some people will add terrorist material (i.e. history and chemistry books), other will add extremist material (religious writings), blasphemous material (Christian or Atheist teachings in Saudi Arabia), and other illegal content
Apple doesn’t seem to do that covertly, what is wrong with blaming them when they actually do above things? This is a genuine question, because rn I see no issue with automated searching CP through their my iphone.
In theory, Apple could silently push above updates without any prior practice. Then why this issue became an issue only now?
You know how in history, occasionally the good old king would die and his crazy nephew would take over and burn all the peasants? This was possible because the king had absolute power.
Now, you might argue that this absolute power in this case is being used for good - but given the brush the US just had with accidental Nero, it’s worth being wary of how tools and powers might not only be used by current powers, but by future ones too.
Exactly. If you don't want weapons of mass destruction to exist, don't create them and definitely don't tell anyone (too late).
If you don't want tools of mass oppression to exist, don't create them. (We are here now.)
The fight against Japan in 1945 was important, as is the fight agains child abuse today.
But we will have to live with the choises we make, in the short run like I wrote about above and also in the long run when a crazy president is elected like you write.
I actually trust local police and courts. But I don't blindly trust future police, future courts and future politicians.
And when it comes to multi national companies I trust them to maximize shareholder value, even if that means doing what China or Saudi Arabia wishes.
As a sibling commenter noted, we are long past that. I see points of all of you in this subthread and I agree, but this doesn’t answer my last question. Tools of mass everything are already here for more than a decade, ready to deploy and use. And when these are used to do an actually good thing (stopping dickpics to minors), everyone wakes up and blames them for the possibility that could always be deployed overnight without any prior notice.
> Tools of mass everything are already here for more than a decade, ready to deploy and use.
You are forgiven if you have missed it but in the wake of Snowden Google and others have hardened their systems massively.
Signal, Matrix and others are actually making it hard to do dragnet surveillance.
> And when these are used to do an actually good thing (stopping dickpics to minors), everyone wakes up and blames them for the possibility that could always be deployed overnight without any prior notice.
Because boundaries have been overstepped again. This is a constant battle that we software people have with authorities :-)
There has been an informal truce that they leave our devices alone and we accept that they scan the cloud.
Now things are about to change and we'll respond. We've won before and I think we can do it again.
PS: There are always good reasons.
PPS: We won the last big one: Cryptography software was "munitions" and couldn't be exported until someone took it on them to make a book out of it, ship it to Europe and let cryptography people here scan it.
So according to the argument up front terrorists won, and I guess we should have a lot of problems now, but we don't have.
If you've never seen a slippery slope in action, ask someone else if they have. It always starts with something everyone can agree on. It's the inevitable slippage over time as the population replaces itself with people who arrn't intrinsically cognizant of the "before" state and the implicit normalization of deviance that represents. We may only live for about 100 years, but I challenge you to look at the size of the United States Code and what has been specifically carved out as illegal or aberrancies normalized just in 200 years.
If you don't want the atmosphere full of toxic corrosive oxygen, don't breathe it out during photosynthesis. (we were here 2.5 billion years ago, worked great for methanogens)
If you don't want to live in oppressive stratified sedentary society don't invent agriculture. (we were here ~dozen millenia ago, worked great for hunter-gatherers)
I used to read the terms when I was younger and even more stupid than today.
I fully expect someone else does it now and I even think there exist GitHub repos or some SaaS or something (some tldr for eulas?)
(Today I more or less consequently don't read thenm because 1. as a European they aren't valid if they go beyond what European law allows 2. nobody can be expected to read those anyway and if I admit to reading them I just make my life harder.)
> ... what is wrong with blaming them when they actually do above things?
It is unfortunate because although the consequences are seismic the actual problem is subtle and abstract; and difficult to get people excited over. Basically, civilisations that protect the weak against the strong (and in this case, the strongest party is by far the government and the police) are more prosperous. The more the strong are empowered to act against the weak the worse the actual outcome gets. Although not on any one easy axis to measure.
I suspect part of it is that every political movement hinges on a small network of people organising it. These systems are fantastic plausible-deniability screens for powerful people to disrupt and destroy those networks to preserve the status quo. Like, for example, how China tries to operate.
You can see signs of similar systems developing in the US. Note that Trump then Biden were both the targets of official investigations (Trump-Russia, Bidan's son & Ukraine). That isn't going to go away, it'll probably be a long time before we see a president who isn't being investigated for something. The tools that people like Apple are building will be drawn in to the struggle, and not to promote truth or fairness but to destroy their support networks if they aren't friends of the Tim Cooks and Susan Wojcickis of the world. And make no mistake, powerful people aren't looking after your interests because you like the companies they run.
Plus on the way through they are going to be used to target minorities. That part is just sort of traditional, though incidental. Like when they decide to search people's phones for marijuana use but not cocaine and it turns out different racial groups use different drugs.
The only defence is blanket bans on activity that could be used to target people.
Apple doesn’t seem to do that covertly, what is wrong with blaming them when they actually do above things? This is a genuine question, because rn I see no issue with automated searching CP through their my iphone.
In theory, Apple could silently push above updates without any prior practice. Then why this issue became an issue only now?