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A catalog of naturally occurring images whose Apple NeuralHash is identical

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Re: A catalog of naturally occurring images whose Apple NeuralHash is identical

#171

Post by zepto »

iamtheworstdev wrote: post #126
monkeynotes wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think before a criminal investigation, or any investigation at all is pursued, a human verifying the images would dismiss the false positive. I would think surreptitiously placing actual child porn on a rival's phone/computer would be much, much more effective. Cybercriminals could likely do all this remotely. Phish for apple account login, upload images. Done.

you think the US government would respect the law before initiation of actions to take down a criminal? they rarely do that when dealing with people that dont have criminal backgrounds

If you really believe you live in a country with a completely corrupt legal system, then this stuff is the least of your worries.

Re: A catalog of naturally occurring images whose Apple NeuralHash is identical

#173

Post by zepto »

toxik wrote: post #30
read_if_gay_ wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “actual argument” against the system that this provides is that Apple lied about the likelihood of hash collisions. Therefore, why trust any of their other claims?

I find this an unconvincing argument as well, you're saying that because Apple made a false claim, any claim may be valid. This is obviously not the case, what they did was to, albeit likely knowingly, calculate the hash collision probability /if each bit is a coin flip/, which comes out to pow(2, -k) for k bits. It's tiny. Of course, each bit is /not/ an independent coin flip under the NeuralHash function. So again…

> that because Apple made a false claim

Apple never made a false claim. They have never anywhere stated that neuralhash makes false positives at 1 in a trillion. Only that that is the rate for the system as a whole to flag accounts for review. The explicitly mention that they will vary the number of matches needed to maintain this if it turns out to be higher or lower based on images in the wild.

There are good arguments against this system but most of the technical debate seems to have devolved into amplifying lies now.

Re: A catalog of naturally occurring images whose Apple NeuralHash is identical

#174

Post by volta83 »

foxfluff wrote: post #123

My take on this is that the system is by and large useless. It won't catch anything but the dumbest of dumb criminals, because those who care about CSAM can surely figure out a better way to share images, or find a way to obfuscate their images enough to bypass the system (the lower the false positive rate, the easier it must be to trick the system). So what's left when all the criminals this is supposed to catch hav…

The false positive rate reported in the blogpost for imagenet was 1 in a trillion, and the author concludes that this algorithm is better than they expected.

Re: A catalog of naturally occurring images whose Apple NeuralHash is identical

#175

Post by School-Cotton »

scotty79 wrote: post #71

Why are exact collisions interesting? They are not intended to be compared exactly. This algorithm doesn't even give exact matches for the same image on different hardware. https://github.com/AsuharietYgvar/AppleNeuralHash2ONNX Note: Neural hash generated here might be a few bits off from one generated on an iOS device. This is expected since different iOS devices generate slightly different hashes anyway. The reason…

That explanation doesn’t make sense to me. Standard (IEEE) floating-point math is deterministic; it shouldn’t depend on the hardware.

Re: A catalog of naturally occurring images whose Apple NeuralHash is identical

#176

Post by nextlevelwizard »

verygoodname wrote: post #121
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #38

How are any of these "naturally occurring" when all (4) examples are things cut out of context on a white background. Yeah two sticks (ski and nail) are visually similar on a white background. Why is this news to anyone? EDIT: if you are going to downvote please leave a comment unless you are just downvoting for wrong think.

As it is explained in the "readme" part, in this specific context, "naturally occurring" means that no one has purposefully manipulated any of the images to make them collide: that the images were already published and "out there" and happen to collide. In other words, it does not necessarily imply that the images correspond to natural photographic scenes (which seems to be your interpretation of it). Besides, you co…

It is unlikely unless you manage to capture some position and happen to have some background. This whole thing is a nothingburger. This is one of those weird things were many people have baseless gut reactions and then try to go and prove if flawed even though they don't have a complete picture.

It is unlikely that there is a collision of benign image with the database and even if that happens it is not some automatic process that just sends cops to your house to raid it.

Of course we can get bunch of collitions with essentially same images, I don't get why this is so magical just squint your eyes and I'm sure you have two objects with in your reach that could be made to collide, but that isn't a gotcha on any level

Re: A catalog of naturally occurring images whose Apple NeuralHash is identical

#177

Post by websites2023 »

roody15 wrote: post #33

Apple has yet to make a valid reason for implementing client side CSAM scanning. According to Apple only images that will be uploaded to iCloud will be scanned. If this is the case there is zero reason to scan locally and you can just scan the uploaded image once it is on the server. Apple has not implemented E2E nor has it released a statement indicating this will be implemented in the future.

> If this is the case there is zero reason to scan locally and you can just scan the uploaded image once it is on the server.

You’re having a house party. Because of the pandemic, you’d rather people who have COVID not attend. You can’t trust everyone to get vaccinated or get tested beforehand. So, you decided to set up a rapid-test system, just to be sure.

Would you rather test in your kitchen or your driveway?

Re: A catalog of naturally occurring images whose Apple NeuralHash is identical

#178

Post by oauea »

StrLght wrote: post #161
oauea wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you fine with an apple employee looking at all your private pictures just because some hashing algorithm decided you're a pedophile? Personally, I'm not.

First, this doesn't change my opinion on CSAM, I still consider the thing way too intrusive until Apple announces E2E for iCloud. Now, I can't really call something I voluntarily uploaded to Apple's servers a "private picture". But that's just a matter of perspective, and I understand that many people would disagree with me on this.

Good luck convincing all the couples who back up all their pictures by default to iCloud that those pictures are not private.

Re: A catalog of naturally occurring images whose Apple NeuralHash is identical

#179

Post by user-the-name »

foxfluff wrote: post #123

My take on this is that the system is by and large useless. It won't catch anything but the dumbest of dumb criminals, because those who care about CSAM can surely figure out a better way to share images, or find a way to obfuscate their images enough to bypass the system (the lower the false positive rate, the easier it must be to trick the system). So what's left when all the criminals this is supposed to catch hav…

> It won't catch anything but the dumbest of dumb criminals

This includes the vast majority of pedophiles.

Re: A catalog of naturally occurring images whose Apple NeuralHash is identical

#180

Post by UncleMeat »

foxfluff wrote: post #123

My take on this is that the system is by and large useless. It won't catch anything but the dumbest of dumb criminals, because those who care about CSAM can surely figure out a better way to share images, or find a way to obfuscate their images enough to bypass the system (the lower the false positive rate, the easier it must be to trick the system). So what's left when all the criminals this is supposed to catch hav…

> It won't catch anything but the dumbest of dumb criminals, because those who care about CSAM can surely figure out a better way to share images, or find a way to obfuscate their images enough to bypass the system (the lower the false positive rate, the easier it must be to trick the system).

Given the reported numbers of illegal images detected by similar systems within Facebook and Google, I think it is very clear that this will catch a lot of illegal content.

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