RAW, video, anything that grabs stills in real time...

Not soon enough, apparently.

"I'm too stupid and impatient to lose all my own money. Maybe this computer can help!"

"or even simulated depictions of those acts"

So they're going to be arresting thousands of actors and film crew now? This basically criminalises making movies or tv shows.

Depends on the country...
Many european countries have welfare and taxation systems that reward having children but punish higher earners.
This creates a situation where the higher earners can't afford to have kids as it would mean time off work, childcare costs etc. Meanwhile those on welfare have every incentive to have more kids.

They read a lot, it's just that the content they read comes from their peers rather than authors with an editorial team to ensure proper grammar and spelling.

Lower rates of teen pregnancy could also be caused by better education about contraceptives, and easier availability of contraceptives.

Ostensibly, Apple could open source the code running on their own baseband hardware (Apple C1). I'm pretty sure the hardware requires signed code for FCC compliance reasons, so you'd never be able to modify it, but as far as I know, nothing prevents them from making the code available.

You're missing my point. To the best of my knowledge, you can't buy a phone that has an entirely open source operating system now; the phone hardware vendors provide closed-source bits preinstalled, and nuking them is problematic at best. More importantly, even if that were not true, you still would not be able to buy an Apple iPhone or iPad with an OS that is pure open source, which makes your concern entirely irrelevant in this context.

This discussion is about what Apple would need to do to satisfy people with privacy concerns when it comes to third-party replacements for Siri on devices that Apple makes. Arguing that you don't trust Apple because parts of the OS are closed source is irrelevant, because you won't ever trust their device in the first place (or any devices, in all likelihood).

Either way, the automatic presumption is that if a consumer does not trust the device maker, that person will buy a device from some other manufacturer. So for the purposes of this discussion, the decision by the consumer to trust Apple is in the past. It was made when they bought the device with a preinstalled OS. Thus we can presume that the consumer in question therefore trusts Apple to a great extent.

What remains, then, is what Apple, as a presumptively trusted party, would have to do to continue to maintain that level of trust in their devices while allowing third parties to inject code that deeply integrates with every app on the system in a highly invasive way.

The moderate parties are trying not to offend anyone or lose any votes, so they don't offer any solutions to anything that might be controversial. This is not just things like immigration, a lot of economic reforms would also cause short term pain even if the long term was hugely beneficial. Political parties are deathly afraid of this kind of thing because it means losing votes in the short term so they'll lose the next election cycle and the next party will take the credit when the long term benefits kick in.

So you get various problems building up over time with no mainstream parties offering any kind of solution just more of the same with the problems gradually getting worse.

The fringe parties only have a small hard core of supporters that they're not going to lose, so they start promising solutions because they've got nothing to lose. Moderate voters who are increasingly sick of the mainstream parties status quo might disagree with 95% of the fringe parties policies, but these parties are also the only ones offering any kind of solution to the biggest problems voters face, so they start voting for the fringe parties and they become successful.

Well, that rules out 99.9999% of all mobile phones for you, then, with a +/- .0001% margin of error. :-)

That's an arbitrary distinction, though. What percentage of even the most tech-savvy users would actually take the time to audit every source code change to every software update to their phone to make sure it doesn't do something questionable? How many people would be capable of doing it successfully? I'm thinking back to the obfuscated C contest, not to mention thousands of examples of just how easy is to introduce a vulnerability that will get missed by code reviewers for years.

Open source is not even slightly immune to those sorts of issues. It could reasonably be argued, at least on an epidemic level, that we're better off with a larger number of different OS vendors, so that compromising a single vendor will compromise a smaller percentage of devices, but other than the high level of platform divergence that open source tends to bring with it (which has negative consequences for security, too), Open Source really isn't a panacea in a world where vulnerability discoveries are weaponized almost overnight.

If anything, big companies at least have the resources to throw huge amounts of money at prevention, which is something that open source likely does not have.

