Now that Apple has changed the rules, everyone should be under their impression that their phone is a cop and will snitch them out to the re-education board for punishment. This is reality.
What they built is a way of scanning things on your phone and reporting that to Apple. The chance of multiple governments not passing laws eventually to force this into scanning for whatever they wish is low. Previously to this Apple could have fought back on privacy terms but now its argument will be much weaker.
edit: It's also a model based scanner so they scan for types of things and similar things instead of explicit copies of things. Which makes it an even more powerful tool for governments than a simple direct scanner.
All of which has been common for a long time. You where already sending your unencrypted phots to Apple, that’s the point when you should be concerned. Apple and all other service providers are required by US and most other countries laws to do searches on their servers.
The only difference is Apple is upfront about what their doing on iCloud where most backup providers are keeping silent.
You where already sending your unencrypted phots to Apple
No, I wasn't. The whole point here is that Apple is not scanning server side, they've built the functionality to scan device side. You need never use iCloud in any way whatsoever in order for Apple's new scanning tech to be used against you. That is a major difference.
Apple and all other service providers are required by US and most other countries laws to do searches on their servers.
No, they are not, even if that was the new thing Apple is doing which it isn't. If a company builds server-side scanning, then they may be required to fulfill certain requirements. But companies are not required to actually do that in the first place even if many choose to do so. Apple already did scan uploaded photos and voluntarily chose not to have E2EE for iCloud data in order to please law enforcement agencies, but that's a voluntary choice by Apple. This new client side scanning is a different beast. Please try to gain even the slightest fucking clue what you are talking about before spouting off on something so important.
Edit: to add for those interested in more details on the law, the federal reporting requirements are under 18 U.S. Code § 2258A [0]. What you'll see there is a "Duty To Report", and the reason for that is to evade Constitutional protections. If the government compelled companies to scan, as well as any legal challenges (by very well funded actors) and public blow back, as a practical matter those companies would become State Actors for the purposes of 4th Amendment evaluation. However, even if it's heavily incentivized so long as it's "voluntary" courts have repeated ruled that 3rd parties can do searches that would be illegal for the government, turn discovered evidence over to the government who in turn may then use it freely. Walter v. United States (1980, [1]) is a good example, covering the [righteous and just prosecution] of someone transporting "films depicting homosexual activities" after it was mailed to the wrong address and turned over to the FBI which I'm sure everyone here on HN would applaud and definitely is what they have in mind when they think of client side scanning in the US. Tim Cook is carrying on that tradition with Pride no doubt.
You need never use iCloud in any way whatsoever in order for Apple's new scanning tech to be used against you.
False. Phones don’t download the CSAM hashes so they can’t do device side scanning as they have nothing to compare the images to. Yes, the phone uploads a hash, but they also upload the unencrypted images along side it.
Thus the only thing that changes is Apple isn’t paying for the compute power to do the hashing. That and a tiny amount of extra bandwidth on uploading images.
PS: In response to your edit, perceptual hashes are a grey area. However, as long as a judge agrees they can very much just take down production systems when it pertains to a case. That’s a rather big stick to force compliance even if it’s not an explicit law it’s very much a consequence of it. Thus companies really don’t push back as some that have simply got raided.
> The whole point here is that Apple is not scanning server side
False.
No, TRUE. Apple announced TWO difference technologies. The first one is specifically for completely independent machine learning client-side scanning of all messages. From Apple's own announcement:
First, new communication tools will enable parents to play a more informed role in helping their children navigate communication online. The Messages app will use on-device machine learning to warn about sensitive content
Which has been clarified to mean any and all sexually explicit material, and then notifies the parents. Apple is billing this as only for child accounts and only to parents, but that is merely a set of flags and directions in the programming not anything inherent to the system. It could be applied to any ML model at all and the notifications sent to anyone at all. The system is now built and ready for governments to compel Apple to use for other things in complete violation of device owner's rights, backed by Apple's total ownership of device root.
