skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The use of the detection algorithm is for iCloud only today.

Now that the technology is on-board the device, how many lines of codes do you think it will take to scan the full photo-roll?

Do you think that this ability will not tempt LEA, law makers, governments, to push for that ever-so-small change to the code, either for blanket monitoring (see if China is not tempted, using their own database of "illegal" content) or for targetted monitoring (some specific users, with or without valid court orders).

The main issue is that the wall has been breached: monitoring data that was otherwise only on-device is now possible with little to no change as the feature is now embedded in the OS.

You can argue we're not there yet and can trust Apple to do-the-right-thing and that the Rule of Law will protect citizen against abuse, but that's a big step into a worrying trend, and not all countries follow the Rule of Law and have checks and balances to avoid misuse. Don't forget that Apple abides by the laws of countries where it sells its devices. That means they will -forced or not- do what they are told.
Hmm. How long until someone creates a “pump and dump” scheme here to get the Miami police dependent on this MiamiCoin, only to then totally destroy the police department as part of the “dump” side of that scheme?

I think a lot of people might wonder whether or not that would that really be such a bad thing?
Its more the electron tradeoff. We have picked slightly slower software if it means more software at a cheaper price which works on more platforms and has more features.

Vim and sublime still exists and yet people flock to VS code because they would rather get a more powerful laptop to run an electron app.
The only way to get them to play nice is make it impossible for them to do otherwise. These artists all way come out of the woodwork to support some garbage laws that are used to censor the internet in one form or another or put some garbage spyware/security hole in our OS or browsers.

I am fed up of these psychopathic companies making billions for old (and mostly crap) music that should have been made public domain decades ago (especially with some of garbage Cliff Richard has produced over the years).
> Chess is way older than a few centuries, so why do the extra rules sidle in and when?

Not exactly what you were asking, but you may be shocked to learn that Chess has had two significant patches very recently - namely clarifying the rules to prevent promoting a pawn to an enemy piece (sometimes causing a smothered mate), and to prevent castling with a pawn promoted to a rook on the 8th rank (annotated humourously as 0-0-0-0-0-0!!). These patches were seemingly implemented in the late 19th century and 1970s respectively, although it's surprisingly hard to find out precisely when.
Copyright shouldn't ever turn into a threat to culture preservation.
> If you are a parent and lose a child then you would want every possible avenue taken to find your child. You would be going mad wanting to find them. If there is a way to match photos to known missing children then I say it should be at least tried.

the problem with this argument is that you can use it to justify basically anything.
I'd consider that biological origin, if not primarily then through an obligate mechanism.
And this is exactly why we have things like the fourth amendment in the US.
If I lost my child, I would do anything and everything to get them back. I would shoot anyone who got in the way. This is fine because I am not the police and they won't give me guns.

Kinda unrelated to that, is the 4th amendment, which protects the rights of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government.
It's far easier to make something worse than make it better. There are few good solutions to problems, but infinite bad ones. Sometimes change is called for, but it needs to be done carefully and only when necessary.

Fundamentally, you need a healthy balance between conservatism and liberalism. Software companies don't have enough reverence for the former, and perhaps they're structured in ways that incentivizes the latter far more than they ought.
Not really, the community of Mendocino is in a different watershed. Per the article, it relies on shallow aquifers.

You can look at on Google maps. The agricultural areas are along the 101 and further east. Even those areas aren't involved in the California Canal politics, They're still in a different watershed.
I don’t think it does. Buildings aren’t maintained by construction crews. They’re maintained by facilities teams, and maintenance contractors, the latter of which are hired on an as-needed basis rather than on permanent retainer.
Don't leave the onion network. It's the exit nodes where 1/3 are hostile.
What I meant by parity was 'evenness' -- but the ultimate purpose was to explain the utility of the xor function provided by the operator module.

But, the more useful concept is parity for error detection, which my example clearly fails at.
To their credit, the enhanced security configuration does turn off JS and reduces other attack surface significantly. Also, IE has a very useful black/whitelisting feature called Internet Zones (which Edge removed, not surprisingly) so you can allow those features on sites you really do trust.

"breaks the entire web" is really an exaggeration from the Google-propaganda-pushers. You don't all the extra crap like JS when you're just looking at static pages. A lot of sites are fine without. This site doesn't need JS either.
Are you a robot or something? Finding value in the arts isn't a "shell game tactic". That's just weird to think.
Something else I haven’t heard anyone bring up: when child abusers are caught, sentences are often a joke. They often spend less time in prison than low to mid level drug offenders.

CP is rape porn. People who produce or knowingly distribute actual rape porn (of children or adults) should be going to jail for 25+ years. I would not rule out life for extreme cases that also involve other forms of abuse.

