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Key senators have voted for the anti-encryption EARN IT act

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261–270 of 348 posts

Re: Key senators have voted for the anti-encryption EARN IT act

#261

In my mind "Think of the children" is synonymous with "ulterior motive". After reading the comments here, I am adding CSAM to the list of synonyms.

Banning encryption because of some people use it to transfer abusive images is literally throwing baby out with the bathwater. Why not ban sending snail mail as well, as it can be used to send abusive images too?

Don't give them ideas.

We might as well ban sending pictures and audio because least-significant-bit steganography is a thing.

Re: Key senators have voted for the anti-encryption EARN IT act

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example, by forcing Apple to remove the apps from the Appstore. Apple would fight this all the way to the Supreme Court. This is IMHO a clear violation of the 1st amendment. With such a conservative Supreme Court, I doubt they would look favorably at restricting speech of a company. Besides, Apple’s App Store is available in many countries around the world; an American iPhone user could get restricted apps from i…

>Apple would fight this all the way to the Supreme Court. This is IMHO a clear violation of the 1st amendment. I'm not so sure anymore. Apple of yore is dead. They recently announced a plan to scan local files on iPhones against a government created list of hashes. Only after immense backlash did they agree to "delay" the implementation. This had no profit motive for Apple. As a company, the move served to seriously…

To play devil's advocate, I actually suspect the reason Apple were planning to implement this was because they were intending to start using E2E encryption on iCloud photos, but to keep various governments off their back figured they could placate them by implementing this scanning.

Re: Key senators have voted for the anti-encryption EARN IT act

#266
post #193

I guess this is the end of "sending customer data to the us". Quite impressive how fast the US-politics can burn billions in $, endanger the technological lead and build a massive opportunity for Europe! I, as a European could not be happier about this, from a economic standpoint. Hope you guys over there are not drifting to a surveillance dystopian.

Get off your high horse. This is a long term international effort where irrelevant Western countries in the peripheries (that’s the EU) have nibbled away at encryption protections to make it easier for the US to do the same. It’s part of a two decades long effort by Western elites to correct their mistakes from the nineties - namely loosening the noose on information and privacy. Australia, France, UK all have dracon…

> The US is really flawed, but I wouldn't move back to the EU for double my family’s income.

Which of the 27(8) countries did you live in, as they are rather different?

Re: Key senators have voted for the anti-encryption EARN IT act

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I'm not really answering to you (as an individual/person), but to the concept you expressed, which is VERY american.

I didn't express my concept, I expressed the reality that US tech companies have universally conquered Europe. If the EU would have had the ability to compete in these sectors, then we would have done it already ever since we found out in 2013 that the US is spying on us, or way before that. But nothing changed since then. Almost every EU company and government institution is using Microsoft products and all consumer…

The sad reality is that we have all tied ourselves to America which was considered an unsinkable bastion of Western democracy and civilization.

As Europeans we should have known better: all nations rise and fall.

Re: Key senators have voted for the anti-encryption EARN IT act

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're kind of arguing a straw man, sure it technically runs it on the phone (I don't dispute that), but only when upload to iCloud is enabled and the photo is being uploaded to iCloud . The latter bit matters (and what I meant by 'essentially'). Running the check on the phone on upload with these constraints is what would enable iCloud to be encrypted. I don't think there's much point in discussing further, the main…

> only when upload to iCloud is enabled and the photo is being uploaded to iCloud You have to trust Apple that this will always be the case. Your model should be to trust no one . Don't take anyone at their word as it's subject to change at any time. Especially not a corporation which is easily manipulated governments (look how they bend to Russia and China). It's entirely obtuse that this can be turned with product…

> You have to trust Apple that this will always be the case.

You're right of course, but I'd argue this is true in either case. If you're using an iPhone you're trusting Apple is doing what they say they're doing and there's not much you can do about it.

> Your model should be to trust no one. Don't take anyone at their word as it's subject to change at any time. Especially not a corporation which is easily manipulated governments (look how they bend to Russia and China).

I actually agree with this general idea (I work on urbit fwiw), I just think in this case you already have to trust anyway. If they're going to lie and do something differently that's bad - I just think that's independent of this policy and the policy specifics matter.

As it is unencrypted iCloud is a worse state imo, but as I said elsewhere reasonable people can disagree with this. The specific policy as described though isn't worse - it's people's assumption that it increases risk of an abusive policy that is. My take is that that risk is there in either case and really independent of this policy.

Re: Key senators have voted for the anti-encryption EARN IT act

#269
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really buy this, I don't think this feature makes abuse any more likely and it's important to be loud against features that are actually abuse vs. ones that are just adjacent to something that is abuse. The difference matters, particularly when the pragmatic approach could allow encryption of images on iCloud without any actual downside given the constraints. If people act like all actions are equivalent then…

I don't think this difference is relevant here. We've seen many technological features that were supposed to be only used in a very narrow use-cases be abused by governments. Contact tracing technologies (for covid-19) being the most recent victim where they are now being used by governments to track political protesters, criminals, and seemingly anyone else that catches their fancy. I've seen this cycle play out eno…

Contact tracing is actually a perfect example.

Early in the pandemic the tech companies came together to create a privacy preserving bluetooth exposure notification system that relied on phones and a clever design to prevent this kind of tracking panopticon you describe. See: https://covid19-static.cdn-apple.com/applications/covid19/cu...

The HN response was ignorant and loudly knee-jerk without understanding how any of this worked. It was stuff like this that caused this to fail to get adopted (see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25629304 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26957763). This is partly why I ignore HN on topics like this.

Instead, we ended up with governments just doing it via data brokers and other types of way more invasive tracking.

Our response to encryption policy like Apple's that doesn't decrease privacy could lead to a similarly bad outcome.

Re: Key senators have voted for the anti-encryption EARN IT act

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They why are those US tech companies so successful in the EU with no viable local competitors, if nobody wants them? US tech has too much money they burn it on shit. So any potential competitor is bought, you see some UK AI company pops up then Google buys it and 1 year later you read how Google made huge progress in AI. IMO EU needs to first fix the illegal US companies tax tricks, also fix the Apple software tax o…

So, why are these noble, incorruptible EU-based companies selling out?

For money, I did not say are incorruptible. I explained why you will not see a FB or Google,Intel,Apple private competitor appear , it will be bought, the competitors will appear from China for sure, they have already mastered the smartphone , they are working on CPUs , I am not into social media but I read that they have pretty good alternatives to US versions too.
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