How long until media players and display devices are hashing all of our media to check for copyright violations. Right now it is effectively impossible for a consumer to buy a TV that doesn't include a computer capable of this.
CSAM is one thing, and from reports it sounds like checking hashes isn't really that effective. However, this paves the way for hash checks for a variety of scary things.
What happens when governments start distributing lists of hashes belonging to "subversive" material (this isn't pipe dream, numerous large countries already block subversive material on the internet).
Slippery slope is vastly oversold as a logical fallacy. It is only a fallacy in the absence of evidence that there is a slope. If there's a multi-decade trend of which this is only a single step, and there's no visible mechanism for making it stop here and go no farther, then the logical fallacy is in believing with no reason that the trend line will stop here.
It is not a fallacy to speak as if this is only the beginning of a huge push into intrusive monitoring. It is a fallacy to pretend otherwise.
Slippery slope is also a fallacy if you take one instance of a trend and then logically project it to an absurd extreme, but this is not what we're doing here. We're simply looking at the next obvious, logical, well-evidenced step, with plenty of people who obviously want this even if they are a bit too discreet to come right out and say it in public.
But it's not a hard leap to see that our rulers today would like to be in full control of everything bit of data we receive and every bit of data we produce and the only things stopping them are technical possibilities and whether or not we'd put up with it. I see nothing else stopping them; not scruples, not morality, no existential awareness of the sheer staggering amount of responsibility they would be pushing on to themselves, no concerns about how it may hurt anyone, nothing.
I think Scott Alexander’s piece on slippery slopes and Schelling fences [1] does a nice job delineating between good- and bad-faith slippery slope arguments.
“Slippery slopes legitimately exist wherever a policy not only affects the world directly, but affects people's willingness or ability to oppose future policies.”
"Slippery slope" is so overused that we forget the original analogy. It needs to have a pressure in one direction and very little to resist that pressure. That is, it has to have a slope and that slope has to be slippery.
In this particular case, it's a slipper slope on which we already have a ton of momentum.
Agree. People, especially from what I see, less socially savy people who need a fool-proof way of trying to win by force any discussion, nowadays have been using logical fallacies and logical soundness of an argument as the ultimate way to win an argument which is BS. There is a reason why our brain evolved to use probability and make logical fallacies to form judgements. Granted, it doesn't work all the time, but it does work A LOT.
Example:
Ad hominem - true, often people start attacking the person in order to escape the argument altogether, and because they have no good counterpoint. But again, this just shows lack of social intelligence. Maybe, we cannot counter-argument that person, but we show that they have ulterior motives, that they are a bad person, and whatever they're cooking, even if it seems ok by their current words, and I can't refute their well thought out position and explain my intuition, he's going to do something bad really soon. So, don't listen to him.
Logical fallacies are useful to be known, but they lately tend to be overused as the end all of "you're making a logical fallacy therefore you fail."
The amount of times someone decries any argument as a slippery slope fallacy based only on the merit that we are trying to figure out a trend is... far too common and it just really upsets you, yah know?
One of the blog posts I'd like to write but probably never will is an examination of the logical fallacies that are fallacies under an Aristotelian, true/false view of the world, but are valid under a Bayesian point of view.
A simple one is that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. It's a "fallacy" because absence of evidence is correctly not proof of absence, so in an Aristotelian framework where something is either true or false, it is indeed a fallacy to claim that absence of evidence proves absence. However, from a Bayesian perspective it is indeed evidence, though one must be careful in how ones works the math to determine how strong that evidence is. Sometimes it's so weak as to be irrelevant, but sometimes it can be overwhelming.
> Slippery slope is also a fallacy if you take one instance of a trend and then logically project it to an absurd extreme, but this is not what we're doing here. We're simply looking at the next obvious, logical, well-evidenced step, with plenty of people who obviously want this even if they are a bit too discreet to come right out and say it in public.
What makes it easy to oversell as a fallacy is that everything you described that defines it is subjective, and easily argued about. People disagree a lot on what's "absurd" or "obvious" or "well-evidenced."
Political leaders feel compelled to provide a “service” in which they “solve” societal problems. Not all problems can be solved across the board, however, so what happens is a sideways motion into violations of privacy in exchange for a visible “difference” in handling illegal behavior which was previously beyond the reach of law enforcement.
This fallacy is a direct result of the technologies developed and discussed here, so we’re all culpable for what has been already laid down. Maybe keeping this in mind with AI will help, but given corporate stakeholders, probably not.
With stuff like phones there's probably plenty of options for mass production of open source hardware modules purchasable from electronic hobbyist stores anonymously with cash which would allow anyone to build their own personal communicator with radio, SIM, wifi, quantum, etc modules.
The issue is that competitive mass production of many independent compatible modules would required a public description of an applied system that everyone can debate and discuss and agree to on technical merits, but people self-censor and don't want to share ideas for such applied systems online because they think some monopolist is going to patent everything in order to arbitrarily halt development for 20 years.
In order to achieve such a cultural shift it might be necessary to reform the religions.
It's not a fallacy as we have the whole human history of governance to point at and show how similar overreaches for power have always happened with governments and why the bill of rights should present in spirit even in day to to day goings on where privacy is a concern. Apple acting as a proxy for government is just as bad as the government doing it. Slipery slope indeed.
Any logical argument which is inductive is technically fallacy. The way people use the phrase "fallacy" as a checkmate in online discussions, but this ignores the fact that all empirical study is fallacious strictly.
As in all things, it's important to seek out evidence elsewhere that it might exist. For example, the US is already significantly "behind" many other developed nations in terms of not just how much surveillance and censorship is tolerated, but also in other freedom-oriented areas like choice to own firearms, choice of whether to have medical insurance, etc.
So it shouldn't really be necessary to have any of these arguments based on speculated future scenarios when you can look to Canada, the UK, Australia, etc, and see that slight increases in surveillance, censorship, gun regulation, health care availability, etc might actually have some benefits and certainly don't necessarily put you in the instant quicksand toward fascism/communism/scary scenario X.
Personally, I find Australian censorship and UK surveillance have already crossed the line. I'm not convinced that censorship ever has benefits, so any cost seems too much. Surveillance helps catch more criminals, but the US hardly has a problem finding people to put behind bars.
I don't hate Australian gun control- it is a little overzealous but within reason imo. I'm not someone who values gun ownership, so others might disagree. In the UK, however, https://twitter.com/mayoroflondon/status/982906526334668800 is a line crossed for me.
Even if there is a slippery slope that just ends at those levels, I think we should be fighting it. And it's not clear to me whether the slope does actually stop there, and that the UK and Australia aren't still sliding.
What happens in practice, is that police stop investigating most crimes where there isn't good CCTV coverage. The cost-benefit tradeoff is much more favourable in surveillance conditions. After a while, the public learns that if they want the police to do something about thefts and robbery, they need to support more cameras.
(Victim of one motorbike-jacking, one attempted motorbike jacking and 5 separate motorcycle thefts in London.)
>
What happens in practice, is that police stop investigating most crimes where there isn't good CCTV coverage.
The police straight-up don't investigate property crime committed against private individuals, regardless of whether or not CCTV was involved. They write you up a report that you can take to your insurer.
This process saves everyone time and money - you, the cops, the courts, the criminal...
