22july2013

I'm not saying that I'm for or against this system. I am unbiased for now. I don't have any position yet, I just have some technical and procedural questions.

1. Why would CSAM or Apple use a hash algorithm that has a 1 in 1,000,000,000 (a trillion) chance of a mismatch, when using the MD5 hashing algorithm which is already built-into macOS has a 1 in 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (70 octillion) chance of a mismatch? Yes, I know this is an image hash and not a byte-wise file hash, but even so, why was the image hash algorithm designed with such an amazingly high collision chance? Is it impossible to design an image hash that has an error rate in the octillions? Why did they settle for an error rate as surprisingly large as one in a trillion? I want to know.

2. What happens if the news media releases a picture of a child in a victimized situation but blurs or hides the indecent parts, in order to help get the public to identify the child, and what if this image gets sent to my iCloud? Is that going to trigger a match? The image has lots in common with the original offending image. Sure, a small part of the image was cropped out, but the CSAM algorithm results in matches even when images area as they say, "slightly cropped." They said this: "an image that has been slightly cropped or resized should be considered identical to its original and have the same hash." This means it could trigger a match. Am I entitled to know exactly how much of a change will typically cause the match to fail? Or is this something the public is not allowed to learn about?

3. When Apple detects a matching photo hash, how does Apple (or the US government) take into account the location of the culprit when a match occurs? Suppose the culprit who owns the offending photo resides in, say, Russia. What happens then? The US can't put that person on trial (although since 2004 the US has been putting a growing number foreign terrorists on trial after dragging them into the US, and then using tenuous links like accessing an American bank account as justification for charging them in a US Federal court.) About 96% of the people in the world do not live in the US, so does that mean a high percentage of the cases will never go to trial? Does the US government send a list of suspects to Vladimir Putin every week when they find Russians who have these illegal images in their iCloud? Or do Russian culprits get ignored? What about Canadian culprits, since Canada is on good terms with the US? Does the US government notify the Canadian government, or does the US wait until the culprit attempts to cross the border for a vacation? I want to see the list of countries that the US government provides its suspect list with. Or is this something the public is not allowed to learn about?

And now for a couple of hypothetical questions of less urgency but similar importance:

4. If a friendly country like Canada were to develop its own database, would Apple report Canadian matches to the Canadian authority, or to the US authority, or to both governments? In other words, is Apple treating the US government as the sole arbitrator of this data, or will it support other jurisdictions? 

5. What happens if an unfriendly country like China builds its own child abuse database, would Apple support that, and then would Apple report to Chinese authorities? And how would Apple know that China hasn't included images of the Tiananmen massacre in its own database?

And now a final question that comes to my mind:

Since the crimes Apple is trying to fight occur all over the world, shouldn't the ICC (International Criminal Court) be creating a CSAM database? Frankly, I blame the ICC for not tackling this problem. I'm aware that US Republicans generally oppose the ICC, but Democrats sound much more open to using the ICC. Biden has been silent on the ICC since getting elected, but he has said that his administration: "will support multilateral institutions and put human rights at the center of our efforts to meet the challenges of the 21st century.” Reading between the lines, that sounds like he supports the ICC. And since 70% of Americans support the ICC, according to a poll, maybe this is a popular issue that Biden can hang his hat on.

My main concern with this whole topic is that there are so many important questions like these that are not being considered.

The "Apple lawyers" alluded to in this story are actually lawyers from China who are subcontracted by Apple (which this story didn't report.) I presume these lawyers are trying to help Apple by using local laws to punish the leakers (who appear to be unaffiliated with Apple or its subcontractors.) However these lawyers do not appear to be holding to American standards of law or human rights. I guess they don't have to, since they live in a dictatorship, not in the US. But Apple in the USA should have told them that they need to respect all human rights as defined both in local law and also in the US constitution.

Personally, if I was Tim Cook, I would fire those lawyers (that is, if they were previously instructed to respect US laws.) However Cook seems very friendly to that dictatorship and I can't see him doing that.

I don't need this feature as my Apple Watch has its own phone built in.

robertwalter said:

Expensive camera.  Money sucking monthly subscription to get remote access.  Competition has cameras that don’t require the subscription. 

I don’t think this camera will be very successful. 

The camera's data is sent to the cloud, and possibly stored unencrypted on servers in China. Which the CCP government has access to. And GE thinks we don't care to know what is happening with our data.

Every day I use over a dozen Hue bulbs in my home, and perhaps the frequencies they use are too crowded from my neighbours' own devices, (so your results may be better) but during the course of the day there are always random bulbs with "No Response." As I write this I have three Hue bulbs saying "No response." I've switched zigbee frequencies, with different results, but never get very good results. I'm done with Hue (I think the real problem is zigbee) due to many daily failures to work properly. I'll wait for bulbs that use Thread.

By the way, despite what the manufacturer claims, the bulbs are all dimmer than incandescent bulbs, and it takes extra bulbs to get the same amount of light. So unless you have the vision of an owl, get the brightest bulbs you can get, since they are all supposed to be energy efficient anyway. And don't bother with colour bulbs, which cost way too much extra and are rarely useful.

/opinion