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If you’re Apple, and you’re throwing your weight around in the US bread and butter market to convince the FBI to not scan your servers for CSAM, which is more compelling: we check for it when it gets here, or we keep it off our servers using crypto hash magic?

CSAM on the server means the server is tainted and likely to be searched by governments. Good plan to keep it off eliminates that excuse.

Everyone’s going to get COVID eventually. Natural immunity + 3 rounds of the vaccine are probably enough to make it acceptable level of deadly.

“Zero COVID” was never possible.

> If this is the case there is zero reason to scan locally and you can just scan the uploaded image once it is on the server.

You’re having a house party. Because of the pandemic, you’d rather people who have COVID not attend. You can’t trust everyone to get vaccinated or get tested beforehand. So, you decided to set up a rapid-test system, just to be sure.

Would you rather test in your kitchen or your driveway?

That this article is even necessary proves that our leadership in the west has utterly failed to convey the goal of Coronavirus suppression tactics. Either that, or the sensible message is being morphed, funhouse mirror style, even through the most banal of media outlets.

COVID-19 in some form was always going to be around forever. The goal was never complete eradication. Perhaps the miracle of the mRNA vaccine led us to fantasize, a little too openly, about going back to the pre-pandemic status quo. But that was never going to be the case.

Personally, I’ve already moved on. I’ll wear a mask as the situation dictates. I’ll get the boosters. I’ll keep mailing in my nasal tests twice a week and check the results. I’ll keep an eye on the hospital numbers and modify my risky behavior as needed. I won’t argue with people about the mask, about vaccines, about the origins. I’ll work from home as long as they’ll let me and go into the office when they say I’ve got to — or I’ll find another job.

I’ve already made peace with this thing. I’ve moved on. If I get it, I get it — but there’s no real use in obsessing over it any longer. I’ve adapted, and I’m ok with that.

I already do, but I can’t shake the feeling that it’s all bound up together and there are no choices I could make that mitigate the deleterious effects the industry has.

You’re free to label that histrionics, but I’m the one who has to face myself in the mirror.

There is no serious threat the US Dollar as the global reserve currency. China is a currency manipulator and is teetering on the edge of collapse because of their monetary management. Bitcoin is far too unstable and represents a relinquishment of government control over monetary policy, which no sane government will give up. To put it bluntly, governments would rather the US control the world’s money supply than to give up control to the blockchain, which is poorly understood and far too risky to use outside of speculative markets and small scale experiments.

Off topic but your response is spot on, and a key justification for why I want out. I want out of Silicon Valley. I want out of tech, out of screens, out of all of it.

I’m using COVID as an excuse to move away and start drawing down my involvement with all of it. I spent years trying to work my way into one of the few tech companies I considered at least nominally not trying to ruin the world for money but that’s not even enough.

We have built a dystopia, and short of finding a way to dismantle it that still lets me pay the rent and eat and not resign myself to a cat food retirement, I just want to get as far away from it as possible.

Lenovo? After Superfish? Interesting choice.

EFF lost credibility on this issue when their first statement conflated the iMessage safety for kids feature with the CSAM scanning. It’s clear that they are willing to fearmonger to raise money and aren’t committed to the cause of educating users and advocating a nuanced position. I cancelled my recurring donation.

To be clear, the content being scanned in messages is not a hash check against a database. It’s a plain old nudity detection algorithm similar to what Facebook has.

I’m in the same boat. Unfortunately, I don’t see myself continuing to donate to them, given the terrible job they’ve done on this topic. I trusted them to bring nuance and clarity —- really liked what they did in response to the cash bail discussion in California —- but this was too much of a miss for me.

I’m still a fan of the ACLU, even with their spotty record on gay rights, but it might just be a matter of time.