skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a reminder for context, Apple already did do a server side check for iCloud photos [1]. I think that's missing from the debate, what's changing is moving the check to on device which many object to (and I and others have written enough about that).

To add to this though : I think they built an extremely complex - and hopefully perfectly robust - system to make the check on device. On top of the other issues, it's massively important said process is not exploitable.

The content of the NCMEC database is not public, one can argue for good reason, and if that effort to move on device lead to the database being leaked (and thus bad actors being able to "mark" content that they shouldn't share), that would be incredibly counter productive. Maybe only knowing that the database was updated is too much information to leak about this ?

I think that's an additional concern to the ones already expressed many times, and I sincerly wish Apple had kept the checks server side even more now, as I only see downside to not doing so.

[1] : https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/01/09/apples-scanning-...
I'm pointing out that sensibility is determined by multi-person consensus which by definition will tend to exclude a lot of viewpoints.

The presence of legitimate common sense (an actual concordance of principles, life experience, understanding, and the existence of a fungible nominative signpost that will be reliably reproduced within error bars) is surprisingly difficult to hew and maintain. It morphs over time, and is exactly why these multi-national tech companies implementing things like this is so terrifyingly dangerous. If they implement the capability to do a thing, they are now the movers of the political Overton window by realizing the means. They are literally shaping the rhetorical landscape.

Example: Let's say the push for this intrusive client side scanning came from the U.K., and the U.K. marketplace alone accounted for enough business to make it too painful to NOT do (simplifying economic/business assumption for illustrative purposes, and just picking on the U.K for because they are $not_my_jurisdiction). In the U.S. (Third Party Doctrine aside), this feature would be something that would be a U.S. Constitutional violation (4th Amendment) if mandated by the legislature short of an Amendment, yet since it would be done out of expedience in the absence of someone telling them NOT to do it, they'd ship it by default on American phones anyway. The mere existence of the capability greatly increases the willingness of jurisdictions to use it. This means the most privacy eroding jurisdictions are creating a race to the bottom for infecting everyone else barring population Al refusal to say No unambiguously.

I don't know why this jurisdictional backdooring isn't more obvious to people than it is. Or maybe I'm just starting to grasp how politics actually works vs. working in theory, but this really does seem to be completely screwing up how process is supposed to go. This is nothing short of a private entity taking the practical reins of power, and the political edifice coming along behind and post-facto rationalizing what the actual trailblazers are doing.

To be frank, this terrifies me even more than Congress being in charge. Congress's process rounds out most things to some level of effectual benign nature. Tech companies though? If you even start asking the important questions about higher order effects, either out the window you go, or everyone looks at you like a nut.

This is not a good way to go.
Make your substantive points without flamebait please.

Without snark also.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The Internet enables the exposition of discordant data.
It might track location via Wi-Fi.
They failed to predict the future hardware.

A failure isn't always a bad thing. Sometimes it's the best thing possible.
I paid even less for my Bolt and while I think it's a wing dang doodle of a little car, I am not stupid enough to try to take it on a road trip. If I had to move the car any significant distance, I would not even attempt to drive it; I would ship or tow it. I "fast charged" the car exactly once, to test that it worked and familiarize myself with the process. $15 and 90 minutes later, I lost interest in ever doing it again.

By contrast I would drive my Tesla without hesitation to anywhere in the continental US. I am increasingly finding that I don't even bother to plan the drives anymore or micromanage the charging-- this is a significant difference from when I first started doing >1k mile trips in the car 4 years ago.

I am sure that we will see strong opinions come from both the tesla and non-tesla EV camps in discussing this post, so hopefully my dual perspective will be of some value.
Its compression a legitimate concern for primary keys?
Electric car leader Tesla left out of White House event
Sure, here is one such full lifecycle study: https://sustain.ubc.ca/sites/default/files/2018-63%20Lifecyc...
ISIS, 9/11 and the invasions were planned
you don't think people in high places are just some kids getting angry and acting on it, do you?

the dictators when you try to reasonate anything they're doing, you can see clearly they're working for someone, and you guess who might this one be.

because of course, destroying a whole country, violating human rights etc, isn't going to guarantee you a good long life for you and your family unless you have someone stronge enough to make you trust him tell you otherwise.

most dictators are against what the population believe and are enslaving people more or less.
it's just the modern unseen slavery of the west.

By the way, USA made Al Qaueda and they were called the freedom fighters or something like that inb4.

What changed? the USSR ended and now they found another use for them, to stereotype the muslims and cause distress and push them off their religion to the new world-wide religion, humanity, ps. sugar-coated atheism.
I mean ideally, in a western liberal society of humans, race shouldn't matter in comparison to sex which has biological meaning and social function. Culture matters, but culture isn't race (at least not in a western liberal society).
There are sites like APKPure that mirror the Play store. That particular site also has an app of their own that functions as an app store, which will install from their catalog.

