For CSAM, there's all sorts of monitoring, scanning, identify capturing, etc. But it's all after abuse has taken place, and it seems that many of the people actually arrested are arrested for CSAM and not CSA. This has even extended to fictional CSAM such as AI generated stories and pictures. As an aside, if that gets extended to political speech or other non-CSAM materials that are determined to be undesirable, that's a big concern. I can imagine that a conservative state could pass a law banning all porn because they claim it could encourage illegal activities such as prostitution, rape, or CSA.
On the CSA side, you rarely hear about arrests (they happen but less than CSAM). There doesn't seem to be any real push for educating and protecting kids before it happens. Ironically, the groups doing the most to educate and implement protective strategies are the ones who have been involved in abuse scandals in the past (Churches, Scouts, etc). Even then, a lot of it is just getting clearances, which doesnt prevent people who where not caught or were first timers. Offenders get put on a list/map. This is sort of a half approach. If they are still a threat, they shouldn't be released. Yet if you comb the list and see some of the results, they don't all seem to fit with CSA. I personally know of 1 who took a leak across from a playground at 2am walking home from the bars and was put on the sex offender registry because it was within 500'.
It seems like these laws are more about peddling to the publicist and lawmakers fantasy of incrementally extreme punishment rather than taking a appropriate, data driven, and level-headed approach that actually protects kids. Otherwise they will just keep pushing ham-fisted low-hanging "fixes" like required scanning and IDs to access the internet.
The same technology/access used for CSAM identification can find copyrighted files, materials that don't support current government, etc. Full E2E encryption seriously raises the cost of mass surveillance, and why the US government fights it at every turn going back 30 years.
Apple could easily not do this stuff and it may even be easier to not.
> It also ensured pressure from governments and plaintiffs, including CSAM victims, who preferred Apple’s more interventionist approaches, which Apple had voluntarily demonstrated it was willing to do.
I feel that Apple open pandora's box with the client-side scanning. It proved that it was technically feasible, and was "privacy preserving". I use scare quotes there because I don't think that political or religious dissidents would find that the same or similar technology used to discover and persecute them is "privacy preserving". And that's really the problem with Apple here. They provided a model for scanning for any kind of message or material while purportedly maintaining privacy.
There is something ironic about US laws that attempt to prevent crime A by outlawing action B. For example:
* A: physical sexual abuse of children. B: possession or distribution of CSAM
* A: drug trafficking or tax evasion. B: structured cash withdrawals
It's my understanding that conviction of CSAM-related crimes do not require any physical act to have ever occurred to any real person: one can be convicted of CSAM-related crimes related to paintings/drawings/created_art of fictional people.
It's my understanding that one can be convicted of structured withdrawals that are not driven by, linked to, or in any way related to anything nefarious.
Same issue with Proton, MEGA, and any other e2ee app... it's only useful when the company decides not to mess with the data it could always decrypt locally. Also why people are hesitant to use javascript-based e2ee solutions where the site owner can modify the code at will to do what they want.
As sad as this is, end to end encryption means no CSAM scanning.
As an alternative Apple previously tried to do scanning on the phones locally but caught hell for that too.
This is one of those unfortunate tradeoffs but I see no alternative to privacy taking priority.
Just because we technically can make a privacy destroying drag net does not mean we should. Had phones existed 250 years ago, I have no doubt the founders would have thought it obvious that a cellphone’s contents were your personal papers which could not be freely searched.
Once again, someone (in this case, the judge of this case) asks if we can meet in the middle on whether or not private communications are actually private.
To be clear: this is not a limitation of nerds' imagination. This is a limitation of physics. A person is either party to a communication (and thus can decrypt it) or is not (and thus cannot). If you demand Apple scan encrypted photos for CSAM, what you are demanding is that Apple be party to every communication done with an iPhone. There is no middle ground on encryption, there will never be a middle ground on encryption, and I will hold this truth on my deathbed.
There is no "encrypted but crackable" - if the CIA can crack it at all, we're only a few years away from some kid's gaming rig doing the same thing. There is no "secure golden key" - if there was, you could buy it in the same section of Amazon that sells copies of the TSA master key that opens all luggage locks.
Personally, the next time a government demands decryption keys, I think Apple should just set all iCloud photo libraries in that country to public and say "Sorry, your politicians made private photos illegal, take it up with them". Obviously, telegraph this far in advance and give users time to actually delete their cloud-hosted photos first. But definitely do not pretend like you can keep a secret with a government bureaucracy of hundreds of thousands of people.
But then again, Apple also capitulated (good meaning) to the EU on third-party app distribution, so Apple has a lot less of a spine than they let on. At least Google actually stayed out of China.
Wasn’t Apple’s design to explicitly NOT scan in its cloud storage, but look at the file on-device at the moment you wish to upload it to iCloud? This method would make it compatible with Advanced Data Protection; so ADP could have always been in the pipeline rather than Apple u-turning. In fact, NeuralHash may have been proposed because Apple wanted to introduce ADP and saw a potential problem here/get concerns from government agencies about it and saw this as a means to an end(-to-end).
The system was designed pretty elegantly and offers far better privacy protections - including guardrails - than what Microsoft and Google do, but the communication from Apple about it was absolutely horrible and generated enormous backlash. (Not saying I agreed with implementing it, just saying the design was infinitely better than competitors.)
Governments need to catch criminals, but they shouldn’t do it at everyone else’s expense.
The VAST majority of “CSAM” is consensually created and exchanged by teens. Their future selves and their parents form this pressure group attacking everyone’s liberty and privacy to try to undo the downsides of choices they made themselves with full knowledge of what could happen.
The criminal and disgusting tail end of this type of material deserves the worst of consequences for the perpetrators and all the support in the world for the victims, but these are mostly - you guessed it - poor and unprivileged children from far away places and they certainly can’t put this much pressure on apple
Don't let a classic "think of the children" appeal to emotion short circuit your reasoning.
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We're not allowed to use data or experts. They’re untrustworthy and out to trick us.
When politics is involved, there is a lot of truth to this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout#Weapo...
It's hard to find 1998 news articles about it now, but I would guess that the law was a reaction to this high profile crime.
Data and statistics is as always dependent on how and what you measure.
So the number of hanguns is maybe something like 20% higher than long guns, but murders using handguns are 10x higher than with long guns.
https://www.thetrace.org/2023/03/guns-america-data-atf-total...
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
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https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/476409/mass-shootings-in...
Also you can do one and the other ... at the same time. E.g. suicides of kids/teenagers (<= 19) in Germany in 2025: 216. That is, compared to the population in this age group, 1.38 per 100'000. In the USA that ratio is 9.4 in the age-group 15-19 and 2.3 in the age group 10-14.
And keep in mind, the total deaths by firearms in Germany in 2024 was "just" 168 (we have 1/4th of the US population, in the US police forces alone killed more people ... the total number of 44'000 firearms deaths in USA/2024 is even more staggering). Even if I multiply the 168 by 4 for the population difference ... then 672 vs. 44'000 is still a point of shame for the USA.
So in Germany, we do BOTH better regarding firearms AND regarding health services on kids. And if the USA truly would try MAGA they'd actually copy good results from other countries. So a real-MAGA-person must be against liberal firearms distribution AND for better social health work with teenagers.
BTW, the USA ideology of "the population needs arms to fight a corrupt state" is laughable. When you had your armed religious sects clash with the state, then the state always won. They still have more and better weapons and armor. On the other side, if you look how east-europe shed off their socialist regimes 40 years ago, than nowhere was an armed general population involved. So one can conclude that private firearms may as well be highly regulated and diminshed.
A note about copying - you have to look at the culture to see if how things will work. Germany has vastly different socioeconomics than the US, and socioeconomics are major factors in crime and homicide. Not to mention the percentage of people who own guns and are pro-gun are vastly different. Applying the same regulations in the US will take decades for criminals to no longer have many guns and then they will switch to knives and screwdrivers as we see in the UK, which has about dowluble the violent crime rate as the US after accounting for differences in the stats (somewhat culturally/socioeconomically similar). So it might make the gun numbers better, but it won't solve the real drivers.
The best approach would be to address the underlying factors and causes of all violence while still allowing freedoms for the 44% who do not support stricter regulation.
Well, most of Europe simply has banned guns in the hands of civilians instead, so that's some data as well.
The only reason why the US is so extremely lax on firearms is because people keep blathering on about how guns are the last line of defense against a tyrannical government - and yet, what do the most rabid of these people do? Vote in and defend a literal tyrant.
No, it’s because the right to own firearms is very explicitly stated in our constitution and the constitution requires an extreme super majority to update. A 50%+1 majority is all that’s required to ban civilian ownership of guns in most parliamentary systems, not so in the US. The culture is downstream of the law.
The right to bear arms does not necessarily mean firearms. Arms doesn't necessarily even have to include firearms, and America is already pretty damn strict about certain armaments, such as sub-machine guns.
Americans are allowed to have certain firearms, sometimes, in some places. I'm not sure how one squares that with the blanket statement from the American constitution that Americans have the right to bear arms, unless it's simply an impossibly poorly-informed citizenry
Tyrant? You may disagree with him, but he got in through the system. Now if he doesn't get out that is another story.
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No, that's some bullshit. How do you think we eat pheasant and rabbit and venison? Show me a pheasant farm and I'll show you forty acres of unfenced woodland littered with empty cartridges.
Observe! https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gun-owner...
Nope
The detectives assigned to this work tend to not last long, and the horrific nature of the crime affects them.
Like all rape, it’s a combo of control and dopamine. The church and Boy Scout leaders leveraged their societial influence and power to compel compliance and even loyalty from their victims. Boy Scouts as an organization inserted itself into existing power structures like church, police and other institutions. It’s difficult for a 11 year old victim to make an accusation about a beloved community figure. They also tend to find ways to make their victims feel complicit. Even if people come forward, they are hard cases to try and exposes young victims to public shame. Many of these people plea to lesser crimes to protect the victim.
I wasn’t a victim thank god, but a Boy Scout leader at my parish was a serial molester who abused dozens or hundreds of children. I learned about it years later and realized that some of my friends were almost certainly victims — in his case everyone in authority just blew it off
This doesn't mean I agree with active scanning of things like iCloud, effectively making everyone a suspect, but counter to what people here seem to think it really might help prevent CSA.
How do you square this with fictional material being illegal?
I was curious about this. I did find some research here: https://www.suojellaanlapsia.fi/en/post/csam-users-in-the-da... (2021)
That paper states
> Traditional research on individuals who use CSAM is often inherently biased as it has focused primarily on convicted and known offenders.
and appears to be directly trying to avoid that bias, which is good to see.
Isn't there still some bias here though? They only got answers from 1. people who were using a dark web search engine with ads, 2. felt the need to click a "Help us to help you" link, 3. were willing to discuss the topic with strangers on the web. Only (3) was (almost) acknowledged in the Limitations section.
They concluded that "Many CSAM users are not just viewers" and, while "many" could mean any number, I think readers would probably take it to mean something like 30% (shown in graphs) which isn't indicated by their data.
Furthermore, the "not just viewers" conclusion is from a question about "seeking direct contact with children through online platforms". I'm not sure why they didn't more directly ask if respondents took action towards abusing children, with the inspecific "direct contact" qualifier and very specific qualifier "through online platforms". I wonder what the results would have been if they removed "direct" and "through online platforms" from the question.
Admittedly I don't know a lot about statistical techniques! Has there been other research, or do you know what the police agency was basing their explanation on?
