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

A catalog of naturally occurring images whose Apple NeuralHash is identical

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 304 posts

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

#231

Post by addingnumbers »

websites2023 wrote: post #177
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?

Why the contagion analogy?

If contagion wasn't a factor, I'd rather test in the kitchen, it's cozier.

Are you suggesting CSAM will infect more unwilling victims if it gets into a private iCloud account?

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

#232

Post by woofie11 »

sroussey wrote: post #219
woofie11 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really want my family photos reviewed by strangers. "Reducing the search space" of photos on my phone isn't an outcome I want to live with. At the time someone is looking at photos of my, my wife/husband/girlfriend/boyfriend, and my kids, they'd better have a darned good reason (e.g. a search warrant). I'd also appreciate if Apple let me know if my false positives were reviewed and found to not be CASM.

Don’t upload an image anywhere, else it can be reviewed.

The whole point of Apple's system is that I don't need to upload an image anywhere.

Images from my phone can be stolen and reviewed with no due process, based on proprietary Apple technology.

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

#233

Post by zepto »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #201
zepto wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. It’s not controlled by the government, and it’s not warrantless, since it is opt-in.

Since the govt. supplies the hashes in an unauditable way, it absolutely is controlled by the government. What's to stop them from using hashes of non CSAM material?

The government doesn’t supply the hashes in an unauditable way, that is a totally false statement.

The hashes are supplied by NCMEC, a non-profit which is auditable, not a secret government agency.

In any case, even if a non-CSAM hash were somehow in the database, Apple reviews the images before making reports, and those reports are used in normal criminal prosecutions.

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

#234

Post by zepto »

wyager wrote: post #213
zepto wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. It’s not controlled by the government, and it’s not warrantless, since it is opt-in.

The database of hashes is controlled by the government. They can put whatever they want in there.

False. See my other reply.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28303966

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

#235

Post by zionic »

madeofpalk wrote: post #64
mns wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I would trust a huge corporation with this. Plus, leaving the review to some internal classified process where some poor faceless guy needs to reach an unrealistically high quota of reviewed images per day to get his bonus, might be a bit of a risk.

it's not just internal policy - the safety vouchers will not decrypt (technically impossible) unless there are ~30 matches. It is a policy encoded in cryptography.

"30 matches" just means you're one imgur album of adversarial images away from a swat team.

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

#236

Post by websites2023 »

addingnumbers wrote: post #231
websites2023 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Why the contagion analogy? If contagion wasn't a factor, I'd rather test in the kitchen, it's cozier. Are you suggesting CSAM will infect more unwilling victims if it gets into a private iCloud account?

CSAM on the server means the server is tainted and likely to be searched by governments. Good plan to keep it off eliminates that excuse.

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

#237

Post by theshrike79 »

teekert wrote: post #152
theshrike79 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your threat model here is that the person at Apple tasked to check for Child Porn is an actual Paedophile and might accidentally see a false positive of your child's naked photo? You do know that they don't see the whole photo at full megapixel resolution? They're just given "a visual derivative" of the photo for checking. Also, you really think that the persons tasked with this process are just randos off the str…

Are you saying randos flock to this position? And where do you get the "visual derivative" information? Apple sure didn't communicate that to me. All I know is some person may look at my pics at some point.

From the spec: https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni...

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

#238

Post by hackinthebochs »

snowwrestler wrote: post #230
hackinthebochs wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested in the details of the manual review. Does Apple have access to the database of original images and will they use it compare? If not, I can imagine a scenario where a photo of a naked child is flagged as matching the database, the human reviewer sees that it is in fact a naked child and assumes this must mean the image has been legally determined to be child pornography. The case gets referred to author…

Law enforcement must manually review all suspected CSAM before seeking a warrant based on it. There is a whole process there, beyond whatever Apple has implemented, before a prosecution begins. Understand that matching a file in the NCMEC database is not itself a crime. The whole CSAM-detecting ecosystem is just a tool for surfacing potential crimes. Having a few pics of your own child naked is not illegal and it’s p…

>Law enforcement must manually review all suspected CSAM before seeking a warrant based on it.

Is this a legal statute or simply convention due to the ways things have historically worked (i.e. pre-hash matching at scale)? If warrants are granted based on probable cause, it seems easy to convince a judge that a hash match is sufficiently unlikely that it would exceed the threshold for probable cause. In the context of cryptographic hashes, this is accurate. But if law enforcement doesn't distinguish between cryptographic and perceptual hashes, then there is the real possibility for cases opened and warrants issued unjustifiably.

Sure, matching a hash isn't a crime and you will eventually be exonerated. But as they say, you can beat the rap but you can't beat the ride.

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

#239

Post by addingnumbers »

websites2023 wrote: post #236
addingnumbers wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the contagion analogy? If contagion wasn't a factor, I'd rather test in the kitchen, it's cozier. Are you suggesting CSAM will infect more unwilling victims if it gets into a private iCloud account?

CSAM on the server means the server is tainted and likely to be searched by governments. Good plan to keep it off eliminates that excuse.

I don't see how this scanning reduces the likelihood of a government searching their servers. Seems to me like this can only result in more court orders than they had before scanning.

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

#240

Post by wpietri »

woofie11 wrote: post #215
wpietri wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew a probation officer for sex offenders. They told me that most of them were quite dumb. What the repeat offenders were, though, is dedicated. They had all day to try to avoid getting caught, and the PO had a few minutes per week per offender. It's true that in any arms race, a given advance gets adapted to. This will surely catch a bunch of people up front and then a pretty small number thereafter as the remain…

I think it's only the dumb ones who get caught. Source: I've met a few white collar criminals.

Probably some of both. One point of the criminal justice system is to shift incentives such that people with their acts together satisfy their desires without criming. There are plenty of smart, greedy people who just go get an MBA and siphon off value in ways that are technically legal. The risk-adjusted ROI is better.
Post reply on HN