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Yes it can; I've done this in the past.

Maybe more people would vote before taking up arms?

My TV appliance does not support other browsers; must every appliance be open and support multiple competing browsers? Is there some rational boundary where the appliance can be shipped and just work as it was designed, and not have to support everybody's choice of software? If there exist too many limitations without work arounds, why buy it?

I said a jpeg pixel is the summation of 64 8 bit coefficients. The coefficients are 8 bit, but obviously the cosine values are not 8 bit. They can be floating point. All a jpeg need give is coefficients, the coder/decoder knows what to do with them. Summing 64 products, with each product = 8 bit numbers x cosine value gives more than an 8 bit result for the resultant pixel. In addition, there is another dct for the color values. This adds more bits of info.

The cosine values are transcendental numbers, they can have an infinite number of decimal places, yes? So adding up 64 products of (cosine values * 8 bit integer) to get 1 pixel value can obviously have more than 8 bits.

A jpeg pixel is 64 (=8 x 8), 8 bit coefficients which are summed together for each pixel. That result is not 8 bits, but more; that is a misunderstanding, often repeated. A jpeg is capable of over 11 bits dynamic range. You can figure out that an 11 bit dynamic range image has more than 8 bits. See the wikipedia.

All cloud platform scan for CSAM. Apple was going to move the scanning task off their servers, where it is now, onto apple devices only as the devices upload to apple's cloud. If you use cloud services, info does not stay on your phone, does it?

It seems apple devices are a black opaque box: support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 Every thing is encrypted except imap email storage. They have no access to anything except that. They can't do anyting with any data except imap emails stored on their server.

The governments want them to do some thing preventing CSAM, so now they can match a perceptual hash--not content--to known images from an non-governmental organization. That is about the minimum invasive CSAM prevention anybody can do.

Can someone suggest an alternative CSAM prevention which is less intrusive?

It seems the alternative would be to continue to be a black opaque box, or NOT encrypt you photos and rumage through them.

Let us look on the bright side: With all the "alternate facts" promulgated by politicians one must undertake some discernment of the context, the source, and not immediately accept what is said as fact. This hesitancy to immediately accept what is written is a good quality to have. Unfortunately it does not seem to be a widespread quality in the US voter.

Many people were raised and psychologically used to the days when news media had professional journalist who dug out the truth and presented it to the people. Many have still that mindset even though those days are in the past, and many media sources are tainted with other objectives than digging out the truth. That seems to be left to the individual. So Life is forcing us to grow more discerning; hopefully there will be a long term payoff.

I'd guess most macos systems (laptops) have encrypted hard drives.

The idea that one can transplant a brain and thus a human's consciousness is based on erroneous concepts. Because humans currently have only physical senses they assume, naturally, that all of reality is based on matter. The situation however is that the brain just mirrors the reality of consciousness. Therefore the brain is not the center of consciousness, but only reflects the activities of mind. Just as looking in a mirror you see a reflection of a person which is not the reality of the person but only a reflection of something that is real, so seeing the activity of the brain is only the reflection of the activity of mind.