No surprise. Apple has long made personal privacy part of its very DNA. Engineers chose to join Apple for less pay and a tougher work environment because they believe in product excellence and chose to serve on the front lines of privacy as a human right.

https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1425986762132713473

The US constitution protects against arbitrary government search of one’s home and personal effects. Data one stores privately and doesn’t share is a personal effect. Apple backdooring iOS to examine personal iCloud data is a suspicionless search of personal effects.

Governments want this search capability but many, including America, are constitutionally prohibited from it. Perhaps Apple thinks that if they give governments this massive surveillance gift at this critical time, regulators will look the other way on their antitrust abuses.

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Tim Sweeney

@TimSweeneyEpic

8 Aug

So how should powerful tech companies reason about matters that balance individual freedom and collective safety? We should start with the underlying legal standards, especially when a policy may involve government reporting or policing.

An individual has strong legal protections of privacy in their personal effects and in personal communication through the post. There are very different standards in publishing material, engaging in commerce, communicating with groups of unknown third parties, and so on.

People have strong expressive rights in a public commons, and less so on private property. We should be more honest about which online venues really are commons and which are company property in 2021. The answer can’t be that corporations reign over the whole internet.

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Tim Sweeney

@TimSweeneyEpic

7 Aug

I've tried hard to see this from Apple's point of view. But inescapably, this is government spyware installed by Apple based on a presumption of guilt. Though Apple wrote the code, its function is to scan personal data and report it to government.
eff.org/deeplinks/2021…

This is entirely different from a content moderation system on a public forum or social medium. Before the operator choses to host the data publicly, they can scan it for whatever they don't want to host. But this is peoples' private data.

Apple's dark patterns that turn iCloud uploads on by default, and flip it back on when moving to a new phone or switching accounts, exacerbate the problem. Further, in many contexts Apple has forced people to accumulate unwanted data, as with mandatory iCloud email accounts.

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Tim Sweeney

@TimSweeneyEpic

15 Jun

An axiom is an assumption that something is true. A theorem is a claim that something is true. A proof is a series of steps that show exactly how a theorem follows from axioms. These notions were clearly laid out in Euclid's Elements around 300 BC.

In programming, a native is a function or type provided by a compiler. A type is a claim that value of that type exist. A type-checked expression establishes that a value belongs to a type. These notions came about in the 1950's as compilers were developed.

These notions of proofs and programs turn out to correspond. This was proven by Curry and Howard from the 1930's through the 1960's, starting even before programming languages were invented.

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Tim Sweeney

@TimSweeneyEpic

10 Jan

The topic of functional logic programming is extraordinarily rich and is largely unexplored, due to limits of the original reasoning model (closed world SLD resolution) which hindered a view of the bigger picture.

David McAllester wrote all down in 1989 with Ontic, but it wasn’t recognized as being implementable nor was it even clearly understood what an implementation would comprise, nor were its connections to functional logic recognized.

Such a language so expressively mixes types and values that traditional type checking is inapplicable. The only tool adequate for compile-time reasoning is a static analysis of the program under the assumptions proffered by the domains of functions within it.

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