Ah yes, the "slippery slope" argument, where evidence is never required, pessimism always wins over realism, and any counter-argument can be dismissed with "but they COULD!"
I remember when an Apple auth server went down and no one could launch non-Apple applications because Apple needed to see the hashes of the things people ran on their computers.[0]
When will the slope be inclined enough for you?!
[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/llanga/status/1326989724704268289
Apple's design was fail closed, so if OCSP is down, assume the application has had its key revoked.
Unfortunately that's just how OCSP is, your browser (if you're using Firefox) does this with CAs. The unfortunate thing is, due to the nature of desktop applications, OCSP stapling doesn't really work when you're not the one serving content.
Uh, sure, fine. But Apple decided they needed to see the hashes of the things people ran on their computers, to possibly block execution if they decide that's necessary, and they don't have to. I'm kinda shocked that you're framing this as if it's innocent, and therefore a bad example of Apple's increasingly paternalistic control. I don't particularly care what sort of RFC they're following or which alternative implementation sucks or which fig-leaf covers their true intent; Apple chose to have the ability to see what people are running in real time. If you're a regular of this forum, and can't immediately imagine how this sort of information might be used to harm users, rather than help them, now or in the future, I don't know what to tell you.
I also don't quite understand how this even helps with the stated goal of virus-corralling. Does the hypothetical virus that they're trying to guard us against change an executable? If so, then the hash is immediately different, but presumably no longer matches its signed checksum, and so could be rejected at the OS level without needing the whole 'real-time seeing what people run' aspect. Does the hypothetical virus run independently? How could it, given the prohibition against non-signed code? I guess the idea is 'prevent a once-legit app from pushing a malicious update and turning several nations worth of Macs into a botnet', style of thing?
You can turn that feature off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Certificate_Status_Prot...
They're just following basic pki. Again, Firefox does this with https certs. The CA knows who went to what website.
...uh, then how did the failure of the auth server mean that nothing (except Apple apps) could run? My understanding was that the auth server checked the hash of every application that was being run, and the absence of that auth server meant nothing could run.
Moreover, I don't care about the fact that they're just using plain ol' certs, just like Firefox. They could be using screen recording software and Mechanical Turk to decide whether users can execute some third-party software -- the point is that they are deciding whether users can execute some third-party software. The technical implementation is unimportant, it's a bad thing.
Code revocation checking should be local.
Apple said "Hey everyone owns this U2 album now". And if your phone had automatic downloads turned on it downloaded the album.
The idea that even belongs on the slope is … you're not a serious person and you're not making a serious argument.
It wasn't that simple. The usual functionality of slide-to-delete didn't work at all, because of iCloud, or something. A week after they foisted it on everybody, they decided to implement a dedicated page to allow frustrated users to delete it, because of how different it was from a mere purchase authorization from the iTunes Store. [0]
"The slope", in this case, as far as I understand the root-level ancestor comment, refers to the idea that Apple is increasingly paternalistic about its powers over the device you ostensibly own:
>>>>"We're going to scan your photos, on your encrypted device, to look for badness. Right now, we're going to claim that's only for the really icky people that nobody is going to defend, but, hey, once the tech is in place, who's to say we can't scan for dank memes and stuff?"[1]
I think bringing up the U2 album is entirely within scope re paternalistic overreach. I assume your arbitrary goalpost movement to "invasion of privacy or some new technical advance" is considered by you to be indicative of your personal and argumentative seriousness?
[0] https://www.eonline.com/news/1071481/remember-when-apple-for...
Apple gave everyone the album. It just assigned that album to everyone's library. It could be deleted from the device, but it stayed attached to your account. So it showed up in your library when you searched even if you didn't have it downloaded, because that's how Apple's library worked.
I'm not sure how that's "paternalistic" in any sense of the word.
I didn't move the goalpost. This article, and commentary, is specifically about how Apple is adding technology that can be used to invade our privacy or be abused by state actors.
A bad marketing tactic from seven years ago that amounted to a free gift no one wanted is an absolutely ridiculous example.
https://www.txstate.edu/philosophy/resources/fallacy-definit...
In the colloquial language we are using here, there is absolutely evidence, tons of it, that this will take the same downward trend of previous infractions.
Also your characterization of "things change and some of the those end up being bad" is not the nature nor specificity of the evidence in this case.
Lastly, perhaps you should remain consistent and not utilize the "appeal to authority" fallacy.
Second, I'm not appealing to authority. You said a slippery slope isn't a fallacy. I provided a link which makes the case as to why a slippery slope is considered a fallacy.
We are not using "slippery slope" in any way which is different from the examples given.
That one thing has lead to a bad thing in the past is not evidence that this thing will lead to this specific bad thing in the future.
Yes, sometimes, slippery slopes end up being slippery, and sloped.