Third party insurance, since theft insurance was too expensive. It's not like a claim would make the insurance cheaper. There's no upside in making the yearly premium £1000+ for a bike worth £2000 or so.
It's not quite true that they did nothing. A couple of times they dusted for prints, leaving silvery powder residue. After they found some of my bikes, they moved them into compounds where I had to pay a vehicle transport to get them back.
Mostly what they do is write up advice on how to contact Victim Support.
I guess I've never been a victim of a major crime, but to the extent that I've been a victim of minor ones (like being harassed or swerved at by drivers while on my bike commute), I've never had success getting an action out of the police even when I can supply helmet cam footage clearly showing the incident.
So I can imagine that a person without CCTV footage on their side might be especially inclined to despair, but these experiences have led me to question the worthwhileness of crime-reporting in general.
Yeah, definitely. And a number of the cases I've tried to report have indeed been scenarios where a bike lane actually exists but cars are using it for various purposes— to park in, as a right-side passing lane, as a right-turn lane.
Most of which I wouldn't even mind; it's actually correct behaviour to block the bike lane when making a right turn so that you don't accidentally clip a cyclist when making your turn— but it's not correct behaviour to honk at a bike in the bike lane to get out of the way so you can make your right turn, nor is it correct to drive one off the road so you can swerve into the bike lane and use it to pass a column of five cars before your right turn.
"“For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens 'as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone',”" - said UK Prime Minister David Cameron in 2016. ( https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/britain-too-t... )
As for Australian gun control, they banned all semi-autos - that's hardly within reason. But even if it were, now the goalposts are being moved, and there's talk of banning lever-action and pump-action shotguns, on the basis that they're "almost assault weapons".
If you want to see a country with reasonable gun control, take a look at Czechia:
And to be clear, the reason why I call it "reasonable" is not just because it's very liberal, but also because they don't have problems with gun violence regardless - which, IMO, shows just how much all the bans are security theater that doesn't actually address the root causes of such violence.
Correct, the availability of guns does not equal violence with guns, one example is Switzerland where nearly every 18-30 yo male has a full automatic assault rifle (aka sturm-gewehr) under his bed, ammunition can be easily obtained at the shooting-range, and nearly no crime is done with it, the illegal obtained handguns are the much bigger problem, and talking about suicide (which i don't see as a criminal act, but a lost chance to help) i think it's much better to shoot you at home then to jump in front of trains.
Switzerland is a common talking point, but the practice and culture of gun ownership there is very different, just one small example:
"People who've been convicted of a crime or have an alcohol or drug addiction aren't allowed to buy guns in Switzerland.
The law also states that anyone who 'expresses a violent or dangerous attitude' won't be permitted to own a gun.
Gun owners who want to carry their weapon for 'defensive purposes' also have to prove they can properly load, unload, and shoot their weapon and must pass a test to get a license."
Do these sound like the kinds of regulations that the NRA and typical 2A types could get behind? If not, then it seems to me they're not really interested in following a "Swiss model" and are just making a bad-faith argument based on the top line numbers.
FWIW, people who have been convicted of a felony, or are addicted to illegal drugs, are not allowed to buy guns in US, either.
But yes, they're generally more strict about who can own a firearm, as opposed to what firearms can be owned. Czechia is pretty similar. That was kinda my point.
I wish that the non-NRA pro-gun people and organizations were a lot more vocal and got more airtime. In the absence of a clear "we like our guns but dislike the NRA and its politics" message, it's easy to wonder if there may be a sizable gun-owning population who doesn't actively support the NRA, but are perhaps privately grateful that it exists in a bad cop, end-justifies-the-means kind of way.
I wish we got more airtime! I think the reason why organizations like LGC do not, is because they don't really have much if any political clout in Democratic politics
- primaries etc - the way NRA does on the right (Republican politicians jokingly refer to it as Never Re-elected Again, because of how much influence it has on the primaries).
>People who've been convicted of a crime or have an alcohol
or drug addiction aren't allowed to buy guns in Switzerland.
Just the crime thing (more if your a driver etc) is being tested when entering military service..and in your service time you don't own the rifle, after service you can obtain it but it's getting refitted to half-auto. And yes the culture to guns is different and that was exactly my point, it's not the availability of guns but the culture too it, is it a sports thing like a bow and not a status/might/cowboy/survival-symbol.
BTW: It pretty much impossible to have a gun for self defense, the training is pretty hard (like police/security..i mean you shoot in public space...that's a bit more responsibility then to load/unload correctly) and you need a real point, like being a prosecutor for organized crime and being already threatened...otherwise impossible. BUT i remember in the past >20 years, nearly every jeweler had a license.
>As for Australian gun control, they banned all semi-autos - that's hardly within reason.
I'm Australian and I support a ban on semi-automatic guns, except for certain people (pest control, etc). I don't see why it's too much of a burden for a civilian with a gun to have to spend a second to cock it.
Maybe you've heard of Port Arthur, the event that motivated the ban?
>From the first shot, all of these events took approximately fifteen seconds, during which Bryant fired seventeen shots, killed twelve people, and wounded ten more.
> So it shouldn't really be necessary to have any of these arguments based on speculated future scenarios when you can look to Canada, the UK, Australia, etc, and see that slight increases in surveillance, censorship, gun regulation, health care availability, etc might actually have some benefits and certainly don't necessarily put you in the instant quicksand toward fascism/communism/scary scenario X.
There are a lot of benefits to living in countries with different governance approaches from the in many ways ultra-laissez faire approach taken in the US, but I don't think you'll find many takers here for the idea that the physical and internet surveillance of the UK and Australia are a model to which to look forward.
To play devils advocate for a bit, London is an incredibly safe city at night compared to say Paris or Rome or Madrid or Amsterdam. I’m pretty sure part of that is down to the staggering amount of cameras
Conversely, if you actually do get attacked in London, you better be real careful to not accidentally hurt your attacker:
"There are products which squirt a relatively safe, brightly coloured dye (as opposed to a pepper spray). A properly designed product of this nature, used in the way it is intended, should not be able to cause an injury. However, if injury does occur, this may be assault. ... The only fully legal self defence product at the moment is a rape alarm. "
The way UK defines "offensive weapon", literally anything is one if you have intent to use it against somebody, even in self-defense:
"any article made or adapted for use for causing injury to the person, or intended by the person having it with him for such use by him or by some other person ... even if they have some other legitimate use e.g. car keys held between the knuckles"
It is illegal. It probably does sound insane if you believe that carrying weapons can improve safety and not simply escalate violence. To me it’s a pretty sound policy.
I've traveled the world, the place I felt the least safe was London. Perhaps it was because they have signs all over the place warning you about pickpockets.
I was in Madrid a few years ago— it was just for a weekend conference, but my flight was 12h delayed leaving, so I ended up getting a pretty long unplanned walk around the city.
I felt very safe there, though I think the biggest thing was how insanely courteous the motorists were. Compared to North America where even when the signal is on your side you have to watch for a gap in turning cars and dart across the street, in Madrid I would just be walking up to a crosswalk and cars would already be voluntarily coming to a complete stop to wait for me to begin and then fully finish crossing. Night and day difference.
> I don't think you'll find many takers here for the idea that the physical and internet surveillance of the UK and Australia are a model to which to look forward.
