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Of course, the next step after that is to make "non-authorised" operating systems -- which may include Linux (except for specially signed versions that will also include similar spyware) -- "deprecated" or "discouraged", then "suspicious", and perhaps even eventually illegal.

Stallman predicted a similar outcome, and although he (and many others) thought the end of computing freedom would be due to copyright/DRM, I wouldn't be surprised if "the children" is what eventually pushes things over the edge.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

in a situation like the attach in US capitol this year

...and as much as I'd like to see at least that amount of "watering the liberty tree" directed at Big Tech, it unfortunately would likely lead to even more authoritarian outcomes. Any future fights for freedom will need to happen online and non-violently, but on platforms that are also under their control.

> ...and as much as I'd like to see at least that amount of "watering the liberty tree" directed at Big Tech […]

I’m having a hard time finding a reading of this that isn’t advocating violence against tech workers. Is that what you intended?

Given corporate personhood, destroying the companies could be considered corporate murder. (I admit it's a very stretched reading.)

I agree that is a favorable reading.

But it is especially a stretch in the context of January 6th which involved violence directed at people. And the rest of the paragraph laments that future action must be nonviolent.

So, in fact, it's not advocating the violence.

It’s hard to say. Words like “I’d like” and “unfortunately” make me think it’s a desire for violence but an acknowledgement that it’s not worthwhile. Like I said, I’m trying to find the favorable reading. It seems hyperbolic at best.

tech workers are replaceable. even if we assume violence was implied, it s better directed at their datacenters.

I did not find it very hard to assume a not-the-worst-possible reading of the comment. What's with the comment police here lately that's labeling various comments? I hope this ain't becoming the new twitter

Are you aware of what “water the tree of liberty” references?

It is a Thomas Jefferson quote:

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

In the context of January 6th it’s hard to make a leap to metaphorical server blood. Datacenters still have people inside them, no mention of servers was made. Only a quote from a man who waged a real war.

> tech workers are replaceable.

Speaking as a tech worker, no, my life is not replaceable.

> I did not find it very hard to assume a not-the-worst-possible reading of the comment.

The not-the-worst-possible reading being what? Mobs attacking data centers?

> What's with the comment police here lately that's labeling various comments? I hope this ain't becoming the new twitter

I feel the same way. So let's tone down the rhetoric. If this post was metaphorical hyperbole it is the kind that got a president impeached.

> possessing CP to automatically considering them a child molester, yet someone posessing an action movie is not considered a murderer

That's specious reasoning. Someone who posesses an action movie likes action movies, while someone who posesses child porn likes child porn. One is ok, the other is pretty vile and illegal for a reason.

I don't agree with Apple on this but let's be clear on what is and what isn't

> Someone who posesses an action movie likes action movies, while someone who posesses child porn likes child porn.

Unless it's planted. [0] Or sent to you. [1] Or (farther out there) happens to be embedded on a site you visited and ends up in your browser cache.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/world/europe/vladimir-put...

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/nyregion/alex-jones-sandy...

It only scans images in your iCloud Photo Library. Not paying for iCloud? No scanning. Not in your photo library? No scanning. And even then, only for known content, not new content.

So the attacker only needs to get access to your iCloud. Your iPhone will happily sync down photos uploaded elsewhere.

You don't have to be paying for iCloud, either. There's a free tier, so I'd imagine almost all iPhones are using some tier of it.

iCloud account break-ins aren't exactly rare. An accusation, even if false, could ruin an innocent person's life.

> There's a free tier, so I'd imagine almost all iPhones are using some tier of it.

i was quite surprised to see this was the default or at least was setup unknowingly to me.

Not only is there a free tier, but the iPhone defaults are cleverly configured so that you quickly fill it up with random junk on your phone, and feel pressured into paying for more iCloud storage, because the default sync behavior is so non-obvious, and the settings to disable it are buried.

I know multiple people (most of them in their 50s or older) who started paying for iCloud because they thought it was their only option.

If this was going to happen, it would have already happened on Android, Gmail, OneDrive, or any of dozens of services which already do what Apple is now doing.

Or are you saying that malicious activity is only interesting if it was on an Apple device?

Conveniently, iOS 15 also syncs images from your messages and many other places into your photos. Whether this will put that file in your iCloud Photo library, I do not know.

https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/see-photos-shared-with-you-...