It is technical possible that in small villages there is only a single Boy Scout leader and no other adults, who then spend a lot of time alone with children. In my experience however, after school activities involving children also generally involve several adults. That makes it a major structural issue among the adults if they fail to detect a problem like hundreds of victims, and the more common remedy would be to train people, apply some form of screening, and change routines that limit risk and encourage reporting in case of inappropriate behavior.
In addition, having trained people that regular meet and talk to children can help detect situations even when they happen in peoples home, like having school employees training in detecting signs of CSA.
You have been mildly brainwashed.
It would be best if that episode lead you to study a bit of psychology but instead you chose to believe.
Like any belief it's a combo of control and dopamine. The feeling of belonging to a group and being righteous within that group hits so hard that it takes hard explicit effort to screen your perception of its effects.
You are a victim because you failed to accept reality.
Meanwhile the real pedos are rich people vacationing in well known places.
Why? are you hiding something in your email?
Now for real: People often do not care a lot about child abuse. It does not affect them as it happens in private where they do not see it. CSAM however does affect them as it makes the abuse visible and shows something deemed reprehensible. In a lot of ways people see themselves being witness (even indirect by purely hearing about it) to CSAM as the victim rather than the children who are harmed in the making and by redistribution.
My cynical opinion is that it is a lot more about social norms and feelings arising from the violation of these norms rather than the harm done through the violation of children.
This isn't entirely true. In much of the Western world – outside the US – CSAM (or equivalent legal terms such as "child pornography", "child abuse material", "child exploitation material", etc) can include text, drawings, AI-generated imagery, etc, which no child was abused to create, indeed the child depicted in it may be entirely fictional. Canadian law goes so far as to treat material which "advocates or counsels" the commission of CSA as CSAM - which the Supreme Court of Canada insisted (in the 2001 case of R v Sharpe) doesn't include mere political advocacy for its legalisation (as in e.g. the NAMBLA Bulletin), although some will question whether that insistence actually cashes out in practice.
Now, as a father of school-aged children, I find the whole idea of groups like NAMBLA rather abhorrent – but, I'm hesitant about the government making it illegal for people to express abhorrent ideas, because there are likely ideas which you or I hold which somebody out there considers abhorrent.
Conflating the two is 1. wrong as a matter of fact and ethics and 2. a great injustice to the victims of child abuse.
This is exactly what I wrote about in the second part of my comment. People see themselves as the victim of CSAM or proclaimed CSAM through being witness to it. In fictional works there is no child who could be the victim showing very clearly what these people are really about. They are not primarily concerned about children being exploited but they do not like the existence of such material as them deem it offensive to themselves.
CSAM is a very real crime; including cases where real children are not physically harmed but get sexualized through the composition of the material. It is a crime because it violates children, not because it is offensive to societal norms.
You might want to look up if that's actually true. It might be. It might also be a lie to hide the real reason why they are registered.
Talk about tainted for life.
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It's almost like they can spot an easy target.
Deal drugs and conduct yourself violently in society, sit with a gang and destroy property... Police seem to have a hard time with you.
Push someone over who is threatening to knock your teeth out when you're walking with your wife and kids... that's an assault charge, because naively you explained what happened to the police, and they're going to make sure you see the inside of a court room for it.
I make this point on HN each time it comes up: Dealing with actual CSA requires actual people going to investigate actual reports of children's living conditions out in the real world, not "scanning digital files". Seems obvious when you say it like that, but the alternative seems to still score heavily on the political scale. Ironically, spending more money on "scanning digital files" takes away from resources that could prevent those digital files from being created in the first place, so all the additional time, money, and effort towards combatting CSAM is time, money, and effort specifically _not_ working against stopping CSA. It's categorically _not_ protecting the children.
Teachers, in Australia at least, have mandatory reporting where any kind of abuse is suspected. The heart-breaking irony is that the resources to investigate the reports are so scarce that they can only respond to reports where the child's life is in immediate danger.
Caveat: the above was true a few years ago, I genuinely don't know if it's still true. What I do know is that 'social work' isn't suddenly a high paying job, so I doubt resource availability has changed much.
There is no easy answer to this. It's entirely nuance.
That's exactly what happens. CSAM has two parts to it.
The first is the known and most horrific videos of CP out there. These aren't shared, instead only hashes are used to determine if the image/video matches. It's next to impossible to get an mis-hit on that.
The second is nudity and age detection AI. Apple has this on their devices, but warns the user before sharing not reporting.
It normally takes more than one hit to get flagged for investigation. At that point law enforcement are informed and take over.
The majority of investigations are children sending naked pictures of themself to their friends.
So it is absolutely being used as the purpose to protect children and it's amazing how many people don't realise how it works when they are very transparent about it.
Of course it is not without its issues that need to fixed. For example providers will just ban the person before it's determined if they broke a law or not.
It also requires devices to run this spyware without a way to disable it. The natural consequence of this is to ban everything but government approved, restricted OSes and to outlaw devices capable of running anything but these. Mandatory CSAM scanning is part of the war on general computing and privacy.
For many, probably most victims, they just want to forget about it and let it vanish into the past, and ideally someone else who was abused by that person comes out and has them jailed.
I won't leave. I was born here, and my ancestors were too and this is my beautiful country.
If there's a person committing abuse against a child, usually a family member in their own household, there's no story there. They (hopefully) get arrested, get a minor mention in the media if that, and life moves on.
If, on the other hand, they send CSAM using a platform, device or protocol, then clearly the makers of that technology failed to uphold their sacred duty to protect the child. If most CSAM cases happen using a few major technologies (and they will, because societies tend to standardize on what technologies they use for communication), the technologies get blamed for the problem they supposedly enable.
If you dislike the technology for other reasons (the distrust of corporations from left-leaning politicians, censorship allegations on the right, a moral panic about the impact of smartphones on children's mental health), you can use people's misunderstanding of statistics to exaggerate the CSAM problem, blame the tech, and gain some notion of control over it in a way that is politically palatable to citizens.
It's worth saying explicitly that centralization doesn't have much to do with this. We've seen similar stories play out with bicycles, Walkmans, pagers, AI, heavy metal and Uber rapes. They were different moral panics, but the mechanic was roughly the same. I think the situation wouldn't change much if we all used PGP-encrypted email over personal mail servers to communicate.
An exception that proves the rule is the moral panic over CSA in primarily-catholic countries, notably relating to abuse committed by catholic priests, which are statistically no more likely to commit it than anybody else. As the influence of the Church on government policy is a hotly-debated topic in those countries, CSA is suddenly an issue that people can use to further their political causes.
- Prosecutors want to go after it because it is much easier to prove than CSA.
- Authoritarians want to go after it because it gives them a chance to get things like ID checks accepted by the public.
- People who genuinely want to prevent CSA focus on it because a large amount of CSAM is made by serial abusers - so capturing producers can prevent future abuse. Additionally, they believe (with good reasons) that CSAM consumption is a gateway to CSA and CSAM production for many people. Further, finding CSAM can be a way to identify and rescue children from abusive situations.
- CSA survivors may advocate for it often feel traumatized not just by the abuse, but by the fact that people might be continuously viewing that abuse.
- Going after it winds up creating digital forensics specialists and task forces, which creates a special interest group within police departments which wants to continue focusing on CSAM but is not set up to do anything about CSA.
I would recommend the podcast Hunting Warhead to anyone interested in learning more about this.
> yet almost nothing seems to be done to prevent CSA
> On the CSA side, ... [t]here doesn't seem to be any real push for educating and protecting kids before it happens.
> I personally know of 1 who took a leak across from a playground at 2am walking home from the bars and was put on the sex offender registry because it was within 500'.
My school did not cover that (but at least my parents did).
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Because it is nearly always someone we know. Someone who we just cannot imagine would ever do such a thing, even when the evidence is glaringly obvious. And I suspect that the fraction of the population diddling kids in real life is breathtaking, and nobody really wants to face that head on. Too uncomfortable.
I could just be overly cynical today. But given my own experiences and other people I've known throughout my life, I really believe it is very common.
Before abstinence and birth control, CSA prevention should be the primary goal of sex ed in schools, especially before high school. (Though on birth control [1] and probably STIs as well the US is not doing well.)
[1] https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/issues/sex-education...
If you provide the government a platform to do So, they'll do Y if you wait long enough
There's a user-company data boundary.
Keep it.
for the UK, there has been a massive shift to prevent this kind of stuff.
anyone who even volunteers with children or vulnerable adults needs to be screened. Charities are required to have policies for dealing with vulnerable people safely.
but to the point, Apple halfarse CSAM reporting.
Whatsapp which doesn't do "CSAM scanning" reports in one hour more CSAM than apple does in a year. From memory meta (instgram, facebook and whatsapp) reported millions of cases of CSAM for 2021, compared to apple's ~250 (not thousand, just 250)
for facebook its automated scanning, but for whatsapp, its just design. its really obvious how to report a message/image. in imessage, its impossible, there is no mechanism to long press/select/other a message.
Now, Facebook are bastards in virtually every way, but for whatsapp at least, they have made GUI changes that have real positive impact on CSAM protection.
Apple has not.
They made some noise about hashing, but thats invasive and ironically noisier than having user reports.
as far as i am aware, that is common practice in many countries. the problem is that screening is typically a quick check of "has this person been suspected or arrested for something involving minors already" and perhaps a few questions on a piece of paper. its not like they give everyone volunteering for a fieldtrip an extensive 1:1 with a psychologist and an mri. any predator who has not previously been caught will easily pass screening.
>From memory meta (instgram, facebook and whatsapp) reported millions of cases of CSAM for 2021, compared to apple's ~250 (not thousand, just 250)
easy enough to explain. instagram and facebook are social media with billions of public posts. whatsapp is in a similar enough boat, with large (up to 1000 participants?) facebook-like groups of otherwise strangers and a lot of marketing and inertia for social-media-like use.
i imagine instagram is a majority of it. it's disgusting on there.
on the other hand, apple is not a social media company nor facilitates large group chats (imessage goes up to 32 participants).
i doubt adding an easier UX for reporting would make a material difference in the number of reports apple submits because you're typically already talking with people you know when using imessage.
Apple reported 250 items
Instagram 3.1million whatsapp 1.1 million facebook 8.8million tiktok 1.3 million snapchat 1.1million
Look I hate meta, more than you would know. But apple have very little excuse here. Even Anthropic reported more CSAM than them. I get your point about group vs 1:1, but frankly that holds only a tiny amount of water. Even if you did want to report it, you can't, not through apple at least. And if you did report it to the police, there is a high chance you'll loose your phone for use as evidence.
Peripheral to your comment, there is an argument against AI generated CSAM that no one seems to be making so allow me. AI will do the same for CSAM as it has already done for copyright laundering. That is, it will enable its distributors to train their models on real CSAM while obscuring the training material. A legal regime that permits unrestricted distribution of AI generated CSAM incentivizes actual abuse as a source of training material. If one opposes legal prohibitions on free speech grounds, then at a minimum there should be an audit requirement incumbent on AI generated CSAM distributors to document their process in sufficient detail as to establish that they haven't used actual CSAM for training, similarly to the way porn distributors are required to document that their models are of legal age.
That's not to say it's acceptable if illegally produced.
We have issues in the UK. So far they've banned 'rape' porn. And now they're talking about 'barely legal'
None of this seems to be based on any statistics showing this is actually harmful in any way.
>that many of the people actually arrested are arrested for CSAM and not CSA
So there are, or there aren't arrests?
Also you hear about CSA arrests all the damn time. If anything it's underplayed in the media somewhat when they're a specific people.
