Here is a source in Russian [0] saying that Apple is asking Telegram to remove messages that de-anonymize Belorussian police members, rather than blocking channels outright. I don't know whether their source is reliable, but here is the relevant snippet (google translate):
> Apple says it didn’t require any channels to be removed. But they demanded to immediately remove any information that discloses someone's data on the Internet without the consent of these persons, as well as content aimed at specific people in accordance with the rules of the App Store.
This refers to the efforts of the Belorussian opposition to 'unmask' members of the riot police by posting their personal details online. Without going into the moral weeds, from the terms-of-service point of view that's basically griefing, no?
So this is a very curious quandary Apple finds itself in. Let's assume that griefing Belorussian law enforcement is a good thing. But at the same time griefing people (regardless of whether they are bad/good/chaotic neutral) is against the TOS.
One issue is that public attitudes to doxxing vary between places. What is unacceptable in America may be considered more normal elsewhere.
In this specific situation there’s a pretty obvious power imbalance where the public do not wear masks and the authorities would be able to track them down and oppress them later (or just do what they currently do and grab them from the streets at the time). The threat of unmasking is one of the few things the people have to use against the authorities: when a policeman has his mask removed he will typically run away for fear of being identified. (The only other things they have are sheer numbers and the moral superiority of being basically peaceful against a violent government).
A similar argument about law enforcement safety was used by Apple to remove a map app in Hong Kong which showed people where large groups of police (and eg tear gas releases or which small coloured banners announcing illegal assemblies had been raised). The claim was that the app could be used to target individual policemen even though it only showed larger units and mainly helped people to get around the city without getting gassed by the police. Meanwhile the Chinese government were funding a site offering money for doxxing protestors but it wasn’t in the App Store so I guess it was ok.
Mentioning public attitudes as a focus for discussion is basically appeal to authority: just because some other group here or elsewhere thinks something is good or bad, doesn’t make it so. The ideas below that part stand just fine without talking about popularity of norms
Is doxxing a police officer even unacceptable in America? There is very different standard of privacy between an average Joe and an agent of the state performing their duties.
But the whole point here is that this line of reasoning is limited. If Apple were indiscriminately ordering protestor channels to be taken down, we wouldn't accept an excuse that suppressing protestors is "considered more normal" in Belarus, or an argument that the unique context of Belarus means they have no choice but to restrict speech in ways America wouldn't. So if Apple has strong principles against doxxing people, should they really compromise on that just because it'd be good for the protestors if they did?
In what particular hellhole have I even landed that we are now using the terms of a Twitter fight to discuss brutal, indiscriminate suppression of protests?
Applying "doxxing" rules to police on the job in public must be the most absurd perversion of the term ever. Why on earth would we grant privacy to public servants entrusted with the force monopoly?
It really is one of the most egregious examples of a cultural echo chamber I've seen on HN.
We're talking about a brutal police force serving a corrupt and delegitimized regime, that is involved in extrajudicial detention, torture, and murder of peaceful protesters. This unit, the OMON, was specifically established to serve as Lukashenko's beatstick against the opposition. Now, the overwhelmingly peaceful protest movement in Belarus has turned towards intimidation (no actual violence has been reported, afaik) against these people specifically, as a way of fighting back.
And then you see people on HN referring to this as "doxxing", as if this was some kind of pithy Twitter fight. I understand that Twitter fights are what people around here can more easily relate to their own life experience than what is currently going on in Belarus, but for Christ's sake, let's try and put things in perspective here.
> In what particular hellhole have I even landed that we are now using the terms of a Twitter fight to discuss brutal, indiscriminate suppression of protests?
I don't see any part of the comment doing that. Can you quote it?
I see internet terms being applied to the actions against the police, and those actions aren't brutal at all.
This seems to match this post, where apple is asking to remove telegram groups used to de-anonymize law enforcement members.
Apple could do something really simple if they wanted to not interfeer with how people organize their fight: allow to install apps outside of the app store.
This would force law enforcement to deal with Telegram directly rather than being able to take advantage of apple's own authoritarian way to run its platform.
Now it's a question of what's apple highest priority, people freedom or profit.
They are already requiring entitlements to develop things that use the network extension framework (no sideload for VPNs and proxies bypassing the Chinese firewall).
This is just them being forced (again) to make visible the negative sides of such a centralized platform.
> messages that de-anonymize Belorussian police members,
Police officers must not be able to act anonymously. This is not like "doxxing" anonymous Internet trolls or forum users or whatever.
> Apple says it didn’t require any channels to be removed. But they demanded to immediately remove any information
If they don't like published information, they are welcome to sue the people who published it. That is, if they are in cahoots with the US government's foreign meddling initiatives.
> that discloses someone's data on the Internet without the consent of these persons, as well as content aimed at specific people in accordance with the rules of the App Store.
Can't break the rules of the all-powerful Apple app store, now can we? Tsk tsk tsk.
> This refers to the efforts of the Belorussian opposition to 'unmask' members of the riot police by posting their personal details online.
> So what do you do if you are Apple?
Exploit my users, perform mass surveillance for the US government, breath down the neck of app makers, produce cheaply with poor employment conditions in China, and manipulate the media to fawn over me. That is, if I were Apple.
Luckily I'm not Apple and neither are you, so don't think about what you would do in a place in which you should never get to.
DeepL is a much better translator, at least for the languages I know and according to all comparisons I’ve heard others make, btw (though I don’t know if Yandex Translate is better for Russian).
Holy crap, complete with a disparaging なんて, and a nice わ sentence-ender to make it a feminine sounding complaint.
I'm almost sensing like the thing is tying to tell me, "here is how your boring English sounds if it is turned into line from a J-drama."
Was this trained using subtitle databases, I wonder. It's as if a mediocre English subtitle was found, similar to my text, and the corresponding original line had been retrieved.
Whilst I agree with the specifics here, the problem is the general case.
I don't agree that you should be allowed to post people's private, identifying data to a public forum without consent.
This HAS to apply equally, because the idea that there is a universal set of right and wrong is incredibly naive.
A better argument here is how the laws aren't applied equally.
TrueCaller was used by the Chinese to harass and attack human rights activists, and it is essentially an index of everyone's contact list.
Yet, somehow, this doesn't bother Apple. 100% financially motivated.
But my point stands. These telegram channels that exist to distribute public data of people merely accused of being involved with the regime should be shutdown. The term here is witch hunt and I'll take a lot of convincing that innocent people haven't already been falsely accused
Yeah, I don't see how this is different from Twitter taking down a tweet which doxxes someone.
Would people object if Apple told Telegram they had to remove a channel that was being used by white supremacists to coordinate terrorist attacks?
