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> The surveillance technology itself is not really that novel

What's novel is that the tech reports you to the authorities. Imagine your AV reporting you to the authorities for digital piracy, it's something that RIAA could only dream of back in the day. Now it's becoming a reality.

"We just scan every song on your iPod to make sure the neural hash isn't copyrighted content. If it is blah blah blah tokens blah blah report you to the RIAA."

Just bought a System76 laptop. Happy birthday Linux!

ok but how do they know you haven't bought that content?

Or are the author/creator of that content!

As if they would care for such details.

authors/creators of content don't exist; content springs fully formed from centers of large corporations, especially if that corporation is named Disney.

Gotta go deeper and scan the bank transactions going through your phone. Why not just watch your screen and build a model of everything you do. It's a slippery slope ... of extrapolation.

> Gotta go deeper and scan the bank transactions going through your phone.

Sight Piracy as the reason, but get better conversion tracking for those sweet Ad clicks. We all know which companies would be drooling at the prospects of this.

Sadly this isn't hypothetical, Card companies have colluded with the data hoarders in the past for this exact purpose.

This kind of reporting is of course standard practice in the banking industry and has been going on for 20+ years.

> Why not just watch your screen and build a model of everything you do.

https://www.consumerreports.org/privacy/how-to-turn-off-smar...

In the future, everything is streamed. You don't own the content.

...If people will want to pay for that model. Not everybody will - this is absolutely certain. So, there is still some space for physical media being around for the rest.

Are you sure? There are already music albums that you can't buy in stores.

The free market serves only the masses. Everybody else can only hope to buy what they want.

I am sure I will never, ever go streaming, if that means cultural consumption linked to my identity.

If there will be unavailable goods or services, I will be forced to do without.

Children being born now will come into a world with no concept of either privacy or ownership.

Children being born these days will probably have parents to teach them that, and will be exposed to past culture, unless civilization fully collapses, and will understand privacy and ownership naturally, as they do not need to see those concepts around to understand them and "want" them.

The presumption with that line of thought is that "people will WANT the album at all" and/or "WANT at any price". These are implicit assumptions you are failing to acknowledge/mention.

And they are NOT generally valid.

For example, I stopped listening to broadcast radio in the 1990s - I've never missed it and I've done without quite happily.

I stopped watch any of the mainstream TV networks in the 2000s - I've never missed it and I've done without quite happily.

I've never used a music streaming service to this day - I've never missed it and I've done without quite happily.

No one piece of media is SO VALUABLE that it's irreplaceable or necessary to have access to. NONE.

I'm not a slave to whatever emotional beast would DEMAND I live crappy music or music only available from streaming. It can always be substituted either with music from other sources or living without it entirely.

If Justine Bieber was wiped from existence, my life would not change one iota. Same goes for pretty much ALL other "artists" today - and that's made easier because most are pure garbage without any musical talent anyway. Want to put up barriers to entry preventing me from getting garbage? OK. Thanks, I guess?

It will turn out like the Saints football tickets - they can't even give them away.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/08/get-woke-go-broke-n...

Yes, there will be people who want the album. Or at least the song. For example, people who heard a song in a club and used a music fingerprinting service like Shazam to find it.

>And they are NOT generally valid.

you make this statement, but then you just have a bunch of examples where it is not specifically valid for you.

Audio Hijack to the rescue.

DRM to the "rescue"

Well clearly the burden of proof now lies with you. Have fun with our fully automated appeal process. If you get over 10,000 retweets we may reconsider.

The idea is to force you to buy the same content in multiple platforms. Bought content would have DRM; anything stripped of DRM is presumably pirated content.

who says the government cannot come up with a twisted reasoning of mandatory compliance to serve the unique IP industry which is struggling in the face of harsh pandemic and more seriously the threat imposed by those egregious hackers and thiefs who steal and consume content without paying for it. How dare they! they are killing the entire artist community. or " in the face of unprecedented attacks on our domestic soil by foreign alien enemies, we are forced to implement a assailant monitoring programme which i assure you will not be used for any other purpose. the programme is going to be strictly for intended purposes only. That said, while partnering with the industry, we have realized the immense potential to build an inclusive and healthy competitive environment in the market and will help the industry leaders root out evil "

Or they could just scan the songs themselves. Why bother with hashing when you have full control? This is a red herring.

Since they have had the ability and incentive to stop music piracy that way for at least a decade, and haven't done it, that should tell you something.

Not the authorities perhaps, but it is already happening in some degree: Windows Defender sending “samples” or unknown binaries to the cloud to analyze them. I am extremely bothered by this and try to disable this “feature” as much as possible. As always with Windows, you have to aggressively tweak system settings to permanently disable the constant reminders “Oops we have detected suboptimal settings, please turn on every privacy invading feature for your convenience”. We can only hope MS doesn’t abuse the samples for other purposes, but given their and other big techs track record, we can assume there are additional parties interested in the submissions.

