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The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”

piotr.is

481–490 of 595 posts

Re: The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”

#481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youtube current censorship outrage with abusive video take downs is a proof that perceptual hash false positive are a massive problem. Even if the tech has 1 in a trillion chance, it will happen a lot with billions of people generatin thousands of ilage every years. And of course, the hash database being abused.

Are those YouTube takedowns happening due to perceptual hashes? I assume they are just standard ML.

[deleted]

Re: The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”

#482

> The worst part is: how do I put my money where my mouth is? Am I going back to using Linux on the desktop (2022 will be the year of Linux on the desktop, remember), debugging wifi drivers and tirelessly trying to make resume-from-suspend work? Oh come on. DOn't make it sound like it's that bad. Wifi is a solved problem for a long time now, and you can buy Lenovo, System76 or Tuxedo if you want to make sure 100% thi…

Can I upgrade video drivers without being dumped to a command line?

On Ubuntu, nvidia drivers update seamlessly as part of system updates. On Windows, I have to sign in to an nvidia account, solve 3 capcthas and then manually download half a gig of "driver".

Re: The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”

#483

> The worst part is: how do I put my money where my mouth is? Am I going back to using Linux on the desktop (2022 will be the year of Linux on the desktop, remember), debugging wifi drivers and tirelessly trying to make resume-from-suspend work? Oh come on. DOn't make it sound like it's that bad. Wifi is a solved problem for a long time now, and you can buy Lenovo, System76 or Tuxedo if you want to make sure 100% thi…

You can indeed tell how tired and old the complaint is by the nature of what it complains about. In 2021 we are instead lumbered with inconsistent support for hidpi displays, lack of DTMF in linphone, and Evolution’s option to disable pc beep on new message being a plugin . But that was just the last week. Next week will be better and the fight for freedom is indeed an eternal struggle.

> Evolution’s option to disable pc beep on new message being a plugin.

Are you really complaining about GNOME software lacking options as if that wasn't what GNOME is all about. Please don't blame Linux for problems with one specific DE and its applications.

Re: The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”

#484

> The worst part is: how do I put my money where my mouth is? Am I going back to using Linux on the desktop (2022 will be the year of Linux on the desktop, remember), debugging wifi drivers and tirelessly trying to make resume-from-suspend work? Oh come on. DOn't make it sound like it's that bad. Wifi is a solved problem for a long time now, and you can buy Lenovo, System76 or Tuxedo if you want to make sure 100% thi…

Can I upgrade video drivers without being dumped to a command line?

Last time I had to install either AMD or Nvidia drivers there was GUI installers. Or in the case of AMDGPU the driver is already in kernel and is updated automatically via package manager.

Re: The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”

#485
On the internet almost everyone wants to extract money from kids and their parents and they try to hook them up with different mechanisms. That is also true for Apple, although they appeal to protective instincts of their guardians.

I get why a safe environment is appealing. Parents know that their kids get milked by virtual goods in games or social media and don't know how to protect them from that. I think states are indeed responsible to set sensible boundaries for the industry to protect minors.

But this cannot lead to subject the whole net to it. Age verification is also not possible, so a protected environment is the way to go. The latter is difficult to advertise to developers because they also know about corporate ambitions to get their hands on market share.

Google isn't even the worst actor, more aggressive corps like Amazon are far more destructive in this field, but there isn't a single corp that is guilty here, so legislation also needs to protect free spaces. While seemingly in contradiction, this is also extremely important for digital education of future generations, even more so than questionable content in my opinion. Most here might have been subjected to that as kids. Was it that bad as generally assumed? This is a threat that should not be overblown. Parents feeling guilty neglecting their kids are extremely vulnerable to this line of thinking, even if they don't neglect their kids at all.

Many countries have rules against cartels, but there is a conflict of interest here. No country likes to split their most successful companies for nothing in an international market. So nobody does.

