Apple tells Telegram to take down protestor channels in Belarus
iphoneincanada.ca
iphoneincanada.ca
> 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...
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.
Presumably Belarus would then make a demand that Apple delete Telegram from people's phones as it is "malicious", but I'd hope that forcing a company to delete things from someone's phone is legally harder than forcing them to hide things on their own servers.
Rather than blacklisting the app's name or hash, Apple would probably have to blacklist the Developer ID, which it would be hard for Belarus to generate quicker than Apple could blacklist.
And let's not pretend that Apple has shown any willingness to stand up to the Chinese government.
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.
And Liang is vice-chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. What it means is he is not officially CCP but a very trusted person to be included as decision maker of CCP.
I don't know should we be 'realistic' or should we be 'accurate' when we make a point. This is a strange time.
When people tried to avoid government funded software, let say a communication app, what is the reason? Because we want to avoid state-owned software violating user privacy and sent all my personal data for their profiling database.
You will trust a private company for that more, why? Because even a private company have to obey court order to disclose personal information to law enforcement, they usually have the right to deny it before the issue escalated to the court.
Now what is the case for autocratic government? Are there any real private company? Using China as an example, any person have to right to inform the government about secret information obtained, so China government have the right to get any information obtained from any Chinese private company without court order. In addition, any large organization including public company have to setup a party branch and have CCP member to oversee the organization. Including Huawei, claiming to be a private company.
So, using any product from any private Chinese company has equivalent disadvantage to a 3-letter agency funded VPN network.
Now back to the issue of if Liang is CCP or not. I won't quote unconfirmed source about Liang is a hidden CCP member. Just use the opened fact, Liang is a formal governor of Hong Kong, which means Liang has taking oath to CCP and CCP trusted this person to rule HK. Liang is currently a decision maker inside CCP's committee, and if Liang has conduct issue from CCP's point of view, then Liang can be secretly prosecuted by party order and put in jail in China.
Another example is Teresa Cheng, Hong Kong Secretary for Justice. For some reason she has been to UK but being taken back to China for investigating her conduct and possibility for applying political asylum by party secret police. She was then released and continued her work in Hong Kong. Detailed is not confirmed, but one thing is clear. Any Hong Kong official can be threatened by party secret police and they must do their job according to CCP plan.
Not only that, the stance they are taking is with a dictator who stole the election ...
To throw a dumb example your electricity company is not policing you for how you are using your killowats.
My point is that violence may not be a good fit for every situation, but that doesn't mean it never is. Gandhi was an effective non-violent protester, against the British in Africa when backed by large numbers. How effective would Gandhi have been protesting against the Nazis?
I don't know anything about Belarus, so I don't know anything about what is or isn't justified, it just seems wrong to me to suggest that violence is categorically less effective. Political violence is a tool and like any other has moments where it should and shouldn't be used.
(Not stating my personal examples, too contentious, but I'm sure you could find your own).
How ineffective was that protest?
This is precisely why lack of choice in app stores is so harmful. The phones belong to the people. Without the app store, the manufacturer has no grounds to allow or disallow behavior.
Is Apple a law enforcing agency with jurisdiction in that region? If the answer to that is no, then the answer to your (rhetorical) question is equally no.
Even more, Apple might very well be the one legally at fault here, for assuming authoritative powers for which it has absolutely no legal mandate or justification.
So, if anything, it is rather Apple that is likely the one braking the law here, despite all the rhetoric about Apple having some kind of moral duty (absolute hogwash).
It isn't so much about meddling, but more about Apple assuming powers it should never have in the first place (legally speaking).
Also, the issue with getting the gome adresses of police officers in that case is that the intent was to bomb them, not getting their address per se, as that really is quite easily done and not something the state would notice.
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.
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.
Precisely, there is no difference between oppressing white supremacist minority and any other minority that wants to overthrow the status quo. It’s not going to be easier or harder depending on how the anti state elements are hiding their communication, because their conflict has to become public to have the effect you desire, which is some systemic change that you agree with ( making you part of this group by the way).
I’m not saying privacy is not important. I’m wondering whether unmitigated privacy is more important to people you and I most probably do not support.
Stability comes with slowing down the progress and the top taking ever so more and getting more corrupt. So there always need to be some upwards pressure.
I don't agree that that characterisation of a state is true.
I mean, it's sort of true, but it misses out some essential features which are directly relevant to that description, for some states anyway.
One of those is: Some states (maybe the USA?) believe in more than just acting out the wishes of the majority at any given time.
Some of them believe in ideals, which outlive an ephemeral majority. Things like "rule of law" (which doesn't mean clobbering minorities, it means the government is held to account rather than acting like a rogue king), "human rights" (in theory, things like the Magna Carta), "justice" (as defined by a long history of institutions and systems whose learned principles are studied by people that practice in it).