Even ADP in iCloud sends the hashes of the plaintext to Apple, non-e2ee. This allows them to see who has unique files, and when, and the networks of users to which they spread, and when.
Second, detecting CSAM leads to its producers who are by definition abusers. Here’s a nice article in Wired about the digital forensics of cracking down on a CSAM ring with some interesting details about the role played by crypto, and abusers’ misconceptions about it: https://www.wired.com/story/tracers-in-the-dark-welcome-to-v...
With that said, I agree that a lot of political concern for this is a smokescreen for a creating more surveillance. “think of the children!” has the flavor of a rhetorical trump card.
Compared to this, CSA is much harder. Every case is different. You have to do due diligence. And it is extremely hard to proactively detect them. Careful criminals will destroy all evidence. The number of case itself is smaller. And there is a good chance to lose in the court and for prosecutors this is a clearly risky move. Good ol' criminal investigation is expensive. There is a structural reason not to prioritize them.
The whole incentive structure is broken. The only thing to fix this is external pressure, but even it does not work these days. Exposing CSA is a rare event but media needs constant, sensitive headlines so they tend to treat CSA and CSAM like the same thing. Hence external pressures do not work, and even worse those work in a wrong way. This creates a bad feedback loop.
These are utterly anathema to huge chunks of society, especially American society. It's more and more clear, from the scope of the Epstein Files, just how much of American society and government has been influenced specifically to enable easy access to children by rich white men. Even beyond that, the entire right wing would instantly catch fire if we actually required effective sex education. Especially age-appropriate sex education going right down to kindergarten (yes, kindergarten: the better children that age understand what's normal and safe, the better they can communicate when someone is doing things to them that are not that...and I only stop at kindergarten because AFAIK that's the earliest mandated schooling still). Similarly, the right wing desperately wants to have absolute control over their children—treat them as property—so giving children rights that even parents have to respect will get them to oppose absolutely everything.
Plus, as other sibling comments have already noted, the real desire here is for ubiquitous surveillance. CSAM is just the excuse they use.
You're absolutely right that, even if such a mandate had already existed, it would've been erased or co-opted by right-wing groups by now.
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It's all about surveilling the masses and keeping them under control. Children are merely one of the political weapons they use to make the masses accept any proposed solution, no matter how Orwellian. You're not against protecting children from drug trafficking, money laundering, child molesting terrorists, are you?
And those groups still have lower rates of abuse than Schools which do a lot less training and enforcement of youth protection policies.
Children are still safer in Scouts and churches than in schools.
Just about every kid goes to school though, so people just prefer to sweep that under the rug and focus on targeting organizations they are not a part of or disagree with because they're easier to demonize and make fun of.
I work with kids, and I've had to take the Scouts and Catholic Church's youth protection training. They are both free to take online if anyone wants to check it out.
What evidence do you have of this? The only sources I can find that would even vaguely support your claim switch to talking about physical abuse in schools, or sexual assault committed by fellow students.
To be clear, we're discussing the sexual assault of children by adults here. We're not talking about physical abuse, nor are we talking about assault by fellow students.
Is that in absolute terms, or per child who frequents the establishment?
So something like 1 per 100,000; which of course is still 1 too many.
(The other comments in other branches seem to prove my point. I am not defending any institution by the way. No one should be covering up crimes and/or allowing criminals to victimize people further.)
Why are you making apologies for (Catholic) church sex abuse? Because you are a member and you took a training? Yikes.
I read it basically as “schools are even worse than churches and scouts yet are overlooked,” nothing apologizing for the churches.
Didn't their paper disproved by reversing the perceptual hashes to reveal blurred version of the images being hashed, and Apple basically said "that's fair, it's not as robust as we wanted, let's visit this later"?
If not, I'll happily stand corrected, but please share sources.
Addenda:
- Apple's original paper: https://web.archive.org/web/20210807165030/https://www.apple...
- Paper breaking the hash: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.06628
Edit: The second one is the wrong paper. I’ll find and link the correct one tomorrow. Keeping the link for transparency.
Skimmed your linked paper. It seems they were able to classify hashes up to ~8% top-1 accuracy and ~30% top-10. Not exactly a blurred version, or any images at all.
So for example, they can say that you probably have images of trees, or images of buildings, but without much other data & very low accuracy.
I'd still be a lot more concerned about them simply flagging political images rather than trying to get a broad understanding of what type of photos I have
https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?archives/931-Pho...
That box has been open for years now.
Big brother is already watching what you do on your Android device.
> A Dad Took Photos of His Naked Toddler for the Doctor. Google Flagged Him as a Criminal.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...
Very different than trying to narc out users to the authorities.
The other is detection of images that may contain nudity, whether sent or received, when the owner/admin/parent enables the feature. It is relatively uncontroversial and is described here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/105069
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No, in the sense that your therapist is still required to report you to the police in various situations where you pose an immediate threat to yourself or others, etc.
Trying to avoid false positives by not firing until a threshold was hit (was it 20 images?) seemed insane from a PR position... rightly or wrongly, all it would take would be the wrong court case and you can see the headlines:
"Apple says users can have up to 20 CSAM images on their phone before they'll tell police"
You might not like pictures that way but honestly I think more important in procescuting CSAM is to go after the large sources of CSAM generation. Its trafficing in East Asia, and in Europe. I think weirdly America actually produces less CSAM in general because Americans are lot more off put by Sex than most other cultures. Abuse definitely happens in the US but making policy decisions like this produces bad policy.
Does iCloud rehost the photos to other people I don't really know because I use andriod tbh. If they are being rehosted (I assume to members of your contacts) that can be problematic but I think honestly the issue a lot more complex than just protect the children which the source of critic is a lot attacks against apples are coming from
If Apple's interests sometimes align with ours then great. I'll take it. But don't attribute to this ~5 trillion dollar company some kind of altruism.
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Altruism or not, I've found that their interests almost always align with mine when it comes to privacy.
At least on Desktop we have usable Linux, but on the phones there is literally nothing usable because thanks to Google efforts switching to GrapheneOS mean tons of apps either not working or break every few months.
Yes its possible to make Andoid spy on you a little less, but even for tech savvy person its damn inconvinient and Google making platform worse with every single release.
Thanks to Google "security" I can use my banking apps on 9 years old device with 6 years outdated firmware, but not on GrapheneOS.
I've been using GrapheneOS for years and that hasn't been my experience. There are two financial apps that don't work for me, and that's it. Pretty much everything else I use is fine. But, to be fair, I'm very scrupulous about my apps and tend to avoid installing an app for every little thing that wants me to.
With only one brief exception, all of my financial institution's apps have worked fine, too, including some banks I see drive-by complaints about on here.
Anyone curious should refer to the tracker: https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...
Sometimes, all you need is a Web browser. I personally don't want any "apps" on my phone that aren't basic utilities.
I am aware some banks in Europe require 2FA on a mobile device. Short of switching banks, my answer to that is a cheap or e-waste Googled Android phone that stays at home and serves that sole purpose.
[1] https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/no-longer-neccesary-to-s...
They probably use E2EE just so they don't have to respond to court orders and such.
Like OP said, Apple isn't perfect nor will they ever be, but they do prioritize privacy better than most.
Watchdog ponders why Apple doesn't apply its strict app tracking rules to itself (theregister.com)
161 points by Logans_Run on Feb 14, 2025 | 69 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43047952
Apple silently uploads your passwords and keeps them (lapcatsoftware.com)
170 points by ingve on Nov 1, 2024 | 127 comments
And whenever your privacy contradicts their control over "your" device, you are also out of luck, e.g., you can't have Ublock Origin on an iPhone. Relevant discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44804921
Except ublock, which can't do what it does the way it normally does, for the same reason you can't have any plugin inspecting realtime activity and doing scriptlet injection.
You can have ad blocking. You can't have plugins with that kind of low level access to your browser activity.
You can prefer something that allows dangerous behavior as a trade-off for greater capabilities, but you can't deny it's a safety trade-off where Apple picked what's safer.
They're pro-privacy when it serves them financially.
But they are until they are actually defeated. I would rather plan for failure. We are in a global climate where court rulings can be ignored.
They might be slightly better than some others (horray!) but given their ecosystem it is still the worst platform if you value any form of freedom. Depending on apple for your privacy is ignorance at best.
Look up the "iCloud Keychain" API:
For years Apple has let and helped Facebook, TikTok, Tinder etc. track users even after you delete an app, even ACROSS DEVICES and DEVICE RESETS.
There's no way to even SEE what data the apps have stored on your device & iCloud account on iOS, only through the macOS Keychain Access app. Even then you can't be sure that that's all that being stored.
They temporarily changed course and wiped iCloud Keychain data when deleting apps, but only during a single beta of iOS some years ago, and then reverted to the way it is now.
This scores so many points in favor of privacy intruding corporations that it puts Apple far from being the paragon of privacy they pretend to parade as.
It's a real flaw that they should've fixed a long time ago, but your conspiratorial framing makes it seem like Apple colluded with Facebook et al. to end run their own privacy protections, while ignoring the fact that Apple's App Tracking Transparency feature has cost Facebook billions.
2. Why in't there any UI in iOS yet to view and delete that data without using those apps, asking them nicely, and trusting them to do it?
3. Why aren't users informed about apps storing data that will carry across app reinstalls, device reinstalls, and to all your other devices?
2. Why would there be? Apple building a UI for people to accidentally fuck up their apps sounds like the exact kind of thing Apple would never do on iOS.
3. Users are already informed when an app wants to track them. Beyond that, having an app store data so that it carries across reinstalls and to all my other devices is what I would expect my apps to do. If I uninstall an app and reinstall it later, I want it to pick up where I left off, not with a blank slate.
People understood this settlement to mean Apple was spying on their conversations and selling them to advertisers, when it seems to have more to do with people accidentally triggering Siri. But people don’t care about this kind of nuance or actually tallying up all the ways Apple is pro privacy against rare issues like this one. It’s all just tribalism at the end of the day.
> Although Apple does not explicitly disclose it in its consumer-facing privacy documentation, a small proportion of Siri recordings are passed on to contractors working for the company around the world. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/26/apple-con...
Regardless of how you feel towards Apple, this sort of data should be siloed in a way that makes it impossible to share with undisclosed third-parties. It also should not be shared anywhere until Apple can confirm that PII and other sensitive information was redacted from the data, which they did not. It generally points to a laissez-faire attitude towards personal data that is hard to abdicate without seeing the Siri server-side code or retention architecture, which is why Apple settled to avoid revealing the extent to which they retain and share data in a class-action discovery process. The settlement is a mea-culpa without admitting to wrongdoing or proving fundamental security.
The lawsuit was entirely avoidable if Apple didn't play fast-and-loose with production databases. It'll be a black eye for anyone that points to Apple's whitepapers as an example of their commitment to security - some retention simply doesn't get documented by Apple.
So once there’s a profit motive for violating your privacy, the justification for eroding your privacy will proceed. It’s really the inertia of Apple starting out as privacy-compatible that makes them hesitant to throw that away.
These companies are liars. I do not trust liars. It has served me well.
Quite a lot of the labor issues in Apple's supply chain we found out because Apple found them and included them in their annual report on these and other supply chain issues.
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Apple is on the side of making money, and the privacy claims are mostly marketing. The entire stack is closed source, which means it is difficult and expensive to independently verify any of the claims made. What's more, the "auto update" universal backdoor means that Apple can forcibly push a user-hostile "feature" like client-side scanning when it wants or is compelled to by a state actor.
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This isn't necessarily the case in the US, though I believe only for drawings. AI-generated CSAM probably wouldn't fly in a court of law.
