I agree, but for this to matter, a critical amount of fraud should be based on people uploading modified photos of ID's.
If someone took a picture of a fake ID in the past, this method will bring no benefit, it will just add Apple as a paid service-provider.
It also doesn't change the trust-relationship between the two parties: If I need to prove my identity by uploading a government ID, _I_ am doing the photo attestation that this is the ID matching the data I provided, with or without an Apple Reference image.
To me the weakest spot of this whole endeavor is how this will create false confidence in a story just because the accompanying images pass Apple's verification.
Like with the Watch Ultra (attacking the diving-watch market with the sheer volume-scale of selling the development to everyone buying a Watch Ultra), Apple is attacking the trusted-imaging market with the same strategy.
Okay, fine. Will work for sure, this will disrupt the trusted-imaging market and moreover make Apple a service-provider in this industry (with the ramp-up cost paid by customers buying iPhones for entirely different purposes).
But creating this impression and media-buzz that Apple is now verifying more than just the digital authenticity of an image may shift the public scrutiny of MANY media/online statements:
There is a risk that random claims (and propaganda) will be given more credibility in the public eye just because they came with images that were confirmed to be "taken like this on an iPhone"
> images that were confirmed to be "taken like this on an iPhone"
No, because images will be confirmed to have been taken on "this iPhone". The New York Times will be able to publish an article and to attest that the photographs shown were taken by their journalists, and then your user agent will verify that provenience.
I think it's great for journalists and journalism because maybe people will stop paying attention to crap on social media, which won't have such verification, and they'll be instead looking at legit journalism.
Not the OP, but yes, other vendors will be able to support that as well. But a camera sensor that has
1. a public/private key exchanged during device-production (production-cost),
2. the capability to reboot in a cryptographic mode (R&D / component cost) and
3. a cloud-service which then processes the raw data to create a JPG (operational cost)
comes at a premium. Why should this premium be applied on a 99 USD Smartphone?
Which is my whole puzzle on this vector: If the big benefit is for insurance/ID-verification, which apply cost-saving by offloading their process to the untrusted customer, how much they can offload this by requiring their customer to own a 1000+ USD smartphone to provide THEIR service...?
The most I can imagine is insurances offloading their work to OTHER companies, NOT trusting them and therefore requiring them to own a 1000+ USD Smartphone. But even then, why not use a third party app that also runs on a 3y old iPhone and a 99 USD Android device...?
We have 99USD smartphones with 1080p+ AMOLEDs, massive 5k amp batteries and very performant SOCs (e.g. Galaxy A16) among other costly, but not vital niceties. I struggle to see how cost could be a factor here.
> I struggle to see how cost could be a factor here.
Okay. In good faith, I'll go with you:
If COST is not a factor, why does the Galaxy A16 still have no OIS (Optical Image Stabilization)?
Unlike this trusted-imaging service, OIS would be a feature for increased user-experience which is highly-matured and exists in Smartphones since 2013.
The answer is COST: A camera-module with OIS is a more-expensive component than a module without it.
And that's ONLY the component-cost: A OIS-camera doesn't come with increased cost in device-production (it's just another component to place and assemble), no increased cost in R&D (the tech is very mature, all the SW is there) and no running costs (there are no cloud-services required to operate OIS)
Doesn't OIS increase the size of a sensor by roughly half and thus take some significant engineering and design cost to accommodate? At least it seems that way in the phones I've taken apart and looked at.
Also, OIS is a major mechanical add on (a literal motor) and even 1500usd smartphones lack it on some of their sensors, mainly because while it can have an advantage on an ultrawide, that tends to be more limited. Incidentally, most 99usd phones have one (actually usable) sensor which thus tends to have a larger width to compensate. I hope, in good faith, you see the difference, to something like ARI.
AMOLED, etc. are also a bit more expensive then OIS, but we get those into a sub 100usd BOM easily somehow. More so for 5g, certain features just become expected/required.
Your logic would lead to OEMs making SOCs without things like TEE and other things which started in the high-end but quickly became required and essentially free to implement.
Not saying it is free now, but that the upcoming gen of chips from Sony, Samsung, etc. will have it build in for such a minimal BOM impact, this will be an expected, common place feature across all prices.
To have a more serious, honest and accurate comparison than OIS, why do most new smartphone at 99usd include some form of an NPU? Or the trusted modules for biometrics, etc.?
>Doesn't OIS increase the size of a sensor by roughly half
No, you can apply smartphone OIS-tech on any sensor, stabilization is achieved via the lens-array, not the sensor. The size of the module slightly increases but that's not a hindering factor. Cost/Benefit of OIS on ultra-wide lenses is not there, so it's usually not applied.
>Your logic would lead to OEMs making SOCs without things like TEE and other things which started in the highend but quickly became required for one and basically free to implement for two.
TEE became a mandatory requirement of the media industry for Smartphones in ~2010, as they announced plans to restrict media-playback on a device without measures to secure the DRM-keys. Google made it mandatory shortly after, because the entire ecosystem was built on media-consumption.
It didn't come for free to the players in the industry, it became a very expensive task to develop, support and maintain it, but that's another story.
Drawing a parallel here, I fail to see who should require cryptographic authentication of a taken image from end-user devices, to the point that no consumer devices without it will be built anymore.
