skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And the percentage of their revenues that's derived from tracking and adds.
No. They calculate a hash on the device, but they only do it as part of the iCloud upload. So whether the hashing happens on the device or on the server, the same images get hashed either way.
Ethics aside, on-device scanning has the benefit of Constitutional protection, at least in the USA. Any attempt by the Government to compel Apple to expand the on-device searching of privately owned devices to find other things would be a clear-cut 4th Amendment violation.
>It would be more surprising if citations and usefulness were anti-correlated in some way.

I have definitely seen some highly cited and influential papers overstay their welcome and hold the field back.

That's not to say they didn't propel the field forward when they were initially published, just that their overbearing influence causes us to stick to a paradigm that is no longer producing results.

"Science progresses one funeral at a time" and all that.
Never heard of this before, but it seems like it was a class-based Battle Royale created 25 years ago? Wow, that was way ahead of the times.
I doubt finding it would really be that hard, if you wanted to be on a list somewhere in some government database, but even armed with a full image that is in the NCMEC database, the problem is that the second hashing algorithm runs on the server and presumably has secure-by-obscurity details… so it would be hard to collide with it on purpose unless you are an insider. That’s my understanding, although details have been a bit shaky at times.
It's not even that, it's that they're doing so to give a religious justification to a stance that is inherently non-religious, knowing that the veneer of Christianity that they slather on their views will make it easier to sell.
Now, how about the Apple II version? (Yes, I know there are "places.")
I'd argue you can't reconstruct a country at all.
Japanese houses usually lasts at least 40 years unless serious disaster (not earthquake, but like heavy typhoon or tsunami), maybe over 60 years if properly maintenanced. Any house won't last 20 years must be blamed. But just people may don't want to live in 40 years used old house but want only the land.
Their spokesperson basically said women would be allowed to go to school, work, hold office and similar but it definitely does not sound like complete freedom since they would need to wear the head scarfs (not burkas) . When pressed, his justification was Islam. I truly hope they will be at least that moderate and not do what they did the last time they were in power.

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-58223530
Then simply disable iCloud Photos sync.

It's bizarre to me that people are freaking out about governments adding client side hashes but no concern that they could be doing server side checks.
The "send known CSAM" attack has existed for a while but never made sense. However, this technology enables a new class of attacks: "send legal porn, collided to match CSAM perceptual hashes".

With the previous status quo:

1. The attacker faces charges of possessing and distributing child pornography

2. The victim may be investigated and charged with child pornography if LEO is somehow alerted (which requires work, and can be traced to the attacker).

Poor risk/reward payoff, specifically the risk outweighs the reward. So it doesn't happen (often).

---

With the new status quo of lossy, on-device CSAM scanning and automated LEO alerting:

1. The attacker never sends CSAM, only material that collides with CSAM hashes. They will be looking at charges of CFAA, extortion, and blackmail.

2. The victim will be automatically investigated by law enforcement, due to Apple's "Safety Voucher" system. The victim will be investigated for possessing child pornography, particularly if the attacker collides legal pornography that may fool a reviewer inspecting a 'visual derivative'.

Great risk/reward payoff. The reward dramatically outweighs the risk, as you can get someone in trouble for CSAM without ever touching CSAM yourself.

If you think ransomware is bad, just imagine CSAM-collision ransomware. Your files will be replaced* with legal pornography that is designed specifically to collide with CSAM hashes and result in automated alerting to law enforcement. Pay X monero within the next 30 minutes, or quite literally, you may go to jail, and be charged with possessing child pornography, until you spend $XXX,XXX on lawyers and expert testimony that demonstrates your innocence.

* Another delivery mechanism for this is simply sending collided photos over WhatsApp, as WhatsApp allows for up to 30 media images in one message, and has settings that will automatically add these images to your iCloud photo library.
As someone who has been a part of the demo scene in the 90s I find this offensive.

Generative art can be a wildly creative process on par with anything a painter works through. It's just a different medium.

The way you express yourself through art is not threatened by people choosing other ways using different tools. Painting did not become obsolete because someone invented art photography.

I do agree with the sentiment about NFT 'artists' though. Copy pasting a colab notebook, replacing a string and selling the result as NFT is just idiotic.

I wonder who the bigger fool is. The one who sells or the one who buys.

Demoscene Wikipedia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene

Wired article about the demo scene from 1995
https://www.wired.com/1995/07/democoders/
I have a feeling they already did a test of this with some small sample of people who did not know they were test subjects. I think that in the future it will come out that what they found was disturbing enough that they thought doing it network wide was a worth while endeavor.