Re: The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”

#486

> The worst part is: how do I put my money where my mouth is? Am I going back to using Linux on the desktop (2022 will be the year of Linux on the desktop, remember), debugging wifi drivers and tirelessly trying to make resume-from-suspend work? Oh come on. DOn't make it sound like it's that bad. Wifi is a solved problem for a long time now, and you can buy Lenovo, System76 or Tuxedo if you want to make sure 100% thi…

I don't know why, but Ubuntu still manages to make installing updates a 50/50 chance of breaking the NVIDIA GPU drivers, which then means I have to reinstall them in 800x600 where the "Software Updater" window doesn't fit on screen anymore.

Also, getting full USB3 support on Ubuntu is still a struggle. On Windows and Mac, the same USB camera "just works". On Linux, I need to learn how to download the kernel sources, checkout the correct branch, and recompile uvcvideo with different URB parameters, or else I get random disconnects.

And of course, "apt-get source" will produce the source code for the 4.x kernel that Ubuntu 18 had when I installed it, but they since upgraded it to 5.x so "apt source" is now utterly useless.

If I had to summarize my Linux experience:

"Pain only makes you stronger"

Re: The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”

#487

> The worst part is: how do I put my money where my mouth is? Am I going back to using Linux on the desktop (2022 will be the year of Linux on the desktop, remember), debugging wifi drivers and tirelessly trying to make resume-from-suspend work? Oh come on. DOn't make it sound like it's that bad. Wifi is a solved problem for a long time now, and you can buy Lenovo, System76 or Tuxedo if you want to make sure 100% thi…

Can I upgrade video drivers without being dumped to a command line?

With Ubuntu 18, no. Updating it fails roughly as often as it works. And the error messages are obscure and confusing.

I didn't try Ubuntu 20 because it has known incompatibilities with software that I use.

Re: The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”

#488

> The worst part is: how do I put my money where my mouth is? Am I going back to using Linux on the desktop (2022 will be the year of Linux on the desktop, remember), debugging wifi drivers and tirelessly trying to make resume-from-suspend work? Oh come on. DOn't make it sound like it's that bad. Wifi is a solved problem for a long time now, and you can buy Lenovo, System76 or Tuxedo if you want to make sure 100% thi…

> The worst part is: how do I put my money where my mouth is? ..., debugging wifi drivers and tirelessly trying to make resume-from-suspend work? Coincidentally, this is actually a good idea. Apart from using supported hardware (that others have checked actually works), contributing fixes for hardware that's not officially supported yet and hasn't been tested would benefit everyone in the future! I remember having to…

Yeah... when you have a home-built PC with *nix unsupported hardware and invested lots of $$ you're still looking for a hard time. First, there's the hardware cost. I'm not throwing my Surface out, and I'm not throwing out my perfectly working desktop components either. But that aside...

Every time I read how the great unwashed should just contribute fixes already to benefit everyone, I despair. I write code. I build my own PCs and I have a rather good knowledge of how to debug, fix, optimise and otherwise maintain all my software and hardware.

I happen to also LIKE my software and hardware.

If I were to start digging through Github repositories and... whatever other unknown resources I don't know the search terms to even search for I'd probably shoot myself.

The point isn't that Windows is good. The point is that *nix assumes everyone's a *nix rocket surgeon and has nothing else in the world to do than spend days getting the blasted thing to deliver an equivalent level of productivity I get from my Microsoft setup.

As much as I acknowledge everyone's right to like what they like, and agree that *nix might offer one or two better things than Windoze there's just no way...

Re: The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”

#489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The false positive rate for any given image is not 1 in a trillion. Perceptual hashing just does not work like that. It also suffers from the birthday paradox problem - as the database expands, and the total number of pictures expands, collisions become more likely. The parent poster does make the mistake of assuming that other pictures of kids will likely cause false positives. Anything could trigger a false positiv…

> The false positive rate for any given image is not 1 in a trillion What's relevant is the overall false positive rate. If they require 6 matches for example, it's enough for each match to have a 1% false positive rate in order to get 1 in trillion overall.

Sadly not, because like the original comment implies, a false positive on a given image might cause it to be uploaded to Apple for manual review.

So if Apple has a "1 in a trillion" 1e^-12 chance of flagging a person and they require (my guess) 3 hits to flag someone, then that would mean the chance of each single image being false positive is (1e^-12)^(1/3) = 1e^-4. So that means:

Expect 1 in 1000 images to be uploaded to Apple for potential human verification.

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