Yet as far as I know this isn’t what is being pushed for. Instead we get a dragnet to try to catch low level offenders who will probably barely see prison because sex crimes are just not punished much in our society.

Secondly… look into some of the people who have set up fake CP honey pots. These have included both vigilantes and security researchers trying to get a sense of how much CP is on Tor. Turns out most of these people are imbeciles and catching them is easy. Why don’t police do this more? Because… well… as I said sex crimes are just not a priority.

I really feel like the whole argument is in bad faith. If they really cared about the children there are so many other things that would be both easier and more effective.
I can see that as a factor.

Do you not have a desktop / laptop on which you could read the article later?
> The football (soccer) offside rule is often held up as an example of complication

I don't follow the sport much - what's so complex about it? It always seemed fairly simple to me, especially in comparison to other sports' more complex rules (good luck explaining the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern system to someone).
Sure, it's just as fine as tonne in the first place (I assume you do mean (metric) tonnes, kilo with Imperial or US customary tons would seem to me as weird as calling thou 'milli-inches'). But does anyone actually use it?

We use plain t everywhere because, afaik, that's what the users want, how they think about it even if it's thousands or more of them.
"It’s all an invasion of privacy until you’re sitting on the other side of the table"

This is very insightful. It's also depressing, because it's a great point for those who oppose privacy. I even find myself swayed by this reasoning.
Death is too optimistic about dystopias. 1984 wasn't a world which wanted to kill you: it might, but that wasn't the goal. The goal was to keep the system going: achieve absolute dominion over the human condition and thought. Suicide means that's no longer happening, so it can't have that.

The 1984 cycle continues forever: it is it's own purpose.
MusicXML is basically a graphics format. MIDI is basically a keyboard sequencing system.

They're effectively different render targets at the end of whatever input system you happen to be using.

Neither is the musical equivalent of a compiler's IR - which is why OP is confused about two different representations of the same musical object in two different music editors.

Without a well-defined IR it's not clear what the musical objects are supposed to be. There's a semantic level missing, so the intent is unclear. And without that information it's impossible to render them unambiguously.

Unfortunately it's debatable if a true IR for music is even possible.
Excellent! Love seeing walkthroughs of data processing of radio telescope arrays. I've long been ashamed that it just doesn't seem to "click" for me, but I keep trying.
It happens to be the case that software maintenance requires essentially the same skills as software implementation, so we don’t differentiate between the two jobs. And besides that, the nature of what people demand is different: nobody expects a single-family home to suddenly accommodate 50 families, but the equivalent of this is not exactly rare in the world of software.
Fewer words :p
Populating a place (making babies) is not a problem and if it starts to be one, then something is wrong with the place: If future prospects are very grimm, then people stop having kids. This is something seen across the entire western world. Wages are too low and to add insult to injury people outside the west (Jews, Arabs, PoC) demand immigration to solve the (wrong) problem, but serving their own interests.

This became such an accepted narrative, that it is hard to correct (I just did) and gets pushed and used else/everywhere, like here, in a small island: Pitcairn.

Something is wrong with the place itself: "As of 2012, just two children had been born on Pitcairn in the 21 years prior."

Which is also shown in the absolute migration numbers: "For a recent survey that contacted hundreds of islanders who have left Pitcairn over the years, only 33 participated and just 3 expressed a desire to return."

It's like a company which pays peanuts having 80% of their positions open and complaining about not being able to find new employees and "HR (desperately) searching".

The article is out of the category that HR pulls all the time ala "Why you should work at place XYZ". But the reality is, that they only hire one specific person out of 100, that has exactly the skill they need.

So, fundamentally everything is going the right way on Pitcairn: A harsh place gets depopulated. And someone is spinning the fairytale and roses story, because it's one of the rare things there is to do: A payed (government) job on the island.

And: Everyone is just so isolated on that island and super-welcoming (of course) to someone new (and nice, ... he needs to be "a nice chap") arriving, because... excitement.
With regard to Alexandria, if Euclid had access to all the resources of Alexandria, and Elements is the second-most translated and transcribed book (behind the Bible) then Euclid had the best known explanation of where the Greeks got the theorem (right or wrong) and also the historiographic influence to credit Pythagoras (also, of course, right or wrong). There might be a missing chapter of Euclid.

WRT Babylon, I don’t know how many tablets are left undeciphered. This article (or a comment) mentions the famous cosecant tablet. We have the tools to fill in the gaps for their language and math. I think extrapolating past that is at least as ahistorical as speculating about what was lost at Alexandria.
Here's the first 12 videos they played. It's a mix of American and "foreign" (mostly UK) bands, but it's interesting to compare the different styles. The UK (and NZ) videos are slick, artistically produced music videos in the modern style we'd recognise today. But the US ones are mostly just simple recordings of the bands performing live. Did the US just not have the concept of music videos before MTV came along?

