What we're describing at this point is effectively the same as a system of automatically flagging users as potential criminals based on something as manipulable as a filename.
459 karma · joined February 10, 2021
https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/05/apple-icloud-photos-scanni...
Versus:
https://blog.roboflow.com/nerualhash-collision/
Along with:
https://github.com/anishathalye/neural-hash-collider
Demonstrates blatant incompetence on the part of Apple's design. At this point, trust is broken. That's the end of credibility regarding any other claim made about the security or base function of the system.
As for a simple example of one of many potential attack vectors (search HN for "neuralhash" and read the comments for countless examples), here is a basic attack:
As Apple's hash algorithm is entirely broken and useless, a malicious actor can easily craft a NSFW, but otherwise legal image, that has a hash matching one in the CSAM database, that is visually ambiguous in that context (for example, a close-up). Targeted attacks could be launched on unsuspecting victims as simply as sending them an image.
If their app is configured to auto-save to iCloud - as some are by default, and as many are configurable to be - the image will then get automatically flagged as a match, and may well potentially pass a human review - because the image may indeed look just like CP - and an innocent person, who may not even be aware of the presence of the image in their iCloud library at this point, may get visited by the police.
That in itself is bad enough.
However it gets worse - do bear in mind that "the police" is not an equivalent concept across nations, yet iPhones are ubiquitously used across the world. In certain countries, a "visit from the police" over such automatically-flagged content could well result in presumption of guilt to the point of immediately administered punishment and a destroyed innocent life.
In China for example, conviction rates are routinely 99.99% - being accused of a crime there is equivalent to being convicted, and that's just one major country containing well over 100 million iphone users.
Apple is demonstrating not only gross incompetence in this design of this "system", but vagrant disregard for human rights, along with utterly destroying their own long-cultivated pro-privacy stance.
It's a disaster for them and their customers in every possible way it could be.
The point about selectively choosing data, how to process it, etc is important, and often overlooked. People are accustomed to working with what they're given, but objectivity may be a step further back.
Regardless, such things can only be better revealed by providing the data.
If the goal is greater illumination, there is simply no argument to be made against greater transparency.
Your question is essentially equivalent to: "If you don't believe what the politician said about the event, why would you believe the video recording of it?"
Apple is trying to automate and computerise a process that was not automated previously, apply it to a huge number of people, and with disastrous potential consequences should their wonderful design be found lacking.
And within days, they have already utterly failed to provide one of their own self-stated and incredibly obvious requirements. What else could possibly go wrong?
Further, if you think that because the first pre-image failure found (in days...) was a grey blob, that this means all future possible cultivated collisions will only ever be grey blobs, well - good luck with that.
Introducing the people asking us to trust them with the responsibility of mass, automated crime accusations.
It's maybe similar to predicting the weather - we can have all the perfect equations in the world for fluid dynamics and heat flow etc, but until we have system-invisible temperature and humidity sensors for every square millimetre of atmosphere and earth volume, we won't be able to predict the weather very accurately or very far ahead.
As far as I'm concerned, if rats are shown to get cancer from something for which there are many alternatives, I'll steer clear of it.
Regardless, where did you get the idea it's "practically universally" consumed?
Taking soda for example, people typically either do or don't drink diet soda, and in much of the beverage chillers I've seen "diet" is stocked in the minority (with limited regional variation). Bear in mind diet itself is fractured into aspartame and stevia and various others.
Similarly, aspartame or sorbitol or other artificial sweeteners are presented as an option for most hot drinks, alongside sugar - in my experience it's the sugar constantly being replaced on the table.
Looking at packaged foods, I can find few products containing it, and again, packaged foods are only a subsection of all foods out there.
Also there are those among us who consume predominantly (in many cases only) fresh vegetables, fruit, grains, legumes etc.
Look at India, China, Africa, and everywhere in between - this is well over half the worlds population and while many are exposed to at least a small selection of packaged foods, few can afford them, and many simply have no interest.
Just a cursory glance and very rough estimate showed 6000 metric tonnes of Nutrasweet produced in 2014. Divided into a population of 7.8 billion gives each person less than a gram per year.
Aside from the fact that like all products a chunk of that will go back to landfill unsold, there simply isn't nearly enough for it to be universally consumed.