The second feature is the one for client-side scanning of all photos uploaded to iCloud for illicit content using "neuralhash" which is subject to collisions as have already been repeatedly generated and received lots of discussion here as well as elsewhere (ie., [0]). That is claimed to be initially aimed at uploads and CSAM only, not that there is any way to be sure, but again same thing: the system now exists to perform arbitrary fuzzy scans on-device whether someone is uploading elsewhere or not.
This is absolutely new and horrible capability. If you upload something unencrypted to somebody else's property, as well as the law there is a reasonable common sense understanding that you're depending upon their good will and that they may be compelled at that point without having to involve you. "Possession is 9/10 of ownership" and all that, regardless of details. Now one's own personal private property will have built-in locked down systems to scan all your data based on arbitrary third party choices.
You are missing the point. It’s too easy to make excuses “for the children”. We are tying to fight against dystopia here, against a global technological panopticon. Even if this feature was made with entirely the best intentions, with the strictest controls and best audits — it’s still a cop in your pocket. And that cop always wants more. And more. History has demonstrated this.
Fantasy is believing that granted powers will not be abused because the powerful claim they won’t abuse them. Yes, we extrapolate and this might seem outlandish to the naive. Some of us know how history rhymes and call out the patterns that are paving the road the hell.
But if it was, I would suggest using a different phone. Maybe a fairphone running /e/ - that's my setup, with almost exclusively open source software. I can recommend it.
I think you'd be surprised at how light and subtle these things can be. I remember seeing some on something printed back in early 2000s and they were yellow dots barely registerable under a magnifying loupe, never mind by eye up close.
Which, if the same sort of case here, makes the CCD(s) on the phone here particularly impressive.
I just took a picture of every Euro banknote (which of course have EURion on them) in my wallet with my Poco Phone (which has the same MIUI version / camera app) and all photos are perfectly normal
But could of course be a special change in this Xiaomi model :-)
The german postal voting documents do, with 99,9% certainty, not include any EURion constellations (---and they have no window, the return address is printed directly on the envelope--- EDIT: they do in cologne! See [1], last image, sorry for the misinformation). Wouldn't make much sense, as the envelope is thrown away immediately and the inner letter (which is not the ballot) contains a unique number per postally voting citizen that's not trivialy guessable.
They are however made from non-bleached (only coloured) recycling paper, so maybe the camera is picking up some artifacts from the different visible paper fibers?
There is something really scary about this being all secret functionality. How do I know my scanner/printer/camera/... isn't snitching on me when connected to the internet?
Also can I put those dots in any picture/document to mess with cameras/editing software? Or is there more than those few dots to it? Would be kinda useful for public images, to at least annoy some stalkers, impersonators and other creeps. Doing this all over the place could also really support open source projects like GIMP!
The title assumes, with "censoring". A more appropriate title would be "Strange quirk when photographing German postal voting documents with the Xiaomi Camera".
But what a quirk, a real life object causing issues in software.
People and their conspiracy theories... Cell phone cameras do a lot of post-processing, like skin smoothing, color enhancing and edge sharpening. Before jumping to this censorship conspiracy without evidence, I would investigate if one of those algorithms are buggy, and somewhere on the photo there is a combination of pixels that trigger the bug. Or sure, I'd investigate if there's censorship code, but I'm not going to assume there's some evil stuff going on before I see the code.
Maybe it's as simple as flash memory corruption on the guy's phone, the photo of mostly table and just the edge of the envelope is "simpler" (lots of the table which is just white), so maybe it takes less space. The more complicated photo would take more storage space, what if it's hitting a bad block or a period of bad blocks because of the physical memory layout (e.g. a sequence of bytes every 4MB is bad).
It’s probably unintended, but intentional censoring methods exist, as documented elsewhere in this thread. The most likely explanation seems to be this being a side-effect of those.
Your explanations appear less likely, as I’d expect those types of bugs to show differently.
I doubt this is a censorship, or a anti-counterfitting feature. It's most likely something wrong with the codec used to display images, possibly 10-bit heif photos are being interpreted as 8-bit jpegs. See other people getting the exact same shade of green in random photos:
Note that in the OPs photo (https://imgur.com/a/SCHGo4N) it happens to every other image consistently. If you were shooting raw (with Pixel, not familiar with Xiaomi camera), it would save the raw and jpeg together. The gallery not being able to display the raw image results in the green image would be consistent with whats being shown.