Given the binary choice I would rather have the surveillance instead of the outrage-driven anti-science hordes that have been empowered by those US gifts to society Facebook and Twitter.
Not a fan of binary choices myself, I'd like to consider these options:
1 - everyone believes every single thing they see on fbk feed.
2 - everyone is well versed in how to highlight, one-click / tap search ggle,ddg, bing - for more info about highlighted thing (taught how to determine what a good source is).
See, the first way can work mostly, but many problems emerge in short while. The second way empowers people to think before acting and to learn more and not buy what X is selling automatically.
(I have witnessed first hand the damage done by 'fact checking' on fbook - people 100 believe a false post because fbk has not labled it as misinfo - for three days)
At this point, there is a sizable population who has internalized the message that "MSM == lies", like, it has to come from some guy's garage YouTube channel for it to be credible.
So yes, there's an issue with people not knowing what a "good source" is, but it's hard to know how much education could inoculated this population to a message like that. Especially when in many cases it was a treadmill of Fox News telling people that CNN is lies, and then OAN and Newsmax telling them that Fox is lies, and then internet sources telling them that anything on TV is lies. The thrill was never the truth; the thrill was in thinking you were getting some kind of unique insider scoop.
Oh I know. I'm being downvoted to oblivion already— that's the reality of HN being US-centric (I'm Canadian).
But my point is less about taking a stand on any of one of those issues and more just that US-based advocates making slippery-slope arguments often resort to wide-eyed speculation about the future rather than evidence because they're unaware of or unwilling to acknowledge what the realities are elsewhere in the world.
It's right to be critical of the slippery slope argument, except that you can take a look at history and see how even in western governments in "free" societies have spied on those who challenge the status quo. I think we're right to be skeptical of surveillance as there is a proven track record of this kind of behavior from governments and corporations.
Take a look at a law that's being proposed in Canada right now. It includes allowing the government to request take downs for a broad number of reasons including otherwise legal speech that they consider to be offensive, data retention, what essentially amounts to a national firewall etc.
It is coming, and there is nothing we can do about it.
There's a chilling feeling watching this all unfold, as our freedoms get taken away and we're powerless to do anything other than complain on a programming themed social media website.
We'll be labelled as conspiracy theorists, wackos, nutjobs, unintegratable people.
That meme you shared with your friend in a private chat? Sorry, was a bit too anti-establishment for our tastes.
I think that "nothing we can do" is an overstatement.
Open-source media players do exist. Projects like VLC have seen worse times when they were banned because of the DVD-decoding ability, for instance.
Hardware is harder, but dumb enough devices keep existing. Industrial displays, simple audio tracts on hobbyist computer boards, etc. Such devices either has no ability to host surveillance processing, or at least can't do so covertly.
Of course, mass consumer devices are not like that. Well, know your risks.
Until Jeri Ellsworth MacGyvers together a way to make Ryzens with some sand and an Easy-Bake Oven, we are at the mercy of the chip manufacturers, all of whom would gladly add spyware to their chips' must-have-in-order-to-boot firmware with minimal arm twisting from the USG/CCP, if that.
And President Biden has already started urging people to report extremists to the goverment.
That isn't going to happen. Jeri Ellsworth is fantastic at what she does but there are some hard to get around physical limits in terms of material purity and once you get to a certain degree of integration that pretty much guarantees a yield of 0 until you spend a very large amount of money.
Then we will always be beholden to large chipmakers who will crumple to governments at the drop of a hat and implement whatever spyware they desire on-die.
Not necessarily. But it is a hard problem to solve. If you can't trust complex hardware your options are limited to using simpler systems where a part that behaves in an undefined way could still be detected.
Detecting copyright violation would need some sort of license info side channel so your TV knew what subscriptions, what digital copies, what BluRays, etc, you owned. Fortunately that's basically an impossible thing to wrangle currently, but if things like Blu-Rays go away it starts to be more feasible ("Oh, you're watching this show in 8K? Please connect your Netflix account to verify your access.")
Once the technical capability is there, how can we best stop it? That's where I don't have good answers.
Possibly the only thing unique about what Apple is doing is that they announced it.
> Detecting copyright violation would need some sort of license info side channel so your TV knew what subscriptions, what digital copies, what BluRays, etc, you owned.
An anti-piracy scheme that respected legitimate use would need this. History suggests that breaking existing media so that you have to buy (or rent) new copies of the same content over and over may be seen as a feature rather than a bug.
> Detecting copyright violation would need some sort of license info side channel so your TV knew what subscriptions, what digital copies, what BluRays, etc, you owned.
Did you know that there is ethernet running over HDMI already?
As this blocklist issue gains increased contemplation lets not forget that this is a "new feature". Lets consider the silent remote access subterfuge that has become known as "software updates".
Therefore, as this is a "new feature", 1. it does not apply to older computers, particularly ones that are not remotely acessible by others to install their opaque "updates" and 2. on newer computers these lists can only be dynamic if the owner allows "software updates".
The moral of the story is (a) not all "new features" are ones the computer owner may want, and (b) older computers have value, if only becoause they lack the bad stuff that greedy, manipulative, overreaching "tech companies" are building into new ones.
There is nothing wrong with updates so long as they are granular1, transparent and optional2. It is the owner's computer and the owner has a license to the software installed on it at the time of purchase. Any party wishing to install new software on the owner's computers should need the owner's permission. Owners should have a reasonable option to deny such permission and to review and install updates themselves, or to reject individual proposed "new features".
1 Here "granular" means avoiding a situation where the user has to install a feature that she does not want in order to get a feature she does want.
2 Manual installation of updates should always be possible.
This assumes the base software and its updates are both secure. Considering the velocity of development and complexity of modern software I don't think that's ever true of general purpose devices.
The problem is that one man's hell is another man's paradise.
Gun-free America, strong covid public health policies, "hate speech", device surveillance, etc ... you name the slippery slope and you'll find at the bottom of the slope that it's hell for some people and paradise for others. Some people prefer highly authoritarian governments that manage (and minimize) life risk and others prefer hands off governments with self-managed risk.
Authoritarianism doesn't only swing in the liberal direction. Until the last generation most authoritarian policies were of the conservative sort.
And with regards to this specific debate, being tough on crime and (largely unnecessary conspiracy level) fear over pedophilia are both conservative darlings.
The 2nd amendment has typically been the only love of conservatives.
Where were they when the police illegally searched us in dozens of ways, or when free speech was limited to easy to ignore "free speech zones"?
They've only clamoured to defend free speech once the right to freely abuse weaker social classes was at risk of being taken away.
What's at risk of being taken away is the right of weaker groups to abuse stronger ones, at least to some degree.
Stronger ones always have and always will abuse weaker ones. It's pretty much a tautology. Freedom of speech and classical liberalism in general is the only defense the weak have.
Europe's privacy protections only seem to apply to what companies can do. Their governments seem to be perfectly happy with your privacy being invaded as long as they're the ones doing it.
This is absolutely not true. The privacy protections in Europe apply to companies and governments alike, to the great chagrin of our police forces and the intelligence services.
Democratic governments doing sucks, because they shouldn't. In the cade of a democracy we still have elections as a way to change policy.
Im case of companies based in other countries there is not even that, there is basically nothing I can do, as a EU citizen, to prevent companies from spying at me. Not even voting. I can refuse using that companies hardware or services, which is hard enough with the likes of FANG or MS.