If you are tired of fighting with your own computer, consider switching to Linux. It's been working flawlessly for years for me.

I am certainly considering it every now and then. Already use it for main desktop usage. And I hear good things about Proton, but I really like ease of usage of Windows for everything gaming related. It somehow reminds me too much of my working job, when trying to figure out how a certain game needs to be started in Linux.

Not all games work but many on Steam do and most run well out of the box. It will only improve as Steam is committed on making Linux the new PC OS for gaming.

> I do not see anyone who understands how evil this is ever forgiving them.

I'm not so optimistic.

How many people among Apple's users actually understand how evil this is, and among those, how many do really, actually care? People seem fine enough with Facebook's data vacuuming, why would they protest against Apple's "non-intrusive" scheme? They "don't hate children" and, of course, "have nothing to hide".

The issue, as has been brought up in one form or another in the numerous threads on the subject, is that people like their comfort (using smartphones) and there really isn't that much of a choice.

> The good news is running OSX made me lazy, and getting back into running a linux or freebsd laptop again is going to be fun.

And therein lies the rub. Many people wouldn't find doing this fun. They'd much prefer being able to watch Netflix in ultra high-def and not having to futz around with Nvidia's drivers or what have you.

> Many people wouldn't find doing this fun. They'd much prefer being able to watch Netflix in ultra high-def and not having to futz around with Nvidia's drivers or what have you

I think they were being sarcastic, maybe not. Either way, you're right. And this is why WE need to be doing this so that it becomes a viable option.

This is the attitude anyone who cares about this stuff needs to adopt. Especially those with engineering, design, or documentation skills.

Now is the time to get the open alternatives shored up, and to start creating a viable and concise pathway and ecosystem that we can recommend to “non-techies” who are looking for an alternative.

That can only happen if we start using this stuff now, and commit to donating some time and effort to take the deficiencies we find in our own use and make them better.

It’s fine to vent, and I hope to see people continue to call big tech out. But putting on a more positive mindset, this is actually an amazing opportunity we have to start creating the change we want to see.

1. Ditch Apple

2. Buy the best that exists today (ie System76)

3. Give monthly critical feedback every step of the way to open source hw/sw companies and their competitors about what you really need in the next version

4. Buy a Better world

Ask HN: Do you use Purism, PinePhone, or Fairphone? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28164208

Ask HN: Do you use a Linux-first laptop? (System76, Librem, Dell XPS Dev Ed) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28216287

I successfully transformed my company from MacOS to Arch on Apple hardware. There are two computers left with Catalina for some specific workflows, in isolation from outside world.

System 76 are cool, but when the time comes we will build custom PCs for work. The "aura" and "coolness" of Apple is gone.

I admit that my decision to use only Apple computers in the office was irrational and tainted by emotional perception from the past. I almost puled the trigger for M1 Air and was planning to upgrade office Macbook Pro's to M1X. Not anymore.

Wow congrats, getting Macs to run Linux sounds a superhuman feat.

No it's really easy, I had Linux running on a 2006 model iMac and I am as far from a Linux expert as you can come.

Ah yes! My understanding is older Macs are easier. The newer T2-enabled Macs make it hard. For example wi-fi, keyboards, and trackpad don't work out of the box, lots of configuration is needed, and some things (ie microphone) simply don't work at all.

Ah ok, makes sense. This was my first mac, things have definitely changed since then...

> That can only happen if we start using this stuff now, and commit to donating some time and effort to take the deficiencies we find in our own use and make them better.

If, and i doubt it in any reasonable time, you can replace all of apples ecosystem, including buying / renting of DRM media i would switch. until then switching is quite a big step back.

the problem is not lack of software so much as it’s lack of industry support.

The industry is what got us here in the first place... we need to do this for ourselves. By us, for us.

yea great pep talk, but go convince the various license and copyright holders to allow you to create a store to sell media on linux. this just isn’t going to happen. which means, we’re done here.

Well you could categorise them as not understand how evil this is. They are not comfortable, but they may not see it as evil.

I feel it's bit unreasonable to expect a non-technical user to even start to comprehend this issue.

Many of them know that the photos, videos, music from their old iPhone would be available in their new iPhone after they sign-in; But do they really understand what happened in-between to enable that, Should they even know that? That's what Apple is banking on.

It would be pragmatic to expect even technically equipped Apple fans to call-out Apple's latest hypocrisy and move away from the ecosystem. They didn't do it earlier, They didn't do it when it came to light that Apple knew that its contractors exploited child labor[1], They wouldn't do it now.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/apple-knew-a-suppli...

