skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The parent was proposing to “just send known CSAM”.

But OK, say someone sends you a sunset that fools the hasher. Then what? Of course one match won’t do anything, so you’d need to download however many matching sunsets. Then what? The Apple reviewer would see they’re sunsets and you’d challenge the flag saying they’re sunsets. And if somehow NCMEC got involved, they’d see they’re just sunsets. And if law enforcement got involved, they’d see they’re just sunsets.

These proofs of concept might seem interesting from a ML pov, but all they do is just highlight why Apple put so many layers of checking into this.
You could pollute the pool and overwhelm their human review process, making it untenable to operate. And that's if you just wanted to pollute it with obvious non-CSAM content.
And it has been explained to you repeatedly that wgpu is already more or less "least power" - that Bevy already uses most of the API surface and will soon be using nearly all of it.
Isn't that the opposite of how it works?

Transferring data and calculating the core of a new block takes a fraction of a second, and then it takes an average of several minutes to find the right random numbers to finish the block.

A latency advantage in HFT lets you take most of the profits. A latency advantage in cryptocurrency mining gives you a fraction of a percent better profits.

A calculations-per-second advantage helps in mining, but it's strictly proportional.
I grew up in a single parent household. My Dad left when I was 6.
> In my view, reproducibility is neither strictly necessary nor sufficient for scientific progress.

In your view? Reproducibility is essential to scientific progress because it defines what science is. It's the backbone of science. Hypothesis,testing/experiments. It's what separates science from math, arts and pseudosciences like social "sciences".

> I'm sure if you went back through the literature on something like electromagnetism, you would find results that fail to replicate, yet the theory of electromagnetism if applied properly is remarkably robust.

How would it be "robust" if it couldn't be replicated? How would the theory of electromagnetism be robust if it failed to produce replicable results?

> Scientific results can be strengthened by replication

No. It can only be a "scientific result" if it can be replicated/tested. It's definitional.

> Discovery of a psychological "effect" is perfectly scientific and interesting

No it isn't if it can't be test/replicated/reproduced. It's not science. It's something else altogether.

> And if those sciences are also plagued by irreproducibility, then they may embrace scientific methodology without producing a useful scientific knowledge base.

There is no "scientific methodology" without testability/replication/reproducibility.

All science is based on hypothesis-testing.
I have no feelings towards the topic. I am merely summarizing what the consensus is writing on places like HN towards what Apple is doing.

The general sentiment does appear to be that the laws are misguided. That does not necessarily mean repeal is necessary. Augmentation may also provide a solution that satisfies their concerns. However, that is moving well beyond the topic at hand. There is no indication I can find that some kind of change is controversial. There is clear worry about the status quo based on the potential outcome of what information Apple may glean.

What remains is that Apple isn't anyone's real concern. An inanimate corporation can't do much to you. Apple is simply bringing attention to what actually concerns people, which is something that was already there all along.
I would pay money for it if they made it available on the iPad Pro. Think £20-40 seems reasonable
That sounds like survivorship bias. Of course the people who get caught for doing things the stupid way are going to be branded as stupid. How about the people who don't get caught, or the people who get caught despite doing a decent job of covering their tracks? What evidence do you have that most pedophiles are of the stupid sort?
Our profession is such a joke. We're no better than the stereotypical trades worker of yore... a bunch of plumbers scamming and ripping off the every day person that doesn't know any better. Truly pathetic.
Give it a few days, and you'll probably find someone selling a list of CSAM neural hashes on darknet marketplaces.
What kind of social engineering would lead an innocent person to save known CSAM to their photo library?
It would still be mentally draining to be accussed of CP. Can you imaging how terrified one would be if they see a warning message with a blurred sunset? I don't know exactly how the system works but from Apple's press release, it hides the image and gives a warning to the user. This would not go well on social media.
The best I have is from [1], which estimates 50 million gallons a day at an ongoing operating cost of around $50 million per year. You'd have to pick a timeframe to also amortize the cost of the plant itself and add that in.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324049504578545...
Apple has outlined[1] multiple levels of protection in place for this:

1. You have to reach a threshold of matches before your account is flagged.

2. Once the threshold is reached, the matched images are checked against a different perceptual hash algorithm on Apple servers. This means an adversarial image would have to trigger a collision on two distinct hashing algorithms.

3. If both hash algorithms show a match, then “visual derivative” (low-res versions) of the images are inspected by Apple to confirm they are CSAM.

Only after these three criteria are met is your account disabled and referred to NCMEC. NCMEC will then do their own review of the flagged images and refer to law enforcement if necessary.