The GOOD news is that there is no One World Government, so people are able to buy their transfer to another country to better fit their definition of paradise.
For the vast bulk of people, you may as well suggest they move to a different planet.
The even worse problem with this line of thought is the econ-101 conclusion - that they must be OK with things if they don't demonstrate otherwise by voting with their feet. (Not ascribing that assertion to the parent.)
Yep. You’ve found one of the true purposes of immigration law. As with barriers to free competition among employers in the market for employees acting to suppress wages to benefit companies, so with nation states in their control of citizens immigration allowing for higher repression and exploitation of various forms.
This is an interesting theory, but it falls apart upon contact with reality.
The vastly overwhelming majority of immigration barriers in the world keep people out of other countries, not keep people in them.
The motivation behind those barriers is, broadly speaking, in keeping out moochers and undesirables, not "Actively helping some country on the other side of the world repress its citizenry."
You'll be hard-pressed to find people who support strict immigration controls for the latter reason. You don't have to look hard to find supporters of them for the former reason.
You don’t think both reasons have been important? How about the eastern block during the Cold War?
I bet my rulers in the USA are happy that the EU makes it difficult for our people to move there. On the other hand I am certain our populace mostly thinks about keeping “the other out” sure.
Cannot both things hold on their own time and place, and depending on where the person holding the view sits?
Mexico’s ruling class is likely glad for our immigration law, as it keeps their populace pinned in. Economic issues always cut two ways, and the press will stoke emotion about only one of the two, for some reason.
The BAD news is that there are so many government options that it will be hard to find a country that will fit you perfectly and some countries tend to overreach their borders very far so that you cannot escape their tyranny even if you move. The WORSE news is that even if they're able to find a country that fits them better, they still need to invest a lot of money and time to move (if they get in at all) and leave their family, friends and home behind.
Seriously, moving to a different country is hardly an option. In nearly all cases, fighting to keep your country good is your best bet.
Some people are born in societies that overwhelmingly hold opposite views to their own. In these cases, escaping outweighs staying since they have no chance of seeing them change during their lifetimes
I specifically didn't say it's never an option - if you don't have anything to hold you back or if your country is no longer livable, escaping might be your only option. My point is, this is more of a very last resort rather than something you just do.
We might not have a world government on paper, but governments around the world tend to be largely on the same page. Those that aren't following the lead of the world hegemony have an unfortunate tendency to get invaded, have uprisings of dubious origins, or other inconveniences like assassination[1]. Considering how long that list is, I don't think it's unfair to assume there's many more subtle instances where foreign governments decided to cooperate that we don't even know about.
> Right now it is effectively impossible for a consumer to buy a TV that doesn't include a computer capable of this.
Digital Signage Displays come to the rescue, although they cost more and some are starting to put Android inside, which however can be kept offline as the device would work merely as a display.
The upside is that they're designed to work 18/7 to 24/7 and won't easily break like cheaper Smart TVs; setting up a wall of screens in a mall can be a real pain in the ass if every month some guy needs to climb up there and swap the one that died because of bad capacitors etc. That stuff must last or it becomes a huge waste of money.
The result can be bulky and probably Grandpa wouldn't welcome it, but for technical inclined users, the level of freedom and security that can be achieved is worth the effort.
And, even beyond the improved quality, they'll cost a lot more than a "smart" TV, because the "smart" TV is (likely?) subsidized by whomever gains access to your media stream.
This is possible, although economies of scale also play a role here; they probably sell like a thousand Smart TVs for each signage display.
I like to think however that for that higher price I'm actually buying a better durable product that will pay in the long run: 4K will last for a while, and by keeping things separated, other potential weak points (incompatibility with new formats or standards) are left to the tuner/mini PC, which would cost a lot less than the screen to change, or possibly nothing in case of software update.
> If we forget, no other forgetting will ever happen. Everything will be remembered. Everything you read, all through life, everything you listened to, everything you watched, everything you searched for.
Of course that was just file names and TV tuner/input metadata like channel numbers, not even MusicBrainz/Shazam-style fingerprinting like they would probably be capable of these days with beefier SoCs and more widespread always-on connectivity. Files-on-USB are no longer “en vogue” anyway with everyone and everything moving to streaming services where the surveillance is built right in by definition. Every time I watch something on Netflix/Hulu/Disney they’re watching me right back even if it’s ostensibly for my benefit e.g. for more accurate recommendations.
No, they 100% have services that buy data from SmartTV manufacturers like Vizio and sells this data to advertisers to help track attribution and campaign effectiveness.
A big one is iSpot.tv, the TV will use a fingerprint of your commercial and determine when/where it was watched, and help you tie back the attribution of a customer that visited your site.
Well, the good news is that the vast majority of those monitors and TVs need a WIFI connection, which is optional to set up. However, unfortunately, we're on the cusp of devices having their own permanent mobile phone network connection. Rozzie can confirm.
All they need is flip a few bytes in the software and all newly sold screens only work if they're registered with an active, unbanned and non-anonymous account and were online in the last 12 hours.
And then you won't just get randomly banned from Facebook or Google with no human support staff to talk to, you'll also lose access to half your media devices. This is already true for Oculus/Facebook (and probably some others).
> all newly sold screens only work if they're registered
The other side of this pincer movement is to mandate that all devices which access the internet must send a remote attestation of their boot process, to check that you haven't "tampered" with them by installing your own OS or jailbreaking them.
There is a stronger 2nd argument, but it's buried towards the end:
> Now imagine an Internet of Snitches doing it badly. It’s easy if you try. Some vendors already do a bad job of keeping customer data private and will continue that track record, so you can expect public leaks of databases that have flagged suspected criminals. Other vendors will write bad machine learning algorithms (or biased ones) leading to false positives and ruined lives.
No slippery slope is needed, CSAM alone is extremely sensitive, a false accusation is ruinous... if automated client side CSAM scanning becomes a wide spread practice with Apple leading the way, it will be an "AI" of the flies... Apple has also demonstrated that it's willing to use ML as an unquestionable source of truth before with it's in store security, using facial recognition which is blatantly wrong to prosecute the innocent.
I had a pretty shocking moment recently. I bought a cheap simple Chinese 55" TV when I moved into my new place in Hong Kong recently. Worked fine for 6 months. I don't connect it to the internet or cable, it's just a screen in front of a few HDMI devices (Roku + Switch). It recently started randomly playing 30s video ads every time I turn it on. I can't figure out how it's getting them, because I've never connected it to the wifi (nor would I even know how to given the menus are all in Chinese). Does it have its own LTE connection?
Anyways, this has got me pretty annoyed and I'm thinking of tossing it on principle.
It probably has a built in WiFi unity, before tossing it you could open it up and try to find the antennae, they are usually just short bits of wire. Snip those off and see if there is a factory reset option, that should 'cure' it.
Some devices will scan for open wifi networks in the area and connect to those if you don't give them your own network. It's also entirely possible they have deals with ISPs to use the router you rent from them on a separate network (some routers in the US broadcast a 'public' paid wifi network that's separate from yours that anyone can connect to and doesn't count toward your data).
Governments already are. The question is what safeguards you have against your own government doing this.
If we weren’t worried about government overreach, we wouldn’t be worried about CSAM scanning.
