/tech/ - Technology

Sometimes the EU does some quite admirable legislation to protect user privacy, but what in the actual fuck is this?

Apple as a company did the same thing not to long ago where they scan user images in search of CSAM.
"Save the children" is the rallying cry of modern attacks on our right to privacy and security.

>>11968
ITT: Eurofags don't know what it's like to be preotected by S230. The ends do not justify the means and, to quote the founding fathers (broken clocks etc etc) Those who would trade liberty for security deserve neither.

>>11969
>Apple as a company did the same thing not to long ago where they scan user images in search of CSAM.
>"Save the children" is the rallying cry of modern attacks on our right to privacy and security.

You are not going far enough without your accusations. They aren't just committing the heinous crime of mass-assult on privacy.

Their CSAM scanners are based on a massive collection of pedophile-porn. And their scanners also hack into the phones of children. So in essence it's an organization that collects massive amounts of pedophile-porn and hacks into the phones of children. And it claims that it wants to protect society from pedophiles, talk about the fox guarding the hen-house.

On the very small chance that this "initiative" wasn't started by pedophiles in the first place, it's going to become overun by them. They will get paid to look at CP instead of getting prosecuted. It's a massive pedo-magnet.

Even if you think what I'm saying is over the top, accusing these people of having pedophile intentions is likely a more effective narrative. They are associating privacy with pedophilia, it's high time to return the favor, and associate hacking into personal computers that are also used by children , to scan their private photos, with pedophilia.

>>11971
You are most likely glowy looking to discredit a pro-privacy / anti-surveillance position
You could potentially redeem your self by making an actual argument.

>>11972
Nope, I'm highly pro privacy. It's the modern muhleft which is so quick to give up rights, liberties, and privacy to protect against imaginary/overhyped threats.
>Covid
>Mass shooting
>Climate change
>Omg that girl's 17.5 years old

Granted, the modern right is hell-bent on rescinding the right to [checks notes] crossdress and creep on women in the bathroom.

>>11973
Hmm that's kind off an unexpected reply.
I don't know if this really is about right-left bourgeois direction-politics or a cultural issue.

If you want to fight pederasty you need to fund investigative police-work, like with detectives and crime laboratory stuff. And you need highly trained social workers that can figure out if children are in social conditions that could lead to molestation.

I don't really see the point of bothering with computer and internet stuff, by the time pedophile-porn ends up on the internet it's too late and the damage has been done.

If you find the pedos in meat-space that will fix the internet content problem by extension.

If this really is about protecting children online, then i would be onboard with a general ban to post pictures of non-adults online. Because that makes it a privacy argument. You can argue that children can't consent to their likeness being published, because they aren't legally able to consent. Parents arguably don't have that right either because it might have effects beyond childhood and that would be violating the privacy rights of future legal adults.

The big advantage of a general age restriction mechanism is that there is no need to have a data-base full of CP to create anti-CP-filters. And you won't end up with government institutions or private corporations that are filled with pedophiles ""managing the illegal content containment"". You can have a relatively simple algorithm that is very accurate at guessing the age of somebody even when photos don't include a face. There's no need to do any invasive stuff like hack into the phones and computers of private persons either. And the age-guessing algorithm has no legally problematic technical components derived from CP, so it can be opensource code that can be inspected to make sure there are no malicious features. It's also very light on computation resources, cheap compact-cameras with 500mhz MIPS-architecture processors could do this a decade ago. You can add this to any website or app without it becoming a regulation that promotes big tech-monopolies because only they are able to have the technical and legal capacity to implement it.

I don't believe for a second that the people who have proposed the CP-scanner laws care about protecting children, because they want to undermine the privacy and computer-security of devices used by children. What they want has a technical requirement that a big stash of child-porn exists somewhere in a vault. You can't claim to fight against child-porn and than proceed to build the largest collection of child-porn. That's not a valid line of reasoning.

People use their personal computation devices as a prosthesis for their brains, hardware is just so much better at accurately remembering information than wetware. Any kind of access to personal computation devices is the same thing as asking for access to a pulmonary-pace-maker (fixes irregular heartbeats) or cochlear-implant (artificial hearing). I think it's madness, this is some kind of mental assault. People have a right to perfect privacy to their brains, and that includes the parts that are made out of silicon. We're already cyborgs, just not the creepy kind with mutilated bodies that have technology bits poking through the skin like the monsters in science fiction.

