skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They're not owned by the federal government, but they do get a lot of federal government money.

> The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children® was established in 1984 as a private, nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization. Today, NCMEC performs the following 15 specific programs of work, funded in part by federal grants (34 U.S.C. § 11293):
Source: https://www.missingkids.org/footer/about

US DOJ OJJDP lists recent grants totaling $84,446,366 in FY19 and FY20.
Source: https://ojjdp.ojp.gov/funding/awards/list?awardee=NATIONAL%2...
What abuses apply to CSAM scanning in this hybrid pipeline which don’t apply to iCloud Backup? If they scanned on the server, why couldn’t governments “slippery slope” abuse the system by requiring that all files on iOS end up in iCloud Backup, where they can be scanned by the system?

Since the announcement, I can think of a dozen ways Apple could be easily forced into scanning all the contents of your device by assembling features they’ve already shipped. Yet they haven’t. At some point, people need to produce evidence that Apple cannot hold the line they’ve said they will.
Why everything organic is better than everything
Ok, so you posit an attacker could find/generate 30+ pictures that are

1. accepted by innocent user,

2. flagged as known CSAM by NeuralHash,

2b. also flagged by the second algorithm Apple will run over flagged images server side as known CSAM,

3. apparently CSAM in the "visual derivative".

That strikes me as a rather remote scenario, but worth investigating. Having said that, if it's a 3-letter adversary using Pegasus unhappy with a journalist, couldn't they just put actual CSAM onto the journalist's phone? And couldn't they have done that for many years?
And in English, to go full circle, a con is what a con man pulls; a confidence trick.

Hey BTW, is a JS "const" really constant, or can it (like in some other languages) be changed after all? Because if it can, then it isn't really const but more of a con...
This was specifically about people who cannot get vaccinated for medical reasons. They are only a small fraction of the unvaccinated, and usually the medical reasons that keep them from getting vaccinated also make COVID particularly dangerous for them.
For many use cases biased is good enough.

The topic of unbiased bounded generation is pretty interesting itself and both lemire and M.E. O'Neill (author of pcg) wrote blog posts and an academic paper comparing different approaches (some using as building block the fixed point trick)

https://www.pcg-random.org/posts/bounded-rands.html https://lemire.me/blog/2019/06/06/nearly-divisionless-random... https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.10941.pdf
If anybody with enough motivation can modify any existing harmless image to have the same neural hash as a "tracked database" image this will create too many false positives. Too many false positives make the algorithm useless.

If someone with even more motivation and the means to put those images onto your device via social engineering, exploits or maybe even features and you become the target of a criminal investigation in any jurisdiction you just happen to be at the moment, this makes the algorithm harmful.
How is your integration for DARPA opportunities and SBIRs?
So? That makes it okay to call a distinguished scholar a fraud? (is that a claim Taleb ever made? or just you?)
There is a big difference between shipping a 192px PNG/WebP image and shipping a custom font. Most of the criticisms I mentioned don't apply to something as small and safe as a logo.

Small PNGs with good alt text are not as unsafe, large, and brittle as third party fonts.

You're not responding to what I said; you're responding to a caricature of what you imagine me to be like. Doing so derails the discussion.

Cosmetics can be used, but they need a strict performance budget. I'd say that 50kb of render-blocking/CLS-inducing cosmetics and 250kb total cosmetics would be quite generous for 90% of corporate websites, though I'd rather see much lower sizes and reserve more space for content. I would not count inline images that convey information as part of an article's content in this budget.
Hubspot; Complete Review
They almost certainly will, yes. Especially given that all the popular vaccines are spike protein vaccines only, which are relatively easy for SARS-2 to “learn” how to evade. Exposure to the whole virus provides a much broader set of epitopes for the immune system to learn.

I’d add that anyone who got vaccinated so that they can show proof of vaccination needs to understand that there’s no getting off the train. If you don’t get your booster you’ll be - gasp! - not fully vaccinated.
Sure. But that's a very distinct task vs. the implication that Zoom is somehow making ad revenue off of Linux process names. The latter strikes me as not very likely because there's no money in it; the former is well outside of anything I feel qualified to opine on.
> NECMEC isn’t owned by the government

Even though NCMEC describes itself as "private", it was established by and has been heavily funded by the U.S. government.

From an archive of NCMEC's own history page, cited on Wikipedia (https://web.archive.org/web/20121029010231/http://www.missin...):

> In 1984, the U.S. Congress passed the Missing Children’s Assistance Act which established a National Resource Center and Clearinghouse on Missing and Exploited Children. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children was designated to fulfill this role.

> On June 13, 1984, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children was opened by President Ronald Reagan in a White House Ceremony. The national 24-hour toll-free missing children’s hotline 1-800-THE-LOST opened as well.

