Internet of Snitches
puri.sm
puri.sm
How long until media players and display devices are hashing all of our media to check for copyright violations. Right now it is effectively impossible for a consumer to buy a TV that doesn't include a computer capable of this.
CSAM is one thing, and from reports it sounds like checking hashes isn't really that effective. However, this paves the way for hash checks for a variety of scary things.
What happens when governments start distributing lists of hashes belonging to "subversive" material (this isn't pipe dream, numerous large countries already block subversive material on the internet).
Detecting copyright violation would need some sort of license info side channel so your TV knew what subscriptions, what digital copies, what BluRays, etc, you owned. Fortunately that's basically an impossible thing to wrangle currently, but if things like Blu-Rays go away it starts to be more feasible ("Oh, you're watching this show in 8K? Please connect your Netflix account to verify your access.")
Once the technical capability is there, how can we best stop it? That's where I don't have good answers.
Possibly the only thing unique about what Apple is doing is that they announced it.
An anti-piracy scheme that respected legitimate use would need this. History suggests that breaking existing media so that you have to buy (or rent) new copies of the same content over and over may be seen as a feature rather than a bug.
In practice this just means you can't play ripped movies using blu-ray players or Sony devices like Playstations.
Did you know that there is ethernet running over HDMI already?
Sceptre makes consumer 4K "dumb" TVs upto 75". Walmart sells them.
I remember reddit being stumped by this question years ago.
Their TV-sized screens are filed under "large format display".
They're 4K, pretty large and the price was surprisingly low for a screen this large and of this quality.
I prefer to support the market for "dumb" TVs.
Also, if you purchase a "smart" TV, then you either have to open it up and remove the WiFi card (and deal with any anoying messages), or hope no guest ever connects it to anything.
Slippery slope is vastly oversold as a logical fallacy. It is only a fallacy in the absence of evidence that there is a slope. If there's a multi-decade trend of which this is only a single step, and there's no visible mechanism for making it stop here and go no farther, then the logical fallacy is in believing with no reason that the trend line will stop here.
It is not a fallacy to speak as if this is only the beginning of a huge push into intrusive monitoring. It is a fallacy to pretend otherwise.
Slippery slope is also a fallacy if you take one instance of a trend and then logically project it to an absurd extreme, but this is not what we're doing here. We're simply looking at the next obvious, logical, well-evidenced step, with plenty of people who obviously want this even if they are a bit too discreet to come right out and say it in public.
But it's not a hard leap to see that our rulers today would like to be in full control of everything bit of data we receive and every bit of data we produce and the only things stopping them are technical possibilities and whether or not we'd put up with it. I see nothing else stopping them; not scruples, not morality, no existential awareness of the sheer staggering amount of responsibility they would be pushing on to themselves, no concerns about how it may hurt anyone, nothing.
https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/987274961659232256...
They literally stated when it is and isn't a fallacy with differentiating conditions...
I believe the poster you’re responding to is making a joke.
So it shouldn't really be necessary to have any of these arguments based on speculated future scenarios when you can look to Canada, the UK, Australia, etc, and see that slight increases in surveillance, censorship, gun regulation, health care availability, etc might actually have some benefits and certainly don't necessarily put you in the instant quicksand toward fascism/communism/scary scenario X.
There are a lot of benefits to living in countries with different governance approaches from the in many ways ultra-laissez faire approach taken in the US, but I don't think you'll find many takers here for the idea that the physical and internet surveillance of the UK and Australia are a model to which to look forward.
But my point is less about taking a stand on any of one of those issues and more just that US-based advocates making slippery-slope arguments often resort to wide-eyed speculation about the future rather than evidence because they're unaware of or unwilling to acknowledge what the realities are elsewhere in the world.
As if London didn't have its own and huge pack of chavs...
I felt very safe there, though I think the biggest thing was how insanely courteous the motorists were. Compared to North America where even when the signal is on your side you have to watch for a gap in turning cars and dart across the street, in Madrid I would just be walking up to a crosswalk and cars would already be voluntarily coming to a complete stop to wait for me to begin and then fully finish crossing. Night and day difference.
"There are products which squirt a relatively safe, brightly coloured dye (as opposed to a pepper spray). A properly designed product of this nature, used in the way it is intended, should not be able to cause an injury. However, if injury does occur, this may be assault. ... The only fully legal self defence product at the moment is a rape alarm. "
> There are products which squirt a relatively safe, brightly coloured dye (as opposed to a pepper spray).
The way UK defines "offensive weapon", literally anything is one if you have intent to use it against somebody, even in self-defense:
"any article made or adapted for use for causing injury to the person, or intended by the person having it with him for such use by him or by some other person ... even if they have some other legitimate use e.g. car keys held between the knuckles"
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offensive_weapon#England_and_W...)
