Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

Apple’s scanning system for CSAM. The vast majority of the debate was dominated by how people imagined it worked, which was very different to how it actually worked.

It was an extremely interesting effort where you could tell a huge amount of thought and effort went into making it as privacy-preserving as possible. I’m not convinced it’s a great idea, but it was a substantial improvement over what is in widespread use today and I wanted there to be a reasonable debate on it instead of knee-jerk outrage. But congrats, I guess. All the cloud hosting systems scan what they want anyway, and the one that was actually designed with privacy in mind got screamed out of existence by people who didn’t care to learn the first thing about it.

> The vast majority of the debate was dominated by how people imagined it worked, which was very different to how it actually worked.

But not very different to how it was actually going to work, as you say:

> If you change parts of it, sure.

Now try to reason your way out of the obvious "parts of it will definitely change" knee-jerk.

I’m not sure I’m understanding you.

Apple designed a system. People guessed at what it did. Their guesses were way off the mark. This poisoned all rational discussion on the topic. If you imagine a system that works differently to Apple’s system, you can complain about that imaginary system all you want, but it won’t be meaningful, it’s just noise.

You understand it just fine, you're just trying to pass you fantasy pod immutable safe future as rational while painting the obvious objections based on the real world as meaningless noise.

Your point did not come across. It still isn’t. I don’t know what you mean by “pass you fantasy pod immutable safe future as rational”. You aren’t making sense to me. I absolutely do not “understand it just fine”.

If they are running safe mandatory scans on your phones for this, you seem shocked and angry that anyone would imply that this would lead to safe mandatory scans on your phones for that and the other, and open the door for unsafe mandatory scans for whatever.

If you can't acknowledge this, it puts you in a position where you can't be convincing to people who need you to deflect obvious, well-known criticisms before beginning a discussion. It gives you crazy person or salesman vibes. These are arguments that someone with a serious interest in the technology would be aware of already and should be included as a prerequisite to being taken seriously. Doing this shows that you value other people's time and effort.