But that doesn't mean anyone has to take it as a given that any other specific slope will be slippery, nor slippery in some specific way which leads to some specific outcome.
The slippery slope fallacy us real - but so are the slippery slopes.
I don't. I've seen what the FBI claims, that they then magically find ways around the "impenetrable encryption" they claim they can't break (but then do), and I don't trust them to not require Apple to add hashes of "things they find problematic," and include a gag order with it so Apple can't report it.
I've worked computer security long enough to know that it's always worse than advertised, always will be abused, etc.
My contention isn't that I trust my government, but instead that this specific technology is no more threatening than the technology already present on my phone and the trust I've already placed in the vendor.
Yes. They could. However, getting caught doing that, from Apple, would be an absolute disaster for them, and they've both made the right statements and made the right actions in terms of things like physical device security (moving more and more into the secure enclave to protect against demonstrated attacks).
It's entirely possible they've done this for specific cases, with a gag order, and nobody knows. However, it cannot be widespread, or it would end up known.
This, however, is adding a blackbox image matching algorithm (we know it's not matching image file data based on statements about how it's robust against cropping/rotation/resizing/etc), and a blackbox database of "Stuff claimed to be Really Bad." There is no way to audit the database and see what's in it, because of the one way nature of hash functions, and there's almost certainly not a pile of the source material laying around for audit reasons (because that would be a really nasty legal problem). So you've got a "Trust us, this stuff is bad" database, and a "Trust us, it matches images accurately" hash function.
And, if those find enough matches (also unspecified), you get yourself reported directly to the various authorities.
It's guilt by algorithm, across every single Apple device (running the latest OS, etc... handwave as needed).
That's very, very different from a customized backdoor deployed to a small number of phones.
The scanner that can be fooled by embedding the images into some document is going to get useless fast. Therefore, PDFs and office formats have to be checked, too. Well, and archives, without doubt, should be unpacked on-the-fly. What if someone embeds the base64-encoded image into HTML? And so on, and so on.
You can't just look at media files, you naturally need to scan everything, and the working thing is likely to be antivirus-like, with many file format filters, heuristics, and extended description language.
Do you have the Collateral Murder video? Abracadabra, and now you don't have it.
Perhaps the community could run a crowdsourced "keep them honest" service web service -- upload the latest illegal-in-China Winnie-the-Pooh meme, oh hey look at that, it's in the China-only version of the database, isn't that weird, etc etc. (Obviously you wouldn't want people "testing" images that are in the database for the actual stated purpose...)
The reaction of the police seems to be “why do you care about this? We have the data let’s use it. And we could use it to find those ~killers~ these people that allegedly just killed the most popular crime news reporter. So let us do our work.”
Just like software expands to eat cpu/memory/disk resources and people start living up to their salaries: whatever is possible will happen.
To me the slippery slope argument is perfectly valid.
Searching everyone's media for evidence of criminal wrongdoing, but setting only one example of the kind of wrongdoing you're looking for is very susceptible to an actual slippery slope, given that there are plenty of other criminal activities they could start looking for should they decide that it's part of their mission.
The only thing that makes CSAM so attractive to go after is how disgusting society feels that it is. Up next could be reporting drug-related texts of known convicts to parole officers. Next could be drug-related texts of everyone to police officers. Next could be letting the police officers make their own searches, where they find everyone talking about a certain kind of political organizing.
We should refuse to accept even the first instance of this kind of thing.
It's much easier to change the policy than to add a new mechanism. Governments, including the US government have previously attempted to force Apple to break into users' devices, and often apply gag orders to such attempts.
Now they could, and that's enough for me to be unwilling to keep sensitive information on an iOS device.
Someone finding a way to plant this kind of material on your phone does that.
Besides, the fact that something that can be misused exist isn't a very good defense for creating something else that widens the opportunity for abuse significantly.
The blacklist itself is not maintained by Apple, but by the US government or a third party like NCMEC, which means Apple can't be sure content that isn't child abuse imagery hasn't made it onto the list. Perceptual hashes probably can't be abused to target non-image/video content because they're an inherently image-oriented technology.
Apple could, however cause such a program to match on different criteria with a simple update, and such a change would likely be difficult to detect. Most of us assume Apple wouldn't voluntarily do such a thing, but it's very probable that they would do it involuntarily. The US government has already attempted to compel Apple to create a tool to compromise the security of an iPhone, and might have eventually succeeded in court if they hadn't gained access by other means. That fight took place in public, but the next one might well take place in secret.
Who cares what it's for? The fact that they are even doing this at all is a huge infringement to their customer's autonomy.
But this will further open possibilities for abuse not only in China but everywhere else as well.
If you haven't noticed jokes is on you.
It's not subtle. No expansion to the program is necessary to violate your privacy or endanger dissidents.