Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.quintarelli.it

261–270 of 318 posts

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

#261
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The discussion I thought we were having was about false positives and not adversarially induced false positives. For the former the random collisions have a probability of 1/(2^64). To mitigate adversarial false positives one idea is to use the combination of a cryptographically strong hash along with a randomly selected perturbation of the file. Prior to hashing, perturb the file and submit both the hash and the sel…

I thought that the random collision for md5 was way higher than that. If it's that low, you're right, this would work. I'm not sure I understand the part about the pertubation.

It’s actually 1/(2^128).

If the attacker does not know how the image will be perturbed prior to hashing then he cannot generate an image which matches with known CSAM.

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

#262
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, the next step after that is to make "non-authorised" operating systems -- which may include Linux (except for specially signed versions that will also include similar spyware) -- "deprecated" or "discouraged", then "suspicious", and perhaps even eventually illegal. Stallman predicted a similar outcome, and although he (and many others) thought the end of computing freedom would be due to copyright/DRM, I w…

> ...and as much as I'd like to see at least that amount of "watering the liberty tree" directed at Big Tech […] I’m having a hard time finding a reading of this that isn’t advocating violence against tech workers. Is that what you intended?

Given corporate personhood, destroying the companies could be considered corporate murder. (I admit it's a very stretched reading.)

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

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

At the time of my comments people weren’t discussing the fuzziness of perceptual hashing - they weren’t discussing implementation details at all.

I don’t know enough about the specific implementation or perceptual hashing details and probably pushed back too hard as a result of the other comments at the time (which were comments out of ignorance).

The level of downvotes I received is disproportionate to what I wrote anyway - this is clearly a political issue on HN. The irony is I’d probably align more with the risks being too high position, but it needs to be considered after actually understanding what the true risks are first.

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

#264
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...and as much as I'd like to see at least that amount of "watering the liberty tree" directed at Big Tech […] I’m having a hard time finding a reading of this that isn’t advocating violence against tech workers. Is that what you intended?

Given corporate personhood, destroying the companies could be considered corporate murder. (I admit it's a very stretched reading.)

I agree that is a favorable reading.

But it is especially a stretch in the context of January 6th which involved violence directed at people. And the rest of the paragraph laments that future action must be nonviolent.

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

#265
post #47

Apple will release this in their desktop pcs. The major consequence of this is that, a year down the line, microsoft will also be compelled/forced to join this "coalition of the good". After all, they already scan all your files for viruses, it would be a shame if they didn't scan for anything that is deemed incriminating and also call the cops on you. Of course, the children are being used as a trojan horse again. W…

> possessing CP to automatically considering them a child molester, yet someone posessing an action movie is not considered a murderer That's specious reasoning. Someone who posesses an action movie likes action movies, while someone who posesses child porn likes child porn. One is ok, the other is pretty vile and illegal for a reason. I don't agree with Apple on this but let's be clear on what is and what isn't

You realize if this is as problematic as we are talking about and peoples lives are ruined from false positives it will create a political movement that will make this illegal. Stop trying to lobby companies and lobby for politicians that will rein this shit in.

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

#266
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 can be against this kind of thing from Apple, but as a result more CSAM will be undetected.

You cannot claim to be making "the real reasonable analysis" and write this. So much for "you're all geeks stuck on technical details". Quite the contrary: I'm sick of bogus software pretending to solve problems for me, while the quality of tech has exponential degraded over the last 20 years (often due to trying to solve some unsolvable problem in a bad way that backfires).

Now imagine you have a 16 year old girlfriend. She sends you a nude photo. Your phone calls the cops on you (it doesn't matter if the phone doesn't quite do this now, it will in the future. They will use their ML crap to detect the age of subjects in photos and explicitness of the photo). You normally wouldn't go to jail for this since 16 is legal in 99% of the civilized world, but thanks to America with their super duper "non-technical" innovations that only big boy white collars can understand, you can go to jail for having a photo of your legal girlfriend.

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

#267
post #47

Apple will release this in their desktop pcs. The major consequence of this is that, a year down the line, microsoft will also be compelled/forced to join this "coalition of the good". After all, they already scan all your files for viruses, it would be a shame if they didn't scan for anything that is deemed incriminating and also call the cops on you. Of course, the children are being used as a trojan horse again. W…

> possessing CP to automatically considering them a child molester, yet someone posessing an action movie is not considered a murderer That's specious reasoning. Someone who posesses an action movie likes action movies, while someone who posesses child porn likes child porn. One is ok, the other is pretty vile and illegal for a reason. I don't agree with Apple on this but let's be clear on what is and what isn't

You can have videos of somebody actually getting killed and it's not a crime. Reddit killed the /r/watchpeopledie subreddit, but it wasn't illegal to go on.

Until people are actively encouraging people dying for people getting killed by paying for gladiator matches, I agree with you it's not the same thing, but I don't think the person you're answering to is talking about action movies.

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

#268

> Do we really think criminals trade CSAM in plain-sight web sites ? "In 2018, Facebook (especially Facebook Messenger) was responsible for 16.8 million of the 18.4 million reports worldwide of CSAM" Apparently they do, yeah.

Also

> Do we really think criminals don’t know mathematics or programming ?

Yes, by and large yes I do. Amon is a great example of this. Surely in the world this author is imagining no criminal would get caught up in a scheme like Amon since there are criminals that know "mathematics or programming", except... no one noticed/blew the whistle and instead the FBI rounded up the users of that device.

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

#269
post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't even mention the giant logical leap from finding someone possessing CP to automatically considering them a child molester, yet someone posessing an action movie is not considered a murderer. Filming an action movie does not require actually murdering people.

And neither does producing child porn. Drawn child porn is banned in most countries.

And that's silly. But I'm talking about actual child porn.

I'm not defending Apple. I'm saying it's absurd to act like "merely" distributing explicit photos taken without the subject's consent is a victimless crime.

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

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 can be against this kind of thing from Apple, but as a result more CSAM will be undetected. You cannot claim to be making "the real reasonable analysis" and write this. So much for "you're all geeks stuck on technical details". Quite the contrary: I'm sick of bogus software pretending to solve problems for me, while the quality of tech has exponential degraded over the last 20 years (often due to trying to solv…

Mostly good...

> big boy white

but why the totally uncalled racism and sexism here?

It does nothing to strengthen your argument and it is just dumb.

Post reply on HN