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It is not possible for this to be fully private in the United States because the government not only can force Apple to open up the kimono, it can also forbid i
by ein0p 2y ago
It is not possible for this to be fully private in the United States because the government not only can force Apple to open up the kimono, it can also forbid it to talk about it. There’s not really anything Apple can do to work around this “limitation”. Thank your “representative” for extending the PATRIOT Act when you get a chance.
- paradite 2y agoSlightly off-topic, "open up the kimono" sounds disturbing and creepy to me as an Asian. I suspect I'm not alone in this.
- ein0p 2y agoThat’s even better. I do think it’s disturbing and creepy when someone goes through my private data without my knowledge.
- digging 2y agoThat's not what they meant or what the phrase means. It's mildly racist and misogynist, and the kinds of discomfort it elicits are not the kind that will make people trust you, the user of the phrase.
- dxbednarczyk 2y agoSome share your sentiment. https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/11/02/360479744/why-corporate-executives-talk-about-opening-their-kimonos https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/11/02/360479744...
- arresin 2y agoIs this phrase worth an entire long form blog post from NPR?
- rpastuszak 2y agoHonestly, why not? I love reading about etymologies and I know that many people here do as well.
- _heimdall 2y agoI'm not sure how I've been in tech since before this article was written and today is the first time I've ever even seen/heard this phrase.
- tantalor 2y agoWarrant canary
- afh1 2y agoApple removed theirs year ago.
- sneak 2y agoThe orders in question aren’t search warrants and don’t require probable cause. 70,000+ Apple user accounts are surveilled in this manner every year.
- egorfine 2y agoIt makes zero sense for a company of this size. I bet they are served with gag orders like daily, so the warrant canary is going to expire the moment it is published.
- sciolist 2y agoThere's a difference between guaranteed privacy and certifiable privacy. Yes, the government can request one's data. However, Apple's system would reveal those intrusions to the public, even if Apple themselves couldn't say it.
- afh1 2y agoHow?
- aalimov_ 2y agoTheir post sure makes it seam like it’s possible. Was there something that stood out to you?
- quenix 2y agoI mean, the software running on the client (phone/mac/ipad) is closed-source and, if we assume Apple is compromised, can be made to circumvent all of these fancy protections at the push of a button. If pressured by the government, Apple can simply change the client software to loosen the attestation requirements for private compute. And that would be the most inconspicuous choice.
- rvnx 2y agoOr target a device by IMEI or iCloud to be candidate to receive a software update, and push an update that sends data to "dev-llm-assistant.ai.apple.com". "oh it's our dev version ? what's the problem ? we need data access for troubleshooting"
- amiantos 2y agoPrivate Cloud Compute servers have no persistent storage so there would be nothing to see upon opening the kimono. You'd need some sort of government requested live wire tap thing to harvest the data out of the incoming requests, which might be a different situation. I'm, of course, just some dude on the internet, thinking up a counter-point to this concern, who knows if I am even remotely in the right ballpark.
- visarga 2y agomandatory 30 day retention policies or something like it
- theshrike79 2y agoYou can't mandate retention on stuff you're not storing anyway - or because of encryption can't store.
- talldayo 2y agoYou would think that, but cell carriers have been found to retain both plaintext and encrypted traffic for several years in some cases: https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7vqkv/how-fbi-gets-phone-data-att-tmobile-verizon https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7vqkv/how-fbi-gets-phone-da...
- theshrike79 2y agoCell carriers aren't a bastion of end to end encryption, the tech just can't do it. That's why you use them just as dumb pipes forwarding encrypted data traffic from one place to another. No SMS, no phone calls if you can avoid it.
- talldayo 2y agoSpeaking of tech, has anyone ever independently audited Apple's encrypted infrastructure a-la what they're promising for Private Compute? I'm unconvinced that the government couldn't crack that if they wanted.
- ls612 2y agoWhat Apple can do (and appears to be doing throughout its products) is not have the data requested. Or not have it in cleartext. NSLs can't request data that doesn't exist anymore.
- ein0p 2y agoLLMs work on clear text inputs
- ls612 2y agoBut the setup is that Apple doesn't know which cleartexts currently being processed are associated with which user meaning that even live surveillance can't work without surveilling everybody, making any such program very quickly discoverable. Read the section about non-targetability in the link. Apple deserves credit for correctly analyzing their threat model and designing their system accordingly.
- ein0p 2y agoI’m willing to concede that Apple’s system is the best designed of the bunch. I’m not willing to call it “private”, however, if it processes unencrypted inputs in the jurisdiction of a nation state with pervasive government surveillance.
- ls612 2y agoI agree from a technical perspective actually. What this system does to counteract that is use a social strategy. The government couldn't break "this specific system" without a lot of people knowing, and that makes it very likely that they would be discovered. And not in a vague way but in a very specific one. Would this work in some authoritarian countries? No and Apple doesn't care. Would it work in a western one? Maybe.
- sneak 2y agoIt seems to me that this security architecture is a direct response to the hostile regulatory environment Apple finds themselves in wrt USA PATRIOT and the CCP et al.