4 ms·

> There are types of hashes that aren’t for finding exact matches. My thesis in school way back when was building something for image near-duplicate detection u

> There are types of hashes that aren’t for finding exact matches. My thesis in school way back when was building something for image near-duplicate detection using a sort of hash made out of the image features detected. The output of a neural net run on an image is also a sort of hash in a (maybe) semantically meaningful vector space. And then you can look for similar or nearby vectors. This isn’t just useful for finding one type of image. What's the point you're trying to get at here. I think it's well understood that there can be false positives -- but can you tell me at what rate of false positives it makes this type of child abuse detection unjustified? Also can you tell me what rate Apples system would cause a false positive. If for every one billion people(hypothetically of course) that are caught with child abuse images, one innocent person is asked to unlock their phone to prove that it's a false positive to a court, I think that's a fine trade off to make. I understand it's unpleasant for that one person, but I don't think you're correctly weighing the suffering to children this could help stop. > It’s because it makes it easy to create a population-wide dragnet for other things. It’s not hard to apply something similar to find photos taken at a protest, for example. This is in my opinion where thinking of people on your side is wrong and fundamentally dealing with these hard and nuanced issues on the wrong conceptual level. If the government wants to create a population-wide dragnet there are a lot of other ways to also do that. If for example an iPhone was a literal perfect privacy machine it would simply be forbidden from being sold in totalitarian countries that wanted that type of dragnet. The thing that you're fundamentally missing the point on, in my opinion, is that the thing that protects me is not the technology, it's that I live in a democratic country that has laws to stop such thing as being prosecuted for just attending a protest. The police can listen to my phone calls and read my mail _right now_ but what keeps that kind of thing from being used against me in an unfair way are the courts. Fundamentally I don't think any technological solution can save any of us if we live under a totalitarian government.

smoldesu 5y ago
Boy, there's a number of misconceptions here. I was considering not responding, but you're so wrong here that I just can't walk away and let you continue to spread this kind of blatantly wrong handwaving. > If for every one billion people(hypothetically of course) that are caught with child abuse images, one innocent person is asked to unlock their phone to prove that it's a false positive to a court, I think that's a fine trade off to make. How do you know the false positive rate yet? Not only has Apple not implemented it yet, but people have shown that a. NeuralHash can correlate two completely unrelated, undoctored images b. Hash collisions are be manually designed with minimal effort and changes to the source image You're pulling this hypothetical figure out of thin air, it may as well be one in a hundred or one in a trillion. > I don't think you're correctly weighing the suffering to children this could help stop. That's not the problem here. If people want to continue to store photos of child exploitation on their iPhone, they can do it with the flip of a switch. Once you disable iCloud, Apple stops client-side scanning altogether. That arguement is a whole lot of bark with no bite, and unless Apple did the unthinkable (eg. store hashes for every photo you ever took regardless of it's status on iCloud), it's never going to hold water. > If the government wants to create a population-wide dragnet there are a lot of other ways to also do that. Oh, like they already[0] do[1]? iMessage has been wiretapped since 2013, it's an open secret at this point that Apple is deep in bed with domestic intelligence agencies. Denying this is just refusing to acknowledge a truth that has reared it's ugly head again and again and again. > If for example an iPhone was a literal perfect privacy machine it would simply be forbidden from being sold in totalitarian countries that wanted that type of dragnet. Countries like China, who demanded that Apple give them complete control over their domestic data[2], a request that Apple happily complied with? If they give foreign markets complete control over iPhone data in their respective countries, imagine for a moment how trustworthy their behavior is in the United States, the same country that decides if they're a monopoly or not and sets their tax rates. > the thing that protects me is not the technology, it's that I live in a democratic country that has laws to stop such thing as being prosecuted for just attending a protest If you think that's what they care about then you're missing the point entirely too. People aren't paranoid that they're going to be thrown in jail for legal action, that's frankly silly. What the United States wants is two things: your trust and your data. They could care less if you're cooking drugs on your property, selling weapons illegally or, in many cases, exploiting children. If they actually cared about those things, they'd divert some of the national budget to addressing those issues. Instead, they take that money and invest it in surveillance. Billions of dollars get poured into black budgets every year, with margins that constantly expand. The NSA regularly backdoors encryption standards, the FBI regularly designs exploits and incorporates them into US infrastructure. If any of our surveillance programs want to backdoor an iPhone or introduce vulnerabilities into iPhones, Apple has no recourse. > The police can listen to my phone calls and read my mail _right now_ but what keeps that kind of thing from being used against me in an unfair way are the courts. What keeps them from doing that is that it's a pointless, fruitless endeavor to try and criminalize their entire nation. It wouldn't be hard to arrest the majority of US Citizens, it would just be expensive and time-consuming. A much more appealing effort is to keep tabs on everything you do, everywhere you go and everyone you talk to. That way, if you become a legitimate threat to the state they can zero you before you cause any real damage. Make no mistake, every government is only out to save their own skin. You may disagree with it, or find it silly, but that's realpolitik for you. > Fundamentally I don't think any technological solution can save any of us if we live