[1]: https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/Security_Threat_Model...
The Myth of the Fox, Skyrim
The theory is that if you make it too risky to possess CSAM, demand for it will drop, leading to less exploitation. I don't know if I buy that theory, but... there it is.

Compare this to the war on drugs. There is huge demand for drugs. Many drugs are highly illegal to possess, and a lot of people get jailed for possessing them. And yet most of us consider the war on drugs to be an abject failure that hasn't done much more than create inequity.

Why should something like CSAM possession be any different? I wish it was different, and these sorts of tactics would reduce this awful problem, but I'm just not convinced it does.
China Propaganda Network Targets BBC Media, UK in Large-Scale Influence Campaign
Our savannah ancestors very likely consumed less meat than modern humans, like you said, but my point was that certain nutrients aren't too humans available at all without animal inputs. Agriculture (notice I didn't say modern agriculture) enabled lacto-vegetarianism by adding milk to get those nutrients, but that's 12,000 years out of...what? 50,000 years of homo sapiens sapiens existence? Those inputs aren't trivial, either, since a lack of B12 will cause irreversible central nervous system damage in adults after about 5 years and straight up kills children.

Indian diets are also a great example here since the Kshatriya caste were the warriors and rulers and also included meat in their diet, partially for the caloric density to make transporting rations easier but also for the health benefits to get fighting fit. Most indians included at least some eggs and meat while none of them went without dairy, except in fairly narrow cases of ascetics for limited periods of time. The Brahmins, who had the strictest rules against meat, were not laborers, which should tell you something important about human physiology and heavy physical activity.

Of course in the modern era, with abundant food, refrigeration, dietary supplements, and so on...sure, a legitimately vegan diet is absolutely possible. Historically? Not so much.
This isn't new for any social media app nowadays
What exactly would you be charged with? Why would law enforcement even be involved in a case of false positives?
You don't have to be intelligent to know that CSAM is super illegal and you probably don't want them to be co-mingled with pictures of your mum and last night's dinner.
They had to have been coerced.
Oh, I was really hoping that we were having a discussion about the historical reasons why Metal and DX12 exist. Complaining about how evil Apple and Microsoft are was fun and all in the 1990s when I was a kid hanging out on Slashdot, but I'm just kinda bored of it now.
I’m financially illiterate, ignorant, and as a result my net worth is not significant, but I was excited to actually know this answer. Maybe there’s hope for me!
There is no way to scan people’s content while “respecting their privacy.” The goal should be to create a system where you couldn’t do so even of you wanted to (or the state demanded it).
How are you defining "science"? That would help us understand how it's applied too broadly.
The even worse part here is that not only could it impact an image of a beautiful sunset, which would fail the human check, it could impact a low quality version of legal porn, which could easily pass the human check and get passed on to law enforcement.

A sufficiently advanced catfishing attack could probably take advantage of this to get someone raided and have all their electronics confiscated.

Just send someone a zip of photos and let them extract it...
why is “benign garbage” (in your completely subjective opinion) “damning”? That implies a certain level of intentional wrongdoing on behalf of FB. What did you expect the typical online social content to look like?
> Apple's reviewers, by law, cannot look at the target

This is false.

> No one except NCMEC is allowed to possess the target (CSAM material).

False. No one is allowed to knowingly possess it, without taking certain actions forthwith when they become aware of it. Obviously, prior to it being reviewed as it is, neither the reviewer nor Apple has knowledge that it is actual or even particularly likely CSAM.
Coding a MUD is what switched me from Health Science to Computer Science in 1996. Though, in hindsight, I wish I'd gotten a double major in both subjects.
So, everyone is going to turn off their iCloud sync and they won’t be a target anymore?
What score will you get? IQ sample test for kids, far from easy
Crunchbase says 101-250 employees, so they must have guessed wrong. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/turbot Hope you get to that level soon, looks like a great product.
what do you think would happen if insider trading were not illegal?
I'm going to take the opposite position and posit that the "problem" with studying humans is that we just don't know enough yet.

We can't predict human behavior because our science is simply not advanced enough. I think once we have as strong an understanding of biology as we do something like say, physics or mathematics, we'll find it significantly easier to predict human behavior.

Or put another way, I don't think we can't predict human behavior because humans are "special", but because we're actually kind dumb on a cosmic scale.
even the docs are written in first person
That is the problem. CSAM is just smoke and mirrors paired with appeal to emotions to win approval more easily.
I don't want anyone, neither Apple, nor Microsoft, Google and others to sneak into my files. Did anyone realize that in the 21st century our cellphone is essentially our wallet?
Artificial Rain with Drones, Electricity
Great work, I hope people keep hacking the system to lower the system's credibility. This idea is just beyond insane, and the plan to have manual check on user's photos on their own devices sounds like what China is doing - not great
Some people seem to be confused why a hash collision of a cat and a dog matters. Here's a potential attack: share (legal) NSFW pictures that are engineered to have a hash collision with CSAM to get someone else in trouble. The pictures are flagged as CSAM, and they also look suspicious to a human reviewer (maybe not enough context in the image to identify the subject's age). To show that this can be done with real NSFW pictures, here is an example, using an NSFW image from a subreddit's top posts of all time.