>>11973
Can you not derail the thread with your crackpot conspiracies about Covid and Globla warming which are actually real threats you moronic faggot and mass shootings are too even if liberals have a dumb ass backwards way of fixing it.

Are you seriously this dumb?
Covid and global warming are not comparable to this at all.

This guy who makes tech privacy related stuff released a video about the "content scanner" maleware.
Is this batt shit crazy idea still a thing ?

https://inv.makerlab.tech/watch?v=uegzHgKcyqk
https://odysee.com/@RobBraxmanTech:6/e2e-x:0

>>12451
>Is this batt shit crazy idea still a thing ?
If you've got antivirus installed and scanning all your files then you've already lost this particular battle. That's why russian owned kaspersky is banned on government equipment.

And don't forget that all operating systems have a backdoor called Automatic Updates. There is nothing technical stopping Microsoft/Google/Apple from pushing malware straight to your device with a special update just for you.

Since the EU doesn't have any major OS or AV vendors to coerce it makes sense that they're trying to invent some new thing to push a backdoor they control onto people's devices.

>>11975
>global warming is real
tfw you claim you want to eat the rich but all you eat is their propaganda.

>>12481
>That's why russian owned kaspersky is banned on government equipment.
No, that one is because of a fucking insane anti-Russia hysteria whipped up during Russiagate.

just don't be a pedo. Simple as.

>>12481
>antivirus scanning all your files then you've already lost this particular battle.
I don't know much about anti-virus, most cyber-security people seem to think that it increases the surface area for attacks more than they mitigate viruses. Their argument is that there is no substitute for making the operating system secure. I wouldn't know, i guess it could make sense to have one to scan files you don't trust. Microsoft seems to bundle anti-virus with windows, but then again windows has so many other privacy-violations, windows might be a lost cause.

>That's why russian owned kaspersky is banned on government equipment.
I don't know if kaspersky is trust-worthy or not, there might be legit reasons to avoid it, but it probably doesn't come down to nationality. This looks more like somebody is using security-concerns as an excuse against market competition in the realm of anti-virus. Like the 5G security hysteria was probably a stunt to give cellular network adapter companies like Ericson and Nokia time to catch up with Huawei on 5G tech. I don't mind countries doing economic protectionism, it's a legitimate economic strategy that has proven to be beneficial and effective for catching up. But the bullshit political theater is so annoying and unnecessary. It's not fooling the Chinese, and nobody in the west cares, because protectionism for catching up on tech or economy of scale isn't wrong. It's just pissing off a bunch of people who don't like the anti-China/Russia hysteria for no reason.

>a backdoor called Automatic Updates.
>trying to invent some new thing to push a backdoor
People have a right to privacy, brains have perfect privacy, and personal computers must be included in perfect brain privacy, because people are using their personal computers as brain extensions. In the future people might get a personal AI, and that too will go under the umbrella of perfect personal privacy. Any violation of that is a grievous crime. Obviously computers that aren't personal, like commercially or institutionally used computers are not protected by this.

We will need this perfect personal privacy, not just for the sake of safeguarding human-rights. But also because the thread-model for everybody will change dramatically in the near to mid term future. We will figure out how to apply AI-stuff to make really effective bug-scanners that will plug virtually every conceivable hole in software security, in the vein of software-fuzzing but orders of magnitude more effective. Software exploits will become extremely cumbersome and only practical in very high effort hacks, think high value targets like industrial espionage targeting strategically relevant military-weapons secrets. However as software-vulnerability declines very sophisticated exploits that target "human biological security weaknesses" will evolve far beyond social-engineering attacks like fishing. And the only way to mitigate that is to boost privacy until it's no longer possible to get enough personal information about people to create advanced social engineering attacks. In societies that fail the digital privacy challenge, computers will likely go back to being toys for techies, like in the 1980s and 90s and paper-work will suffer a technical regression to actual paper.

Sending malicious updates, yeah that's just breaking into somebodies computer, that's a crime too. And the mechanisms that make this possible will get abused. It's the same problem that backdoors have. They're just security holes. Intentionally creating security holes makes one a malicious actor.

