11 ms·

Don't worry, as this is not about child sex abuse anyway. The legislators know, from experience, that it's hard to argue against measures to protect children f

by zosima 4y ago

Don't worry, as this is not about child sex abuse anyway. The legislators know, from experience, that it's hard to argue against measures to protect children from predators, and so they are free to launch controversial and unacceptable measures. Once in place, it will be extended to other purposes. The same as always.

chinathrow 4y ago
> The same as always. Do you have a guess about who is behind that lasting global push against private communications?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- K0balt 4y ago
  I’d love to know, specifically
- emteycz 4y ago
  Why does it have to be a somebody? It's almost every politician since the invention of privacy. It's not a cabal, they just have common goals. Edit: can't reply. The endgame is control over the population - taxing them, imprisoning them, etc. Why? I don't know, some people just like to be in (absolute) power.
  - chinathrow 4y ago
    And what are these common goals then? I really don't see the endgame here.
  - eru 4y ago
    It's the government version of instrumental convergence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence
- hulitu 4y ago
  Your government who wants to control you. Or do you still think that data is collected just so that Google can give you more ads ?
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    > Your government who wants to control you How exactly? In Italy we had 67 different governments since 1946. What can they do with CSAM data? Government can't blackmail citizen, they can't use CSAM scans for other purposes, they can't even authorize a scan, because that's the justice system prerogative. Do you really believe that in Europe governments are in control of everything like it happens in Russia or in North Korea? They are as weak as they can be.
    - newsclues 4y ago
      "Do you really believe that in Europe governments are in control of everything like it happens in Russia or in North Korea?" No, but I really believe European leaders are jealous of the authoritarian powers they lack, and are working to resolve that.
      - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
        > No, but I really believe European leaders are jealous of the authoritarian powers they lack, and are working to resolve that. You can believe anything you want. That wouldn't make you right. national parliaments have to pass these legislation, EU is formed by 26 countries, all with very different ideas, traditions, political stances and objectives. So, Orban? Yeah he would love to be the sole leader of his country. In my country? those that tried have been destroyed by their same allies, out of fear of having to live in someone else's shadow. If everyone wants to be the one and only leader, nobody will ever be. Opposing forces always balance themselves. Funny that all USA businesses lament that there is too much democracy in EU (like too much democracy is bad!), but now HN says that there is an imminent risk of totalitarianism...
        4y ago
- c0balt 4y ago
  Not gp, but I would recommend reading about the crypto wars[0] and related conflicts. While the arguments are slightly different the overall idea of needing every message to be scannable stayed the same. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars
  - mgdlbp 4y ago
    the Cypherpunks FAQ (1994): 8.3.4. "How will privacy and anonymity be attacked?" ... - like so many other "computer hacker" items, as a tool for the "Four Horsemen": drug-dealers, money-launderers, terrorists, and pedophiles. ... [1] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/crypto/cypherpunks/cyphernomicon/CP-FAQ https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/cryp... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
- nix23 4y ago
  >Do you have a guess about who is behind that lasting global push against private communications? Every single government ever?
  - stjohnswarts 4y ago
    This is the correct answer. People are lazy; politicians, police, your mail person, YOU. It's much easier to put on some coffee and start going through CSAM alerts from the emails and texts you AI sent you overnight and see what looks promising. Sure glad we got past those silly 4th amendment weirdos (or whatever the equivalent in your country is) who think privacy is less important than making my job easier. A decade down the line, a popular right/left wing nationalist with authoritarian tendencies wins. Now he sends down a request to comb through his opponent's messages to see what he can send him (or his relatives) to prison for daring to run against Him. A cop caught you flirting with his gf, let's just see what we can dig up on him on the CriminalSearch app...
londons_explore 4y ago
The thing is, with current 'privacy-protecting scanner' designs, the scanner is running on every end users device, and it would be fairly simple for an expert to dump out the list of things being looked for. That in turn makes such a system far less useful to intelligence services and authoritarian regimes. You don't want to tell your target that you're looking for them and which keywords not to use! I wonder if this is part one, and then a later revision will require centralised scanning rather than on-device scanning.
- pc86 4y ago
  More like this is part 50,000 of an ∞-part plan to give the government more and more power and oversight.
- gambiting 4y ago
  >>and it would be fairly simple for an expert to dump out the list of things being looked for. If you embed a neural net trained to detect "some" kind of images, I would love to know how one could "dump" the list of things the net is looking for. Basically it's not how it works - the neural net is more or less a black box, you can't tell what kind of things it's looking for by just looking at its contents. You give it an image, it says it is a match or not, based on some internal algorithm - but looking at that algorithm tells you nothing about what kind of images would produce positive matches.
  - stephen_g 4y ago
    The hashes are something like a 64x64 pixel representation that can apparently be recovered to a small, very blurry but still recognisable image (when the Apple thing blew up there was a researcher who’d done it with a reimplementation of PhotoDNA from the paper).
    - gambiting 4y ago
      Sure, but if you read the article the proposed law by EU specifically mentions detecting brand new and not yet classified CSAM by using machine learning. So it's not just hashes we're talking about here.
me_me_me 4y ago
> Don't worry... Unless you are going through a nasty divorce and you future ex starts throwing accusations of you keeping and constantly watching those videos.
- pc86 4y ago
  Easy, then we'll just add additional tracking to everyone's personal devices that tells the government what is on your screen and for how long. For the children, of course! /s
  - MerelyMortal 4y ago
    We already have TVs that are content aware, and Macs that report CSAM, it won't be long until the two are merged together. Anyone who wants a dumb TV or an offline computer must be a pedophile. /s
    - minton 4y ago
      I don’t think Macs have any built in ability to report CSAM.
      - GekkePrutser 4y ago
        Not yet no, because Apple postponed their plans. But it was planned along with the plans for iOS. The Mac was not going to be excluded.
        supramouse 4y ago
        they are just waiting a little bit, the software's been written and it's not like you have a choice lol as far as I know the delays are more about giving apple's friends in hollywood some time to cleanup than caving to libertarian outrage
        SxC97 4y ago
crmd 4y ago
Quoting Adam Curtis from The Power of Nighmares: > In the past, politicians promised to create a better world. They had different ways of achieving this, but their power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered their people. Those dreams failed and today people have lost faith in ideologies. Increasingly, politicians are seen simply as managers of public life, but now they have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority. Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us: from nightmares. They say that they will rescue us from dreadful dangers that we cannot see and do not understand. They had a great 20 year run on the terrorism narrative, but they need a new nightmare, and they’ve apparently settled on child predators.
- ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
  Absolutely brilliant series, and highly recommended. Available on the Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares-AdamCurtis https://archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares-AdamCurtis
  - eru 4y ago
    I have watched 'All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace' by the same guy. If that stuff is anything to go by, Adam Curtis long on insinuation and clever cuts, and short on actual insight. Beware of Gell-Mann Amnesia. Btw, I suspect politicians always used the protection-from-nightmares just as much as promising utopia.
    - mhh__ 4y ago
      I agree. Curtis complains about narrative building and hypernormalisation, when he is arguably doing both of those things every time he speaks. The tune of the poem is more important than the words to him.
      - chillingeffect 4y ago
        Urm clarify plz how one documentarian can hypernormalize? It's a collaborative work by many parties w overlapping interests. Over time. Using vast resources.

