Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

One Bad Apple

hackerfactor.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 557 posts

Re: One Bad Apple

#131

Post by kemiller »

upbeat_general wrote: post #125
kemiller wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They want to move to e2e for photos so they don't have to keep those keys. That's what this is part of — a way to prevent their service from being used for CSAM, yet still provide e2e encryption. I feel very ambivalent about this.

That was never mentioned by Apple. If that was their intention then I suspect they would have mentioned it alongside this announcement to provide a justification and quell the (justified) outrage. I also question the value of e2e there’s an arbitrary scanner that can send back the unencrypted files if it finds a match. If apple’s servers controls the db with “hashes” to match then is it all that different from apple’…

They don’t send unencrypted full-res files, they send low res “visual representation” and can only decode if they get > x “hits”. Assuming it works as described I do think it’s better than just having full keys as they do now. And why else would they go to all this trouble? They can scan images now on their servers if that’s what they want.

Re: One Bad Apple

#132

Post by slg »

hackerfactor1 wrote: post #115
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #7

NCMEC has essentially shows that they have zero regard for privacy and called all privacy activists "screeching voices of the minority". At the same time, they're at the center point of a highly opaque, entrenched (often legally mandated) censorhip infrastructure that can and will get accounts shut down irrecoverably and possibly people's homes raided, on questionable data: In one of the previous discussions, I've se…

> I'm surprised, and honestly disappointed, that the author seems to still play nice, instead of releasing the whitepaper. I'm the author. I've worked with different parts of NCMEC for years. (I built the initial FotoForensics service in a few days. Before I wrote the first line of code, I was in phone calls with NCMEC about my reporting requirements.) Over time, this relationship grew. Some years, I was in face-to-f…

>About this time, someone usually mocks "it's always about the kids, think about the kids." To those critics: They have not seen the scope of this problem or the long term impact. There is nearly a 1-to-1 relationship between people who deal in CP and people who abuse children. And they rarely victimize just one child. Nearly 1 in 10 children in the US will be sexually abused before the age of 18.

I think we have seen "think of the kids" used as an excuse for so many things over the years that the pendulum has now swung so far that some of the tech community has begun to think we should do absolutely nothing about this problem. I have even seen people on HN in the last week that are so upset by the privacy implications of this that they start arguing that these images of abuse should be legal since trying to crack down is used as a motive to invade people's privacy.

I don't know what the way forward is here, but we really shouldn't lose sight that there are real kids being hurt in all this. That is incredibly motivating for a lot of people. Too often the tech community's response is that the intangible concept of privacy is more important than the tangible issue of child abuse. That isn't going to be a winning argument among mainstream audiences. We need something better or it is only a matter of time until these type of systems are implemented everywhere.

Re: One Bad Apple

#133

Post by kemiller »

Gaelan wrote: post #64
kemiller wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They want to move to e2e for photos so they don't have to keep those keys. That's what this is part of — a way to prevent their service from being used for CSAM, yet still provide e2e encryption. I feel very ambivalent about this.

> They want to move to e2e for photos so they don't have to keep those keys. That's my suspicion too, but has it actually been confirmed?

Well why else would they bother? This is WAY more complicated than just scanning on their servers.

Re: One Bad Apple

#134

Post by nullc »

shuckles wrote: post #16
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it: When you choose to upload your images to iCloud (which currently happens without end-to-end encryption), your phone generates some form of encrypted ticket. In the future, the images will be encrypted, with a backdoor key encoded in the tickets. If Apple receives enough images that were considered a match, the tickets become decryptable (I think I saw Shamir's Secret Sharing mentioned for this ste…

These are not “claims.” The process by which they get access to only the safety vouchers for images matching CSAM is private set intersection and comes with a cryptographic proof. In no step of the proposal does Apple access the images you store in iCloud. All access is through the associated data in the safety voucher. This design allows Apple to switch iCloud storage to end to end encrypted with no protocol changes…

The private set intersection is part of the protocol to shield Apple (and their database providers) from accountability, not to protect the users privacy.

They could instead send the list of hashes to the device (which they already must trust is faithfully computing the local hash) and just let the device report when there are hits. It would be much more CPU and bandwidth efficient, too.

The PSI serves the purpose that if Apple starts sending out hashes for popular lawful images connected to particular religions, ethnicity, or political ideologies that it is information theoretically impossible for anyone to detect the abuse. It also makes it impossible to tell if different users are being tested against different lists, e.g. if Thai users were being tested against political cartoons that insult the king.

Re: One Bad Apple

#135

Post by headShrinker »

iJohnDoe wrote: post #91

I haven’t read all the details, articles, and comments. My personal thoughts on the whole situation are the following. If you are a parent and lose a child then you would want every possible avenue taken to find your child. You would be going mad wanting to find them. If there is a way to match photos to known missing children then I say it should be at least tried. I equate this to Ring cameras. They are everywhere.…

> It’s all an invasion of privacy until you’re sitting on the other side of the table where you have a vested interest in getting access to the information.

That’s the thing about privacy that so many don’t want to admit. “Everyone deserves it, until they don’t”. All of society’s privacy is more important than your single child, sorry.