under a totalitarian government. Finally, your first reasonable argument (and it's a concession to the point the other commenter was making in the first place). There is no way that we're living in a world where our government lacks the competence or resources to effectively monitor us at every corner. The reason why this concerns people is that it allows governments to collect data on what kinds of photos their population has saved/synced with the cloud. Apple is given a black-box list of irreversible image signatures that the government themselves consider harmful, and there is literally zero transparency that goes into this process. We have quite literally no idea how any of this works, and have no way to verify that it isn't being abused. Your trust in Apple and the US Government has to be unreasonably high to confidently say that this won't be abused in some way. [0] https://reason.com/2021/12/07/secret-documents-show-which-message-apps-are-the-most-fbi-proof/ https://reason.com/2021/12/07/secret-documents-show-which-me... [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/04/apple-holds-the-master-key-when-it-comes-to-icloud-security-privacy/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/04/apple-holds-the-mast... [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insight-idUSKCN1G8060 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insigh...
- dsomers 5y ago
  >You're pulling this hypothetical figure out of thin air, it may as well be one in a hundred or one in a trillion. I agree, but it’s just as had waving when I say maybe it’s low chance that there are false positives, as it is when you’re freaking out at it being a hypothetically high number of false positives. > That's not the problem here. If people want to continue to store photos of child exploitation on their iPhone, they can do it with the flip of a switch. Once you disable iCloud, Apple stops client-side scanning altogether. If it’s so much under the users control why do you care or feel like this is an invasion of privacy then? I’ll say I feel like it’s still useful because criminals make dumb mistakes that incriminate themselves all the time — and this is a fine balance between being overly invasive and catching some people that store abuse images. > Oh, like they already[0] do[1]? iMessage has been wiretapped since 2013, it's an open secret at this point that Apple is deep in bed with domestic intelligence agencies. Denying this is just refusing to acknowledge a truth that has reared it's ugly head again and again and again. Yes, everyone knows this stuff, but just because it’s happening does not mean it can be used to incriminate someone in court unless there is justified prior suspicion which a judge issues a warrant for. That’s where the transparency is, at the court level. > Countries like China… This is a silly example, it makes me sad to say, but people in China are going to have their personal freedoms violated in very harsh ways regardless of Apple operating there of not. Unfortunately that’s the reality of living under totalitarianism — I don’t know why you’d even bring this up when I am clearly stating that what really protects people is living in a free democratic country with a well functioning court system. > If they actually cared about those things, they'd divert some of the national budget to addressing those issues. Instead, they take that money and invest it in surveillance. Billions of dollars get poured into black budgets every year, with margins that constantly expand. The NSA regularly backdoors encryption standards, the FBI regularly designs exploits and incorporates them into US infrastructure. I don’t wholly disagree, but I don’t see the connection with the original point. Also, you’re talking about governments as a monolith, which is a mistake. Any government is made of may departments and people, when you say ‘if they actually cared’, who’s the ‘they’? I think it’s really silly to say no-one in any part of the FBI cares about stoping child abuse for example. Sure I get that the CIA does not care, but that’s just not their job either. > If any of our surveillance programs want to backdoor an iPhone or introduce vulnerabilities into iPhones, Apple has no recourse. Maybe, maybe not. What is your hypothetical scenario for this? Can you explain how you think they’d do this where Apple has no recourse? Also who is the ‘they’? When you just say ‘they’ in a handwaving general way you sound conspiratorial. Are you saying they’d do it and apple could not detect it? Or that they’d coerce apple and apple would have no legal way to stop them? > A much more appealing effort is to keep tabs on everything you do, everywhere you go and everyone you talk to. That way, if you become a legitimate threat to the state they can zero you before you cause any real damage. Make no mistake, every government is only out to save their own skin. You may disagree with it, or find it silly, but that's realpolitik for you. This is where we depart the most. I’m European, In my opinion, America, with its two party non proportional system is a very poor example of democracy that is quite susceptible it corruption because of it’s concentration of powers. Just because you guys don’t live in a well functioning democracy does not mean that’s the case for the whole world — you’re projecting a bit here. I guess we agree in our mistrust of the US. Hopefully you guys don’t slid more on that totalitarian scale even more I guess. > There is no way that we're living in a world where our government lacks the competence or resources to effectively monitor us at every corner. I guess you don’t know about off grid log cabins that have no cell signal ;-) > Apple is given a black-box list of irreversible image signatures that the government themselves consider harmful, and there is literally zero transparency that goes into this process. We have quite literally no idea how any of this works, I think this is the point you’re wrong here, if there is a false positive I believe even in the US that you’ll be able to simply exhibit the source image that caused the false positive in court, if it even gets that far, which I think probably not, and prove innocence. The hash match is not the proof that you have child abuse images — it just starts a process of review. I think in practice it’ll start a process where a manual review will happen where someone will look at your source image and say, oh yeah, that’s clearly a false positive, and then it’s done. I’m sure we’ll know more where the first people get cause with this mechanism because it will still have to be prosecuted in a public court and at that time we won’t have to speculate so much.

