skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If Apple sees a material difference in their sales, they might consider changing that policy.

I think the problem is that it's too late; they expended the effort to build the engine into iOS 15. As far as we know the FBI couldn't compel them to write code like this (see the case with the San Bernardino shooter), but it's easy to believe they could compel Apple to maintain this backdoor in the future.
Technically, Google can sell the entire trove of data they have collected about you to anyone willing to write them a check.

Do you think it's likely they will do so?
> A company that turns your Spotify playlists into a radio station that plays similar music based on your tastes.

"It's like Spotify for Spotify."
Oh... you just reminded me of the upcoming VPN service that will act as a proxy of sorts for internet browsing. If they do MITM HTTPS then they will basically scan evertything about you and your internet habits.

When did it became like that? Their only saving grace was that they were okay-ish with user privacy.
Yeah this. I’ll leave my iPad on my bed for 10+ hours and when I come back it’s lost maybe a percent or two of battery life. With my Android tablet I had it had to be on the charger constantly. My phones battery lasts about a day with all my apps on it, where my old android I had to charge mid day.
This entire analysis is based off a flawed assumption - that it’s a matter of proactiveness and not a nature of platform differences that causes the reported CSAM numbers disparity.

A social networking site/platform is one where previously created media is shared. iMessage pictures are not uploaded to iCloud Photos by default (they are part of the usually E2E content with the standard online backup caveat), only photo albums or photo rolls are - and those are overwhelmingly first or second party just-created content.

This means that if comparing against known CSAM hashes, it’s extremely likely for Apple to find orders of magnitude less content in the first place. The only thing that their system can catch is first-party images that end up being distributed and registered with the various hash databases.

Regardless of whether we are talking CSAM or anything else, it is the norm for the amount of content “created” to be significantly (as in several orders of magnitude) less than the material consumed.

I don’t think scanning on the device vs scanning in the cloud is going to change any of that.
My mom is 80 years old and still alive. Therefore she will live to be 160.
I think so too but from a different angle. It sounds like the federal government is strong arming Apple to spy on their users. Apple would rather use on-device hashing to preserve some amount of privacy rather than give unfettered access to the feds to their cloud.
In the sense that you, as the owner of a name, can choose to have your certificate say it must always be presented with OCSP stapling, and thereby your certificate can have revocation that works without privacy concerns?

Yes.

But for the larger global problem, OCSP stapling is a solution in the same sense that "Don't dig up any more coal, oil or gas" is a solution. Yes, I urge you to do this in both cases. It's a good idea. But, is everybody going to do it tomorrow? Next year? In my lifetime?
This article has what I would consider a major error. It attributes Facebook's CSAM reporting to "scanning."

In truth, the issue is that photos are put on Facebook to share with others and other people will be looking at them and reporting them. Facebook does look at content as well, but the reporting numbers are guaranteed to be vastly different simply because one is a sharing platform and the other is a means to back up your private data.
I think that can be compressed to “Idea Generator”.
Has anyone here bought from Blackhole? I always wanted a NeXT but never pulled the trigger back when they were easier to find.
Optimized Battery Charging isn’t the same as being a node in a bot net.
You mean… what you have determined as “the right thing”.

Even though others may also have different needs, desires, and risks.
This is very cool. Thanks for making it.
> you can be political active in other ways than direct votes

Absolutely. That's why we're posting our thoughts here and attempting to convince others.
Hiding such a massive thing in a quiet update would have generated a much larger shitstorm, I don't know if the internal memo I've read is legit but by the look of it: Apple made its calculations and decided it was more interesting to release it this way.
Android is also Linux. Yet some manufacturers don't allow any kind of boot unlocking or root access.

Open source doesn't guarantee we have any type of control over it if the hardware is locked down. The reason is more that the industry hasn't bothered selling locked-down computers yet by default. The tech is there, Secure Boot + TPM. They just give us the options to override in the BIOS. For now.
A lot can be said about this article, but just to pick on one thing. It can be useful to think of yourself as having an "addictive personality" if it helps you make smarter life decisions about avoiding situations where addiction is a possibility. "Discretion is the better part of valor".

It is possible to recognize certain paths in life will put you under greater stress and do some cost benefit analysis of that, to do an accurate cost benefit analysis you must have a realistic idea of how you deal with stress and how likely serious issues might arise.
Some notes from someone who has experimented with this for years - with zero gravity chairs, beds, floors...

- having your hands elevated above chest height sucks after a few minutes. The Altwork and Ergoquest workstations suck for that reason, and you _need_ a split keyboard if you don't want numb fingers.

- not moving sucks. I think I've hurt my neck and back (and throat) more by doing this than I'd like to admit

- for short periods of time, and when you can _actually_ relax (side projects etc.), working in this way is divine.

