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Comment by nbzso | Hacker News Reader

These features are coming later this year in updates to iOS 15, iPadOS 15, watchOS 8, and macOS Monterey.

The Elephant in the room is "this will be on Mac OS". So the fact that the user cannot have root access to an Apple mobile device is well established by now. But to have my desktop/laptop computer do things on behalf of third party, whatever the "logic", is total madness. This is not some SaaS app. When I buy a car I expect that I am in control. When I buy a computer I care about my control over my property.

What is this madness? Is due process and innocent until proven guilty bed time stories now?

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To be honest, this entire episode is starting to radicalize me.

Everything stallman has said about proprietary software is slowly coming true, and I must admit that now I’m reevaluating a lot of the technology in my life.

As a long time iPhone/Mac user, this change has me seriously looking at Android and Linux for my next devices. Only a couple of months ago I was wondering whether I was too invested in Apple's ecosystem, and what it would take to push me to a competitor. Got my answer surprisingly quickly.

> Next, iOS and iPadOS will use new applications of cryptography to help limit the spread of CSAM online, while designing for user privacy. CSAM detection will help Apple provide valuable information to law enforcement on collections of CSAM in iCloud Photos.

The CSAM scanning is only getting added to iOS and iPadOS. If it does getting added to Mac at some point it will be part of Photos.app, not the general OS.

No one knows. They could make it part of the os. They could even hide the fact that it is there. Like the intel ME stuff. I am switching to Linux for desktop.

People are forgetting here that MacOS is already scanning all your unknown files (not only images) and sending hashes into the cloud.

https://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-yours/

OCSP isn't "scanning". It checks if a certificate is revoked.

https://blog.jacopo.io/en/post/apple-ocsp/

My source was bad, scanning is related to antivirus and is better explained on here: https://eclecticlight.co/2020/08/28/how-notarization-works/

Not forgetting. "Now, it’s been possible up until today to block this sort of stuff on your Mac using a program called Little Snitch (really, the only thing keeping me using macOS at this point)."

I use Little Snitch from version 2. The last MacOs on our company (and personal) computers is Catalina 10.15.7. Switching production to Linux is planned for the near future. We don't care about "how powerful and beautiful is M1" or how "iPhone 13 will break sells records".

The normalization of digital surveillance and digital police state is everywhere. As people that create consumer technologies we take a stance and inform our customers about this and help them make rational decisions for the future.

Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter have historically unprecedented power over people.

Governments are caring more about using this power over people instead of protecting human rights.

Read the actual quote from Apple; https://www.apple.com/child-safety/ These features are coming later this year in updates to iOS 15, iPadOS 15, watchOS 8, and macOS Monterey.* End please, don't be naive. We all are guilty of projecting emotions over corporate marketing tricks and behaving like a children when given a shiny toys.

will i be able to avoid this if i put linux onto my mac?

Presumably yes, this is still OS-level stuff, not Kernel-level. Provided you can actually install Linux; I don't think there's a single stable distro that runs on M1 Macs yet.

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