Ask HN: What are you using to replace shared iCloud Photos albums? Please recommend a boomer friendly photo sharing service that is also privacy conscious…if such thing even exists. Looking for easier/better alternatives than doing Nextcloud, ownCloud, etc. |
Emails reveal during the Apple vs Epic trial revealed that Apple store apps were infected, then Apple prepared an email for the users to inform them but Timmy decided that informing the users about possible security or privacy problems is bad for PR. We need to keep reminding or informing people about the reality and not the myth of Apple.
Yes I know you use Apple because Google shit is probably worse but Apple shit is still shit, Apple hypocrisy is still hypocrisy and Apple greed is still greed.
I realize this does not meet your criteria of privacy conscious but does meet boomer friendly. Sorry
Not only that, it commits a felony when it transmits found CSAM to a party other than NCMEC (i.e. Apple itself).
Other companies have CSAM scanning and reporting with much fewer safeguards and the “my kid in the bathtub” scenario hasn’t seemed to actually be a problem.
How about spending like 10m reading actual information about how this works, instead of perpetuating ignorance? This tech is not new.
Your phone and photos app ask for this and you have to accept it before it is enabled. Sounds voluntarily to me.
Worth reading: https://pingthread.com/thread/1424873629003702273
I know someone at Apple who knows their head of privacy... so #2 may be in question, given the design of this system and its capability of further compromising the privacy of millions of Chinese citizens on the Chinese government's whim (and any other strongly-authoritarian government).
And do you seriously think they didn’t check the legality of what they built? Really?
That's the catch. Nothing in the system design prevents them from adding hashes of other types of photographs to that database.
> And do you seriously think they didn’t check the legality of what they built?
IANAL, but the law clearly states that transmitting CSAM to any party other than NCMEC is a felony. Apple != NCMEC. More info: https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/929-On...
The very same law you’re citing describes, in detail, the good faith diligence process that requires the service provider to verify the suspected material before transmission to NCMEC. But no, some random blog and you, you two have a handle on legal analysis that the most litigiously sensitive entity on Earth must have missed while designing one of the most litigiously sensitive systems ever fielded by humans. How’d they miss felony criminal liability, right? It’s just too easy to overlook while designing a system whose sole purpose is to gather legally actionable evidence against other people.
As someone who’s built these systems for over a decade, it’s remarkable how one Apple press release can make everyone so hopelessly uninformed and confident that they know the score. Nobody used the acronym CSAM until a week ago except for people like me, those of us haunted by (actual) nightmares of this shit while HN distantly pontificates on the apparent sacrilege of MD5ing your photos of a family vacation to Barbados to see if you happen to be sharing images of children being raped.
Nobody commenting on this has ever seen child pornography. I’d take that to the bank. Did you know the organized outfits design well-polished sites like PornHub, complete with React and a design palette? 35 thumbnails of different seven year olds right on the front page, filterable by sexual situation. Filterable by how many adults are involved. With a comment section, even!, and God help you if you even begin to imagine what is said there. You’re right, though, let’s think about your privacy and the criminal liability for Apple for taking action on something that clearly doesn’t matter to anyone except those stuck with dealing with it.
Get real. Sometimes the lack of perspective among otherwise smart people really worries me, and this conversation about Apple’s motives for the last week or so has worried me the most yet.
People should really stop using this “conspiracy theory” as a reason for Apple to not scan for CSAM in a privacy-preserving fashion. There are way too many “hot takes” that don’t take into account any legal ramifications of their “what if” scenarios.
And the law clearly states that that doesn’t apply if an immediate effort is made to involve law enforcement. Besides, Apple is not transmitting it to Apple, the user is.
This is probably the best design we have so far for something that everyone else is already doing, and I give Apple credit for going to greater lengths to preserve privacy.
But the “just trust us, we only want to do good things and we will be ruined if you ever catch us doing bad things” rationale doesn’t help. In fact it sends me right back into protest every time I’ve seen it posted.
There will not be legal ramifications for “what if” scenarios. Not enough to prevent abuse.
Especially if these would be the same (weak) legal ramifications that prevent people from being wrongfully accused of murder, arrested for peaceful protest, or bank accounts frozen on baseless suspicion of fraud or terrorism.
From the same government that has treated legitimate political beliefs and entire religions as terrorism.
If the core defense is that I should just trust that NCMEC exists for a single purpose, will never be manipulated or expand outside that purpose, and is completely uninterested in carrying out any other agenda, then that defense has already lost.
Because that exact scenario has already occurred with other government agencies.
And suggesting that NCMEC is somehow at such a disadvantage in power that Apple has a choice to say “no” (and that Apple will do so at even the slightest hint of impropriety) and that alone will bring NCMEC and all of the good work they do crashing down?
I bought this reasoning fully with the Patriot Act and warrantless wiretaps. I had no doubt these things were being used to do good and prevent deaths, and I’m sure they have.