by zosima 4y ago

chinathrow 4y ago

> The same as always. Do you have a guess about who is behind that lasting global push against private communications?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
K0balt 4y ago
I’d love to know, specifically
emteycz 4y ago
Why does it have to be a somebody? It's almost every politician since the invention of privacy. It's not a cabal, they just have common goals. Edit: can't reply. The endgame is control over the population - taxing them, imprisoning them, etc. Why? I don't know, some people just like to be in (absolute) power.
- chinathrow 4y ago
  And what are these common goals then? I really don't see the endgame here.
- eru 4y ago
  It's the government version of instrumental convergence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence
hulitu 4y ago
Your government who wants to control you. Or do you still think that data is collected just so that Google can give you more ads ?
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > Your government who wants to control you How exactly? In Italy we had 67 different governments since 1946. What can they do with CSAM data? Government can't blackmail citizen, they can't use CSAM scans for other purposes, they can't even authorize a scan, because that's the justice system prerogative. Do you really believe that in Europe governments are in control of everything like it happens in Russia or in North Korea? They are as weak as they can be.
  - newsclues 4y ago
    "Do you really believe that in Europe governments are in control of everything like it happens in Russia or in North Korea?" No, but I really believe European leaders are jealous of the authoritarian powers they lack, and are working to resolve that.
    - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
      > No, but I really believe European leaders are jealous of the authoritarian powers they lack, and are working to resolve that. You can believe anything you want. That wouldn't make you right. national parliaments have to pass these legislation, EU is formed by 26 countries, all with very different ideas, traditions, political stances and objectives. So, Orban? Yeah he would love to be the sole leader of his country. In my country? those that tried have been destroyed by their same allies, out of fear of having to live in someone else's shadow. If everyone wants to be the one and only leader, nobody will ever be. Opposing forces always balance themselves. Funny that all USA businesses lament that there is too much democracy in EU (like too much democracy is bad!), but now HN says that there is an imminent risk of totalitarianism...
      - 4y ago
c0balt 4y ago
Not gp, but I would recommend reading about the crypto wars[0] and related conflicts. While the arguments are slightly different the overall idea of needing every message to be scannable stayed the same. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars
- mgdlbp 4y ago
  the Cypherpunks FAQ (1994): 8.3.4. "How will privacy and anonymity be attacked?" ... - like so many other "computer hacker" items, as a tool for the "Four Horsemen": drug-dealers, money-launderers, terrorists, and pedophiles. ... [1] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/crypto/cypherpunks/cyphernomicon/CP-FAQ https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/cryp... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
nix23 4y ago
>Do you have a guess about who is behind that lasting global push against private communications? Every single government ever?
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  This is the correct answer. People are lazy; politicians, police, your mail person, YOU. It's much easier to put on some coffee and start going through CSAM alerts from the emails and texts you AI sent you overnight and see what looks promising. Sure glad we got past those silly 4th amendment weirdos (or whatever the equivalent in your country is) who think privacy is less important than making my job easier. A decade down the line, a popular right/left wing nationalist with authoritarian tendencies wins. Now he sends down a request to comb through his opponent's messages to see what he can send him (or his relatives) to prison for daring to run against Him. A cop caught you flirting with his gf, let's just see what we can dig up on him on the CriminalSearch app...