This is not me agreeing or disagreeing.
Something initially very light and small (PowWow) turned into something very... not. Is second-system effect the right term here?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

> The second-system effect or second-system syndrome is the tendency of small, elegant, and successful systems to be succeeded by over-engineered, bloated systems, due to inflated expectations and overconfidence.
> If Apple's reviewers see 30 CSAM matches and the visual derivatives look like porn

Even worse, just get a "teen" porn screengrab, pass it through the collider and you have pretty much a smoking gun
A lead engineer at Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin has left to join Elon Musk's SpaceX
SAGE was truly impressive.

I can't dig up the link right now but highly recommend reading the manuals they wrote for engineers working on the computer. They are from the good old days when manuals were closer to textbooks than what we have now - it starts with the basics of logic and electronics and basically intuits the computer inductively from there.
> other major cloud providers catch CSAM content on their platform by inspecting every file uploaded

So does Apple.

EDIT: some people don’t like that answer, but “inspecting” in this context clearly means “digitally inspecting” (Google does not physically look at every file) and Apple does this with files that are uploaded. They do it in device, but it’s still inspected. That’s the whole point of this controversy, that there’s not much difference to people WHERE apple inspects and on device is actually arguably worse. Your sentence does not in any way distinguish what Apple does from what others do.
I came to this site out of interest to see how people were responding only to find people hiding behind pseudonyms and bashing a company that does a shit ton of amazing tech. I’m half tempted to ask RvSucks what their real name is so I could give them a 360 review instead of hiding behind a keyboard.

It’s just funny to me how much angst some people have because of THEIR bad experience when thousands would say they have a great one.

I hope everyone the best. To each their own. But for me, at least for the foreseeable future, I’ll be at RV - building cool shit and being part of an amazing company.
Apparently the images in question would get sent to the server, and all calculation happens there.

> In a call with reporters regarding the new findings, Apple said its CSAM-scanning system had been built with collisions in mind, given the known limitations of perceptual hashing algorithms. In particular, the company emphasized a secondary server-side hashing algorithm, separate from NeuralHash, the specifics of which are not public. If an image that produced a NeuralHash collision were flagged by the system, it would be checked against the secondary system and identified as an error before reaching human moderators.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/18/22630439/apple-csam-neura...

For one reason or another Apple really wants to create this precedent, so it’s only natural they’re doing every last thing to make the feature hard to defeat.
Oh, I see. The parent company, Turbot, has 100+ employees and has been at this for a while.
What makes physics a science and psychology not? Are our brains made of the same matter as the rest of the universe? Surely so. Is it because psychology seeks to describe/predict aggregated phenomena? This is a non-starter. Take for example the derivation of Boyle's law, pv = k, for pressure. Surely this derivation was the result of real scientific inquiry, despite that equation merely describing the aggregate of underspecified and innumerable interactions? Is it instead because brains are too complex for scientific inquiry? I quite understand that, despite the immense technical prowess of physicists and engineers, the problems they seek to elucidate are all said and done, easy. Easy because the complexity is low, easy because the problem space is limited, easy because you can see and control more of the entire picture. Is psychology not a science because its problems are just too hard for physicists to tackle? Or to tackle in way they'd prefer: easy, controlled, identifiable, enumerated??? Is it because you can never *actually* rerun a psychology experiment because people are always different always changing? Well, please refer to the experiments deriving Boyle's law. Each experiment was not an exact replica of the previous, because the innumerable collisions/interactions of molecules will never take the same path through time, no matter how hard we try, because, well hell, quantum physics, or so I am told. Buy Boyle did derive some useful relationships, despite the heterogeneity of subjects/runs, and so has psychology.
what do you mean by presence?
> They say the virtual DOM is the most important feature

Who says that now? I mean, in recent years VDOM seems to be more often criticized as the problem (with performance, but also otherwise) with React, even by people who like its basic dev-facing structure. Which is why you see frameworks with JSX and React-like structure (even Hooks, but without the explicit dependency pain point in the case of Solidjs) whose key selling point is no VDOM.
Joe's Classic Video Games
If your device generates a safety token and it's never uploaded anywhere, that's a no-op.
One of the grosser clean room designs.

It's certainly possible, but I posit that the exploit chain necessary to get the capability to inject photos onto an arbitrary user's iPhone is valuable enough that it's more likely to be used for spying by repressive regimes than straight up blackmail-- and if you had such a capability, why bother with hash-colliding permutations of legal pornography? Why not plant CSAM directly onto the user's device?

Nearly all cloud storage services implement a scanner like this, and permit the same level of blackmail with a simpler attack chain, such as phishing Dropbox credentials to inject illegal material.