$40 million/year of U.S. government funding from a 2013 bill (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_Children%27s_Assistanc...):

> The Missing Children's Assistance Reauthorization Act of 2013 (H.R. 3092) is a bill that was introduced into the United States House of Representatives during the 113th United States Congress. The Missing Children's Assistance Reauthorization Act of 2013 reauthorizes the Missing Children's Assistance Act and authorizes $40 million a year to fund the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Is there a consumer computing device that’s more secure than iPhone against state actors? A Chromebook, maybe?
No, one case is about photos you upload to iCloud Photos only, and the other case is about every single thing in your Google account.

>So if iCloud Photos is disabled, the system does not work, which is the public language in the FAQ. I just wanted to ask specifically, when you disable iCloud Photos, does this system continue to create hashes of your photos on device, or is it completely inactive at that point?

If users are not using iCloud Photos, NeuralHash will not run

https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/10/interview-apples-head-of-p...
Certainly a nice positive message, and there's no doubt that consistency and discipline can take you very far. "Slow and steady wins the race" is a mantra we've all heard before.

But it really depends what "your field" is, and how old you are. For example, good luck pivoting mid-career from software engineering to professional hockey.

Also, "not that hard" means different things to each of us. Some people are so passionate about their hobbies that giving them up to be in the top 10% (according to whatever metric) is not even close to an attractive tradeoff.

In life we all have a trajectory determined by our genetics, environment, childhood, and life decisions. Don't let that limit your imagination and ambition. But you'd be foolish to believe the laws of physics don't apply to you.
Even then it seems that there aren't that many checks you can do, other than:

-warning if different rows have different numbers of columns

-warning if the file ends without closing escaping

Without meta data you can't check data types.

A missing escape character might result in a valid CSV (just not the one intended).
I'm not concerned with this system -- I'm concerned with the things that governments will now start to force Apple (and any computer vendor) to start scanning for on the client side. Once the client side scanning Rubicon is crossed, countries will want vendors to scan everything (not just iCloud folders) for everything (not just CSAM).
Apple already has technology deployed to perform binary file scans of every file on macOS and iOS, and the ability to at any time release signatures for those scans, that are very difficult for normal users to prevent updates for. They've had that for years, maybe even a decade by now, and so far to date we have seen no abuse of that list.

How is Apple's new CSAM list somehow increasing the chances of Apple going rogue, given that we've all been living with that risk for the past X years?
> Personally I’d prefer this than no encryption and scanning in the cloud, which is already possible.

What is also possible: No scanning on your device and encrypted cloud storage. E.g. borg + rsync.net, mega, proton drive.
They lost funding yet work still continued and they know much more on how Geobacter absorb and mineralize nuclear waste today. They are trying to get funds to build a machine to mimic the Geobacter's and have a practical way to attack stockpiles of nuclear waste.

https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2021/bacteria-clean-up-radioac...
There was no nuance in "Big pharma in action".
Come on, "you're just jealous" is the best argument you can come up with? You'd be closer to home if you called me a hypocrite but these are just ways to sidestep the question at hand by attacking me personally. Heat pumps are much more efficient, let's grant, but there's no answer with zero waste heat. I think there's a real question whether, no matter how much everything's electrified, a model where everyone rides a single-occupant car nearly everywhere they go is really sustainable.
Teenagers Are Rediscovering an Old Game About Authoritarianism
Why build anything using msloth products? Completely unnecessary in 2021.
This seems a little bit like claiming that while you can't deliver an aircraft carrier right now, you do have several canoes available and since they both float it's basically the same thing.
Maybe Apple was focused on keeping CSAM off a cloud resource that really is Apple's in both a practical and technical sense. Merely scanning after upload maybe doesn't accomplish that because the material already has arrived in an Apple resource and someone might define that as a failure. Viewed from a perspective of iCloud compliance it sorta makes sense. No one ought to feel a lot of (legal) security deploying a system that could be used to host CSAM, from the Blockchain to whatever, it sounds like a don't-wizz-on-the-electric-fence kind of risk.

Saddened by the privacy-adverse functionality on handsets but Apple seems to be hitting the nail on the head that poor communication principally is driving outrage.
A json serialization (no parsing) library is not going to be 10k+ lines, and it's going to be extremely simple.

You can define a JSON AST type very simply, and then converting that to wire bytes is also quite trivial. Also simple to test via golden testing (you could even use property testing + shell out to jq to validate the json)

https://github.com/nikita-volkov/jsonifier This one is nowhere near 10k lines - and it is heavily optimized and polished!
I'm glad that you're bringing this up, because it's an interesting (almost philosophical question) around what art is.

In my mind, the interesting part in this installation is not necessarily the generated artworks, but rather the fact that they are one push of a button away from being deleted forever. It adds a consumable aspect to the installation, which I think is interesting. Can that evoke emotions and be art in itself?