Given the binary choice I would rather have the surveillance instead of the outrage-driven anti-science hordes that have been empowered by those US gifts to society Facebook and Twitter.
1 - everyone believes every single thing they see on fbk feed. 2 - everyone is well versed in how to highlight, one-click / tap search ggle,ddg, bing - for more info about highlighted thing (taught how to determine what a good source is).
See, the first way can work mostly, but many problems emerge in short while. The second way empowers people to think before acting and to learn more and not buy what X is selling automatically.
(I have witnessed first hand the damage done by 'fact checking' on fbook - people 100 believe a false post because fbk has not labled it as misinfo - for three days)
So yes, there's an issue with people not knowing what a "good source" is, but it's hard to know how much education could inoculated this population to a message like that. Especially when in many cases it was a treadmill of Fox News telling people that CNN is lies, and then OAN and Newsmax telling them that Fox is lies, and then internet sources telling them that anything on TV is lies. The thrill was never the truth; the thrill was in thinking you were getting some kind of unique insider scoop.
Hope you are kidding to us...
FB and Twtr are huge turds full of anti-science mobs composed anti-vaxxers sharing fake news everywhere.
There is more science in all the IRC and Usenet subnets today than in the whole FB network...
I don't hate Australian gun control- it is a little overzealous but within reason imo. I'm not someone who values gun ownership, so others might disagree. In the UK, however, https://twitter.com/mayoroflondon/status/982906526334668800 is a line crossed for me.
Even if there is a slippery slope that just ends at those levels, I think we should be fighting it. And it's not clear to me whether the slope does actually stop there, and that the UK and Australia aren't still sliding.
(Victim of one motorbike-jacking, one attempted motorbike jacking and 5 separate motorcycle thefts in London.)
So I can imagine that a person without CCTV footage on their side might be especially inclined to despair, but these experiences have led me to question the worthwhileness of crime-reporting in general.
Most of which I wouldn't even mind; it's actually correct behaviour to block the bike lane when making a right turn so that you don't accidentally clip a cyclist when making your turn— but it's not correct behaviour to honk at a bike in the bike lane to get out of the way so you can make your right turn, nor is it correct to drive one off the road so you can swerve into the bike lane and use it to pass a column of five cars before your right turn.
The police straight-up don't investigate property crime committed against private individuals, regardless of whether or not CCTV was involved. They write you up a report that you can take to your insurer.
This process saves everyone time and money - you, the cops, the courts, the criminal...
It's not quite true that they did nothing. A couple of times they dusted for prints, leaving silvery powder residue. After they found some of my bikes, they moved them into compounds where I had to pay a vehicle transport to get them back.
Mostly what they do is write up advice on how to contact Victim Support.
"“For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens 'as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone',”" - said UK Prime Minister David Cameron in 2016. ( https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/britain-too-t... )
https://twitter.com/mpsregentspark/status/974645778558980096...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powers_of_the_police_in_Englan...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Justice_and_Public_Or...
https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-47475566
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-social_behaviour_order
As for Australian gun control, they banned all semi-autos - that's hardly within reason. But even if it were, now the goalposts are being moved, and there's talk of banning lever-action and pump-action shotguns, on the basis that they're "almost assault weapons".
If you want to see a country with reasonable gun control, take a look at Czechia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_law_in_the_Czech_Republic#...
And to be clear, the reason why I call it "reasonable" is not just because it's very liberal, but also because they don't have problems with gun violence regardless - which, IMO, shows just how much all the bans are security theater that doesn't actually address the root causes of such violence.
"People who've been convicted of a crime or have an alcohol or drug addiction aren't allowed to buy guns in Switzerland.
The law also states that anyone who 'expresses a violent or dangerous attitude' won't be permitted to own a gun.
Gun owners who want to carry their weapon for 'defensive purposes' also have to prove they can properly load, unload, and shoot their weapon and must pass a test to get a license."
https://www.businessinsider.com/switzerland-gun-laws-rates-o...
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2018/0307/Switzerland...
Do these sound like the kinds of regulations that the NRA and typical 2A types could get behind? If not, then it seems to me they're not really interested in following a "Swiss model" and are just making a bad-faith argument based on the top line numbers.
But yes, they're generally more strict about who can own a firearm, as opposed to what firearms can be owned. Czechia is pretty similar. That was kinda my point.
I also have to note that "the NRA and typical 2A types" do not represent all pro-gun-minded people in US. For example: https://theliberalgunclub.com/about-us/stances-regarding-reg...