You can certainly argue that sort of thing still comes down to some level of majority oppressing a minority. But I think the character of that ruling is very different in ways that matter, if it demonstrates a decent attempt at those attributes and builds them into stable institutions, than if it doesn't bother or just pays lip service.
I can't judge you personally, but history will.
Governments have found it convenient to offload policing to communication companies, via putting liability on them unless they do.
I don't think this is the way to go.
If Apple wants to change their TOS and say "publishing personal information is now OK", that is one thing. Maybe publishing personal information should be allowed. The point is that there is an intelligent human being weighing tradeoffs and trying to make a good decision as we muddle our way through the 21st century.
Infrastructural changes, on the other hand, aren't as reversible. Screwups are more likely to be permanent. You're flipping a switch that can't be flipped back. That is the point I was trying to make by mentioning terrorism--there can be unintended consequences which you don't necessarily anticipate, so retaining flexibility is good.
I'm having trouble understanding your point. Apple makes devices. They sell (not rent or lease) those devices.
As such, just as if I were to buy a gun or a knife or a dozen chicken wings, what I do with such a device isn't anyone else's business. It's mine.
If I use that gun or knife to injure or kill someone, is the gun or knife manufacturer involved? No. Because I, not the manufacturer, am responsible for my actions. They have nothing to do with it.
If I insert those chicken wings into orifices other than my mouth, is that any business of the restaurant who sold them to me? No. For the same reasons.
As such, Apple is no more part of the "comms infrastructure" (and especially in this case, as it isn't Apple software -- like iMessage -- being used) than the knife manufacturer is part of my circus knife throwing act.
This issue is broader than the awful stuff going on in Belarus.
Who owns the stuff you purchase? If the manufacturer (and/or other private entities) can unilaterally decide what you can or cannot do with your own property, then you don't really own it.
And there will always be some folks who object to the use of, well, just about anything.
Should the folks at PETA[0] be able to block communications between a group of friends going hunting for deer or quail?
In their understanding, that's exactly the same as a group plotting to kill humans.
The situation in Belarus is more complicated, as it pits the the government against the governed. Even so, I say it's not the place of a manufacturer to tell someone what they may or may not do with a product once it has been sold.
What's more, Telegram needs to decide what happens on their infrastructure and Apple has no business being involved at all.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_for_the_Ethical_Treatme...
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?
Going in a different direction, you could also look at the state of Windows malware (and adware, eg toolbars) as a potential outcome to the un-walled garden approach: you end up with malware and thus the existence of an anti-malware industry.
It's why I like(d) Linux and Mac OS X (macOS) as well: I can set up my parents with a non-admin default account on their system and not worry too much about them hosing things too greatly (especially with off-machine backups). Windows caught up with that paradigm eventually.
If sideloading comes to iOS I hope that a similar mechanism is introduced: not just "please confirm" dialogue and/or Touch/FaceID pop-up, but a separate 'login'.
But yes, the safeguards that prevent sideloading today make me confident in recommending an iOS device even to someone that downloads malware anytime an ad shows up promising free gift cards.
I'm happy that GPG/PGP etc. are a bit difficult to use, because it makes the IQ threshold necessary to coordinate nastiness secretly a bit higher.
Remember how great the blogosphere was prior to the advent of social media? Social media made "blogging" a little more accessible and it became a cesspool. Speed bumps can be a very good thing.
There is research on this in the field of existential risk. I don't remember where exactly but it's formulated as the number of people one person can kill with easily accessible products. In particular biotech is becoming more and more accessible, which great, but has a big impact on that index. There is a great defcon talk by a doctor working at Intel I think.
Those are very different things, and it is necessary to differentiate between the two.
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.
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.
Belarus is on the brink of civil war.
Doxxing regime supporters can easily end up as a "murder todo list" if things heat up.
Do you give an innuendo that this is somehow wrong?
If you don't see the power imbalance between the government and the people, then you are very lucky that you had not experienced it.
Not trying to justify murdering, but some kind of deterrence for oppressing peaceful, freedom-loving people is not a bad thing. Of course if it become French Revolution style execution after taking power, that is wrong and it must be stopped. For the moment, that is before that state, so anything can be bearable.
- Killing a "regime supporter", meaning someone targeted only because of their political beliefs. It is not right that political beliefs should be punished like that. Ideally they shouldn't be punished at all, they should be tolerated but simply lose an election.
You can't claim to "protest for democracy" while being happy to facilitate murdering people who vote for the other side! That would be mad hypocrisy.
- Killing a police officer whose crime, even if violent, fell significantly short of killing someone themselves. Punishment should fit the crime, not be 10x worse.
You can't claim to "protest for justice" while being happy to facilitate extra-judicial killings that aren't even based in justice.
- Killing an innocent person who is mis-identified, whether by accident or not so much.
See above.
The third point, killing an innocent person seems even more likely due to automated facial recognition software like what's running on Facebook, with its biases and a mask to add more noise too, integrated with deepfake image reconstruction technology to produce convincing "unmasked" images, combined with vigilantes often not being too bothered about accuracy and statistics.