Technology upgrades for police-work requires investment into actual forensic tech. The computer surveillance stuff is a dead end, you're not actually getting direct signals from reality, you're just getting signals that computers make. Very soon a new breed of cyber-mafias and hostile spy organizations will arise that figure out what signals they need to plug into the system to give them a screen of impunity. For a time surveillance might have given the police an advantage over organized crime. But that will soon turn into a disadvantage once it's possible to make signals that create the impression that nothing is going on, while crime is happening underneath. It's better to begin the shift from surveillance to forensics before this happens, because paradigm shifts are hard and slow.

>>12483
Improved Privacy protections, will protect children from pedophiles. Why on earth would you shill for surveillance-pedophilia.

>>12484
>the 5G security hysteria was probably a stunt
Considering 5G adoption is a bonanza of profit for the regional telecom monopolists, and that if anything scientists who study the health effects of EMF are suppressed on safety and standards boards, no.
https://emfscientist.org/
http://www.5gappeal.eu/

>>12484
>I don't know much about anti-virus
Antivirus is a software program that reads every byte of every file on your computer to look for malicious code. So the corpo which controls the antivirus software also has access to every byte of every file on your computer.

>Sending malicious updates, yeah that's just breaking into somebodies computer, that's a crime too.
It's not a "crime" when the state does it. The point you're missing is that these are all US companies. If the EU wants their own backdoor then they have to legislate it into existence which is what the OP is about.

>>12487
>Antivirus is a software program that reads every byte of every file on your computer to look for malicious code.
Yes Anti-virus software compares files with virus-signatures, but they only need to download the signature files to function, they don't need to upload anything. They only need to inform you in case they find a virus, they don't have to send anything back. If there are malicious spy-ware anti-features, those are not necessary to make the software perform it's anti-virus function.

I don't understand what this is about. Are you trying to say that anti-virus is fundamentally incompatible with privacy? I don't see how this is the case. Is there a technical reason why anti-virus would interfere with privacy ? You know other than malicious actors infecting anti-virus software with malicious anti-features.

I don't quite understand why you would even compare anti-virus software to surveillance-scanners, they are fundamentally different things. Anti-virus software checks software instruction logic while the surveillance-scanners violates the content of private data. The Surveillance-scanners are malware while non-malicious anti-virus remove such malware. I'm confused why you would say these are the same when they seem more like opposites.

If your comparison only hinges on anti-virus touching every file on your computer, well that's too broad, there are plenty other computer components that also do this.

>It's not a "crime" when the state does it.
Of course it's a crime. Laws can only be laws if they apply to everybody without exemptions. A society where the laws don't apply universally is a lawless society. Rules for thee and exemptions for me, is the logic of absolute monarchy, i.e. not a legitimate government.

>The point you're missing is that these are all US companies. If the EU wants their own backdoor then they have to legislate it into existence which is what the OP is about.
Privacy rights were granted, and human-rights have no take backs. That means it is criminal regardless if the US or the EU does it. Legislation can't change this, implementing unjust laws is as much a crime as breaking just laws is a crime. I do understand that there seems to be significant criminal activity with regards to breaking privacy. But scale doesn't change that, violating privacy is a crime. Illegitimate legislation incompatible with privacy does not make privacy violations any less of a crime.

The current level of somewhat political apathy towards privacy violations will not last, the pendulum will swing back into the other direction, and then there will be a reckoning. Excuses like "We made phony laws that gave our selves permission" will not fly, anymore than Nazi-race laws could grant permission for the holocaust. I'm bringing up this comparison because the Nazis also made databases of people before they began their mass murder stuff. That historic precedent is part of the reason why privacy is a hard requirement for legitimate governance. Especially in Europe and the US where unspeakable genocides happened not that long ago in historic terms.

Maybe the privacy question can be simplified into a binary. 2 kinds of people, the ones that uphold privacy and ensure that the horrors of the past can't be repeated. And those that would allow the conditions for the recurrence of mass atrocities. If privacy swallows surveillance and regular people become opaque, the tendency towards mass-murdering a scapegoat like the Jews, will lack the ability to find it's victims.

>>12486
Do you have a source that explains exactly how non ionizing radiation causes DNA damage. Every time i try to investigate this, that part never seems to get explained.