>Not saying it is free now, but that the upcoming gen of chips from Sony, Samsung, etc. will have it build in for such a minimal BOM impact, this will be an expected, common place feature across all prices.
It will be supported in sensors for sure, but those will be premium-tier sensors, as a differentiation factor. Until today there was no premium sensor used in mass-tier devices.
Of course, again, if there is demand in the market or a regulation requiring it, it will create an incentive for the industry to follow, but I fail to see why either of this should happen in the coming years.
>To have a more serious, honest and accurate comparison than OIS, why can you not buy a single new smartphone at any price without some NPU?
I don't know why OIS is not a "serious, honest and accurate" comparison, can you elaborate?
As stated, it's a highly mature technology available for over a decade already, providing critical-mass observable end-user value, yet it didn't just naturally "trickle down" to every smartphone price-segment, simply because it comes with additional cost no matter which scale (and the Galaxy A1x tier has massive scale).
A NPU is just the evolution of a DSP, which exists in Smartphone SoC's for more than a decade now and is required for Audio and Image processing. DSP's used to run pre-calculated inference models for lens-correction, exposure, white-balance, etc., now these processes can run as models on an NPU.
---
You are trying to argue why that feature won't naturally become a commodity at basically no cost. I'm trying to answer why I don't see this happen, because I worked in this industry for more than 20 years.
The market doesn't get features as a default "easily somehow", features reach this commodity stage because of significant end-user demand (like Camera, Display, Battery), business-value (for the vendor, like Apple Pay) or industry-requirements (like TEE, Widevine example above).
I don't see this happen for this feature, because there is
1. no significant end-user value (unless the public narrative is massively skewed towards "everything is true when the image was signed"),
2. the business-value applies only for Apple's service-proposition for now (which will likely make this feature expand to the non-Pro iPhone tier), and for
3. the industry-requirement I don't see WHO would actually be able to enforce this, for WHICH actual benefit.
> I'm trying to answer why I don't see this happen, because I worked in this industry for more than 20 years.
And despite that experience, you do not see the universal value in reliable, verifiable image attestation for any user? You cannot imagine why that may not just be very useful, but quickly become required, what the "end-user demand", "business-value" or "industry-requirements" could be?
This is not what I wrote and a very bad-faith statement of yours.
There is universal value in many features, yet they didn't become a commodity in all smartphone-tiers.
I don't see how and why this feature should become a default in all smartphones, which you keep insisting on without apparently comprehending the industry and market aspects I am trying to explain.
What? Those three sentences are not really compatible with each other?! Like, they are mutually exclusive and each appears to hold a different position.
How is what I wrote (that you seem to not see universal benefit) in bad-faith/not what you wrote (honestly trying to understand what you mean) if you then add:
> I don't see how and why this feature should become a default in all smartphones [...]
So, do you see universal value or not? Cause you again said you do not and that was precisely what I wrote, that you do not seem to despite it being obvious to anyone who thinks about why phones of any price have cameras.
Should I honestly start writing a list why private as well as business users of smartphones may want, even need this? Is that really required? Consider every use case of a camera on a phone, please, before I feel the need to do that.
You fail to understand the difference between a feature having perceived "universal value" and that same feature being applied universally in all price-segments of a device. These are, and I cannot overemphasize this, two different things!
You stated that you "struggle to see how cost could be a factor here", so in good faith I was trying to give you an insight.
There is universal value in OIS, as everyone takes pictures while holding the device in his hands, yet OIS is not applied universally in all price-tiers of devices. The reason is COST.
So you wanted to shift the conversation, claiming that it's not a "serious, honest and accurate" comparison, without providing any reasons for that.
Again, I walk with you, I respond to what you're stating.
Now it ends with you starting the straw-man argument of how obviously great this feature is and asking how despite all experience I am not capable to see that.
See, it doesn't matter if _I_ see universal value in this feature or not, the topic was why I consider it unlikely to become a commodity.
You tried to move the conversation to this straw-man argument, and doing so in bad-faith. That's why our talk ends here. I give you my side of this conversation so you may read and grow from it, but this is entirely up to you.
P.S.: You also seem to misunderstand what this feature is. It's NOT picture attestation as you put it.
Picture attestation means an entity confirms the connection of a picture to something else (some "metadata"), e.g. a picture of a person to an identity (Name, ID,...) or a place. This attestation party can either be a person (self-attested) or an official entity (e.g. a government).
Nothing in this process changes with this Apple feature, because all it can do is confirm that the picture was taken by the camera as-is, but the attestation to the external metadata (WHO this is, WHAT this is, WHERE this is) still needs to be done by someone else. A party trusted enough to vouch for this.
>There is universal value in OIS, as everyone takes pictures while holding the device in his hands, yet OIS is not applied universally in all price-tiers of devices. The reason is COST.
The reason is digital stabilization is a good enough alternative to not bother, and the lens/sensor modules they use in bulk just didn't come with "analog" stabilization. And OIS is way less important than a future digitally verified photos feature could be (which could be mandated by corporations, banks, governments, insurance companies, for several uses when it becomes widespread), so they didn't bother to add it.
