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Apple’s new abuse prevention system: an antritust/competition point of view

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Re: Apple’s new abuse prevention system: an antritust/competition point of view

#221

Post by mshroyer »

lijogdfljk wrote: post #79

So this new Apple stuff has made me decide not to buy an M1. I'm leaning Framework laptop. For my phone though... no idea. My iPhone is honestly such a solid piece of tech. I don't _want_ to go Google either... so what else do i have? I know lots of people run de-googled Androids, which i guess works, but i'd prefer to avoid them entirely. Is there anything that works? edit : I know of the Purism phone ( https://puri…

My MacBook Pro is overdue for an upgrade, and I literally ordered a Framework laptop (on which I plan to run Debian) partially in response to this announcement.

Re: Apple’s new abuse prevention system: an antritust/competition point of view

#223

Post by ComputerGuru »

gonehome wrote: post #58
least wrote: post #28

There is no such thing as a trustworthy third party and even trusting yourself is questionable at the best of times. We are constantly balancing a bunch of different considerations with regards to the way that we compute, purchase devices, and utilize services. Security and privacy are of course important, and Apple to date has had a fairly good (if shallow) track record in this regard, at least in the United States.…

> "As mentioned in the article, this does absolutely nothing towards protecting children other than directing all but the biggest idiots towards platforms that can't be linked to them, which I'd imagine, they already are." I suspect you're more wrong than you think about this. People share large volumes of CSAM through lots of different services - I knew someone who worked on the problem at Linked In (!). HN likes to…

You need to stop assuming everyone is commenting out of ignorance and read up on how perceptual hashing works. It’s about as far as you can get from zero false positives, if configured otherwise it becomes just a poor version of SHA or whatever and can only detect exact matches.

Re: Apple’s new abuse prevention system: an antritust/competition point of view

#224

Post by lamontcg »

mthoms wrote: post #113
lamontcg wrote: post #60

> But when a backdoor is installed, the backdoor exists and history teaches that it’s only a matter of time before it’s also used by the bad guys and authoritarian regimes. Problem is that this scanning is necessarily fuzzy and there is going to be a false positive rate to it. And the way that you'll find out that you've tripped a false positive is that the SWAT team will knock your door down and kill your dog (at a…

> Problem is that this scanning is necessarily fuzzy and there is going to be a false positive rate to it. And the way that you'll find out that you've tripped a false positive is that the SWAT team will knock your door down and kill your dog (at a minimum). Not true. Hash matches are to be human reviewed. So no, people won't get "swatted" accidentally as you allege. The other concerns people have been voicing are ce…

Google and Apple have burned all their trust for this kind of thing. They already do terrible with all the people who get banned off their platforms with no notice of what they did wrong and no recourse. These companies cannot be trusted with the power to arrest you. They don't care if they ruin innocent lives due to edge conditions.

Re: Apple’s new abuse prevention system: an antritust/competition point of view

#225

Post by aburneraccnt »

e-clinton wrote: post #174

This is optional. You don’t HAVE to use iCloud for your photos. This is no different that YouTube searching videos you upload for copyrighted music. If you don’t want your photos scanned, don’t upload your images to their servers.

You're 100% correct. I had my images on iCloud because I thought Apple put my privacy first. I was being naive. I've pulled all my photos off and am looking to move the rest of my data too. My iPhone and iPad just got a lot less useful.

Re: Apple’s new abuse prevention system: an antritust/competition point of view

#226

Post by mthoms »

nomel wrote: post #148
mthoms wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. A registered charity called The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children controls the hash list. Yes, they are partly government funded, but I highly doubt they'd let their mission be compromised by allowing the government to inject non-CP hashes. Doing so would compromise all the work they've performed over the last four decades. These people are (rightfully) very passionate about their work and can't…

> by allowing the government to inject non-CP hashes I don't think "allowing" is the concern here, because I highly doubt they get to generate the hashes themselves.

I think you misunderstand the Center’s role in this. They review and categorize the images. They maintain the database and provide access to different organizations for the purpose of catching CP. Why wouldn’t they also generate the hashes?

Re: Apple’s new abuse prevention system: an antritust/competition point of view

#227

Post by lamontcg »

gonehome wrote: post #149
bnj wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but my understanding is that the hashes are perceptual, as opposed to cryptographic. If the system was matching against known cryptographic hashes the collision / false positive rate would be small, but the fuzzy matching involved with perceptual hashing necessarily has a greater false positive rate. And that doesn’t even begin to address the detection of sent and received “explicit images” which are detected on…

I suspect that's why they have some threshold that moves the false positive rate to one in one trillion. The iMessage bit is different - it's only on device, only on child accounts, and only alerts parents. It's more akin to a parental control feature than anything else.

It doesn't matter if the cryptographic algorithm is one in a trillion. If there's a concurrency bug in the application which applies the algorithm the wrong account could be flagged against a legitimate image in the database. If the human involved overly trusts the system they may not validate against the actual file in the users account, or may assume the user deleted it somehow and figure its "safter" to let law enforcement figure it out.

Bugs in the application of the code, combined with human complacency and mistakes can certainly lead to errors, even if the cryptographic algorithm itself was perfect.

We really need to bring back comp.risks

Re: Apple’s new abuse prevention system: an antritust/competition point of view

#228

Post by mercora »

runlevel1 wrote: post #111
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only scans images in your iCloud Photo Library. Not paying for iCloud? No scanning. Not in your photo library? No scanning. And even then, only for known content, not new content.

So the attacker only needs to get access to your iCloud. Your iPhone will happily sync down photos uploaded elsewhere. You don't have to be paying for iCloud, either. There's a free tier, so I'd imagine almost all iPhones are using some tier of it. iCloud account break-ins aren't exactly rare. An accusation, even if false, could ruin an innocent person's life.

> There's a free tier, so I'd imagine almost all iPhones are using some tier of it.

i was quite surprised to see this was the default or at least was setup unknowingly to me.

Re: Apple’s new abuse prevention system: an antritust/competition point of view

#229

Post by mthoms »

sithlord wrote: post #163
mthoms wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you actually think there is going to be a fully automated system dispatching police SWAT teams throughout the US without a manual (or judicial) review then.... I really don't know what to tell you.

Guess its hard to believe that their is a world outside of the United States. Already do whatever it takes to pin some BS on someone that opposes them and has them executed. This would be no different.

I don’t understand. If the government can just claim you had CP without proof, then they can just… do that? They don’t need Apples system.

Especially since anything flagged by this system is manually reviewed by Apple. So, there would exist counter-evidence for the govt claim.

Don’t misunderstand, I see how this system is ripe for abuse. I was just commenting on the specific claim that there will be automated SWAT call outs (presumably in the US).

Re: Apple’s new abuse prevention system: an antritust/competition point of view

#230

Post by noduerme »

macintux wrote: post #213
noduerme wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but then there's a way to upload it in plaintext. That's the backdoor. That can, and will, eventually be used to exfiltrate any file, anytime, whether it would be going to the cloud or not.

It does set a terrible precedent, but it's possible this is a step towards E2E encryption on iCloud data; a way to comply with the law while preventing law enforcement from being able to subpoena other data. Apple is being its usual cryptic self about this, which is once again breeding uncertainty, but I still have hope in the end this will work out.

Again though, what is the guarantee this is only going to be used to scan data uploaded to the cloud? If Apple has the ability to exfiltrate data from a phone at whim, they lose any deniability or leverage they still have with authoritarian regimes that want all the data on a phone. It's not just a terrible precedent, it's a dangerous piece of malware.
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