Of course, you're just moving your trust from Google to this other third party, it's up to you if you consider that wise.
> If you believe that child pornography is a massive issue, I respect that. I just would have hoped you could better describe the actual size of the problem and its evolution.

I don’t mind whether you are convinced. I’m not trying to convince you about the size of the problem.

My position isn’t about how large the threat is. I don’t have any information that you don’t have access to. My position is that if we care about privacy we have to accept that people other than ourselves think the problem is big enough to warrant these measures.

You have already lost this battle because enough people are convinced about the problem that tech companies are already doing what you don’t want them to do.

https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/child-predators
If you want to make policy based on the rain, yeah, I'd prefer to wait for it. Otherwise your 'really coming down out here' might be my 'light drizzle.' Especially if you've ever lived in the midwest.
True. Many people get offended when you say the glass is half empty, but nobody gets offended when you say the glass is half full. If I must point out a failure, I will make sure to wink and smile while doing it, which is tough on Twitter.
That sounds like the real Reddit experience.
I've been thinking about it a bit more and I think I've gotten to the bottom of the point I'm trying to make. But again, it's very subtle and unimportant 99% of time but it's the way I tend to think about code

First example (C):

for(i=0; i<N ;i++) {
t = data[i];
...
}

Second example (python):

for t in data: ...

The difference is that in the second example I'm telling the compiler what I want to *have*. It will give me exactly that ('t' will contain consecutive values from 'data') and it will do it's best automagically. In the first example however, I'm telling the compiler what to *do* and it will just and only follow orders (iterate 'i', copy the value from data+i to 't').

Insignificant difference most of the time but an important one to me. And sugar makes it more complicated to distinguish what I told the compiler to do vs. what I wanted to have. Helps me with debugging and getting cycle count under control
From poking through the repo, it looks like it uses a FreeBSD port of Cocotron to handle Objective-C and some of the Core* APIs.
All the comments here seem to be from and about people who own their homes. What about renters?

https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/tenants-worry-smart-hom...
It’s possible, but very unlikely. Then of course you need many matches to flag the account. And then of course there’s the manual review. The likelihood that an innocent person would get caught up in this at all is zero.
Because Black communities aren't countries.
the line is crossed because if you store data in the cloud you kind of get that the provider might be force to give LE to it. It may or may not happen but if it's in the cloud technically it's out of your control.

Stuff running on your device OTOH, you have the illusion that you control it. It's YOUR physical device and technically you should be able to do whatever you want with it. Now, enter closed source software + walled gardens => you don't really control your device. You don't get a say on what's going on in it. Up until know we believed Apple would do the right thing. Well... Myth busted I guess.
Isn't there a ferry from Finland to Germany or at least Poland?

... What would be really nice on that route would be a sleeper service, once that tunnel between Finland and Estonia and rail Baltica is built.
And following this logic does that mean we're essentially governed by aliens ?
> The battery has a life of ~120k miles …

This appears to be untrue. High-mileage Teslas are showing about 10% range degradation after ~250kms on the odometer: https://electrek.co/2020/06/06/tesla-battery-degradation-rep...

Notably, this isn't about Tesla specifically — the broader point is that the technology exists for mass-market car batteries to support many hundreds of thousands of miles/kms within a reasonable lifespan of the battery.
One instance of this misunderstanding that comes to mind is the feverish insistence of some people that "corporations must always act in the interest of shareholder value" and the idea that anything else quickly lands decision-makers in jail. That notion takes the principle that capitalism allows selfish interests to also work for the greater good, and turns it into a religion, where any attempt to directly act with non-selfish motivation is considered a moral failing.

Any actual CXO knows full well that it's rarely obvious what's in the shareholders' interest, that they have rather large discretion and, in a worst case, can always invoke some positive PR value of whatever altruistic decisions they take. As for criminal or civil liability, there has been like one case concerning this idea in the history of US corporations.
> These data show that only about one in eight white students (12.9%) attends a school where a majority of students are black, Hispanic, Asian, or American Indian. (We refer to this group collectively as students of color hereafter.) In contrast, nearly seven in 10 black children (69.2%) attend such schools (see Figure A).

That seems less like segregation and more of just statistics. If black students are a minority, then by definition they won't be a majority in a random subsample.

> As shown in Figure B, black students are also in economically segregated schools. Less than one in three white students (31.3%) attend a high-poverty school, compared with more than seven in 10 black students (72.4%).

That's probably the stronger argument in your link. That outcome isn't surprising given that most school funds come via property taxes - if most economically depressed areas are minority occupied due to lower costs, then those same schools would also be economically depressed.
> why this is contentious, but "X for Women" is not seen as contentious.