In another thread someone suggested that the 4th Amendment might be a protection in the US. I am doubtful about this, but I am interested in what actual law might help. Breaking up large companies doesn’t seem likely to protect us from the government.
> What happens when governments start distributing lists of hashes belonging to "subversive" material
Soon for any device containing a computer: "We are just including this hash check feature so we can do business with China, don't worry it'll be disabled by default for western countries"
It’s not a fallacy when we can see the slope being actively oiled up right now. Hate speech laws and policies being used to target dissenting political opinions, tech companies using their power to put their thumb on the scale in elections, health emergencies to curb basic civil liberties, etc.
And generally any law and policy should be looked at with the optic of how is it going to be used in the worst possible bad faith because ultimately it will. I remember the UK using its anti-terrorist act powers against Iceland during the 2008 financial crisis.
I wouldn't worry about purely display devices like TVs sending hashes. They don't retrieve the entire file, and hashing streamed data has challenges that tend to break the active stream. They would need to have a large enough sample of the streamed media, and most importantly it isn't illegal to watch pirated materials, only to distribute or publicly show them.
The television manufacturers simply don't have an economic interest in trying to do so when they can easily collect data regarding subscription based app use. The cops asking them to do so wouldn't change the fact it would cost the company money to implement and maintain, and no real pay off.
There certainly is a slope to worry about here, but the slope is in the direction of corporate profits. Anything that doesn't result in profits is a slope up hill and nobody wants to be the one pushing that particular rock up hill.
I heard in some other HN thread that the quality isn't that great on these. Was that an issue for you? I looked into NEC monitors, but they're a bit pricey. Does anyone know of other options?
We have five of these in the office. They're pretty good, and work well from a reliability perspective. These have seen some pretty heavy use in the last two years, one had a power supply issue in the first 90 days that was fixed under warranty, and otherwise they all worked flawlessly.
They're 4K, pretty large and the price was surprisingly low for a screen this large and of this quality.
I bought a Sceptre TV. Quality seems fine, but I'm no videophile. It could be that when displaying certain shades of blue, the display is four or five nits dimmer than spec, but I wouldn't know if it was.
If you buy a "smart" TV, then you're just supporting the market for "smart" TVs.
I prefer to support the market for "dumb" TVs.
Also, if you purchase a "smart" TV, then you either have to open it up and remove the WiFi card (and deal with any anoying messages), or hope no guest ever connects it to anything.
It is only a slippery slope fallacy if your argument relies on sure escalation alone.
But if you have other factors, like obvious corporate ambitions to fight piracy or to protect their industry and states ambitions to fight memes that exposes or embarrasses their policies, it isn't a fallacy at all and just another indication.
I'm reminded of that story of how airline ticketing systems assumed names ending with the suffix "*MR" had an honorific appended and so cleverly stripped it.
Cue the Arabic name "Amr"
The thing is with this types of systems that are deeply ingrained in our lives, we create the possibility to make people's live profoundly miserable because of an "edge case"
And for that individual who is many times removed from the reason why their life is being wrecked by software it can be next to impossible to even feed back that their life is a misery, let alone get recourse.
WRT to copyright violations, I expect the same thing that has always happened will continue happening. Pirates will stay 3 steps ahead and only legal consumers will be harmed.
> How long until media players and display devices are hashing all of our media to check for copyright violations. Right now it is effectively impossible for a consumer to buy a TV that doesn't include a computer capable of this.
Not my area, but wasn't this part of the point of HDMI... So, the slope seems slippery and pretty vertical to me
It's also pretty easy to take it apart and remove the SIM card and/or disconnect the antenna. Also mobile data is expensive. Even more expensive if you want something that works in more than one country.
Slippery slope argument are a very good thing when talking about abuse of power, because history proved again and again that potential very often becomes reality: humans are opportunistic greedy creatures.
We absolutely need to address slipery slopes for all things that are related to freedom and democracy.
I can easily imagine American Media rubbing their hands with glee as they hash every pirate torrent and get it on the "to scan for" list for Microsoft.
Good old fashioned police-work is needed instead of back-doors into our favorite apps.
The Internet and app ecosystems can't work properly if they're weakened by LEAs. People would just not use them if they know they're being watched. I'm not saying the majority would switch to Linux phones either (like Librem 5 & Pinephone), simply that the two dominating app-stores (Play & Apple Store) would be phased out and people would probably fund independent FLOSS app stores to replace them.
In the end, the people will speak out and respond to back-doors. In-fact we need FLOSS app stores right now (Similar to F-Droid[0], but baked in as the default store), and they need to be funded properly & they need sound economic incentives to continue. No more 'free' apps where you pay for them with your data. It's possible to have FLOSS apps that are not gratis where people pay for them with money, not their data.
(The reason I suggest we switch to FLOSS app stores is that the apps can easily be checked for back-doors or malicious code since the code is open source. It makes the apps readily available for audits too)
CSAM also doesn't prevent children from being exploited. It's an archive of past abuse. The police should focus and finding creators of such abhorrent material and put them in prison.
1. CSAM production may be incentivized by consumers (either because they pay for it or because they serve to encourage the producers).
2. CSAM may (as, famously, with Backpage) be an advertisement for real-world meet ups and further abuse.
3. Having pictures of one’s own abuse further disseminated is itself abusive and morally wrong.
Obviously producers should also be prosecuted, but while I do think the American approach is in many ways informed by puritanical beliefs, there are perfectly rational reasons to pursue the spread of such material.
This characterization of Backpage diverges significantly from the realities of the site uncovered by authorities [1]. Choice excerpt:
> "Information provided to us by [FBI Agent Steve] Vienneau and other members of the Innocence Lost Task Force confirm that, unlike virtually every other website that is used for prostitution and sex trafficking, Backpage is remarkably responsive to law enforcement requests and often takes proactive steps to assist in investigations," wrote Catherine Crisham and Aravind Swaminathan, both assistant U.S. attorneys for the Western District of Washington, in the April 3 memo to Jenny Durkan, now mayor of Seattle and then head federal prosecutor for the district. Vienneau told prosecutors that "on many occasions," Backpage staff proactively sent him "advertisements that appear to contain pictures of juveniles" and that the company was "very cooperative at removing these advertisements at law enforcement's request."
> "Even without a subpoena, in exigent circumstances such as a child rescue situation, Backpage will provide the maximum information and assistance permitted under the law," wrote Crisham and Swaminathan.
Backpage had a staff of ~75 employees dedicated to manually reviewing all adult ads and they were the #1 source of trafficking tips until they were shut down and the owner jailed.
They truly did good work and were an unfortunate casualty of a political pissing contest.
I don't think the theory that consumption drives production holds true when talking about child pornography because the material can be copied infinitely, it's not a finite resource.
> I don't think the theory that consumption drives production holds true when talking about child pornography because the material can be copied infinitely, it's not a finite resource.
Exposure to more people might lure more people into becoming buyers; what's what CSAM distribution laws are trying to prevent: showing them to more people.
The link between exposure to visual material and illegal buying is IMO extremely sketchy. I mean, we can’t even get enough people to pay for legal, mainstream, consensual and officially produced porn.
Getting random people to pay for content is a pretty hard thing to do, and I’d assume illegal content wouldn’t just be taking credit cards either, so the barrier is way higher. The conversion rate looks to me to be abysmally low, and we’re trying to police the whole internet for that.