The answer to that question matters, because if users in this thread succeed in making iPhones less of a walled garden, terrorists will be able to use their iPhones to coordinate terror repeatedly on a large scale, and there won't be anything Apple can do about it. Is that really the world you want to live in? Personally, 2020 has satiated my appetite for craziness, and I'm ready for a little stability.
> […] terrorists will be able to use their iPhones to coordinate terror repeatedly on a large scale, and there won't be anything Apple can do about it.
And? If they're using (say) Signal or even Messages, it's already end-to-end encrypted and there's nothing Apple can do about it.
> Is that really the world you want to live in?
You mean like they're able to use GPG/PGP, Tor browser, and Tails Linux distribution to potentially have secure encrypted communications now? Terrorists, drug dealers, pedophiles, and organized crime have been the boogeymen against strong crypto for decades:
We've been through this before in the 1990s, and the techies (who tend to often lean libertarian) have generally sided with opening things up even if that meant the baddies also got the same capabilities:
Coming at it form the opposite end: should the IETF weaken TLS with backdoors so the government agencies can monitor the bad people? Is that really the world you want to live in?
I think a channel for white supremacists to coordinate terror attacks existing isn't good, per se, but it should still be possible for them by default and the government should have to demonstrate that it can responsibly handle the power to police it before we let it do so. So at the current state of the world, I wouldn't object to Apple doing this, but I'm still in favor of white supremacists being able to do this, because I don't know of any mechanism by which you could stop precisely white supremacist terrorists from coordinating but not also citizens coordinating against state power.
I don't want white supremacists being able to carry out terror attacks, but I want people to be able to coordinate demonstrations and civil resistance, and I'm not aware of a way to do this without also enabling white supremacists, and I think that's a valid tradeoff.
Well yeah, white supremacists are violent racist. People protesting against election fraud, aren't.
If your idea of stability is the opression of the unprivelidge, then you are part of the problem.
This is exactly why corrupt government call protesters anarchists, so middle class people wouldn't mind opression as long as there's stability. While usually the actual destabilization and craziness comes from the people with power who are afraid to lose it.
Yes, it is quite different. Twitter is one of many platforms. If it begins to censor content it’s relatively straightforward to move to telegram or signal of matrix. The App Store on the other hand is a platform of platforms so its decisions affect all platforms on it. if you’re on an iPhone, there’s nowhere else to go. And Belarus has a gdp per capita of 6300. I imagine for most citizens getting a new phone is not trivial.
This is a false equivalency. One is a group objecting to rigged elections and another is a group that advocates for violence against others based on ethnicity.
Those are very different things, and it is necessary to differentiate between the two.
>Yeah, I don't see how this is different from Twitter taking down a tweet which doxxes someone.
I dont think that is an accurate analogy. It would more accurate to describe AWS / GCP asking Twitter to take down a tweet. Because Apple in your example Apple should be replaced with Telegram.
> Yeah, I don't see how this is different from Twitter taking down a tweet which doxxes someone.
No, this is Microsoft telling Twitter to take down that tweet, because they have a Windows app. Or threatening to block access to the app or twitter.com.
This keeps being posted and keeps disappearing, so I'm going to not link to it, but when you search around, a post on telegram by Pavel Durov explains that apple has in fact made 2 demands: Take down the private information __and__ in addition to that, do so silently: Do not replace it with a notice explaining which part of apple's guidelines were breached, because that would be 'irrelevant' info.
Apparently, whilst the quandary is real, apple is either living on a different planet than I am, or doesn't care, and decided to pepper in something that the vast majority (I would assume) find distasteful 1984 stuff.
Apple released a statement saying they didn't want us to take down the 3 channels run by the Belarusian protestors, but just specific posts "disclosing personal information."
This sly wording ignores the fact that channels like @karatelibelarusi and @belarusassholes consist entirely of personal information of violent oppressors and those who helped rig the elections – because that is why those channels exist.
By hiding their demands with vague language, Apple is trying to avoid the responsibility of enforcing their own rules. It is understandable: according to this poll, over 94% of Belarusian users think the channels that made Apple worry should be left alone.
Previously, when removing posts at Apple’s request, Telegram replaced those posts with a notice that cited the exact rule limiting such content for iOS users. However, Apple reached out to us a while ago and said our app is not allowed to show users such notices because they were “irrelevant”.
Similarly, when Facebook wanted to inform its users that 30% of the fees users were paying for online events went to Apple, Apple didn’t let Facebook do it saying this information was (once more) “irrelevant”.
I strongly disagree with Apple’s definition of “irrelevant”. I think the reason certain content was censored or why the price is 30% higher is the opposite of irrelevant.
Apple has the right to be greedy and formalistic (or maybe not – that’s something for the courts and regulators to decide). But it’s time Apple learned to assume responsibility for their policy instead of trying to hide it from users – they deserve to know.
I take no issue with wanting to remove content that doxxes people, even if those people are doing bad things. I do, however, take issue with Apple pushing this idea that they can decide what information you can and cannot give users. Barring people from saying "Hey, we didn't delete this because we wanted to, Apple asked us to" is a bit suspect as it leads to people associating the act with the app by default. It takes away agency from companies while giving Apple free reign to rule without being blamed for any mistakes.
Fwiw, t.me is banned on HN because the vast majority of submissions don't show anything unless you install their app. It seems some posts are also display actual content, but they're rare, and it would require writing some special-case code to whitelist them.
Telegram is small enough for Apple to bully. Imagine if Apple tried to force Twitter to censor every "cancel crusade" or be removed from the App Store.
Telegram has more monthly active users than Twitter (400 million vs 360 million, according to Statista)
Even going by metrics like cultural significance, there are large regional differences. It's a little unfair to call them smaller, even if they don't quite have the same level of political and social clout in the US.
Exactly? Why does Apple get to moderate Telegram's users?
If you let a communication app onto your platform, you are letting people use that to communicate. It is not up to apple to moderate telegram. It is up to telegram.
If apple wanted to, they could argue "Telegram is so badly moderated we want them off our platform". But that is very different from saying "If you do not take these specific moderation actions, we will kick you off our platform". Unless telegram was already on very thin ice with Apple, this is a massive over-reach by Apple.
Through what right or means can Apple demand this, though? Telegram is a platform for user-generated content and it seems odd for Apple to single-out those 3 channels/groups specifically - what about the hundreds of thousands of other objectionable groups on Telegram?
And why Telegram in particular? Why doesn't Apple give the same ultimatum to Facebook to pressure them to block access to militant ethnonationalist groups - or for a more-fair comparison: Awful groups on WhatsApp.