I think the more interesting attacks are governments colluding to add politically motivated non-CSAM material to the lists and then requiring Apple allow them to perform the human review to discover dissidents.
Try it. Take 5 companies whose share price reactions might be predictable ahead of time by "most people" and for each of the next 4 quarters make an up/±epsilon/down prediction. See how often you're right.
We are looking at a republican party the majority of which would happily end democracy to end the threat of them ever being tossed out again. Tipping the scales in their direction at this critical juncture to motivate Democrats seems like a spectacularly bad idea.

Seems like it would be a better and safer idea to to work towards the same goal using primaries to tilt already democratic districts in the direction of reformers.
For the 0.3 seconds until they automate emptying accounts...
Leigh Brackett also wrote the screenplay for that movie.
The UK mandated this, possibly the EU also, but it works very well.

https://www.openbanking.org.uk/what-is-open-banking/
It's maybe best thought the other way. Immigrants are minorities.
Evraz is making their Colorado mill entirely solar-powered to recycle scrap steel
Somehow this didn't solidify my trust in Apple! By this standard you can probably mount a half decent defence off "ignorance" if you are even caught sending the colliding material. Add this whole debacle on top of what's going on in the EU parliament and 2021 has been WILD for privacy.
>SSNs are not universal, either. There are some unions and religious groups that have legal exemptions.

Exempt from participating in social security (the program), not exempt from having a social security number. In fact, getting a social security number is the first step in applying for an exception from social security. Basically, SSA needs to track you as being exempt from social security, which requires a unique identifier.
It is super weird to me that no big compile-to-Go languages have emerged. It doesn't seem like anyone is even trying! Why not?
Well, there are reports that the Taliban have gained control of a bunch of biometric scanning and reporting tools used by the US forces in Afghanistan so...
My team is working on a very large Elm codebase for over 3 years now, we got a runtime error in production only once (stack overflow when parsing an unusually large file, made it tail call optimized to get rid of it).

I will consider it sticking to it's promise of no runtime errors.
Yes, they are old. WoW came out in 2005 and is old enough to be classic.
There is no feedback loop to support the development of the attack. Apple in this case would just be filtering and ignoring false positives without notifying the attacker if they were successful or not.

I still don't quite see how the 'worm' would work in practice. It's not just a matter of sharing a link to an image, but you have to add it to your photo album. Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't have a single meme-type image in my album.

I don't think this can be classed as a security by obscurity problem. Security by obscurity fails because they 'key' (the obscure bit) can't be easily changed if it leaks. But given Apple has both the target and candidate images available to it, it can in effect generate a new key at the expense of having to do additional computation.
The human review phase is supposed to explicitly prevent that. Im not sure I would but my faith there, especially if its a flood of colisions and they are rated/paid on case clearance rate.

Further, this is step 1 of a process they have explicitly said they are looking to expand on [1], even going as far to state it in bold font with a standout color.

So theres no telling that they wont expand it by simply scanning everything, regardless of icloud usage, or pivot it to other combat "domestic terrorism" or "gun violence epidemics" or whatever else they feel like.

Its an erosion of trust, even if not a full stop erosion, its something they intend to expand upon and wont be taking back.

[1] https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/Expanded_Protections_...
I made it to the end, but it was hard. Partway through, I was thinking that it would be cool to re-watch the whole series after it was done to see everything fit together but after that final season, I had zero desire to watch anything to do with the series at all.
Review: Why FP Matters (Hughes)
Cities with public transit still have roads, if that's what you prefer. More people on trains means less people on the roads, which is better for everyone. I think people should have free choice over what mode of transport they use, but in America right now the only option is: car.
This is not true and a harmful generalization. There are dumb people of every type. There are probably smart people you respect that engage in CSAM and are minor-attracted. This kind of privacy invasion will only net a tiny section of that population, as most know that lack of caution is life or death.
I honestly don't see a good reason.

The process is commonly abused by divorce lawyers to gain control of the house for their client, and the bar for evidence is extremely low. The way our adversarial justice system is supposed to work is that the truth comes out in a fair fight. This process obviously ignores this foundation.

If there's really enough evidence to suggest immediate violence, then they should be arrested for terroristic threats and other stuff. And let's not forget that the protective order is just a piece of paper and won't stop any violence if the person is truly motivated.

Frankly, I think a lot of civil court actions have been created just to avoid the protections guaranteed in the criminal system.
So, what does Apple get out of all this, except negative attention, erosion of their image, possible privacy lawsuits, etc?

I just don't understand what Apple's motivation would have been here. Surely this fallout could have been anticipated?
> Most would answer that they don’t know exactly but think it was in the 60’s.