Just the crime thing (more if your a driver etc) is being tested when entering military service..and in your service time you don't own the rifle, after service you can obtain it but it's getting refitted to half-auto. And yes the culture to guns is different and that was exactly my point, it's not the availability of guns but the culture too it, is it a sports thing like a bow and not a status/might/cowboy/survival-symbol.
BTW: It pretty much impossible to have a gun for self defense, the training is pretty hard (like police/security..i mean you shoot in public space...that's a bit more responsibility then to load/unload correctly) and you need a real point, like being a prosecutor for organized crime and being already threatened...otherwise impossible. BUT i remember in the past >20 years, nearly every jeweler had a license.
I'm Australian and I support a ban on semi-automatic guns, except for certain people (pest control, etc). I don't see why it's too much of a burden for a civilian with a gun to have to spend a second to cock it.
Maybe you've heard of Port Arthur, the event that motivated the ban?
>From the first shot, all of these events took approximately fifteen seconds, during which Bryant fired seventeen shots, killed twelve people, and wounded ten more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Arthur_massacre_(Australi...
Maybe some of them would have survived if we slowed him down a bit.
In this particular case, it's a slipper slope on which we already have a ton of momentum.
A simple one is that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. It's a "fallacy" because absence of evidence is correctly not proof of absence, so in an Aristotelian framework where something is either true or false, it is indeed a fallacy to claim that absence of evidence proves absence. However, from a Bayesian perspective it is indeed evidence, though one must be careful in how ones works the math to determine how strong that evidence is. Sometimes it's so weak as to be irrelevant, but sometimes it can be overwhelming.
This fallacy is a direct result of the technologies developed and discussed here, so we’re all culpable for what has been already laid down. Maybe keeping this in mind with AI will help, but given corporate stakeholders, probably not.
With stuff like phones there's probably plenty of options for mass production of open source hardware modules purchasable from electronic hobbyist stores anonymously with cash which would allow anyone to build their own personal communicator with radio, SIM, wifi, quantum, etc modules.
The issue is that competitive mass production of many independent compatible modules would required a public description of an applied system that everyone can debate and discuss and agree to on technical merits, but people self-censor and don't want to share ideas for such applied systems online because they think some monopolist is going to patent everything in order to arbitrarily halt development for 20 years.
In order to achieve such a cultural shift it might be necessary to reform the religions.
What makes it easy to oversell as a fallacy is that everything you described that defines it is subjective, and easily argued about. People disagree a lot on what's "absurd" or "obvious" or "well-evidenced."
“Slippery slopes legitimately exist wherever a policy not only affects the world directly, but affects people's willingness or ability to oppose future policies.”
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-...
The amount of times someone decries any argument as a slippery slope fallacy based only on the merit that we are trying to figure out a trend is... far too common and it just really upsets you, yah know?
Connecting motive and opportunity is not a fallacy
Example: Ad hominem - true, often people start attacking the person in order to escape the argument altogether, and because they have no good counterpoint. But again, this just shows lack of social intelligence. Maybe, we cannot counter-argument that person, but we show that they have ulterior motives, that they are a bad person, and whatever they're cooking, even if it seems ok by their current words, and I can't refute their well thought out position and explain my intuition, he's going to do something bad really soon. So, don't listen to him.
Logical fallacies are useful to be known, but they lately tend to be overused as the end all of "you're making a logical fallacy therefore you fail."
Edit: rather than “tend to be right”, I should have said can be right given the right argument and evidence.
Gun-free America, strong covid public health policies, "hate speech", device surveillance, etc ... you name the slippery slope and you'll find at the bottom of the slope that it's hell for some people and paradise for others. Some people prefer highly authoritarian governments that manage (and minimize) life risk and others prefer hands off governments with self-managed risk.
Seriously, moving to a different country is hardly an option. In nearly all cases, fighting to keep your country good is your best bet.
The even worse problem with this line of thought is the econ-101 conclusion - that they must be OK with things if they don't demonstrate otherwise by voting with their feet. (Not ascribing that assertion to the parent.)
The vastly overwhelming majority of immigration barriers in the world keep people out of other countries, not keep people in them.
The motivation behind those barriers is, broadly speaking, in keeping out moochers and undesirables, not "Actively helping some country on the other side of the world repress its citizenry."
You'll be hard-pressed to find people who support strict immigration controls for the latter reason. You don't have to look hard to find supporters of them for the former reason.
I bet my rulers in the USA are happy that the EU makes it difficult for our people to move there. On the other hand I am certain our populace mostly thinks about keeping “the other out” sure.
Cannot both things hold on their own time and place, and depending on where the person holding the view sits?
Mexico’s ruling class is likely glad for our immigration law, as it keeps their populace pinned in. Economic issues always cut two ways, and the press will stoke emotion about only one of the two, for some reason.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in...
