Hacker News Reader

Comment by danuker | Hacker News Reader

This is particularly troubling in light of their CSAM detection.

"Before an image is stored in iCloud Photos, an on-device matching process is performed for that image against the known CSAM hashes."

You do not own an Apple device that you buy.

https://www.macworld.com/article/352875/ios-15-csam-scanning...

View on HN

I’m willing to bet that this will be called an accidental bug by apple and never addressed.

I'd prefer we call it data piracy though.

Is there any good reason to take Apple on their word that all their scanning for is CSAM? How certain can we be that they're not already using this technology secretly to look for other types of content when the government asks? I doubt they're going to announce every time the government requests they add detection for a new Pepe frog meme and other "far-right" content, and it seems almost inevitable governments will want them to do something like this at some point, if not already.

I feel like we're giving Apple too much trust by labelling this CSAM detection. In reality the technology can (and probably will) be used to detect anything they want to.

At the same time, they did announce this. How would we know if they put a backdoor in and had said nothing at all?

I know there are a lot of eyes on iOS, but if they wanted find a place in the gigabytes of binary blobs to do this quietly, I think they could.

This same logic can be true of any cloud provider that scans indiscriminately.

Sure, I guess my point is that calling this CSAM detection is deceptive as the technology itself can (and probably will) be used to detect any type of content. We also have no way to verify Apple are only using the technology currently to scan for CSAM so why give them the benefit of the doubt when they have so many incentives to go beyond CSAM scanning?

> You do not own an Apple device that you buy.

There's no way to avoid the Apple. It's become the Berlin Wall of computing. No admittance, no escape, secret police, protection racket.

Companies with apps don't have customers. They're unnaturally fenced off, cajoled, and taxed. Apple laughably claims privacy.

Meanwhile device owners can't repair their phones or expect not to be spied on. When they aren't paying $500 for RAM, they're letting Apple define what activities are permissible.

The damn thing doesn't even have a web browser that isn't safari. The Apple is so afraid of runtimes threatening the app store distribution model.

> The damn thing doesn't even have a web browser that isn't safari.

Why would you claim this? There are no limitations on web browsers.

> Why would you claim this? There are no limitations on web browsers.

All browsers on iOS must use the WebKit browser engine making them, in essence, safari clones with a different look and feel.

They say “the Apple” While it’s true for ios, “the Apple” also makes macos, where you can freely pick your browser

They say "There are no limitations on web browsers.", while on iOS, there are clearly some limitations on web browsers. It doesn't matter that there also exists another platform where that statement may apply; the statement was generic and itself made no distinction.

OK, so "no limitations" wasn't correct. But still, you can use chrome on ios, you get all the ui and behaviours you are used to, no?

No support for Chrome extensions. Not even support for Safari Web Extensions bundled with iOS apps.

Some browsers do have their own extensions (Edge has AdBlock Plus built-in, but that's all; iCab has quite a few Javascript-based extensions) and of course you get things like using another vendor's bookmark and password sync. But that's about it.

Oh really? But extensions are separate from the rendering, right? So is that a separate limitation then?

Not really separate. Many extensions designed for other browsers will still depend on quirks of the respective extension implementations, JavaScript engines, rendering engines, etc.

Of course, there are (supposed-to-be-but-aren't) browser-agnostic WebExtensions — but again, only Safari implements them on iOS (starting with iOS 15), they must be bundled with an iOS app, and non-Safari browsers don't have access to those bundled extensions.

Perhaps those browsers will implement support for WebExtensions by some other mechanism but it certainly won't be the case that Firefox for iOS could run extensions intended for Firefox on desktop, nor would one expect extensions from the Chrome Web Store to work properly on Chrome for iOS.

Perhaps that's an upshot? Better support for browser-agnostic WebExtensions?

Even then, that's up to whether or not Apple permits that in the App Store.

Ok, thanks for the thorough explanation

You are limited to WebKit rendering engine and JavaScriptCore, so practically all non-Safari browsers are more or less just a different skins of Safari.

Apple forces all third party browsers on iOS to use WebKit, so really everything has to use safari’s rendering engine.

I guess it'll soon be save to call it Apple's devices and not owning your content follows.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com