jkaplowitz (u/jkaplowitz)

jkaplowitz commented on Apple pulls iPhone torrent app from AltStore PAL in Europe theverge.com/news/767344/... · Posted by u/pabs3

isodev · 17 hours ago

And 3, Apple asking for a photo of the ID instead of using eID so the entire process can be tap > Face ID (in your country’s eID app) > done.

Also for some reason on App Store Connect, Apple is asking for a country of birth, not citizenship so with that alone, it’s unclear to me how can they make a determination at all.

Once again, our random spawn point (of which we have no control) is interfering with what we can and can’t do in life. Oh and Apple totally not getting how people live and move in the EU.

jkaplowitz · 2 hours ago

My understanding is that the EU sanctions themselves do care about place of birth, separately from citizenship, not just Apple’s implementation. I’ve certainly seen such a question in non-Apple implementations of these sanctions.

As for not supporting eID, yeah that isn’t great, but so many people have non-electronic EU residence permits (including me within the last few years - though I don’t have Russian origin or citizenship) that they’d have to support the non-eID flow regardless. Maybe they wanted one fewer flow to implement, or maybe they felt that eID verification didn’t meet their compliance needs. No idea there.

jkaplowitz commented on Apple pulls iPhone torrent app from AltStore PAL in Europe theverge.com/news/767344/... · Posted by u/pabs3

duskwuff · 16 hours ago

> But two, Apple has taken a long time to react to this guy providing proof of his Maltese residence, so that’s on them for being an unresponsive bottleneck.

Someone I know has Maltese citizenship. From the stories they've told, the unresponsive party might not be Apple.

(At one point, my friend had to show up at the Maltese immigration office in person to get them to respond to an inquiry.)

jkaplowitz · 3 hours ago

The proof of residence that he said he sent Apple was his Maltese residence permit, so unless Apple verifies provided documents with the issuing authorities (honestly doubtful), the bottleneck is within Apple and/or anyone to whom they outsource these appeals.

jkaplowitz commented on Apple pulls iPhone torrent app from AltStore PAL in Europe theverge.com/news/767344/... · Posted by u/pabs3

WatchDog · 18 hours ago

Some more context from the linked github issue[0], the app was removed because of European sanctions against Russia, it seems that the app developer who now lives in Malta, has a Russian background.

What is interesting is that it's Apple enforcing these sanctions, rather than AltStore.

The amount of control that Apple exercises over these alternative app stores, really does seem to be against the spirit of the DMA.

[0]: https://github.com/XITRIX/iTorrent/issues/401#issuecomment-3...

jkaplowitz · 18 hours ago

That’s also weird to me. I don’t have current 2025 info on the sanctions, but back in early 2022 I had a colleague with Russian citizenship who was living in Ireland (with proper permission to live and work - I think even permanent residence). He was exempted from the nationality-based sanctions because of his EU residence, although he did have to prove it to e.g. his banks.

Do the sanctions applicable in 2025 apply even to EU residents of Russian nationality or origin without such an exemption, or is this person covered by more narrow sanctions like one which name him individually, or is Apple going beyond the sanctions rules here for a store they don’t even operate?

Edit: reading the linked GitHub discussion more closely, it seems that he expects to benefit from the same exemption as I was describing, with the problem being twofold: one, the developer had neglected to update his personal info in Apple’s dev portal - not Apple’s fault, at least assuming that sanctions enforcement is their job at all in this scenario. But two, Apple has taken a long time to react to this guy providing proof of his Maltese residence, so that’s on them for being an unresponsive bottleneck.

jkaplowitz commented on How did .agakhan, .ismaili and .imamat get their own TLDs? data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-al... · Posted by u/aerodog

maxbond · 4 days ago

It's the central bureaucratic/theocratic function of a major world religion which, it just so happens, is organized as a micronation instead of as a foundation or something like that. The primary function of the UK is not to run the Anglican church, nor is their king generally thought of as their primary leader.

jkaplowitz · 4 days ago

Interestingly, legally, the Holy See and the Vatican City State are not the same thing.

The one which is the global seat of the Roman Catholic Church, which has existed since ancient times including for a time without any territory after the Papal States were lost, which is internationally sovereign, and the one to which ambassadors to the "Vatican" are accredited is the Holy See, not the Vatican City State.

The one that has .va is Vatican City State, which was created only in 1929 by the Lateran Treaty between the Holy See and the (then-)Kingdom of Italy. That treaty was signed to return a certain degree of independent territorial authority to the Holy See, including the Vatican City State where it has full sovereignty, to give financial compensation to the Church / the Holy See for the loss of the Papal States, and to address a few other matters.

Yes, the Vatican City State is under the governance of the Holy See as a sovereign entity, but it's the Holy See that's sovereign, not the Vatican City State - and the Holy See would remain legally intact if the Vatican City State were to be physically conquered by a foreign power.

ISO country codes which lead to ccTLD domain names like .va are often given more on the basis of internationally recognized/relevant territorial definition than on the basis of international recognized/relevant sovereignty where those two things diverge. After all, the British Indian Ocean Territory has never itself been sovereign under that name, and Taiwan's international sovereignty is a controversial question, but .io and .tw ccTLDs were still assigned and are universally recognized. it's for the same reason that .va goes with the territory and not with the global church.

jkaplowitz commented on How did .agakhan, .ismaili and .imamat get their own TLDs? data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-al... · Posted by u/aerodog

jkaplowitz · 4 days ago

Presumably way the same as .google and all the other special-purpose organization-specific domains.

