skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I stopped my Apple Music subscription and downgraded iCloud to free, then donated a year of those fees to the EFF.

$13/month is nothing to Apple, and I really regret it since photos in iCloud is really convenient, however it feels unethical to contribute to the Apple services system when it will inevitably be used to hurt people like dissidents and whistle blowers.

It is arrogant to blow off security and human rights experts outside of Apple as simply confused or mistaken, when there are sufficiently informed and imaginative people within Apple to understand the practical implications of preemptively investigating users. Such contempt for users is also a sign of worrisome complacency.

On the plus side, Apple has seemed to crowd out interest in third party OS user interfaces. Knowing that Apple believes you're a pedophile until they've run image analysis software on your stuff is one way to motivate people. Maybe 2021 will be the year of Linux on the desktop.

Anyway I hope that more users sacrifice the convenience of Apple services now that its hostility is apparent, and I hope that more people tell their political representatives that it is time for meaningful updates to anti-trust legislation. I know that I was complacent when I thought that having a choice, where at least one of the companies didn't place ads in the start menu, was a tenable state of the market.
The song is a great mnemonic.
> Not offhand, but I've heard of users getting temporary suspensions for using the word, although I don't believe there's an automated rule site-wide.

Merely for using the word? this seems like a myth to me. Various subreddits would obviously ban for it if used as a direct insult, but banning any use of it side-wide seems unlikely.

> If you're just a regular person going about your day and say something stupid, an automod removal with a warning that circumventing the rule will result in a permanent ban is probably sufficient to make you give up and move on with your life. And of course bots that aren't specifically designed to circumvent my subreddit's rules would be trivially blocked.

In which case it would be just as effective to simply give a warning based on detected words that various conduct with it will not be tolerated and that a moderator will be automatically informed of the post, and to remind users to make use that their usage of the word falls within the guidelines.

This would eliminate scuntorpe false positives, and have about the same effect of stopping the intended behavior.
I understand more presentable data/graphs will be released by the end of September
> Apple is engaging in this activity of their own free will for sake of their own commercial gain and are not being incentivized or coerced by the government in any way.

Honest question: how do you know this, for sure? Or is your comment supposed to be read as an allegation phrased as fact?
This blog post got a lot of commentary on HN a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28118350.

iMessages are already E2E encrypted, but you are correct, iCloud backups are decryptable with a warrant (and that was reportedly added at the FBI's request). But I agree with Ben Thompson's point in that blog post, that it's OK to not have strong, unbreakable encryption be the default, and that it's still possible to use an iPhone without iCloud and get full E2E.

But with Apple's CSAM proposal is NOT possible to have an iPhone that Apple isn't continuously scanning.
I can easily imagine American Media rubbing their hands with glee as they hash every pirate torrent and get it on the "to scan for" list for Microsoft.
The idea that money is wealth isn't just bad for our wellbeing, it's bad for the economy because money is meant to circulate. It's a means to an end, not the means.

True wealth only exists in the real world. That includes our bodies and the environment around us, not just our material possessions.
So if I make a large deposit they probably won’t worry about it, but if a black guy does, maybe that’s a different story?

Great.
Certainly this can be used just as easily to analyze documents on the phone for antigovernment sentiment and I think Apple will use it for that eventually because "the Chinese government demanded it"
> Did the Census screw up and forget a burgeoning identity?

"Mixed" folks.

Same thing with college admissions. What should they select?
Of course they do. That merely slows the rate at which you can create accounts.
One of the dirty secrets of li-ion is that in order to use it for cars, you need high voltage batteries, and if your charging source isn't similarly high voltage, your charging efficiency tanks because you spend 30-40% of your energy stepping your voltage up to a level that will charge your batteries. For example, if you charge your Tesla with a 120v AC power supply, you're looking at 58% charge efficiency, which will put your end to end efficiency at the same level: ~50%.
The US was fighting an undeclared naval war against Germany in the North Atlantic before any formal declaration of war.
Do you claim to know the solution to the age-old problem of epistemology? A Nobel Prize awaits you.
I like this take. It shortcuts around all the "but people misunderstand the technology" back and forth and gets to the root of it. "Don't scan my phone for stuff you can send to the police."
Last time I looked at hydrogen-electric, a huge limitation was the lifetime of the electrolyzer membrane. They are expensive and you have to replace regularly.
10 minutes isn't that far off what people routinely spend today to fill a tank of gas. Especially people with trucks, which is a large part of the US.

Over half the population probably has the infrastructure to home charge right now, so this does not need to replace gas station pumps 1 for 1. I was not suggesting that all of us charging at home need to start using public chargers.
Most people aren’t of any single race. America is used to 3/4 white 1/4 black being considered black, but what about 1/2 white, 1/4 Hispanic, 1/4 Asian.
They see ownership more as "guidelines" than actual rules :)
I won't try to tell you what to think though, "bud"
How are they getting your phone number?