On top of that, at this stage you are right. How long before they move it to every file in your device's storage "because of the children!"

You realize if this is as problematic as we are talking about and peoples lives are ruined from false positives it will create a political movement that will make this illegal. Stop trying to lobby companies and lobby for politicians that will rein this shit in.

You can have videos of somebody actually getting killed and it's not a crime. Reddit killed the /r/watchpeopledie subreddit, but it wasn't illegal to go on.

Until people are actively encouraging people dying for people getting killed by paying for gladiator matches, I agree with you it's not the same thing, but I don't think the person you're answering to is talking about action movies.

> You can have videos of somebody actually getting killed and it's not a crime.

yet

Microsoft already does this.

„Microsoft removes content that contains apparent CSEAI. As a US-based company, Microsoft reports all apparent CSEAI to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) via the CyberTipline, as required by US law. During the period of July – December 2020, Microsoft submitted 63,813 reports to NCMEC. We suspend the account(s) associated with the content we have reported to NCMEC for CSEAI or child sexual grooming violations.“

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/dig...

I think that's for files uploaded to onedrive etc. Not for all the files on any windows pc

The encouranged windows 10 setting is to sync your whole profile to OneDrive.

Does this imply that apple was not checking the photos stored in their servers for CP? Then icloud must have been the best way to share it

It at least looks like apple is the last one to do this. google, flickr, facebook, twitter etc did this since forever.

Almost like Apple was the last holdout to not give up customers’ privacy, and eventually had to cave. So they came up with a sophisticated system to handle the scanning on-device, and only for data that’s already destined for their servers.

>We don't even mention the giant logical leap from finding someone possessing CP to automatically considering them a child molester, yet someone posessing an action movie is not considered a murderer.

This is a wild and in my opinion a wrongheaded analogy. Possessing CP is a crime by itself. It doesn't matter if the person possessing is actually a molester or not. It is just like the possession of drugs being illegal and it does not matter whether the person has actually taken or plans to take those drugs.

Yeah it wasn't meant to be an analogy. For example consider a real murder video, is its posession illegal and does it mean its owner should be a murder suspect?

You are still falling into the same line of thinking here. The person isn't arrested because we assume they are a molester. They are arrested for possessing illegal material. Your argument here really sounds like you are suggesting that CP should be legal and it is the action of molesting that should be illegal. I don't think you would find many people who agree with that. Society has decided both are separate crimes and while there is likely large overlap, overlap is not required to be charged for either crime individually.

> Society has decided both are separate crimes

Actually it's legislators and the courts that come up with these laws and they are complicated. The question is if these laws reduce child abuse or simply increase spying, and in the end what is the acceptable balance between these two.

Legislators are a proxy for society. Do you believe that if you polled the US that any sizable portion of the country would be in support of legalizing CP?

In liberal democracies legislators also protect fundamental rights from the whims of the majority.

> if you polled the US that any sizable portion

No, but they also would agree to that they should have an option to keep their data privately. Maybe the public should be polled about this tradeoff?

For example the case of virtual CP has an interesting legal history https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/first-amendment-center...

>No, but they also wouldn't consent to having no option left to record their thoughts privately. Maybe the public should be polled about this tradeoff?

It is fine if this is your argument, but you don't have to wrap this argument in with the very legality of CP. You can acknowledge something is and should be a crime while also being against these type of automated dragnets to find people guilty of said crime.

> something is and should be a crime while also being against these type of automated

But there is a clear tradeoff between the two so saying that would be a useless platitude. If we really see the internet as an extension of our vocal chords, then we should have individual rights to it, especially considering the fact that the internet infrastructure is not provided by the governments themselves, only the spying is.

I don't know what to say to you if you consider someone voicing opposition to this move by Apple as a "useless platitude" if they don't also believe that we have a constitutional right to post CP on the internet.

If you polled the population, chances are they'd support torture, rape and execution as punishment for abusers.

The real crime is child abuse. Material related to that is also illegal because it presumably creates demand for the abuse. Whether that's actually true I don't know.

The worst thing about it is that CP possession is a strict liability crime in most jurisdictions. Meaning that prosecution doesn't have to prove intent - if they can find it on your machine, you're guilty regardless of how it got there.