And with regards to this specific debate, being tough on crime and (largely unnecessary conspiracy level) fear over pedophilia are both conservative darlings.
The 2nd amendment has typically been the only love of conservatives.
Where were they when the police illegally searched us in dozens of ways, or when free speech was limited to easy to ignore "free speech zones"?
They've only clamoured to defend free speech once the right to freely abuse weaker social classes was at risk of being taken away.
Stronger ones always have and always will abuse weaker ones. It's pretty much a tautology. Freedom of speech and classical liberalism in general is the only defense the weak have.
You know, that's called... Europe.
Im case of companies based in other countries there is not even that, there is basically nothing I can do, as a EU citizen, to prevent companies from spying at me. Not even voting. I can refuse using that companies hardware or services, which is hard enough with the likes of FANG or MS.
-- Eben Moglen, https://benjamin.sonntag.fr/en/2012/moglen-at-republica-free...
Of course that was just file names and TV tuner/input metadata like channel numbers, not even MusicBrainz/Shazam-style fingerprinting like they would probably be capable of these days with beefier SoCs and more widespread always-on connectivity. Files-on-USB are no longer “en vogue” anyway with everyone and everything moving to streaming services where the surveillance is built right in by definition. Every time I watch something on Netflix/Hulu/Disney they’re watching me right back even if it’s ostensibly for my benefit e.g. for more accurate recommendations.
And then you won't just get randomly banned from Facebook or Google with no human support staff to talk to, you'll also lose access to half your media devices. This is already true for Oculus/Facebook (and probably some others).
The other side of this pincer movement is to mandate that all devices which access the internet must send a remote attestation of their boot process, to check that you haven't "tampered" with them by installing your own OS or jailbreaking them.
A big one is iSpot.tv, the TV will use a fingerprint of your commercial and determine when/where it was watched, and help you tie back the attribution of a customer that visited your site.
Soon for any device containing a computer: "We are just including this hash check feature so we can do business with China, don't worry it'll be disabled by default for western countries"
Take a look at a law that's being proposed in Canada right now. It includes allowing the government to request take downs for a broad number of reasons including otherwise legal speech that they consider to be offensive, data retention, what essentially amounts to a national firewall etc.
Cory Doctorow, who is from Canada originally, has a good write up on it: https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/11/the-canada-variant/#no-ca...
I specifically remember it refusing to play an mp4 of a spiderman movie.
Heard Sony TVs doing it right NOW.
Just search HN for TV, and you'll see plenty of companies uploading screen shots and file lists and who knows what else.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Digital Signage Displays come to the rescue, although they cost more and some are starting to put Android inside, which however can be kept offline as the device would work merely as a display. The upside is that they're designed to work 18/7 to 24/7 and won't easily break like cheaper Smart TVs; setting up a wall of screens in a mall can be a real pain in the ass if every month some guy needs to climb up there and swap the one that died because of bad capacitors etc. That stuff must last or it becomes a huge waste of money.
Then the necessary tuner can be either bought stand alone (and kept unconnected), or enclosed in a Linux/Kodi mini-PC in the form of a cheap USB dongle. https://linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/DVB-T2_USB_Devices
The result can be bulky and probably Grandpa wouldn't welcome it, but for technical inclined users, the level of freedom and security that can be achieved is worth the effort.
There is a stronger 2nd argument, but it's buried towards the end:
> Now imagine an Internet of Snitches doing it badly. It’s easy if you try. Some vendors already do a bad job of keeping customer data private and will continue that track record, so you can expect public leaks of databases that have flagged suspected criminals. Other vendors will write bad machine learning algorithms (or biased ones) leading to false positives and ruined lives.
No slippery slope is needed, CSAM alone is extremely sensitive, a false accusation is ruinous... if automated client side CSAM scanning becomes a wide spread practice with Apple leading the way, it will be an "AI" of the flies... Apple has also demonstrated that it's willing to use ML as an unquestionable source of truth before with it's in store security, using facial recognition which is blatantly wrong to prosecute the innocent.
If we weren’t worried about government overreach, we wouldn’t be worried about CSAM scanning.
In another thread someone suggested that the 4th Amendment might be a protection in the US. I am doubtful about this, but I am interested in what actual law might help. Breaking up large companies doesn’t seem likely to protect us from the government.
I buy monitors or projectors, no TVs for me.
There's a chilling feeling watching this all unfold, as our freedoms get taken away and we're powerless to do anything other than complain on a programming themed social media website.
We'll be labelled as conspiracy theorists, wackos, nutjobs, unintegratable people.
That meme you shared with your friend in a private chat? Sorry, was a bit too anti-establishment for our tastes.
There will simply be more divide between know-how people who can save their freedom (tech people, friends, family) and the rest who get left behind.