YMMV.

Side note - I discovered OP Andy Matuschak around 3 hours ago while pimping my Obsidian config, and have been the biggest fan of @msgsloan's vim Todoist plugin for years.
No, but this should _NOT_ be fought by invading the privacy of the home of the employee.

Besides that, as others already stated, there are a lot of jobs that have a lot more access and they are not subject of those invasions.

This invasion with camera's and microphones etc to monitor the employee and it's surrounding is simply not ok. And specially not when it's about their HOME. No matter how you try to defend it.
I'm not talking about buying a 2 ton truck or flying across the Atlantic, or owning a big house. I'm talking about people needing to get groceries.

I would prefer that infrastructure in the U.S. were more dense, that less people were not required to drive everywhere. But the reality is that, as life in many parts of the U.S. is currently set up, people cannot rely on bicycling as a safe, efficient, and effective means of transportation in their daily lives. Biking, if you live in a place that supports it, is good, but telling people to "just bike" remains a useless and naive plan for addressing climate change. Your energy will be better spent elsewhere.
I agree that the idea of the AG bringing felony charges against Apple employees because of their approach to dealing with CSAM is pretty far-fetched. But the article you're referring to [0] is correct to point out that Apple will be silently exfiltrating unencrypted data from its users' devices to be reviewed by its employees, meaning that they'll be viewing arbitrary content from Apple users' devices without their knowledge or consent. That's not speculation, it follows directly from Apple's explanation of how the system will work, with the only safeguard being Apple's purported one-in-a-trillion false positive rate for the on-device scanning that causes the data to be sent to Apple.

[0] https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/929-On...
> One of the most powerful arguments in Apple’s favor in the 2016 San Bernardino case is that the company didn’t even have the means to break into the iPhone in question, and that to build the capability would open the company up to a multitude of requests that were far less pressing in nature, and weaken the company’s ability to stand up to foreign governments.

I think that a crucial missing piece is the FBI's argument: Apple is fully capable of developing and signing a "law enforcement iBoot". IIRC, the FBI was even willing to have someone else develop the software and only ask Apple to sign it–which they definitely have the capability to do, and only policy of not signing other people's software stood in the way.

If we agree that Apple was right in 2016, it stands to reason that Apple cannot be compelled to modify its CSAM filter to capture arbitrary contents, or report it at lower thresholds, or expand it beyond iCloud Photos (like to Messages itself). The amount of work they would have to do for it seems like it would be even higher. There are whole infrastructure pieces that just don't exist. What am I missing?
Was there anything about food supply? I see that as the biggest concern. We can deal with heat and floods and such. But when the world's bio ecosystem starts looking like the Great Barrier Reef's, then that's when we start talking about collapse or extinction.
For the last couple of years my org has been self-hosting Yopass https://github.com/jhaals/yopass. We use it to share secrets (with one time URLs) with each other.
Apple is a company that has gone completely out of it's way to protect their users from end-to-end encryption and refusing to introduce backdoors into their products to get data from suspected terrorists.

These slippery slope type arguments tend to assume that there is no middle ground between sides of this argument.
Unlikely you would be even able to recognize it as fruit.

Probably there are some remnants of seeds and a bit of dark goo inside something that is a basket only after a lot of analysis.

Fruit just doesn't do well underwater for any length of time. Except for being frozen, encased in sap or in volcanic ash, there isn't many ways to preserve the shape of the fruit for thousands of years.
This is a weird mindset. Either you care about privacy or you don’t: what a person does on their device shouldn’t matter. If you only care about privacy when doing illegal things you don’t actually care about privacy you’re just a criminal not wanting to be caught.
You imagine that people working for McDonalds act in the interest of McDonalds as a company. But instead, within a big corporation there are fiefdoms and factions. People at McD mostly act within those. Higher management plays favorites. McD's "reputation" generates no revenue, so has no voice unless the CEO worries about it. But the CEO is probably focused on revenue targets and personal bonuses instead.

In this case, somebody influential at corporate seems to feel they are not getting enough tax revenue from franchisees, and that the kickbacks they get from Taylor are worth the damage to McD's reputation.
Is this generated by AI or are these generated by a person? Some context would be helpful here.
What obvious reasons? If it was legal to make porn with 16 year olds, you can bet that it would be made and sold. (It's illegal of course.)
I agree with all that. This is specifically about the style of writing, not the actions taken.
> A company that creates educational material for children.

(looks up school textbook publishers.)

> A company that lets you rent out your car's battery when you aren't using it.

I don't see that one happening. Ever.

> A website that lets you order and purchase local food in your area.