However wrong or right you think it is, surely everyone agrees it's wrong if it ends up getting the wrong people.
But no apparently. I've spoken with people in other situations (at other times) who said, basically, it's ok for "a few innocents" to die if that's what it takes to rid the world of guilty people. And others taking the view that it's ok for "police" to die because police are bad. Both views strike me as boneheaded AF.
It is clear AF from the reports that the Belarus authorities think it's ok for some number of innocents to die and suffer for the sake of policing and intimidation. If I were there I would certainly want the authority to "die", by being thoroughly dismantled asap.
This is just one tool, and there will be killing with or without it.
Right or wrong, when people are abused repeatedly, and or they cease to believe in governance, they will act out and it won't all be nice.
The root cause here is an authoritarian regime failing to justify their authority. People acting out is a symptom.
Yes, but the discussion here is about whether Apple should facilitate or hinder particular kinds of act by people.
That's not a symptom for Apple, that's a dilemma for Apple, and there is no truly neutral option.
Regarding apple...
At least being transparent and willing to take a part of responsibility of this action?
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.
Apple doesn't have any good options here; I think their strategy of a toothless demand with no follow through might well be the least worst option for Apple, and for Telegram.
Apple have a really good, straightforward option: Don't police user-generated content in iOS apps. Or, at the very least not the ones intended specifically for communication. They aren't listening to people's phone calls or reading their messages in search of ToS-breaching content after all.
It simply shouldn't be any of their business what Telegram's users post on Telegram's platform. Telegram should be able to independently make the decision what it wants to permit therein.
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.
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.
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.
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
Apple as a distributor should have NO relevance to this. Apple is like a landlord who legally rented his shop to people who run it as a bar in which some people might meet to discuss protests. Should the police even call the landlord? Should the landlord act on this info?
If, as you say Apple is like a landlord, Apple can demand specific things in the contract (ie no pets) and the person renting needs to comply.
Not getting into the moral side of the argument of Apple Vs Telegram but want to point out that the landlord example isn't applicable in my opinion.
> Even if there were something, certain things are typically protected in law; in most western countries, for example, a landlord cannot forbid a shop from serving members of a specific religion or of a specific ethnicity
Of course, but the landlord can forbid a shop from having any animals inside the shop for example, except the service animals ofc or to say that only specific type of shop can operate on the ground (prior to signing the contract). This is a more complex issue than "landlord example"
Those channels exist to spread private, identifiable data and this breaks the law.
A better version of your argument is Apple is the landlord where people are planning lynchings.
Again, I side with the Belarusians. But pretending this is different to China's doxxing of Uighurs is naive
The worst part is that this isn't even accurate. What this is really like is Apple sells a bunch of residences, the users are buying their homes, but for some reason all utilities/cable/internet/etc. has to go through the real estate company that the house was purchased from as they dictate what you can and cannot do in that house. Even stranger, it is now somehow the real estate company's place and responsibility to tell a telephone company that the real estate company allows to drop conference calls that mention the private information of some third party, whether the phone calls are coming from the houses purchased from them or not.
Out of curiosity, to which law are you referring?
I'm not being snarky here, I'm just not clear about which law(s) are being broken.
According to the Wikipedia page for Telegram[0], Telegram's team is based in Dubai, and the company is registered in the UK and the US.
IANAL, nor am I any sort of expert on US, UK or Dubai law. If you could expand on this, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_(software)#History
That doesn't characterize a general record of numbers/addresses, which more or less ensures some basic anonymity as connecting names to numbers doesn't do much outside some other qualifier, like, these people are the police who are suppressing our cause
The problem with that belief is enforcement.
Because illegal numbers [0] are trivially shared, the only viable enforcement to prevent their sharing must have incredibly broad reach.
This ultimately collapses down into "users cannot be allowed to own and operate their own general purpose computer."
And while I'm open to arguments as to why the above is a straw man (I disagree), if you believe the above enforcement scheme is for the greater good then we have very different ideas about individual freedom and the relative value thereof.
Both of which are contingent on end users not being allowed to possess strong encryption.
Which is only a fallacy because data is a commodity, not because it's technically impossible.
And yes you can't really be forgotten, copies can always exist but it shouldn't be hosted readily if you don't want it to be.
Unless I'm missing something?
It's not always possible to make people do the right thing. But when it's not possible, it doesn't cease to be the right thing to demand, continuously, hoping to use the power of pressure or persuasion.
No, it really doesn't. IMO it has to apply consistently. And it's easy to maintain cohesion / consistency here: If you have different rights, you get different rights.
Police have additional rights, particularly when acting in the course of their jobs - specifically, they have the right of violence. Seems reasonable to give up the "right" of protection-from-griefing.
No, police exercise and are protected by powers of government, these are not the same kind of thing as rights, and do not belong to the individual the way rights do. Moreover, the legitimacy of such powers is exactly dependent on the legitimacy of the government and the extent to which it observes the rights of the people subject to it's powers.
