just ugly for Apple. I suspect the on-device scanning element is going to be removed and it'll be on ingress to iCloud, which is what I said on my very first post to this. It was ill-considered to do it on device given Apple's privacy push.
    - darksaints 5y ago
      Most? Probably not. But developers are more sensitive to privacy issues in general, because they work in the most privacy invasive industry that ever existed. They know how much corporations dig into your stuff, and they might have even implemented some of it. At least speaking personally, I know my purchasing behavior changed on Amazon when I worked for them and realized how much they tracked me. More importantly, there is an oligopoly in tech and up until now, only one of the manufacturers of tech devices cared about privacy. And to that extent, I wouldn't be surprised if vast majority of developers who care about privacy have biased themselves towards apple. And now they have a reason to treat apple like every other privacy invading company.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

headmelted 5y ago

Apple didn't blink. They just don't want the bad press hurting iPhone 13 sales. It'll go live around December when the Christmas sales push for iPhones is winding down and people are distracted with everything else going on.

haswell 5y ago
A more charitable take is that both are true. Apple blinked, and one of several large contributing factors (probably a very big one) is the upcoming iPhone launch. When the tech news cycle is dominated by bad press about a move like this, and every tech nerd community is discussing this topic almost daily, it would be insane for Apple not to take some notice. I know many are pessimistic about this, but Apple has learned from bad mistakes before. They rarely directly admit they're wrong, but conceding to pressure from the community is not unprecedented: see the return to the "Magic Keyboard" in their laptops. Edit: removed the word “never” and replaced it with “rarely directly”.
- Bud 5y ago
  Could we please not say silly, easily-disproven things like Apple "never admit[s] they're wrong", when 10 seconds of Googling instantly gives the lie to that assertion? It might not happen every day, but it happens frequently enough that it's easy to find a lot of examples.
  - Bud 5y ago
    I expected the knee-jerk lazy downvotes from the usual suspects, so: Apple admits mistake, says it’s back in EPEAT https://channeldailynews.com/news/apple-admits-mistake-says-its-back-in-epeat/10691 https://channeldailynews.com/news/apple-admits-mistake-says-... Apple Admits the Mac Pro was a mess https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/4/15175994/apple-mac-pro-failure-admission https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/4/15175994/apple-mac-pro-fai... Apple Admits iPhone 7 Manufacturing Fault https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/feb/11/apple-iphone7-loop-disease-repair-fault https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/feb/11/apple-iphone7-... I could go on for pages, but I trust the point is made.

yyyk 5y ago

>Wow, we made Apple blink. Did we? I suspect the real issue the original client-side proposal had a lot of holes. What if the bad guys upload CSAM which hasn't been tagged by NCMEC yet? What if they then delete it from the device (but keep it on iCloud)? Or what if they zip the CSAM images and backup that? In order to be even semi-effective, the client-side scanning has to be more invasive, or they have to implement server-side scanning too. Apple may well be looking whether they can implement this scanning without even more backlash.

stjohnswarts 5y ago
I don't think you're right. Apple didn't care about CSAM policing, it's just they weren't opposed to it and throwing governments a little bit of what they wanted to make them shut up. They thought this through very thoroughly. I read the whitepapers they put out on it. Clearly this wasn't done overnight by a confederacy of dunces. I think they thought they were picking a middle ground on surveillance and privacy (clearly they weren't as they broke the 4th wall of "this is my damn iphone you're scanning on!") . Anyway, they didn't want to be the police and they aren't going to be doing more to police your device as you are pointing out. They never cared if they caught anyone, just trying to make the US government a bit happier.
- yyyk 5y ago
  Apple may have thought this thorough technically, but politically I find it very unlikely the proposed method is a sufficiently effective scanning. Sooner or later government and NCMEC will push them to complete the feature (understandably so from their POV), and when they do, Apple will have to expand scanning. Apple may have already been pressured to do so. Sometimes choosing the middle ground is like choosing to drive on the white line in the middle of the road as a 'compromise' between the lanes.