Blame ICANN for allowing any public or private organization who can meet the requirements to buy and operate a gTLD back in 2012: https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/global-support/faqs...

And as per another comment in this thread, they’re doing another round of this in 2026: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45068328

jkaplowitz commented on Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use? · Posted by u/rickybule

codethief · 5 days ago

> - Tailscale with Mullvad exit nodes

Tailscale is completely unnecessary here, unless OP can't connect to Mullvad.net in the first place to sign up. But if the Indonesian government blocks Mullvad nodes, they'll be out of luck either way.

> - Your own VPSs with Wireguard/Tailscale

Keep in mind that from the POV of any websites you visit, you will be easily identifiable due to your static IP.

My suggestion would be to rent a VPS outside Indonesia, set up Mullvad or Tor on the VPS and route all traffic through that VPS (and thereby through Mullvad/Tor). The fastest way to set up the latter across devices is probably to use the VPS as Tailscale exit node.

jkaplowitz · 5 days ago

Tailscale + Mullvad does have a privacy advantage over either one by itself: the party that could potentially spy on the VPN traffic (Mullvad) doesn’t know whose traffic it is beyond that it’s a Tailscale customer. Any government who wanted to trace specific traffic back to OP would need to get the cooperation of both Mullvad and Tailscale, which is a lot less likely than even the quite unlikely event of getting Mullvad to cooperate.

jkaplowitz commented on Updates to Consumer Terms and Privacy Policy anthropic.com/news/update... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

dpcx · 5 days ago

I don't love that this is opt-in by default, but I'm happy that they're at least offering an opt-out.

jkaplowitz · 5 days ago

I agree with everything you’ve said, but also am happy that they’re forcing users both new and existing to make a choice to continue using Claude under the new terms, rather than silently starting to train for existing users who take no action.

Like you, I would have preferred that the UI for the choice didn’t make opt-in the default. But at least, this is one of the rare times where a US company isn’t simply assuming or circumventing consent from existing users in countries without EU-style privacy laws who ignore the advance notification. So thank you Anthropic for that form of respect.

jkaplowitz commented on Updates to Consumer Terms and Privacy Policy anthropic.com/news/update... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

lostmsu · 5 days ago

Were they not using the data from Claude Code for training before this change? After this change, will they not train on my code if I switch this off (Claude Pro sub)?

jkaplowitz · 5 days ago

From their FAQ at the bottom of the linked page:

“Previous chats with no additional activity will not be used for model training.”

So, I guess they weren’t. You can switch off and keep that the case.

jkaplowitz commented on Developer sentenced to prison for activating “kill switch” to avenge his firing arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/Volundr

rank0 · 8 days ago

I haven't even really been discussing the case from the OP. I'm more so just surprised at the number of comments (like yourself) that appear to be expressing sympathy for financial or white collar criminals.

I suppose it's a philosophical difference...I just hope that you appreciate how extreme the position is. The amount of fraud in this country is disturbing and I don't think it is compassionate/kind at all to keep these people out of prison while most people are struggling to make an honest living. It creates a moral hazard.

jkaplowitz · 8 days ago

I’m not expressing sympathy for financial or white-collar criminals. They deserve lots of scorn and punishment, including more criminal convictions, fines, restitution, court orders, and court oversight than they typically get. My position is not what you seem to think it is, which would indeed be an extreme position.

I just don’t equate punishment with prison. I realize that the best kind of punishment isn’t always having the taxpayers pay for years of that person’s food and lodging, depriving their innocent relatives and colleagues of the emotional/family presence and professional labor/earnings of someone who may have been very noncriminally important to them in many ways outside of prison, introducing them to the many gangs and violent criminals that populate US prisons while simultaneously subjecting them to a traumatic change in life circumstances, turning them into low-paid involuntary workers for wealthy capitalists to profit from as is done in many privately run prisons pursuant to the exception in the Thirteenth Amendment, and so on.

Nothing I said is true only for the financial or white-collar criminal. In particular, poor brown or Black drug users are way over-imprisoned and that shouldn’t happen either. I’d actually rather harsher punishments for the financial white-collar criminal than for the poor minority drug addicted, but in most cases neither should involve prison.

Prison is clearly necessary in some cases and arguably necessary in others, but it shouldn’t be our first thought of how to punish a criminal - whether white-collar or blue-collar - especially not the way typical US prisons work.

jkaplowitz commented on Developer sentenced to prison for activating “kill switch” to avenge his firing arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/Volundr

ofalkaed · 10 days ago

>But we are discussing what is morally appropriate punishment for this misdeed, not what current law allows.

Even if you had not said that, your argument ignores my point.

jkaplowitz · 8 days ago

> Even if you had not said that, your argument ignores my point.

I don’t think I am. You argued against compensation and damages, which are not at all ruled out by the prison sentence, and said you’d seriously consider the prison time if given the option.

I assume mean that you’d consider the prison time as an alternative to the compensation and damages, but that’s not what happened here. Did you actually mean you’d consider the prison time whether or not the company could still sue you in civil court for damages and whether or not the criminal sentencing court could also order financial restitution?

If so, I guess I did miss that implication, but it seems unlikely. Maybe you would want the free lodging and food in that scenario due to the career and financial difficulties that will result from this, even if the free options on offer are a prison cell and prison food?

I think very few people with a spouse or kids (or elderly parents) depending on them would make the same choice, but I can see how some young single people might.