>>12491
Are you asking because you disbelieve it, or because you're genuinely curious about the process?

If it's the former, the non-ionizing-can't-do-anything concept is an absurdly reductive talking point that's so easily refuted with simple examples that it could only have been propaganda invented by telecom industry shills. Visible and UV light are indisputably non-ionizing radiation, yet they function daily in basic chemical processes within cells. Here are just a few examples. Visible and near-visible light excites electrons in order to split water and protonate NADP in the first stage of photosynthesis. UV radiation converts 7-dehydro-cholesterol into the precursor to vitamin D in human epidermis. UV radiation both directly disrupts nucleotide bonding in DNA and indirectly increases DNA damage rates by increasing the production of damaging reactive oxygen species such as superoxide radicals and hydrogen peroxide. This is how people get skin cancer from too much sunbathing, and it's also how tanning itself works (melanocytes only increase their melanin production after DNA damage has been detected). These are all basic, elementary examples of radiation-driven biochemistry that no biologist or physician would ever dispute. That radiation which is non-ionizing (an extremely large category of radiation) can affect biological systems and specifically DNA is beyond debate.

Now if you're asking more specifically about the radio- or micro-wave frequencies implicated in research on EMF, I don't have a source on the specific biochemistry involved and it may not be a settled subject. But based on other studies I've read, my guess is that it's primarily the increased generation of reactive oxygen species which results in damage, by the species themselves induing DNA strand breaks and by interfering with enzymes involved in normal strand break repair. It's notable that in some studies there is a correlation between radio-frequency dosage and the number of of micronuclei during cell divisions. A micronuclus is a small nucleus that forms when a chromosome or a fragment of a chromosome is not incorporated into one of the daughter nuclei during cell division. That tells us that either DNA breaks are occurring more often, breaks are being repaired less often, or both. This study I've attached has some interesting citations in it's introduction for further reading. I'm by no means an expert on this subject and wouldn't know what the best sources are, and I'll note that I found this one from a 5-minute search on pubmed several years ago. I'm sure you can find more informative sources with some effort.

>>12492
Oh yeah and I'll note in this study that they measured increased rates of catalase and superoxide dismutase activity in the group with higher radio frequency exposure, two enzymes responsible for "disarming" reactive oxygen species to protect other molecules from them. The supports the theory of RFR -> reactive oxygen species -> DNA damage.

>>12492
>Are you asking because you disbelieve it, or because you're genuinely curious about the process?
It's difficult to put my reasoning into words. In my mind technology that does harm = weapon. So if somebody says technology XYZ is harmful , i would try to reason what would it take to weaponize XYZ. You have to try to instrumentalize a physical effect, and preferably boil it down to an engineering equation to fully understand it. Wireless digital signals are micro-waves, so the question becomes how can micro-waves be weaponized. Since wireless radio emitters tend to be relatively low-power equipment, the question gets further refined to how can low power micro-waves be weaponized. I don't know any direct solution to this question. My guess is that if it's possible it would need to trigger secondary effects which release enough energy to cause destruction. Now i have to track down all the interactions between matter and microwaves, to find out potential links in a chain that leads towards releasing a bunch of destructive energy from secondary energy sources. I also have to track down all the forms of stored energy in human cells that could potentially be released. There's like sooo many and it would be really tedious work to find out if there's a potential path-way of knocking loose a peace that knocks loose a bigger peace until you get enough energy released for a destructive effect. Most of the peaces you can knock loose just go to dead ends where you end up a with a tiny amount of heat-release that does nothing, and leaves the body as waste-heat. What I'm looking for is whether you or the people who research this topic know of a chain that doesn't deadend.

>non-ionizing-can't-do-anything concept is a talking point
The reason why everybody goes there, is because if there is little power, it has to be highly focused to cause damage. Basically the logic behind stabbing somebody with a pointy stick costs less energy than stabbing somebody with a blunt stick. When we're talking photons the pointiest stick is the one with the short wave-length, and that's ionizing radiation.

>Visible and UV light are indisputably non-ionizing radiation, yet they function daily in basic chemical processes within cells
Very interesting however if it's part of the spectrum of sunlight that passes through our atmosphere, it's not a danger at low intensity.

