A catalog of naturally occurring images whose Apple NeuralHash is identical • Hacker News Board

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

#301

Post by Lamad123 » Fri, Aug 27, 2021, 1:00 AM UTC

Tagbert wrote: post #206

Lamad123 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They say only if they find 30 matching images, they'd act. So if they find 20 or 29 and don't report them, they are actually breaking the law!! I am wondering why they chose that magical number!

Just getting a match on the neural hash is not sufficient to declare an image CSAM. It just flags it as a candidate for review. Apple is not required to report it unless it can be verified to be CSAM. there is a multi-step process involving multiple processes and organizations to do so.

They are opening the door for a lot of questions like this. They didn't say (as far as I know) if this 30-number cover multiply upload sessions or it gets reset with every upload. I feel like this number gets reset to 0 each for each upload session. Somebody can deliberately safely upload 29 actual CSAM photos each time. I know Apple is not stupid, but you know the government and lawmakers will ask it for a smaller magical number...

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

#302

Post by xtiansimon » Fri, Aug 27, 2021, 12:36 PM UTC

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #162

tzs wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It won't catch anything but the dumbest of dumb criminals Dumb is a pretty accurate description of a large fraction of criminals. For the most part you only get smart criminals when you are talking about crimes where you have to be smart to even plan and carry out the crime.

Given the average user don't know what a url is and a pedophile can use the darknet, I'd say criminals are not all dumb.

Apple seems to have completely botched this PR stunt/feature.

Reading your comment, I realize how these… ‘criminals’ could use phone number networks to share illegal sexual content peer to peer.

In other words, Apple doesn’t need to analyze your images to find these criminals. They only need to analyze the frequency or quantity of flagged images.

In other words not one image correctly/falsely tagged, but individuals and networks of individuals who are *collecting* and *storing* mass quantities of these images. And, they’re using Apple privacy and security to hide from law enforcement.

Racketeering?

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

#303

Post by tsimionescu » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 9:41 AM UTC

toxik wrote: post #9

tsimionescu wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then let's get rid of the NeuralHash entirely, if it doesn't matter, right? If it's a critical part of the system, then it should be inspected thoroughly. If Apple claims a minuscule chance of a hash collision, and the reality is that collisions are relatively common, that significantly changes the requirements for the backend system, which Apple keeps secret. We have every right to believe, bbased oon ppublic info,…

The point in the NeuralHash and PSI system is to preserve user privacy as far as possible. From a technical standpoint, it is not essential - a NeuralHash function that returns 0x0000… for everything would still catch CSAM. It's just that it would upload every single image on the user's device. Now, how well this NeuralHash does preserve privacy is a different question, and /not/ one that is being answered by the ori…

Sure, but a NeuralHash system with a collision chance of 100% would obviously not be abused to say NeuralHash collision implies CSAM - the secondary validation system will definitely be the last bastion.

In contrast, a NH system believed to have a collision chance of 1 in a trillion trillion may well be considered infallible, and any detection be directly reported as CSAM, with the 'backend verification' amounting to nothing more than a rubber stamp.

Of course, if you implicitly trust Apple not to do the second, than you're right, the NH collision rate doesn't matter too much.

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

#304

Post by ogma » Mon, Aug 30, 2021, 3:17 AM UTC

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #176

verygoodname wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 automati…

You do not have the requisite knowledge to comment on this. You were dead wrong, got corrected, and then just continue to ramble on with no insight and clear lack of understanding... unreal.