If there's one thing worse than burdensome walled-garden rules, it's inconsistent enforcement of them.
With this kind of policy Apple's hypocrisy really shines bright. An app like Reddit is allowed, meanwhile Telegram not only has to not show porn channels to users, but now has to ban content from the whole platform or be removed from the App Store. On Reddit, there by far more porn accessible to users, and probably more "incitement of violence" too. There's no way to support Apple here. Just another example of the tyranny of the App Store.
Yet at the same time it was apple and app store policies that apparently drove the decision to ban porn from Tumblr. If Reddit ever goes on a similar decline, I could see Reddit being suddenly held to those guidelines too.
It ended up as the main way Belarussian protesters organize themselves. TG is a huge target for their government and I would not be surprised if Apple is being pressured by them.
Belarus is the last European dictatorship considered a pariah state with no international influence and propped up economically by Russia, so I don't think it has much leverage over Apple. The situation would be very different if it was, for example, China.
> what about the hundreds of thousands of other objectionable groups on Telegram
Exactly! If they want to start policing all content generated through apps that can be installed on iOS... they'll start getting millions of takedown requests from governments around the world.
Very weird decision strategically, and ofc very questionable morally.
I would be surprised if this were not a demand from the Belarus government, threatening sanctions on Apple, possibly with Russian support.
The Belarus government can just block the App store entirely and may, if Apple does not comply.
> The Belarus government can just block the App store entirely and may, if Apple does not comply.
So what???
Protestors are being imprisoned and tortured, they actually hanged protest organizers from trees, as a scare tactic, does Apple really want to go on public record as an enabler of this?
It is ethically abhorrent, disgusting and beyond terrifying.
If the team responsible for this at Apple is reading this thread, you should know you have blood on your hands.
That's just a theater. If anybody can join a group, there must be a way to distribute the keys to those who joined. Anybody can get a key then, including Whatsapp/Facebook.
No, Facebook is not aggressive in moderating anything except their PR. It's full of bots, full of disinformation, and full of hate-filled groups. You have to be smart enough not to use it to be naive enough to believe they police any aspect of it adequately.
The worst ones are all private, so they can't be pointed to. But we do find out about their existence after they're broken up (by law enforcement action, not Facebook). E.g. the domestic terrorists that were planning to overthrow the Michigan State government were coordinating via private Facebook group. So there's one example for you.
App store may be theirs, but this is like after you install some third party e-mail client on your phone, Apple trying to force their way into telling you what e-mails you can receive, or who you can communicate with. (by proxy) Surely that's not reasonable. What does ownership of the phone mean then?
Everyone else's iphone isn't theirs though. Apple's abuse of their users is directly contributing to the consolidation of power in the world, which will likely lead to violence against and abuse of poor people.
Apple operates in Belarus and must respond to the pressures of the government. Americans would find it intrusive if Apple was strong enough to tell the US govt to back off.
Americans have the right to tell the government to back off when the government breaks the law. We shouldn't hold everyone to the same low standard as Belarus.
Apple has tried in the past, of course. I believe the policy they say they take is “we respect the law in the country we operate in”. It’s not clear if this was something that the law mandated; if it wasn’t to be morally consistent they should have pushed back like they have in the US.
To be fair, Telegram is a total nightmare. It's like bitcoin or Tor and dark web, it may facilitate anonymous free speech, but in doing so, it facilitates a helluva lot of crime.
There has to be limits on freedom, you can't just be allowed to post bomb making plans on the internet or yelling fire in a crowded theatre
You may not know this but the fire in a crowded theater case was about criminalizing opposition to the draft during WWI. Criminalizing speech always ends with the powers that be using it to stop people saying things inconvenient to them. One year it’s Obama prosecuting whistleblowers, the next it’s Trump. Any power the government has will be used and “abused” almost immediately.
> Holmes, writing for a unanimous Court, ruled that it was a violation of the Espionage Act of 1917 (amended by the Sedition Act of 1918), to distribute flyers opposing the draft during World War I. Holmes argued this abridgment of free speech was permissible because it presented a "clear and present danger" to the government's recruitment efforts for the war. Holmes wrote:
>> The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. [...] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.
> you can't just be allowed to post bomb making plans on the internet or yelling fire in a crowded theatre
one is very different from the other. I agree yelling fire in a crowded place can't be allowed - causes people to panic, because it's not possible to 'unhear' a sound.
But posting bomb-making information (or really, any information) should be allowed. This information is voluntarily consumed, so it has no danger of causing harm without a person acting on said information (in which case, it's not the information but the person acting on it that is the problem). This applies to _any_ information, not just bomb making information.
>
To be fair, Telegram is a total nightmare. It's like bitcoin or Tor and dark web, it may facilitate anonymous free speech, but in doing so, it facilitates a helluva lot of crime.
So what? Freedom of speech isn't meant to be just free speech as long as it's approved by some government.
>There has to be limits on freedom, you can't just be allowed to post bomb making plans on the internet or yelling fire in a crowded theatre
One of those things is not like the other.
From an ethical standpoint, the only limits on freedom should be those that infringe on the rights of others.
As in, "Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins."
I'm from Belarus. Honestly, I'm surprised Apple gives a shit. Now I'm worried that Apple can cooperate with local police in case they make inquiry. Am I safe?
Looking at the video, on the one hand, I can see why that could be a sort of public service against the most egregious of brutal policing.
On the other hand... that AI/ML looks like it has immense potential for wrongful identification.
"AI hallucinating" the wrong person's face into the scene using totally convincing feature interpolation.
In a high stakes scene where people feel the need to fight back, it's not hard to imagine such false positives ruining an innocent person's life.
Edit: If the other comment about people being killed as a result of identification videos is true, "ruining" only scratches the surface. Getting people killed due to an algorithm false positive would be a terrible thing to facilitate. We are talking about an algorithm where the "recognise face" part is known to make errors as well as subject to many kinds of bias (and that's even without a mask); and the "project the face into the video part" is optimised for making the most convincing deep fakes. Especially in the most high stakes scenes, somebody will inevitably convince themselves or others that the interpolated face is really the person who was there behind that mask. Heck, even experts misjudge pattern-matching evidence: https://www.cebm.ox.ac.uk/news/views/the-prosecutors-fallacy "The Prosecutor’s Fallacy is most often associated with miscarriages of justice."
Noone was killed. They are safe. We have peaceful protests. Noone even using something like a bat and we don't have weapons in the arms of regular people
You've got to just hope that Apple realizes how bad this would blow up in their face if they worked with police in Belarus to identify democratic protestors, especially given their emphasis on "privacy" in their marketing.
How would it blow up in their face when Apple's customers don't care?
