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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

#271

Post by rangerdan »

simondotau wrote: post #138
rangerdan wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the US Government forced Apple to add other entries to the hash table, this would constitute a warrantless Government search of the private physical property of US citizens. This is a clear-cut, unambiguous breach of the 4th Amendment. There's no reason not to assume this isn't already happening, being closed source and proprietary. The question to ask is, what are we going to do about it?

If you take that line of argument, you must also accept that you have no reason not to assume that binary distributions of Android and Windows haven't been doing similar things for the past decade.

The audience here should know that where there is capability, there is abuse. Android and Windows are no exception.

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

#272

Post by sroussey »

burnished wrote: post #243
sroussey wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think the issue is that the content review is happening on phone, and would be a small change to go from scanning uploaded photos to all photos

Oh yes, I agree. We will see a change in privacy policy before that happens. And Apple will lose a lot of us if that comes to pass.

For many years, it happened in the cloud. Soon it will happen on device and send a message about which item in the cloud is an issue.

I think it’s all about apple moving ML jobs (like Siri) to device to lighten the load on their datacenters.

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

#273

Post by wyager »

zepto wrote: post #234
wyager wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A government-funded “NGO” with special legal powers is the government.

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

#274

Post by solveit »

nicce wrote: post #226
r3trohack3r wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Selection bias? It _might_ be a pretty accurate description of a large fraction those who _get caught_.

So we must compare those statistics for unsolved mysteries to find the truth and correlation.

For the best criminals, you wouldn't even know that there's an unsolved mystery to be solved.

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

#275

Post by nullc »

monkeynotes wrote: post #269
nullc wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a human verifying the images would dismiss the false positive How is a human supposed to distinguish that a visual derivative (a low res sobel filtered image, presumably) of ordinary, lawful, adult pornography isn't child porn when the system has already identified it as such? I agree that using real child porn is an attack too, but at least in that case you could say the system was doing as designed (even though w…

Are you saying humans cannot visually inspect the actual image that the flag is set against? If not, then how on earth do you prosecute someone if you can't demonstrate they had the actual image, and not just the derivation used to flag it? The way I see it working is Apple scans a ton of shit, some of it shows up as possible child porn, human intervenes and looks at the source images, if there is indeed child porn t…

Apple's review has no access to the matched images in the database, just a 'derivative' of your image. Hopefully the prosecutors will check against the real images. But by that point your privacy has been damaged and your reputation might be trashed.

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

#276

Post by nullc »

zepto wrote: post #270
nullc wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Courts have determined that for this purpose the NCMEC is an agent of the government. NEMEC is 99% funded by the government and its ability to handle child porn is directly deprived from a explicit legislative carveout for them by name. What they do would be a felony for you or I to do. The fact that they are technically non-profit rather than an agency makes them significantly less accountable to the public. We cann…

> And we have no way to tell what their database contains, nor is there any avenue for redress should we somehow learn of an inappropriate listing. Yes there is. It’s called legal liability. They are not immune to being held accountable for their actions just like any other non-profit. They may be immune from prosecution for possessing CSAM, but they don’t have any kind of immunity for damages they cause through thei…

So you would agree that Apple's use of private set intersection serves the purpose of shielding themselves and their data sources for the purposes of mitigating their legal liability from the harms created by false listings by concealing the content of the databases?

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

#277

Post by panta »

prirun wrote: post #205
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…

> Is it really worth turning personal devices into snitches that don't even do a good job of protecting children? Yes, because the point is not to protect children. It's to get everyone used to the idea that their content is being monitored. Once that is accomplished, other forms of monitoring can and will be added.

Exactly. It's a Trojan Horse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Horse) to make more pervasive individual control the new normality. The current motivations are just a pretext.

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

#278

Post by scotty79 »

GistNoesis wrote: post #156
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…

Afiu, Apple's NeuralHash uses exact collisions when they do their Private Set Intersection. The main advantage of using exact collision is that you can then blind the perceptual hash with a cryptographic hash and avoid any leak of information. (Taking for example sha256 of this perceptual hash won't allow any attacker to get any information on the features from the hash, but if the perceptual hash are the same then t…

But they can't use exact matches because their algorithm doesn't create same hash for same image on their various platforms due to hardware differences in floating point arithmetic on their different devices. Unless they have on their servers floating point arithmetic emulators that can calculate exact hash for each of their different devices for each offending image then they can't only match exactly.

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

#279

Post by scotty79 »

specialist wrote: post #99
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…

Per ATP: Apple will compare hashes of local photos with a national registry of child pornography photos. Once a certain (unknown) threshold is reached, let's say 20 hits, some kind of escalation occurs, with some kind of manual (human) review steps. Accidental Tech Podcast - A Storm of Asterisks https://atp.fm/443 I haven't listened to the follow up episode yet. I still have zero opinion on this photo scanning kerfuf…

So there's a national database of all child pornography that Apple has access to? How is that access legal?

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

#280

Post by scotty79 »

cannabis_sam wrote: post #100
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…

> Why are exact collisions interesting? 1. What does “exact” mean to you in this context? 2. What else is more interesting about a hashing algorithm used to identify things, other than its collision rate?

Ad.1 Same value of each of 96 bits of the hash.

Ad.2 If hashes are to be matched approximately, not exactly, for example will be considered a match if they differ in less than 3 bits out of 96 then the most interesting thing should be how many collisions you can find if you compare them like that.

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