All kinds of cheapo smartphones still manage to have OIS, just because some Samsung models don't doesn't mean it's a universal argument for cheap phones in general.
>Nothing in this process changes with this Apple feature, because all it can do is confirm that the picture was taken by the camera as-is, but the attestation to the external metadata (WHO this is, WHAT this is, WHERE this is) still needs to be done by someone else. A party trusted enough to vouch for this.
Moot point, since the entity (e.g. gov) asking for an untampered photo (which this can do), can combine the photo with the metadata from the upload, like your gov mobile app account.
> See, it doesn't matter if _I_ see universal value in this feature or not, the topic was why I consider it unlikely to become a commodity.
> You tried to move the conversation to this straw-man argument, and doing so in bad-faith [...]
What? This entire conversation started with the assumption being made that this was going to be iPhone exclusive. I stated doubt and then you (re-read to verify cause you seem to have forgotten that) out of left field and for no discernible reason felt the need to move the conversation to the only massive straw man in this interaction, the 99usd phone market.
I personally still believe that this is going to be a universal feature soon enough (wait to hear from Omnivision, etc.) and stand by that. This is my personal assessment due to the objective need for such features in the world we live in today. I may be wrong on this, we will see. Maybe it will be restricted to the higher end Android phones, but that would still be compatible with what I started out saying.
I shouldn't have engaged with someone so serious that they must drag "why couldn't Android OEMs in general do the same" (a purely technical question) down to "99 USD Smartphone" and "premium" on those (an odd and empty pivot). Anyone who does such a shift, well, they must have a well founded, serious point to make.
How many smartphones have no camera? Zero? Bluetooth? Zero? But they could save cost by not having those. I think they are basically table stakes. If this type of thing becomes required for more and more things then no one will buy a phone that doesn't have them.
Yes, the whole insurance self-service is built on smartphones having a camera.
But the assumption that smartphone cameras, including those used in 99USD smartphones, will become 100% cryptographic cameras in a few years is highly unlikely, considering that those cameras didn't even gain OIS in the last 13 years despite the feature being highly matured and widely available.
Changing the topic to other features won't change that.
You seem to lack the understanding how this industry works, and assume that every development naturally just trickles down and becomes a commodity. This is not the case.
This cryptographic feature will definitely become available from camera sensor suppliers, first of all likely from Sony. But it will be a feature of premium sensors and will remain a differentiation factor.
Sony will not support cryptography to its sensors without additional cost. Device-vendors integrating those sensors then have additional cost in R&D, production AND operations. All this will not be waived and put in a 99USD device.
For the other assumption, that "If this type of thing becomes required", I fail to see how this should happen for a mass-market consumer: This feature doesn't authenticate the content of an image, it just authenticates the RAW data of the image sensor.
It won't (and shouldn't!) make the user more trusted towards another entity (like Apple mentions themselves in the link)
>But the assumption that smartphone cameras, including those used in 99USD smartphones, will become 100% cryptographic cameras in a few years is highly unlikely, considering that those cameras didn't even gain OIS in the last 13 years despite the feature being highly matured and widely available.
Them becoming 70% cryptographic is enough. The people who need the feature, can get a compatible model. Nobody argued that smartphones sold for kids to game on for example should have it.
1. OIS (optical stabilization) ensures that the light photons consistently hit the same pixel, removing the blur caused by camera-shake during exposure.
2. EIS (electrical stabilization) via cropping compensates camera-shake on video(!) recording by applying the same shake to the crop-canvas within the frame.
--> EIS can fix a shaky video but not a blurry photo.
It's 2026, with cleaner high ISOs even in phone sized sensors giving the ability to raise the shutter speed as needed, we hadn't had much of an issue with blurry photos for a decade now, with or without OIS. There have been several expensive cameras with no OIS, like Ricoh GR and (and v2), or ZVE10 (and v2).
It's video where people care about these days. Does anybody complain about blurry S12 photos?
Might be boring, but in 2026 "clean high ISOs" in phone-sized sensors mainly comes from image post-processing (stuff like multi-frame merging is done even when shooting "RAW"). Post-processing requires a stable (albeit noisy) image, otherwise it'll be garbage-in/garbage-out.
--> OIS actually became MORE important for Smartphones in the past years, because while post-processing produces better and better results, it massively depends on usable input data. OIS is one of the very few methods to improve the INPUT-quality for post-processing.
>"There have been several expensive cameras with no OIS, like Ricoh GR and (and v2), or ZVE10 (and v2)."
That's a apples and oranges comparison. A quick Google search tells me the size of a pixel on the Ricoh GR sensor is 4.81 µm, which is ~8 times larger than the pixel in recent smartphones (~0,6µm). It is not only physically capable to capture 8x more light, it is also much less affected by minor shaking than sensors with smaller pixel-sizes.
>"Does anybody complain about blurry S12 photos?"
Not sure what's a "S12", but:
- On flagship phones with OIS: Not so much. Maybe in low-light scenarios, because, you know, not much light...
- On cheaper devices without OIS: Yes! Oh yes, constantly.
People assume that the picture-quality of a e.g. 2026 Galaxy A16 must be comparable or better than the picture of a 8-year old Galaxy S9. It's not, the S9 is still better in everyday shooting.