smoldesu 5y ago

Boy, there's a number of misconceptions here. I was considering not responding, but you're so wrong here that I just can't walk away and let you continue to spread this kind of blatantly wrong handwaving. > If for every one billion people(hypothetically of course) that are caught with child abuse images, one innocent person is asked to unlock their phone to prove that it's a false positive to a court, I think that's a fine trade off to make. How do you know the false positive rate yet? Not only has Apple not implemented it yet, but people have shown that a. NeuralHash can correlate two completely unrelated, undoctored images b. Hash collisions are be manually designed with minimal effort and changes to the source image You're pulling this hypothetical figure out of thin air, it may as well be one in a hundred or one in a trillion. > I don't think you're correctly weighing the suffering to children this could help stop. That's not the problem here. If people want to continue to store photos of child exploitation on their iPhone, they can do it with the flip of a switch. Once you disable iCloud, Apple stops client-side scanning altogether. That arguement is a whole lot of bark with no bite, and unless Apple did the unthinkable (eg. store hashes for every photo you ever took regardless of it's status on iCloud), it's never going to hold water. > If the government wants to create a population-wide dragnet there are a lot of other ways to also do that. Oh, like they already[0] do[1]? iMessage has been wiretapped since 2013, it's an open secret at this point that Apple is deep in bed with domestic intelligence agencies. Denying this is just refusing to acknowledge a truth that has reared it's ugly head again and again and again. > If for example an iPhone was a literal perfect privacy machine it would simply be forbidden from being sold in totalitarian countries that wanted that type of dragnet. Countries like China, who demanded that Apple give them complete control over their domestic data[2], a request that Apple happily complied with? If they give foreign markets complete control over iPhone data in their respective countries, imagine for a moment how trustworthy their behavior is in the United States, the same country that decides if they're a monopoly or not and sets their tax rates. > the thing that protects me is not the technology, it's that I live in a democratic country that has laws to stop such thing as being prosecuted for just attending a protest If you think that's what they care about then you're missing the point entirely too. People aren't paranoid that they're going to be thrown in jail for legal action, that's frankly silly. What the United States wants is two things: your trust and your data. They could care less if you're cooking drugs on your property, selling weapons illegally or, in many cases, exploiting children. If they actually cared about those things, they'd divert some of the national budget to addressing those issues. Instead, they take that money and invest it in surveillance. Billions of dollars get poured into black budgets every year, with margins that constantly expand. The NSA regularly backdoors encryption standards, the FBI regularly designs exploits and incorporates them into US infrastructure. If any of our surveillance programs want to backdoor an iPhone or introduce vulnerabilities into iPhones, Apple has no recourse. > The police can listen to my phone calls and read my mail _right now_ but what keeps that kind of thing from being used against me in an unfair way are the courts. What keeps them from doing that is that it's a pointless, fruitless endeavor to try and criminalize their entire nation. It wouldn't be hard to arrest the majority of US Citizens, it would just be expensive and time-consuming. A much more appealing effort is to keep tabs on everything you do, everywhere you go and everyone you talk to. That way, if you become a legitimate threat to the state they can zero you before you cause any real damage. Make no mistake, every government is only out to save their own skin. You may disagree with it, or find it silly, but that's realpolitik for you. > Fundamentally I don't think any technological solution can save any of us if we live under a totalitarian government. Finally, your first reasonable argument (and it's a concession to the point the other commenter was making in the first place). There is no way that we're living in a world where our government lacks the competence or resources to effectively monitor us at every corner. The reason why this concerns people is that it allows governments to collect data on what kinds of photos their population has saved/synced with the cloud. Apple is given a black-box list of irreversible image signatures that the government themselves consider harmful, and there is literally zero transparency that goes into this process. We have quite literally no idea how any of this works, and have no way to verify that it isn't being abused. Your trust in Apple and the US Government has to be unreasonably high to confidently say that this won't be abused in some way. [0] https://reason.com/2021/12/07/secret-documents-show-which-message-apps-are-the-most-fbi-proof/ https://reason.com/2021/12/07/secret-documents-show-which-me... [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/04/apple-holds-the-master-key-when-it-comes-to-icloud-security-privacy/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/04/apple-holds-the-mast... [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insight-idUSKCN1G8060 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insigh...