brundolf 5y ago

It was a torpedo to the heart of the privacy marketing campaign they've spent who-knows-how-much-money building up over the past several years. That translates directly to wasted dollars, which they do care about.

echelon 5y ago
Well done, screeching voices!
wintermutestwin 5y ago
But isn't their privacy marketing: we will protect you from abusive surveillance capitalists, not we will protect you from state level actors?
- xvector 5y ago
  privacy is privacy, you can't pretend to care about it while at the same time pushing something like this through
  - wintermutestwin 5y ago
    >privacy is privacy Are you asking Apple to come out and say that they are supporting privacy against state-level actors? After snowyD, why would anyone believe that anyway? I'm not advocating against or for - I'm only wanting to add more clarity to the discussion because I think it is an important distinction that is often left out.
- lrem 5y ago
  Wasn't there a very public "no, FBI, you cannot get the shooter's phone contents"?

jimbob45 5y ago

>People like me who sold their iPhone and cancelled all services probably are a drop in the bucket Yeah, very few have the financial independence to be able to do something like that. However, over the next few years when everyone gets their free upgrades, I imagine we'll see some slower, yet more robust, switching.

rconti 5y ago
Financial independence to... spend less money?
- post_break 5y ago
  Most people finance their phones. To sell them means to pay them off which is extremely hard for most people. I had the luxury of paying off my phone, and buying another while waiting to sell my current phone. In that timeline it was about $2,000 in cashflow. So yeah, I'm blessed to be able to do so at the drop of a hat.
  - rconti 5y ago
    Gotcha, yeah, I was focusing on the "sell phone / cancel services" side and didn't even think of the prerequisite to be able to sell the phone. (and, i guess, buy a new one before you ship your old one off!)
Grustaf 5y ago
Just like people stopped using google and facebook because they also scan for CSAM?

istingray 5y ago

Congrats on selling your iPhone so fast. I managed to purchase a System76 laptop in the meantime, typing from it now. The cat is out of the bag. You and I have realized Apple can make these type of changes whenever they want. I'm disappointed to report that Linux needs a lot of improvement to be viable for most people. I'm forging ahead, donating to open source software and hardware projects, filing bug reports, and generally bringing the Mac spirit to Linux. "It just works." What phone did you switch to?

pshirshov 5y ago
Buy a Pixel and install Calyx or Graphene with sandboxed Play Services.
- RussianCow 5y ago
  How does sandboxing Play Services compare with using microG?
  - pshirshov 5y ago
    Well, push notifications are lot more reliable, safetynet passes basic check and app do not complain about play services issues. But network location provider doesn't work, that's an issue.
- istingray 5y ago
  Is Pixel open hardware? I'm assuming not but props to them if so.
  - pshirshov 5y ago
    It's not. Unfortunately there is little open hardware around. Though proprietary hardware plus mostly open OS is better than proprietary everything.
rconti 5y ago
> I'm disappointed to report that Linux needs a lot of improvement to be viable for most people. I'm continually surprised that people are continually surprised by this. I'm sure this post will get a lot of anecdotal replies; of course it can work fine for many people, but that's not the point. I used it exclusively on the desktop from 1995 to 2002. I could make it work for me, today, if I wanted to. > You and I have realized Apple can make these type of changes whenever they want. Was this not obvious? I'm pretty shocked that, for example, Docker can decide to change their license, and now in a few months a bunch of companies owe them money for every single user they have, even if the users don't do anything different. If they opened the license agreement and chose NOT to upgrade. If they never use the software again. But bam, terms changed, now you owe us money.

tyingq 5y ago

I have to wonder if the sequence was somewhat deliberate on Apple's part. Like: - The government is pressuring us to do things that don't fit with our "privacy is good" sales pitch - Let's propose something, but in a ham-handed enough way that it gets a ton of public push back - Now we can argue our point with the government in a way that has already has more public support and existing discourse/debate Somewhat risky though, since it hurt their public image.

