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In this final episode of Season 4 of Your Library Podcast, we meet staff member Sunny Sickle, a Taiwanese immigrant who has worked at St. Louis Public Library s

Washington University biologist Aryeh Miller explains how he analyzed data from 2,600 lizard species to find if lizards with toepads had an evolutionary advantage for life in the trees relative to their padless counterparts.

photo by Agê Barros

When Apple announced a new plan this month for scanning photos on user devices to detect known child sexual abuse material (CSAM), the company might have expected little controversy. After all, child sexual abuse is a problem everyone wants to solve.

But the backlash from privacy and human rights advocates was swift, loud, and nearly unanimous. The complaints were not largely about the precise implementation Apple announced, but rather the dangerous precedent it sets. The ways in which the technology could be misused when Apple and its partners come under outside pressure from governments or other powerful actors are almost too many to count.

Very broadly speaking, the privacy invasions come from situations where "false positives" are generated — that is to say, an image or a device or a user is flagged even though there are no sexual abuse images present. These kinds of false positives could happen if the matching database has been tampered with or expanded to include images that do not depict child abuse, or if an adversary could trick Apple’s algorithm into erroneously matching an existing image. (Apple, for its part, has said that an accidental false positive — where an innocent image is flagged as child abuse material for no reason — is extremely unlikely, which is probably true.)

The false positive problem most directly touches on press freedom issues when considering that first category, with adversaries that can change the contents of the database that Apple devices are checking files against. An organization that could add leaked copies of its internal records, for example, could find devices that held that data — including, potentially, whistleblowers and journalists who worked on a given story. This could also reveal the extent of a leak if it is not yet known. Governments that could include images critical of its policies or officials could find dissidents that are exchanging those files.

These concerns aren’t purely hypothetical. China reportedly already forces some of its citizens to install apps directly onto devices that scan for images it deems to be pro-Uyghur.

Apple has promised to stand up against the forced inclusion of non-CSAM images to the hash database in an FAQ document it published amidst the backlash: "Apple would refuse such demands and our system has been designed to prevent that from happening." If only it were that simple! Even with the best of intentions, Apple (and the organizations that maintain the databases in question) are likely to face extreme pressure from governments all over the world to expand their efforts to all sorts of other types of “illegal” content. And legal orders are not exactly something companies can just “refuse.”

As EFF said, “if you build it, they will come.”

After extensive criticism, Apple last week issued more clarifications about efforts to mitigate those concerns. It would only match against images that had been flagged by groups in multiple countries, and sophisticated users would be able to check that the list of images their own phone was checking against was the same as on every other phone. While these assurances help mitigate the risk of a single point of failure, they do not fully address the risks posed by a state-level actor.

And unfortunately, the company has in some cases yielded to that kind of pressure. Reporting earlier this year documented Apple agreeing to store user data and encryption keys in China, at the government's behest, and complying with requests for iCloud data. The company has also removed apps and games from its marketplace to comply with local regulations. What would it do differently in the face of new demands to misuse this image matching tech?

Beyond the possibility of database tampering, another way false positives could occur is if adversaries are able to generate files that are "collisions" with known images in the database. Since even before Apple's formal announcement, researchers have called for the company to publish its matching algorithm so they could see how susceptible it is to these kinds of generated bogus matches (which are usually called "adversarial examples" in the world of machine learning).

Apple has thus far declined to make that matching function available, even as the company has called on security researchers to check its work. However, researchers appear to have recently extracted the matching function from iOS, and even generated a "pre-image" match — that is, generating a file from scratch that Apple's matching function cannot distinguish from another known image.

This research represents a serious problem for Apple's plans: adversaries that can generate false positives could flood the system with bad data, even using the devices of unsuspecting users to host it. The earliest adversarial examples look like white noise, but it is likely only a matter of time before they can be embedded in another image entirely.

Journalists, in particular, have increasingly relied on the strong privacy protections that Apple has provided even when other large tech companies have not. Apple famously refused to redesign its software to open the phone of an alleged terrorist — not because they wanted to shield the content on a criminal’s phone, but because they worried about the precedent it would set for other people who rely on Apple’s technology for protection. How is this situation any different?

No backdoor for law enforcement will be safe enough to keep bad actors from continuing to push it open just a little bit further. The privacy risks from this system are too extreme to tolerate. Apple may have had noble intentions with this announced system, but good intentions are not enough to save a plan that is rotten at its core.

Terrell Carter, the new executive director of the nonprofit Rise Community Development, talks about his vision for the local community development organization.

Overall jail admissions in St. Louis County declined over the last decade. Yet the number of people in the jail at any given time remained stubbornly high, according to a new report produced by criminologists at the University of Missouri–St. Louis.

There’s one term that always comes to mind when discussing Dutchtown’s historic housing stock: variety. Dutchtown has something for everyone—spacious two story homes, an array of bungalows big and small, shotgun cottages, two and four family flats, and everything in between.

Read the rest of “Small Spaces for Living Large in Dutchtown” 

The post Small Spaces for Living Large in Dutchtown appeared first on DutchtownSTL.org.

Wine lovers should thank a few Missouri winemakers and scientists who saved the global industry after small bugs almost wiped it out in the 1850s.

