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websites2023 | 4 years ago

BigCos, take note: you’re better off doing nefarious shit without telling anyone. Because, if you come clean, you’ll only invite an endless parade of bloggers who will misconstrue your technology to make you look bad.

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__blockcipher__|4 years ago

No misconstrual needed. This technology is genuinely bad. It scans images against an arbitrary government-owned black-box database. There’s no guarantee that it’s only CSAM.

OrvalWintermute|4 years ago

I have a serious problem imagining that Apple will not be willing to redeploy this technology in a novel and nefarious means in exchange for continued market access when billions are on the line.

Mainland China will probably be the first chip to fall. Can't imagine the Ministry of State Security not actively licking their lips, waiting for this functionality to arrive.

websites2023|4 years ago

NECMEC isn’t owned by the government and the database of hashes is available from Apple.

justin_oaks|4 years ago

It's important to keep nefarious stuff on the server side because eventually someone will reverse engineer what's on the client side.

Imagine if Apple had done this on the client side without telling anyone, and later it was discovered. I think things would be a whole worse for Apple in that case.

squarefoot|4 years ago

Devices with proprietary OSes spend more and more time phoning home, then exchanging data officially for "updates". They probably tell the truth, but should one of them decide to hide users data exfiltration or other monitoring practices behind those updates, it would be quite hard to catch them. In other words we have no way to tell that they're not already doing this.

websites2023|4 years ago

That being the case, why do it client side at all, when presumably every claim they make is verifiable?