The Buggles (UK)
Pat Benatar (USA)
Rod Stewart (UK)
The Who (UK)
Ph.D. (UK)
The Pretenders (UK, but the singer was American)
Todd Rundgren (USA)
Styx (USA)
Robin Lane & The Chartbusters (USA)
Split Enz (New Zealand)
38 Special (USA)
Rod Stewart (again!) (UK)
> I'm still not buying the "searching is better than organizing" line

From what I see around me, though, most people just do not have any digital organizing skills whatsoever. It's honestly exceptional that I meet someone who has files going back more than five years and those files are not on their desktop in a "previous computer" directory; and even that category of people includes only those with tech friends that helped them move the data over and set the new system up.

I don't disagree with you, but we might just be the minority.
Yeah, a lot of the discussion here and in OP seems to take the machine learning angle at too much face value. Sometimes a CAPTCHA is just a CAPTCHA.

Guys, do you really think that in 2021, when ImageNet has been solved to hell and back even with unlabeled data, and CNNs/Transformers/MLP eat it for breakfast, and we are doing OCR from CLIP trained on unlabeled untranscribed images, Google really needs you to label images of big green US highway signs written in the standardized highway font with text containing names of highways and words like 'miles'?

"Oh yes, I can distinguish between 100 breeds of dogs and I know what every public figure in the world looks like and can edit images with the 'unreal engine' trick - but gosh, I just can't figure out where in this image a big green blob is! Only humans with a soul can possibly do that!"
>Unless someone explains to me, in plain English, why we ought to abolish the very important freedom of deciding for themselves who and how private entities do business with, I don't want to read any essay length pieces any more about the Gulag archipelago, Orwell or how his friend being cancelled by Mailchimp is like being stuck in Soviet Russia.

Because the government is supposed to enforce antitrust laws to make sure there is always a handful of private companies competing with each other, and taking different stances at various topics, so that the consumers could find the one that suits them.

Currently, if you want others online to hear your opinion, you need to rely on a very limited set of free-to-use services that have an increasing appetite in deciding what opinions should be heard. You cannot easily outcompete them, unless you can find billions of venture capital to subsidize your service until it grows large enough for the big advertisers (that are part of the same club) to consider it interesting.

I would say, if a private company doesn't directly charge its users for the services it renders, it should be treated as a government service.
> To reiterate: scanning your device is not a privacy risk, but copying files from your device without any notice is definitely a privacy issue.

I think the article is wrong about this. Or, right-but-situationally-irrelevant. As far as I can tell from Apple's statements, they're doing this only to photos which are being uploaded to iCloud Photos. So, any photo this is happening to is one that you've already asked Apple to copy to their servers.

> In this case, Apple has a very strong reason to believe they are transferring CSAM material, and they are sending it to Apple -- not NCMEC.

I also suspect this is a fuzzy area, and anything legal would depend on when they can actually be said to be certain there's illegal material involved.

Apple's process seems to be: someone has uploaded photos to iCloud and enough of their photos have tripped this system that they get a human review; if the human agrees it's CSAM, they forward it on to law enforcement. There is a chance of false positives, so the human review step seems necessary...

After all, "Apple has hooked up machine learning to automatically report you to the police for child pornograpy with no human review" would have been a much worse news week for Apple. :D
I'd question what doing something useful means long long before advocating for something like this. I have a few domains that might some day be in demand, and on the surface they do very little (if anything at all) when accessed directly from a browser on port 80/443. However, they are each doing significant, private things elsewhere, and the domain names are a convenient entry and branding point for those who need to know.
Hi Gizmodo— please add more advertisements to this page

It isn’t nearly saturated enough (on mobile)

As a reader, I want to be fully choked to death by advertisements and Gizmodo you’re almost there but not quite. So please make it more difficult for me to read your content so that I know what brand to avoid in the future
It's also trivial to make chess fair by agreeing that every match ends in a draw. The concern is in how we can make it fair without making it less interesting. The cake-cutting solution would severely reduce opening variety.
I disagree. Ask anyone you listed if they'd be comfortable with Apple reviewing their photos and possibly sending them to another organization without any warning or recourse and I highly doubt any of them would be okay with it.
Amazon is doing the opposite. They're making their OpenSearch client compatible with both OpenSearch and ElasticSearch.
When all the Coast Redwoods were gone was probably when people should have started worrying, but that was more than a hundred years ago.
There's a good unofficial Rust library for Spotify called librespot that powers some great terminal clients. I use ncspot and it's pretty good once you learn the weird quirks (e.g. song radio is buried deep in a context menu).
Puts me in mind of Pratchett's parody of 'fuzzy logic', "Woolly Thinking".
There’s a lot of hysteria about identity politics and hate-filled social justice activists. I’ve read about the reaction of mature adults to the hippie culture of the late 60’s and 70’s, they were equally horrified and convinced that the world wouldn’t survive that corrupt generation either.