In criminal law you must be aware of an item for it to be under your possession. If someone plants illegal content on your computer, and you are unaware, you aren't legally in possession.

"Typically in criminal law, the defendant's awareness of what he is doing would not negate a strict liability mens rea (for example, being in possession of drugs will typically result in criminal liability, regardless of whether the defendant knows that he is in possession of the drugs)."

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/strict_liability

Note the word 'typically'.

The purpose of strict liability in possession is to prevent the defense that someone does not know the legal status of an item in their possession. It does NOT prevent the defense that someone does not _know_ something to be in their possession.

For example, it is not a defense to have drugs and claim "but I didn't know they were illegal". It is a defense to claim "I did not know they were there."

In drug cases with actual possession, it is difficult to support a defense of "I didn't know they were there", which is why charges typically result in criminal liability. They drugs were physically on you, and unless you have evidence that someone planted them, it is unlikely you could establish reasonable doubt.

But in cases of electronic material for networked devices, there is most certainly an affirmative defense to counter actual possession and constructive possession. Computer devices are hacked all the time, and network & device logs exist. For example, if a prosecutor agrees to the fact that a defendant had no knowledge of the material, a judge would toss the case and a jury would not convict you. The law is not meant to pedantically convict you of non-crimes.

But for any serious charge you need indisputable evidence, and usually lots of it, usually the threshold is quite high.. But in the United States the system is insane so I could be wrong

All the evidence required is that it is there.

Does not matter if someone else put it there without your knowledge. Or maybe it matters, but then it's on you (for all intents and purposes) to prove that it was without your knowledges.

The punishment for strict liability is much lower than for the same act with intent.

It's still essentially a death sentence if you are innocent.

> yet someone posessing an action movie is not considered a murderer.

I think it is more similar to drugs, possesing one doesn't mean you are consuming it, yet it is an illegal substance and production, transportation and distribution are understandably not allowed.

Good point. There are over 80,000 drug overdose deaths a year in the US, if these systems can detect nudity and CSAM, then why not save tens of thousands of lives by detecting heroin and fentanyl dealers, too?

> We don't even mention the giant logical leap from finding someone possessing CP to automatically considering them a child molester, yet someone posessing an action movie is not considered a murderer.

Filming an action movie does not require actually murdering people.

And neither does producing child porn. Drawn child porn is banned in most countries.

And that's silly. But I'm talking about actual child porn.

I'm not defending Apple. I'm saying it's absurd to act like "merely" distributing explicit photos taken without the subject's consent is a victimless crime.

>We don't even mention the giant logical leap from finding someone possessing CP to automatically considering them a child molester, yet someone posessing ~~an action~~ a murder video is not considered a murderer.

That is because the consumption of child porn induces people to create it. The consumption of action movies does not induce people to murder anyone.

[citation needed]

I'm curious to what extent the demand for new child porn content is directly driven by its illegal nature.

Some proportion of existing content has been discovered, tagged, and hashed. The legally and technically savvy members of the audience would likely know this. In such an environment, "old standard" content would be seen as riskier to hold or exchange. A completely fresh, new abuse image is the least likely to trip any automated monitoring system.

I could also easily see warez-ratio style "you've got to share something new to get access to our content" patterns, to try to discourage law-enforcement infiltration of their groups and to ensure "if I go down, I take you with me" legal leverage.

Windows has been doing this for years. Not with this new tech, but with older methods.

I'm skeptical of the claim that MS has been A: scanning files on local windows machines and B: forwarding anything concerning to law enforcement. That's a fairly extraordinary claim, and I would like to see the evidence.

Microsoft hasn't been scanning files on local machines but Microsoft has been doing essentially the same thing Apple has been for years -- they pioneered it with PhotoDNA back in 2009. It's been in use with OneDrive since back when it was called SkyDrive (https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/unfortunate-truths-about-child...). Apple's implementation is scanning images 1) stored on iCloud or 2) in Messages if parents turn it on.

The first seems pretty arbitrary -- why is it worse to scan files you're sharing with the cloud locally than in the cloud (except potential performance/battery impact, but that seems moot).

If Apple brings this feature to the desktop, it seems likely they'd be using it the same way: files stored in their cloud.

Ok but this is not Windows, Which the op stated

What are you talking about?