Apple has handed over the entire operation of iCloud in China to a regime owned company, including all user data and keys (they did warn users that they were going to do that though).
At the same time they do not permit side-loading, thereby handing complete control over what users are allowed to install on their devices to authoritarian regimes.
This is not simply "complying with local laws" as they like to present it.
Why would this blow up in their face? Have you seen the lines outside Apple stores whenever they launch a new product?
Apple customers do not care. There is a small minority of people who care (like people on this site) but I bet even they will continue to buy Apple products.
We are talking about a mind bogglingly rich company with arrogance to match. Even if this gets them bad PR, it will be forgotten in a few minutes.
Android makers and telegram could make huge PR/marketing campaign out of this.
I mean huge. Outdoor posters and slogans. TV shows.
I mean, this is truly Orwellian stuff, but in real world. Old uncharismatic dictator recruits huge soulless machine of most powerful corporation in the world to rule small poor country. I know this is not entirely true, but people will love this.
I doubt Apple fanboys even know about Belarus, after all the media is pointing them everywhere but where actual tyranny, injustice and oppression occurs.
Well, just like apple can auto remove applications that were pushed out from their app store, they certainly can install new application signed with privileged entitlements on your phone that can spy on you without you even knowing. Remember that when apple advertises that "built for security" garbage on you.
At least with most androids you can unlock the bootloader and install something like linageos and remove google services to stop their ability to spy on you.
Strength to you, these are very difficult times and the same tech that can help you can just as easily be used against you. Apple is very much in the wrong here but dollars tend to be more important than principles so I hope that this will end well. Be careful!
Curious why dont you use Signal? Is Telegram more convinient? If so, in what aspects? Signal has group chats that are fully end to end encrypted so that noone can demand to take something down because noone is able to see inside the chat (except participants).
This is a complete double-standard. Telegram messages are user-generated content. Is Apple going to start blocking websites in the Safari app? I'm sure one could find a lot worse things than doxxing by using Safari.
If China would threaten to ban iPhones, surely Apple will block websites.
The difference is that governments can block websites without Apple approval. But governments can't block app content without blocking the entire AppStore, so they have to reach Apple.
We browsers are specifically excepted from the App Store rules on content. That’s basically because browser vendors don’t have a direct relationship with web site publishers, the way that a service provider like Facebook or Telegram has a relationship with their users that post content. That relationship creates a chain of responsibility.
So it was fine when Apple banned Infowars but now it’s different?
This is exactly what those free speech advocates meant when talking about slippery slopes: you either support free speech or censure. There is no middle ground.
So let's say I'm a book seller, offering books on a variety of topics.
Some particular country does not allow books promoting religions other than their official religion. What am I supposed to do? Refuse to sell books on pet care or calculus or gardening in that country because I can't sell books about Druidism?
Endocrine disruptors are a real thing[0]. They come from many kinds of pollution. Probably not intentional but they are there.
Endocrine disruptors can cause changes in sexual behaviours and expression of primary and secondary sexual characteristics in animals (including humans).
Not exactly the same thing but this is the grain of truth in what seems like an entirely absurd idea.
Why does an App Store have any say in the content of an online community? I’m sure there is plenty of content on Reddit that Cupertino censors may not like. Can / do they apply similar pressures to other social media companies with iOS apps?
> Previously, when removing posts at Apple’s request, Telegram replaced those posts with a notice that cited the exact rule limiting such content for iOS users. However, Apple reached out to us a while ago and said our app is not allowed to show users such notices because they were “irrelevant”.
Please stop worshipping this company. It's not a force for good.
They've kicked us out of open computing by locking down the only computer a lot of folks own (iPhone). And now look what kind of shit they can pull because they own the entire stack! This shouldn't be possible!
We really have to push against this and hope the DOJ forces all phone providers to allow "side-loading" (what a bizarre term!)
The iPhone is a computer, not some gaming console. It has to be free for freedom. You should be able to install straight off the web.
And before you downvote me, please look again how much Apple gives a damn about democracy in the world. And look what it's doing because of its power. Double plus ungood.
Yes, don't worship any company or organisation, not Apple, not SpaceX, not Bell Labs, not the United States of America, none at all. Even if they do the right things now, future leadership may decide to do the opposite and lie about it, values may change, goals shift. Try to treat them as groups of strangers that change every few years, not as individuals with a personality that you somehow feel like you really really know.
Still, free-as-in-freedom iPhones? Hell no! I give them money because they are not free-as-in-freedom, but provide a walled garden and defend it for me. I don't think I could do this myself; I know lots and lots of people absolutely certainly couldn't in the same way that I couldn't perform open-heart surgery. On iOS right now it's really, really hard to inadvertently give one's data, money or identity to any random app, and even for people who are not in the cohort that somehow always accumulates browser toolbars, the security measures by device/OS and browser vendors are the only thing that keeps them safe. This is an absolutely huge thing. If they break that, it'll wipe out their mobile products.
I do wholeheartedly agree that they lock down too much and too hard. I get that it shouldn't be easy to side-load software, but making it utterly impossible is a bit too advanced-user-hostile. And this particular action of theirs is wayyy over any line one could draw, and I absolutely think their brand should suffer big time for this.
But taking things to the other extreme – free as in freedom – I really don't see how that could end well. Give the big app vendors easy, convenient ways to bypass all restrictions and they'll make use of it, if only to make development cheaper, and then the small vendors and eventually the shady vendors will follow suit, and we're essentially back at the Windows 95 security model with some permission nag screens that no one really cares about anyway, and then everyone gets scammed and flocks to whatever vendor still has a properly secured walled garden. If there is a way to open things up completely while keeping the platform safe and usable for absolute laypeople, I haven't read or heard of it. Right now, I vastly prefer a locked-down but completely usable platform to some abstract notion of freedom.
It's a shame that anti-trust enforcement has been so effectively neutered in the US. This is exactly the type of thing it's designed to protect us from.
But I think with the current high bar for anti-trust, it can be argued that Apple is "hurting consumers" through the lock-down of their platform.
It's fine that Apple should offer a safe, curated experience of using their devices through the App Store. I'm even fine with the App Store having some OS-level integrations which would not be available to 3rd parties. But the App Store should have to compete on its own merits for how it delivers value to the customer - it should not be the only option by fiat. Maybe at the beginning, but not when smartphones are the dominant computing platform and the main way people use software on a daily basis.
The 30% cut which Apple requires is simply not justified for how much value Apple offers to businesses which drive revenue through the App Store. Again, maybe at the beginning, but the App Store no longer offers any meaningful benefit in terms of discoverability. Losing almost 1/3 of revenue out of the gate can make the difference between viability and not for a lot of companies at the margins, meaning this policy costs the user access to all those products which might be able to exist were it not for the "apple tax".