labcomputer 5y ago
Then why wouldn't they say, "the government asked us to do this"? Apple is taking all the negative publicity this way. My favorite theory is this: Apple wants to create a chilling effect on reverse engineering iOS. They're starting to catch regulatory attention and lost their recent suit against Corellium. By putting neural hashes in the encrypted OS image, they can accuse anyone who reverse engineers iOS of: 1. Being in cahoots with child abusers 2. Knowingly possessing CSAM I would hope that most courts would see through that paper thin logic, but the idea would be simply to introduce enough doubt that most reverse engineers don't want to risk it.
- mackrevinack 5y ago
  they could be under a gag order which would mean if they did mention anything about the government they could get into deep shit
  - upbeat_general 5y ago
    I can't imagine how the gag order would allow Apple to announce a CSAM scanning system but not announce that the government forced them to. What basis could there be for that? And I'd be even more skeptical if this originated from a single case of abuse.
  - labcomputer 5y ago
    Sure, but look at the context. The hypothesis was that Apple was doing this to create negotiating leverage with some three letter agency. How does Apple get leverage if Apple gets all the negative publicity, and can't even say "TLA made us do it"?

sneak 5y ago

The fact that they are going to sneak this backdoor in the back door later against the wishes of their customers is sufficient for me to decide that Apple has abandoned any values they may have once had. I won't be purchasing any more iPhones, and I've had every one.

A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago

Just before everyone starts high-fiving each other, even the release itself brands it as a delay. I accept that it is a positive development, but do not read as anything but that: a temporary delay to let the furor die.

albertop 5y ago

Are you sure they did? Or it’s just a doge to avoiding bad press at the time they getting ready to introduce new devices.

rajacombinator 5y ago

Yep they’ll just quietly backdoor it in next time.

gojomo 5y ago

A "blink", or the iterative strategy of a skilled manipulator/abuser/groomer? Push to the level of their target's discomfort, then back off – without respecting the "no!", pretending to hear only "not now". Come back later from a superficially-different angle, when the victim's defenses are down. Couch the next attempt, or the next, or the next, in some combination of feigned sweetness ("but I waited & changed things for you"), or esteem-attacks ("you're so nasty you deserve this"), or inevitability ("this is going to happen whether you like it or not, so stop fighting").

float4 5y ago
Yeah, this has been done many times before by other tech companies. Facebook being the prime example.
delaaxe 5y ago
Don't forget public safety matters ("but COVID!")
- gojomo 5y ago
  "We're sorry to inform you that Apple iCompliance AI Eyes, as of last night's updated version 16.4.2, has identified the following violations of laws & emergency edicts in your recent local photo roll: • Unmasked proximity with non-household member • Unlicensed gathering of more than 6 people • Association with unidentifiable individuals (no faceprints on record) These are your 2nd, 3rd, and 4th strikes so your phone has been disabled and you are now under arrest. Do not leave your immediate vicinity. As always, keep your phone on, charged, and in your personal possession at all times. Due to large violation volumes, we are currently experiencing long physical arrest team hold times. Your arresting agents should arrive at your location in approximately... 5... hours. Thank you for using Apple products, the leaders in Social Safety. 'Better Safe – Or You'll Be Sorry!'™"
new_realist 5y ago
Wow, this is unhinged.