Is Tim Cook really qualified to be the ultimate authority of what speech is allowed or not allowed on a global basis, at least for all the billions of people who use their devices?
Similarly for Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. We cannot allow a very small number of corporate CEOs to make unilateral decisions about how to police speech across the globe.
Tim Cook is not qualified. No single person is.
That suggests either:
Apple stay out and the discussion moves to Telegram
, or
Apple and others need a formalized process, just like we use for other conflicts.
A case needs to be made, rules of order, etc... and a decision comes from all of that, not what makes more money, or what might cost money.
Not meddling means enforcing its TOS in an evenhanded way. Otherwise it's playing favorites.
It's weird how people in this thread are zigzagging between saying Apple has too much corporate power and Apple needs much more.
Does every country in the world really have to be a democracy? Remember how the Arab Spring turned out?
Don't worry, Apple doesn't have to decide anything here. The US government already did.
https://www.axios.com/us-lukashenko-president-belarus-353ed2...
It seems to me that this offers a clever way out for Apple: If Lukashenko isn't the legitimate president of Belarus, then the "police" following his orders to attack protesters are not police at all, but terrorists; and Telegram is helping to bring them to the attention of the legitimate authorities of the president in exile.
They don't.
Does every country in the world really need to have racial equality and an even-handed police force? They don't either.
I won't pretend I know what Apple should do here. But I certainly don't agree with the cavalier assertion that unrelated organizations need to confidently pick sides in moral and political battles. Just because you're so certain what the answer should be doesn't mean that you're right. And your lack of visibility and accountability means you risk much less when you quickly come to strong moral conclusions than do large organizations.
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.
> (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.
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.
```
Especially Apple's attempt/request/demand to remove things silently goes way beyond what any company (or citizen) should ever be allowed to do to speech of others. Whether this doxxing is justified or not, that's up to courts and certainly not Apple. Censorship (while debatable if it ever should be allowed in some cases or never) should always be a monopoly of a state (which should be legally accountable) and never commercial entities.
I'm honestly a bit surprised, that so far I hear few governments protest, about how a commercial company basically usurped powers that are supposed to be limited to governments only. Such powers belong only there not just by habit or by convention, but also because this an important aspect of the legal order in any state of law. That is, at least for any country that has signed and ratified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
As appalling as Apple's behavior might be (and I certainly hope they will pay dearly for it), it's not particularly surprising (anymore). But the silence of governments on this behavior, that should worry more people a lot more.
Since when is control, or censorship, of what someone else says speech in it's own right? If Apple wanted a disclaimer next to a message, or something along those lines, you might still remotely have somewhat of a point.
Following your contrived line of "reasoning", any TV producer should have a right to decide what viewers can (and can not) watch on their hardware.
Last time I checked, companies that make product for a consumer market explicitly do NOT have a right to decide what consumers can do with it.
Somehow, software producers already got way more leeway with that than the probably ever should have in the first place (in accordance with the law). But to argue that they should because it's about the free speech of companies, is absolutely bunkers.
I'm aware that the USA made the rather mind boggling decision that companies are people to them (though arguably only so politics could be even more corrupted with corporate money), giving rise to the lunacy of a company having something as free speech. But even accepting that as a (dismal) fact of reality (in the USA), controlling the speech of others just isn't speech itself. More importantly, such control is explicitly forbidden by law (even as per the UDHR).
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.
Contrary to your goal you actually made Durov sound much more impressive.
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.
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.
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.
Because they are usually pretty aggressive about acting on inciteful content.
Also known as accountability for their own actions.
The mechanism is already in place and ready to be expanded to include anything more as necessary.
Plus they make and sell communication apps subject to carrying the exact same sentiments. Content policing a chat app is asinine.
Apple can do whatever they want on their platform. I wouldn't want to be involved in something illegal such as above when using an app on iOS accidentally.
Apple owns the app store and the iOS platform. They have a duty to protect their customers from clicking on unsightly and wrongful content. Customers expect that from apple. I wouldn't want any kid to end up accessing this channel on telegram.
If you believe democracy to be unsightly and wrongful, then your believes are reactionary, and must be subject to rectification.
Somehow in your definition democracy is something only allowed to happen organically, if forcefully torn from you by corruption and guns, "oh well".
They don't.
> Customers expect that from apple
They shouldn't
> I wouldn't want any kid to end up accessing this channel on telegram.
It's parent's duty to protect their kid however they see fit, not Apple's.
Actually no they can’t much of the world has laws to prevent such abuses of power.
Nit: apps may show user-generated adult content (with some restrictions), as long as such content is not the main purpose of the app. So a “porn browser” would not be allowed, but an “internet browser” is.
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 seems like the logical conclusion if you think they have blood on their hands.
It seems like a little much to call Apple an ‘enabler’ for being against doxing.
