rcfa

Without x86 emulation, this is going to be useless on M-series Macs.

Windows emulation is essentially barely necessary anymore these days, plenty of native apps on the Mac.

But the access to legacy operating systems and apps, to access old documents and data sets, THAT is key. Can’t run old windows software, NeXTstep, old versions of MacOS, etc. without CPU emulation,

Remains to hope that QEMU picks up the slack…

auxio said:

lkrupp said:

Remember, people, this is the former 'Facebook security chief’. Facebook and security are mutually exclusionary terms.

I was just about to say the same thing.  If people are outraged about CSAM scanning, they surely know about Facebook scanning everything (and not just hashes).  A former Facebook employee weighing in on it?  That's a joke right?

Not really, in this case. If you upload things to FB you do so fully aware that it’s for sharing with a more or less limited public. It’s like sending postcards.

What you keep on your phone/computer, which in essence is a brain prosthetic, is in its very essence private and not shared.
Imagine Apple scanning your diary or your thoughts! We’re literally just a technological gap distanced from “Minority Report”.

What if machine learning derives personality profiles of rapists? What if social media profiles allow the creation of very detailed psychological personality profiles? (They do!) You want Apple to scan (on device of course, for the protection of your privacy,) scan peoples social media interactions, and alert an NGO of people’s sex offender potential?

What if someone installs a hidden folder with offensive files on someone’s device, they get flagged and they deny any knowledge? Whom do you think the courts will believe?

The problem is not what Apple is doing now, but what it opens the door to.

We can only hope that some organization with deep pockets sues Apple, gets a temporary restraining order, and then finally wins the case on a wide ranging constitutional foundation.

radarthekat said:

Wait, let me understand….  You’re saying that China didn’t know about CSAM database scanning and couldn’t, without Apple introducing the hash on device, have told Apple and others that it wants them to implement on-device photo scanning for anything they want to spy on?  Of course China could have.  So there’s NOTHING inherent in Apple doing this that suddenly allows China to make such a demand.  They could have done so last week or a year ago, requiring Apple and other vendors to implement code to scan photos, or next month even if Apple undoes it’s changes.  So please tell me, what has changed?

It’s difficult to impossible to demand an infrastructure that needs to be working at the lowest levels of the OS to be built.
Governments have and do force the inclusion/exclusion of Apps and App-level functionality.

An infrastructure matter is hard to force, because a company like Apple can say it doesn’t fit into their OS’ architecture, etc.

None of these apply, once the infrastructure is actually in place. China, to stick with the example, may simply demand that they are in charge of the database and that they (rather than some NPO/NGO) be notified, citing “privacy laws” and “sovereign jurisdiction over criminal matters” as well as “national security concerns” as reasons, and on the surface, they are correct. After all, who guarantees that NPO isn’t an NSA front, and the hash database doesn’t contain items of concern to the Chinese government?

Once China is in charge of the hash database used in China, and violating notifications don’t go to Apple or an NGO but to Chinese authorities, it’s game over. After all, what’s a human rights violation and what’s a legitimate national security concern, is just a matter of perspective. We get (rightly) outraged at how Russia treats Navalny or China treats supporters of the Dalai Lama, yet many are blind to the plight of Snowden and Assange.

It’s one thing to architect a system that has no provisions for backdoors, it’s another to try to deny a government access to a back door that actually exists.

osmartormenajr said:

You know who doesn't give a damn? Regular Apple customers. You know, people with real jobs and life worries, that don't abuse children, and invest in Apple hardware because they think it is better than the competition's. They are also people that don't agonize about some very technical and narrow definition of privacy, […]

Talk about an overblown "first world" problem.

Talk about utter naïveté!

This isn’t about “some very technical and narrow definition of privacy” this is about an infrastructure that can be used for arbitrary things. Just because, initially to sell it to the public, they limit it to child abuse, doesn’t mean there’s anything technical that limits the expansion to other domains.

In adaptation to your Brazilian saying: “It’s stupid to think just because a jaguar was slain, the jungle is no free of dangers.”

“People with real jobs and live worries” are bred, such that they prevent the solution of problems. Poor people desperate for a job won’t demonstrate or block the deforestation of the Amazon, they didn’t prevent the rise of Hitler to power, they were easily recruited by the Stasi in exchange for a little privilege and a small pay raise. They are the henchmen of any evil system, and then act surprised, when the powers show up at the door and drag them to a KZ or gulag.

Tell the GeStaPo you’re not a criminal, when they knock at your door for having looked at the wrong web site, tell yourself “me being deported is just an overblown first world problem.”

mr lizard said:

“The implementation of the technology itself has left Stamos puzzled. He cites that the on-device CSAM scanning isn't necessary unless it is in preparation for end-to-end encryption of iCloud backups. ”

Bingo. 

Not sure why he’s saying that. On-device scanning gives users a fuzzy feeling of privacy (“I have nothing to hide, but no data leaves my device”) and saves Apple server side infrastructure for scanning large volumes of data across a massive cloud infrastructure. Instead they just have to deal with a (hopefully rather small) number of alerts.

So even without E2E this makes sense.