Just check user-reviews of mass-tier smartphones without OIS, like Samsung Galaxy A series...
Well, that happened because in ~2011 the entire media industry announced that they will stop media playback on devices which didn't secure the DRM-keys.
As media consumption was fundamental to the Smartphone ecosystem, Google made secure-boot and widevine mandatory.
Sure, the same could happen here, but I don't know which industry (or other body) would demand that and have sufficient justification for it.
After all, the feature doesn't really change that much for a consumer, the trust-chain is largely unchanged: If I send you a picture and tell you that's my dog, you still have to take my word for it, regardless whether Apple signed the picture or not.
> comes at a premium. Why should this premium be applied on a 99 USD Smartphone?
It's entirely software. It's R&D cost, with basically none of it in hardware (you technically just need the private key store which even very cheap devices have)
An insurance would either assign #1 an insurance agent or mechanic to initially assess the damage (trusted) or #2 ask the customer to send pictures (untrusted).
Tendency is #2 for cost-saving of the insurance, and 3rd party apps are used to execute this.
Now the idea is that the insurance company discontinues the App and the (untrusted) customer must have an iPhone 18 Pro to make an insurance claim?
Or is the insurance agent / mechanic an untrusted entity who will now be required to have an iPhone 18 Pro?
What is the fraud vector here, and how can the insurance service provider continue cost-saving on damage-assessment by offloading to the customer, if the customer is required to own a specific device?
So the insurance would then, instead of contracting the current service-provider for the 3rd party app, contract also with Apple and, let's say Samsung?
And then stop the 3rd party app which is vendor-agnostic and works on all devices?
I'd say that's unlikely.
IF that's an industry this Apple-feature will disrupt, it seems it will barely have an impact on the process of insurance companies themselves, but will actually disrupt the service-provider industry FOR insurances:
The insurance won't be able to stop their existing 3rd party cost-saving, as it provides the largest device-coverage for offloading to the customer.
Instead, either the insurance or the 3rd party service-provider will have to pay Apple in addition to make use of this feature, with the hopes that the provided data will reduce fraud.
Which brings me back to my actual question: What is the fraud-vector here?
> So the insurance would then, instead of contracting the current service-provider for the 3rd party app, contract also with Apple and, let's say Samsung?
The industry has some extensive experience in independently verifying signatures, I don't see how the manufacturers factor in here. And for app features, just ask banks how integrating biometrics, payment services, etc. goes. Tends to be preferred, once Apple and Google Pay became fully available here in Austria, banks dropped their own NFC payment solutions in rapid succession.
>So the insurance would then, instead of contracting the current service-provider for the 3rd party app, contract also with Apple and, let's say Samsung?
There would be no contract, you just upload image from your phone and they verify signature in the file
Some banks needs photos of machine readable IDs to verify user details to fight fraud. These IDs can be passports or NFC enabled EU (and compatible) ID cards.
This will allow banks to trust these cameras more on the long run, allowing higher security ID checks.
Okay, this doesn't answer the question on the vector but is another interesting example. Let's expand on that one then:
Banks are offloading the trusted process of ID verification to an untrusted entity (end-user, merchant,...) and compensate for the loss of security by using a trusted service-provider (now Apple AND an iPhone 18 Pro).
This is already happening today in two scenarios:
1. lower-risk scenarios (remotely) with trusted 3rd party service-providers and very low Hardware-requirements ("use this app on your phone to take a picture/video") and
2. higher-risk scenarios (on-site) with trusted 3rd party service-providers ("use THIS expensive device to take a picture/video of the customer/citizen")
Apple now potentially disrupts the service-provider industry of #2 (higher-risk scenarios) by
#a grabbing a part of this hardware/service market that MAY allow the end-user to be in control of the device and
#b replacing the on-site hardware/service with an iPhone "in a box".
They can't disrupt #1 because their cost-saving can't mandate the end-user to buy a 1000+ USD device just for THEM to provide the contracted service. (They can add convenience if you have it, but they can't reject their service if you don't)
Which means they disrupt mainly #2: The industry providing trusted imaging solutions for higher-risk scenarios.
--> So it's the Watch Ultra game all over again.
On Watch Ultra they disrupted the diving-watch market by the sheer scale of selling their development to everyone buying a Watch Ultra, driving down the cost so much that they can undercut every diving-watch company on the market.
Now they use the sheer scale of iPhone 18 Pro sales to enter the trusted-imaging market-segment, undercutting every player there and take that market.
Don't forget law enforcement, customs or any high(ish) stakes sector which needs to be able to trust the images they show as evidence as well.
Back in the day Canon and Nikon tried this with embedded private keys on their cameras, and with Sandisk's WORM SD cards. Then, somebody extracted the keys and it was game over.
While my iPhone 17 can't match a full frame mirrorless camera, it can take pretty impressive photos, so they are already more than adequate in detail and clarity department. So making these images trusted is a huge win for them.
ID document verification via NFC can't by itself replace also biometrically verifying the person purporting to be the one that the document belongs to.
Without it, anyone with a stolen document can pass it. (I don't think there's a generally available database of stolen documents, so I suspect these usually remain valid until their regular date of epxiry.)
Generally, the information in our country is checked via multiple ways:
NFC + Biometric data (checked against the data inside the ID card) (+ photo of the ID in some cases), or any combination of those.