Does reason (1) mean that we should disincentivize CSAM production by funding a large, free, publicly accessible and searchable database of CSAM images, to make current CSAM producers unable to compete with free? If we believe the RIAA and MPAA, anyway.
(2) and (3) can be handled by enforcing a delay of, say, 15 years between CSAM being produced and it entering the database (and censoring any identifying information, of course), and by giving people the choice to opt out before their pictures are added.
> (2) and (3) can be handled by enforcing a delay of, say, 15 years between CSAM being produced and it entering the database (and censoring any identifying information, of course), and by giving people the choice to opt out before their pictures are added.
The problem isn't CSAM being in the database, but being disseminated in public. The database is designed to reduce public dissemination.
>here are perfectly rational reasons to pursue the spread of such material.
sure but people should also keep in mind that pursuit could massively backfire, like in the case of backpage, where the shutdown of the site actually made is HARDER to find and recuse children being abused because now the traffickers are using more secure, more underground platforms...
For sure. I have problems with some policy approaches taken here. My point is only that a glib “consumption has nothing to do with production and is thus fine” argument is pretty absurd.
Nope, for western "consumers" of CSAM it's not uncommon to find CSAM produced by themselves or evidence of non-CSAM abuse (e.g. grooming). While organized crime does play a role in the "market", the majority of CSAM is produced within families. Also, some of the CSAM sharing rings that have been busted had a joining requirement of original/self-produced CSAM, so in those scenarios the participants who joined just to get access to CSAM were not just "in possession" of it but actively involved in abuse.
This would seemingly help police catch more of these abhorrent people in less time. I think the question is does that outweigh the eventual abuse of the much larger population of non-abusers.
Personally, I've been heading toward a life more free of the internet and technology. This move by Apple is speeding that up.
> People would just not use them if they know they're being watched.
Are you so sure of this? Maybe some people.. like the same kind of people who visit this web page, they might get a sick feeling in their stomach thinking that their basic human interactions like talking to their mother, are swallowed up and surveilled... but MOST PEOPLE will just accept it and it will become the new normal.
> It’s not too late to reject technology that’s not on your side.
Oh, but it is. I have yet to see any convincing argument for how we get “back” (if we were ever there) to a time when technology was on our sides.
Vote with your wallet, they say, but when hostile technology is far cheaper than friendly technology, and the vast majority of the population couldn’t care less, how could we possibly make a dent? And this is before even considering that governments around the world are on the side of hostile technology.
Write to your representative, they say, but when our “democratic” representatives couldn’t care less about the needs of their constituents, yet term after term get re-elected regardless, who will hear us? And again, before considering that a) they’re voted in by the same careless majority, and b) that they are empowered by the very hostile technology we want them to combat?
I just don’t see a future that isn’t plagued by the overbearing influence of soulless tech companies and the corrupt scumbags that enable them.
> Vote with your wallet, they say, but when hostile technology is far cheaper than friendly technology, and the vast majority of the population couldn’t care less, how could we possibly make a dent?
I don't see the goal as making a dent. That's too large.
I have two goals:
* Ensure I have access to free platforms. I use a Librem laptop and a Pinephone. I also use closed platforms as part of living in society.
* Ensure the free flame is kept alight. I do that by using the free platforms, buying the products, and improving them with bug reports and patches.
The vast majority, for better or worse, do not share those goals.
As an advantage to free platforms, those that do care have the capability to improve it. We don't need many.
Free platforms/tooling won't be as shiny. So be it.
But that’s my point, sure it works now, but in 10-20 years what’s keeping free, floss, friendly technologies from being bullied out of availability?
Google delisting floss alternatives, because they’re from unverified developers and could contain malware; governments mandating ISPs ban “untrusted” protocols like FTP because paedophiles use them to share CSAM; etc.
> Vote with your wallet, they say, but when hostile technology is far cheaper than friendly technology, and the vast majority of the population couldn’t care less, how could we possibly make a dent? And this is before even considering that governments around the world are on the side of hostile technology.
If you need a phone that has all the modern features and app support (so you can work with your banking app, local parking app, etc.), you're basically limited to android and iphone. Apple just did "this"... google is probably next... what do I buy after?
I mean.. i can maybe modify android enough to remove the offedning features, but what will average joe do?
Lead time is 6 months. You cannot buy it in telco stores, to get monthly payments with your phone bills, and you cannot buy it cheaper on a contract.
Basically, if you're a "normal person" (non-geek), you're limited to iphones and a selection of samsungs, huaweis, xiaomis, and some cheap plasticky telco-branded chinese phones.
> Basically, if you're a "normal person" (non-geek), you're limited
Every technological breakthrough starts with geeks. HN audience can support and promote the user-respecting technologies, even if they are half a year away.
Create a botnet that downloads CSAM to millions of devices so that millions of reports are generated for innocent people so that it’s clear that all of this doesn’t work as intended.
That would be good (as long as people can't actually see the CSAM, perhaps find a hash collision), but I wouldn't want to be the one who ends up in solitary for life for taking one for the team.
Don't download actual CSAM, that's too questionable of a proposition. Just figure out how to manipulate innocuous images such that they trigger Apple's perceptual hashing algorithm. Then flood the web with those. If the false positives massively outweigh the true positives then eventually people will stop paying attention.
> our “democratic” representatives couldn’t care less about the needs of their constituents
I'm not sure this is actually the reason in this case. If you go outside of the tech bubble, a lot of people don't understand what the fuss about CSAM is all about, and "if you're not doing anything wrong, why are you opposed to saving children?" is an oft-expressed sentiment. So, politicians support it because 1) the majority of their voters approve, and 2) not supporting it makes them vulnerable to highly effective attacks on their public image from their opponents, again, because the general public buys into those arguments.
I don’t see how that refutes anything I said. The way I see it, they’ll either fail, or stop respecting their users, like every other successful tech company thus far.
They are not a for-profit comany but a Social Purpose Corporation, which values user freedom more than profits. They provide auditable devices running free software. It does not even matter if they fail in the future. If you have their device, you can trust and verify it forever.
Something the whole Apple kerfluffle has revealed to me is how many services were already scanning for CSAM in the cloud and reporting to authorities. E.g. Google, Facebook, Microsoft. I consider myself tech-literate and had not known about this.
Are there other types of material or kinds of activity that cloud services might already be scanning for, but might not have much public awareness?
Another is that Google Photos and Facebook both do classification for objects and text within photos - eg. a Kohl's ad in my timeline on Facebook has image alt text of "May be an image of 1 person, standing, footwear and outdoors". I'm sure their detections look for TOS breaking content or other pictures showing illegal activities.
I think everyone who allows users to upload images and is medium sized or larger has to- you really don't want to be hosting CSAM, for legal and moral reasons.
I have two issues with automatic surveillance. One is of course false positives. When you scan everything, even a small false positive chance will mean a LOT of people get swept up by false positives. Scan enough things, and soon everyone will be victims of false positives.
This is compounded because people don't understand probabilities. Take DNA... if someone says "the chance of this DNA match being wrong is one in a million", people will assume the match is correct, because that seems like a really small chance of a false positive.. however, if you are matching that DNA to everyone in the United States, that one in a million ends up with over 300 matches that are wrong.