FWIW the redmi note 8 pro main 64mp camera (it's a Samsung sensor shared by many phones) can shoot in raw but only with a gcam port, not with the default Xiaomi camera app.
Making a guess here, the envelope has a distinct shade of pink, which may trigger some processing. It looks like it is in "AI" mode, and who knows what "AI" does.
There is nothing special about this shade of green that causes it to come from a codec issue. This green is what you get when you convert a 0-buffer from YUV to RGB. Depending on what colorspace you convert with it will be a slightly different shade.
You can play around with this yourself in imagemagick:
Conversion from YUV to RGB will be at one of the last steps of the image capture pipeline. Anything in between could wipe the buffer to 0s. It could be due to a simple bug in the image pipeline or it could be censorship. It tells you nothing.
I’ll bet someone slapped a common QR code library in there that also matches other barcode types, made a few modifications and didn’t test the unusual types.
- The strings "Entgeltfrei im Bereich der Deutschen Post" (free shipment in Germany), "Wahlbrief" (postal voting document), "An <address of your local election office>"
- The name of the manufacturer and an order number for the envelope (which is identical on all envelopes), "Fachverlag Jüngling-gbb, Bestell-Nr 109 024 9319 099"
- Two fields that are filled out by hand (with a pen) by the election office before sending them to the citizen, "Wahlscheinnummer" (serial number) and "Stimmbezirk" (polling station)
They have not changed in the last... 30 years? :-)
I don't think any of that could trigger a barcode library :-D
EDIT: This is not true for all postal voting documents in all German municipalities, every municipality can order their own postal documents from several sources (or even print their own), but the specific envelope with the "green image problem" still does not contain a barcode, as seen in the last image the user posted: https://imgur.com/a/SCHGo4N
The unofficial Google Camera port I've been using silently discards photos containing the sun's reflection in water. Rather than assuming Google is intentionally concealing the appearance of a celestial body, I've chalked this up to a bug in post-processing code that only kicks in when a specific image recognition pattern matches. Modern ML-driven camera systems make for some fun "500 mile email" [0] esque failure modes.
A question - does Photoshop/AfterEffects/Premiere automatically embed a similar sort of a "watermark" to e.g. make tracking back meme authors possible? How about cameras?
In some countries it is allowed to vote, but your employer or landlord may request you to prove to you that you voted for the „right“ guy by sending them a picture of your filled out ballot.
A feature like this (properly implemented) could actually be great for those countries.
The slippery slope argument still applies of course.
Modern camera stacks use a lot of machine learning to figure out what kind of scene is being captured; primarily to apply specific tuning for that scene. For example, certain settings are applied for night time, portrait, landscape, beach, etc.
Xiaomi might be using an ML detector to figure out it is looking at something that resembles an official document, and refusing to take a picture of it.
Does anyone know what is going on here?
Is Xiaomi stock camera known for censoring certain documents?
I'd say something like this is more likely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
Is there perhaps an invisible anti-counterfeiting constellation [0] on the ballot? Have digital cameras started enforcing that type of optical DRM?
It's true the envelope's closed, but part of the ballot paper is visible through the transparent window.
Should the poster be worried about their smartphone reporting them to law enforcement?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
Now that Apple has changed the rules, everyone should be under their impression that their phone is a cop and will snitch them out to the re-education board for punishment. This is reality.
No, it isn't. Go learn about the system they built instead of posting fearmongering lies about it.
What they built is a way of scanning things on your phone and reporting that to Apple. The chance of multiple governments not passing laws eventually to force this into scanning for whatever they wish is low. Previously to this Apple could have fought back on privacy terms but now its argument will be much weaker.
edit: It's also a model based scanner so they scan for types of things and similar things instead of explicit copies of things. Which makes it an even more powerful tool for governments than a simple direct scanner.
All of which has been common for a long time. You where already sending your unencrypted phots to Apple, that’s the point when you should be concerned. Apple and all other service providers are required by US and most other countries laws to do searches on their servers.
The only difference is Apple is upfront about what their doing on iCloud where most backup providers are keeping silent.