Now, if we get to China and North Korea levels of authoritarianism and people start snitching on each other, then that's a whole other problem :-)
And President Biden has already started urging people to report extremists to the goverment.
Open-source media players do exist. Projects like VLC have seen worse times when they were banned because of the DVD-decoding ability, for instance.
Hardware is harder, but dumb enough devices keep existing. Industrial displays, simple audio tracts on hobbyist computer boards, etc. Such devices either has no ability to host surveillance processing, or at least can't do so covertly.
Of course, mass consumer devices are not like that. Well, know your risks.
Have a look at the website where the article is published.
Not my area, but wasn't this part of the point of HDMI... So, the slope seems slippery and pretty vertical to me
Therefore, as this is a "new feature", 1. it does not apply to older computers, particularly ones that are not remotely acessible by others to install their opaque "updates" and 2. on newer computers these lists can only be dynamic if the owner allows "software updates".
The moral of the story is (a) not all "new features" are ones the computer owner may want, and (b) older computers have value, if only becoause they lack the bad stuff that greedy, manipulative, overreaching "tech companies" are building into new ones.
There is nothing wrong with updates so long as they are granular1, transparent and optional2. It is the owner's computer and the owner has a license to the software installed on it at the time of purchase. Any party wishing to install new software on the owner's computers should need the owner's permission. Owners should have a reasonable option to deny such permission and to review and install updates themselves, or to reject individual proposed "new features".
1 Here "granular" means avoiding a situation where the user has to install a feature that she does not want in order to get a feature she does want.
2 Manual installation of updates should always be possible.
It has been rumored back in the day that WMP 10-12 would be like that.
Regarding media players, VLC is open source. Is anyone even using proprietary media players any more?
We absolutely need to address slipery slopes for all things that are related to freedom and democracy.
And generally any law and policy should be looked at with the optic of how is it going to be used in the worst possible bad faith because ultimately it will. I remember the UK using its anti-terrorist act powers against Iceland during the 2008 financial crisis.
But if you have other factors, like obvious corporate ambitions to fight piracy or to protect their industry and states ambitions to fight memes that exposes or embarrasses their policies, it isn't a fallacy at all and just another indication.
Anyways, this has got me pretty annoyed and I'm thinking of tossing it on principle.
Internet over HDMI.
Cue the Arabic name "Amr"
The thing is with this types of systems that are deeply ingrained in our lives, we create the possibility to make people's live profoundly miserable because of an "edge case"
And for that individual who is many times removed from the reason why their life is being wrecked by software it can be next to impossible to even feed back that their life is a misery, let alone get recourse.
The television manufacturers simply don't have an economic interest in trying to do so when they can easily collect data regarding subscription based app use. The cops asking them to do so wouldn't change the fact it would cost the company money to implement and maintain, and no real pay off.
There certainly is a slope to worry about here, but the slope is in the direction of corporate profits. Anything that doesn't result in profits is a slope up hill and nobody wants to be the one pushing that particular rock up hill.
The Internet and app ecosystems can't work properly if they're weakened by LEAs. People would just not use them if they know they're being watched. I'm not saying the majority would switch to Linux phones either (like Librem 5 & Pinephone), simply that the two dominating app-stores (Play & Apple Store) would be phased out and people would probably fund independent FLOSS app stores to replace them.
In the end, the people will speak out and respond to back-doors. In-fact we need FLOSS app stores right now (Similar to F-Droid[0], but baked in as the default store), and they need to be funded properly & they need sound economic incentives to continue. No more 'free' apps where you pay for them with your data. It's possible to have FLOSS apps that are not gratis where people pay for them with money, not their data.
(The reason I suggest we switch to FLOSS app stores is that the apps can easily be checked for back-doors or malicious code since the code is open source. It makes the apps readily available for audits too)
1. CSAM production may be incentivized by consumers (either because they pay for it or because they serve to encourage the producers).
2. CSAM may (as, famously, with Backpage) be an advertisement for real-world meet ups and further abuse.
3. Having pictures of one’s own abuse further disseminated is itself abusive and morally wrong.
Obviously producers should also be prosecuted, but while I do think the American approach is in many ways informed by puritanical beliefs, there are perfectly rational reasons to pursue the spread of such material.
Getting random people to pay for content is a pretty hard thing to do, and I’d assume illegal content wouldn’t just be taking credit cards either, so the barrier is way higher. The conversion rate looks to me to be abysmally low, and we’re trying to police the whole internet for that.
Legal porn seems like a strong counterexample.
sure but people should also keep in mind that pursuit could massively backfire, like in the case of backpage, where the shutdown of the site actually made is HARDER to find and recuse children being abused because now the traffickers are using more secure, more underground platforms...