Even under the current legal framework, I just don't see how it's justified.
I’m guessing you’re speaking about the “freedom” meme but there’s nothing uniquely American about freedom. If anything, capitalism tends to trump “freedom” and any pressures to equal the balance (like government oversight) almost always gets heavily condemned. So from that regard, iPhones (and Apple in general) are very much American entities. Not that I have anything against iPhones (I have one myself) but this is “just business”, as they say.
Two companies fighting for monopoly, one side saying the other side is worse instead of fixing the system, middle class getting squeezed. Sounds pretty American to me.
It´s like Apple wants to enforce censorship on behalf of oppressing dictatorships, but doesn´t want to deal with the consequences of enforcing censorship on behalf of oppressing dictatorships.
It hurts their PR. They can't be out there doing ad campaigns taking a dig at the Facebooks and the Googles of the world whilst overtly abiding to the whims of totalitarian regimes.
Not only are you forced to follow whatever Apple tells you to do, you’re not allowed to communicate as such because it might make Apple look bad to users who don’t know any better. It’s really a quite inconvenient situation.
That's been a technique that apple have been using quite a bit. Forbid apps to be transparent with their customers around apple rules. This way app users are pissed at the app makers not apple.
These must be the Information Purification Directives, it seems :)
To wit:
"Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology [...]"
You skipped a few paragraphs. Here’s the beginning:
> Apple released a statement saying they didn't want us to take down the 3 channels run by the Belarusian protestors, but just specific posts "disclosing personal information."
> This sly wording ignores the fact that channels like @karatelibelarusi and @belarusassholes consist entirely of personal information of violent oppressors and those who helped rig the elections – because that is why those channels exist.
So wait, the issue foremost is the doxing. Doxing is against the clearly stated rules of their platform, so they don’t want you doxing people in apps on their platform. Which is okay with me, because the mob (The “majority”, note Durov even cites a very high consensus percentage for us to feel good about it) deciding who is ok to dox and who is not ok to dox is always dangerous for humanity.
Now, Belarus is without doubt (in my view) run by “violent oppressors”, and there is no rule of law by which protestors can seek redress, but the notion that it’s okay to dox people because you took a poll somewhere that included some percentage of Belarusians is downright naive and scary, and doesn’t smell much better at all than the government itself, however true it may be.
That Apple steps in and micromanages at this level is the disturbing element in my opinion, because certainly they’re only doing it because they were notified by Belarusian authorities, but to me the greater issue is the mob justice, against which there is also no appeal or redress, which to me is very scary, even if in this instance it is correct.
"Do this or you're banned! But don't mention that it is us telling you to do it, or you're banned, because that might mean our PR team has to do some damage control!"
I think it's a pure evil move. Seeing Cook indeed hobnobs with the likes of MBS I won't be surprised if there's more to what's visible, especially beneath this veneer of being privacy champions. Esp. considering their entire platform is closed source.
You are locked in, they genuinely don't care about your opinions.
Getting government contracts and keeping a market open is vastly more important.
Plus the whole privacy thing is just marketing, they have worked with the US government with PRISM. They will keep running the advertisements regardless if they sell your data to a government or corporation.
But those notices really are irrelevant, right? I mean, there is nothing I can do to bypass them. It's bad UX, like showing a disabled button that I can't enable by any means.
Having said this, you can still use Telegram Web on Safari to bypass these restrictions.
No, they're not irrelevant. These notices tell people why they can't access certain information. They improve the user experience, otherwise the users will not know why certain information is suddenly inaccessible to them.
You can't use Telegram Web if government blocked Telegram website. App have a way around government blocking (they use server push to deliver proxy addresses, so the only ultimate way to block Telegram is to block Apple servers).
The definitions of "irrelevant" and "bad UX" are obviously very subjective. Personally, I don't think good UX means stripping out the ability to see user intent and context just because it reduces friction.
Showing where user generated content has been censored and the rational as to why is definitely a feature I would want to have regardless of how inconvenient it might be - especially in the context of political discussions.
I don't think they're irrelevant at all, but anyway why would it be forbidden for a developer to include some irrelevant information in their app if they want to?
Readit News
> Apple says it didn’t require any channels to be removed. But they demanded to immediately remove any information that discloses someone's data on the Internet without the consent of these persons, as well as content aimed at specific people in accordance with the rules of the App Store.
This refers to the efforts of the Belorussian opposition to 'unmask' members of the riot police by posting their personal details online. Without going into the moral weeds, from the terms-of-service point of view that's basically griefing, no?
So this is a very curious quandary Apple finds itself in. Let's assume that griefing Belorussian law enforcement is a good thing. But at the same time griefing people (regardless of whether they are bad/good/chaotic neutral) is against the TOS.
So what do you do if you are Apple?
[0] https://tjournal.ru/tech/221326-apple-zayavila-chto-ne-trebo...
In this specific situation there’s a pretty obvious power imbalance where the public do not wear masks and the authorities would be able to track them down and oppress them later (or just do what they currently do and grab them from the streets at the time). The threat of unmasking is one of the few things the people have to use against the authorities: when a policeman has his mask removed he will typically run away for fear of being identified. (The only other things they have are sheer numbers and the moral superiority of being basically peaceful against a violent government).
A similar argument about law enforcement safety was used by Apple to remove a map app in Hong Kong which showed people where large groups of police (and eg tear gas releases or which small coloured banners announcing illegal assemblies had been raised). The claim was that the app could be used to target individual policemen even though it only showed larger units and mainly helped people to get around the city without getting gassed by the police. Meanwhile the Chinese government were funding a site offering money for doxxing protestors but it wasn’t in the App Store so I guess it was ok.
Applying "doxxing" rules to police on the job in public must be the most absurd perversion of the term ever. Why on earth would we grant privacy to public servants entrusted with the force monopoly?
We're talking about a brutal police force serving a corrupt and delegitimized regime, that is involved in extrajudicial detention, torture, and murder of peaceful protesters. This unit, the OMON, was specifically established to serve as Lukashenko's beatstick against the opposition. Now, the overwhelmingly peaceful protest movement in Belarus has turned towards intimidation (no actual violence has been reported, afaik) against these people specifically, as a way of fighting back.
And then you see people on HN referring to this as "doxxing", as if this was some kind of pithy Twitter fight. I understand that Twitter fights are what people around here can more easily relate to their own life experience than what is currently going on in Belarus, but for Christ's sake, let's try and put things in perspective here.
I don't see any part of the comment doing that. Can you quote it?
I see internet terms being applied to the actions against the police, and those actions aren't brutal at all.