Second, perfect enforcement of laws is not always ideal. If we catch everyone who breaks the law, how can we ever decide as a society to change the law? For example, if we had 100% effective anti-marijuana laws, no one could have ever tried marijuana and we would not have been able to determine that we actually don't want it outlawed. If no one can ever break a law, we have no way of testing whether a law is good or not.
You also must trust that it's actually automatic, kind of like police dogs. Turns out their main function is to provide "probable cause" when their handler wants a search. This opens the door to the same thing except now it's a free warrant to access any device, as long as you pay Apple to automatically "detect some CSAM" first.
> Scan enough things, and soon everyone will be victims of false positives.
If there is a human in the loop checking for false positives, then I don't see how it could get to this point. It surely wouldn't take hundreds of millions of false positives -- each with a non-trivial cost for manual review -- before pulling the plug.
Yes, humans could help correct false positives... however, that doesn't mean there are no consequences for the people wrongly matched. Investigators might have to look into the person, and question them. Not sure if you have ever had to talk to the police about anything, but the situation is stressful even if you are completely innocent. Also, having your life examined, having to answer questions about why you did things, etc, can be scary.
What I really wonder is, once virtually everyone has crossed the rubicon to reuse the article's expression, how long it will take for whoever decides NOT to be tracked to look guilty?
How long before people without phones, doorbells or smart watches get frowned upon?
At the rate we're accelerating, it wouldn't be crazy to see it happen in a couple years.
What I’m about to say is a bit controversial and cannot be implemented by majority, or even a large minority. Maybe a subset of HN that isn’t already in this mindset:
Treat all devices as adversarial as you possibly can within some sensical reason. Use Tor, for example, but expect that everything you do is being logged and that sometime in the future if a vulnerability, exploit, whatever is discovered that can trace these logs back to you, that you know what you’re in for. Apply this to whatever else you feel like could have a negative impact on you.
Obviously this is now coming to light because of Apple but this has been an issue long before.
To put it into more morbid terms: assume that the government thinks you’re storing CP and they’re going through your trash, and behave accordingly.
Y tho? Your advice reads like a recipe for a bad time.
Mitigation is required, if you actually do have something to hide.
Freedom however is endangered, if you personally mitigate this or not. I think for most people the best course of action would be to speak out against this, boycott the companies or get politically active, educate others about the threat to all of us.
And evading hostile tech's reach is really not a practical every day thing. I mean look at the shitshow of browser fingerprinting. Behaving vastly different than most will leave a trace of its own, even if it's just the absence of common information.
The best personal protection is being part of a healthy, democracy valuing collective not okay with this surveillance.
And if you are about to explode the next big story, I would probably advice migrating somewhere hostile to the country you are about to piss off. It's not like they turn on your fridge because you bought LSD for you and your boyfriend; I mean generally buying drugs happens in public Telegram groups these days... Politicians love spending money on surveillance tech, but not law enforcement people. Nothing is gonna happen, if you don't mess with powerful people's egos.
The real damage of these trends is the self censorship and permanent premptive self-surveillance you automatically do in the face of it. Like treating every device as hostile! You are killing off the mental freedom more and more, creativity, possibilities. No one is going all to prison, but no one isn't in prison a little bit.
I think it's good advice to assume your device is doing things against your best interests, especially when running software from MS, Google, etc.
There are a few easy things you can do like use e2e encryption wherever possible and trust as few things (devices, companies, apps) as you can get away with.
TOR has dubious value given the effort put in by various actors to de-anonymize its traffic.
1. I only run Linux where possible, and I install myself (and I realize I do not control the BIOS, etc). OpenBSD would probably be even better.
2. I assume that Google knows everything that is going on my Android phone, Apple knows everything on any Apple device, and Microsoft know everything going on on my son's gaming PC.
This is a dangerous trajectory and we'll hear "But think of the children!" or the good old "If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear." ad nauseam.
We've been over the fallacy of these statements already, so I will just quote Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." (Although apparently the original context of that quote was not about Liberty at all.)
This also goes both ways: there are children with phones, in terms of reality, not morality. These children are being spied on.
That's what people don't get about these backdoors and sidedoors (?). There is no way to guarantee that a malicious actor hasn't gained control or knowledge of them.
It was never going to be as simple as all or nothing. We have to define where to draw the line, and not everyone will agree on where the line should be. So this is a good conversation to have, and "do nothing" is not an answer most people will actually agree on.
> This “Internet of Things” has promised people convenience, yet we know that convenience has already come at the cost of personal privacy.
I really wonder if the privacy implications of the "internet of things" are so dangerous that the internet of things should never be realized to its full potential. There is the always present temptation for governments to co-opt it as a surveillance apparatus. It really is the perfect tool for Big Brother style rule.
Also consider most of those devices after 2-3 years as insecure. Many running a decade old version of linux at its core, and the other bits of software usually just as old. Written by someone whos job was outsourced 4 years ago. Never to be updated again. Just assume someone is going to do things with it that you do not want them doing. That the gov wants in on the action is just another in the list of threat actors.
Whenever I want an IoT type device, I would rather home brew it. Technically my stuff would be more of a local network of things since I rarely expose stuff over the internet, especially due to lack of static IP.
The selling point of IoT is the data. It's the reason for the heavy investment in big data/neural networks/nvidia/etc. Preparing for the IoT world where there isn't much privacy but lots and lots of data.
I have to give Apple credit for unintentionally making this a well-known topic. Suddenly people are realizing that their content is being scanned constantly. Now they care.
Interesting take on the situation. It's even possible that Apple did this deliberately to get people talking about privacy.
Child porn is an odd hill to die on. Of course pedophiles and purveyors of child porn need to be locked away; no one disagrees with that.
But to pull this out of seemingly nowhere, and inform all 300m iPhone users (plus however other millions use iCloud on Macs) that they must submit to a search, because we are all suddenly suspects... this is beyond the pale.
Like others, I have baby pictures and kid pictures. I'm thinking about a couple of pics my wife took of our 18-month old, in the bathtub with her equally young cousins. I am wondering whether these pictures might get flagged in some way. Apple claims that they are only looking for known pictures already in a particular database, but that is cold comfort. If somehow one of my pictures pops up because of an A.I. decision, and a human decides it qualifies as child porn, my life is ruined.
As a side note, I was planning to upgrade later this year from a Samsung to the latest iPhone. That plan is now on hold pending review.
In fact I'm suddenly much more interested in the Librem phone, purveyed by the author of the article. As I recall, it's about $2000 USD so I had really not considered it seriously in the past. Now I am considering it seriously. I hope a whole family of new Linux-based smartphones can jump into this market and take advantage of the situation.
It'll be interesting to see how things shake out. Will this move by Apple go down in history as a textbook example of shooting oneself in the foot? Or will the masses simply grunt, and accept the inevitable?
How many do care though? The vast majority has swallowed whichever pills were laid in front of them and fully believe the "I have nothing to hide" message.
It's not hopeless, the people with money here should be putting it where their mouth it and actually buying things or donating to projects that make a positive change.
There is hope. Shock to the system is how one disabused of trusting to benevolent companies.
Instead of upgrading to next iDevices, I ended up getting a much cheaper de-googled device and will split the different by donating to privacy advocacy organizations. A bit harder for other family members, but I did that before by converting everyone to a Linux laptops.