5faulker 5y ago

Hmm... this is getting more serious with potential ramifications many years down the line.

ak391 5y ago

also check out the neural hash demo here to test it out on your own images https://huggingface.co/spaces/aliabd/generate-neural-hash-collision https://huggingface.co/spaces/aliabd/generate-neural-hash-co...

hutzlibu 5y ago

"So now the question is in what 15.X update do they just sneak it in." I think they cannot really sneak it in. Some people do read updated TOS. And I think a "featurechange" like this, requires one. And yes, the question will be, if the broad attention to the topic can be brought back on to it, if that happens. And they clearly say it will come, only with some "improvements" (but I cannot think of any improvements, that can be made, without abondoning the basic concept): "we have decided to take additional time over the coming months to collect input and make improvements before releasing these critically important child safety features"

Zak 5y ago
> I cannot think of any improvements, that can be made, without abondoning the basic concept The concept of scanning for CSAM during the upload process, or the concept of making the user's device do it? Apple could do the former on their own servers and essentially nobody would be upset.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  The basic concept of Apple running private pictures through an KI algorithm to detect something worthy of investigation. The algorithms never work 100% right. That means there will be always humans in the loop, sorting through false positives etc. which means probably very private pictures here in this context. And to the end user it does not matter, whether this happens on the server or on their device. The message is: your pictures are not private with apple.
  - Zak 5y ago
    It matters very much with regard to the distinction between yours and theirs. I strongly believe the operating system of your device should never actively work against your interests, and checking whether you're using the device to commit a crime, then reporting it to the device manufacturer who will tell the government is potentially strongly against your interests. If that's too abstract, it matters in that it's a foothold for further scanning of data on your device. Without this system, if a state wanted to pressure Apple to create spyware and add it to their operating system to look for something else, that would have been easy to refuse. With this system, the spyware is already there, and despite Apple's protests to the contrary, it's just a matter of a few tweaks to repurpose it.

sharken 5y ago

Generate enough bad press for long enough works wonders for creating change. The battle is not over though, as you say Apple might include the feature unchanged in a later release. If they do, should come as no surprise that they will lose a lot of business. The correct business decision will be to cancel the feature and double down on the privacy angle.

spacebear 5y ago

My bet is they wait a few months and quietly announce that they’ll do the scanning on the iCloud servers instead. That would be relatively uncontroversial in the tech press and probably never make it to the mainstream press.

babypuncher 5y ago

I think the internal backlash helped a lot. The initial move was very contrary to the culture Apple has cultivated over the years and it did not go over well with them.

bobbytit 5y ago
Yeah their orig mac ad was 1984 will not be like 1984. They were just out by 37 years.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

"So now the question is in what 15.x update do they just sneak it in." It would be nice if the general public and the news therefore now picked up on the issue of opaque "automatic updates". To date, they have been trained to always every update without question. Conventional wisdom: Never, ever question any particular automatic update. Don't think, just enable. All updates are created equal. Assumptions: Every update is for users benefit. Software companies never operate out of self-interest. There are no trade-offs. Whats good for them is good for users and vice versa. Theres no reason for end users to trial updated versions of software ("A/B test") before deciding to use them "in production". Thought experiment: User installs Software from Company to perform "Function #1". Company makes changes to Software, described as "Fixes and other changes." Software now performs Function #1 plus Function #2. User allows new software to be installed automatically. (Automatic updates enabled per "expert" advice.") When user downloaded and installed Software she based her desicion to use Software on its ability to perform Function #1; however, did she have any interest in Function #2. Did she agree to Function #2. Company says yes. Developers say yes. What does User say. The license agreeement places no limits on what might comprise Function #2. It could be anything. It could have no benefit whatsoever for User. Moreover, Company is under no oblgation to disclose Function #2 to User. With automatic updates, Company is free to keep changing Software. User originally chose Software for Function #1 but Software may look very different after many "automatic updates". Would she choose it again in its current state. Segue to discussion of "lock-in".

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
s/always/& accept/

gjs278 5y ago

enjoy being a green bubble in people’s texts now

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ksec 5y ago

I posted on HN [1] that I really wish they stand ground, it makes decision on Apple a lot easier. Now they wont. Half of the people will forgive them, the rest will most likely forget about it in a few years time. But to me, it did at least look like this scared the shit out of Apple PR. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28221869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28221869