I think this is an important point. Humans and Google have a similar bias (for different reasons) that they want to be helpful or seem knowledgeable when asked a question, so won't say "I am confused by that question" and will rather give an answer to a question which is similar to a question that they can understand, in the hopes that it is approximately right.

In the case of asking when Neil Armstrong landed on Mars, guessing "I think it was in the 60's" is accurate to within 10 years but off by 56 million km. For a good example of what average people think about the solar system, though, consider the question "Is the moon really a planet?" that was once part of an impromptu debate on TV:

https://www.cnet.com/news/qvc-stars-confused-about-whether-t...
Not on paper, at least. But socialism is very attractive for hypocrites who want to tell others how to live. In pretty much every country descended into socialism, the founding members were comically frugal on public, but lived a lavish capitalist lifestyles in private. This includes the icon of socialism Lenin.
We currently have 37 open source plugins [1] like AWS, GCP, GitHub, Kubernetes, Hacker News, etc. More are in development by Turbot and community members [2]. Each plugin has many tables, e.g. 223 for AWS [3], 23 for GitHub [4].

The 200+ on the home page is referring to tables. Most tables have a single API source behind them, but others like aws_s3_bucket [5] have ~10 API calls for each row to collect related data like tags, versioning, etc.

(We're excited about the rapid growth of our plugins / tables, but can see that if you read it as plugin == data source then the 200+ would be wildly impressive.)

1 - https://hub.steampipe.io/plugins
2 - https://github.com/topics/steampipe
3 - https://hub.steampipe.io/plugins/turbot/github/aws
4 - https://hub.steampipe.io/plugins/turbot/github/tables
5 - https://hub.steampipe.io/plugins/turbot/aws/tables/aws_s3_bu...
There is a bit of a grey area with respect to insider trading and cancelling a standing 10b5-1 order and the SEC has recently commented that they’ll be looking at those foregone transactions with more scrutiny in the near future: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/06/25/gensler-plans-to-...
Rule the first: Don't talk to the police.

The SEC and the IRS are police.

Obligatory repost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE&t=612s
Or perhaps it’s easier than I thought, since I assumed surely those sources would be fully mined, such that insider knowledge of subscriber numbers wouldn’t be enough to reliably know which way the stock will move after an earnings announcement.
https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-transparency-biggest-si...

"The answer: memes. From his personal account, which has more than 120,000 followers, Jacke posts a steady stream of low-rent viral memes that have nothing to do with the Packers, adding the URL of his business to the top of the post. We’re talking the likes of “Pick one cookie variety to live without,” or “Give yourself a point for each of these that you’ve done.” "

Perhaps a more interesting quote -

"It’s remarkable that the data Facebook chose to publish"
Clicking on the graphics seems to open a corresponding blog post.
For now. Wait until the FBI comes knocking with a warrant.
Designing Virtual Worlds is free for download
A couple of my banking institutions let me generate a read-only set of credentials for this sort of purpose.

Citi and Capital One have OAuth flows that Plaid supports, too, which tends to make me angrier at the banks than Plaid; the need for this stuff has been clear for a decade now, but only a few have added OAuth or similar.
> Isn't one of the key tenants of socialism that almost all power is consolidated into the hands of the few

No, oligarchy is not a key tenet of socialism. You may be thinking of Stalinism.

Pure socialism would tend toward extreme democracy, where the government controls all things, but all workers have equal say in what the government does.

The editor[1] of Current Affairs describes himself as a libertarian socialist[2] -- someone who strongly opposes centralized rule by a small number of people (or single person).

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_J._Robinson

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism
What is comparable in comparative cognition? (2012)
Why would anyone save CSAM to their photo library?
Chat, forums, and email were the killer apps. Also, wandering around web directories.
The integrity of this entire system now relies on the security of the CSAM hash database, which has just dramatically increased in value to potential attackers.

All it would take now, is for one CSAM hash to be known to the public, then uploading collided iPhone wallpapers to wallpaper download sites. That many false positives will overload whatever administrative capacity there is to review reports in a matter of days.
It seems like it’s a great way to get ideas. A lot of art (for some artists at least) is a little bit of throwing stuff on the wall before your taste spots something forming. That’s when the ‘human’ artist kicks in, but everything before that is a lot of just trying shit.
Motte and Bailey much?

"Well you can turn it off" to "Well, but then you just don't trust Apple".

Clearly these are users who did trust Apple. Apple betrayed their trust. Given that Apple bulk handed over iCloud data to China, I don't really believe their pinky promise that they are, by policy only, going to resist government use of this tech. They can cave to government cases _and_ the government can certainly force them to.
What if I want concept art for my card game? Would this AI be helpful in that case?
You should watch the documentary Tim's Vermeer.