Name and shame them.
They're planning this in LA also. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-08-11/l-a-move...

I am vaccinated but I am totally against government mandates to show proof of vaccination.

I believe this is a form of privacy extortion and it's completely unfair to business who would be forced to enforce these rules or face fines or worse.

It should always be a matter of preference, let the free market sort it out and the government should only supply the facts and make the information freely available and accessible.
Cancelled my Apple TV+, iCloud. In the process of selling my iPhone and Apple watch. I know it seems crazy but I feel betrayed and this is the only way I can protest this. Will I have less privacy on android? Yes.
> Everyone who ever joins the military

That's not a waiver, that's a space warrantless searches are reasonable under the fourth amendment and Congress’ Art. I, Sec. 8 powers with regard to the military, etc. Otherwise, when we had conscription, conscripts, who do not freely consent, would have been immune.
Can you expand upon what you mean by "feels different because you supposedly own the device"? Just want to get a clearer idea of what you're saying. How does it feel?
Smoking cigarettes is harmless.... nobody gets sick after smoking for a year

thalidomide is harmless... "On October 1, 1957, the company launched thalidomide and began marketing it under the trade name Contergan. It was proclaimed a "wonder drug" for insomnia, coughs, colds and headaches...
In late 1959, it was noticed that peripheral neuritis developed in patients who took the drug over a period of time, and it was only after this point that thalidomide ceased to be provided over the counter.
...Despite the side effects, thalidomide was sold in pharmacies in Canada until 1962."
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide]

the industry doesn't turn on a dime due to adverse effects when there is money to be made
Do these meet your criteria?

The first three articles:

1. Meta analysis of mask usage

2. "''A Danish randomized controlled trial with 6000 participants, published in the Annals of Internal...."''

3. """large randomized controlled trial with close to 8000 participants"""

You clearly didn't click on the first two articles like you said you did.

You're a liar and a fascist.

I'm done here.
And all the while:

Sir James Wilson Vincent Savile OBE KCSG (/ˈsævɪl/; 31 October 1926 – 29 October 2011) was an English DJ, television and radio personality who hosted BBC shows including Top of the Pops and Jim'll Fix It. He raised an estimated £40 million for charities and, during his lifetime, was widely praised for his personal qualities and as a fund-raiser. After his death, hundreds of allegations of sexual abuse were made against him, leading the police to conclude that Savile had been a predatory sex offender—possibly one of Britain's most prolific. There had been allegations during his lifetime, but they were dismissed and accusers ignored or disbelieved; Savile took legal action against some accusers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Savile
No, this is obvious to anyone that understands that companies one master: profit. The soon as it becomes convenient to discard a "principled" stand, a company will do it. Apple was using privacy as a wedge to attack the Android consumer base or because they wanted their customers to believe they were special to reinforce their velben brand, not because they have some deeply held belief. In this case, perhaps Apple saw a way to do a favor for the government in exchange for some policy that will advantage it.
> Don't forget they disarmed the people.

SIGH. This isn't true and I wish Americans would stop saying it. You can own guns down here, even keep them in your house. Sure, you're limited to bolt actions/side by sides, etc; but there is a healthy shooting community down here. For instance, I've got a mate who owns 7 rifles, the largest of which is a .338 Lapua.

What Australia did was break the 'gun culture' down here and ban semi-autos, pump actions, etc. And let's be honest, I'd take that over the 18 million ARs in circulation in the USA every day of the week. Not having semi-autos is preferable to daily shootings in the community.
Which inhabitants?
100%.

I wish I could upvote this more.
Has someone built a guide to self host on iOS/MacOS so the CSAM issue is moot? Or what are the other platform options, like on Android?

I’m concerned that Apple’s stance on security has been compromised and it is time to dump the platform or find an acceptable modification.

I’m surprised there’s no gist being linked on HN about to get people bootstrapped for secure device backups as an alternative to iCloud (and without a jailbreak).
>maybe that means something different in America? It's just an arrest

an arrest record searchable by all the prospective employers (until you spend an effort/money to seal it in jurisdictions where it is possible, and even then you still would have to disclose it any time you deal with federals). Good luck finding a job anywhere where computers are present with an arrest for hacking.
> Capability has been there already, for very long time.

Capability was always there but it wasn't implemented. Now arguments like excessive battery drain or processor usage or any argument they could have come up with can no longer be used since they went ahead and implemented software that scans iPhone files.

