Comment by motohagiography
4 years ago
This distinction of changing the defacto ownership of your device and data is the real inflection point. The surveillance technology itself is not really that novel, as functionally it's applying established anti-virus techniques to data instead of code. Ask any AV company how their detection works, and it will include a variation on this.
This same tech can (and will likely) be used to find the owners of bitcoin and other cryptocurrency wallets, honeypot tokens, community identities, and to provide profiling information to the company's political masters. The collisions in the hashing scheme mean that you can insert anything you want onto peoples devices and get them pulled into the legal system once it is flagged, where the process itself is the punishment. The whole scheme is too stupid to ever have been about reason, it's just pretexts and narrative, and this is as good a time as any to exit their ecosystem.
Apple really picked the wrong time to attempt this, as I do not see anyone who understands how evil this is ever forgiving them. The most charitable thing I can say about it is that they're probably just doing it as part of a deal to avoid anti-trust plays, where Apple plays ball with the feds and its parties, and the storm just magically passes them over. The good news is running OSX made me lazy, and getting back into running a linux or freebsd laptop again is going to be fun.
> The surveillance technology itself is not really that novel
What's novel is that the tech reports you to the authorities. Imagine your AV reporting you to the authorities for digital piracy, it's something that RIAA could only dream of back in the day. Now it's becoming a reality.
"We just scan every song on your iPod to make sure the neural hash isn't copyrighted content. If it is blah blah blah tokens blah blah report you to the RIAA."
Just bought a System76 laptop. Happy birthday Linux!
Or they could just scan the songs themselves. Why bother with hashing when you have full control? This is a red herring.
Since they have had the ability and incentive to stop music piracy that way for at least a decade, and haven't done it, that should tell you something.
ok but how do they know you haven't bought that content?
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who says the government cannot come up with a twisted reasoning of mandatory compliance to serve the unique IP industry which is struggling in the face of harsh pandemic and more seriously the threat imposed by those egregious hackers and thiefs who steal and consume content without paying for it. How dare they! they are killing the entire artist community. or " in the face of unprecedented attacks on our domestic soil by foreign alien enemies, we are forced to implement a assailant monitoring programme which i assure you will not be used for any other purpose. the programme is going to be strictly for intended purposes only. That said, while partnering with the industry, we have realized the immense potential to build an inclusive and healthy competitive environment in the market and will help the industry leaders root out evil "
Not the authorities perhaps, but it is already happening in some degree: Windows Defender sending “samples” or unknown binaries to the cloud to analyze them. I am extremely bothered by this and try to disable this “feature” as much as possible. As always with Windows, you have to aggressively tweak system settings to permanently disable the constant reminders “Oops we have detected suboptimal settings, please turn on every privacy invading feature for your convenience”. We can only hope MS doesn’t abuse the samples for other purposes, but given their and other big techs track record, we can assume there are additional parties interested in the submissions.
If you are tired of fighting with your own computer, consider switching to Linux. It's been working flawlessly for years for me.
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> I do not see anyone who understands how evil this is ever forgiving them.
I'm not so optimistic.
How many people among Apple's users actually understand how evil this is, and among those, how many do really, actually care? People seem fine enough with Facebook's data vacuuming, why would they protest against Apple's "non-intrusive" scheme? They "don't hate children" and, of course, "have nothing to hide".
The issue, as has been brought up in one form or another in the numerous threads on the subject, is that people like their comfort (using smartphones) and there really isn't that much of a choice.
> The good news is running OSX made me lazy, and getting back into running a linux or freebsd laptop again is going to be fun.
And therein lies the rub. Many people wouldn't find doing this fun. They'd much prefer being able to watch Netflix in ultra high-def and not having to futz around with Nvidia's drivers or what have you.
> Many people wouldn't find doing this fun. They'd much prefer being able to watch Netflix in ultra high-def and not having to futz around with Nvidia's drivers or what have you
I think they were being sarcastic, maybe not. Either way, you're right. And this is why WE need to be doing this so that it becomes a viable option.