But that being said, I don't look at myself as an artist. I'm a simple Data Scientist enjoying building projects at the intersection of technology, woodwork and art (whatever that is).
How are those two examples different than before? You can't unupload a photo under either the old or new system. I don't know why we would expect that the scanning feature will be more prone to accidentally scan too many photos compared to the uploading feature accidentally uploading too many photos.

>Many people did trust Apple to keep their files private until now.

And that was my original point. If a pinky promise from Apple is not enough to trust them, then Apple should have never been trusted.
Happy to read about your efforts trying to investigate the issue :)

Personally, I think that there are 2 separate issues: displaying/generating such a panel (including a pic) + the correctness of the informations displayed/generated.

Maybe knowledge panels should just not be generated for sensitive topics (e.g. identify "sensitive material" through keywords?) as in that context the potential for mistakes and/or subjective opinions can be quite high. Or maybe panels containing potential sensitive material should be checked manually before being published and references to the sources of the text/pics should be shown clearly (e.g. like Wikipedia does).

In general, it's absolutely too easy to require the affected people to react & try to get things fixed - people might even be completely unaware of "bad" things being shown about them on Google, they might just feel the after-effect of that. The mistake(s) in this case originated apparently at Google, the user had apparently no involvement with the generation of wrong informations, Google must fix it.

Cheers :)
You may want to try any of the other platforms. For instance, Google Play store.
Take a look at this collision https://twitter.com/SarahJamieLewis/status/14280837442802565...
FWIW our experience has been:
- finding devs with experience is hard
- finding great devs who want to use interesting tooling is easy

In the end, we hire interesting, curious devs, and ask them to use tooling (elm) that has a pretty shallow learning curve.

I think bootstrapping a project in Elm without any experience on the team could be tough, but once you have some expertise, the seeds you plant in yield abundant fruit. At NoRedInk it's been a great success -- especially with regards to "finding other developers".
Ask HN: Any solo founders looking to exchange code reviews?
> "The photos get transferred either way, so one has nothing to do with the other."

That doesn’t change anything. It may be a pre-requisite from the perspective of their business. You replied to me and I didn’t constrain my point to just technicalities.

> So, what on earth are you so invested in that you feel the need to argue minutiae that don't apply?

It does apply. I’m simply pointing out that what you said is not correct.
The young Lauren Bacall somehow looks very contemporary. No idea why...
gut -> liver yes, but the relevant comment I was responding to was about how much dosage does not provide therapy and how it ends up in the water.
Your hash will match to say image 105 of the dataset. Upon visual inspection, your 'legal porn' is going to have to at least look passably like image 105 of the dataset to get anywhere.

So at this point we have an image that computers think is CSAM and people think is CSAM, and when held up next to the original verified horrific image everyone agrees is the same image. At this point, someone is going to ask, rightly so, where that came from.

In order to generate this attack, you have had to go out and procure, deliberately, known CSAM. Ignoring that it would be easier just to send that to the target, rather than hiring talent to recreate the pose of a specific piece of child porn (or 30 pieces to trigger the reporting levels), the most likely person by orders of magnitude to be prosecuted in this scenario is the attacker.
It has been conjectured before, that probably "most published research findings are false" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Most_Published_Research_Fi....
But science is a body of the findings that are confirmed many times, harder and harder to falsify.
why stop there modern medicine is also full to the brim with non tested hypothesis. i,e only recently have we seriously looked at the effects of saline and the placebo effect is well documented phenomenon.
Under the US system as it is, with first-past-the-post voting and all votes for a state going to the presidential candidate who got the most, a third party can't gain any traction. Worse, third parties under the US system are another vehicle for corruption (example: Republicans paying fees and collecting signatures to get Greens on the ballot to divide the left vote and get a Republican in office, though this problem could be fixed with some form of instant runoff). You'd need constitutional reform.

While imperfect, I think that German electoral system is much better. Any party that gets 5% or more of the vote is guaranteed fair representation, gerrymandering isn't a possibility.

However, in a multiparty system deals still have to be struck to put together governing coalitions, so a party that insists on being purist is likely to be shut out.
What about EQ aka emotional intelligence? Your comment betrays a very biased view. Is it at all possible these people are very good at areas you yourself may be considered "low IQ?"

And how are they to work with otherwise? I've worked with many "high IQ" people who were awful colleagues because they had superiority complexes, had no concept of collaboration, were crap communicators, especially for audiences not familiar with their domains, etc.

Meanwhile I've worked with others who may not be traditionally smart, be deeply technical, etc. But they got people. And people liked talking and working with them. And that led to progress, alignment, and less stress.