Perceptual hashing is a mere detail of how they are scanning files TODAY. Same for scanning only files which are to be sent to iCloud, a mere detail that can be changed anytime and surely will be requested by tyrants around the world.
People switch back and forth between iphone and android all the time.
I was going to say; I'm aware security is always a compromise (vs speed or ease of use or budget etc), but I've never seen that privacy and security are the natural opposites / inverses in same spectrum.
Nix is already most of the way there with content-addressed packages. An IPFS project is also in the works using this feature. A blockchain is unnecessary because reproducible packages can be checked with `nix build --rebuild` and stores are signed by default. A bridge is unnecessary because Nix wraps language-specific package managers when building and does not allow network access in its sandbox.
Value is the net present value of estimated future cash flows, discounted to the present with an appropriate estimated rate (risk free rate + estimated risk premium). It is very hard to compute further out flows (benefits and losses) for most individual employee activities, thus the risk premium should be high, like really high. This results in making the value have short "duration". Ergo, don't be shy about bragging about short term value gains, for the value gains are usually sandcastles.

This is not civil engineering, most of the stuff me or you used 10 years ago has been rewritten and rebuilt, sometimes from scratch, sometimes several times.

Of course, exceptions exist, but remember that exceptions are exceptional - rare.
>what makes reddit and say facebook so different?

After ~2014, nothing. Reddit drove off it's original user base and replaced them with the exodus of people who want to use Facebook but think Facebook is bad for various reasons. Reddit corporate has obliged them.
My daily drivers are an Android and an iPhone while my PinePhone gathers dust, so I don't understand what this has to do with my privacy choices. Nor did I say it to act superior or imply that no one had a right to complain.

This is merely a reminder that Apple was founded in and most HN readers live in the United States, a nation founded on the idea that, without checks and balances, any power that can be abused will be abused. Without something legally binding and someone holding Apple to their word, their privacy stance was never going to be anything more than a temporary ploy in their ultimate goal: to make more money.
> On a visitor perspective, this seems undervalued.

Cause they’re always one drama away from losing tons of people. The platform seems to attract drama involving the platform and decisions made more than say Twitter does
Here's my attempt to explain the whole thing:

Almost all modern AI is a search problem; We're just trying to find a clever way to search the problem space.

Most supervised learning methods are a search problem for best programs (models) that explain the data; We're just trying to find a clever way to express the model and efficient algorithms to search the problem space.

Many popular ML algorithms (NN, SVM, etc.) are an optimization problem; you just want to find parameters to maximize some performance metrics. But you don't want to search all the parameters exhaustively. You want something that can be improved incrementally over time.

NN is popular because it's flexible (can have thousands of inputs/outputs) and can be built incrementally. The secret sauce is its performance metrics (loss function) being differentiable. This way, you can incrementally improve the model via gradient descent.

NN is popular also because in theory you can stack as many layers as you want, giving it more power to learn complex relationships. It's applicable to many tasks.

CNN/RNN/LTSM/Transformer are just variations of these. They have different structures, but all operating on the same principle: differentiable loss function and iterative training methods.
I think you already got one great reply, I have just one thing to add to it: your post literally presupposes a 1.0 version of this software that never has its feature set expanded. I don't think that's a reasonable assumption. After all, with 1.0 the goal of catching this class of person is barely achieved. They'll likely arrest people, 99% of whom are just CSAM jpeg collectors who get an extra kick out of viewing a class of image that is super illegal. And nothing more.

Then for version 2.0, they'll realize the INTERPOL, FBI, whatever can provide them a combo hash plus one string of text that can nail a known active producer. The holy grail. This small feature add to get so much closer to the original "moral goal" will prove too appealing to pass up. Now all the code is in place for the govt to pass over requests for data pinpointing mere common criminals.
The Census has a two or more races option. I could see how a form designer would expect someone who is mixed to select that option. But perhaps “two or more races” doesn’t register when people identify more closely as “mixed” or “bi-racial” while rushing through government paper work (that is to say I’ve never heard someone describe themselves as being “two or more races”.)
Yes that's slightly better. However millions may still die even with vaccinations, because most of the world does not have access to them and they don't have adequate health care. Also, with time as mutations occur, vaccines will get less efficient.

You got confused with the smallpox. I mentioned smallpox as an example of what COVID isn't. Not every disease warrants mass vaccination, and this depends also on efficacy of the vaccine.

COVID may warrant it for specific subpopulations. But we don't have good enough vaccines yet to eradicate COVID. "Getting rid of COVID via vaccines", "vaccines is the only way" is just fantasy/propaganda tactic to increase vaccinations.
Do you mean it's not already?
> But with Apple's CSAM proposal is NOT possible to have an iPhone that Apple isn't continuously scanning.