Before deepfakes were dime a dozen, I remember my bank starting a video-call with me and required me to show my ID to them via camera. This was after a multi-factor check that I passed.
Making any of these factors more trustworthy is a win in my perspective, so having a trusted sensor is always better even if you do multi-factor authentication.
Our ID cards have a private-public key pair inside them, and it allows us to sign things amongst other things. Renewing your ID card for any reason revokes the digital signature of the previous one, so scanning it via NFC probably enough to check whether it's revoked. Same with photo (since machine readable part contains serial and check digits and such).
Nowadays they do #3, demand that the customer takes pictures with a special app that claims to make the process nearly as trusted as #1 while being nearly as cheap as #2.
The idea is indeed that instead or in addition to requiring an app, the insurance company would require the app to run on a phone that supports Reference Image to make sure the image wasn't tampered with. Not right now, when the phones are new, but in a while when 50% of Americans have a sufficiently new iPhone. The rest of the people gets told to either borrow one if they want to make a claim, or go through some other alternative process designed to be so annoying that most people give up.
According to the description in the article, "an outside observer cannot determine whether any pair of reference images were taken by the same device." and they "avoid even implicit public association between different photos taken by the same sensor"
Of course, because by the new definition, the leader is "peak American", so everything in collision with his view is naturally "anti-American".
The usage of the term "anti-American" by anyone in a public role should be rejected as insufficient definition and unfit for a representative to use. On the spot, immediately.
Is it anti-American to brush your teeth after breakfast? or rather before? Is both American? Neither of it?
While the exact point at which it becomes "anti-american" isn't clear there's certainly a category of rhetoric in which people peddle subservience to the state (usually dressed up in obfuscating words, like they'll use "society" instead of "the government") that is undeniably "anti-american" except perhaps by some obtuse technical interpretation of all the words. And I will die on the hill that those who peddle such ideals are bad people and ought to be looked down upon the same way we'd look down upon someone peddling phrenology as a basis for racism.
Im not quite following. Things can be mislabeled as anti American, but everyone has some idea of whats anti-American in principle. Anti free speech for example is anti American.
How that gets applied is a matter of debate. But I think all public officials should agree with that.
Its kind of a fundamental thing to have an idea about the nation’s values. If that’s too taboo for someone then they are quite literally anti American. Having a country means organizing around a core set of values. We can debate what those are but arguing you can’t stand for anything?
What I'm saying is literally The usage of the term "anti-American" by anyone in a public role should be rejected as insufficient definition and unfit for a representative to use.
Especially when glanced-over mid-sentence, the term evokes the inversion of your idea what being "American" means, without ever clarifying whether your assumption is correct.
Me saying "the liberties of the banking sector are deeply anti-American, we will revert those changes to relieve the increased tension they cause in American households" might evoke an association of "less debt" or "owning a home" in a listener, while I might actually mean "women shouldn't be allowed to own credit cards" (because they weren't until 1974 and MY American values are some form of "vanilla constitution")
I'm Muslim. Born in the US. I've seen politicians and right wing public figures call my entire faith anti-American. One of them just had a nice memorial for their one-year since their death.
The term may have had an agreed upon meaning at some point, but not anymore.
Edit: it seems like most right-wing people conflate "non-Christian" with "anti-American". i don't know what's worse; the fact that these people say and think it, or the fact that their constituents don't know the difference.
It doesn’t have to have an agreed upon meaning. My point is its not inherently bad to think something is anti-American.
In fact, treating the very idea of judging something as “anti-American” as inherently illegitimate is quite literally anti-American. Its saying Americans shouldn’t be allowed to have opinions about what their country stands for.
Fundamentally I agree. But my point is that while it isnt inherently bad to think of something as anti-American, it is bad when politicians use that terminology to create divides and further their agendas. My statement about Islam being anti-American is just one example.
Honestly I think because there is no agreed upon meaning, the term "anti-American" is meaningless and means whatever the speaker/listener wants it to mean, and is just used to score political points.
I’m as atheist as they come and I see the tenets of Islam — as widely practiced throughout the world, and self-reported in a litany of surveys — to be clearly anti-woman, anti-freedom, anti-free speech, pro blasphemy-law, et al … and as a result, anti-American.
Charlie Hebdo was not that long ago. Anti-women practices are the predominant norm. The list of regressive and oppressive political norms is practically endless.
Nothing here absolves Christianity or any other religion of its crimes either, but (1) the sexism is on another scale entirely, and (2) we’ve been far more successful as a global society of separating those religions from their political aspirations.
Several nations that are predominantly Muslim have had female heads of state before the US has. If your perception of Islam is based on how Middle Eastern countries practice it then you are only looking at the countries that choose a theocratic way of ruling. Islam mandates that women (and men!) cover certain parts of your body but the most populous Muslim country (Indonesia) you'll see women in hijabs wearing short sleeves or low cut shirts.
Additionally, Christians are the predominant voice on many female-regressive laws in the US, such as the overturning of Roe. Women have been arrested for having miscarriages. If that isn't "anti-woman" i dont know what is.
> we’ve been far more successful as a global society of separating those religions from their political aspirations.