Correct. There's absolutely no plausible way to do it at an OS level except *maybe* for the camera, and even that can likely be thwarted by recording a video that starts on something innocuous and ends on nudity, because by the time the monitoring algorithm notices the nudity, many frames would already have been sent to the recording app.

But what the device manufacturer can do is require that all apps submitted for app review must comply with those standards and use those tools to check for disallowed content, and block any apps that do not comply from being installed on a device that is owned by someone under 18 (or whatever age is specified by the law in question), including blocking side-loading. You'd still have a handful of parents who unlock the devices for development so that their kids can write apps, but all other young people's devices would presumably be locked down (assuming the parents don't or can't turn that off).

It's fundamentally impossible for an operating system to protect you from the manufacturer of that operating system. That trust is unavoidable.

First, you'll have to build the hotword support for them, because you're not going to want to give random companies the ability to surreptitiously keep the mic hot and listen for the hotword support, because nothing would prevent them from exfiltrating arbitrary amounts of audio. This means developing a framework for running third-party companies' on-device hotword detection models and triggering the execution of that third-party code when the hotword is detected.

Next, you'll need to be able to support running the on-device models, though I guess that already exists.

And if you don't mandate that any prospective provider must give the same level of security that Apple does (e.g. running all cloud-based processing in an encrypted container), you will massively weaken the security of the platform, so to make this even remotely tolerable, you'l need a fine-grained security model to limit what gets shared with that third-party provider. Given that this is going to involve things like sniffing the keyboard in real time, accessing arbitrary text fields in the browser, etc. on command, that is a non-trivial amount of invasiveness, so giving users control over what gets shared and what doesn't get shared could be a nightmare.

I'm sure that's just the tip of the iceberg here.

It could be done, yes. Doing it in a way that respects user privacy would require a lot of careful thought when designing the architecture, IMO.

One of the biggest problems, from my perspective, is the risk of allowing real-time audio input from a background app that the user may or may not be actively engaged with. It's not just data. It's a live mic.

As far as I know, Apple isn't preventing companies from being able to add features and services inside Siri. They're just not allowing companies to replace it wholesale. You can run any arbitrary model that you want to within their frameworks, and you can extend Apple's assistant platform in arbitrary ways. What you can't do is switch to an entirely different assistant front end.

And even if you ignore the security concerns, there are very real usability reasons to disallow replacing Siri outright. Imagine if every app developer had to write twelve different versions of their AI integrations so that their apps would work with the twelve different assistants that users install on their devices. It would break the unity of the platform and make life miserable for developers. Realistically, nobody would support anything but Apple's built-in offerings, so any third-party services would be DOA anyway.

With that said, my opinion is based entirely on what I saw at their keynote on Monday and a quick gut check. I could be very wrong here, and I'm open to contrary opinions.

The DMA means that they are limited in their ability to build systems that favor Apple-provided services over other companies' services. And Siri is a service. So unless they want to allow native Google Assistant, Alexa, etc. alongside Siri, complete with the same level of access to user content, they can't roll it out in Europe. Creating an infrastructure for making that possible while protecting user privacy is genuinely hard.

This is not to say that Apple shouldn't be pressured to do so, but at the same time, I understand why they don't want to do so, and I'm not convinced that there's enough societal or individual consumer benefit from competition in that area to warrant the technical overhead. The EU really should have granted them an exception for this.

What I would like to see is for the EU to force Apple to open their devices up to other companies competing against iCloud. There are potentially *huge* consumer benefits from doing so, and unlike Siri (which has to tightly integrate with on-device content in potentially intrusive ways, which requires continuous microphone access, which has major performance/battery life risk, etc.), there is really no good reason not to demand competition being possible for cloud storage and cloud backup.

What you can do is provide trained on-device models that apps like WhatsApp can use to recognize whether they need to flag content, and flags to indicate whether the user is a minor whose content should be checked by that model.

But yeah, global enforcement of viewing naked pictures is impossible, and global enforcement of taking naked pictures is also impossible unless you don't provide direct access to the camera (which would break a whole lot of apps in fundamental ways).