Disagree.
Something this ludicrously intrusive, over-reaching, reckless and trust-destroying is a dealbreaker for exactly the demographic of technology enthusiasts who influence others purchasing. It may not be instantaneous, but it would certainly propagate.
It's anecdotal, but I know zero people who are NOT reconsidering even lifelong loyalty to Apple over this.
It's just too crazy big a wrong, it's like the company just had a nuke go off inside it and is trying to pretend nothing happened.
They may as well have announced a partnership with Trump to put MAGA engravings on all future products, and then in the ensuing furore say they "regret the confusion", whilst carrying on with it regardless.
Though I suppose in that scenario they'd at least be targeting a significant market.
The same can't be said for the size of "sign me up for software-automated police raids" market. A market whose naiveity-induced initial "size" would rapidly shrink after the first few innocents went down, as they absolutely would.
I mean depending on the targets chat software preferences, could a malicious actor potentially ruin an Apple iOS users life just by sending them an image?
There are many troubling scenarios one could imagine. In fact, there is nothing but troubling scenarios.
It's not a can of worms so much as a wormhole, blasting an endless stream of worms at the speed of light.
I'm left not just questioning Apple's leadership, but - honestly - their mental faculties. Really.
No innocent person wants to walk around with an automated snitch in their pocket - I mean, hacking? Bugs? Oversights? Just the overall preponderance of fear that every millisecond you walk around with this thing, it - and its parent corporation and all the depersonalised machinations that go along with it - could be busy organising a blithely mistaken police raid on your family?
Say, because someone you've never met, sent you a message on that new chat app you forgot you installed, that autosaves all media to your iCloud? Or because someone stole the spare phone you keep in a drawer at work, used it for God-knows what and you didn't even notice it was gone? Or, maybe your teenage son got sent something from his teenage girlfriend who unbeknownst to any of them had her phones images uploaded and subsequently catalogued and flagged? Or any number of other entirely plausible scenarios that provide the very reason we have law enforcement protocols and procedures for reporting crimes and that are complex, nuanced and have evolved over hundreds of years and mountains of cases into a massive structure that exists primarily to protect the innocent from exactly this kind of freaking crazy shit?
And Apple expects people to pay them to carry the weight of all that around with them?
Or their TV scans every frame displayed and every word said if it sees anything the TV manufacturer thinks is illegal it's reported to the police?
Or their blender has an array of chemical sensors in it, and if it detects a substance the manufacturer thinks is illegal it's reported to the police?
How about smart floorboards that detect illegal dancing by women in Iran? Shall we do that too?
Apple where are you on that one? I can point you to a country filled with eager customers, seems right up your alley.
But, it's better than nothing, and at least documents who started what. In the case of Berlin recently, it was particularly shocking.
For an example of underrepresentation, "160k" was the "official" figure for the totality of France recently in the few mainstream media reports. Most "official" figures, if they report at all, are multiple factors low, or in same cases orders of magnitude too low.
Eg, just the single public square in Paris (place de la concorde) protestors have occupied in most protests, easily holds much more than 160k, on its own. That was just one square in one (albeit the biggest) city that day.
Find drone shots or timelapses to make estimates, for example: odysee.com/@alltheworldsastage:0/Aug-7th-Paris---Montpellier-France-Massive-Anti-Vaccine-Passport-Protests-Libert%C3%A9-Manifestations:2?
(Absolutely don't endorse this channel or anything - but this bit of content in this case is largely unedited or editorialised, and is sourced.)
If you find a good visual source, use one of various free crowd estimator tools to see for yourself. Draw lines on the map and drag a slider for crowd density - eg the above-mentioned square in Paris is 50k for a light crowd, up to 200k+ for a packed crowd - and the protests meet the definition of packed.
There are no easily-accessible, centralised and vetted sources of indisputable information during times of widespread censorship - you simply have to go look and do the work of vetting it yourself. Beware sometimes it's mislabelled/misinformation, eg, actually shots of a world cup celebration (likely intended to discredit). It's not hard to be discerning however - if absolutely everyone is holding the countries flag and there are no signs, it's likely a sports or other national celebration. If some are holding flags and others are holding signs saying "liberte" it's a protest. You need to learn the foreign words for freedom and vaccine passport at least.