Have we though? Just a few years ago right-wing politicians were complaining that the woke left wanted to cancel Christmas. As mentioned above, Christians won the lobby on overturning Roe. Christians won the lobby on banning same sex marriage.
A religion taking over a country isnt every citizen bowing down to that religions faith. Its everyone in the country being subject to that religion's laws and beliefs regardless of your faith.
This is half-right. Islam does have its own political system, but the faith is largely divorced from that system.
I'm fairly active in my mosque and ive met a lot of community members running for various levels of public office. None of them are calling for Islamic jurisprudence, and none of the policies they promote are obviously "anti-American," unless you consider a higher standard of living for the lower and middle class or higher accountability for the ruling class anti-American. I suppose historically speaking those concepts are anti-American but whether that's a good or bad thing can be left as an exercise to the reader.
Nowadays there's a lot of Muslims practicing their faith very differently from what most do. They might drink or smoke, and live a more "flexible" version, their own version of their own faith.
Even if, in fine, you are right despite the downvotes. Islam is also a political and legal system that cannot cohabit with another system (no system can cohabit with another one, you can't have a democracy and a dictature at the same place)
> Islam is also a political and legal system that cannot cohabit with another system (no system can cohabit with another one, you can't have a democracy and a dictature at the same place)
How much of an aversion to objective reality is required to believe this, as you’ve worded it?
As I mentioned in the other comment, Islam the faith and Islam the political system are largely different. Most Muslims (myself included) know a lot about the faith but know nothing about the jurisprudence. So I agree that Islamic jurisprudence is unlikely able to cohabit with American democracy, its pointless to talk about because no Muslim running for public office is trying to introduce such concepts into American politics.
If they're not trying, it's because it would fail due to lack of "faithist" Muslims to support them. Islamist politicians do push for that when they have popular support, and they do have popular support in Muslim majority countries, as well as local areas in other countries. The average Pakistani might not know much about that jurisprudence thing, but the law still prohibits him from having gay sex or insulting Mohammed.
Where are all the secular Muslim countries? Turkey? Why are they so few and so weakly secular?
When Trump calls Democrats "enemies from within," that's anti-American.
When Trump refuses to peacefully transfer power to his victorious opponent and instead plays "heads I win tails you cheated," that's anti-American.
When Trump sends the FCC chair to suppress speech "we can do this the easy way or the hard way," or yucks it up with the president of El Salvador over suspending Habeas Corpus, that's anti-American.
The "American Experiment" isn't an empty concept, but it is about democracy and law and rights as opposed to conservative cultural values, and when people in power start to argue that the former must be sacrificed for the latter they certainly deserve to be clowned on. Not because they are wrong to imagine an American Ideal, but because they have its contents exactly backwards.
While I understand the intention of what you're saying, you're still attempting a definition of the term "anti-American", which needs no definition as the term should be rejected as a whole.
It's just the idea that vague terms get misused so much I demand the specific. "Anti" anything can just mean you aren't "pro" it enough, or not pro a particular version.
So for restricting speech, you could say not honoring the first amendment or something like that.
I think about this because sometimes people or ideas are described as "problematic". Sometimes for very good reason, but sometimes you find out the speaker has trouble being specific. I like to hear the specific reason when I can to understand the facts or logic. Sometimes these classifications come third hand.
For you that might be a confident definition, for others it might not mean "anti-constitutional" but "against the declaration of independence", for even others it might not create any clear association at all.
That's because something being "American"/"anti-American" is not sufficiently defined in this context. It triggers a highly subjective assumption of what it means, allowing people to evoke "us vs. them" solidarity without actually taking a position.
Example: I can (probably) break your assumed association by stating "women owning credit-cards is anti-American". It (probably) doesn't fit your mental model of what being "anti-American" means, but women were in fact not allowed to own credit cards in US until 1974. So my definition might be more in-line with the era of the constitution than yours.
That's a blunt example. Now imagine I use "anti-American" in a context of "law and order" and then keep talking. People instinctively glance over it because they create the meaning by taking their personal association of being "American" and invert it. You may feel like agreeing but I might actually say the complete opposite of what you think.
That's why IMO the phrase should be rejected from people in a public role.
Not really. America stands for something, they wrote a whole document about it.
There is a big difference between being "American" and being something like "German" because Germany has existed for so long as different governments and the thing that ties it together is not an ethos, but an ethnicity. Being American is different, there's no ethnicity that makes one American, there is only it's ethos. The ideals written in the declaration of independence are American values.
And that's the weak link of tying ideals and values to a location like a country:
The group elected to lead and represent this location also represent ideals and values, so THEIR ideals and values become inseparable of the location they were elected to represent.
For a certain period in the mid-1900s, "German values" meant something different than it did before and after, because Germany was represented by a different leader...
And what I'm trying to explain is, that this paper doesn't matter if it is represented by someone who doesn't uphold its content.
Germany had the Paulskirche-, the Bismarck- and the Weymar-Constitution, all of them before that certain Leader elected into power. He got to define who is worthy/unworthy, decide how to read the document his party represents and change the definition of "un-German"
> this paper doesn't matter if it is represented by someone who doesn't uphold its content.