Purism's accurate take on Apple's recent CSAM-scanning announcement is preaching to the choir since the typical consumer use-cases for an iPhone versus a Librem phone don't overlap well. Still, I'm glad Purism continues to stake-out and explain its entire reason for existing.
What do you mean? I’ve owned iPhones for 13 years and ordered a Librem earlier this week. I’m determined to use it as my daily driver, no matter how buggy it turns out to be when it arrives.
> "Still, I'm glad Purism continues to stake-out and explain its entire reason for existing."
I'm not convinced that's a good look from this blog post. See the examples they give: "a Catholic priest’s resignation after location data revealed he used the Grindr app and frequented gay bars", "might expand into terrorism, sedition, or similar categories of crime", "[catch] DMCA violations", "Your car could report when you parked illegally or disobeyed the speed limit", "Your smart irrigation system could detect whenever you watered your lawn in violation of water conservation orders".
There's more to this whole topic than "you won't be able to break laws and decieve people with casual abandon", right? Like, a presumption that your customers are actually innocent, maybe.
Innocent? INNOCENT? are you not fucking aware how judicial systems are constructed? I swear, it makes feel that to kill myself is the only solution sometimes! It's illegal to be gay in some countries, and you're born that way.
By writing this comment I violated laws for profanity (writing "fucking" in a public forum), posting about suicide (see roskomnazors' github block over a repo with humorous description of suicide), claiming that some people are born gay (falls under the law of "protection of children from negative information" that even applies in some EU countries).
Innocent! Hah. Give us a name, and we'll find what you're guilty of...
I'm ready to go back to 2003 era technology at this point.
If I need to take photos, I'll buy a digital camera. If I need directions, I'll get a GPS. If I want to talk to someone, I'll call them on my Nokia or email them from an anonymously registered address. If I want music, I'll download it and use an MP3 player.
There's not a single piece of consumer tech in the last 20 years that has made our lives tangibly
better in any way.
I wouldn't say none. But I'm with you. I am back to CD's and vinyl for music, flip phone for communication, I drive cars from the early 2000's, we keep our wifi off at the house almost all the time. It is on one hand a shame that tech has become so soured, but on the other hand, the ability to pick and choose technology from any era, and be content with it because of the fact that newer technology is not better, and in some ways is way worse because it is intrusive.
On the other points about slippery slopes, we don't even know the full extent of how the powers that be are surveilling us, it could quite possibly be 100x worse than we even realize. Certain cities, like Santa Monica, CA for instance, are almost completely under camera control. I have seen the camera room at the promenade mall, and the camera stations near some of the intersections. The illusion of privacy is evaporating before our eyes.
> There's not a single piece of consumer tech in the last 20 years that has made our lives tangibly better in any way.
Tell that to blind people who, for the past decade or so, have had screen readers built into our mainstream smartphones at no extra cost, giving us access to a wide variety of functionality all in one device. And that functionality includes access to on-demand transportation through Uber or the like. Yes, we have to pay for that last part, but for those of us who can, it's still liberating.
Edit: And I'm sure there are other counter-examples; I hope others will add their own. I just wrote about the one that has affected me and my friends.
So how are we going to stop this if it becomes a reality for 99% of phones sold?
I'm very poor- like on and off homeless poor- and I would be willing to pay up to $200 for a free phone, but I couldn't go higher. I dearly hope that it doesn't become the case that any "free" phone isn't a luxury like current privacy oriented phones.
What will be really painful is that you won't even be able to prevent data egress, since these devices will just hit Amazon Walk, or connect via some hidden 6G modem, or use DNS over HTTPS to hide the network names.
It’ll be interesting to see if there’s a market for “dumb” technology. I still use my iPod Shuffle because it doesn’t buzz when I’m listening to music while working. I can imagine regular HD TVs that are not “smart” could become popular again.
I genuinely was curious about the reasons why the US gov't was looking into enforcing anti trust laws. Why would they do that, now that their entire political careers depend on the unlimited donations they get from these sharks
The reason is clear now. They want the sharks on their side
You make a good point, but your example is out of date; "Happy Birthday To You" melody was recently found to be copied from an earlier composition "Good Morning To You" and the copyright is therefore invalidated. Decades of royalties for a stolen song!
I think I would be content with the panopticon if it were All Can See All. That way I know there is no selective enforcement. That way I know that if a law is overly restrictive I can apply it to the guys making the law too.
Actually, no, I’m not okay with that but I’m okayer than with others can watch me and I can’t watch anyone.
Fully agree with everything, except the last paragraph.
> It means using a free operating system that lets you install whatever software you want and remove any software you don’t.
I don’t understand, how free can be scalable. I am ok to pay for software and hardware. Even I update phone, only because Apple stops supporting my old one, I am still ok with that. It was part of why I chose Apple as a platform. Yes, they are expensive and unfortunately you have to update to keep up. But because they have revenue stream from hardware sales and integrated services, such as iCloud, they did not have to sell my data and had an incentive to protected. The promise of privacy was aligned with their revenue goals.
Free and open source software is amazing, but is not scalable. Very rarely it comes close on terms of usability to paid software. I want to be in environment, where one can pay for product and expect not to get stabbed later by invasion into they privacy.
> Very rarely it comes close on terms of usability to paid software.
Free software is not about price. It can be paid.
Why can't a company sell products running free and open-source software? In such case, you pay for the software, too. By the way, this is exactly what Purism is doing, the company behind this article.
"You should have control over your own computers. Your phone should be your castle. True control means controlling your hardware and software. It means picking hardware that doesn’t depend on absolute trust in a vendor for its security, but gives you control over your own security so you don’t have to ask the vendor’s permission to use the computer how you wish. It means using a free operating system that lets you install whatever software you want and remove any software you don’t."
Has this ever been the case
even since the very beginning of smartphones?
No, smartphones have historically been under the control of the phone operators. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be true. I'm looking forward to getting a Linux I control and which provides strong protections.
The cost of these devices and services is offset by the fact that we don't truly "own" nor "control" them. That's the way the economics work. We (the people) are not going to give that up...
Any VCs willing to invest into pure Linux phones? It should be a gold mine now with Apple destroying its brand and losing its main marketing differentiation for privacy-conscious people (i.e. high IQ, top $).
What is the alternative? Android phones aren't any better. A 2000 dollar phone that barely works? Besides custom open source android ROMs, I don't see any other way.
The title reminded me of an intro to one of packt's books.
"At Packt, we take the protection of our copyright and licenses very seriously. If you come across any illegal copies of our works in any form on the internet, please provide us with the location address or website name immediately so that we can pursue a remedy."
They want their readers to be the their personal snitches online. What a crazy world we are headed towards.
How come ubiquitous swarms of camera-equipped private and governmental drones are not a reality yet? I'd assume technology is far enough to make this happen.
How long until media players and display devices are hashing all of our media to check for copyright violations. Right now it is effectively impossible for a consumer to buy a TV that doesn't include a computer capable of this.
CSAM is one thing, and from reports it sounds like checking hashes isn't really that effective. However, this paves the way for hash checks for a variety of scary things.
What happens when governments start distributing lists of hashes belonging to "subversive" material (this isn't pipe dream, numerous large countries already block subversive material on the internet).