Apple Is Said to Deactivate Its News App in China | Hacker News Reader

Apple Is Said to Deactivate Its News App in China

nytimes.com

40 pointsJayXon22 comments

The interesting bit to me: If you load the app with content before entering China, when you are in China the app won't open. It seems to be deactivated if your phone connects to any Chinese cell tower. This seems to be a bit heavy handed, particularly for Apple, but also doesn't feel terribly surprising.

Also, the article seems to be based on some Reddit posts and no actual fact checking, so the quality of the journalism here is pretty low for the NY Times. I'd expect they could check with some of their staff in China rather than write "it appears" and use an anonymous source.

I think it's actually using location services (GPS+wifi triangulation) to determine where you are rather than traditional server-side inference from IP address.

I'm on vacation in China right now and did some experimentation and even if I have my VPN connected the app still says it's not supported in this region.

China is an exception here. I live in Kazakhstan, News app is not available here. But I just set my region to US and I have working News app without any problems.

I reason it's a preëmptive block so China won't try to block the servers to prevent Chinese users pretending to be U.S. users and reading US news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10384070

This would be consistent with that hypothesis.

It almost feels like lazy edge-case coding instead of intentional censorship of on-device data. Like someone didn't reason about how to handle local data when shifting regions, and the app is just behaving in a way consistent with how it locks down information per region.

I don't know if the Times has any full-time reporters left in China, what with the visa refusals a while back

Interesting that this is news considering that the News app isn't even available in Germany (among other countries?).

You might need to change the device's region, but it's certainly possible to access English language news from within Germany.

You're right. Changing the region and rebooting the device makes the app appear. That's still anything but discoverable though.

Is this that thing that shows up when I swipe left on my work iphone with vapid news about celebrities and poorly-targeted sport-related tales?

I'm unexpectedly finding XING's news stream peculiarly adequate these days. Nice to see a bit of competition.

There is an actual News app, but yes the furthest panel to the left has an embedded list of articles pulled from that app, which is curated based on interests the user selects.

it's not curated if you don't have the news app.

Oh I see.

>"Beijing generally insists that companies are responsible for censoring content inside China. In Apple’s case, that would mean it would probably have to develop a censorship system"

Does this mean that Apple currently don't have a censorship system, or that the censorship system they have is not nuanced enough to deal with the requirements laid down by the Chinese Government?

Apple state at http://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/terms/site.html that:

>"Apple reserves the right to limit, in its sole discretion, the provision and quantity of any feature, product or service to any person or geographic area. Any offer for any feature, product or service made on the Site is void where prohibited. If you choose to access the Site from outside the United States, you do so on your own initiative and you are solely responsible for complying with applicable local laws."

So it seems that they do do some vetting of information, and that this applies to everywhere, not just China. It's interesting that the "you are solely responsible for complying with applicable local laws" clause seems to be the bit that's different in China's case.

Who is correct? Apple states "you are solely responsible" while the Chinese government states "companies are responsible".

I presume this one of those grey areas in international law.

Those are the rights to access Apple's site (hosted outside of China), not their news app. And in any case, if the law says their are responsible, they are, unless the law specifically says they can transfer that responsibility to the user. The TOS is (usually, IANAL) worth nothing if the law conflicts with it.

Thanks, it's the only TOS I could find relating to Apple's online services so I assumed it applied to News, iTunes etc.

In the preamble, it only seems to apply to the site itself. Since News is included in iOS, I assume it's part of its 410 page TOS: http://images.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/iOS9.pdf

Chinese law makes it so companies cannot force their users to be solely responsible for complying with local laws. Any such clause in any agreement are probably voided by default. For Apple's products to be legally marketed in China, they must abide by Chinese laws.

I suspect Apple's blocking the US News app in China preëmptively so that the PRC Government don't get mad at them and use the Great Firewall to block the News servers.

Consider many Chinese users might try to fool Apple into thinking they're U.S. users. If you make sure that anyone in China – rather than anyone apparently Chinese – can't access the app, then China won't cause Apple trouble.

What kinds of ramifications would there be if Apple did nothing on its end to "censor" (for lack of a better word) content from the News app?

Chances are the content providers itself (or apple?) would be censored by Golden Shield (great firewall of china).

The real question should be: Is China a threat to future world?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com