londons_explore 4y ago

The thing is, with current 'privacy-protecting scanner' designs, the scanner is running on every end users device, and it would be fairly simple for an expert to dump out the list of things being looked for. That in turn makes such a system far less useful to intelligence services and authoritarian regimes. You don't want to tell your target that you're looking for them and which keywords not to use! I wonder if this is part one, and then a later revision will require centralised scanning rather than on-device scanning.

pc86 4y ago
More like this is part 50,000 of an ∞-part plan to give the government more and more power and oversight.
gambiting 4y ago
>>and it would be fairly simple for an expert to dump out the list of things being looked for. If you embed a neural net trained to detect "some" kind of images, I would love to know how one could "dump" the list of things the net is looking for. Basically it's not how it works - the neural net is more or less a black box, you can't tell what kind of things it's looking for by just looking at its contents. You give it an image, it says it is a match or not, based on some internal algorithm - but looking at that algorithm tells you nothing about what kind of images would produce positive matches.
- stephen_g 4y ago
  The hashes are something like a 64x64 pixel representation that can apparently be recovered to a small, very blurry but still recognisable image (when the Apple thing blew up there was a researcher who’d done it with a reimplementation of PhotoDNA from the paper).
  - gambiting 4y ago
    Sure, but if you read the article the proposed law by EU specifically mentions detecting brand new and not yet classified CSAM by using machine learning. So it's not just hashes we're talking about here.

me_me_me 4y ago

> Don't worry... Unless you are going through a nasty divorce and you future ex starts throwing accusations of you keeping and constantly watching those videos.

pc86 4y ago
Easy, then we'll just add additional tracking to everyone's personal devices that tells the government what is on your screen and for how long. For the children, of course! /s
- MerelyMortal 4y ago
  We already have TVs that are content aware, and Macs that report CSAM, it won't be long until the two are merged together. Anyone who wants a dumb TV or an offline computer must be a pedophile. /s
  - minton 4y ago
    I don’t think Macs have any built in ability to report CSAM.
    - GekkePrutser 4y ago
      Not yet no, because Apple postponed their plans. But it was planned along with the plans for iOS. The Mac was not going to be excluded.
      - supramouse 4y ago
        they are just waiting a little bit, the software's been written and it's not like you have a choice lol as far as I know the delays are more about giving apple's friends in hollywood some time to cleanup than caving to libertarian outrage
        SxC97 4y ago

crmd 4y ago

Quoting Adam Curtis from The Power of Nighmares: > In the past, politicians promised to create a better world. They had different ways of achieving this, but their power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered their people. Those dreams failed and today people have lost faith in ideologies. Increasingly, politicians are seen simply as managers of public life, but now they have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority. Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us: from nightmares. They say that they will rescue us from dreadful dangers that we cannot see and do not understand. They had a great 20 year run on the terrorism narrative, but they need a new nightmare, and they’ve apparently settled on child predators.

ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
Absolutely brilliant series, and highly recommended. Available on the Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares-AdamCurtis https://archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares-AdamCurtis
- eru 4y ago
  I have watched 'All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace' by the same guy. If that stuff is anything to go by, Adam Curtis long on insinuation and clever cuts, and short on actual insight. Beware of Gell-Mann Amnesia. Btw, I suspect politicians always used the protection-from-nightmares just as much as promising utopia.
  - mhh__ 4y ago
    I agree. Curtis complains about narrative building and hypernormalisation, when he is arguably doing both of those things every time he speaks. The tune of the poem is more important than the words to him.
    - chillingeffect 4y ago
      Urm clarify plz how one documentarian can hypernormalize? It's a collaborative work by many parties w overlapping interests. Over time. Using vast resources.