You don't watch TV, do you?
The way it works is people report CP to a third party organization that fights CP. A hash of some sort is recorded in a central repository that is used by many services including every major social media company. Those companies then use it to delete/ban/etc users who post images matching those hashes. Generally, they also work with law enforcement.

In the current iteration they are not using AI or anything to identify "bad" content. They are matching hashes for files on on your device against known bad hashes/content.

I'm not trying to convince you one way or another about it, just clarifying what is happening.
You’re right; this feels like a “do what we tell you or we go after you for <insert any of a thousand things Apple is guilty of>” situation.
Open source also doesn't guarantee any type of control if it's SaaS or anchored to a closed source SaaS system. There's a ton of "but it's open source!" SaaS companies that I shall not name that leverage open source but in reality are lock-in walled gardens. The code is open but the data and network effect are not.
“ Experiencing technology as a kind — but only one kind — of revealing, and seeing man’s essential place as one that is open to different kinds of revealing frees us from “the stultified compulsion to push on blindly with technology or, what comes to the same, to rebel helplessly against it and curse it as the work of the devil.” Indeed, Heidegger says at the end of the lecture, our examining or questioning of the essence of technology and other kinds of revealing is “the piety of thought.” By this questioning we may be saved from technology’s rule.”

The article assumes a strange contorted definition of ‘technology’ to try to jam a certain point in.

By most definitions, human language would be considered as part of ‘technology’, certainly the written word would be considered so by nearly all. From that understanding, to question at all requires ‘technology’ thus making the final sentence absurd.
How much risk do you think your children have? I believe it's the same as the flu according to recent stats.
One thing that might happen is that they could MITM your internet connection by default while maskerading it as a privacy feature.

https://www.theverge.com/22573519/apple-private-relay-icloud...
Civil disobedience. If we think a law is unjust, it is our duty to disobey and undermine it. Technology is a tool that allows us to do exactly that.
Agreed - if the situation is as dire as presented then nuclear fission is the only clear solution today for baseload power. All the rebuttals I usually read seem to present hypothetical alternatives that may very well come to fruition but we have nuclear as a well-tested and known solution to the problem ready for us to begin using today should we simply decide to act.
Hard to believe that a law limiting that would stand up in the supreme court, and Apple has previously indicated they would be willing to pay whatever legal costs are necessary to defend themselves from that sort of attack.

It is weird that Apple would do this in the first place though, it certainly doesn't make me want to use their products.
Even if it did, iCloud is less of a necessity with a Mac than it is with an iOS device. I have a little more agency and utility on Macs.
For now; new laws should be created to take away that right.
"An online virtual reality surgery training simulator."

Sounds like great fun if it's open to the public :D
20 MILLION reports just from Facebook alone in one year?? I am surprised there is no discussion of the sheer scale of the problem. Will we need to build more prisons once this new system is rolled out?
Hah! i thought it was not a hack so much as a 'joke' that someone had discovered and posted to the discord, to much amusement. Are people actually using this?

I will be amused when std.math.range shows up with this implementation.
So is this essentially Fidelity's Cash Management Account with access to riskier investments?
> Flash could also do 3D animation, which CSS cannot

Saw a few Codepens over the years[0] where people managed to rotate 3D cubes, all done entirely with CSS. Of course if you needed to interact with the cube you would need JS, but 3D can be achieved with CSS alone, it's just a very hacky way of doing it.

[0] https://codepen.io/mehra_as/pen/KRKPBq
Nuclear power can be fast to build. It would need to be constructed in volume, with immutable designs. Right now, America builds so few nuclear plants that they are essentially all one-off designs. Mass production is key here.

Vis-à-vis costs, the government can poof into existence trillions of dollars with no ill effects. Cost is an easily overcome obstacle.

If a mandate came down to produce 1000 new nuclear reactors by 2030, I think it could be achieved. The country just needs the political will to make it happen.
Nothing to hide right? As an otaku who collect figurines I can't wait to have the police knocking at my door because of a false positive triggered by a 1/8 scale statue of Megumin casting a fireball.
I also want to add that anyone that says “you can just turn off iCloud photos” can just see themselves out of the conversation. Apple iPhones ship with such low free space after OS and apps and they refuse to support SD cards (although it would be trivial for someone with their resources to abstract away the UX problems) and each photo is now 8+ MiB while videos quickly reach a GiB+ that users really have no choice - especially given how badly iPhones double as mass storage USB devices to allow for manual curation - but to enable iCloud photos.
I went on a game hiatus in June just to see if I'd even miss them or if they were nothing but a time sink. So far there's only two games I'd really like to play, Battlefield 2042 (which hasn't released yet) and Minecraft. To my mind it is a perfect sandbox game. Solid core loop, various secondary objectives you can set, high replayability, and deep customization. There is an impressively deep level of interaction between different objects in the game, combined with the redstone logic system there's no real limit to what can be designed. It's the Lego of the digital age.
Visually, the "no" grid website [0] just looked like a website created with CSS Grid. I was expecting some sort of design that would be different. Are we missing something?