Apple could do something really simple if they wanted to not interfeer with how people organize their fight: allow to install apps outside of the app store. This would force law enforcement to deal with Telegram directly rather than being able to take advantage of apple's own authoritarian way to run its platform.
Now it's a question of what's apple highest priority, people freedom or profit.
They are already requiring entitlements to develop things that use the network extension framework (no sideload for VPNs and proxies bypassing the Chinese firewall).
This is just them being forced (again) to make visible the negative sides of such a centralized platform.
It’s not simple.
Police officers must not be able to act anonymously. This is not like "doxxing" anonymous Internet trolls or forum users or whatever.
> Apple says it didn’t require any channels to be removed. But they demanded to immediately remove any information
If they don't like published information, they are welcome to sue the people who published it. That is, if they are in cahoots with the US government's foreign meddling initiatives.
> that discloses someone's data on the Internet without the consent of these persons, as well as content aimed at specific people in accordance with the rules of the App Store.
Can't break the rules of the all-powerful Apple app store, now can we? Tsk tsk tsk.
> This refers to the efforts of the Belorussian opposition to 'unmask' members of the riot police by posting their personal details online.
> So what do you do if you are Apple?
Exploit my users, perform mass surveillance for the US government, breath down the neck of app makers, produce cheaply with poor employment conditions in China, and manipulate the media to fawn over me. That is, if I were Apple.
Luckily I'm not Apple and neither are you, so don't think about what you would do in a place in which you should never get to.
Belarus is on the brink of civil war.
Doxxing regime supporters can easily end up as a "murder todo list" if things heat up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Griefing
This is just one tool, and there will be killing with or without it.
Do you give an innuendo that this is somehow wrong?
At least being transparent and willing to take a part of responsibility of this action?
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Deleted Comment
> (google translate)
DeepL is a much better translator, at least for the languages I know and according to all comparisons I’ve heard others make, btw (though I don’t know if Yandex Translate is better for Russian).
"I cannot believe you would say that to me."
It came up with:
私にそんなことを言うなんて信じられないわ
Holy crap, complete with a disparaging なんて, and a nice わ sentence-ender to make it a feminine sounding complaint.
I'm almost sensing like the thing is tying to tell me, "here is how your boring English sounds if it is turned into line from a J-drama."
Was this trained using subtitle databases, I wonder. It's as if a mediocre English subtitle was found, similar to my text, and the corresponding original line had been retrieved.
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Nothing because Apple has ZERO, no place meddling in this business.
Just hear yourself, "it's against the TOS" versus people on the streets trying to save their own country from a stolen election and a dictator??
OF COURSE the TOS of a tech company is completely irrelevant in this situation.
TOS aren't even laws, they were just created by a profit driven corporation for legal protection. Of course they aren't relevant here.
Just because Apple can say this, and can pressure Telegram, doesn't mean they aren't absolutely in the wrong here.
I don't agree that you should be allowed to post people's private, identifying data to a public forum without consent.
This HAS to apply equally, because the idea that there is a universal set of right and wrong is incredibly naive.
A better argument here is how the laws aren't applied equally.
TrueCaller was used by the Chinese to harass and attack human rights activists, and it is essentially an index of everyone's contact list.
Yet, somehow, this doesn't bother Apple. 100% financially motivated.
But my point stands. These telegram channels that exist to distribute public data of people merely accused of being involved with the regime should be shutdown. The term here is witch hunt and I'll take a lot of convincing that innocent people haven't already been falsely accused
This is literally the "just comply with the police and you'll be fine" argument.
Yes, we KNOW everyone clicked through the ToS, but it _completely_ misses the point of the discussion.
Not meddling means enforcing its TOS in an evenhanded way. Otherwise it's playing favorites.
Would people object if Apple told Telegram they had to remove a channel that was being used by white supremacists to coordinate terrorist attacks?
The answer to that question matters, because if users in this thread succeed in making iPhones less of a walled garden, terrorists will be able to use their iPhones to coordinate terror repeatedly on a large scale, and there won't be anything Apple can do about it. Is that really the world you want to live in? Personally, 2020 has satiated my appetite for craziness, and I'm ready for a little stability.
And? If they're using (say) Signal or even Messages, it's already end-to-end encrypted and there's nothing Apple can do about it.
> Is that really the world you want to live in?
You mean like they're able to use GPG/PGP, Tor browser, and Tails Linux distribution to potentially have secure encrypted communications now? Terrorists, drug dealers, pedophiles, and organized crime have been the boogeymen against strong crypto for decades:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
We've been through this before in the 1990s, and the techies (who tend to often lean libertarian) have generally sided with opening things up even if that meant the baddies also got the same capabilities:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars
Coming at it form the opposite end: should the IETF weaken TLS with backdoors so the government agencies can monitor the bad people? Is that really the world you want to live in?
I don't want white supremacists being able to carry out terror attacks, but I want people to be able to coordinate demonstrations and civil resistance, and I'm not aware of a way to do this without also enabling white supremacists, and I think that's a valid tradeoff.
I can't judge you personally, but history will.
Those are very different things, and it is necessary to differentiate between the two.
I dont think that is an accurate analogy. It would more accurate to describe AWS / GCP asking Twitter to take down a tweet. Because Apple in your example Apple should be replaced with Telegram.
No, this is Microsoft telling Twitter to take down that tweet, because they have a Windows app. Or threatening to block access to the app or twitter.com.
Apparently, whilst the quandary is real, apple is either living on a different planet than I am, or doesn't care, and decided to pepper in something that the vast majority (I would assume) find distasteful 1984 stuff.
```
Apple released a statement saying they didn't want us to take down the 3 channels run by the Belarusian protestors, but just specific posts "disclosing personal information."
This sly wording ignores the fact that channels like @karatelibelarusi and @belarusassholes consist entirely of personal information of violent oppressors and those who helped rig the elections – because that is why those channels exist.
By hiding their demands with vague language, Apple is trying to avoid the responsibility of enforcing their own rules. It is understandable: according to this poll, over 94% of Belarusian users think the channels that made Apple worry should be left alone.
Previously, when removing posts at Apple’s request, Telegram replaced those posts with a notice that cited the exact rule limiting such content for iOS users. However, Apple reached out to us a while ago and said our app is not allowed to show users such notices because they were “irrelevant”.
Similarly, when Facebook wanted to inform its users that 30% of the fees users were paying for online events went to Apple, Apple didn’t let Facebook do it saying this information was (once more) “irrelevant”.
I strongly disagree with Apple’s definition of “irrelevant”. I think the reason certain content was censored or why the price is 30% higher is the opposite of irrelevant.