Meanwhile I created this great new technology. It runs in the background super efficiently on your phone. It immediately detects housefires and alerts you. It uses a combination of sensors to literally detect the spark of flame and there’s only one in 1 trillion false positives.

Simply download the app and give it permission to sample your microphones, cameras, accelerometers and historical gps data to build a profile, then flick a lighter anywhere in your house and sure enough your phone alarm goes off.

How it works is incredible, an algorithm listens for supersonic soundwaves created by the chemical reaction during combustion. Video and sound samples are then reviewed by one of our technical representatives.

Housefires and house fire deaths will be a thing of the past. The only compromise is that our algorithms listen to all of your video and audio and occasionally monitored by a human technician, which might include audio of you making love to your wife.

Re: One Bad Apple

#136

Post by zionic »

cromwellian wrote: post #88

I don't see many people pushing back on the child pornography laws themselves that are the cause of this. I'm stepping into a hornets nest by even bringing this up, because any criticism of the laws on the books makes one look they're a pedo, so I'll preface by saying, child pornography (filmed with actual kids) is vile and disgusting, but it is the production of it that is evil to be fought and suppressed, not the p…

This. Everything that is happening now is downstream of some terrible laws.

Re: One Bad Apple

#137

Post by fuzzybassoon »

cletus wrote: post #121

I'm honestly shocked that Apple is buying into this because it's one of those well-intentioned ideas that is just incredibly bad. It also goes to show you can justify pretty much anything by saying it fights terrorism or child exploitation. We went through this 20+ years ago when US companies then couldn't export "strong" encryption (being stronger than 40 bits if you can believe that). Even at the time that was ridi…

I don't know how I feel about all of this yet (still trying to understand better), but your post implies that you've made a lot of incorrect assumptions about how this system works.

For example, the main system in discussion never sends the image to Apple, only a "visual proxy", and furthermore, it only aims to identify known (previously cataloged) CSAM.

There's a [good primer of this on Daring Fireball](https://daringfireball.net/2021/08/apple_child_safety_initia...)

Re: One Bad Apple

#138

Post by shuckles »

nullc wrote: post #134
shuckles wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are not “claims.” The process by which they get access to only the safety vouchers for images matching CSAM is private set intersection and comes with a cryptographic proof. In no step of the proposal does Apple access the images you store in iCloud. All access is through the associated data in the safety voucher. This design allows Apple to switch iCloud storage to end to end encrypted with no protocol changes…

The private set intersection is part of the protocol to shield Apple (and their database providers) from accountability, not to protect the users privacy. They could instead send the list of hashes to the device (which they already must trust is faithfully computing the local hash) and just let the device report when there are hits. It would be much more CPU and bandwidth efficient, too. The PSI serves the purpose th…

The list of hashes is confidential. Good luck getting NCMEC to sign off on an implementation which lets clients infer which photos are matching their database.

The database is embedded into iOS. There are at least three primary sources which say that users will not receive different databases, and it should be easily confirmed.

Re: One Bad Apple

#139

Post by zionic »

kook_throwaway wrote: post #74
Klonoar wrote: post #57

I appreciate just about everything about this post, but this part keeps getting lost in everything I see written about it: >As noted, Apple says that they will scan your Apple device for CSAM material. If they find something that they think matches, then they will send it to Apple. The problem is that you don't know which pictures will be sent to Apple. It's iCloud Photos. Apple has explicitly said it's iCloud photos…

The entire technical infrastructure to scan your entire device for arbitrary content is being built and deployed. The only change necessary to scan other files is changing a path and that's configuration that could even be silently done per-device.

I love that this is the (correct) response here. /r/Apple is full of morons that read the press release and honestly believe making this system scan the whole file system is impossible.

Re: One Bad Apple

#140

Post by zug_zug »

slg wrote: post #132
hackerfactor1 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm surprised, and honestly disappointed, that the author seems to still play nice, instead of releasing the whitepaper. I'm the author. I've worked with different parts of NCMEC for years. (I built the initial FotoForensics service in a few days. Before I wrote the first line of code, I was in phone calls with NCMEC about my reporting requirements.) Over time, this relationship grew. Some years, I was in face-to-f…

>About this time, someone usually mocks "it's always about the kids, think about the kids." To those critics: They have not seen the scope of this problem or the long term impact. There is nearly a 1-to-1 relationship between people who deal in CP and people who abuse children. And they rarely victimize just one child. Nearly 1 in 10 children in the US will be sexually abused before the age of 18. I think we have see…

> Too often the tech community's response is that the intangible concept of privacy is more important than the tangible issue of child abuse.

Is it intangible? 18% of the world lives in China alone. That's more people than the "1/10 who are victims of child abuse*", and I'm sure that 18% will only grow as other authoritarian countries get more technologically advanced.

I think "Think of the kids" applies very well to the CREATORS of pornography. Per wikipedia, there isn't any conclusive causal relationship between viewing CP and assaulting children.

* Per a google search "A Bureau of Justice Statistics report shows 1.6 % (sixteen out of one thousand) of children between the ages of 12-17 were victims of rape/sexual assault" which is a lot less than 10% figure you're citing. Non-sexual abuse wouldn't really have any bearing here, right?

Post reply on HN