This characterization of Backpage diverges significantly from the realities of the site uncovered by authorities [1]. Choice excerpt:
> "Information provided to us by [FBI Agent Steve] Vienneau and other members of the Innocence Lost Task Force confirm that, unlike virtually every other website that is used for prostitution and sex trafficking, Backpage is remarkably responsive to law enforcement requests and often takes proactive steps to assist in investigations," wrote Catherine Crisham and Aravind Swaminathan, both assistant U.S. attorneys for the Western District of Washington, in the April 3 memo to Jenny Durkan, now mayor of Seattle and then head federal prosecutor for the district. Vienneau told prosecutors that "on many occasions," Backpage staff proactively sent him "advertisements that appear to contain pictures of juveniles" and that the company was "very cooperative at removing these advertisements at law enforcement's request."
> "Even without a subpoena, in exigent circumstances such as a child rescue situation, Backpage will provide the maximum information and assistance permitted under the law," wrote Crisham and Swaminathan.
1. https://reason.com/2019/08/26/secret-memos-show-the-governme...
They truly did good work and were an unfortunate casualty of a political pissing contest.
(2) and (3) can be handled by enforcing a delay of, say, 15 years between CSAM being produced and it entering the database (and censoring any identifying information, of course), and by giving people the choice to opt out before their pictures are added.
The problem isn't CSAM being in the database, but being disseminated in public. The database is designed to reduce public dissemination.
Personally, I've been heading toward a life more free of the internet and technology. This move by Apple is speeding that up.
Good luck with that. They are in Russia/Eastern Europe, behind mafias.
Are you so sure of this? Maybe some people.. like the same kind of people who visit this web page, they might get a sick feeling in their stomach thinking that their basic human interactions like talking to their mother, are swallowed up and surveilled... but MOST PEOPLE will just accept it and it will become the new normal.
Oh, but it is. I have yet to see any convincing argument for how we get “back” (if we were ever there) to a time when technology was on our sides.
Vote with your wallet, they say, but when hostile technology is far cheaper than friendly technology, and the vast majority of the population couldn’t care less, how could we possibly make a dent? And this is before even considering that governments around the world are on the side of hostile technology.
Write to your representative, they say, but when our “democratic” representatives couldn’t care less about the needs of their constituents, yet term after term get re-elected regardless, who will hear us? And again, before considering that a) they’re voted in by the same careless majority, and b) that they are empowered by the very hostile technology we want them to combat?
I just don’t see a future that isn’t plagued by the overbearing influence of soulless tech companies and the corrupt scumbags that enable them.
I don't see the goal as making a dent. That's too large.
I have two goals:
* Ensure I have access to free platforms. I use a Librem laptop and a Pinephone. I also use closed platforms as part of living in society.
* Ensure the free flame is kept alight. I do that by using the free platforms, buying the products, and improving them with bug reports and patches.
The vast majority, for better or worse, do not share those goals.
As an advantage to free platforms, those that do care have the capability to improve it. We don't need many.
Free platforms/tooling won't be as shiny. So be it.
Mandatory trusted computing for access to the internet would screw free platforms.
People who use, support them and promote among friends.
Create a botnet that downloads CSAM to millions of devices so that millions of reports are generated for innocent people so that it’s clear that all of this doesn’t work as intended.
Did you actually see who had written this article? This is CSO of Purism, company developing user-respecting devices.
I'm not sure this is actually the reason in this case. If you go outside of the tech bubble, a lot of people don't understand what the fuss about CSAM is all about, and "if you're not doing anything wrong, why are you opposed to saving children?" is an oft-expressed sentiment. So, politicians support it because 1) the majority of their voters approve, and 2) not supporting it makes them vulnerable to highly effective attacks on their public image from their opponents, again, because the general public buys into those arguments.
If you need a phone that has all the modern features and app support (so you can work with your banking app, local parking app, etc.), you're basically limited to android and iphone. Apple just did "this"... google is probably next... what do I buy after?
I mean.. i can maybe modify android enough to remove the offedning features, but what will average joe do?
No, you aren't. You can use Librem 5 with Anbox.
https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/#availability
Lead time is 6 months. You cannot buy it in telco stores, to get monthly payments with your phone bills, and you cannot buy it cheaper on a contract.
Basically, if you're a "normal person" (non-geek), you're limited to iphones and a selection of samsungs, huaweis, xiaomis, and some cheap plasticky telco-branded chinese phones.
Every technological breakthrough starts with geeks. HN audience can support and promote the user-respecting technologies, even if they are half a year away.
Are there other types of material or kinds of activity that cloud services might already be scanning for, but might not have much public awareness?