Regardless, it's a naive conception of a system of law to think of it as a utilitarian system of restitution in contexts of "this individual harmed this individual". In fact, that would fall under the category of a "tort" rather than a "crime". The law is just as much about enforcing social mores and norms as it is about dealing with individuals harming each other. Hence why locales like Canada outlaw all forms CSAM, even fictional ones. The victim taken is to be society itself. The possession of this material, implicitly entailing enjoyment of it, is so gross a violation of society's norms and mores that it becomes elevated to a legal matter.
This shouldn't be the case in a society that supposedly values liberty.
The reason why the Supreme Court upheld bans on possessing CSAM is not because it's obscene, but because it incentivizes abuse of children to produce it.
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As well as possession. I don't actually know if those are different for CSAM, but I would assume so because they are for drugs.
Mere possession of a substance is surely not what society cares about.
> Non-consented distribution of sexual images (eg: revenge porn) is also a crime.
There is very compelling empirical evidence that this causes actual harm (suicide ideation in a very big fraction of the victims), even if it is fictional, so here there is no question about the harm.
I can't wrap my head around how AI-generated imagery is evidence of child sexual abuse (CAS). How are you abusing a real child by generating an image of a fake one?
[1] https://rainn.org/get-the-facts-about-csam-child-sexual-abus...
(a)In General.—Any person who, in a circumstance described in subsection (d), knowingly produces, distributes, receives, or possesses with intent to distribute, a visual depiction of any kind, including a drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting, that—
(1)
(A)depicts a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; and
(B)is obscene; or ...
(b)...
(c)Nonrequired Element of Offense.—
It is not a required element of any offense under this section that the minor depicted actually exist.
People have infantilization fetishes - where they wear diapers and shit. You can certainly imagine someone making a cartoon of that in a sexual way.
Adults often don't look their ages. John Mulaney famously had a set about resembling a child when he was 29.
What if someone generated an image that looked like a teenager, but there was a driver's license in the frame that said the person was an adult?
Real people have ages. Imaginary people are imaginary.
What about art from the antiquity when what we would call a teenager would have been treated as an adult? Surely someone painted people having sex before "the age of consent" was a well-defined term. Is it illegal to own that painting?
I mean, if there were any truth to it, surely our nation would have seen an uptick, in the past 30–40 years, of new generations picking up guns and just mercilessly mowing down soft targets as if playing GTA.
Thankfully, that is all confined to fantasy in cyberspace!
On top of that, while there are different types of child abusers, the worst ones almost invariantly collect CSAM to the point of hoarding. So it really isn’t that bad of a proxy.
The root comment is implying that legalizing or decriminalizing csam would somehow help with prosecution of child abuse? I’m kind of speechless. Csam IS child abuse. The fact that there are consumers encourages producers to, well, produce!
There have been a handful of convictions based on fictional content, but usually the defendants also possessed real CSAM so there wasn't much point in contesting the charges over fictional images.
> The PROTECT Act includes prohibitions against obscene illustrations depicting child pornography, including computer-generated illustrations, also known as virtual child pornography. Previous provisions outlawing virtual child pornography... had been ruled unconstitutional... The PROTECT ACT attached an obscenity requirement under the Miller test or the variant test noted above to overcome this limitation.
Which, if I'm reading it right, means that GP was correct in saying "conviction of CSAM-related crimes do not require any physical act to have ever occurred to any real person"
> However, the court did not reverse its holding in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition as to virtual child pornography which is not obscene under the Miller standard
Also, in regard to the fictional CSAM depictions that stuff is still wending its way through the courts.
- Structured transactions are illegal because we put a minimum on the amount of cash that has to move before government financial surveillance applies. The alternative (at least, one acceptable to the state) would be that the government knows every transaction you make[0] no matter the size. Since we don't want that, it has to be illegal to lie about the size of a transaction. Furthermore, the harder it is to get away with structuring your transactions, the more legible the financial system becomes and the easier it is to catch drug dealers.
- Pedophiles have not stopped possessing or distributing CSAM to reduce their legal liability. Actually, this argument ignores the main reason why pedophiles store and trade CSAM around in the first place: it's specifically to scare victims into silence and revictimize those who tell the cops. In fact, this is why we stopped calling it "child porn" and started calling it "child sexual abuse material" - because it is specifically material designed to sexually abuse children by way of it's mere existence.
If you're a "no touch" pedophile (they do exist!) that's still trading real CSAM around, well... Congratulations, Nobuhiro Watsuki, award-winning author of the hit samurai manga Rurouni Kenshin, you're still doing the dirty work for the full-contact pedo who recorded the damned thing.
As for drawn child porn, involving fictional characters (i.e. not CSAM), it is legal in certain jurisdictions. Notably, America, where the 1st Amendment errs on the side of creative expression[1]; and Japan, the thinking man's Epstein Island, where... I actually don't know why the fuck Japan is so weirdly tolerant of all this sick lolicon trash. Hell, Watsuki didn't even get cancelled when it came out he had 100 DVDs worth of actual CSAM.
There's an additional layer to this, though, in that for all the crimes you brought up, there's been a history of active state complicity in the crime:
- The CIA is a drug trafficking gang that happens to moonlight as a government intelligence agency
- A good chunk of elected officials and heads of state in multiple countries were compromised by notorious child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein
- The government doesn't pay taxes. I mean, obviously, they're the ones levying them.
We like to think of law enforcement as a cat-and-mouse game: criminals do a thing and law enforcement tries to hunt them down within the bounds of 4A/5A. The reality is more complicated. There are cases in which governments actively collaborate with organized crime, either because the government is corrupt as sin, or because the criminals are offering the state a way out.
[0] Fun fact: if you use Bitcoin, you're automatically opting into this.
[1] To be clear, while I agree with the American argument, you still shouldn't actually expose yourself to this kind of porn, because you're training yourself to get horny around kids. I shouldn't have to say this, but just because it's not illegal doesn't mean it's safe to use.
As I noted in another comment:
Currently this is explicitly against the law[0]:
(a)In General.—Any person who, in a circumstance described in subsection (d), knowingly produces, distributes, receives, or possesses with intent to distribute, a visual depiction of any kind, including a drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting, that—
(1)
(A)depicts a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; and
(B)is obscene; or ...
(b)...
(c)Nonrequired Element of Offense.—
It is not a required element of any offense under this section that the minor depicted actually exist.
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Sure, the NSA, GCHQ and Mossad have a way to exfiltrate the unencrypted data but proprietary e2e is a good thing for most people IMO. Shifts the risk from "my messages are theoretically available to most law enforcement in the globe" to "YOU’RE STILL GONNA BE MOSSAD’ED UPON"[0]. This is specially good for me because I know the equivalent to the FBI where is live is too cheap to buy a Cellebrite [1] license.
[0] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/leaker-reveals-which...
EDIT: I suppose someone could ask about Meta. The reason behind their support for scanning (and removing e2e in facebook msg) is simply regulatory capture. The zucc wishes to have a letter of marque to "protect" your children and remove the "unsafe" competitors.
EDIT2: Used the wrong term, I mixed up exfiltration channel with sidechannel attack.
Watching memory changing on a complex code base without having said code base is near impossible.
1. Run code 2. Watch memory changes 3. Correlate those to real data
If your code is doing anything complicated that's an intense thing to determine. If you're deep enough for a side channel there's likely a lot easier way of getting in.
My mental model is that most competent intelligence agencies have a PRISM 3.0 deal with FAANG, including on E2E products or at least have devs on the payroll. I imagine that any backdoor is only used on important targets, so no intel sharing with Cletus the deputy.
What financial gain do they get from this?
A: risk billions in stock value and customer purchases for basically a "thanks" from the gov? One whistleblower would also have the real ability of becoming world famous for "exposing" apple.
B: Get publicity actually resisting the gov and not lying, what is the gov gonna do? I imagine it has and does happen but I also imagine there's a crying tim apple being dragged through it painfully.
Unlike google I just don't see the financial positives for them to do it beyond massive arm twisting. For many companies the risk of destroying their entire value to customers is just not worth it.
The only money in it is mass scale data collection for training data and ads, if they aren't doing that any other method is the opposite of valuable it's a massive liability.
I'm curious as to how well (legally) this "we could modify the app to do it, but nah" approach actually works, and for how long.
From a liability standpoint that implies a security breach could result in massive loss of customer data and if it did occur would destroy their privacy image to their customers.
I agree with the point that what you actually trust is the company to not insert maliscous code or keys into your protected path but modern systems actually contain ways to truly lock out the company itself from seeing your data.
Security wise it's amazing. If a company's admin cannot take your data it's excedingly hard for a hacker to do so.
If the company is misleading, any encryption technology is irrelevant anyway.
This is for example why Lavabit chose to go out of business instead of giving up their keys.
Which apple does.
It's largely academic though, as almost nobody opts-in to escalated e2e posture in apple services unless they're a high risk person (journalist, dissident, etc).
The headaches that come from e2e everything are too great for most people.
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That's obviously only the case if they aren't also the sole providers of the "ends".
1. 3rd party audit of a current repo hash 2. Public hosting of hash 3. Modern attested compute can check the current startup and running code hash and return to the user for their own checks. 4. User encrypts the last known hash they used or trust a 3rd party to perform the check like azure's methods.
Another way is to open source it and repeat 2/3/4
The way around that requires either a backdoor in attested hardware which would be wild if discovered because it's the same tech protecting companies and governments most sensitive info so they're all incentivised to audit that.
In a technical sense it's absolutely possible. Owning the servers != transferring keys to the servers. Most E2E apps run both client and servers, it's about if they ever had key access.
But when Apple etc. control both ends, their app could always see your data locally because it is the one that encrypts it to upload to the server in the first place. And these companies can receive secret orders from the US government to add backdoors into the local app and there's nothing you can do or say about it, except go out of business (like Lavabit).
An icloud is like a storage locker or a safety deposit box... the owner should go through all your stuff there, just in case you have some CSAM!
Metadata is just tracking info about who, where and with whom... every bartender should take your IDs and log when you came to the bar, who you sat with and how long you talked there.
EU Chat control is like general eavesdropping... every time you sit down and talk with someone, an EU bureaucrat should sit next to you and listen and write down your conversations, just in case.
etc.
Somehow people think that "it's ok if it's on the internet", even when it's stuff they'd never accept in real life.
Personally, I am on the side of privacy, just to be clear.
When arguing against surveillance, the arguments should be on its merits, not on whether the current proponents happen to have ulterior motives.
If you take a 1000 random people of the street now,how many of them are sharing CSAM via icloud?
If you take a 1000 random politicians, how many of them have corruption scandals? Why not start with them instead, a bodycam and an AI powered microphone that would detect corruption automatically... let them lead as an example, before they apply the laws onto "the rest of us".
It's harder to do, but conceptually the same. So sad it's not being done. Very disturbing.
They could do it when people are not at home. There'd no problem, nobody would even notice.
A better one: what about rental property, like a business? Can the landlord randomly check for criminal behavior?
Absolutely not.
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And client side scanning is just as bad as encryption backdoors. There's a good reason Apple was attacked for even considering it: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.07450
The primary focus should always in preventing the creation of CSAM.
- Comprehensive Sex Ed starting young so kids can identify grooming and seek help from a trusted adult, even if abuse comes from a family member.
- Fixing schools in general so homeschooling isn't as attractive for parents. Keep a tab on home schooled children and identify social isolation.
- Bigger resources for actual honest to god on the ground investigations.
To be clear I'm not saying that homeschooling = child abuse, simply there's a lack of the mechanisms to detect it in homeschooling settings.