Not at all...that's when the paper matters the most, because the electorate can see that the person in charge is not upholding our values, purely in contrast to the document. The document sets the baseline. Writing things down has value.
The words on the paper represent the ideas of what it means to be American. Trump has nothing to do with that. His actions, when the do not align with that paper, can be described as "anti-American".
The US has had a total of _one_ government and what it means to be American is in the founding document of that government. To be German is to lay claim to a history and cultural lineage that is filled with many different governments and even different states all-together.
The US has distinct regional and cultural identities as well, to be a Texan means something more akin to being German. Texas has a history that extends beyond the US. One can be American and Texan precisely because they are describe a different thing.
To be American is to ascribe to a certain set of ideals and, as far as someone isn't living up to those ideals, they are "anti-American".
What I read is "what it means to be American" is more clear in ideology and values as "what it means to be German", and I can only wholeheartedly disagree with that.
As someone who is neither born American nor German, I can tell you that both terms describe a subjective feeling and not objective facts. Moreover, they are terms to create unity/solidarity among those who identify with them and exclude those who don't.
Unlike of course someone born Italian telling you that it's clear for everyone what it means to be anti-Italian: ...don't know, doesn't eat pasta or sthg...? /s
I mean, there are American values. The country was built around the idea of limiting the federal government's power, and adherence not a person, but to a set of values (like freedom of speech). We're explictly founded on the concept of rule of law.
Through that lens, it is very clear what anti-American means: adherence and loyalty to a person instead of a set of values, expansive government overreach, erosion of individual liberties, including the ability to express dissent.
It was also built around a process by which those values can be codified and changed to reflect changing times, i.e. the amendment process. Which we have forgotten about entirely.
What Trump and his followers mean by it, though, is that any disagreement with Trump on policy, strategy, tactics, procedure, or belief is anti-American. The way they use the term "anti-American" is anti-American. Therefore the term outside of context is meaningless. It's been coopted, twisted, and perverted.
It could e.g. be "anti-democratic" by a universal definition of democracy and civil liberties which no single country then gets to fork and redefine...
Let's suppose you had your way and the cultural concept of America as a set of ideas and values related to democracy was erased. Would the universal non-national concepts of democracy and civil liberties have been able to inspire Mike Pence to stand up to Donald Trump on January 6th?
Sorry, I don't know what this conversation is about. This is not about a "concept", it is about the label itself.
When the term "anti-American" is used, it is a placeholder for "against my values". Noone is ever anti-American himself, it is only a label applied upon others.
That's why IMO it should be rejected when used by people in a public role, see original comment.
You are free to think otherwise, which I may then label as "anti-American" in passing, while quickly moving on to you mentioning Mike Pence and some random conspiracy I have /s
I'm not sure what point your trying to make? I would also say trying to abridge speech is generally "un-American" as well as "anti-American." Are you trying to differentiate between the two terms? Or are you saying because HUAC existed half a century ago that nothing can possibly be considered un/anti-American?
> The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), was an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives created in 1938. Their goal was to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and those organizations suspected of having communist ties. It was abolished in 1975.
I'd heard of this but didn't realize it went on for decades.
Turning it around, I'd say persecuting political enemies for being "un-American" - or as a recent book declared, "unhuman" - is a very un-American thing to do. At least according to the values for which the nation stands (or supposed to stand).
> I'd say persecuting political enemies for being "un-American" - or as a recent book declared, "unhuman" - is a very un-American thing to do
Dude. Dude. You've said yourself: this Congress committee went on for almost four decades. And before it, it was Yellow Peril, or anti-Irish sentiments, or manifest destiny with its "the only good Indian is a dead Indian". So, no, it's a very American thing to do, has been since the foundation of the US and arguably from even before than that.
> The "American Experiment" isn't an empty concept, but it is about democracy and law and rights as opposed to conservative cultural values, and when people in power start to argue that the former must be sacrificed for the latter they certainly deserve to be clowned on. Not because they are wrong to imagine an American Ideal, but because they have its contents exactly backwards.
From the many responses on this thread, it appears that many either don't want a defintion of "pro-American" or "anti-American" or "an American Ideal" or don't have one but these are core to your point.
> When Trump calls Democrats "enemies from within,"
He did not say this.
Please spare me the part where you show me the things that you think establish the claim. I have already seen them and they do not establish the claim. At best you are intentionally conflating "Democrats" collectively with specific individuals who happen to be part of the Democratic party.
I could continue on with the rest but you get the idea.
If you go far into the user you’re replying to’s post history, you’ll find them unambiguously referring to the Jan 6 crowd as terrorists. They are very aware.
I know there’s a pretty strong norm against dragging people for their posting history here, but that’s in service of maximizing light vs. heat and I feel like pretending to be ignorant of recent events in order to relitigate something unrelated in the comments is wholly unproductive.
> you’ll find them unambiguously referring to the Jan 6 crowd as terrorists.
While I wouldn't agree with that, there is no contradiction between that claim and Trump himself "not refusing" to "make a peaceful transition of power" (putting aside the downthread arguments about how the transition of power is actually made).
> pretending to be ignorant of recent events
Disagreement on interpretation is not the same thing as ignorance.