Just because protesters use a tactic doesn’t mean everyone needs to support it, especially if it is a tacit call to violence.
It seems a lot closer to the argument DoingIsLearning is making about why “Apple employees” have blood on their hands.
Here’s a real quote from my comment, rather than a few words out of context in quote marks:
“That seems like the logical conclusion if you think they have blood on their hands.”
It’s obvious that I am not saying they should be doxed.
But sure - if people are just reacting to a few words without reading the whole comment or what is a reply to, then they won’t understand.
However if you believe that doxing of individual law enforcement officers is justified because of their support for the regime, and you accuse Apple’s team of having blood on their hands for ‘enabling’ the regime, it would be logical to conclude that you support doxing Apple’s employees.
But your comment didn't just say such a person would conclude it's justified. You said the logical conclusion would be them participating in the doxxing. Those are very different things. The list of actions that I think are justified but don't participate in is enormous.
(And by "mandatory for everyone that believes that" I meant that logic would mandate it, which is the same as it being the logical conclusion.)
But even with your new version, just talking about it being justified, well that's not necessarily the logical conclusion. One reason is that their participation is at a different level, so the justification might not extend to them.
And if you go by the motive in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24738218 then identifying the police is being done for a very direct purpose to level the playing field on the ground. Someone might reasonably feel that this reason doesn't apply to Apple employees, even while saying that Apple employees have blood on their hands.
It is true that some person might have the nuanced sentiments and tactical analysis you hypothesize, but the actual person who I was responding to didn’t seem to be expressing such a complex view in their comment, and my original reply still stands as a reasonable challenge to the implications were of what they wrote, given the sentiment with which they expressed it.
I, too, can cheer on HK, whatever that means...
Anyway, if I understand correctly your position is that if people here believe that Apple's action is wrong, then they must believe that protestors doxxing Belarusian law enforcement is justified. Therefore people here should also believe that doxxing Apple employees is justified.
My response is that any question of "relative badness" changes drastically in the immediate presence of real physical violence. If Belarusian law enforcement is out on the streets cracking demonstrators' skulls, it's more plausible that doxxing is a lesser evil (though of course, I have no idea how credible this doxxing is) -- direct physical violence just makes every response more acceptable.
Apple's response may have the downstream effect of increasing physical violence, but only through a more diffuse chain of events, so it's possible to think that Apple's action is bad but, unlike direct physical violence, not bad enough to warrant doxxing its employees (which, anyway, doesn't seem anywhere near as effective as doxxing Belarusian law enforcement -- how many Apple employees have the power to affect this policy?).
Two points I question:
You assume that doxxing Belarusian law enforcement is effective.
You also imply that Belarusian law enforcement have the power to affect Belarusian policy.
These seem like very much unjustified assertions.
You also seem to ignore the possibility that doxing Apple employees could affect Apple’s policy which is what people want when they criticize Apple.
I am not arguing for doxxing. I’m against it.
However if one believes it would be effective at changing Belarusian policy, it raises the question as to why it would not be effective in changing Apple’s policy?
There is also the point made by the parent that Apple’s people have “blood on their hands”, and are “enablers of violence”.
From your statement about the relative badness, I presume you don’t agree with the parent comment about this.
So it doesn’t seem like your view is representative of the one I was replying to.
I stand by my original comment.
If someone thinks Apple’s employees have “blood on their hands”, then it is logical to assume that by the same reasoning they support doxxing of police, they would support doxxing of Apple employees because they equate what Apple employees are doing with violence. That’s what it means to say that someone has blood on their hands.
The fact that you don’t actually think that what Apple is doing is so bad, changes nothing about the original comment. I was replying to a comment that was far less moderate than the opinion you have just expressed.
You just don’t share the views of the person I was replying to.
> does Apple really want to go on public record as an enabler of this?
They just did. They are. And I shall treat them as such.
If Apple is going to enforce moral views on countries and users, I want the board that chooses these views to be elected. Because as soon as you make such a legitimate demand, a thousand others will follow in terms of acceptance or not of hate speech, dissemination of propaganda, harassment, and the various definitions of terrorism.
A way to prevent Apple from conducting immoral actions in some countries would be to accepte universal jurisdiction in some places, so that crimes in country A by entity X can be judged in country B. Unfortunately this has been a thing constantly opposed by USA.
I don't think so. IT is 5% of Belarusian GDP.
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.
As long as they operate an app store, they will be a target. Just might not be the only target.
That's kinda the point that having a single controlling entity makes the ecosystem vulnerable to this kind of pressure.
I wish it weren’t so.
Have you thought about what that would mean in practice? Given that the APK could be hosted on multiple (TLS-enabled) foreign sites, a government would need a team of people to be constantly monitoring the web for sites containing the APK, who would then send orders to domestic ISPs demanding that they prevent their customers from accessing those foreign sites.
I believe it is also possible to share apps via Bluetooth.
