Even though the new mbps look really nice, I've got a Framework laptop sitting at home that I'm in the process of migrating to (that's $4k of MBP max that apple have missed out on).
And early next year, I'm moving off the iphone platform onto probably a pixel and switching the OS to something like Graphine. It's going to be fun and experimental.
I'm also looking to hire some developers next year, provided laptops will be Linux too.
Share more details about how you set that up please? Good graphics software, or the relative lack of it, is one of the few things still holding us back from shifting several daily use machines to Linux. Affinity would be OK for that but the only reports we found suggested it wasn't happy running virtually and performance was poor.
https://leduccc.medium.com/improving-the-performance-of-a-wi...
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF#Is...
I've scrapped out a perfectly good (and exceedingly nice to use) M1 Mini, I no longer use a 2015 MBP, I've shut down my iPhone (not quite for good, I still have to figure out how to move my Signal root of identity off it), and I no longer use an iPad for work reference PDFs.
I've replaced these with far less functional "But I'm making them work" sort of devices. An AT&T Flip IV for phone stuff (KaiOS, handles basic calls and texts, and not much else, though it does have GPS and maps, and can do email if you let it), a Kobo Elipsa + KOReader for PDF support, and I've spent a good bit of time tweaking a PineBook Pro into my daily driver laptop.
The general view I have of Apple at this point is, "Oh, we know what kind of company you are, now we're just haggling over details."[0]
To whine about Apple doing stuff and continue to use them says, "Yes, it's important enough to complain about online, but not important enough to alter how I use their products - therefore, not really important at all."
Given that the CSAM issue turns out to be moot, I assume you feel regret at doing this.
I'd love an ODroid N2+ with 8GB RAM, though. Twice the CPU performance of a Pi4 but it's pretty RAM choked with only 4GB.
Now you are promoting the ODroid N2+ which is completely irrelevant to this thread.
The CSAM thing was the final straw for me with Apple, and as it turns out, my needs have rather significantly decreased over time, as the lower power hardware has increased in capability, though... sadly not as much RAM as I'd find useful.
It turns out that I don't actually need Apple hardware to do that which I now care to do with computers. And one of those replacements was a N2+, which, while a bit sharp around some edges, is actually a tolerably usable little Linux desktop.
You can call it what you want, I'm just describing what I've done in response to the changes in how Apple has chosen to treat their users.
The nature of the computing ecosystems have changed around me, such that I chose to make changes. I don't particularly regret the decision any more than I would selling a vehicle that no longer suits my needs when I move.
A final straw which never actually happened. They in fact listened to users saying how unpopular this would be, and changed course.
> I'm just describing what I've done in response to the changes in how Apple has chosen to treat their users.
No, you are describing what you’ve done in response to a demonstrably false belief about how Apple has chosen to treat their users.
It's still coming.
Edit:
Please don’t retroactively edit your comment to make the comment that follows it look misplaced.
It is a dishonest tactic that makes you look like a bad faith commenter. Who can trust that anything you have written hasn’t been altered after the fact?
There is no reason you couldn’t have included that quote as a reply to my question instead of silently editing it in to make it look as if it has always been there.
> Is it? What makes you think that?
The Verge reached out to Apple[0] and Apple confirmed that their CSAM scanning feature is still coming.
> When reached for comment, Apple spokesperson Shane Bauer said that the company’s position hasn’t changed since September, when it first announced it would be delaying the launch of the CSAM detection. “Based on feedback from customers, advocacy groups, researchers, and others, we have decided to take additional time over the coming months to collect input and make improvements before releasing these critically important child safety features,” the company’s September statement read.
So yes, they still fully intend to push the update. You should probably take this less personally too, your arguments are only suffering by attacking people who are just trying to chip in their two cents.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/15/22837631/apple-csam-dete...
You are in fact the one who dishonestly edited your comment. That’s what I was pointing out, and it was you and not the commenter before that I was replying to. We can see your name.
Trying to pretend otherwise is either delusion, or more dishonesty.
I agree that the update provided by the verge suggests that apple has not abandoned this plan yet.
In any case, that's not a refutation or response to the link I sent.
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29569282
I don’t need to refute your response. In fact after seeing the update I agree that CSAM is not yet defeated.
That doesn’t change the fact that your commenting tactics are dishonest. That is the problem here. You cannot be trusted not to edit upthread comments.
I legitimately have no idea what you're talking about. This is either an extremely confusing attempt to gaslight me or you're mistaking me for someone else. In any case, I don't really know what else to add here. Do you remember what was supposedly the original contents of this comment? We're really getting nowhere here pointing fingers.
You posted “it’s still coming”, and only added the quote later after my reply.
That's short-sighted and self-centered.
You don't care about whether or not other people's rights are violated?
You don't see how normalizing rights violations could lead to downstream effects on you?
The whole reason for my HN post activity (reading in the shadows from 2008-10) is CSAM. In the beginning of this issue nobody cared and tons of Apple fanboys down-voted every possible negative reaction.
Apple is industry leader. Everyone will copy what they create. You can read "I don't care" as an emotional reaction of an individual who had invested tons of money in Apple, used Apple products and evangelized thousands of friends and customers. Only to realize that The Beauty is actually The Beast.
If it’s an Android it’s probable got something similar in place.
On an iPhone all you must to use disable iCloud sync to avoid CSAM
CSAM was the last straw. Before this was that: echo 127.0.0.1 ocsp.apple.com | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts
It only applies when you have iCloud Photo Library enabled.