Edit: iCloud data is specifically called out as available here: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/law-enforcement-guidelin...
No, this has never been done before.
No, I wasn't. The whole point here is that Apple is not scanning server side, they've built the functionality to scan device side. You need never use iCloud in any way whatsoever in order for Apple's new scanning tech to be used against you. That is a major difference.
No, they are not, even if that was the new thing Apple is doing which it isn't. If a company builds server-side scanning, then they may be required to fulfill certain requirements. But companies are not required to actually do that in the first place even if many choose to do so. Apple already did scan uploaded photos and voluntarily chose not to have E2EE for iCloud data in order to please law enforcement agencies, but that's a voluntary choice by Apple. This new client side scanning is a different beast. Please try to gain even the slightest fucking clue what you are talking about before spouting off on something so important.
Edit: to add for those interested in more details on the law, the federal reporting requirements are under 18 U.S. Code § 2258A [0]. What you'll see there is a "Duty To Report", and the reason for that is to evade Constitutional protections. If the government compelled companies to scan, as well as any legal challenges (by very well funded actors) and public blow back, as a practical matter those companies would become State Actors for the purposes of 4th Amendment evaluation. However, even if it's heavily incentivized so long as it's "voluntary" courts have repeated ruled that 3rd parties can do searches that would be illegal for the government, turn discovered evidence over to the government who in turn may then use it freely. Walter v. United States (1980, [1]) is a good example, covering the [righteous and just prosecution] of someone transporting "films depicting homosexual activities" after it was mailed to the wrong address and turned over to the FBI which I'm sure everyone here on HN would applaud and definitely is what they have in mind when they think of client side scanning in the US. Tim Cook is carrying on that tradition with Pride no doubt.
----
0: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258A
1: https://www.oyez.org/cases/1979/79-67
False. Apple complies with the laws pertaining to customer data and provides data as legally required. III. Information Available from Apple
J. iCloud
https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/law-enforcement-guidelin...
False. Phones don’t download the CSAM hashes so they can’t do device side scanning as they have nothing to compare the images to. Yes, the phone uploads a hash, but they also upload the unencrypted images along side it.
Thus the only thing that changes is Apple isn’t paying for the compute power to do the hashing. That and a tiny amount of extra bandwidth on uploading images.
PS: In response to your edit, perceptual hashes are a grey area. However, as long as a judge agrees they can very much just take down production systems when it pertains to a case. That’s a rather big stick to force compliance even if it’s not an explicit law it’s very much a consequence of it. Thus companies really don’t push back as some that have simply got raided.
No, TRUE. Apple announced TWO difference technologies. The first one is specifically for completely independent machine learning client-side scanning of all messages. From Apple's own announcement:
Which has been clarified to mean any and all sexually explicit material, and then notifies the parents. Apple is billing this as only for child accounts and only to parents, but that is merely a set of flags and directions in the programming not anything inherent to the system. It could be applied to any ML model at all and the notifications sent to anyone at all. The system is now built and ready for governments to compel Apple to use for other things in complete violation of device owner's rights, backed by Apple's total ownership of device root.
The second feature is the one for client-side scanning of all photos uploaded to iCloud for illicit content using "neuralhash" which is subject to collisions as have already been repeatedly generated and received lots of discussion here as well as elsewhere (ie., [0]). That is claimed to be initially aimed at uploads and CSAM only, not that there is any way to be sure, but again same thing: the system now exists to perform arbitrary fuzzy scans on-device whether someone is uploading elsewhere or not.
This is absolutely new and horrible capability. If you upload something unencrypted to somebody else's property, as well as the law there is a reasonable common sense understanding that you're depending upon their good will and that they may be compelled at that point without having to involve you. "Possession is 9/10 of ownership" and all that, regardless of details. Now one's own personal private property will have built-in locked down systems to scan all your data based on arbitrary third party choices.
----
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28219068
You are missing the point. It’s too easy to make excuses “for the children”. We are tying to fight against dystopia here, against a global technological panopticon. Even if this feature was made with entirely the best intentions, with the strictest controls and best audits — it’s still a cop in your pocket. And that cop always wants more. And more. History has demonstrated this.