“X for Women” is seen as contentious. In fact, “X for Women" articles on HN often have all the same arguments, with gender in place of race, as this thread, with very slight changes, with focus on serving the unmet needs of women with regard to X painted as sexist and equivalent to external regulation based on gender role stereotypes just as this is compared to state-mandated segregated services.
Gold mine asteroid headed into the solar system
How would Apple know what the content was that was flagged if all they are provided with is a list of hashes? I completely agree it's ludicrous, but there are plenty of countries that want that exact functionality.
Do you mean flyctl? “fly” is the CLI tool from concourse-Ci.org.
You didn't have to guess; you could have just read the detailed post instead of jumping to comment after partially metabolizing the title.
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. It's tedious and nasty.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It starts with comparing file hashes. I’m worried about where this goes next.
What does the Delta variant mean for you?
This has been a nightmare for me. Windows has lot of trouble with mixed dpi/scaling too. The only OS that has handled this flawlessly has been macOS.
They're not just checking against a hash list, they're using perceptual hashing, which is inexact and unlike cryptographic hashing or checksumming. Then, they use a fuzzy metric like hamming distance to determine if one image is a derivative of an illegal image.

The problem is that the space for false positives is huge when you use perceptual hashing, and it gets even larger when you start looking for derivative images, which they have to do otherwise criminals would just crop or shift color channels in order to bypass filters.
The last 48 bits should do it.

" node:
48-bit pseudo-random number used as a spatially unique identifier
Occupies bits 80 through 127 (octets 10-15)"
Hmmm...Now I'm wondering why I never bothered to prepend a timestamp to a GUID.
There are third-party clients for the Play Store (Aurora store being a good example). Aurora store uses anonymous accounts to download the APKs directly from Google. That being said, just because you can install the application doesn't mean it will actually work without Play Services installed. I've had quite a bit of luck with random applications I've installed (interestingly most Google apps like Gboard, Photos and GCam work fine offline and without Play Services), however YMMV.
yes, this is coming to the mac also. surveillance across the board!
microG as a semi-Play Services experience is fine, the only issue I have is that most network-based geolocation backends tend to be hit or miss. I usually have to enable the Apple location service if I need a fast geolocation.
M1 Macs are basically iPads, with the same iOS-style locked-down boot process. They even have the same DFU mode as iOS devices.

In my case "my" M1 bricked itself, because Apple servers have refused to permit changes to NVRAM in the machine, and it can't boot a reinstalled OS without Apple's approval.
Make+Money+Like+You+Mean+It?
Careswitch Embraces ReScript over TypeScript
I’ve seen a few of these kind of articles lately on here, and I really enjoy them. I put a _lot_ of hours into the Quest for Glory franchise as a kid, and always wondered what happened to it. Sierra just seemed to vanish in the mid/late 90s. Very interesting to read about the history now.
So the organizations that provide the VPN service are Calyx VPN and Calyx Institute (have I understood correctly?)

The site says these organizations are “trusted”, but I'm still not sure who are they saying is doing the trusting.

It's very easy to label something “trusted”, but trusted by whom?
Bromium is also a good alternative to vanadium.
Maybe it's useful for people with allergies, but I'm not convinced it matters for people with no allergies or severe asthma or anything.
Is something that can be improved inherently a mistake?

Mistake/Failure both imply an extra level of judgement "Oh, if only you'd worked harder you would have had the right API design the first time and you'd never need a new version".

Sometimes the world changes around an API.

Sometimes there is data that can only be gathered from real world usage.

Sometimes there's new use cases to handle.
>Temperature and moisture needs to be dealt with via separate mechanical systems.

Are there dehumidifiers on the market that aren't air conditioners with a bucket under the condenser coils to collect the water? And if you have a whole-house version of one of those, do you need another whole-house air conditioner?
That's what a 3-way or 4-way (should be called X-way) switch setup is - three or four or more switches that no matter what the state of the light is, flipping ANY switch will change the state.

https://www.electrical101.com/4way-switch-wiring-using-nm-ca...
Only available on Pixel phones and a single Xiaomi phone.
Fair enough, that's still a long ways from recording my voice all the time.

Now I need to revisit the teardowns I've seen to see how they missed this.
Maybe you're right that the odds that another company could be trusted are low enough not to be a distinction compared to companies I know I don't trust.

That said, I mind signing up for throwaway services less because it's easy to use a fake name/email, which is becoming less an option for the major services, who try to enforce real identities and revoke accounts without consequences.
> It’s possible, but very unlikely.

I have built products in this space. It is entirely likely, and in fact, it is incredibly common. You can look at literally any reverse image search engine's results and see this, because they use the same perceptual hashing techniques to do reverse image lookups.
That’s a piracy site.
If an entity needs to cooperate to survive, it is selfish to cooperate. I feel like the author, like many other critics of economic theory, have not fully understood economics.