You mean like the MAFIAA[0] has been doing for decades?
https://www.mobiles24.co/downloads/s/96965-m1769-speak_softl...
My point was that any similar attempt would likely be just as unsuccessful.
You can even check if it matches up if you meet in person or if you communicated using another medium.
But a Facebook employee would have to join the group and they wouldn't have access to older messages. It's not like with Telegram, where all the content, including old messages, is stored in plain text on the server.
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.
The reality was their phone did get "hacked" and Apple participated in PRISM.
But Belarus?
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.
I agree with you, but I hope you're not making a false-equivalence between Trump and Obama, or that the Obama administration's actions against free-speech had the same motivations - and lack of conscience - as the Trump administration's.
It would be much fairer to compare Bush Jr to Trump - it was under Bush Jr we got "free speech zones", for example.
> Obama's war on whistleblowers leaves administration insiders unscathed
> Since Barack Obama entered the White House in 2009, his government has waged a war against whistleblowers and official leakers. On his watch, there have been eight prosecutions under the 1917 Espionage Act – more than double those under all previous presidents combined.
> And yet other apparent leaks have gone entirely unpunished or have been treated, as in the case of General David Petraeus, as misdemeanors. As Abbe Lowell, lawyer for one of the Espionage Act eight, Stephen Kim, has argued in a letter to the Department of Justice, low-level officials who lack the political connections to fight back have had the book thrown at them, while high-level figures have been allowed to leak with “virtual impunity”.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/16/whistleblowe...
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.
Like the information the crowded theater is on fire?
I mean I agree, information should be free, but that's a bad way to phrase the argument.
Check Holme's quote. It's not "yelling fire in a crowded theatre." It's "Falsely yelling fire..."
Do you see the difference?
In fact, The Schenk[0] case was partially overturned by Brandenberg[1], where that example was superseded by "incitement to imminent lawless action," as it's more specific.
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."
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 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.
Here is the link to one group that uses ML to de-anonymize people: https://youtu.be/FAJIrnphTFg
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.
Woah. I don’t know how I missed this news for so long.
https://www.androidcentral.com/apple-may-have-ditched-encryp...
One could argue that Apple should have just exited the Chinese market instead of letting the local government spy on their citizens. Google has taken that position.
It’s a similar situation for Microsoft Teams and Skype.
If Facebook does the same, they will be available in China too. Google tried to do it with their Project Dragonfly, but bad publicity made them stop.
Is there a law that requires them to offer iCloud at all if they want to sell their hardware there?
Is there a law that requires them to ban side-loading?
It seems to me that Apple is always doing a bit more than they are required to do under the law. They clearly want to stay in the good graces of those regimes, especially in China.
But I do agree that the problem in general is structural and not specific to Apple. I think there should be something akin to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to limit what those corporations can do in other countries. There has to be a limit to their aiding and abetting human rights violations.
It's very important to remember that a big part of Belarusian protesters work in IT and even in Apple
There are multiple of different negative actions that can be taken against a company, beyond just customers refusing to buy the product.
These potential actions have the ability to cause Apple, and their employees, lots of harm.
For example, in America, one negative action that many people are taking against Apple is lawsuits (Apple has lots some lawsuits, in the past, and lost a bunch of money over it).
But, there could be many other ways to harm Apple, beyond those examples. EX negative publicity, people or companies refusing to work with Apple, and many other things.
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.
No reason for me to buy any new Apple products and after this news, I won’t.
Apple was banking on privacy marketing as a competitive edge. I think that was a good strategy. Since they appear to be worse at executing on that strategy than I thought they would be, they are losing that segment of the market.
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.
Wonderful!
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."
In referring to identified people being killed I contemplated a worst case scenario, following up on comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737255 "in Hong Kong similar channels were used to kill police" and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737546 "possibly leading to innocent people being lynched or killed by the mob because almost no one will verify whether that someone was really to blame".
However, a bit of Googling later and I haven't found any confirmation that any police in Hong Kong were killed either. Perhaps the HN commenter was a bit overzealous to say so. Only death threats to them... and their children (which is pretty bad in its way).
Meanwhile, the same Googling revealed a lot about Belarus: Shooting protestors with live ammo, horrendous abuse, medical abuse, torture, and some death; it sounds pretty bad there. I can see why doxxing them is compelling and perhaps moral.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/09/15/belarus-systematic-beati...
Some police resigning in disgust too. That's good to hear.
The possibility of innocents getting harmed due to false identification remains though. Those AI face recognition and deep fake reconstruction techniques really are prone to errors that look convincing. I hope the committed doxxers have high standards of review and understanding, and are able to correct mistakes. I've read enough stories about innocents being attacked and sometimes killed in the past due to an angry vigilante group's lack of care that I think it's a genuine concern if AI-assisted doxxing ever escalates to violence.
I found this article about Hong Kong interesting for how doxxing and counter-doxxing are evolving: https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Hong-Kong-protesters-are-nam...