In Italy it's easy as the word for "no" is the same as English and the word for vaccine passport is "green pass": so "no green pass", as various members of parliament ambushed the center of a parliament session and held up signs saying so recently.
You can bet if multiple members of parliament are flooding the central chamber of government of a major European country with protest signs, then protests are at least in the millions.
Specifically, stating it directly leads to wild denials, ostracisation, persecution and generally overwrought and unjustifiable discombobulation from many - as they puff about unwilling to accept it.
From a less-reticent perspective:
"On 12 July the British Government announced that it will be strongly encouraging vaccine passports for venues and events to exclude the unvaccinated from public life. Although they say this is a voluntary act of discrimination, they have explicitly stated that they retain the option to make this mandatory in the future, as they also retain the option to resume police state measures as and when they please. The French government co-incidentally announced the same measure on the same day, only going much further, barring the unvaccinated from cafes, metro etc, and mandating vaccination of health workers – which is to say, putting the unvaccinated out of work. They follow the Irish and Greek governments which have brought in similar measures, along with other countries and states worldwide.
The long-term effects of these measures will be disastrous. It will normalise the discrimination, exclusion and persecution of a section of the population.
[...]
Never underestimate how powerful the motive to retain one’s self image is. The longer this goes on and the more brutal the measures enforced the more powerful this motivation becomes. The difficulty of admitting you have been fooled is directly proportional to how much and for how long you have been fooled. Perhaps my labelling of the new regime as fascist will make it even more difficult for people to break from it, as the immediate instinct is self defence – ‘I’m not a fascist. This guy’s a lunatic, he’s calling me a fascist!’"
https://leftlockdownsceptics.com/2021/07/collaboration-or-re...
It hides - and so persists - deep beneath people's therefore ever-increasing unwillingness to face the reality of the consequences of what they've consented to.
Such self-absorbed puffery is the hallmark of any similar regime, and those "toeing the line", which at the moment - is a large number - are of course puffed-up along with the "upper brass" they've aligned themselves with and dutifully follow, and so reap the benefits reserved for and bestowed upon only those who conform, do what they're told, and further dispense those orders to others they themselves see as subordinate.
It's pathetic to watch, will come crashing down eventually, and as the dust settles, those who were ostracised and persecuted for questioning it, will lead us back. As always.
https://mobile.twitter.com/BretWeinstein/status/141654059008...
(Spoiler: not much.)
Do I read correctly to mean Nebulus could potentially be used as a replacement for p2p file xfer, such as per wormhole? Any caveats with such a usecase?
(Also, just FYI there's a one-letter typo with the first sub-title under API)
Oh, but then that entirely sensible and understandable action might get one censored, deleted, fired, fined and/or discriminated against as a third class citizen. Cui bono?
Concepts such as law, order and defence are topics that readily devolve - precisely because of widespread mental deficiency - into counter-productivity.
The base useful question we can ask as a species supposedly seeking peace, is how to best cultivate the material and mental means that demonstrably create it in us.
We don't stop people killing and harming each other by figuring out how to kill/harm them (or threaten to do so), by ever more powerful means.
We stop people killing each other by figuring out how to stop them (and us) wanting to do anything remotely like that in the first place.
Unless we change direction, we will end up where we're going.
The imagination being entertained here is your own; that humanity's future from this point could be even remotely similar to anything that's ever happened before.
Every choice we make as a whole now is of extreme importance, and almost nothing we can conceive of can be sensibly considered to be off the table.
I made a statement, on-topic, about the nature and history of censorship, Google's credibility as arbiter of truth, and how naked they appear now as a result of how extreme they've become in that self-appointed role.
If you're not a bot, maybe try reading it again with that understanding?
In history, it has always been those engaging in widespread censorship who turn out to be disastrously and/or maliciously wrong.
The science now being censored has become so well-established, that at this point, Google/YT et al, has and will delete and suppress the sharing of peer-reviewed science published in mainstream journals and indexed in PubMed.
That 100% ends their credibility. I deplore anyone expecting an explanation as to why.
Anyone yet standing by such incredulous, irresponsible and/or actively-malicious action, reveals themselves as same, for all to see.
I will try to do better myself. I'm sure I am sometimes guilty of same.