This is the attitude anyone who cares about this stuff needs to adopt. Especially those with engineering, design, or documentation skills.
Now is the time to get the open alternatives shored up, and to start creating a viable and concise pathway and ecosystem that we can recommend to “non-techies” who are looking for an alternative.
That can only happen if we start using this stuff now, and commit to donating some time and effort to take the deficiencies we find in our own use and make them better.
It’s fine to vent, and I hope to see people continue to call big tech out. But putting on a more positive mindset, this is actually an amazing opportunity we have to start creating the change we want to see.
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I feel it's bit unreasonable to expect a non-technical user to even start to comprehend this issue.
Many of them know that the photos, videos, music from their old iPhone would be available in their new iPhone after they sign-in; But do they really understand what happened in-between to enable that, Should they even know that? That's what Apple is banking on.
It would be pragmatic to expect even technically equipped Apple fans to call-out Apple's latest hypocrisy and move away from the ecosystem. They didn't do it earlier, They didn't do it when it came to light that Apple knew that its contractors exploited child labor[1], They wouldn't do it now.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/apple-knew-a-suppli...
Well you could categorise them as not understand how evil this is. They are not comfortable, but they may not see it as evil.
"get them pulled into the legal system once it is flagged, where the process itself is the punishment"
This is the real threat here. Anyone can have data flagged at any time, by accident or maliciously. Like how any video can be flagged for copyright infringement and the creator is 'punished by the process' regardless of guilt/innocence. A possible fix would be to have severe financial punishments for every false claim (lets say a million bucks per instance). Imagine how careful the system would be designed if that were the case, verses the case where there is no punishment for false claims.
Supporting and advocating for “Right to Repair” laws was never more crucial, because this is not going to stop at iPhone or mac.
Just to extend my comment in response to how this problem will spread:
By doing surveillance on types of images, Apple is in effect implementing anti-virus - for ideas. That's only a bit hyperbolic, as the perceptual hash for a viral meme can be searched on, just like the material they're using as a pretext for it.
I could even see them announcing it at a launch. We should be concerned that the company has skipped its Black Mirror stage and jumped right into its Universal Paperclips endgame.
(I'm also appreciating the irony that people like me being angry about Apple announcing they're going to implement a version of what Google has already been technically able to do for the last decade, and what Microsoft has probably been doing in secret since even before then.)
Apple already disallows lots of ideas.
You can't make these apps for iOS (NSFW!) https://sexgames.citor3.com/
And arguably, if you've tried apps like those in actual VR their impact doesn't come close in non VR. But, since Apple doesn't carry porn in the app store and doesn't allow other stores Apple is effectively banning thoughts.
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>I could even see them announcing it at a launch. We should be concerned that the company has skipped its Black Mirror stage and jumped right into its Universal Paperclips endgame.
Well, what Apple did is squarely Black Mirror stage, nowhere near Universal Paperclips.
> Apple is in effect implementing anti-virus - for ideas.
Should we call that anti-dissent? Or thought police?
> This distinction of changing the defacto ownership of your device and data is the real inflection point.
So the ability to store child porn is what constitutes "de facto ownership" in your mind?
But why would they "use this tech to hunt down bitcoin owners"? They could just scan emails or photos directly. Doing it by way of neural hashes and vouchers seems like an absurdly complicated detour when they already own the OS and all the most commonly used apps.
De facto ownership means your personal property doesn’t get searched for evidence of crime, without reasonable cause
That’s not how it typically works though. Your car has to be tested regularly, at least in Europe. Your bag is searched when you travel, in an infinitely more intrusive way.
Also , your photos are only scanned on their way to iCloud. Turn off icloud photos and nothing will be scanned.
Besides, the laws around child porn have always been different from other laws, they have preemptively scanned for that for as long as I can remember, without probable cause.
You will really own nothing and you will be “happy”. Soma here. Soma there. Soma, soma everywhere.
> he good news is running OSX made me lazy, and getting back into running a linux or freebsd laptop again is going to be fun.
This is good news.