>But based on other studies I've read, my guess is that it's primarily the increased generation of reactive oxygen species which results in damage, by the species themselves induing DNA strand breaks and by interfering with enzymes involved in normal strand break repair. It's notable that in some studies there is a correlation between radio-frequency dosage and the number of of micronuclei during cell divisions. A micronuclus is a small nucleus that forms when a chromosome or a fragment of a chromosome is not incorporated into one of the daughter nuclei during cell division. That tells us that either DNA breaks are occurring more often, breaks are being repaired less often, or both.

This is a deep rabbit hole, it's tempting, if i can find an explanation for the link between increased ROS and microwaves i might jump in.

>>12490
>they only need to download the signature files to function, they don't need to upload anything
Correct.
However, with the exception of ClamAV, THEY ALL DO UPLOAD WHATEVER THEY WANT BECAUSE THEY ARE PRODUCED BY DEEP STATE PRISM PARTNERS WHO GO TO BILDERBERG AND WEF AND BOHEMIAN GROVE AND PEDO ISLAND AND THEIR BEST FRIEND IS MARION PETTIE SO SHOVE YOUR HUMAN RIGHTS UP YOUR ASS YOU FUCKING NAIVE PROPAGANDA VICTIM OF THE COINTELPRO STATIST SHEEP
https://www.howtogeek.com/719825/how-to-stop-windows-10s-antivirus-from-sending-files-to-microsoft/

Oh, and to quickly find out if a piece of software is malicious they execute it in KERNEL SPACE (meaning with admin privileges).
Because it's impossible to escape from a sandbox, right?
Matrix 4 was pretty gud btw

>>12490
>Anti-virus software compares files with virus-signatures, but they only need to download the signature files to function, they don't need to upload anything.
That's not true, when AV detects a "suspicious" file it automatically sends it back to HQ for analysis. And that can be any file on your computer. And in most cases AV also controls the firewall so it's not like you can stop it from exfiltrating files even if you wanted to.

>Laws can only be laws if they apply to everybody without exemptions. A society where the laws don't apply universally is a lawless society.
If you take someone's money it's called theft but when the state does it it's called taxation.
If you take someone away and lock them in a cage it's called kidnap but when the state does it it's called law enforcement.
If you pick up a gun and shoot someone it's called murder but when the state does it it's called warfare.
And yes, when you hack somebody's computer it's a crime, but when the NSA does it it's called intelligence.

>Privacy rights were granted, and human-rights have no take backs.
Are you literally 3 years old, did you not just witness the state lock everybody in their homes for months and then force them to take experimental medical treatments. What are you even doing on /leftypol/ if you are this pathetically bluepilled.

>>12497
>they execute it in KERNEL SPACE
You're getting a bit advanced for a leftist imageboard but yes anti-virus is basically a rootkit that tries to out-rootkit the other rootkits.

>>12497
how come nobody checks up on those pedo-islands? Ever since the story came out about that infamous guy (whose name i've forgotten) who got sudokued in prison. I think the "elite-pedo-affairs" function as a type of social trust mechanism. If they all commit pedo-crimes together they have a legal version of mutually assured destruction. That might be the mechanism that holds them together, but also a potential Achilles heel.

>>12535
>AV phones home
Sure but that is not necessary for it to function. It's possible to make ethical software that stays loyal to the user.
>The state violates rights
maybe that should be frustrated

>>12537
>It's possible to make ethical software that stays loyal to the user.
That doesn't change the fact that the corporate AV you use is a backdoor into your system.

>>12538
Isn't that the case for most corporate tech ?
Also we probably should call "Backdoors" intentional security holes

>>12539
>Isn't that the case for most corporate tech ?
Most corporate tech doesn't have full access to every file on your system the way anti-virus does. I can't believe how difficult this is to explain.

More evidence is mounting that this is an unworkable system

Tainting the CSAM client-side scanning database.
<It turns out it is also possible to taint the database of images of known child sexual abuse material (CSAM), allowing an adversary to trick the client-side scanning system to also trigger an alarm for other, non CSAM, material
https://blog.xot.nl/2023/10/11/tainting-the-csam-client-side-scanning-database/index.html

Related Comment from Y-combinator
<The article considers "an entity that is allowed to propose new entries to the CSAM database".
<You don't even need this! You could target a whole "social cluster" of people without having any special privileges within this system.
<As an example, lets say you want to attack environmental protesters.
<For image A, you create a meme about climate change.
<For image B, you procure something that looks, to humans, like CSAM (as described in the article).
<Craft B′ such that f(B′) = f(A) (also as described).