I'm skimming the "Aftermath" section and I'm not seeing where Biden's inauguration was cancelled or Trump retained power or anything else? If Trump "refused to peacefully transfer power" how was power peacefully transferred to Biden exactly on schedule the same way it's happened in every other election?
I do see this happened on Jan 7th though:
> 7:10 p.m.: Shortly after Twitter unlocked Trump's account, Trump released a video statement condemning the violence at the Capitol, saying that "a new administration will be inaugurated" and that his "focus now turns to ensuring a smooth, orderly, and seamless transition of power" to the Biden administration.
that an inssurection was stopped doesnt make it a peaceful transfer of power.
the thing about the US system is that the president doesnt do the transfer of power. they just lose power on a certain day, and congress grants it to somebody new
The peaceful tour of the capital by pro American demonstrators (sorry, peak Americans) interrupted the proceedings. They were very close to pulling off a strategy of having the senate override the vote, if they hadn’t reconvened before midnight and had Pence left the Capitol like secret service were urging him to do.
Anyway this argument has occurred a thousand times on these boards so if you saw January 6 as peaceful and harmless I can’t change your mind.
The American people deserve to know that President Trump
and his advisors didn’t just ask me to pause, they asked me
to reject votes, to return votes, to essentially overturn the election.
To keep faith with the oath that I made to the American people and
to almighty God, I rejected that out of hand
and I did my duty that day.
- Vice President Mike Pence
This is why the Jan 6 crowd was carrying around an improvised gallows and chanting "hang Mike Pence." The crowd was there to serve as a pretext for what Trump wanted Pence to do, but Pence refused to do it so the self-coup attempt failed.
This. I don't understand why OpenAI aren't being prosecuted for that attack.
Even if you allow that the LLM can't be held responsible, the sandboxes were clearly not up to the task and the whole incident was mismanaged. There are people who made those decisions and should be held accountable for them.
Only if you find a way to create revenue beyond the time-of-purchase, to offset the cost of development and maintenance, aka service revenue.
So far only Apple achieved this by ensuring a walled garden around their ecosystem, securing additional revenue-share for every single 3rd party app and every transaction of the user.
All other vendors are structurally prevented to properly compete in services, and have to rely on Google paying some minor revenue-share on Services, while having only limited control over the user-experience to distinguish themselves...
This would be a bit convincing if there weren't other hardware and services providers like Fairphone, GrapheneOS and Google themselves, who do support and maintenance for longer.
The fact that you put "Google themselves" in this list makes the conversation moot, because Google is de-facto the service-revenue recipient of the entire Android device-ecosystem and the culprit of the problem.
1. Fairphone actually demonstrates that it's not a matter of "want" for sustainable/repairable/longevity, the market still doesn't reward sufficiently for it.
--> If the total potential is an increase in sales of 100k units at ~450 USD/device, there is no fiscal justification for a stock-trading company to actually build such a product. That's why e.g. the EU keeps mandating more and more of this, they "artificially" create the need for it because the market doesn't do it itself.
2. They don't have a comparable service revenue-ecosystem to Google, not even remotely.
Even in sum across their entire mobile ecosystem, the majority of service-revenue their products generate is actually Google's service revenue of the Android ecosystem, of which they get a miniscule revenue-share via Google's RSA program.
The only substantial revenue is still generated at the hardware time-of-sale only, which needs to finance the lifecycle maintenance of the product. So the objective becomes to sell a critical-mass of hardware to sustain the maintenance of the device.
And then, the next level: The market-pressure for in-time software-maintenance can only be fulfilled by not deviating too much from Google's baseline (minimizing the effort of upgrading to newer Android versions). Not deviating from Google's baseline means either contributing back any disruptive changes to Google for integration in the baseline or (more likely) to not disrupt the smartphone landscape on platform-level at all.
Disrupting with hardware innovation only works either on very-large scale or on small-scale, because either you can contract a component supplier for a huge volume of a component exclusive for you, or you pick a innovative component which cannot be supplied in huge quantity yet (and is therefore out of reach for larger brands)
As result, the established players on the smartphone market don't make any more innovative leaps, because the risk/benefit ratio for the ROI is just not there.
--> Vendors ship devices based on common hardware available at that time, combined with software available at that time.
Chinese vendors changed the game a bit by announcing devices with innovative hardware which then never reached the global market, because the components were not available at-scale yet (under-display camera, wrap-around displays, new battery composition, 5G,...) --> This was a game-changer because e.g. Samsung, Apple, Motorola, LG would not announce a device they knew they can't launch at-scale. Oppo, Xiaomi et al could do a limited run for a device-launch in China, with chinese component-suppliers shipping to assembly-factories in China with low ramp-up costs.
Fairphone is on their 6th generation now, and in the US on Amazon. Easy repairability is as much an engineering feat as adding a button or light bar. Their support window is as long as anyone else. I'll even mention Essential who did day-one updates for monthly android patches, and that was a startup.
Longer support windows are possible and would mean people wouldn't be left behind without updates for problems like this.
If someone took a picture of a fake ID in the past, this method will bring no benefit, it will just add Apple as a paid service-provider.
It also doesn't change the trust-relationship between the two parties: If I need to prove my identity by uploading a government ID, _I_ am doing the photo attestation that this is the ID matching the data I provided, with or without an Apple Reference image.
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