therealjumbo

On a technical level I think you're correct. As a holistic approach to the problem, I still disagree. This is too cute for its own good. The PR misunderstanding is a symptom of that.

>The second scan applies only for those images which are flagged as positive, which are then accessible by Apple.

In the end, Apples software is scanning all of the images, why is it any more privacy respecting to do it this way? I guess reasonable people can disagree on that, personally I wasn't fully aware of the cloud side scanning either, and I don't think the public was either. This is similar to Snowden's revelations, if you were paying attention you probably already knew a lot of that, but the incident made everyone aware of it in a very blunt way.

>The rest of the images stays encrypted

I think this is unclear, Apple can still decrypt those other images, how else could you view them in a browser?

This goes back to what Stratechery said about capability vs policy.

You're exposing the hashes to the world, you're not able to E2E encrypt anything if you need to server side scan, which you probably do since trusting the client no matter what is generally bad in potentially adverserial situations, and you get all this negative press and loss of reputation and potentially pressure from governments around the world to use this for other ends. Cui Bono?

Governments have a very long ugly history.

You said earlier upthread, that HN is ignoring the tradeoffs. I find that distasteful, people have considered the tradeoffs of this and they don't like them, but that doesn't mean they need to preface every single statement about the thing with "well actually i've considered the tradeoffs, and I've found them to be blah, and..." That would quickly get tiresome which is why people don't do it.

I'll make a different, similar generalization. Like most people pushing this, you are pretending to care about the "tradeoffs", but you don't. You don't care about the downsides, you just say you do, and then blithely ignore them when they are brought up. What's the golden rule again?

This is dangerously naive. The US justice system alone will hound people on goosed up charges and try to get people to accept a plea deal and write a bogus confession. Parallel construction. Additionally if you can't audit the database (I'd bet very few people can, including your senator) how do you know a hash of something not CP wasn't inserted into the database. This entire system screams ready for govt overreach. It's worse than normal since there'll be no public evidence when it's abused.

Just like the Patriot Act and the no fly list, it's only a very short matter of time until this is expanded to Android and more importantly, non-CP content. The only difference is its the other party doing it this time, in both cases its "to catch bad guys" and "for your own good".

How are you measuring the ROI of security efforts inside an OSS distro like debian or nixos? The effort in such orgs is freely given, so nobody knows how much it costs. And how would you calculate the return on attacks that have been prevented? Even if an attack wasn't prevented you don't know how much it cost, and you might not even know if it happened (or if it happened due to a lapse in debian.)

>So far exploits on FOSS kind of prove the point not everyone is using Gentoo, reading every line of code on their emerged packakges, let alone similar computing models.

Reproducible builds is attempting to mitigate a very specific type of attack, not all attacks in general. That is, it focuses on a specific threat model and countering that, nothing else. It's not a cure for cancer either.

>Now if we are speaking about driving the whole industry to where security bugs, caused by using languages like C that cannot save us from code reviews unless done by ISO C language lawyers and compiler experts in UB optimizations, are heavily punished like construction companies are for a fallen bridge, then that would be interesting.

This is just a word salad of red herrings. Different people can work on different stuff at the same time.

Experience has shown that for c code for the first two, no it won't. And for any language code, manual audits won't find issues in the last category either. It may help, but it won't excise them all (or even close to all). To get them out, you need real world testing. The system that sees more real world usage, probably gets more testing. Any security analysis would want to take this into account also.

My earlier point about "what do you want to get out of your systems" is that you alluded to the reliability of debian being desirable. Distro maintainers by and large switched to systemd since it saved them a ton of work. They could then spend that extra time on the rest of the activities of being a distribution. So debian could focus on being more debian-like instead of debian-like + maintaining a creaky init system. So if what you want is debian, and you see very few distros like it that also don't have systemd, think about why and if what you're asking is detrimental to the other goal of what you want.

FWIW, I've maintained embedded linux distros at a couple companies, at my most previous employer we used systemd, the current one we don't. It isn't the right choice in all scenarios, but it is a lot of the time.

Similarly, for systemd-init, the comparison should be, the other init system + all the code for the init scripts + all the code for all the utilities that are called inside the init scripts not counting the program being started. You should be looking at the system as a whole, not just a part of it.

I think it sounds like you should seriously sit down and think about why don't you want systemd, but answer some other questions first. You're running windows with all of its telemetry and longstanding security and performance issues but a different init system on Linux is holding you back? That doesn't seem right, I would sit down and honestly think about what you're trying to accomplish with your machines and why. And why does linux vs windows help vs hinder that goal? Then why does glibc or systemd hinder that goal?

I think most people's objections to systemd sound similar to google's objection to systemd. Their objection amounted to "complexity in PID 1" and security. Around the same time they pushed android binder into the kernel, which is just yet another reimplentation of IPC. That spawned some very serious security issues. If they really didn't like the current IPC systems, they probably could have (and should have) implemented one of them on top of AF_UNIX sockets in userspace. So at the end of the day, they apparently don't take "security" as seriously as their objections to systemd would have you believe. What it really boils down to is that they don't like the piece of software for some vague hard to define reason. Ok sure, but that isn't going to help you accomplish your designs since it doesn't inform you on what direction your design should go. I would try to articulate why I don't like it very precisely, and then back it up with data. I can make that argument for windows for example. If I can't do that then my objection was probably emotional and irrational.

