In a new FAQ, Apple has attempted to assuage concerns that its new anti-child abuse measures could be turned into surveillance tools by authoritarian governments. “Let us be clear, this technology is limited to detecting CSAM [child sexual abuse material] stored in iCloud and we will not accede to any government’s request to expand it,” the company writes. Apple’s new tools, announced last Thursday, include two features designed to protect children. One, called “communication safety,” uses on-device machine learning to identify and blur sexually explicit images received by children in the Messages app, and can notify a parent if a child age 12 and younger decides to view or send such an image. The second is designed to detect known CSAM by scanning users’ images if they choose to upload them to iCloud. Apple is notified if CSAM is detected, and it will alert the authorities when it verifies such material exists. The plans met with a swift backlash from digital privacy groups and campaigners, who argued that these introduce a backdoor into Apple’s software. These groups note that once such a backdoor exists there is always the potential for it to be expanded to scan for types of content that go beyond child sexual abuse material. Authoritarian governments could use it to scan for politically dissent material, or anti-LGBT regimes could use it to crack down on sexual expression. “Even a thoroughly documented, carefully thought-out, and the narrowly-scoped backdoor is still a backdoor,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote. “We’ve already seen this mission creep in action. One of the technologies originally built to scan and hash child sexual abuse imagery has been repurposed to create a database of ‘terrorist’ content that companies can contribute to and access for the purpose of banning such content.” However, Apple argues that it has safeguards in place to stop its systems from being used to detect anything other than sexual abuse imagery. It says that its list of banned images is provided by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and other child safety organizations and that the system “only works with CSAM image hashes provided by NCMEC and other child safety organizations.” Apple says it won’t add to this list of image hashes, and that the list is the same across all iPhones and iPads to prevent individual targeting of users. The company also says that it will refuse demands from governments to add non-CSAM images to the list. “We have faced demands to build and deploy government-mandated changes that degrade the privacy of users before, and have steadfastly refused those demands. We will continue to refuse them in the future,” it says. It’s worth noting that despite Apple’s assurances, the company has made concessions to governments in the past in order to continue operating in their countries. It sells iPhones without FaceTime in countries that don’t allow encrypted phone calls, and in China, it’s removed thousands of apps from its App Store, as well as moved to store user data on the servers of a state-run telecom. The FAQ also fails to address some concerns about the feature that scans Messages for sexually explicit material. The feature does not share any information with Apple or law enforcement, the company says, but it doesn’t say how it’s ensuring that the tool’s focus remains solely on sexually explicit images. “All it would take to widen the narrow backdoor that Apple is building is an expansion of the machine learning parameters to look for additional types of content, or a tweak of the configuration flags to scan, not just children’s, but anyone’s accounts,” wrote the EFF. The EFF also notes that machine-learning technologies frequently classify this content incorrectly, and cites Tumblr’s attempts to crack down on sexual content as a prominent example of where the technology has gone wrong. Follow this and more on OUR FORUM.

Eureka! A research team featuring dozens of scientists working in partnership with Google‘s quantum computing labs may have created the world’s first-time crystal inside a quantum computer. This is the kind of news that makes me want to jump up and do a happy dance. These scientists may have produced an entirely new phase of matter. I’m going to do my best to explain what that means and why I personally believe this is the most important scientific breakthrough in our lifetimes. However, for the sake of clarity, there are two points I need to make first: 1. Time crystals are a wickedly difficult concept to understand and even harder to explain. 2. The Google team might have created time crystals. This is pre-print research and has yet to receive full peer review. Until the rest of the scientific community has time to review and replicate the work, we can’t say for sure it’s legitimate. In colloquial terms, it’s a big screw you to Sir Isaac Newton. Time crystals are a new phase of matter. For the sake of simplicity, let’s imagine a cube of ice. When you put a cube of ice in a glass of water, you’re introducing two separate entities (the ice cube and the liquid water) to each other at two different temperatures. Everyone knows that the water will get colder (that’s why we put the ice in there) and, over time, the ice will get warmer and turn into water. Eventually, you’ll just have a glass of room-temperature water. We call this process “thermal equilibrium.” Most people are familiar with Newton’s first law of motion, it’s the one that says “an object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion.” An important side-effect of this law of physics is that it means a perpetual motion machine is classically impossible. According to classical physics, the universe is always moving towards entropy. In other words: if we isolate an ice cube and a room-temperature glass of water from all other external forces, the water will always melt the ice cube. The entropy (the movement towards change) of any system will always remain the same if there are no processes, and it will always increase if there are processes. Since our universe has stars exploding, black holes sucking, and people lighting things on fire – chemical processes – entropy is always increasing. Except when it comes to time crystals. Time crystals don’t give a damn what Newton or anyone else thinks. They’re lawbreakers and heart-takers. They can, theoretically, maintain entropy even when they’re used in a process. Think about a crystal you’re familiar with, such as a snowflake. Snowflakes aren’t just beautiful because each one is unique, they’re also fascinating formations that nearly break the laws of physics themselves. Crystalline structures form in the physical world because, for whatever fundamental scientific reason, the atoms within them “want” to exist in certain exact points. “Want” is a really weird word to use when we’re talking about atoms – I’m certainly not implying they’re sentient – but it’s hard to describe the tendency toward crystalline structures in abstracts such as “why.” A time crystal is a new phase of matter that, simplified, would be like having a snowflake that constantly cycled back and forth between two different configurations. It’s a seven-pointed lattice one moment and a ten-pointed lattice the next, or whatever. What’s amazing about time crystals is that when they cycle back and forth between two different configurations, they don’t lose or use any energy. Time crystals can survive energy processes without falling victim to entropy. The reason they’re called time crystals is that they can have their cake and eat it too. They can be in a state of having eaten the whole cake, and then cycle right back to a state of still having the cake – and they can, theoretically, do this forever and ever. Most importantly, they can do this inside of an isolated system. That means they can consume the cake and then magically make it reappear over and over again forever, without using any fuel or energy. Further information can be found on OUR FORUM.