> "There is power in being able to name those who have wronged you. Doxxing may not be good practice -- the pro-democracy camp has the moral high ground right now -- but few condemn it while the police operate with impunity. Right now, the police doxxing channel on Telegram has more than 242,000 subscribers. As a comparison, the movement's fact-check channel has 60,000."
> "Unsurprisingly, the police have found ways to hide their identities. Since late June, their helmets have had one-way-mirror privacy film adhered to what were see-through visors. Almost none wear their warrant cards or produce them when requested, even under circumstances where force regulations compel them to."
That is some biggest BS right there. Luckily that comment was flagged.
>Only death threats to them...
Alleged.
>and their children (which is pretty bad in its way)
There were never any, alleged or not death threat to their Children. But there were definately peer pressure and bullying. ( Which is pretty bad as it causes mental health issues )
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.
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.
Russia for example is blocking all ESNI traffic... You either downgrade or get blocked. Which makes the big services shutdown of domain fronting so inexcusable, just kowtowing to China and every other regime.
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.
App stores must not be political, even if the politics agree with you.
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.
- 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.
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.
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?
> 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_...
It might just be about doxxing, but the PR problem remains, of course.
This very much reminds me how Google disappeared websites of Russian opposition (weeks after signing some memorandum with kremlin,) and then told "maybe they need to improve their search engine friendliness?"
I don't know whether that's a common thing, and I expect many companies wouldn't go the Telegram route and publish the demands because they don't want to put stress on their relationship with Apple.
Discord apparently has channels that are used for similar activities, but I don't know whether Apple has asked Discord to hide those channels from the app, or whether anyone complained to Apple in the first place.
So, "even" by the word of US law, Apple has no permission to engage with Belarus government.
I doubt there are any laws that would forbid Apple from taking or acting on a report of content policy violations.
This is the kind of behavior that only comes from a company that knows they can get away with murder, and when that happens, it's time to tighten the screw a bit before things get waaay out of hand.
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" ...)
Having said this, you can still use Telegram Web on Safari to bypass these restrictions.
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.
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.
Edit: Reading the article again, there is actually a very simple fix to view these posts: Go over to your friend with an android and access them to there, and then remember to buy android in the future to avoid censorship like this. This is surely the main reason Apple doesn't let them show this note.
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.
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!
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.
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...
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.
In general, prices don't need a legal justification. That's a big part of free enterprise.
> This is exactly the type of thing it's designed to protect us from.
What makes you so optimistic? In practice, complicated laws with lots of reach usually work in favour of the party that can afford more and better lawyers. (Or, sometimes, the party that is winning the PR battle for the hearts and minds of public opinion.)
Well it would need a legal justification if the alternative is that Apple would be penalized under anti-trust regulation for using its market share to hurt consumers for its own benefit. Even "free enterprise" operates within a legal framework.
> In practice, complicated laws with lots of reach usually work in favour of the party that can afford more and better lawyers.
I mean this is an incredibly defeatist and cynical view. Don't get me wrong, I'm not overly optimistic that things will change based on the way laws have been applied in the last few decades, but the fact that people see laws as primarily a tool for the powerful - and don't even have an expectation for legal enforcement to operate on behalf of the consumer - seems to me to be a large part of the reason the US is looking more and more like a failed state.
I have higher hopes for simple laws. And also for efforts to lower barriers to entry.
See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_deregulation and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedoms_of_the_air for a legislative efforts that did much good.
Some interesting thoughts on rail freight transport at https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/SurfaceFreightTransporta... If all you did was follow casual online discussions about the state of American rail transport, you'd think it's in shambles. What's interesting is that the deregulated freight part of the industry is actually doing great. It's the transportation of people part that's not so hot.
I have no ready answer for Apple's walled garden. But as I stated earlier, I'm afraid heavy handed interference might do more harm than good, since Apple has so much money to through at lobbyists and lawyers.
For what it's worth, the default historical case people always cite in favour of trust busting, Standard Oil, actually shows the opposite. See eg https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-standard-oil-was-a-pr...
> 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.
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.
Requiring permissions from users to access data is good, and an actually well curated app store is just as useful.
That doesn't mean that it shouldn't be possible to install through different avenues as well (still requiring the users permission).
Yes you would get a lot of shitty software if you started installing everything you stumble upon, but the apple store quality would probably increased significantly, because they could deny significantly more apps, as they'd have an alternative approach to get to users that really want it
I think you misunderstood me there. Of course permission systems are going to stay, who in their right mind would give up this crucial innovation?
But free-as-in-freedom implies that I, the owner and user, can do whatever I want, including triggering all sorts of footguns – if I get tricked into installing CriminalBankrobberApp and giving it all sorts of permissions because I believe it legitimately needs those and won't abuse them, it's game over. A non-free iOS can simply make this impossible or so inconvenient that I'll never bother – an app that actively attacks banking apps on my device wouldn't even get on the App Store I guess – but I don't think a free-as-in-freedom iOS could possibly keep that sort of tight control, not with a 30%-of-revenue economic incentive for everyone else to normalize arbitrary distribution channels.
