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Comment by Crontab | Hacker News Reader

This is awful, but in England and America, I foresee similar policies will come - in the name of law, safety, and security.

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Neither America nor the U.K. have national firewalls in place.

Yet. Theresa May would build one right away if she could (and the first steps are being taken)

If she could. But they would need to build those first before considering the next step of blocking VPNs. See austrailia at risk also. I doubt it would ever happen in America, however.

And yet Apple already polices you for any kind of content you might deem offensive / objectionable or not "family friendly" enough on your iOS device.

Yes. But Apple is a private company, that is there prerogative.

The private company argument has limits. Common carrier status for one. At least in the EU there also are exemptions for repairing and interoperability.

In my opinion repairability should extend to the ability for the owner of a device to side-load any software.

If apple wants to police their own app-store, fine. But they shouldn't be allowed to exclude installation through other means. If they had not complete control over the ecosystem then they would not be in the situation where they can and have to play deputy sheriff for the government.

You can load your own software on to an iOS device provided you have access to the code. AFAIK iOS dev tools that enable you to load apps onto the device no longer require the $99 annual fee so if you download them you can side-load software.

This post claims otherwise: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14880751

My point was you can side-load apps. As for that specific API even the official docs seem a bit confused:

"Except when you use the NEHotspotHelper class, you do not need to obtain entitlements from Apple to use Network Extension classes. However, you still need to enable the Network Extension entitlement via the Developer portal."

My understanding is that you still need a developer certificate from apple which has a limited lifetime. So you're not given permanent control over your device in the sense of unshackling you from the manufacturer, which is a requirement for repairability.

They're merely handing out breadcrumbs to give the appearance of a way out which they can retract at any time.

The Digital Economy Bill in the UK is a first step towards a national firewall. There are also plenty of sites (torrent sites mostly) which ISP's are forced to prevent access to in the UK.

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