"get them pulled into the legal system once it is flagged, where the process itself is the punishment"

This is the real threat here. Anyone can have data flagged at any time, by accident or maliciously. Like how any video can be flagged for copyright infringement and the creator is 'punished by the process' regardless of guilt/innocence. A possible fix would be to have severe financial punishments for every false claim (lets say a million bucks per instance). Imagine how careful the system would be designed if that were the case, verses the case where there is no punishment for false claims.

Supporting and advocating for “Right to Repair” laws was never more crucial, because this is not going to stop at iPhone or mac.

Just to extend my comment in response to how this problem will spread:

By doing surveillance on types of images, Apple is in effect implementing anti-virus - for ideas. That's only a bit hyperbolic, as the perceptual hash for a viral meme can be searched on, just like the material they're using as a pretext for it.

I could even see them announcing it at a launch. We should be concerned that the company has skipped its Black Mirror stage and jumped right into its Universal Paperclips endgame.

(I'm also appreciating the irony that people like me being angry about Apple announcing they're going to implement a version of what Google has already been technically able to do for the last decade, and what Microsoft has probably been doing in secret since even before then.)

> Apple is in effect implementing anti-virus - for ideas.

Should we call that anti-dissent? Or thought police?

Apple already disallows lots of ideas.

You can't make these apps for iOS (NSFW!) https://sexgames.citor3.com/

And arguably, if you've tried apps like those in actual VR their impact doesn't come close in non VR. But, since Apple doesn't carry porn in the app store and doesn't allow other stores Apple is effectively banning thoughts.

Why do people accept being treated like children?

iPhone=Disneyland, Linux=Real world

>Why do people accept being treated like children?

Because some cultures have a religious-inherited "sin-avoidance" problem, and e.g. try to ban alcohol, disney-fy public discussion, lose it if a tit is accidentally shown, and are "shocked" if somebody utters "fuck" in a late night show.

(It doesn't help that many of the "adult" population behave like children and throw a fit if their morality as to the above is "challenged").

Now, put these cultures, for historical reasons, in charge of technology platforms...

All of these, and more, turn into some state duty (in turn imposed on corporations) to handle moderation and control content in behalf of adult audiences (e.g FCC rules, Hayes code, Apple's ban of political, sex, etc apps, and so on).

This leads to the child-ification of the adult population, where the "adults" in charge know better and protect the masses.

Let me translate your cynic-speak:

___ begin translation ___

some (presumably christian) cultures consider it important to promote a societal standard of morality that encourages self-control as the basis for sustainably safeguarding individual liberty while being (increasingly more) tolerant of aberrant ways of self-expression.

As with every culture, its members defend their way of life and morals.

Put these cultures in control of technology platforms and you will see that they will attempt to strike the right balance between personal freedoms and public responsibility and even failing at that sometimes under pressure from various interests (commercial, the self-interest of spy agencies who want to make their job easier, post-modernist denial of christian cultural norms of morality and personal freedom, far left activism that seeks to dox, cancel, and censor all opposition)*.

___ end translation ___

*I'm pointing out some of the overtly anti-christian or worldview agnostic interests at play to highlight the highly oversimplified anti-traditionalist/anti-conservative/anti-christian slant of the parent comment.

Maybe just maybe we can have a nuanced conversation without all the finger pointing and scapegoating, and recognize that there's some legitimacy to each of these values that sometimes conflict with each other and figuring out the right balance is challenging.

There's more factors here, of course.

Linux phones are only for the most masochistic of techies.

Average Joe who is uninformed about tech will just assume you get something for your money, and by that measure, iPhones must be the best.

I chose Android which comes with it's own problems, but I prefer the way it works, and literally everything about Apple rubs me the wrong way.

You can’t autocomplete "shit" via the iOS keyboard and several other swear or politically incorrect words.

>I could even see them announcing it at a launch. We should be concerned that the company has skipped its Black Mirror stage and jumped right into its Universal Paperclips endgame.

Well, what Apple did is squarely Black Mirror stage, nowhere near Universal Paperclips.

> This distinction of changing the defacto ownership of your device and data is the real inflection point.

So the ability to store child porn is what constitutes "de facto ownership" in your mind?

But why would they "use this tech to hunt down bitcoin owners"? They could just scan emails or photos directly. Doing it by way of neural hashes and vouchers seems like an absurdly complicated detour when they already own the OS and all the most commonly used apps.

De facto ownership means your personal property doesn’t get searched for evidence of crime, without reasonable cause

That’s not how it typically works though. Your car has to be tested regularly, at least in Europe. Your bag is searched when you travel, in an infinitely more intrusive way.

Also , your photos are only scanned on their way to iCloud. Turn off icloud photos and nothing will be scanned.

Besides, the laws around child porn have always been different from other laws, they have preemptively scanned for that for as long as I can remember, without probable cause.

You will really own nothing and you will be “happy”. Soma here. Soma there. Soma, soma everywhere.

> he good news is running OSX made me lazy, and getting back into running a linux or freebsd laptop again is going to be fun.

This is good news.