Hacker News Reader

Comment by flixic | Hacker News Reader

Headline implies that Apple sued Corellium because of their CSAM research, but that's not at all related. This is quite clickbaity.

View on HN

Ok, we've attempted to change the title to something accurate and neutral, in keeping with the site guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(Submitted title was "Apple says researchers can vet its CSAM tools. But sues a startup for it.")

The current title "Apple is suing smartphone emulation software startup Corellium" takes away a lot of context of what the actual article is about. In my opinion, the article title (and the HN title I posted and edited to "Apple says researchers can vet its CSAM tools, but sues a startup that can") is not "clickbaitey" when it is actually factual:

> On Monday, Corellium announced a $15,000 grant for a program it is specifically promoting as a way to look at iPhones under a microscope and hold Apple accountable. On Tuesday, Apple filed an appeal continuing the lawsuit.

> ... “With their left hand, they make jail-breaking difficult and sue companies like Corellium to prevent them from existing. Now with their right hand, they say, ‘Oh, we built this really complicated system and it turns out that some people don’t trust that Apple has done it honestly—but it’s okay because any security researcher can go ahead and prove it to themselves.’”

I didn’t get that impression from the title, but I also knew they were referring to Corellium before clicking the link. I interpreted it as, “Apple says researchers can vet its CSAM tools despite aggressively suing the one company that makes such research feasible.”

Yeah, I thought like that too. It could’ve been better though.

I heard nothing about Corellium before, so my reading of the headline was that Apple is retaliating against a company for trying to audit their CSAM tools despite saying that it's totally fine if people want to do those audits.

I have a passing awareness of the Corellium situation and interpreted the headline just like you.

That’s completely incorrect. This entire article is fluff. The suit against Corellium has been going on for years.

On one level, I'm not surprised and can understand why Apple might be pissed off that Corellium is still making news.

"Researchers can audit our CSAM process...except for you, who we just handed a pile of money over to and are still on our shit list."

Handing Corellium the underdog story on a silver platter again is not how you avoid them making news though

As I see it, Apple had 3 options for how to deal with this case - in decreasing order of hostility:

1) Sue the company out of existence 2) Buy the company 3) Settle

They chose option #3, which from what I've seen is solely related to DMCA claims. With this in mind, why should Corellium be allowed to continue this work having just gotten out of the proverbial "doghouse"?

Apple's already marked them as a bad actor in this regard and continuing to make noise seems ill-advised.

Actually, Apple chose option #1, and when their ass was handed to them by the judge in the case, they opted for #3 to get out from under it.

No matter how they handled it though, the fact remains that they are providing lip service to the public ("security researchers can easily vet our methods") while continuing to fight against the very same researchers who might want to investigate this new scanning technology.

I agree that this is more damage control on Apples side, no amount of spin will make on-device scanning a good idea.

Apple should realize that users just want the privacy they have heard so much about over the years.

And they only went for #1 after #2 didn't work out.

Or Apple says researchers can vet its CSAM tools as long as their results agrees with their ones.

To add, Apple and Corellium settled.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.55...

Apple is apparently still pursuing a copyright claim: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/08/17/apple-appeals-corellium...

Yes but the article also says:

"Part of the two-year case was settled just last week—days after news of the company’s CSAM technology became public."

And

"On Monday, Corellium announced a $15,000 grant for a program it is specifically promoting as a way to look at iPhones under a microscope and hold Apple accountable. On Tuesday, Apple filed an appeal continuing the lawsuit."

Both the headline and the HN title (which is slightly different) use "is suing"--which is a tense in English that indicates an ongoing or even perpetual action--in a way that doesn't in any way imply direct causality on the nested prepositional phrase "that can / does just that": Apple is, in fact, suing--and has been, for a long time now!--a startup that not only "can" "vet its CSAM tools", but "is doing just that" (which maybe itself needs explanation: "just that" doesn't mean "only that" but means something like "emphatically that" in this context).

This is the impression the headline gave me as well.

Correct. I am quite disappointed in the editors.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com