Security

Farid’s Clear Explanation of Apple’s Client Side Scanning

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Click to enlarge. McAfee VirusScan Wireless packaging from 2000. Client side scanning for mobile devices has been around a very long time with little to no resistance.

Here’s an important podcast with Hany Farid (transcript), definitely worth a listen for anyone interested in the facts related to Apple’s client-side scanning for child sexual abuse material (CSAM)

In this Safeguarding Podcast with Hany Farid, Professor at the University of California, Berkeley: PhotoDNA, what is is and how it works, what PhotoDNA doesn’t do, what are Hashes and do they work in an End-to-End Encrypted world, is Apple’s NeuralHash child safety proposal the incipient slippery slope as many claim, Apple’s Secret Sharing Threshold and why that’s a problem, and “WhatsApp’s hypocrisy”.

Keep in mind when listening to (or reading) this podcast that the very big and primary difference between decades of client side scanning of mobile devices for viruses, and Apple’s new proposal to scan for CSAM is… the latter benefits children (society in general) whereas the former benefits mainly a device owner (with some secondary benefits to society).

Farid repeatedly visits allowing the latter and not the former as a form of hypocrisy without pointing to the ugly underlying cultural motive (selfishness).

In other words, what if I told you a primary objection to Apple’s CSAM seems rooted in American political thinking (e.g. techno-political-extremism denying children rights) that wants to block power from being used to protect the most vulnerable in society (e.g. sad history of America’s unique tipping culture)?

This is exactly why Holland and the UK (with high levels of female participation in the political process) can successfully run technology-aimed regulation campaigns like “stop killing our children”, whereas in the US male-dominated government constantly tries to legalize murder (and rape) using technology.

Also I bristle when anyone attempts to claim an “incipient slippery slope” to CSAM or any other technology. A slippery slope risk is like arguing eventually we will be impaled by unicorns. The reason it’s a fallacy is because a line is drawn somewhere, and everyone knows this (if they accept basic science).

Here’s how the fallacy works and why slippery slope is illogical:

  1. They warn the government soon could be using this thing to hurt you.
  2. Then I say why stop there, the next thing I know they are using it to hurt me.
  3. They say whoa there, that’s crazy, why on earth would they want to hurt me.
  4. Then I say sorry it’s a slippery slope (fallacy) therefore nothing stops the slide. Anything is possible, therefore everything will happen including them hurting me.
  5. They protest saying reasons X, Y, Z means they wouldn’t do that.
  6. Then I say AHA! See the problem? Suddenly reasons exist for a slope being not slippery?
History, Security

New war is old war: Propaganda targeting activists is a norm

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A new article makes the strange claim that propaganda networks have “shifted” targeting from drugs to political activism.

New war: How the propaganda network shifted from targeting ‘addicts’ to activists.

The problem with such “new” analysis, any historian could probably show, is that activists historically have been called things like drug addicts to make them targeted more easily (avoid scrutiny of anti-democratic actions).

There is no shift, just recognition a system of heavy-handed criminalization uses encoding to escape proper scrutiny.

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

Today extremist right-wing Americans just overtly say they are going with war with the “left” instead of pretending to care about drugs.

Security

50 Waymo Per Day Reportedly Stuck in a Dead-end Street

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Sad to see how driverless car “learning” is failing so badly:

“We have talked to the drivers, who don’t have much to say other than the car is programmed and they’re just doing their job,” King says.

“There are fleets of them driving through the neighborhood regularly,” says Lewin. “And it’s been going on for six, eight weeks, maybe more.”

How many driverless cars does it take to map a dead-end? Apparently up to 50 every day for two months… so far.

Not just a massive failure of learning, a colossal waste of resources.

History, Poetry, Security

The Day Churchill Called Mussolini “greatest living statesman of our time”

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This very typically biting and insightful anecdote about Churchill comes from a military history book describing Allied preparations for D-Day:

Air Superiority in World War II and Korea: An Interview with Gen. James Ferguson, Gen. Robert M. Lee, Gen. William W. Momyer, and Lt. Gen. Elwood R. Quesada. (1983). United States: Office of Air Force History, U.S. Air Force. Page 56

The General probably should not have been shocked. Everyone surely knows Churchill was known for his failure to admonish Mussolini, right?

Mosley was to put it more concisely later when he repeated that the British Fascists wanted to turn Parliament ‘from a talk-shop to a work-shop’. When Churchill praised Mussolini’s Italy for its economic realism, it was of course the British Chancellor of the Exchequer envying the Fascist dictator for the room for manoeuvre which the absence of an effective opposition gave him.

The offensive declarations of January 1927 were of a different nature, in that they clearly justified the introduction of Fascism as a bulwark against Bolshevism.

However, a careful reader of history will note that Churchill preferred death to either Fascism or Bolshevism and thus was crudely thinking of himself as above either.

…his Commons speech of 14 April 1937 he suggested that a self-respecting Briton would face death rather than accept ‘to choose between Communism and Nazism’ :

I hope not to be called upon to survive in a world under a government of either of these dispensations.

Self-respecting here is taken to mean a Briton who hasn’t stooped so far as to allow extremism to take hold. Or to put it another way, as I described in a 2014 blog post, fall victim to what Germany experienced:

The stock market crash of 1929 led to extremely heated conflict by radical groups trying to split votes; intellectual communism versus ultra-nationalism. This led to violence, which led to mob rule by fascist militia and 1932 end of the republic.

Britain arguably rested upon a representative government that had increasingly allowed for mass dissent. And while it was far from an ideal system it didn’t end with abrupt violent revolution in the “European” way.

Seems almost natural for Churchill to claim to appreciate the very thing that he also detested so much, through dark sarcasm and sharp wit.