Apple enabling client-side CSAM scanning on iPhone tomorrow

Post by zepto » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 1:41 PM UTC

kaba0 wrote: post #295

zepto wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False positives are clearly astronomically unlikely. Not a real issue. Engineered collisions seem unlikely too. Not impossible. Unless there is a straight up cryptographic defect in the hash algorithm, it seems hard to see how engineered collisions could be made to happen at any scale.

Why do you think that? There are plenty of whitepapers on fooling NNs by changing random pixels by a bit, so that the picture is not meaningfully changed for a person, but the computer will label it very differently. Do note that these are not cryptographic hashes because they have to recognize the picture even when compressed differently, cropped a bit, etc.

Post by zepto » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 1:47 PM UTC

regnull wrote: post #507

snarf21 wrote: post #500

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Great, so what's the solution? What are you doing to fix it? Do you roll your own silicon? Do you grow your own food (we have no idea what someone could be putting in it)? Are you completely off-grid? Or are you as completely dependent on society writ large as everyone else? Making holier than thou comments about everyone else being sheep isn't helpful or thought provoking. Offer an alternative if it is a bad one (lo…

The solution is to go back to the original spirit of the Internet, when it was a set of open standards connecting people and organizations. Somehow it got forgotten and now we have a bunch of commercial companies giving you the same stuff in exchange for your privacy and who increasingly control everything you do.

Post by zepto » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 1:49 PM UTC

fsflover wrote: post #482

gjulianm wrote: post #479

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Yes, because the "huge number of independent people" have never missed any serious bugs or backdoor, and they also verify every piece of equipment you use.

Nothing is ever perfectly secure. It's a question of whom you should trust for a lesser damage.

Post by relax88 » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 1:57 PM UTC

zepto wrote: post #523

regnull wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is to go back to the original spirit of the Internet, when it was a set of open standards connecting people and organizations. Somehow it got forgotten and now we have a bunch of commercial companies giving you the same stuff in exchange for your privacy and who increasingly control everything you do.

The spirit of the internet won’t generate secure hardware or a transparent software stack. Also, that spirit existed only in an adversary free environment. You may as well say the solution is for everyone to be nice to each other. The solution is to build new technologies that are privacy preserving, transparent, don’t place trust in a central authority but are resistant to attack . This is possible but nobody has bu…

Post by waz0wski » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 2:00 PM UTC

jsjohnst wrote: post #63

drvdevd wrote: post #54

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Since you worked on an actual contract catching these sorts of people you are perhaps in a unique position to answer the question: will this sort of blanket surveillance technique in general but also in iOS specifically - actually work to help catch them?

I have direct knowledge of examples of where individuals were arrested and convicted of sharing CP online and they were identified because a previous employer I worked for used PhotoDNA analysis on all user uploaded images. So yeah, this type of thing can catch bad people. I’m still not convinced Apple doing this is a good thing, especially on private media content without a warrant, even though the technology can he…