Another is that Google Photos and Facebook both do classification for objects and text within photos - eg. a Kohl's ad in my timeline on Facebook has image alt text of "May be an image of 1 person, standing, footwear and outdoors". I'm sure their detections look for TOS breaking content or other pictures showing illegal activities.
CP?
This is compounded because people don't understand probabilities. Take DNA... if someone says "the chance of this DNA match being wrong is one in a million", people will assume the match is correct, because that seems like a really small chance of a false positive.. however, if you are matching that DNA to everyone in the United States, that one in a million ends up with over 300 matches that are wrong.
Second, perfect enforcement of laws is not always ideal. If we catch everyone who breaks the law, how can we ever decide as a society to change the law? For example, if we had 100% effective anti-marijuana laws, no one could have ever tried marijuana and we would not have been able to determine that we actually don't want it outlawed. If no one can ever break a law, we have no way of testing whether a law is good or not.
If there is a human in the loop checking for false positives, then I don't see how it could get to this point. It surely wouldn't take hundreds of millions of false positives -- each with a non-trivial cost for manual review -- before pulling the plug.
How long before people without phones, doorbells or smart watches get frowned upon?
At the rate we're accelerating, it wouldn't be crazy to see it happen in a couple years.
What I’m about to say is a bit controversial and cannot be implemented by majority, or even a large minority. Maybe a subset of HN that isn’t already in this mindset:
Treat all devices as adversarial as you possibly can within some sensical reason. Use Tor, for example, but expect that everything you do is being logged and that sometime in the future if a vulnerability, exploit, whatever is discovered that can trace these logs back to you, that you know what you’re in for. Apply this to whatever else you feel like could have a negative impact on you.
Obviously this is now coming to light because of Apple but this has been an issue long before.
To put it into more morbid terms: assume that the government thinks you’re storing CP and they’re going through your trash, and behave accordingly.
That's about it.
Mitigation is required, if you actually do have something to hide.
Freedom however is endangered, if you personally mitigate this or not. I think for most people the best course of action would be to speak out against this, boycott the companies or get politically active, educate others about the threat to all of us.
And evading hostile tech's reach is really not a practical every day thing. I mean look at the shitshow of browser fingerprinting. Behaving vastly different than most will leave a trace of its own, even if it's just the absence of common information.
The best personal protection is being part of a healthy, democracy valuing collective not okay with this surveillance.
And if you are about to explode the next big story, I would probably advice migrating somewhere hostile to the country you are about to piss off. It's not like they turn on your fridge because you bought LSD for you and your boyfriend; I mean generally buying drugs happens in public Telegram groups these days... Politicians love spending money on surveillance tech, but not law enforcement people. Nothing is gonna happen, if you don't mess with powerful people's egos.
The real damage of these trends is the self censorship and permanent premptive self-surveillance you automatically do in the face of it. Like treating every device as hostile! You are killing off the mental freedom more and more, creativity, possibilities. No one is going all to prison, but no one isn't in prison a little bit.
There are a few easy things you can do like use e2e encryption wherever possible and trust as few things (devices, companies, apps) as you can get away with.
TOR has dubious value given the effort put in by various actors to de-anonymize its traffic.
1. I only run Linux where possible, and I install myself (and I realize I do not control the BIOS, etc). OpenBSD would probably be even better.
2. I assume that Google knows everything that is going on my Android phone, Apple knows everything on any Apple device, and Microsoft know everything going on on my son's gaming PC.
This is a dangerous trajectory and we'll hear "But think of the children!" or the good old "If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear." ad nauseam.
We've been over the fallacy of these statements already, so I will just quote Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." (Although apparently the original context of that quote was not about Liberty at all.)
This also goes both ways: there are children with phones, in terms of reality, not morality. These children are being spied on.
That's what people don't get about these backdoors and sidedoors (?). There is no way to guarantee that a malicious actor hasn't gained control or knowledge of them.
I really wonder if the privacy implications of the "internet of things" are so dangerous that the internet of things should never be realized to its full potential. There is the always present temptation for governments to co-opt it as a surveillance apparatus. It really is the perfect tool for Big Brother style rule.
The cost may be too high.
Edit: grammar
It's not hopeless, the people with money here should be putting it where their mouth it and actually buying things or donating to projects that make a positive change.
Instead of upgrading to next iDevices, I ended up getting a much cheaper de-googled device and will split the different by donating to privacy advocacy organizations. A bit harder for other family members, but I did that before by converting everyone to a Linux laptops.
Child porn is an odd hill to die on. Of course pedophiles and purveyors of child porn need to be locked away; no one disagrees with that.
But to pull this out of seemingly nowhere, and inform all 300m iPhone users (plus however other millions use iCloud on Macs) that they must submit to a search, because we are all suddenly suspects... this is beyond the pale.