But I have also since seen enough to know that short term good will was paid for by the long term ruining of innocent lives, and racial profiling that continues to this day.
I’m not interested in supporting that again.
I’m good with “Apple is trying to steer this in a more privacy respecting direction” and “this introduces a new avenue in which NCMEC introduces more checks and balances by having third parties double check their work”.
I’m saying this as someone who is torn about this issue.
But the “separate government organization that will absolutely not bend to pressure and will suffer legal consequences if they do, JUST TRUST US KTHX” reasoning already has such strong precedence of being proven false, it only works against your case.
It's exactly and only the latter, actually. Consider how useful an obscure-to-normies Web-forum acronym consisting mostly of "anal" is going to be at deflecting liability—should such even be possible—if it comes up in court. Not a bit, right? So how could it be intended for that? If that were the purpose, people would write out the words.
Other content, private but not sensitive, like holidays photos, can be stored and decrypted remotely and it's a good practice to use encrypted partitions by default. I don't believe Hetzner would do any of the grey things that Google, Facebook and now Apple are doing (i.e. actively scanning your data for advertising and other purposes), but there is a practical problem of broken hard drives - it doesn't matter if it breaks in your place or at a hosting provider, you have a hard drive that is broken but you can't remove your data from easily, but someone else might. I estimate the probability is extremely low, but there is very little downside and effort required to encrypt data partitions nowadays, so I don't see why I shouldn't do that.
As for the interception of data in transit, nowadays everybody is using TLS for everything, so I don't think it's an issue.
* it's intuitive to use, so people who haven't seen it can quickly download what you send them without having to log in, being tracked and so on.
* password protection and expiry date for shared links come in handy
* superfast search is a boon for me as I have so many files it's probably the most important aspect
* the photos app in Next/ownCloud is underperforming if you have a large number of photos in a folder - the thumbnails seem to be generated each time I open the folder, it's probably a bug.
* when you need to collaborate, it's supereasy to add users and they intuitively know how to do things as they're used to Dropbox etc.
[0] https://mega.nz/
If you do, however, set up a server, you can centralize your data and easily run all the backup jobs from it.
Doesn't look like it's available as a paid service, unfortunately.
Hopefully soon!!
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/foss-mobile-app-stin...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/the-big-alternatives...
The client apps and the user interface are super boomer friendly.
The iOS client is excellent but to be totally transparent sometimes the app does need to be opened to make sure the photo sync happens.
One at home, one at office and one on key chain.
Cheap, secure, highly available and offline.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/the-big-alternatives...
It may not have the same integration options but it's better than the alternatives.
My "boomer" group have Google devices, so once they auth to my service I can pull their photo albums for import.
But is the real-world instance of CSAM so high that every photo on every phone that is shared with another human needs to be scanned for it? It seems like there is no tradeoff too big to not be taken in the quest to eradicate CSAM.
Are the resources spent really proportional to the threat?
While KimDotCom is an impressive hacker, I am not sure that I would love to be the target of the FEDs around the world as he is still in the eye of the US.
Fun story about MegaUpload.
I once lived in Argentina back in the MegaUpload days. At the time, piracy was the norm (not only in Argentina), the gov didn't care, and people where selling pirated, burned DVD on the streets. This was a downtown, a high transited area.
Then MegaUpload started to grow like fire, and I remember that starting at 4 pm, the internet would get awfully slow. As people get off their jobs to download the latest movie or episode out there. Then PopcornTime, and things got even worst. Cant find the stat, but I remember something along the line of 60% of Buenos Aires traffic being MegaUpload's at peak time (4-10pm), which caused a lot of controversy at the time.
Old days...
Here in New Zealand we are only just finishing tidying up the fallout from the Dotcom fiasco now. Shame on us.
Ehh idk seems like a dumb concern/losing battle. My thing is about IP. I picked up this e-ink tablet and it syncs to their cloud service for example. Which you can stop but still... Ahh. Just feels like going in circles, ISP knows your content, VPN, is your device actually secure, etc... Do you have anything to hide anyway.
I'm probably just paranoid ha I question using Trello putting "new IP" into it which they say is encrypted at rest so yeah. Gmail too like everything goes through that.
Anyway I'm average intelligence not developing cold fusion or something on my spare time so I don't really have IP anyway.
Here's an idea, a piece of paper and a pencil.
I'm still waiting for it to suffer the same fate as MegaUpload. The reputation has the service tarnished. I don't care that everything's encrypted with Mega - They could still sneak in backdoors or skeleton keys. Plus it needs Javascript to work, which is a privacy nightmare.
In the US, privacy means in your home. It cannot have a third party custodian.
You can use that to identify files.
If the object is encrypted with KMS, which almost everything is, then the hash is the encrypted contents and not the original contents.
Maybe, but if you E2EE it can't detect anything, anyway. (Please don't take this as an endorsement of child porn) NextCloud has preliminary E2EE support built in, but not for photos - yet.