Here is the image (NSFW!): https://i.ibb.co/Ct64Cnt/nsfw.png

Hash: 59a34eabe31910abfb06f308
A good example from physics is this observation related by Feynman in 1974:

"[...] It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that..."
> Democrats are generally in favor

To be clear are we talking about the politicians or the people? The people, yes. Politicians I'm not so sure about. Also I'd encourage you to read my other comment which addresses ordinal voting (like IRV) and the issues with them. It might be why the party likes it (still having vote splitting in the primaries).
I would add 4) editable in vim.
Ask HN: Would you rather have contextual or behavioral advertising
Would you rather have contextual or behavioral advertising?

On one hand, behavioral can be very powerful when it's very articulate with who is shown what and why at that specific moment in their life, maybe in a positive way to help you better your life.

On the other hand, contextual gives you more privacy and a more autonomous decision about what you choose.
I think they are only planning to scan US phones, so I am not sure how German law applies here.
Understand and Reduce Your Technical Debt
> If the system interprets a picture of a pineapple as CSAM, you only need to produce the picture of a pineapple to defend yourself against any accusations.

If the system interprets a picture of a pineapple on your phone as CSAM,

after Apple notifies the authorities they have identified child porn on your phone,

after the police detain you with the courtesies afforded to all alleged pedophiles,

after you cough up your phone’s password,

you only need to produce the picture of a pineapple to defend yourself against any accusations,

and then point out to the folks with the guns that no, you didn’t delete the child porn from your phone, look, it’s just a pineapple,

and then explain to your captors how hashes work,

then there’s nothing to worry about.

Good luck.
If anyone actually cares, the SEC uses the all seeing stone. That’s public knowledge.
I have a personal distaste for it and I'm not alone. It seems deliberately arcane. I mean I get the idea that Microsoft couldn't keep up with their own features via the GUI it just takes too long, so they needed a scripting language. I also get the idea that a lot of the scripting had to cover 25 years of tech choices (registry settings, DCOM and other things that Windows has) and something like Unix shell scripting was inadequate.

I do think they could have encapsulated their DCOM and registry stuff into Unix like utilities instead of the weirdness that is Powershell. Most people from a Unix background (like me) are used to bourne shell like shells and single function utilities and reflexively do things in a particular way.

Powershell seems like you have to have a browser open to accomplish anything. Inexperience sure, but nobody could learn enough Powershell and remember it to be productive.

edit: I also hate, hate, hate that Powershell ISE doesn't work exactly the same as a normal Powershell session. How can you build two things that are ostensibly the same underpinning but work differently? Absolute madness.
It seems like I'm not going to sleep tonight.

Sure, there is hyperbole in OP's comment (CSAM ransomware and automated law enforcement aren't a thing yet), but we're a few steps from that reality.

Even worse, how long will it take until other cloud storage services such as Dropbox, Amazon S3, Google Drive et al implement the same features? Or worse, required by law to do so?

This sounds like the start of an exodus from the cloud, at least in the non-developer consumer space.
So eloquently stated. Couldn't have said it better myself.

Hunt the minnows while at the SEC. Get hired by the whales after leaving the SEC.
Lending your phone to someone for a call, then a quick airdrop. Legitimate-looking emails with buttons. There's probably a list somewhere of proven attack vectors.
> child predators don't exactly have a track record for intelligence

Maybe that's true of the ones that get caught, but if so there's a good chance that at least part of that is inverse survivorship bias. (Similar to “Why are most of the CIA covert missions you hear about failures?”)
Fair points and thanks for bringing balance to the discussion, I did take some creative liberty there and may have extrapolated your thesis to an extreme that you did not necessarily advocate.
Classic George Carlin - "You have no rights!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9-R8T1SuG4
Actually it'll do an excellent job of keeping it off their servers.

Apple's actions will be effective at making sure every CSAM aficionado will not trust their device. Or, if they're tech savvy, they will at least know not to co-mingle their deepest darkest secrets alongside photos of their mum and last night's dinner.