[0]: https://gridless.design
No, they quite clearly say the opposite, I edited my comment to quote the post.
Doesn't the hash change by exporting a photo as a new file type or by changing a few pixels in photoshop?

If this was the FINAL solution to catch every last child pornographer in one glorious roundup MAYBE it would be worth the massive risk of authoritarian abuse but this algorithm sounds stupidly easy to get around for the deviants while still throwing our collective privacy under the bus.
My first instinct would be collecting seeds.
So if you use iMessage and iCloud Photos then they will be scanned by Apple--> it is a lie.
This is definitely not the case.

Yes, with iCloud backup turned on, messages can be accessed by Apple, that hasn't changed, has been the case for a decade. It is specifically written in the technical document that they are not scanning the iMessages photos in the cloud the same way that they would scan your iCloud photos.
That’s how it starts!

For me, my mechanical watch obsession started when I inherited my father’s mid-70s Rolex. Back then, they weren’t as insanely out of reach as they’ve become; they were a very robust watch that would Just Work for a long, long time, and which looked nice. (Remember, this was only about 15 years after Sean Connery wore a Submariner in Dr No; Rolex was even LESS upmarket in the 60s, which was a time when very few watches were waterproof AT ALL.)

Then the dot-com boom happened, and I had a little money, and I bought an Omega (which I’m actually wearing right now). It’s a late-90s Seamaster, like the one they put on Pierce Brosnan’s wrist for Goldeneye around the same time. (Incidentally, snooty jewelers do not think you are funny if you ask how to make the laser shoot out.)

There are others, too, but the Omega is the nicest one I own. They are all EMP-proof, spring-driven marvels. Most have dates, but none show days or months. I do enjoy that there ARE mechanical movements with perpetual calendars, though, even if they do cost as much as a cheap house.

About 5 years ago, I fell down the AppleWatch hole after buying one to use while running and biking, and finding it so useful that I wore it to the exclusion of all the other watches. I have a nicer Apple Watch now (titanium S6) that I wear MOST of the time, but several times a month I’ll pull one of the others out to wear. With this usage pattern, they’re all “oh, shiny!” to me, too, which is neat.
There are many places where there are consumer choice (eg. electric cars, carbon offset credits for flights, renewable energy electricity providers, organic foods at the supermarket[1]), and the uptake there is tepid at best. The critical mass of demand is just not there.

[1] I'm not saying that organic food helps climate, but it captures a similar idea. People complain that industrial food production is bad because of pesticides/hormones, organic mostly solves these problems, but people strangely aren't taking up on it.
I agree. He made a point that, if I understood I agree with, that constexpr is not necessarily as strict as it should be. Specifically that you only need ONE path to work at compile time to be able to be constexpr. I might be missing a reason this is a good idea but at least to me it seems bizarre.

It would 100% be nice if code could be tagged by context in more ways than constexpr so the compiler can better tell you things like "put this behind an ifdef for Linux" etc (maybe with a compiler option to say this will only ever target one context and you don't need to check for that).
> There is another path, with massive economic growth, that results in complete decoupling of GHG and GDP. This is the easiest path in terms of lifestyle changes, but the most difficult path in terms of upsetting entrenched powerful interests.

People have been fantasizing about this my entire life and all we've seen in more environmental destruction, and accelerated GHG emissions. I remember hearing things like this all the time in 2006 when an Inconvenient Truth was big. At the time I thought "that sounds reasonable and the only test will be time".

Here we are, likely already past some crucial boundary conditions with no immediate signs that we'll achieve any of the new targets we have set (since we've already missed all the old ones).

> This is true today, but it will not be true in the future.

How much time do you think we have? In 2000 maybe this was a reasonable argument, but even if emissions dropped to zero today we still have already signed up for plenty of climate change.
A disease which mildly inconveniences men of fighting age for at most a couple weeks makes a poor weapon.

They would be full of grief and anger at losing some of their grandparents, but that won't affect their ability to fight and would be likely to motivate them to continue.

Smallpox had up to 90% mortality in Native American populations, across all demographics. Fair to say it was a different beast.
Ask the real questions Lammy.
although I'm a HN reader, I'm in the camp of "since this doesn't affect me personally (unless apple's algo's mislabel my kids photos as offending), apple is helping make the world a better place" - not enough to make me switch away from the gold standard of today's "smartphone experience"
doesnt matter. lets say the government wanted to find a data leak. they could hash the leaked document and falsify it as cp. its dumb. there is no excuse for apple to be hashing and uploading the hashs