I wonder what the adults raised in the late 1800’s thought of the scandalous flappers of the early 1900’s.

Could be we’re just old, and forgot how being young means wanting to turn the culture upside down.
Yes, sure. For online services, that would be all the people involved with maintaining infrastructure. But my point is that construction workers are no longer needed for that particular building once it's completed. Yet, somehow, apps and websites are never completed. They're always changing for no good reason.
It's entirely possible that the relicense and now this will have the the precisely the opposite effect though. I'm sure the relicense was an attempt to increase Elastic NV's revenues from SaaS by locking out competitors from using their same codebase (from public financial filings, Elastic NV is not profitable so they are probably looking to become so). But open source also attracts new customers and improves the product by encouraging outside contribution. It could very well be that in 10 years we'll look back as this year that led to downfall of Elastic as a company. Or this move towards a different business model could succeed. But even if it does succeed, it's possible it would also succeed if they had kept the code open source.

The person you responded to didn't even assert that open source software is morally superior to alternatives, but instead said that by moving away from open source, Elastic is failing to understand its customers. His argument doesn't require any judgement about the morality of the relicense.
This belongs to archive.org not youtube.
As a fan of this blog for longer than I can remember, it's refreshing to hear this particular author's take on this issue, especially considering their background.

I'm glad these issues were addressed in a much more elegant way than I would have put them:

> Apple's technical whitepaper is overly technical -- and yet doesn't give enough information for someone to confirm the implementation. (I cover this type of paper in my blog entry, "Oh Baby, Talk Technical To Me" under "Over-Talk".) In effect, it is a proof by cumbersome notation. This plays to a common fallacy: if it looks really technical, then it must be really good. Similarly, one of Apple's reviewers wrote an entire paper full of mathematical symbols and complex variables. (But the paper looks impressive. Remember kids: a mathematical proof is not the same as a code review.)

> Apple claims that there is a "one in one trillion chance per year of incorrectly flagging a given account". I'm calling bullshit on this.
What protocol is this "channel" thing using behind? Because I went through the documentation and they don't mention anything of it. I can't understand why.
I don't think this has to do with Orwell's ideas really, and frankly I don't think related to the issue of Newspeak either.

Quebec French vs. France French and Mexican Spanish vs. Spain Spanish exhibit the same issue, it's a 'New World' thing, and it doesn't really have roots in politics so much as basic cultural evolution where there were fewer formal institutions led by even fewer and less educated elites. Headmasters and Teachers in the New World will have had considerably less formal training and at least for several generations, everywhere in the New World will have been somewhat 'cut off' from the rest of civilization.

So not just matter of 'formal education' but the proclivity of the settlers to, on an individual basis, be concerned about literacy etc.. Even if they were, resources, cultural centres etc. were further few between.

From 1492 to 1900 the 'Westward Moving Wave' of civility took at least a few generations to settle in, during which time a lot of things were 'lost' and/or replaced.

Finally - America is not formally an 'English' country. It's a mix of people for whom English is commonly a 'second generational language'.

The rust belt was settled by Germans, North Midwest was settled by Swedes, Norwegians, much of NY/NJ by Italians. Their families are not going to imbue their children with exposure to, or aptitude for more advanced English.

So 'American English', broadly, is a little bit of a common denominator language, kind of a simplified English.

Notably, Quebec is a little bit different, as they are culturally homogeneous and originally French, but they were 'cut off' after 1777 collapse of French colonies to the UK. Their common language and vocabulary did evolve, but they also maintained some degree of intact elite / higher education and formalized institutions. This is evident even now as they produce considerably more literary and other 'cultural' artifacts per-capita than most places in the Americas, even if the local accent has a crude twang.
> There was parents arrested over bath time and playing in the yard sprinklers, photos being processed at photo mats, will the same thing happen by apple mistakenly reporting parents?

No, because they’re not identifying content, they’re matching it against a set of already-known CSAM that NCMEC maintains. As you go on to say, telecoms and other companies already do this. Apple just advanced the state of the art when it comes to the security and privacy guarantees involved.
This article is from mid June (2021) — the NFT was actually sold on the 30th of June, fetching $5.43m.