dsomers 5y ago
>You're pulling this hypothetical figure out of thin air, it may as well be one in a hundred or one in a trillion. I agree, but it’s just as had waving when I say maybe it’s low chance that there are false positives, as it is when you’re freaking out at it being a hypothetically high number of false positives. > That's not the problem here. If people want to continue to store photos of child exploitation on their iPhone, they can do it with the flip of a switch. Once you disable iCloud, Apple stops client-side scanning altogether. If it’s so much under the users control why do you care or feel like this is an invasion of privacy then? I’ll say I feel like it’s still useful because criminals make dumb mistakes that incriminate themselves all the time — and this is a fine balance between being overly invasive and catching some people that store abuse images. > Oh, like they already[0] do[1]? iMessage has been wiretapped since 2013, it's an open secret at this point that Apple is deep in bed with domestic intelligence agencies. Denying this is just refusing to acknowledge a truth that has reared it's ugly head again and again and again. Yes, everyone knows this stuff, but just because it’s happening does not mean it can be used to incriminate someone in court unless there is justified prior suspicion which a judge issues a warrant for. That’s where the transparency is, at the court level. > Countries like China… This is a silly example, it makes me sad to say, but people in China are going to have their personal freedoms violated in very harsh ways regardless of Apple operating there of not. Unfortunately that’s the reality of living under totalitarianism — I don’t know why you’d even bring this up when I am clearly stating that what really protects people is living in a free democratic country with a well functioning court system. > If they actually cared about those things, they'd divert some of the national budget to addressing those issues. Instead, they take that money and invest it in surveillance. Billions of dollars get poured into black budgets every year, with margins that constantly expand. The NSA regularly backdoors encryption standards, the FBI regularly designs exploits and incorporates them into US infrastructure. I don’t wholly disagree, but I don’t see the connection with the original point. Also, you’re talking about governments as a monolith, which is a mistake. Any government is made of may departments and people, when you say ‘if they actually cared’, who’s the ‘they’? I think it’s really silly to say no-one in any part of the FBI cares about stoping child abuse for example. Sure I get that the CIA does not care, but that’s just not their job either. > If any of our surveillance programs want to backdoor an iPhone or introduce vulnerabilities into iPhones, Apple has no recourse. Maybe, maybe not. What is your hypothetical scenario for this? Can you explain how you think they’d do this where Apple has no recourse? Also who is the ‘they’? When you just say ‘they’ in a handwaving general way you sound conspiratorial. Are you saying they’d do it and apple could not detect it? Or that they’d coerce apple and apple would have no legal way to stop them? > A much more appealing effort is to keep tabs on everything you do, everywhere you go and everyone you talk to. That way, if you become a legitimate threat to the state they can zero you before you cause any real damage. Make no mistake, every government is only out to save their own skin. You may disagree with it, or find it silly, but that's realpolitik for you. This is where we depart the most. I’m European, In my opinion, America, with its two party non proportional system is a very poor example of democracy that is quite susceptible it corruption because of it’s concentration of powers. Just because you guys don’t live in a well functioning democracy does not mean that’s the case for the whole world — you’re projecting a bit here. I guess we agree in our mistrust of the US. Hopefully you guys don’t slid more on that totalitarian scale even more I guess. > There is no way that we're living in a world where our government lacks the competence or resources to effectively monitor us at every corner. I guess you don’t know about off grid log cabins that have no cell signal ;-) > Apple is given a black-box list of irreversible image signatures that the government themselves consider harmful, and there is literally zero transparency that goes into this process. We have quite literally no idea how any of this works, I think this is the point you’re wrong here, if there is a false positive I believe even in the US that you’ll be able to simply exhibit the source image that caused the false positive in court, if it even gets that far, which I think probably not, and prove innocence. The hash match is not the proof that you have child abuse images — it just starts a process of review. I think in practice it’ll start a process where a manual review will happen where someone will look at your source image and say, oh yeah, that’s clearly a false positive, and then it’s done. I’m sure we’ll know more where the first people get cause with this mechanism because it will still have to be prosecuted in a public court and at that time we won’t have to speculate so much.