Apple has the right to be greedy and formalistic (or maybe not – that’s something for the courts and regulators to decide). But it’s time Apple learned to assume responsibility for their policy instead of trying to hide it from users – they deserve to know.
```
https://t.me/s/durov/136
Fwiw, t.me is banned on HN because the vast majority of submissions don't show anything unless you install their app. It seems some posts are also display actual content, but they're rare, and it would require writing some special-case code to whitelist them.
Even going by metrics like cultural significance, there are large regional differences. It's a little unfair to call them smaller, even if they don't quite have the same level of political and social clout in the US.
If you let a communication app onto your platform, you are letting people use that to communicate. It is not up to apple to moderate telegram. It is up to telegram.
If apple wanted to, they could argue "Telegram is so badly moderated we want them off our platform". But that is very different from saying "If you do not take these specific moderation actions, we will kick you off our platform". Unless telegram was already on very thin ice with Apple, this is a massive over-reach by Apple.
Deleted Comment
And why Telegram in particular? Why doesn't Apple give the same ultimatum to Facebook to pressure them to block access to militant ethnonationalist groups - or for a more-fair comparison: Awful groups on WhatsApp.
If there's one thing worse than burdensome walled-garden rules, it's inconsistent enforcement of them.
It ended up as the main way Belarussian protesters organize themselves. TG is a huge target for their government and I would not be surprised if Apple is being pressured by them.
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Exactly! If they want to start policing all content generated through apps that can be installed on iOS... they'll start getting millions of takedown requests from governments around the world.
Very weird decision strategically, and ofc very questionable morally.
So what???
Protestors are being imprisoned and tortured, they actually hanged protest organizers from trees, as a scare tactic, does Apple really want to go on public record as an enabler of this?
It is ethically abhorrent, disgusting and beyond terrifying.
If the team responsible for this at Apple is reading this thread, you should know you have blood on your hands.
I don't think so. IT is 5% of Belarusian GDP.
Because they are usually pretty aggressive about acting on inciteful content.
Plus they make and sell communication apps subject to carrying the exact same sentiments. Content policing a chat app is asinine.
I imagine that it's through the terms of the contract signed by Telegram to be allowed into the App Store.
That Apple is flexing its market share (and walled garden) to enforce those terms on Telegram isn't even unusual.
But that doesn't make it ethical or right.
The App Store is theirs and they will kick you out if they don't like you. Isn't that good enough?
Are you sure? I remember people backing Apple when they were protecting users phones from FBI hacking.
There has to be limits on freedom, you can't just be allowed to post bomb making plans on the internet or yelling fire in a crowded theatre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
> Holmes, writing for a unanimous Court, ruled that it was a violation of the Espionage Act of 1917 (amended by the Sedition Act of 1918), to distribute flyers opposing the draft during World War I. Holmes argued this abridgment of free speech was permissible because it presented a "clear and present danger" to the government's recruitment efforts for the war. Holmes wrote:
>> The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. [...] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.
one is very different from the other. I agree yelling fire in a crowded place can't be allowed - causes people to panic, because it's not possible to 'unhear' a sound.
But posting bomb-making information (or really, any information) should be allowed. This information is voluntarily consumed, so it has no danger of causing harm without a person acting on said information (in which case, it's not the information but the person acting on it that is the problem). This applies to _any_ information, not just bomb making information.
So what? Freedom of speech isn't meant to be just free speech as long as it's approved by some government.
>There has to be limits on freedom, you can't just be allowed to post bomb making plans on the internet or yelling fire in a crowded theatre
One of those things is not like the other.
From an ethical standpoint, the only limits on freedom should be those that infringe on the rights of others.
As in, "Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins."
Here is the link to one group that uses ML to de-anonymize people: https://youtu.be/FAJIrnphTFg
On the other hand... that AI/ML looks like it has immense potential for wrongful identification.
"AI hallucinating" the wrong person's face into the scene using totally convincing feature interpolation.
In a high stakes scene where people feel the need to fight back, it's not hard to imagine such false positives ruining an innocent person's life.
Edit: If the other comment about people being killed as a result of identification videos is true, "ruining" only scratches the surface. Getting people killed due to an algorithm false positive would be a terrible thing to facilitate. We are talking about an algorithm where the "recognise face" part is known to make errors as well as subject to many kinds of bias (and that's even without a mask); and the "project the face into the video part" is optimised for making the most convincing deep fakes. Especially in the most high stakes scenes, somebody will inevitably convince themselves or others that the interpolated face is really the person who was there behind that mask. Heck, even experts misjudge pattern-matching evidence: https://www.cebm.ox.ac.uk/news/views/the-prosecutors-fallacy "The Prosecutor’s Fallacy is most often associated with miscarriages of justice."
Apple has handed over the entire operation of iCloud in China to a regime owned company, including all user data and keys (they did warn users that they were going to do that though).
At the same time they do not permit side-loading, thereby handing complete control over what users are allowed to install on their devices to authoritarian regimes.
This is not simply "complying with local laws" as they like to present it.
Apple customers do not care. There is a small minority of people who care (like people on this site) but I bet even they will continue to buy Apple products.
We are talking about a mind bogglingly rich company with arrogance to match. Even if this gets them bad PR, it will be forgotten in a few minutes.
I mean huge. Outdoor posters and slogans. TV shows.
I mean, this is truly Orwellian stuff, but in real world. Old uncharismatic dictator recruits huge soulless machine of most powerful corporation in the world to rule small poor country. I know this is not entirely true, but people will love this.
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Wonderful!
At least with most androids you can unlock the bootloader and install something like linageos and remove google services to stop their ability to spy on you.
https://signal.org
The difference is that governments can block websites without Apple approval. But governments can't block app content without blocking the entire AppStore, so they have to reach Apple.
Servers/databases have IP addresses that can be blocked just as easy to stop and App.
This is exactly what those free speech advocates meant when talking about slippery slopes: you either support free speech or censure. There is no middle ground.
Disclaimer: I think Infowars is pure, evil sh*t.
Pause this slippery slope argument for a second.
The current situation in Belarus:
- Protestors are being imprisoned by unidentified agents in unidentified vehicles
- Protestors are being _tortured_ throughout nightly interrogations
- Protest _organizers_ have been kidnapped overnight and hanged from trees to get the OMON's point across.
This isn't a US politics disinformation twitter ping-ball discussion of who gets to sound the smartest in logical argumentation.
This is an actual dictatorship, with real people and real blood.
Similar to poker, it rarely goes all the way to showdown. But the possibility of showdown still shapes everything.
In this case, they're policing user generated content on a platform.
