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Comment by slownews45 | Hacker News Reader

I feel list this story keeps on showing up on HN.

Does anyone have a link to previous discussion on this topic? Might help avoid endless re-hashes of the same arguments and misinformation.

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This is a new development, please don't try to suppress news.

Dessant, this is a bad take. Encourage others out of the loop by pointing them in the right direction. Done properly it will improve and enable new discussion.

I'm not trying to suppress news.

There have been a ton of letters, calls to action, complaints and outrage about apple's actions.

Many of the conversations are HIGHLY repetitive.

I would strongly urge folks to review past discussions before re-hashing things (again) or focus on new elements.

And these headlines "Global Coalition"? I hope folks realize there is also a "global coalition" of governments that are working to do much more to get access to your information. Australia, China, the EU (yes, go on about GDPR but actual privacy - forget about it), UK etc.

There may also be a "global coalition" of users who like apple's products.

A better headline is EFF writes open letter with 90 other civil liberties groups to Tim Cook?

Edited to list prior topics on HN about this:

Apple's plan to “think different” about encryption opens a backdoor to your life

EFF: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/apples-plan-think-diff... 2260 points|bbatsell|16 days ago|824 comments

Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

EFF: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/if-you-build-it-they-w...

618 points|taxyovio|10 days ago|303 comments

Tell Apple: Don’t Scan Our Phones

EFF: https://act.eff.org/action/tell-apple-don-t-scan-our-phones

161 points|sunrise54|4 days ago|30 comments

Is EFF opposition really new news?

I've also noticed this weird forumulation more often. "Please stop xxxx" rather than an actual discussion of a topic. Ironic to try and suppress a conversation by claiming someone elses comments are suppression?

I think it’s important to distinguish the comments from the submission. I agree the comments are mostly repetitive, but the submissions do, in fact, cover newsworthy facts that should not be dismissed.

This is the forth or more piece about the EFF objecting to Apple's work.

I was just mentioning - maybe it's worth reading the comments on the FOUR prior articles about this EXACT entity complaining about Apple (ignoring the other 30+ HN posts on this) for this specific issue.

This is not "suppressing the news".

Your question is valid. People out of the loop need a way to catch up.

I create this account explicitly because of this new feature. I've been posting constantly about it. If there's a new article on this I will try (and encourage others) to post such a summary as you did at the top of the article for anyone who hasn't been following.

Open to any questions you have about this from a "how do I catch up" perspective.

If the human element to this story was “cat gifs”, you might have a point.

The human element here is “world governments and multinational corps beholden to nobody want to insert the first of possibly many back doors into your emotional life”

Sit down. You’re just looking for attention for your ability to notice a basic pattern.

I find it very ironic that the people complaining about "suppressing news" or "violation of rights" are writing comments along the lines of sit down and shut up.

Your comments aren't news and we aren't the government suppressing your speech, so I'm not sure what you're going on about.

They're not telling you to stop any meaningful discussion about the issues.

“Person on internet can perform basic arithmetic, demonstrates by counting instances of repeat content.” is a headline that:

1) we’ve seen over and over

2) adds little to the context at hand

You’re not wrong. You’re late to the game spotting patterns of reposting (it happens deal with it for yourself) and undermining the context (putting it on others to do better by your expectations.)

You have a body and mind that can be trained to find and reflect on more interesting patterns and ideas. Have at it. Don’t bemoan all of reality not conforming to your current state of cognitive awareness

You can't stop it. Once a topic becomes popular on HN, any plausibly related submission will instantly garner enough upvotes to put it on the front page. Eventually it will fade somewhat. Same thing happens with Boeing-related topics, for example.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=fa...

Wow - 11 stories with tons of upvotes (lots more with fewer).

A fair number are other "open letters" as well.

Helpful.

I've come to abhor the term `misinformation`, I know your intent but Twitter/FB has been using it in nafarious ways. Anytime I hear it, it triggers censorship related thoughts for me.

I agree! It's been misused to mean things someone doesn't agree with too often :)

In this case we have been gettings tons of claims that what apple doing will see them charged with child porn felonies etc with almost no foundation.

We've also had lots of claims based on a failure to actually read about what apple is doing (ie, will scan all content not just that scheduled for upload to icloud etc).

Sure, but as someone who agrees with you, I’m not sure we can call that ‘misinformation’. It’s just poor understanding and bad arguments.

I have seen a little misinformation relating to this subject - direct lies, fake news, fake links etc, but a negligible amount.

All good points. Yeah, we should stop using the term I think given it's lost a lot of its meaning. But a fair bit of the discussion of this topic has been badly misinformed.

I agree, but that is a feature of this particular problem.

For example, I see a lot of people who are simply wrong about how the hash matching works. One way to be wrong is to think it’s a cryptographic hash. Another way to be wrong is to think it’s just a perceptual hash match.

The problem is that these are both not crazy. The actual solution is far more complex and non-obvious than most people would suspect.

I think this is a genuine problem with the system. It is hard for almost anyone to imagine how it could be trustworthy.

Apple have been pretty clear that a human will review things. That is (I hope) a feature of any system that leads to child porn charges. If not it should be - AI gets things wrong and can be tricked (as can humans but in different ways usually).

But agreed, the technical bits may not be obvious (though apple released I thought a pretty darn complete paper on how it all works).

Sure - but who wants a human reviewing their private photos? I don’t.

Unless you understand the technical bits you have know way of knowing how rarely this is likely to happen in practice.

Not me, but if they only review after a flag, that's best you can do I think? facebook works this way too. Users flag photos and someone looks and deals with them.

‘No worse than facebook’ is probably the most damning thing you can say about a tech company.

The best you can do would be to not review people’s private photos at all.

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