<Now, all you have to do is anonymously publish B′ to a platform that is actively moderated/monitored. Unfortunate users will see it and report it as CSAM, and if the platform fulfills its obligations, that report will bubble up to the relevant authorities, who will review it and add its fingerprint to the database.

<Now you can start sending out image A, the meme, to your target demographic. You won't be able to post it on "mainstream" platforms with server-side fingerprint scanning, but there are plenty of other avenues for it to spread. If it's a good meme, it will propagate organically through group-chats and DMs, and eventually find its way onto devices with client-side scanning.

<Apple's proposed device scanning system had a threshold before your device would be flagged, so repeat all these steps a whole bunch of times, until the average meme-savvy environmental protester's device gets flagged for further scrutiny.

<Unwitting victims who do try to post the meme to a mainstream platform with fingerprint matching may risk getting their accounts flagged and taken down, and they might have no way of knowing what triggered it. This would lead to, of course, automated censorship of environmental protest groups.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37870557

>>12558
>More evidence is mounting that this is an unworkable system
What about China's Great Firewall and Russkie SORM? Is that a workable system?

>>12559
This is what-aboutism and barely tangentially related, but i'll reply.

>What about China's Great Firewall
It's OK temporarily, if they are doing this for protectionism to build up their own media industry. However once their media industry is big enough, that shit needs to go too. In the end there's got to be a single global internet, not a bunch of continent-sized intranets.

>and Russkie SORM?
No clue what that does, never heard of it.

>>12562
>It's OK
nice double standards nazoid

>No clue what that does
<The System for Operative Investigative Activities (SORM; Russian: Система оперативно-разыскных мероприятий) is the technical specification for lawful interception interfaces of telecommunications and telephone networks operating in Russia. The current form of the specification enables the targeted surveillance of both telephone and Internet communications. Initially implemented in 1995 to allow access to surveillance data for the FSB, in subsequent years the access has been widened to other law enforcement agencies.

>>12563
>nice double standards
No it is not a double standard to take into account the level of economic development. I want a free and open internet for the users, not shill for enabling the biggest players to suffocate every potential competitor in the crib.

>The current form of the specification enables the targeted surveillance of both telephone and Internet communications.
This is vague jargon, it does not say anything about whether the Russians have a free internet or not.

>>12564
>No it is not a double standard to take into account the level of economic development.
So it's okay to censor internet in third world reactionary shitholes.

Totally no double standards at all lol.

>I want a free and open internet for the users
And yet you're against open internet for the Chinese and Russian users. Curious.

>whether the Russians have a free internet or not.
They don't.

<In Russia, internet censorship is enforced on the basis of several laws and through several mechanisms. Since 2012, Russia maintains a centralized internet blacklist (known as the "single register") maintained by the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor).

<The list is used for the censorship of individual URLs, domain names, and IP addresses. It was originally introduced to block sites that contain materials advocating drug abuse and drug production, descriptions of suicide methods, and containing child pornography. It was subsequently amended to allow the blocking of materials that are classified as extremist by including them to the Federal List of Extremist Materials.[1] According to Freedom House, these regulations have been frequently abused to block criticism of the federal government or local administrations.[2][3]

<A law prohibiting "abuse of mass media freedom" implements a process for the shutting down of online media outlets.[2] In March 2019 the bill which introduced fines for those who are deemed (by the government) to be spreading "fake news" and show "blatant disrespect" toward the state authorities was signed into law.[note 1]

<In June 2020, the European Court of Human Rights ruled against Russia in a case involving the blocking of websites critical of the government (including that of Garry Kasparov), as the plaintiffs' freedom of speech had been violated.[8]

>>12566
Also, russkie blacklist now includes hentai resources lol.

Russkie Ivans are not even allowed near superious anime girls lol, they must slave away for their Natashkas. Such freedom kek.

>>12566
This has nothing to do with the thread-theme about malicious scanners.

Anyway can you at least address the point about enabling less developed countries to do protectionism. Do you have a better way of doing that ?