The equivalent would be if they asked telegram to block infowars channels, or asked VPN providers to block the infowars website.
I had literally just started to defend/advocate-for apple after trash talking it for a while, but clearly I was extremely wrong.
App stores must not be political, even if the politics agree with you.
Some particular country does not allow books promoting religions other than their official religion. What am I supposed to do? Refuse to sell books on pet care or calculus or gardening in that country because I can't sell books about Druidism?
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrazine
A later study, funded by Syngenta itself, essentially said “nothing to see here, move along”.
Endocrine disruptors can cause changes in sexual behaviours and expression of primary and secondary sexual characteristics in animals (including humans).
Not exactly the same thing but this is the grain of truth in what seems like an entirely absurd idea.
[0]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10680769/
> Previously, when removing posts at Apple’s request, Telegram replaced those posts with a notice that cited the exact rule limiting such content for iOS users. However, Apple reached out to us a while ago and said our app is not allowed to show users such notices because they were “irrelevant”.
Fucking hell, Apple.
----
cough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four#Ministry_...
They've kicked us out of open computing by locking down the only computer a lot of folks own (iPhone). And now look what kind of shit they can pull because they own the entire stack! This shouldn't be possible!
We really have to push against this and hope the DOJ forces all phone providers to allow "side-loading" (what a bizarre term!)
The iPhone is a computer, not some gaming console. It has to be free for freedom. You should be able to install straight off the web.
And before you downvote me, please look again how much Apple gives a damn about democracy in the world. And look what it's doing because of its power. Double plus ungood.
It's an American device. It should act like it!
Still, free-as-in-freedom iPhones? Hell no! I give them money because they are not free-as-in-freedom, but provide a walled garden and defend it for me. I don't think I could do this myself; I know lots and lots of people absolutely certainly couldn't in the same way that I couldn't perform open-heart surgery. On iOS right now it's really, really hard to inadvertently give one's data, money or identity to any random app, and even for people who are not in the cohort that somehow always accumulates browser toolbars, the security measures by device/OS and browser vendors are the only thing that keeps them safe. This is an absolutely huge thing. If they break that, it'll wipe out their mobile products.
I do wholeheartedly agree that they lock down too much and too hard. I get that it shouldn't be easy to side-load software, but making it utterly impossible is a bit too advanced-user-hostile. And this particular action of theirs is wayyy over any line one could draw, and I absolutely think their brand should suffer big time for this.
But taking things to the other extreme – free as in freedom – I really don't see how that could end well. Give the big app vendors easy, convenient ways to bypass all restrictions and they'll make use of it, if only to make development cheaper, and then the small vendors and eventually the shady vendors will follow suit, and we're essentially back at the Windows 95 security model with some permission nag screens that no one really cares about anyway, and then everyone gets scammed and flocks to whatever vendor still has a properly secured walled garden. If there is a way to open things up completely while keeping the platform safe and usable for absolute laypeople, I haven't read or heard of it. Right now, I vastly prefer a locked-down but completely usable platform to some abstract notion of freedom.
But I think with the current high bar for anti-trust, it can be argued that Apple is "hurting consumers" through the lock-down of their platform.
It's fine that Apple should offer a safe, curated experience of using their devices through the App Store. I'm even fine with the App Store having some OS-level integrations which would not be available to 3rd parties. But the App Store should have to compete on its own merits for how it delivers value to the customer - it should not be the only option by fiat. Maybe at the beginning, but not when smartphones are the dominant computing platform and the main way people use software on a daily basis.
The 30% cut which Apple requires is simply not justified for how much value Apple offers to businesses which drive revenue through the App Store. Again, maybe at the beginning, but the App Store no longer offers any meaningful benefit in terms of discoverability. Losing almost 1/3 of revenue out of the gate can make the difference between viability and not for a lot of companies at the margins, meaning this policy costs the user access to all those products which might be able to exist were it not for the "apple tax".
Even under the current legal framework, I just don't see how it's justified.
Source: The people he engages with as he attempts to increase Apple's market cap.
https://vid.alarabiya.net/images/2018/04/07/6f86bd65-aefa-4a...
I don't think what the USA is doing is something that should be followed. See anything privacy endangering in the US.
That's a really random nitpick though and I get what you meant.
> It's an American device. It should act like it!
I’m guessing you’re speaking about the “freedom” meme but there’s nothing uniquely American about freedom. If anything, capitalism tends to trump “freedom” and any pressures to equal the balance (like government oversight) almost always gets heavily condemned. So from that regard, iPhones (and Apple in general) are very much American entities. Not that I have anything against iPhones (I have one myself) but this is “just business”, as they say.
Just go buy a phone running the market leading OS, Android.
This is worthy of the Ministry of Truth
To wit: "Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology [...]"
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I
(Talk about a "walled garden" ...)
> Apple released a statement saying they didn't want us to take down the 3 channels run by the Belarusian protestors, but just specific posts "disclosing personal information."
> This sly wording ignores the fact that channels like @karatelibelarusi and @belarusassholes consist entirely of personal information of violent oppressors and those who helped rig the elections – because that is why those channels exist.
So wait, the issue foremost is the doxing. Doxing is against the clearly stated rules of their platform, so they don’t want you doxing people in apps on their platform. Which is okay with me, because the mob (The “majority”, note Durov even cites a very high consensus percentage for us to feel good about it) deciding who is ok to dox and who is not ok to dox is always dangerous for humanity.
Now, Belarus is without doubt (in my view) run by “violent oppressors”, and there is no rule of law by which protestors can seek redress, but the notion that it’s okay to dox people because you took a poll somewhere that included some percentage of Belarusians is downright naive and scary, and doesn’t smell much better at all than the government itself, however true it may be.
That Apple steps in and micromanages at this level is the disturbing element in my opinion, because certainly they’re only doing it because they were notified by Belarusian authorities, but to me the greater issue is the mob justice, against which there is also no appeal or redress, which to me is very scary, even if in this instance it is correct.
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Getting government contracts and keeping a market open is vastly more important.
Plus the whole privacy thing is just marketing, they have worked with the US government with PRISM. They will keep running the advertisements regardless if they sell your data to a government or corporation.
Having said this, you can still use Telegram Web on Safari to bypass these restrictions.
Visible but disabled items can be important for discoverability.
Knowing when and where to apply which ux rules is probably more important than knowing all the rules.
FTR: I'm happy to work with what I think are good ux-ers so they certainly do exist.
Showing where user generated content has been censored and the rational as to why is definitely a feature I would want to have regardless of how inconvenient it might be - especially in the context of political discussions.
Second, them being irrelevant is certainly not a good reason to forbid those notices.
Third, that they are forbidden makes them all the more relevant.