I don't know how you can fight against dystopia when you don't care about the difference betewen fantasy and reality.
Fantasy is believing that granted powers will not be abused because the powerful claim they won’t abuse them. Yes, we extrapolate and this might seem outlandish to the naive. Some of us know how history rhymes and call out the patterns that are paving the road the hell.
Color printers already do this, embedding the device serial into microdot patterns on print-outs.
Scanner firmware won't scan currency, even if doing so is legal.
I've never had an issue scanning currency. Some machines won't photocopy it.
It isn't reality.
But if it was, I would suggest using a different phone. Maybe a fairphone running /e/ - that's my setup, with almost exclusively open source software. I can recommend it.
Looking at OP's photos, I can't discern any such markings.
I think you'd be surprised at how light and subtle these things can be. I remember seeing some on something printed back in early 2000s and they were yellow dots barely registerable under a magnifying loupe, never mind by eye up close.
Which, if the same sort of case here, makes the CCD(s) on the phone here particularly impressive.
Oh god, I am waiting for law enforcement to print this on their uniforms so they can't be photographed.
Richard Stallman coined the term "treacherous computing" to describe things like this. Pity it hasn't caught on -- I think it should!
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html [2002]
He's always right in the long run.
If it was so efficient people marching at rallies would have used it already (on themselves I mean).
Should pair well with playing copyrighted audio.
I just took a picture of every Euro banknote (which of course have EURion on them) in my wallet with my Poco Phone (which has the same MIUI version / camera app) and all photos are perfectly normal
But could of course be a special change in this Xiaomi model :-)
The german postal voting documents do, with 99,9% certainty, not include any EURion constellations (---and they have no window, the return address is printed directly on the envelope--- EDIT: they do in cologne! See [1], last image, sorry for the misinformation). Wouldn't make much sense, as the envelope is thrown away immediately and the inner letter (which is not the ballot) contains a unique number per postally voting citizen that's not trivialy guessable.
They are however made from non-bleached (only coloured) recycling paper, so maybe the camera is picking up some artifacts from the different visible paper fibers?
[1] https://imgur.com/a/SCHGo4N
There is something really scary about this being all secret functionality. How do I know my scanner/printer/camera/... isn't snitching on me when connected to the internet?
Also can I put those dots in any picture/document to mess with cameras/editing software? Or is there more than those few dots to it? Would be kinda useful for public images, to at least annoy some stalkers, impersonators and other creeps. Doing this all over the place could also really support open source projects like GIMP!
The title assumes, with "censoring". A more appropriate title would be "Strange quirk when photographing German postal voting documents with the Xiaomi Camera".
But what a quirk, a real life object causing issues in software.
This is not a quirk. It may be targeting the wrong document, but it’s a feature. Somebody spent time on making this behavior happen.
People and their conspiracy theories... Cell phone cameras do a lot of post-processing, like skin smoothing, color enhancing and edge sharpening. Before jumping to this censorship conspiracy without evidence, I would investigate if one of those algorithms are buggy, and somewhere on the photo there is a combination of pixels that trigger the bug. Or sure, I'd investigate if there's censorship code, but I'm not going to assume there's some evil stuff going on before I see the code.
Maybe it's as simple as flash memory corruption on the guy's phone, the photo of mostly table and just the edge of the envelope is "simpler" (lots of the table which is just white), so maybe it takes less space. The more complicated photo would take more storage space, what if it's hitting a bad block or a period of bad blocks because of the physical memory layout (e.g. a sequence of bytes every 4MB is bad).
It’s probably unintended, but intentional censoring methods exist, as documented elsewhere in this thread. The most likely explanation seems to be this being a side-effect of those.
Your explanations appear less likely, as I’d expect those types of bugs to show differently.
I doubt this is a censorship, or a anti-counterfitting feature. It's most likely something wrong with the codec used to display images, possibly 10-bit heif photos are being interpreted as 8-bit jpegs. See other people getting the exact same shade of green in random photos:
https://forums.androidcentral.com/ask-question/912123-photos...
https://www.reddit.com/r/oneplus/comments/4p2ief/pictures_on...
https://forums.oneplus.com/threads/solid-green-photos.453215...