Also, the selfish gene metaphor was misleading in the sense that it is of course nonsense to ascribe any kind of motivation to genes. I think it was useful to break a common misconception, that evolution would work for the benefit of the individual.
Some of this stuff looks very poorly sourced or misunderstood.

> Marrying within the “gotra” is one of the primary reasons for recurring “honour killing” of lovers in India

I hope not, because it is such a weird upper-caste nit-pick.

> they talk about their lives and walk around the park, or eat aloo-chaat or golgappas at a roadside stall

That is such a still frame of the middle class life in Delhi from the 90s. My partner's been dragging me to Green park and AIIMS to revisit places which has stayed running for 25 years.

The 2012 Nirbhaya case had a chilling effect on this for young couples, which is why the trend moved away from being outside and into malls with security cameras.
That’s the whole point, it’s always free. The commenter pointed out that it’s a valuable service that is always free as part of the social contract. You can be frightened by this if you’re really determined to be, but no sinister dystopia was implied.
Google considered buying Epic Games
Read this if you have downvoted the parent post:

The biggest mistake you can make if you believe that climate change is caused by humans and a looming catastrophe is ostracising people like OP who have a healthy dose of scepticism and actually put down data-based arguments.

You can disprove the data OP has put out, but simply downvoting him means you are passing up on your last chance to convince the part of the so-called "climate change deniers" that can actually be convinced (which I assume OP is part of).

We can only win this if all people pull together, and downvoting a portion of "all people" instead of talking to them and convincing them means we automatically fail.
I can't shake the feeling Elon paid for this.
LinusTechTips Hands on with Steam Deck
A precision of 100 ns is not bad, just inflexible; I didn't mean to imply otherwise. The epoch is weird, though. Here's a thought experiment: imagine that a hundred programmers are each asked to pick an epoch for a timestamp, and will be paid $1000 for each other programmer who chooses the same epoch, but they can't talk with each other to coordinate. Which would you pick? I would pick the Unix epoch, because I think others would do the same. Anything else is, in a certain important sense, weird.
That's still a stupid way of doing it. What they should be doing is caching pixmap atlases server side and sending draw requests to draw subsets of those. If they send an entire image over the wire for each frame draw, it's purely due to developer laziness.

Also, with "flat design", suddenly libXaw is on the cutting edge of UI look and feel again...
> Making the 1000km+ drive in one day isn't a big deal at all,

I'm getting old. The thought of driving 600+ miles in a single day sounds like hell.
When you need it you need it, no matter how often.

in grad school we used it to share very powerful workstations without getting out of the office.

Sometimes I need to use a GUI program on my Desktop while I'm away. It might be something as silly as adjusting a parameter on a simulation run.

Sometimes I want to start a program on a remote computer (say VLC on my kids laptop downstairs)

Embarrassing admission - sometimes I know how to adjust a setting from the GUI and not from terminal. Maybe I want to mute a computer downstairs (btw, just an example. I'd use alsamixer, if killall weren't an option).

Honestly, I'd use it a lot more if it were faster and less laggy. Daily, even.
I know what it means, I was too lazy to do the math properly. The point was that with such a (relatively) short half-life the total amount stabilizes quickly.
I'm sure this is happening on all other cloud photo services already.
Could you explain your concern with dash in url? To my knowledge, that shouldn't be in conflict with anything else like a slash, space, or plus, what sort of issues do you see?
"Anyone with eyeballs" is clearly below the threshold.
I don't know, I didn't know about it :p
Are you a Real Dogers?
Because then it wouldn’t be a UUID in a format that other systems might expect or work more efficiently with.
ive been trying that it the last while with an old phone where i didn't bother logging into google when i reset it. i just use tasker on my main phone to extract the apk for the current app and save it into to my syncthing folder and sync it across that way. but there are other apps that will let you extract the apk's as well.

so far only one or two have worked unfortunately but most do
Stating that they failed to predict the future hardware implies that they should or could have.

Is this true? Maybe, maybe not, I'm neither a GPU driver write or a hardware writer, but I suspect no software writer in 1997 was going to predict the hardware of 2008.
Figures like these always imply some fun facts. $3 trillion in 6 years
is about $15,800 per second. 3 trillion dollar bills laid end to end
the long way (6.14") can wrap around the Earth's equator (24901 miles)
11675 times, forming a four foot high wall of dollar bills separating
the northern and southern hemispheres (at 0.0043" thick per dollar).
If 3 trillion dollar bills are laid end to end in a straight line, it
takes a ray of light 26 minutes to get from one end to the other. At
2.61" in width per dollar, 3 trillion dollars occupy 119 million cubic
feet, or enough to fill 50198 standard 40 foot shipping containers
(each with an interior volume of 2383 cubic feet), so I guess a
freight train carrying all that money would have to be at least 380
miles long. (corrections welcome)
Vac, Waku v2 and Ethereum Messaging
The Secrets of Buying (2006)