As currently implemented, iOS will only scan photos to be uploaded to iCloud Photos. If iCloud Photos is not enabled, then Apple isn't scanning the phone.
I sometimes wonder how many of the commenters actually read the article itself. All the discussion in comments is about residential properties when in the article it clearly says:

"
Another concern the report outlines is that the U.S. anti-money laundering regime is focused on residential purchases, when a significant portion of the cases GFI reviewed involve commercial real estate transactions.
"

Or another:

“When you talk about residential real estate, the heart of it is identifying who is the beneficial owner, [because] if you find out who the beneficial owner is, it also tells you who the criminal is,” Kumar told ICIJ. “In a commercial real estate investment, you don’t have to own the majority stake to be a criminal. You can own 2% of a $500 million property, and you are [still] laundering millions through it.”
Princeton researchers ditch Facebook political ad project
I can’t articulate or explain it better but I feel strongly you aren’t looking at it the right way.
I wouldn't say none. But I'm with you. I am back to CD's and vinyl for music, flip phone for communication, I drive cars from the early 2000's, we keep our wifi off at the house almost all the time. It is on one hand a shame that tech has become so soured, but on the other hand, the ability to pick and choose technology from any era, and be content with it because of the fact that newer technology is not better, and in some ways is way worse because it is intrusive.

On the other points about slippery slopes, we don't even know the full extent of how the powers that be are surveilling us, it could quite possibly be 100x worse than we even realize. Certain cities, like Santa Monica, CA for instance, are almost completely under camera control. I have seen the camera room at the promenade mall, and the camera stations near some of the intersections. The illusion of privacy is evaporating before our eyes.
America was an actual empire (as in actually taking over other countries and colonizing them) back in the 19th century. America's "empire" after WW2 is more of a redefinition of the term.
> Additionally, its trivial to stream and analyze the entirety of Reddit comments and posts in real time (check out PRAW if you like Python).

Chunks of it. Don’t think praw and the api can do all live
Any chance you have a good link explaining this? I saw the parent comment earlier and wanted to add this. But I only recently learned that the US federal government cannot require or incentivize providers to scan user's private documents, so didn't want to post without clear sources.
More precisely, once they have sufficient vouchers, Apple gets to decrypt the contents of the safety vouchers, which contains a low resolution, grayscale copy of the original image. Safety vouchers don't give Apple access to your photo library.
Gas cars are 11x more likely to catch fire than an EV.
Reddit is on its way down. It's been overrun by power-tripping mods, and there's no way to appeal a perma-ban!

I've been banned from /r/india for just commenting on another sub (/r/chodi, which was recommended by the app itself!); banned from /r/worldnews for disagreeing with the herd.

The moment a decent, democratic discussion forum comes along, I'll jump ship to it.
For those of you who are saying you don't really "know" git, your VCS will be so so much less stressful if you take a day or so to learn it! I can't recommend this site enough for familiarity with the basics: https://learngitbranching.js.org/
Avocado toast, caramel macchiatos and AWS charges. Maybe legal costs too
Ehh, they try pretty damn carefully. They absolutely do take into consideration things like changing quality and ingredients.

> Pricing information is then sent to our national office, where specialists who have detailed knowledge about the particular goods or services review the data. These specialists check the data for accuracy and consistency, and make any necessary corrections or adjustments. Adjustments can range from an adjustment for a change in the size or quantity of a packaged item, to more complex adjustments based upon statistical analysis of the value of an item's features or quality. Thus, commodity specialists strive to prevent changes in the quality of items from affecting the CPI's measurement of price change.

> Hedonic quality adjustment is one of the techniques the CPI uses to account for changing product quality within some CPI item samples. Hedonic quality adjustment refers to a method of adjusting prices whenever the characteristics of the products included in the CPI change due to innovation or the introduction of completely new products.

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/questions-and-answers.htm#Question_1...

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/questions-and-ans...
Yes. All the fabs and stuff we have now shoufd be devoted to implementing a surveillance state. This must happen. It cannot be any other way.

This is what you sound like. The problem here isn't the tech. It's that Big Tech has deluded society into believing privacy and personal ownership of devices doesn't exist because it would inconvenice Big Tech. Law enforcement echoes it because they were spoiled by the brief period that they tasted ClearNet, and they don't want to return to having to investigate the old fashioned way.

Every other major industry has increasingly started doing the same thing. It is not okay. We have no right to sell out future generation's privacy. It's cowardly, selfish, and does more harm to them in the long run.
You are regurgitating a clichéd argument.

> massively reduced car transport

How the hell could enough people be convinced to spend say 10% of their income on public transport instead of their car and petrol/charging? https://www.statista.com/statistics/748911/us-average-per-ca...

> improve electric rail and walkability.

So click your fingers and you have cheaply and immediately magically redesigned the distribution of residential and commercial property to suit public transport and/or pedestrian/bike access?

Finally, ignoring the above, building out that infrastructure and other changes would cost trillions, which indirectly causes trillions of dollars worth of extra CO2…

Your argument is as trite as saying “why don’t we just stop producing CO2?”.

Edit: disclaimer: yes I own a car and I also use public transport when convenient (I was even 100% carless for a few years, by living close to work and bus route was accessible).