If you think Apple's very big, very public blow-up is making waves in the hacker/security/libertarian crowd, just imagine how big it's blowing up in the CSAM community right now. I dare say it's probably all they've been talking about for the past two weeks. Unlike places like Hacker News where there's plenty of people desperate to drag Apple through the coals, the CSAM community will be highly motivated to have a precise understanding of what Apple is doing. I dare say that they'll be extremely well informed about exactly what Apple's plans entail and how to work around them.
I guess that's the thing I don't get.. you need to pwn a bank and then pwn a telco.. it feels like if it were a probable scenario all these issues with SS7 would be long fixed, so it must be an improbable scenario?

My recollection is that we had that once incident in Germany with 02, but never really heard how much was lost and it was the result of a bad policy at 02 that they fixed and was particular to 02.
Papers, Please

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papers,_Please
That's cool to know I'm a EASK (Explorer). It's just like Myers Briggs Personality test. I do lean more to exploring the virtual worlds and building things.
Certainly people tow the official line, but it does help us to articulate the position of the company so that we aren’t so misinformed that we spread FUD.
Someone please build a distributed mixer to keep funds away from extortion sector terrorists.
The database is known to contain non-csam images like porn. I doubt the reviewer will be qualified to discern which is which.
Plaid has designed the screens to resemble each bank's login screen. They essentially phish people. I, as a tech-savvy person, noticed something was up when I saw the URL didn't match my bank's. But most people would put in their password, thinking they are logging into their bank's website, and would be none the wiser.
> Heard of enough incidents of this earlier this year through one of the Canadian prepaid mobile flanker brands..

Please explain, sorry I did not hear about this.
We did it after ww2 with West Germany and Japan.
Does anyone save porn to their personal photo libraries? Especially porn as suspicious as the image you posted?
The client has to be able to check for them in some way - just run that algorithm against every image you can scrape from Tor/Freenet and I suspect you'll have results rather quickly.

Or you can probably just wait a minute and pay an... enterprising individual to sell you such a list on a darknet market though, or perhaps even find one posted on the clearnet soon enough.
> The goal should be to create a system where you couldn’t do so even of you wanted to (or the state demanded it).

There’s this bizarre notion that using end-to-end encryption can absolve you of responsibility, that the authorities will have to accept an answer of “we literally can’t access it”.

That’s just not the case for centralised things: you’re deliberately facilitating some service, government will find you liable for some things in its operation, and if you don’t comply, they’ll fine or shut you down. E2EE doesn’t absolve you from law; law is all about saying you’re not allowed to do things that are physically possible.

(Decentralised things, now they can be banned but not truly stopped because there’s no central party to shut down.)
I do agree that it's more private, but I'm not sure it's better.

I'm fine with the idea that if I upload stuff to someone else's server, they may take a look at it and maybe even punish me for what I've uploaded. Certainly if I encrypt the data before I upload it, they can't do that. But if I don't, then it's fine with me if they do.

But my device should not be snitching on me. Yes, this device-side scanning is supposedly gated on enabling uploads to iCloud, but that doesn't really make for much of a distinction to me. And since Apple certainly has the capability, they are likely one secret court order away from being required to scan even photos that aren't being uploaded, at least on some targeted subset of devices.
I know he doesn't like monorails but I don't know about maglevs.
I would trust it approximately as much as I trust voting machines which aren’t built on open source platforms.
So…do these machines seriously not go through a recertification process for every election?!

That seems catastrophically stupid.
I don’t think its a 50/50 split on climate change. I think the majority think it is happening. The disagreement is more on the confidence that this is something govt could ever address via policy and if the policy cure would be worse than the disease. Assuming alignment there it goes to, ok now what policy concretely? Blue states like CA have been warning about climate change and pollution for a long time and while an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure they have been meh on the former and disastrous on the latter. My confidence that more left politicians can shift course or even soften the blow is low.

I dont think we should control information just because someone doesnt like it.
The point isn't to trick NCMEC, but rather create a DoS attack so no actual triggers can get through the noise.
I think my basic point here is that the words dialect and language are too coarse to describe two English variants with identical spelling and grammatical systems, but with some minor differences in pronunciation and word usage. Especially, given that they both have a high degree of internal variance (as you quite rightly said).

If you compare the differences between English as spoken in Australia, England, and (even) America to the various dialects spoken in China, you can see how little descriptive value there is in referring to minor English variants as dialects or even independent languages.

Ultimately, the decision to declare a cluster of variations a dialect or separate language, or even admit it exits is a political choice, closely tied to national identity. For instance, there is technically a New Zealand English, but it's essentially identical to Australian English aside from some minor differences in pronunciation.

So, I don't see why people should really care if they see the Australian flag appears in the language menu.
Had great experiences with https://buydomain.guide/ as a buyer. (six figures for a company I worked with previously)