So people or stories get banned even if they are true for some other reasons. You don't know what those reasons are, and they may change going forward.

Why isn't "if you don't like it leave" a productive suggestion in pretty much any case?

Per the guidelines of this site, we are recommended to take the most charitable interpretation of the other commenter's post. Similarly, you could pay more heed to the more nuanced arguments of the other political side, and just ignore the non-productive arguments like "if you don't like it leave." Throwing that suggestion back over the wall, isn't going to lead to a productive conversation.

Google messing around with their app store is peanuts compared to the government banning or restricting 3D printers because they could be used to evade gun control for example.

We wouldn't be having this conversation if the things labeled extremism and thus banned from platforms was limited to ISIS and literal Nazis. It's been far more far-reaching than that. That's probably due to the incentives, not due to actual extremism.

So if extremism is subjective, it will be leveraged in that manner and you can't stop that behavior without removing the incentive. That's the point, not what is or isn't labeled as extremism today, that's just dragging the conversation back into the political gutter.

So the harm seems proportional to the harm done by refusing to bake that wedding cake for the gay couple.

How do you deal with bad actors? How do companies like ebay deal with bad actors in this realm?

>I get worried when people promote the idea that compelling others speech is pro free speech. It's the modern newspeak.

That is essentially what the woke crazies do all the time by getting people fired and other economic consequences if they don't fall in line.

Conversely, I think other people are criticizing the decision of the company, and the company culture that lead to the decision. That's different than compelling speech or considering using the gov't to compel speech.

The stated reason for this bill is a bald-faced lie. The bear population in CA has been exploding. A good overview of the bill here: https://www.outdoorlife.com/story/hunting/california-black-b...

Even more galling, is that this is being sponsored by the humane society, who's goal is to end hunting of all types, a little bit at a time. They've sponsored legislation in all states and at the federal level. They should lose their non-profit status.

EDIT: Disclaimer, I'm from WI, not CA.

The dealer sold meth to somebody who was obviously far, far beyond the point of being able to drive, got their money, and sent them back on the road merrily. This dealer is also selling to somebody who obviously has almost no money (besides the bit scraped together to pay for the drugs), was just released from prison, and is addicted to both hard drugs and alcohol.

Ya, I'd say dealers are pretty much scum of the earth.

* I don't see how that wouldn't solve any problem with actual gun crime. Cars are required to be registered since they are meaningfully "operated" in public peacefully, guns aren't. For cars this is different because you can see the license plate, whether or not the registration is current, everybody has one... Nobody that wants to remain in good legal standing would drive an unregistered (unlicensed, uninsured...) car on a public road. Outside of concealed carry and a couple political protests, nobody is carrying guns around in public except criminals. Non-criminals shoot their guns on private property like ranges, and transport them in their vehicles on public roads. The latter has never been a problem. And lastly, criminals aren't going to follow silly restrictions like "get your gun registered before you carry it in public to go murder somebody."

* People are paranoid (probably rightfully so) about a gun registration database. This would not only confirm their fears, it wouldn't be useful for combatting crime making the paranoia worse.

If you take a look at CA's gun laws, almost all of them are laughably stupid to the point that they restrict cosmetic features, and where they don't, they don't meaningfully stop somebody from committing a violent offense with a gun. If you understand how guns work you understand this simply: the gun laws in places like CA are meant to stifle gun culture not prevent crime (since they are laughably ineffective) or they are written by people who are very, very, ignorant of how guns actually work. In the latter case, it has the former effect.

I definitely don't have the experience you do, but the regular judicial system (in most countries that aren't kafka-esque throughout history) has adversarial parties that are incentivized to find if the other party is wrong. That's very different from all the corporate, university or open source "governance" systems. Maybe they can't bear that additional cost, but it's a huge difference.

Specifically:

>No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, ... , enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State

In this case, since such a deal is changing how the president is elected, and changing the balance of power between states and the fed, it could probably be seen as encroaching on federal power. So simply getting congress to pass a resolution approving it (which in theory would solve the "consent of congress") wouldn't fly like it would with an interstate compact dealing with something more mundane and less political like water rights, or mutual deal on air pollution between several neighboring states.

Disclaimer: IANAL, this is not legal advice etc.

EDIT: if you can get that many states to agree to it, then you could have just done a constitutional amendment. since all you need for that is for the states to agree, and the senate to agree. Senators come from the states.

So... if you can't get it passed that way, it doesn't pass the smell test.

Mozilla's contract with google was just renewed, and is roughly the same amount of money they were making before. COVID had essentially no impact on their finances, and this is all corporate PR bullshit.

It also seems like with every breakthrough this complaint is raised without addressing the underlying issues with the new AIs shortcomings.

My hot take: true AI is so far out of reach of our ability it's not even funny, which makes the whole field either a search for the fountain of youth at worst, or at best a search for tools to inform humans or to replace humans in rote tasks. See https://youtu.be/orMtwOz6Db0