571–580 of 860 posts
People will just go back to use normal cameras for photos where there is no scanning, the bad guys will use that anyway. It makes no sense for Apple to do that, unless they are preparing for something more big.
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This blog post got a lot of commentary on HN a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28118350 . iMessages are already E2E encrypted, but you are correct, iCloud backups are decryptable with a warrant (and that was reportedly added at the FBI's request). But I agree with Ben Thompson's point in that blog post, that it's OK to not have strong, unbreakable encryption be the default, and that it's still p…
> But I agree with Ben Thompson's point in that blog post, that it's OK to not have strong, unbreakable encryption be the default, and that it's still possible to use an iPhone without iCloud and get full E2E. I disagree completely on this. For one, users aren't aware that using iCloud means that Apple has your decryption key and can thereby read and share all of your phone's data. And two, opt-out is a dark pattern.…
"Do you want to enable iCloud photos? Your private photos will be uploaded encrypted to Apple's servers, so that only you can access them. Before uploading, your photos will be locally scanned on your device for any illegal content. Apple will only be notified once a sufficient volume of illegal content is detected."
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I disagree, strongly. Let's say you're authoritarian government EvilGov. Before this announcement, if you went to Apple and said "we want you to push this spyware to your iPhones", Apple would and could have easily pushed back both in the court of public opinion and the court of law. Now though, Apple is already saying "We'll take this database of illegal image hashes provided by the government and use it to scan you…
Authoritarian governments have never needed preexisting technical gizmos in order to abuse their citizens. Look at what Russia and the Nazis did with no magic tech at all. Privacy stems from valuing human rights, not easily disproven lies about it being difficult to actually implement the spying.
But what people are afraid of is how little it takes when the technology is there. And how Western governments seem to morph towards that. And how some bastions of freedom are falling
I just do not want Apple scanning my phone for the purpose of finding something they can send to the police. I’m not even talking about any “slippery slope” scenarios and I’ll never have any of the material they are looking for. And right or wrong, I don’t really fear a false identification, so this isn’t about a worry that they will actually turn me in. I just don’t want them scanning my phone for the purpose of tur…
It's not scanning your device, but your iCloud uploads, and if configured, the imessages of your children
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Apple is a fairly large company, that gives them some monetary leverage over governments. It's not as simple as you make it seem, I think.
China just hung it's biggest tech companies out to dry. Do you really think they would care in the slightest about banning iPhone? Or that Putin cares more about people not being able to buy what amounts to a luxury item, than being able to hunt down opposition supporters?
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Two issues: 1. Your comment didn't add any information—it was just grandiose, inflammatory claims ("extreme mental gymnastics", "farce to begin with" and "blatantly obvious") 2. Replies like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28163531 are to be expected to such comments. This is the way that discussion degrades. (That was the top reply to your comment before I downweighted it, so the effect was a lot more obvious b…
> 1. Your comment didn't add any information—it was just grandiose, inflammatory claims ("extreme mental gymnastics", "farce to begin with" and "blatantly obvious") "Extreme metal gymnastics" was the only inflammatory claim and it was the same language used by the person I was replying to. "Farce" has no more charitable a synonym [1] and "to begin with" does not make it any more or less inflammatory. "Blatantly obvio…
That's a really bad worst case, far below the line the guidelines draw. Would you mind reviewing them (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart? We want thoughtful, curious conversation here, not snark and fulmination.
> People get defensive sometimes, so what?
The problem is that it evokes worse from others and leads to a degenerative spiral, ultimately to flamewars, and in the long run to the site burning itself to a crisp. Remember that this has traditionally been the fate of internet forums and HN was started as a conscious experiment in trying to avoid that (https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html). Scorched earth is not interesting (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
It's possible to learn not to provoke this kind of thing, and that's what we're asking users here to do. Of course one can't predict specifically how others will react, but one can definitely play the odds. Since the odds are roughly knowable in advance, we want users to post comments with a positive expected value, so to speak: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
I just do not want Apple scanning my phone for the purpose of finding something they can send to the police. I’m not even talking about any “slippery slope” scenarios and I’ll never have any of the material they are looking for. And right or wrong, I don’t really fear a false identification, so this isn’t about a worry that they will actually turn me in. I just don’t want them scanning my phone for the purpose of tur…
> I just do not want Apple scanning my phone for the purpose of finding something they can send to the police. Yes. This is called vigilantism.[1] Apple is proposing to become a vigilante. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigilantism "Vigilantism is the act of enforcement, investigation or punishment of perceived offenses without legal authority."
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Could they though? An authoritarian government could just as easily say "if you do not implement this feature, we will not allow you to operate in this country" and refuse to entertain legal challenges.
Apple is a fairly large company, that gives them some monetary leverage over governments. It's not as simple as you make it seem, I think.
This CSAM Prevention initiative by Apple is a 180 degress change of their general message around privacy. Imagine investing hundreds of millions of dollars in pro-privacy programs, privacy features, privacy marketing, etc... just to pull this reverse card. Of course this is going to spark concern within their own ranks. It's like working for a food company that claims to use organic, non-processed, fair-trade ingredi…
No it's not, it's more like in just a day they started including a chemical preservative amongst all the organic ingredients. All the good stuff is still there, it's just pointless now for people who want to eat pure organic food.
I agree with the sentiment though.
"The ark of the covenant is open and now all your faces are going to melt" - to paraphrase "The Thick of It". Prior to this when a government tapped Apple on the shoulder asking to scan for what they (the government) deem illicit material, Apple could have feasibly say "we cannot do this, the technology does not exist". Now the box is open, the technology does exist, publicly and on the record - Now we are but a nati…
Agreed. And the same holds for this subversion of user control of devices. It too is beyond abhorrent and morally reprehensible.