I'm not entirely convinced that's true. Facebook is a leading reporter of CSAM, much of it sent through Messenger, which only recently got E2EE, and Instagram DM, which briefly had E2EE but no longer does. If I was going to transmit something that could get me in trouble, it certainly wouldn't be via Instagram DM.
Facebook's EU CSAM report is here: https://transparency.meta.com/reports/regulatory-transparenc...
Not true. There is the option of scanning on the device.
There is no back door if nothing leaves your device
> goes against the purpose of having end to end encryption
Most people would consider the "purpose" is to avoid 3rd parties listening in
I think your conspiracy theory needs work, to be perfectly honest with you.
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I think it depends on your definition of e2ee and where the "end"s are.
If the locally running application can decrypt the data, it could always do whatever it wanted. Is that really how you define e2ee?
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What world do you live in?
A growing number of people people today can figure out how to run Fable in a co work session, or codex, and that can indeed set up the self-owned backup system for you along with an alternative trustable cloud backup thats not Apple or Google.
Mind you, an average person probably doesn’t even really know what a server is. And these average people need backups just as much as (probably more than) people technical enough to vibe-and-deploy.
For most people "the cloud" is where you backup stuff. If you have a personal backup strategy that doesn't involve the cloud, you are not "most people".
Doing backups the right way take some skill and investment if you want to do it by yourself. It may involve setting up a NAS, and some discipline with physical media. You have to do your own security too. Most people don't want to do that, so, cloud backup it is.
It is not a perfect solution, even beyond the privacy considerations, like you can still lose your data by losing your account, but from my personal experience, people lose their data less often now that they have cloud backups.
Most people don’t have computers, those who do, do not regularly backup their photos on them.
In both family and extended family many a cry would be avoided if people paid the 5 bucks it costs to backup their photos before your phone gets stolen or lost.
I wrote to the rep and explained my concerns. I wholeheartedly agreed with the intent of the law, but the code was buggy. To my surprise, he wrote back in horror to say he hadn’t considered that and pulled the bill immediately. I’m proud of having done that.
I’m 100% pro yeeting child pornographers into the sun. I still don’t want to throw kids in prison or remove all traces of a right to privacy in our haste to sun-yeet them.
The one messy corner of this is the "strict liability" for this type of material. An underage kid can take a nude photo, send it to an adult, and then the adult can criminally liable for just having it, even if he deleted it as soon as he saw it. Either both parties involved in handing something for which there is "strict liability' need to be held accountable, or "strict liability" has to be changed so a person isn't liable if he deletes or reports the material as soon as he first becomes aware of it. And this isn't likely to happen because it would provide a plausible defense for every one criminally charged.
AFAIK that's more or less how it works today as a practical matter. The law recognizes this situation as an affirmative defense, but does not make it impossible to be charged.
To be an affirmative defense it has to be reported immediately or destroyed, constitute three images or less, and not be sent to anyone [other than law enforcement]. Interestingly, NCMEC doesn't necessarily count for that -- if you find yourself in this situation and you want to report something, call your local police.
I'm sure smarter people than me have sussed this out and can explain why it's a good thing, but it sits wrong with me. We can put the subject matter aside for a second: I don't think I could convict someone for having something happen to them, regardless of what the law says. Let's say drug possession was a strict liability law (and maybe it is for all I know). Finding a baggy of meth on the corner of a farmer's lot would mean that, technically, he was guilty of possession and had to prove that it wasn't really is. That's nuts. And looping back to the subject at hand, if the only evidence that someone possessed CSAM was their email inbox, without proof that it was solicited? They want me on their jury.
There should never be a circumstance where someone can't report something that happened to them to the police without a legitimate fear of being arrested. That's bad for the person, and it's bad for society.
But if their hard drive has folders grouped by age or something, prepare the solar catapult.
Stories like this give me hope - thank you for sharing
This is weird indeed. These bills are mostly put forward in order to appear tough on crime and secure votes of the naive population ("think of the children"). Pulling the bill is detrimental as it may lead to "pedo supporter" conspiracy spreading among the district.
While on statistics, I wonder, are there reliable statistics about child abuse of different types? Studying correlations with other social metrics, like sex education, liberal/conservative, policies regarding prostitution, and others can provide support for/against decisions.
Not that I hope these will impact people's and governments' choices, but I want to challenge my intuitions.
The real question is what happens when a horny teenager sends another a nude. There definitely have been insane cases where they get stitched up for creating child porn. I don't know if that's the normal outcome today though.
Why would some adults find kids sexually attractive? Is it abusive/aggressive behavior manifesting itself in sexuality? Or is it sexuality channeled in the wrong direction? If it's the second, is it out of desperation, and would happen less if the culture makes it easier for them to satisfy their needs with adults, or would it happen regardless? On the victim's side, are the shy and less social ones more in danger, or the socially active ones? From my social scientist friends I hear a lot that most child sexual abuse is domestic. What are measures that a society can take to prevent these, without turning the society into a surveillance state, which will ultimately harm everyone more, including the children? What can be done to make sure children speak up, so that such behavior is dealt with at the beginning (and maybe while the more terrible things have not happened yet), and not turn into a multi-year childhood trauma?
What are signs (and early signs) on the abuser's side and the child's side? How to deal with these signs?
It was not a tool to identify private images as being underage. That’s an impossible task.
Just ask the dad who was investigated for taking pictures of his toddler for the doctor: https://www.koffellaw.com/blog/google-ai-technology-flags-da...
In theory, modern vision language models could classify human nudity and sexual activity very thoroughly. But every model I have tried is reluctant to clearly describe what is notable about sexualized/nude images. The models are deliberately under-exposed to nude and sexualized content during training and further RLHF'd away from generating straightforward descriptions of such images.
Models also occasionally hallucinate WTF captions for ordinary adult sexual activity. I recently ran a baseline test with frames extracted from adult videos and about 1/3000 frames was mis-captioned as involving a child according to Gemma 4 12b.
I don’t have any ideas for a solution, but I suspect that the heightened focus on CSAM is really compensating for the fact that we don’t have solutions for revenge porn.
The only way I can see this working is that people in explicit images need to publicly declare their intent for who can see the images (maybe a hash of the image content and the name of the person who can see that content) and then when the courts prosecute revenge porn the intent can be referenced to see if it was meant to be shared or not. There are still issues in that there is no proof that the person being accused of revenge porn actually distributed the images vs the defendant actually sending the images to other, or the image was leaked by a hack.
I think the best thing we can do is try and educate teens on the dangers of revenge porn like we do on the consequences of having sex. We cannot stop teens from having sex or taking nudes, but we can at least try to educate them as best we can.
Yes, poor and unprivileged children can't really defend themselves here, but this is the system working to find some legal mechanism to do what it can, as a more powerful force. Protecting people from exploitation is a good use of government. If this was shot down for legal reasons, OK, the system is working and I hope there is a way to expand protections that fits into our system.
Our legal systems are not built to deal with that mess, and it may hang around your neck for the rest of your life. Unfortunately, the law is very explicit, leaving barely any avenue for the courts to drag us out of the mess, and politicians - even if they are actually interested in the topic in the first place - won't touch that area with a ten foot pole for fear of getting blamed a pedophile themselves.
[1] https://www.n-tv.de/panorama/KI-treibt-Jugendporno-Fallzahle...
I'm questioning the parent post's contention that the "vast majority" of CSAM falls into this bucket.
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I'm aftaid of putting those terms in my search engine, can you please expand those acronyms?
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-dec-20-la-me-bo...
The decade-old ban was enacted after the 1997 North Hollywood shootout, a confrontation between police and two heavily armored bank robbers that injured officers and civilians. The state Legislature passed the ban in 1998 as a measure to protect police.
The law was subsequently revised to pass court scrutiny and reinstated:
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/california-reinstates...
That said, the death rate of machine gun ownership may still be lower than handgun ownership, with a possible explanation being that it is easier to buy a handgun compared to a machine gun. A further jump into the data would then explore who are the buyer demographic of a handgun compared to a machine gun, and how machine guns compare to handguns in locations where both has similar restrictions on those who buy them.
An other avenue to explore would be to look at purchases of ammunition to determine which guns are actually in use for non-murder purposes. Hunting ammunition for example may show a much more common use than guns used for non-hunting purposes, and thus have a lower murder rate per shot. Machine guns and handguns might share a much more similar profile in that regard, possible normalized towards how much ammunition each use in a target range.
Also, not that it has any bearing on what I said, but I'm decidedly pro-gun for any repliers who want to follow up on this tangent.
[deleted]
Have you met many humans?
Yes, as in the documents, he kicked him out for "stealing his girls".
Fucking hell
Why would you expect anyone else to go to jail under those circumstances? Proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt seems very unlikely
It was an industrial-scale racket. It is impossible for that kind of number of victims to be just for one person or group's recreation.
> The files relating to Epstein include a large volume of images of Epstein, images and videos of victims who are either minors or appear to be minors
> Consistent with prior disclosures, this review confirmed that Epstein harmed over one thousand victims. Each suffered unique trauma. Sensitive information relating to these victims is intertwined throughout the materials.
The second quote doesn’t explicitly say “minor victims”, but the whole document is focused on that, mentioning that “One of our highest priorities is combatting child exploitation and bringing justice to victims.”
People love to throw around the statistics about the number of documents, but most are entirely blah
It's actually pretty easy to prove guilt in the US. But it becomes a lot harder the longer the distance from the crime. In particular, witnesses die or leave. Heck, investigators die or leave which makes discovery for the perpetrator even harder on the FBI.
Further, the bar for civil litigation is lower than criminal. The FBI refusing to prosecute means that victims have a very hard time pursuing civil cases even if the FBI were to lose their case. The FBI has way more evidence that a victim can have.
The most non-nefarious but still shitty reason I can think of for why the FBI hasn't gone to trial is because they know each of these cases will be long and expensive because of the perpetrators. That's caused them to collect way more evidence than they would have if this were just a normal person.
Funny how the FBI is only careful and pensive when perpetrators are rich.
London, with a population of ~8 million has the same murder rate as new Orleans, which is 300k people. Not as in x murders per 100k, but as in total murders in a city.
In terms of knife crime the USA has a slightly _higher_ rate of knife crime than the UK. Bear in mind the UK counts attacks with knifes as knife crimes, where as the states only appear to include death by knives.
Which means that even if you took away gun deaths (~70% of all us homicides) you're still more likley to be stabbed in the USA compared to the USA.
Yeah, stabbing deaths UK vs US is about half (175/70M UK vs 1600/350M US). But if comparing at the national level, 360/100k US vs 1200/100k UK.
So it really comes down to each person's systems thinking approach and which stats they care about.
Sorry but 1200 knife deaths per 100k means the annual rate would be 840,000 murders a year.
last year the total number of murders in the UK was ~600 which is .86 per 100k
(far less than the _gun_ related homicides in the US: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/04/28/what-the-...)
The reason why I was talking about knife homicides specifically is that comparing knife crime between the us and the uk is hard. the UK systematically records crimes where knives are involved at a national level, the USA doesn't really.
But brum has a murder rate twice that of the national average. Even so its not 28/100k its around 1.25/100k which is still just over a quarter of the _national_ gun homicide rate of the entire USA.(~4.3/100k)
The point is, the UK is demonstrably less murderous than the USA. Even the UKs most murderous city is safer than Sanjose, which accordign to the stats I can find has a 3.2/100k murder rate.
That's the violent crime rate.
I do see the 28 was an error.
Yes, lower murder rate, but higher violent crime rate.
The US defines violent crime as literal murder.