I know who I'd prefer to work with any day of the week.
Tesla AI Day: what to expect from Elon Musk’s latest big announcement
Yes, but how can a newly founded startup afford to pay for those patents without external funding?

Or the other way around: Why should any investor pay for patents if they don't know whether they'll turn out to be useful in the end?
A huge part of Apple’s value proposition is iCloud. If I have to turn that off to keep the spy out of my OS, it’s value to me is dramatically diminished.
Given that the last major technological generation of thermonuclear weapons in the US was the W88 (1988) nuclear warhead with a non-spherical primary I have a heard time imagining that spending tens of billions of dollars starting a decade later was the primary motivation of the NIF. The primary, of course, would have had nothing to do with fusion research. It is unclear what the direct application of research on a small target using massive lasers would be to current generation thermonuclear weapons.

Yes, they have stated that the nuclear research labs were contacted by the military; but this occurred after the reported test. Its a stretch to claim that the project is thus military.
Yeah, I'm curious! I recall the NSA's XKeyscore was revealed to put Linux Journal readers in watch lists.
Whoa, we must follow very different critics. My impression is that it's usually referenced as a joke, or as an example of how not to do things. I'm not sure I've seen it unironically praised since back when it was still airing.
Hmm, I guess I don't really get the concept. I still don't know how this stops constant interruption from emails, Zooms, and messaging pings.

If the block on my calendar for this is supposed to help stop people contacting me -- well, it doesn't stop them now.

I'm glad this seems to work for some people though.
Intel Arc
When the scanning gets moved from the cloud to being on device, Apple itself cannot see the results of the scan until the risk that the result is only a false positive is greatly reduced.

You would have to have 30 false positives before Apple can see anything, which is unlikely, but the next step is still a human review, since it's not impossible.
I second the L515 as it's much cleaner then the D435(if you need this). That being said the L515 is not like scanning LiDAR, but it's great tool at the price point.
I wouldn't mind an updated standard to CSV that has the type information in the first line with the column labels. I feel like this is all that CSV is really missing. As a format where you can easily see and interact with the data in plain text if you need to nothing really beats CSV but I believe it could be made better, including strengthening standardization. Eg, a CSV standards version header could be put at the top of the file to minimize import export difficulty.
My point is that the same people are also averse to risk. So now that covid essentially forced these companies to outfit and train their teams for remote and build a culture around remote work.. and they found it successful... Pandora's box may have finally been opened on outsourcing.

We live in a different world than a few years ago.

I hope I'm wrong because I'm benefiting from geographical effects and I have no delusions that I'm smarter than almost 6 billion people.
There is already a process for this and so what is being asked here is a change to the law to punish people beyond remedy that is already available in a civil suit.
The article's strongest criticism of CSV is that it's easy for someone to mangle it when manually editing. This is true. It's also true for every format.

It was weakest when it implied there is no real standard. There is, and it's robust for representing data, even data that includes any combination of commas and double-quotes.

The algorithm for creating well-formed CSV from data is straightforward and almost trivial: if the datum has no comma in it, leave it alone. It's good to go. If it has even one comma, wrap the datum in double quotes; and if it also contains double quotes, then double them.

Not complicated and covers every edge case. CSV is going nowhere. 1000 years from now, computers will still be using CSV.

The answer to his objections could be to extend the format to include metadata. Perhaps a second row that holds type data.

fruit,price,expiration
string,$0.00,MM/DD/YYYY
apple,$0.45,01/24/2022
durian,$1.34,08/20/2021

etc
I believe all the DARPA opps will be in sam.gov, in which case the will be in the public version of Govly. If we're wrong here we'll definitely look into specific DARPA opps.

Looking into SBIR now...
There’s more to software than coding. In fact that’s the point of computer science. So think of the business of software. You have an advantage there because you know how the process works.
Some (e.g. Marc Andreessen: https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/flying-x-wings-into-th... ) say, 90% are either wrong or useless.
It's roughly what I would guess as well.
> No one wants to use glass jars

I do. So do many others. Moreover people want what is pushed on them (aka marketing/public relations works).

> Plastics didn't need to push disposables that hard

Funny because they did push them hard. Tough to say how things would have gone if they hadn’t.

> they were already better.

Better in some ways, worse in others. At first it may have seemed like a good idea, but at this point we need to find ways to reduce plastic use.
This is awesome!

I went through the analogous Italian process. We just wanted to sell a dozen solokeys to my university, but university are now required to go through an official process.

It's been so incredibly painful that just the thought to do something like that again (in the US or elsewhere) scared me away.

I have very big hopes for a startup to disrupt in this space, thank you for doing this.

P.S: if anyone is looking for a product to test this out, happy to have you as a reseller :)
Nearly impossible to verify, though, by construction.
Without reading the article, I think I get it! Lol.
GoKart: A static analysis tool for securing Go code
Because there isn't one?