Nowhere do they say its hamming distance, which would be a pretty poor implementation of this -- they're likely doing fuzzy hashing on the embedded vectors.
Which is why this "feature" encourages the production of new child pornography and the exploitation of additional children by attempting to block the distribution of existing images. New images won't be in the hash DB and can be freely stored and distributed until the DB is updated to incorporate them, so they will be in high demand. This sounds counterproductive to me.
You've mentioned several times how you think it will be different in other countries, based on things like China requiring Chinese citizens cloud data be stored locally, or Russia required Apple to pre-load some non-Apple apps onto phones sold in Russia. The problem with the argument is that these features are part of the OS, not of an off-device storage (China) or additional non-OS applications (Russia). The fact is, Apple ships a single OS worldwide.
I keep seeing this argument, as well. I don't think this encourages the production of new child porn, but rather decreases the likelihood that pedos will be using iCloud in any way.
It’s a match of a perceptual hash, not a cryptographic hash. These are very different things despite both being hashes. Perceptual hashes are functionally different, but in general lack two critical things you’re likely familiar with from E2EE and cryptocurrency (both use cryptographic hashes):
There are some applications that will do save to Photos automatically if misconfigured (e.g. Telegram - which has a setting to automatically store images from chats or conversations in Photos).
Exactly. Or just spread actual images on various chat apps knowing that a significant fraction of naive users will have automatic save to Photos enabled. The possibilities for mischief are endless.
Or they thought that "protecting children" would be good PR.
Hamming distance is one of the more common implementations for edge perceptual hashing. It’s is a dumb way to do it, but it’s simple and efficient. The real problem is, Apple isn’t saying and you’re just guessing based on words they’ve altered and tweaked over the last week. We just have to trust them. I’d love to see the real implementation layer out and verified merely for edification.
What makes you an expert on that? Are you addicted? Are people that are into any kind of alcohol, gambling, & other vices normally addicted to those as well?
I agree -- I mentioned something in that other thread about this as well, and I see it as most likely a big undersell of what the actual false positive rate is. Similar to how they undersell much of the capabilities with their hardware ("only supposed to get x hours but I was able to >>x hours of battery", etc.). Again, we don't know because we can't see it.
Sort of. Spent the day migrating everything off of MacOS because I’m leaving Apple for good. All of it. 6 iPhones 3 Mac mini’s. 4 MacBooks 4 Apple TV’s and 2 Apple displays. Family of 6 leaving for good. It’s liberating.
Yeah not ideal—-I’ve looked into high security phones. For now I bought two 10TB ironwolfs and a NAS to keep everything local. Running windows 10. It just runs way better than macOS which has started to suck. I’m going to host my own email locally too. No cloud at all. I browse with VPN on Firefox. I may ultimately go Linux but for now I’m just dumping all things Apple amd I have a beefed up intel nuc which far outperforms my Mac mini. This departure has been a long time coming. The latest invasion of privacy was just the final tipping point for me.