Yes indeed. This was a really common bug on iOS 13 beta, too.
@dang or other mods, can you change the title to be a little less inflammatory?
When you click OPs link you get to the reddit thread where as an explanation they cite your very comment here on HN. And we've come full circle.
I don't think that's right.
Why would a codec problem, repeatably, affect images of a particular document, but not other images?
Note that in the OPs photo (https://imgur.com/a/SCHGo4N) it happens to every other image consistently. If you were shooting raw (with Pixel, not familiar with Xiaomi camera), it would save the raw and jpeg together. The gallery not being able to display the raw image results in the green image would be consistent with whats being shown.
FWIW the redmi note 8 pro main 64mp camera (it's a Samsung sensor shared by many phones) can shoot in raw but only with a gcam port, not with the default Xiaomi camera app.
Making a guess here, the envelope has a distinct shade of pink, which may trigger some processing. It looks like it is in "AI" mode, and who knows what "AI" does.
There is nothing special about this shade of green that causes it to come from a codec issue. This green is what you get when you convert a 0-buffer from YUV to RGB. Depending on what colorspace you convert with it will be a slightly different shade.
You can play around with this yourself in imagemagick:
Conversion from YUV to RGB will be at one of the last steps of the image capture pipeline. Anything in between could wipe the buffer to 0s. It could be due to a simple bug in the image pipeline or it could be censorship. It tells you nothing.
The user says that with ProShot it worked, it would be nice if those photos were provided so that we could look for differences.
The user supplied a link with a number of sample images, including the photo taken with ProShot at the bottom.
https://imgur.com/a/SCHGo4N
Doesn't imgur compress/resize and convert the images after importing?
I’ll bet someone slapped a common QR code library in there that also matches other barcode types, made a few modifications and didn’t test the unusual types.
The envelope contains no barcode :-)
They have:
- The strings "Entgeltfrei im Bereich der Deutschen Post" (free shipment in Germany), "Wahlbrief" (postal voting document), "An <address of your local election office>"
- The name of the manufacturer and an order number for the envelope (which is identical on all envelopes), "Fachverlag Jüngling-gbb, Bestell-Nr 109 024 9319 099"
- Two fields that are filled out by hand (with a pen) by the election office before sending them to the citizen, "Wahlscheinnummer" (serial number) and "Stimmbezirk" (polling station)
They have not changed in the last... 30 years? :-)
I don't think any of that could trigger a barcode library :-D
EDIT: This is not true for all postal voting documents in all German municipalities, every municipality can order their own postal documents from several sources (or even print their own), but the specific envelope with the "green image problem" still does not contain a barcode, as seen in the last image the user posted: https://imgur.com/a/SCHGo4N
The unofficial Google Camera port I've been using silently discards photos containing the sun's reflection in water. Rather than assuming Google is intentionally concealing the appearance of a celestial body, I've chalked this up to a bug in post-processing code that only kicks in when a specific image recognition pattern matches. Modern ML-driven camera systems make for some fun "500 mile email" [0] esque failure modes.
[0] https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
Other green picture bug threads from Xiaomi..
https://xiaomi.eu/community/threads/sensor-problem-and-green...
https://xiaomi.eu/community/threads/mi-10-ultra-camera-issue...
A question - does Photoshop/AfterEffects/Premiere automatically embed a similar sort of a "watermark" to e.g. make tracking back meme authors possible? How about cameras?
In some countries it is allowed to vote, but your employer or landlord may request you to prove to you that you voted for the „right“ guy by sending them a picture of your filled out ballot.
A feature like this (properly implemented) could actually be great for those countries.
The slippery slope argument still applies of course.
Let’s have fun with this. Get a copy of the barcode or trigger and we can print it on a cheap line of clothing. Tshirts hats whatever
Modern camera stacks use a lot of machine learning to figure out what kind of scene is being captured; primarily to apply specific tuning for that scene. For example, certain settings are applied for night time, portrait, landscape, beach, etc.
Xiaomi might be using an ML detector to figure out it is looking at something that resembles an official document, and refusing to take a picture of it.