Many pregnant women have not gotten vaccinated against COVID-19. As the third wave of the coronavirus pandemic hits the St. Louis region, many of them are ending up in the ICU.

The Clean Air Partnership is pleased to serve a community where several local organizations are playing a crucial role in... Read More

A total of 22 independent productions comprise this year’s series of events. The hybrid festival wraps up Sunday, with some of the virtual offerings to be available on demand soon afterward.

This weekend, the Metropolitan St. Louis Equal Housing and Opportunity Council (EHOC) is putting on a two-day event to help City Residents* apply for rental assistance. 

• When? Friday August 20th from 10am - 6pm and Saturday August 21st from 10am - 2pm

• Where? Gym of St. Louis Community College Forest Park, 5600 Oakland Ave, Saint Louis, MO 63110. 

• Why? To help renters who have fallen behind on rent due to Covid-19 obtain direct payments to pay debt to landlords

Register to Attend

Pre-registration is required to attend. 

If you have questions about how to register or what to bring to the event, contact EHOC at 314-441-5660 or clipsey@ehoc-stl.org.

*If you are a Saint Louis County resident, check out the ongoing assistance programs through the St. Louis County Library

Although rental assistance has been a large portion of the funding released through the CARES Act and American Rescue Plan, municipalities have had difficulty getting the funds to those most in need. Earlier this month, Mayor Tishaura Jones administered an executive order allowing funds to go directly to renters to then pay to their landlords, hoping to relieve some of the administrative burden that has held up the funds to this point. The event this weekend will be the first event of its kind since this change has been made, and hopes to expedite and streamline the process for getting relief to renters at-risk of eviction. 

The City of Saint Louis has extended its eviction moratorium until October 3rd, creating a deadline to get the rental assistance funds out the door and into the pockets of landlords who are owed. By allowing direct-to-renter assistance, the funding should help some of the 3,000 people who currently have evictions pending on the docket in the City of Saint Louis pay their back rent and keep up to date with payments going forward. 

We been focused on helping those most at-risk of losing their homes since the pandemic hit. Through CARES Act Funding we created ARCH by HomeScreen: At-risk Renters’ Connection to Housing. 

ARCH connects local nonprofit agencies, working with those who face eviction, with HomeScreen’s network of landlords. The landlords participating in ARCH by HomeScreen recognize the affects the pandemic - not to mention historic housing laws - has had on low to moderate income renters and disproportionately renters of color. 

ARCH by HomeScreen landlords and want to be a part of the solution by providing safe and stable housing to those who have a barrier to housing, like late payments or balances owed to a past landlord. In order to meet the needs of our community, we are actively recruiting more landlords to participate in the free program. 

Landlords who have not rented to a person with a housing barrier may be hesitant to join the program, but with ARCH by HomeScreen, all of the renters will be supported by one of our trusted nonprofit partners. In addition, ARCH still allows landlords to screen applicants coming from the ARCH platform and ultimately approve or deny the applicants once the screening is complete. Each nonprofit program is different and offers varying types of financial and other support depending on the clients they serve. We are looking for a wide variety of landlords and properties to meet the wide needs in our communities.

Please share this information with any renter in-need of assistance or any landlord looking to register for ARCH by HomeScreen. We’re all in this together!

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Here are some thoughts after a recent visit to Park-Life in Covenant Blu Grand Center.

A recent United Nations report predicts a dramatic reshaping of the climate undoubtedly driven by human activity. The state climatologist discusses the changes in Missouri.

The fourth annual Marquette Community Day was another huge success! Dutchtown neighbors, led by MCD founders Ben Robinson and Markus Haskins, gave out backpacks and school supplies for children in the Dutchtown neighborhood, along with sharing local community resources and providing a fun day out to create a unique, community-oriented celebration in Marquette Park.

Read the rest of “Marquette Community Day 2021 Recap” 

The post Marquette Community Day 2021 Recap appeared first on DutchtownSTL.org.

Enfolding visitors in a wide-ranging, walk-through reimagination of the artist's work and mind, the audiovisual spectacle has proved to be a wildly popular one in all sorts of cities. This fall it's headed to St. Louis.

Collinsville High School grad Michelle Bartsch-Hackley helped the U.S. women's indoor volleyball team win its first ever gold medal. She describes what it was like and her path to the Olympics.

Michael "Bare Hands" Beran is the star of a new reality TV pilot airing on Animal Planet and Discovery+. He discusses his journey to the screen and wildlife work along with local producer Michael D. Francis

Another disturbance at the downtown jail in St. Louis comes as improvements are being carried out at the City Justice Center. The work is expected to be complete by the second quarter of 2023.

On the latest edition of Politically Speaking, Mike Jones returns to the podcast to talk with St. Louis Public Radio’s Jason Rosenbaum about the state of St. Louis and St. Louis County politics — and how redistricting may play a role in reshaping both environments. Jones is a man of many titles, but most recently was a member of the state Board of Education. He’s also served as a St. Louis alderman, a corporate executive, the head of the St. Louis housing authority and an adviser to a St. Louis mayor and a St. Louis County executive. He retired from public life recently but is still a sought-after analyst of regional politics.

Kansas City and St. Louis are both known as barbecue destinations, but recent efforts to redefine the cuisine have sidelined the very barbecuers, pitmasters and restaurateurs who made it an institution.