Those are no way near comparable.
That seems like a thing to pursue rather earlier than later if it takes so long to bear fruits. Knives and screwdrivers are at least only used for close-up combat.
>The best approach would be to address the underlying factors and causes of all violence while still allowing freedoms for the 44% who do not support stricter regulation.
To have the money for that you would need abolish capitalism I guess...
Most firearms murders are similarly close-up.
I feel like you're the one who is poorly informed?
(For the record, I am in favor of strong gun control laws, but your statement just ignores reality.)
Not one but you're really validating their slippery slope fears and claims there.
At the end of the day, judges have the ability to clear away silly logic like that, it's part of their job.
SCOTUS bastardized this original intent. It's shameful.
It's also worth mentioning that most states have similar language to the second amendment, including states whose constitutions were implemented prior to the bill of rights, lending to the credence that this is a right of the people, and not of the state. The 10th amendment was supposed to be for the rights of the states.
It’s unique in that it’s the only right that aligns with business marketing. Peddling fear, mostly to insecure men, has sold hundreds of millions of guns.
The fetishized nature of modern gun culture killed, in addition to people, a lot of shooting sports and hunting.
I grew up in a small hunting town (I'm in my early 30s), where most high school boys (most girls didn't hunt, but some did) had a rifle and/or shotgun in their truck, mounted against the inside back of the cab where you could see it plain view.
We had 0 homicides from guns in the 19 years I lived there, there was 1 suicide by gun that I know of.
Many of us grew up hunting to feed our family. This is in Colorado.
I shot my first pistol around the age of 5.
I accidentally went to 7th grade with ammo in my pocket because we were hunting that morning. I went to the principal, he told me just to put the ammo in my locker.
With that being said, you'd be hard pressed to find a group of townspeople more respectful of guns.
It's not a gun problem, it's a culture problem.
Not saying that there's not "insecure men" out there that are the victim of marketing, etc, but a lot of us grew up with guns and see them as a tool.
Every family still had a rifle, getting license isn't that hard when you could answer questions about your intentions.
No handguns though, not very useful for self-defense or wildlife. I believe mom made and shot her first arbalest around 6-7 yo though.
Similar cultures, but one of them allows for outsiders to screen potential gun owners, and the other doesn't. Which, I believe, is the point – there always will be mentally unwell or ill-intentioned people. There should be a way for a small town to revoke the trust of allowing weapons in their hands.
No it isn't, it says you have the ability to form a militia. Not wave a AR-15 in Walmart. It's lobbying by the NRA that has changed the definition.
But gun manufacturers ragebaited this exceptionally effective marketing campaign around their products and here’s where you folks stand
- Ruler who is unrestrained by law or constitution
- A usurper of sovereignty
- Ruler who uses power oppressively or unjustly
Obviously b) is not applicable as per GP. He has also been constrained by the supreme court and others multiple times in this term, which suggests a) is a stretch. c) probably a fair accusation, though I'm not sure I would agree.
During his political ascent he used his Brownshirts - a large, organised paramilitary force - to assault political opponents, break up rival meetings, intimidate voters, and fight street battles, helping destabilise the Weimar Republic and suppress opposition.
I like your attitude of charity - we should not rush into judgement. But mschuster91's comment said:
> most of Europe simply has banned guns in the hands of civilians
This is bullshit. GP must be aware that they are profoundly ignorant on the topic, so why are they holding an opinion, let alone posting it? Should we tolerate bullshit on HN?
I was this play out in relation to rules/laws applied to those under age. Like harsher and harsher anti-drinking law. The same people who I know were drinking underage have suddenly seen the light and believe someone's life should be destroyed for also drinking underage.
Or drug testing. If using drugs is bad for some group of people, wouldn't it be even worse if the group overseeing them were to be using drugs? Start testing congress first.
That’s your definition, but it isn’t the definition many authorities/activists/etc use.
And I’m not defending their definition, merely pointing out it is a real live definition in active use
There is even a Wikipedia article about the legality. It's quite complicated in a lot of places because people really like to ban it but it very much is free speech or protected artistic expression in countries that have these concepts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_porn...
To be clear fictional pornography about real children has to be distinguished from fictional characters. Even when the depiction is purely fictional. Sexualizing real children is unacceptable.
Regular people having a bad moment think they can just explain everything to the police and they'll go "Ah, sorry mate, we misunderstood and you can go home now"
That's the common argument and it's wrong.
The hash database is regulated and used worldwide. To get the hashes of what you mention into the database requires numerous people signing off on it. It is also a 1:1 match, not a "dissident said X" type meme match.
> It also requires devices to run this spyware without a way to disable it.
All scanning is done on the cloud. Apple operating system has a nudity detector when posting images, but it only warns you the dangers of doing it before you hit send.
There is no spyware.
In fact when Apple tried to protect peoples data from those scans before everyone lost their mind. Forced Apple to remain keeping users data accessible on the cloud.
The truth is, if your government is determined to spy on its population there are much easier and less intrusive methods of doing so.
So, it's correct. What you're describing is a policy, not a technical limitation. The technical infrastructure allows exactly that. Policies can and will be changed and bypassed.
> It is also a 1:1 match, not a "dissident said X" type meme match.
So you can maintain a list of dissident memes just like you can maintain a list of CSAM. There is absolutely nothing technologically differentiating CSAM from images with dissenting political content. The database is an arbitrary list of material deemed hostile. Only putting CSAM on it is a pinky promise that will be broken.
> All scanning is done on the cloud.
Because there was so much backlash against putting spyware in devices, not because they didn't try.
> Forced Apple to remain keeping users data accessible on the cloud.
What are you talking about?
> The truth is, if your government is determined to spy on its population there are much easier and less intrusive methods of doing so.
Why is such a large political faction in the EU continuing to push for this surveillance in the form of Chat Control then? You are just stating this with no facts to back it up against all the evidence to the contrary.
You should take the time to see how it works.
No singular country can put information in that wouldn't be picked up straight away by other countries. There are 70 countries signed up to it.
> So you can maintain a list of dissident memes just like you can maintain a list of CSAM.
Using hashes as a way to match doesn't scale in the way you describe. So it wouldn't be feasible to do that.
There are certainly approaches that can be taken, but CSAM isn't that.
> What are you talking about?
All major companies (for about 10 years) scan everyone's images/files for CSAM. That is happening now.
Apple came with an approach that would have the CSAM hashing checks on the device.
If your image/video passed then it was encrypted so that no one could decrypt it even on the cloud. If it failed, then it was business as usual and your file was uploaded as it has normally been and scanned.
It would have dramatically reduced server costs and meant that your files were 100% safe on the cloud from the government, instead of what they are now. Everyone lost their mind over it, but were taking news stories as facts when it didn't match the research paper.
> You are just stating this with no facts to back it up against all the evidence to the contrary.
To be fair, you started first and I've yet to see a link from you.
But here is a starting point.
Once that is in place it's just a tiny change to switch to a national database. Granted, that's not a purely technological argument, but the main point is, you are not in control of what your images are scanned for and you cannot even verify it because it's hashes.
> Using hashes as a way to match doesn't scale in the way you describe. So it wouldn't be feasible to do that.
Why wouldn't it? If it scales for CSAM why wouldn't it scale for other types of content? If it doesn't scale for CSAM why are we even arguing about it? There is no technological difference between the two. It's all just images or videos.
> All major companies (for about 10 years) scan everyone's images/files for CSAM. That is happening now.
They scan the images on there servers. They do not scan my images, for example.
> It would have dramatically reduced server costs and meant that your files were 100% safe on the cloud from the government, instead of what they are now. Everyone lost their mind over it, but were taking news stories as facts when it didn't match the research paper.
It would have reduced server costs for Apple at the expense of energy costs and battery life for their customers. I fail to see how that is a win.
I don't care if my files are safe in "the cloud" when they are not safe on my device before being uploaded to the cloud. Also Apple introduced E2EE later anyway and there are other E2EE cloud storage options that have been available before. You are painting a false dilemma. We can have E2EE without surveillance scanning.
>>> if your government is determined to spy on its population there are much easier and less intrusive methods of doing so.
What are those methods? It is always about the children and terrorism when the government wants to extend mass surveillance.
Btw, when I follow your link I only get en error page stating "Access to this site was denied for security reasons. Please contact your network or system administrator."
I am seeing my country destroyed in real time by people like you I assume, so YES I am upset.
Where do you live and how many refugees did you take in?
I am seeing my country destroyed in real time so YES I am upset.
Instagram 3.1million whatsapp 1.1 million facebook 8.8million tiktok 1.3 million snapchat 1.1million
those numbers seem absolutely in line with what i would expect when comparing the largest social media platforms on the planet and a company that does 0 social media and extremely limited group sharing.
it seems very strange to me to put any blame apple here when its just a statistics game. billions of image posts = millions of reports. simple as.
and anyways, if i received CSAM from one of my phone contacts im going directly to the local police, skipping the apple -> ncmec -> state -> local pipeline. i think most people would be in the same boat.
a report button is useful when you don't know the identity of the perpetrator. but when you do know them, you should be going to actual law enforcement, not hoping your report eventually gets routed to the right agency.
> it seems very strange to me to put any blame apple here when its just a statistics game. billions of image posts = millions of reports. simple as.
Apple's platform hosts billions of messages and photos. It is the Paedophile’s choice for distributing images and videos. The problem for us is Apple's halfarsedness in tackling this leads to clientside scanning or backdoors in encryption. They are not doing anything at all to stop this, and compared to whatsapp of all fucking apps, they are doing nothing.
you might if you could back up statements like "apple is the pedos choice for distributing images and videos" with any sort of data.
but you wont be able to, because it's not true.
and, again, apple is 1:1 transmission. you know who is distributing the CSAM in that case. dont be lazy, go to the actual police.
instagram, facebook, whatsapp is 1:many transmission with strangers. a report button makes a lot of sense there.
Take your bigotry and stuff it.
Do you think that queer people are a "special interest", like corn farmers?
No; that type of attitude is just run-of-the-mill queerphobia.
Young children need to be taught what gender identities are so that they will know if they are trans/nonbinary, so that they don't have to suffer for years or decades from gender dysphoria.
Slightly-older children need to be taught what sexual orientation is (the whole spectrum, including straight, gay, bi, and ace), so that they don't have to fumble their way through it, confused and often abused, and don't end up feeling like they're broken.
And intersex children desperately need to be taught about all of this and more, so that they don't have to suffer from all those problems plus not understanding why their body just doesn't fit any of the usual options.
>something like 1 per 100,000
What is this? What number are you citing, and where are you getting it from?
It seems like you're trying to be disingenuous, first with "rate", now with my clearly-arbitrary example of rate.
> something like
I might have interpreted your example as such if not for the "one too many" comment. It's strange to throw out a completely fictitious figure and then lament it as if it's real.
see how your patience has been rewarded... no good deed goes unpunished. he will never produce an actual figure. look at his other replies. such a victim complex. on behalf of the catholic church. regarding their sexual abuse of minors. what more is there to say?
Ironic phrasing, given the Catholic Church wants authority to decide what is demonic while acting like demons. Why is the comment so plainly aggrieved? Is the Catholic Church a victim here?
Even as your sanitized claim, where is the evidence?
It doesn't exist.
But that's not the point. You made up a quote I didn't say ("demonization"), and accused the former poster of doing something they weren't: defending the church.
Saying that schools are worse yet ignored is not defending the church. It may also be incorrect, but that's a separate assertion.
Here I'll help you:
> Just about every kid goes to school though, so people just prefer to sweep that under the rug and focus on targeting organizations they are not a part of or disagree with because they're easier to demonize and make fun of.