Like others, I have baby pictures and kid pictures. I'm thinking about a couple of pics my wife took of our 18-month old, in the bathtub with her equally young cousins. I am wondering whether these pictures might get flagged in some way. Apple claims that they are only looking for known pictures already in a particular database, but that is cold comfort. If somehow one of my pictures pops up because of an A.I. decision, and a human decides it qualifies as child porn, my life is ruined.
As a side note, I was planning to upgrade later this year from a Samsung to the latest iPhone. That plan is now on hold pending review.
In fact I'm suddenly much more interested in the Librem phone, purveyed by the author of the article. As I recall, it's about $2000 USD so I had really not considered it seriously in the past. Now I am considering it seriously. I hope a whole family of new Linux-based smartphones can jump into this market and take advantage of the situation.
It'll be interesting to see how things shake out. Will this move by Apple go down in history as a textbook example of shooting oneself in the foot? Or will the masses simply grunt, and accept the inevitable?
I'm not convinced that's a good look from this blog post. See the examples they give: "a Catholic priest’s resignation after location data revealed he used the Grindr app and frequented gay bars", "might expand into terrorism, sedition, or similar categories of crime", "[catch] DMCA violations", "Your car could report when you parked illegally or disobeyed the speed limit", "Your smart irrigation system could detect whenever you watered your lawn in violation of water conservation orders".
There's more to this whole topic than "you won't be able to break laws and decieve people with casual abandon", right? Like, a presumption that your customers are actually innocent, maybe.
By writing this comment I violated laws for profanity (writing "fucking" in a public forum), posting about suicide (see roskomnazors' github block over a repo with humorous description of suicide), claiming that some people are born gay (falls under the law of "protection of children from negative information" that even applies in some EU countries).
Innocent! Hah. Give us a name, and we'll find what you're guilty of...
If I need to take photos, I'll buy a digital camera. If I need directions, I'll get a GPS. If I want to talk to someone, I'll call them on my Nokia or email them from an anonymously registered address. If I want music, I'll download it and use an MP3 player.
There's not a single piece of consumer tech in the last 20 years that has made our lives tangibly better in any way.
On the other points about slippery slopes, we don't even know the full extent of how the powers that be are surveilling us, it could quite possibly be 100x worse than we even realize. Certain cities, like Santa Monica, CA for instance, are almost completely under camera control. I have seen the camera room at the promenade mall, and the camera stations near some of the intersections. The illusion of privacy is evaporating before our eyes.
Tell that to blind people who, for the past decade or so, have had screen readers built into our mainstream smartphones at no extra cost, giving us access to a wide variety of functionality all in one device. And that functionality includes access to on-demand transportation through Uber or the like. Yes, we have to pay for that last part, but for those of us who can, it's still liberating.
Edit: And I'm sure there are other counter-examples; I hope others will add their own. I just wrote about the one that has affected me and my friends.
I'm very poor- like on and off homeless poor- and I would be willing to pay up to $200 for a free phone, but I couldn't go higher. I dearly hope that it doesn't become the case that any "free" phone isn't a luxury like current privacy oriented phones.
And you'll pay for it, too!
The reason is clear now. They want the sharks on their side
At least the owner of "Happy birthday" would start to get their rightful royalties each time we sing that god awful song. /s
Actually, no, I’m not okay with that but I’m okayer than with others can watch me and I can’t watch anyone.
> It means using a free operating system that lets you install whatever software you want and remove any software you don’t.
I don’t understand, how free can be scalable. I am ok to pay for software and hardware. Even I update phone, only because Apple stops supporting my old one, I am still ok with that. It was part of why I chose Apple as a platform. Yes, they are expensive and unfortunately you have to update to keep up. But because they have revenue stream from hardware sales and integrated services, such as iCloud, they did not have to sell my data and had an incentive to protected. The promise of privacy was aligned with their revenue goals.
Free and open source software is amazing, but is not scalable. Very rarely it comes close on terms of usability to paid software. I want to be in environment, where one can pay for product and expect not to get stabbed later by invasion into they privacy.
Free software is not about price. It can be paid.
Why can't a company sell products running free and open-source software? In such case, you pay for the software, too. By the way, this is exactly what Purism is doing, the company behind this article.
Has this ever been the case even since the very beginning of smartphones?
Who cares? It can be true now: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5
Cheap Nice/Shiny Private - Pick two
Underpaid, overstressed and overworked people. Imagine what a job like this does to ones mental health.
"At Packt, we take the protection of our copyright and licenses very seriously. If you come across any illegal copies of our works in any form on the internet, please provide us with the location address or website name immediately so that we can pursue a remedy."
They want their readers to be the their personal snitches online. What a crazy world we are headed towards.
It's also interesting that at least one prepared response will be found to my point above.