Only those pictures which were about to be uploaded iCloud, would have been scanned, and Apple would get information about image contents only if it is flagged. The phone is blackbox and it scans your files anyway all the time, sending metadata to Apple e.g. because of the spotlight feature and photo albums, or simply syncing your data to cloud. There is massive AI behind that spotlight feature. Nothing would have changed, just the different kind of information would have been flagged, but this time encrypted.
The major improvement was E2EE like system for Photos. Currently they are not E2E encrypted in Cloud. They are plaintext for Apple. iOS 15 beta had also encryption for backups, but it never reached public reach after CSAM was delayed. So we lost yet another feature which would have increased the privacy. "But it happens in my device", is not really valid argument since most people don't understand what happens in their devices in the first hand. Even AV engines sends all your data to cloud, and you can't opt out in most of the cases and it is for every file.
But yes, currently Apple can access all your images on the cloud, but with this change they would have been E2E encrypted, hence improving privacy.
Apple said nothing at all this would be the case. It's pure speculation from people on the internet.
What exactly does one achieve in nailing the local pedo for old content? If he's stupid enough to be uploading it to iCloud he's stupid enough to get himself busted in all manner of other ways. The real problem is of course criminals who are currently engaged in the production of CSAM. Which Apple's scheme does nothing to address.
I did the same and I agree with you with one small caveat. For someone like me, who does not use iCloud or any other cloud service, on device scanning seriously compromises my privacy. I want to be clear that I am not doing anything that is currently illegal in my home country, but that could change under a more oppressive government. I know my opinions would definitely get me in trouble in some countries if I happened to live there.
> Of course the best option is to not scan at all, but that is not really option.
Why isn't it an option? I know of no legal requirement anywhere that mandates Apple has to scan fro CSAM.
At least in the current solution scanning was integrated part of the iCloud sync pipeline, and therefore this would not have affected you.
> Why isn't it an option? I know of no legal requirement anywhere that mandates Apple has to scan fro CSAM.
Apple is too big and they try to foresee politicians behavior. With "good will" solutions they can adjust the way how they scan or implement this. With regulation it would be more specific and might even restrict encryption in some cases totally. This is quite difficult topic at Apple's scale and I don't know if anybody really knows what exactly is already required and why
With all the respect, there is one small detail: The search criteria is provided by third party organisation (funded by DOD), without option of public oversight due to nature of "sensitive" data set. This data set would be defined by similar "organisations" per country bases.
In my humble opinion this "privacy related solution" is Stasi wet-dream on steroids.
Some governments liked it so much, that they wanted it to be extended.. https://9to5mac.com/2021/09/09/csam-scan-encrypted-messages/
The backlash was obvious from the outside, but it’s clear someone spent a lot of time building something they felt was reasonable. Even if Apple presumably just implemented the same system in iCloud, at least people became aware governments have access to such systems.
The entire technical underpinnings of this solution rely on essentially neural image embeddings, which are very well known to be susceptible to all sorts of clever attacks. Notice how within a day or two of the announcement of this whole system and it's symbols, people were already finding lots of 'hash' collisions.
In the space of people and places that can train and implement/serve such embeddings, these issues are pretty widely known, which makes it very non-obvious how this happened IMO. Someone that understood all of these issues seems to have directly ignored them.
More importantly hash collisions result in manual review by humans at Apple, hardly a major issue. This is also a safety measure protecting users from political images being tagged in these database.
I can ditch my iPhone at any time, but Apple wanted CSAM to be part of Mac OS and this is unacceptable.
Anyway, I am glad that they tried. This was a wake up call with positive financial and technological outcome for me and my business.
It is already on MacOS. It sends hashes from every unknown file on ”virus protection purposes”. Only name and hash database is different. How that changes your privacy?
And to be fair, they never said publicly that it would come to Mac OS.
http://web.archive.org/web/20210807010615/https://www.apple....
The fact that they went so hard for the feature without really considering how people felt about the invasion is important.
So instead they will just continue to scan your photos server-side.
Yep, and because of that we are not getting E2E services (Photos, backup), which would have been possible with this new technology.
We’re you consulted on how google implemented it server side with google photos? You likely didn’t know!
Only one company chose transparency here.
What a load of BS. Apple told us it was going to happen, and then quietly canned it when there was backlash. There was no intention of "consultation" or "getting feedback" at all.
I doubt it. It will be quietly implemented. If a techie digs in far enough with RE to prove it, general society will treat them like they wear a tinfoil hat.
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2021/08/06/apple-internal-memo-icloud-ph...
No they didn't [0]
> When reached for comment, Apple spokesperson Shane Bauer said that the company’s position hasn’t changed since September
> Crucially, Apple’s statement does not say the feature has been canceled entirely.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/15/22837631/apple-csam-dete...
For now. There are no technical limitations to Apple's proposed solution that preclude it from being always on. It's a policy decision only, and you can be sure there would be immediate pressure to force it to scan full time.
>> First, it is not related to the parent's point at all
The post was about switching away computers. My (badly implied) point was, a lot of the effort is wasted unless if you still use an Apple iPhone...
If you skip using an iPhone, then fine, but the other options out there are likely worse.
>> Second, it is perfectly possible to run AOSP based OSes not tied to google
You can build your own Google-free etc version but again most people won't because of the effort and the need to redo for updates again and again. The Parent post author probably has the means to do it, but it's another endless task they have to stay on. All other options (to my limited knowledge - plz share if you know more) mean compromises in apps, and functionality - unless you're happy to spend hours each wee/month troubleshooting and setting up workaround and working with specific compatible hardware.
It can be done. But how much of your life will you want to spend on that? Reading other comments maybe it is a solved problem now - it hadn't been last time I tried.
If I assumed too much from the parent post then sorry.