In what world is that useful to your sanitized claim? Is it not an obviously underhanded apology for the conduct of the church? Is the aggrieved nature of this really lost on you?
Calling someone's god, an "imaginary friend" is probably a trait of someone very anti-religious though. I haven't read all the different religious texts, but I highly doubt any of them call their god a friend. Perhaps Jesus could be considered friendly, but I don't think the Bible says that a Christian must consider Jesus as their friend. I think it's more like how parents should be parents and not friends. I imagine in most if not all relgions, gods should be gods and not friends.
Google reported him to the police based on a single false positive.
To add insult to injury, even after the police contacted Google to tell them that they had cleared him of wrongdoing, Google refused to restore access to his account.
> The father uploaded photos of his son’s genitals, which were also backed up on his Google cloud, to the health care provider’s messaging system as requested.
(It is, granted, a bit pushy about it and will ask multiple times when you run it with an intrusive dialog.)
And no, this particular article about Google attempting to have innocent parents arrested was published before Apple even discussed scanning images users manually uploaded to their publicly accessible web album on iCloud.
That's a new version. The one that as announced the same time as client side scanning to block uploading CSAM to iCloud worked like this.
1. It could be enabled on a child's device by the parents. It was not on be default.
2. If the child received a sexual image (not necessarily just CSAM...if an adult sends a dick pic to a child that is not CSAM but would have been flagged) the image is blocked, the child is notified, told their parents are worried the image may harm them, and asked if they still want to see it.
3. If the child says no, they do not want to see it, that is the end of the matter.
4. If the child says that they do want to see it and they are at least 13 they are shown the image and that is the end of the matter.
5. If the child says that they do want to see it and they are under 13, they are again told that they parents are concerned, and that if they view it their parents will be notified, and asked if they still want to view it.
6. If they say no that is the end of the matter.
7. If they say yes they see it but the parents also are notified and will be able to see it.
This should have been pretty uncontroversial, but there were objections on the grounds that if someone say sends their dick pic to your under 13 child and the child goes all the way through to step 7 and decides to view it, that is a violation of the sender's privacy because that message was only intended for the child.
This mode is probably best understood as "if someone texts me a dick pic, please blur it". I don't think there's any reasonable objection to this.
And the reporting was still gated through Apple employees; there was no mechanism for the government to expand the scope without Apple’s knowledge.
I understand that people don’t like the idea of their personal hardware being complicit in treachery, but when considered from a purely functional perspective, apple’s proposal was no different to what Google and others were already doing.
Accidental false positives could lead to horrific outcomes up to and including oh look bob got shot by the cops for resisting.
It was possible to produce apparently matching innocuous images and then poison people's machines with them.Oops did you click on that picture of a tree have fun with the cops. Like an advanced form of swatting.
Although inspired by a desire to find CSAM Apple could be forced to scan for ANYTHING by repressive regimes including America and China.
Although initially targeting images client side scanning of messages is a pretty obvious next step. Again obvious good motivation exists and is completely justifiable who doesn't want to stop the next mass shooting or terrorist attack... and then we can basically use it to find people critical of the regime. Do remember we are presently prosecuting a political figure for a picture of sea shells and a guy in texas is rotting in prison for distributing political literature.
Including Europe. Europe is ruled by people who think 1984 was an instruction manual.
European citizen surveillance is something i oppose, but at least it's balanced by a robust bill of human rights. America's surveillance state does not have that balance, because America wrote a bill of rights but didn't bother with the follow-through.
Kindly don't use my continent as a punching bag, thanks.
Edit: There are some rare competent managers who will stop the enquiry before even asking the engineers.
And therapists are legally mandated to report you if you told them you viewed or possessed CSAM.
The US has the largest pornography industry in the world by a massive margin, and the largest consumption of online pornography per capita
Meanwhile should we be surprised that CSAM production is higher in countries like the Philippines that have very weak digital policing, abject poverty, high numbers of street children etc?
Some TV shows rightfully take aim at this contradiction (recently: The Hunting Wives).
You can get married at 15 in Hawaii and Kansas.
You are "grandfathered" into sexual consent (not as in "marital rape" but "no longer statutory rape") when you do so.
So we may not want to be lording it too much on "international norms", particularly given that most of the marriages that happen at those ages are not "young couple got pregnant" but "older man in conservative/religious community".
In some countries it is as far as I’m aware
> In a court filing Friday, Apple said continuing the lawsuit now poses “too significant a risk” of exposing the anti-exploitation and threat intelligence efforts needed to fend off the very adversaries involved in the legal dispute.
> “When it filed this lawsuit nearly three years ago, Apple recognized that it would involve sharing information with third parties. However, developments since then have reshaped the risk landscape associated with sharing such information,” the Cupertino device maker said.
I mean, iOS has never been open source so Apple has always practiced security through obscurity. It doesn't seem unreasonable that they'd be concerned about this. Idk, seems like a nothingburger but maybe I'm wrong.
Dropping the case is great for Apple's obscurity, but terrible for enforcing the security of iOS users that are still vulnerable to Pegasus malware. Now NSO Group is not threatened or deterred, which is the worst of all worlds for iOS security.
Some banks limit functionality on web apps, which is annoying.
More importantly, many refuse to provide a decent 2FA other than push notifications inside the app or SMS, which is insecure and EU has mandated its phaseout.
The thing that works for me is to pretend to be clueless and get an old hardware OTP generator, but those are susceptible to impersonation attacks on the bank side.
I also need to maintain my own nextcloud, photo sync infrastructure and backups.
Its inconvinient. This is exactly what I talking about.
We also acknowledge that participating in pornography requires consent, and that the continued distribution of nonconsensual pornography constitutes a continuing crime against the unwilling subject. Because children have zero legal capacity to consent, CSAM is de facto illegal.
It misses the point to think that CSAM is illegal because it is "obscene". It isn't illegal because it's disgusting; it's illegal because it's egregiously harmful to children. It's like thinking the bad thing a murderer did was make a mess.
Are you sure you're not the one missing the point here? You're replying to the tail end of branch of discussion about AI-generated imagery. Obscene is the only argument that works against it.
perhaps there is more to it?
Oh, and everywhere in your nation? At the same time?
Sorry, I think I have a button.
Mother Shares How Video Games Radicalized Her Son to Run Around and Pick up Coins
the first one is the reason why it happens it america more than any other place. other countries also have youth unemployment and social isolation but they show up as bullying in schools or votes for fascist parties instead of mass murder.
the actual problem is people feeling hopeless, like theres no way they could ever be successful in this world so they want to burn it down. thats why some of them turn violent, when you feel like nothing you can do will make life better the only thing left is making it worse for those you think are responsible, like your classmates or gay/queer people or Jews.
none of this comes down to video games, feminism, rap music, violent movies, atheism or other cultural "problems" conservatives always like to blame. its a social issue that needs social solutions.
If this were true then widespread availability of pornography on the internet would have resulted in a massive increase in rape of adult females. When in fact, assault numbers have been on a steady decline for decades.
60% of respondents who were found looking for CSAM on the dark web stated that they were fearful that consuming CSAM would lead them to do something to a child in real life: https://doi.org/10.54501/jots.v1i2.29
I'm not taking a position here, but the total amount of pornography is irrelevant to the argument. If the amount of rape pornography available has increased 500x as the total amount of pornography has increased 5000x, the proportion of pornography that was rape pornography has been reduced by 90%.
> 60% of respondents who were found looking for CSAM on the dark web stated that they were fearful that consuming CSAM would lead them to do something to a child in real life
Someone looking for child pornography is somebody looking for child pornography, so their opinion about what the search might lead to seems a bit worthless. There's no reason to assume that they have any insight into what will happen next, but we know for a fact what has already happened.
That out of the way, though, and assuming that child pornography leads to child abuse, the good pro-pornography case that has been made is that when pornography is suppressed rather than regulated, the 95% of people who are exclusively interested in adult pornography will have to go through the same underground channels that child pornography flows through, thus having the perverse effect of exposing more people to child pornography (or at least obtaining access to it.) If exposure to child pornography causes child abuse, then the suppression of adult pornography would then lead to more child abuse.
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Does it surprise anyone else that this is a legal possibility?
The other option is good ye old agent cultivation, there must be a degenerate gambler high up in Apple that the MSS or FSB can exploit.
I'm not sure what you mean by "custom methods", but I'm not saying they have bypassed the e2e encryption - I'm just saying that they technically could.
And as for why they would do that, they might get compelled by a government to do it secretly. As far as I know that hasn't happened yet but I see no reason it couldn't and it would take a whistleblower to find out.
> Security wise it's amazing. If a company's admin cannot take your data it's excedingly hard for a hacker to do so.
I agree, it is the best option available. But Apple/Meta are technically lying when they say it's impossible for them to read your messages.
As a company you'd be asking for an internal implosion of your company if everything had an additional backdoor in it.
Any backdoor added is a backdoor the thousands to tens of thousands of advanced hackers are always actively trying to breach. So if they do it they'd be doing it very selectively via special served code.
It's also the only way they'd stop whistle blowers.
Now that I say it. That's 100% what they would do. But again it's a crazy high risk almost zero reward action for them. Is the CIA paying apple a bajillion dollars for phones? No so why unless their arm is twisted would they risk billions of dollars for basically no gain?
This is not bulletproof, because they can potentially change the code to do this - this is what the FBI vs Apple thing was a few years ago was all about.
Yes but the problem is there's nothing stopping them from doing that. If Apple/Meta rely on the argument that they technically cannot read people's messages then they will eventually lose because it's simply not true.
So - political solution, not a tech solution.
Even if the current proponents have no ulterior motive, and in fact live and die having done nothing negative with such power, it does not stop the next group in power from extending and abusing power, don't base laws on temporary trust of politicians.
Arguments that have any chance of persuading a government not to do something (and the public not to support the government in doing that thing) have to a lot more specific than that.
https://www.ncontracts.com/nsight-blog/risk-management-strat...
The training data for these mechanisms is growing. As a technical person I deployed a clients site to lovable and now he maintains it. Anything risky? I trust lovable will surface it, and he’s comfortable with additional risk, and platforms like lovable may want to offer contracting help from humans In their platform in The future to help.
Why does someone who says “I pay -$x for Google Drive, how much can we make our own clone for?” need to know what a server is? The natural language doesn’t necessitate the technical jargon.
> Why does someone who says “I pay -$x for Google Drive, how much can we make our own clone for?” need to know what a server is? The natural language doesn’t necessitate the technical jargon.
My point wasn't specifically that they need to know what servers are. Rather, the point is that the average person who needs backups doesn't have the faintest inkling of the smallest fraction of what goes into a backup solution. For these people (the vast majority of the population), you'd need a truly new level of vibing than what exists today.
Looking at Lovable's homepage, their tagline is "Create apps and websites by chatting with AI." Your average person probably doesn't even understand that "apps and websites" are primary components of a backup solution.
Using me as an example, or my non-technical client now doing app development using lovable, we don't care to know how the things being built but just that it works and its reliable and consistent enough.
Less than a year ago I'd never built iOS or Mac apps, and now I'm building those - I come from an HTML and frontend world, not the Mac or iOS screen layout world and I still know nothing about that and don't want to either.
I back up files to my own cloud with a Nextcloud integration for Android. That being said, a monthly or so backup of devices via USB/Ethernet, like we used to in the pre-cloud area, would be enough for all intents and purposes. It's not like what people have on their phones is generally very valuable.
Ouch man. Don't do that. Nextcloud is fairly unreliable.
> That being said, a monthly or so backup of devices via USB/Ethernet, like we used to in the pre-cloud area, would be enough for all intents and purposes.
And/or use FolderSync to sync to your PC, and then use a proper E2E system to back up to the cloud.
- People's files aren't valuable
You're making a lot of claims that are so blatantly false from what I see on my side that I don't know what to make of it. Are you projecting your own needs onto "people"? Or am I the one who's disconnected, and people truly don't care about losing all their photos?
We sure do. Legislators who pushed this "strict liability" thing forward were playing "tough on crime" for the audience of naive voters. Now anyone who tries to change this will commit political suicide and achieve the "pedo supporter" title.
After having watched what would probably be hundreds (across the US and UK), you start to see some patterns on offenders:
- The ones that are obviously mentally ill/brain development issues - they're adults but act and talk like a child. With some of the interactions with this cohort, some/many don't even realise what they're doing is wrong.
- The ones that seem ok from a developmental perspective, but are physically undesirable from societal norms and don't have a legal outlet - whether that's because of looks/weight/age/disabilities etc. This is where you see many old married men - probably not being fulfilled at home.
- The ones that have a fetish for a type and will go to any lengths after not being able to fulfil this legally (this is where, I think, immigrants over-index: they have a fetish for 'white' women, and can't fulfil their desires legally, so try with the most vulnerable)
- The ones that seem mentally and physically ok, but you can glean from their interactions that they are cold-blooded, ruthless, know what they're doing is wrong. These are the ones that take many calculated steps to cover their trails. When caught, they show barely any regret, and when they do, it's only regret because they were caught.
Then obviously I think there's a class of them that don't come up on these sites, but we can get a glimpse of it from the likes of the Epstein files. The rich. The famous. The ones that think they can do whatever they want. How pervasive this is in society is anyone's guess, but it seems like there is a dark underworld for this class. A Netflix documentary comes to mind about two boys who were trafficked by their parents to wealthy elites in the UK.
Obviously what differentiates all of these to people that may sit in one of those cohorts but don't resort to this despicable behavior is some underlying predisposition to predatory behavior.
all these insane and VERY OBVIOUS attempts to bypass the constitution should result in official doing it be put in jail FOREVER
Reality is shooting sports licensing churns significantly and has for many years - the people doing it get older every year. Some of the stats look better becuase many states offer more deer tags to fewer hunters.
There is a huge culture problem. Army LARPing and conspiracy move guns. Legal arbitrage makes the retail channel a haven for smuggling. Marketing lands heavily on that and politics. The sportsman (and often conservationist) is a relic notion.
Yes, a tool for killing. You’re respectful of guns, but where’s your respect for life?
They do not need to be taught this, except to point out that the ideology behind "trans" is based on sexism and misogyny.
> It's strange to throw out a completely fictitious figure and then lament it as if it's real.
You two are insufferable.
Anyway:
If you do an online search, the first results you may get, say how hard it is to compare. Here is one comparison that I did find:
https://actheologian.com/2025/04/22/comparing-child-abuse-ra...
Please note, this is not where I got my figures years ago, as I no longer have access to that source.
> Public Schools ~450 per 100,000
> Boy Scouts ~100–200 per 100,000
> Protestant Churches Likely 1–5 per 100,000
> Catholic Church (Priests Only) ~1 per 100,000
Also note, something like 90% of the Boy Scout sexual abuse cases were prior to the 1970s before they started mandating adults to take youth protection training. Today, the Boy Scouts and Catholic Church have some of the most comprehensive youth protection traing around, way better than any schools' youth protection training according to educators that I've talked with.
Good riddance. Go sharpen your ideological axes somewhere else.
I thought adding "for example" at the end was just unnecessary redundancy, but I guess I was wrong.
I still don't understand why the other person is trying to cross-examine me on the definition of "rate" or whatever though. That is the person arguing semantics, not me... (Same with you, except you're going one step further and trying to gaslight me.)
I'm curious, do you have something against churches and/or Scouts?
You clarified that you mean per 100,000 children more are likely to be sexually assaulted in schools.
Usually when someone has a belief like this, it’s grounded by something that they read or learned somewhere. Where did you learn this? Why aren’t you sharing the source with everyone else so they can learn it too?
But there’s still nuance there that you’re ignoring as well. We could say that rate should be examined per hour because a kid will spend 30 hours per week at school vs a few hours per week at scouts or church. Without your source though, we have no idea what the rates are, if they are what you say, if there’s even a significant difference, etc.
Now you’re trying to act like a victim because people want clarity on what exactly you mean and where you learned it.
Nobody is “gaslighting” you, just give the receipts.
Is that really the best reply you could conjure? Maybe you can produce some evidence absolving the Catholic Church here? Or are you also an apologist for institutions that call themselves sacred engaging in systemic sex abuse?
Instead ask them if their church ever taught them anything on how to prevent sexual abuse, in both children or adults. Quickly you'll find the apologist for the church saying it's not the churches job even though they are in charge of children and vulnerable adults almost all the time.
It's right there plain as day in the TOS. I don't know how people can use these products without understanding the contract they locked themselves into. /s
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Notifying the parents even requires that the child acknowledge that's what's going to happen.
Family A enables system.
Kid B sends dick pic to Kid A.
Kid A decides to view it, Apple notifies and makes it viewable to Parents A.
Parents A are now guilty of possessing CSAM. (Distributed by Apple for extra fun)
I get it, actually. It's totally possible the picture in question was not known to authorities prior. That's called due diligence to look into it.
Adults not looking into things or following up on things are how the system fails children if you read some accounts of people who were abused by their guardians. Horrifying stuff.
Honestly shocked that anyone would even say this, but even giving you the benefit of the doubt here -- the one case where I could imagine this might not happen would be if you're a police officer investigating such cases. But they also have their own therapists dedicated/trained in police-specific issues.
But also there are definitely ways to get accidentally exposed. That's an absolutely awful thing to call the cops over.
> Across most states, viewing CSEM alone is generally not a mandated-reporting trigger; reporting becomes obligatory when disclosures involve an identifiable child being abused or used to produce material.
> California’s CANRA imposes a distinct duty to report electronic access (download/stream) with identifying patient information, upheld against privacy challenges based on compelling state interest.
[0] https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/mandatory-reporting-ch...
I doubt there would be a special zoning category exclusively for strip clubs.
Where I live "adult entertainment" businesses are forced in most cities to use industrial zoning, like in warehouse / factory districts.
In Texas, I guess it is a lot more restrictive, but most of those businesses are "grandfathered" in because they were built before the suburban areas got built up and the tougher zoning laws went into place.
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you mean anyone who isn't 100% all-in on globalism?
Hence your theory should be easily visible in rape statistics, yet it’s the opposite.
>> most people don't need cloud backups
> What world do you live in?
As put by another commenter:
> Most People™ do not have the technical knowledge to set up a self-owned backup system, and/or will not realize how badly their future selves will wish they had backups if the setup friction for a self-owned solution is too high to conveniently do it right this second.
So, okay, if you're just saying Some Small Percentage of People™ can vibe up a long-term backup solution, then, sure, I grant that.
I just don't think it's a useful or interesting point in the context of this thread, even if it's true.
Just read my last comment I posted two hours before you posted yours?
> you’re ignoring as well.
You're assuming facts not in evidence.
> We could say that rate should be examined per hour because a kid will spend 30 hours per week at school vs...
"Don't worry Timmy, even though you were molested at school, because you're forced to go there every (week)day and spend more time there than church, Boy Scouts, etc, you statistically had less of a chance per hour of being molested."
Per hour makes zero sense.
Do you have something against churches or scouts? I can't imagine why you are being ao convoluted otherwise.
> Nobody is “gaslighting” you, just give the receipts.
I already gave the "receipts". Stop trying to gaslight me.
...
FYI everyone else: the Boy Scouts has a "two deep" leadership policy, meaning no private one-on-one contact between youth and adults. That's why 90+% of cases were from over 50 years ago. And don't believe everything you read on reddit, because I saw one comment where someone claimed they were abused as a kid by their troop manager... No one who actually was a Scout would call their Scoutmaster a "troop manager". It almost certainly was someone who was ideologically opposed to Boy Scouts. (If someone can teach me how to use reddit's aweful search function to find that comment, I'll gladly provide that "receipt".)
Not to me and not when I asked. And you just applied waaaay more effort than it would have taken.
> Don't worry Timmy, even though you were molested at school, because you're forced to go there every (week)day and spend more time there than church, Boy Scouts, etc, you statistically had less of a chance per hour of being molested.
No, but as a parent it becomes part of your risk assessment when deciding if you want your kid to become an altar boy.
I have no idea what you mean by that. I'm guessing it's some kind of jab that didn't land.
> as a parent it becomes part of your risk assessment when deciding if you want your kid to become an altar boy.
"Timmy, remember when I told you that you should keep your private parts private, to only let the doctor touch them while wearing gloves during at the doctor's office, and to let me know if anyone touches them, tries to touch them, stares at them, or asks to see or touch them; to let me know right? That still stands. The robe goes over your clothes, you don't need to undress at church or at school. And do you remember how if someone tells you to keep a secret from me, and it's not something like a birthday surprise for me, that you should tell me. God is not going to be mad at you if you do what's right, God will be mad at someone if they try to take advantage of you, no matter what their position is."
Yes, everything has a risk assessment. Singling out a more rare risk shows that you have a bias. It has been very obvious for a while that you and a few other users have a bias. I don't know why, but I hope you heal or get better/smarter.
Being ganged up on by you all is tiring. Anyone who doesn't have a bias can see this comment chain for what it is. I'm going to move on with my life, and if you want to be happier with your lot, you should too.
Best regards, rationalist
I was a scout and I natively speak Spanish, so I never learned what the ranks are called in English (and after nearly 30 years I've pretty much completely forgotten them in Spanish too, if I'm being honest). Are you going to call me a liar too?
Mandatory reporting makes sense for situations you are connected to. And even then there's presumably good reasons not everyone is a mandatory reporter. This goes way beyond that, mandatory reporting once removed for someone that doesn't know a single person involved.
Hell, reporting someone for that doesn't even guarantee the images get looked into! If they didn't save history they're probably not feeling like going back to the site to demonstrate. Similar if it was sent against their will and they deleted it right away.
A whistleblower goes to a therapist, stressed out over their pending decision to reveal official misconduct. They've been investigating ways to post something on the internet that can't be immediately taken down by the corrupt government officials they want to expose. They express their discomfort, in confidence, to their therapist, about using something they've discovered is also used for CSAM.
You think it's a good thing for the therapist to be required to report this? Should they report that the patient admitted to viewing CSAM with no context so the whistleblower gets investigated and arrested, or should they provide the context -- that the patient is about to expose the corruption of the government receiving the report?
For that matter, consider what it does when someone is actually a pedophile. They find out that if they try to seek therapy to address their perverse attraction to kids, the therapist isn't allowed to keep their confidence and they'll be arrested, so instead of seeking professional help, they keep abusing kids. Is that the result we wanted? There is a reason doctor-patient confidentiality was a thing.
The Boy Scouts of America program has only been in English until just last year (they just released the Spanish version of their Handbook last year, and now they have a Mandarin version too). Anyone who doesn't know the world "Scoutmaster" and claims to have been in the Boy Scouts of America, is very odd... I'm only calling those people liars.
Holy moly. If you thought I was calling you a liar, perhaps you should stop posting. But if you want to continue to grind your ax, since you asked me a question, I'll ask you one: do you have a bias?
If its your license to practice on the line you know what choice you're going to make.