> That doesn't mean that it shouldn't be possible to install through different avenues as well (still requiring the users permission).
How does the user know what avenues are safe and what aren't? Isn't this just a rehash of downloading software from arbitrary websites, just with lots of app stores instead?
> but the apple store quality would probably increased significantly, because they could deny significantly more apps
And lots and lots of others, big names too, would decide to forgo the App Store entirely (even assuming some loss of visibility, those are some really easily-earned (30-x)% in revenue!), so you'd end up with an Epic store and a Steam store and a EA store and a Facebook store and an app store for each media outlet (NYT Recipes now at the NYT App Store!) and possibly for each bank and national app stores and regional app stores and a CoolBeansAppStore with neat UI tweaks and skins and a SuperDuperAppStore with all sorts of small indy apps and a SuperSecureAppStore that distributes copies of other apps with added tracking and tons of Indydev Inc App Stores, and FreeXXXAppStore that has some well-known copyright-agnostic porn apps and absolutely no rules at all and all kinds of malware and scams... pretty much like the internet back then, but with much leakier sandboxes, because there are lots of things apps must be able to do if allowed to that websites pretty much never need(ed?) to do ...
And good luck with crafting a permission system that makes all of this really transparent and clear and actionable and still isn't a huge hassle that everyone just clicks through and works even for disinterested, impatient laypeople ... That's reducing the depth of security to pretty much this single thing that people hate in its current form already.
I mean, really, I am sometimes struggling to tell what's safe and what isn't on the web, and I should tell, I'm building some of the stuff that's on the web – how is someone who's busy being a lawyer, or is elderly and kinda struggling with the latest generation of gadgets, or a stressed-out parent with zero time for ITSec studies on top, or 15 years old, etc. pp. supposed to make that call that in a similarly confusing environment, on similarly bad data – possibly worse data.
The only reason this works on Android so far is probably that the UX of using other stores or sideloading is so bad; some have tried to establish their own, but churn is just too brutal for next to everyone.
I'm not saying free and open mobile platforms cannot be done, or that there's absolutely no way to open up iOS without wreaking havoc, and I'm definitely not saying that wouldn't be really worthwhile, because I think it would be absolutely fantastic to have an open and free mobile platform – but I believe that's going to be much, much more difficult than just throwing out all the restrictions and calling it a day, because we've been there in the early internet and security-wise it was an absolute nightmare.
Do you think that people are incapable of using personal computers then? Just the regular old PC.
This argument falls flat on its face, because it is blatantly obvious, that, for some reason, people are capable of using PCs, and don't explode from the confusion of doing so.
Every single argument that you are making, could apply to the PC. But people still do alright using PCs. Phones should not be any different.
> good luck with crafting a permission system
How are they doing that on the PC? PCs work fine.
> how is someone who's busy being a lawyer
Thats an interesting question. Which has an answer. How does a lawyer use a PC, right now? So thats how they'll do it.
> pretty much like the internet back then
Why do we have to talk about the internet from a long time ago? Just talk about the current internet. Which people use. On the PC. Right now.
> t there's absolutely no way to open up iOS without wreaking havoc
Just do it the same way that PCs currently work. Right now. Because PCs work, right now, and society is not falling apart.
> because we've been there in the early internet and security-wise it was an absolute nightmare.
We don't need to talk about the early internet. Just make the iPhone the same as modern day PCs. Which people are already capable of using just fine.
> Just make the iPhone the same as modern day PCs. Which people are already capable of using just fine.
Ransomware attacks are absolutely rampant, though you'll never hear about the vast majority of incidents of course, and pretty much all of those start with someone running thingycorp_salaries_full_list.xlsx.exe, enabling macros for a fishy .docx, opening an infected .pdf, downloading and running infected installers, plugging in random USB keys, and so on. Then there's lots and lots of phishing attacks going on, and that's with most companies already clamping down on attack vectors really hard — if people used private PCs as much as they use their private smartphones, for sensitive things like banking, without an IT department to shield them from the worst of it, I guess consumer Windows would get a lot more locked down really quickly.
> people are capable of using PCs, and don't explode from the confusion of doing so.
People may not explode from confusion, but if they had a better idea of how complex IT security has become, they might at least feel somewhat uneasy. Even people in IT roles screw up and get pwned, or build systems in a way that lets them get pwned easily, all the time really. Bad actors have become pretty sophisticated over the last decade as well, and Covid-19 is only making things worse as lots of unsavory individuals with money and resources find that real-world crime doesn't quite deliver the returns it used to, and everyone and their mother now conduct large parts of their lives through their smartphone and move lots of money through those devices. Personally, I've definitely noticed both attack volume and sophistication going up few notches already.
> How does a lawyer use a PC, right now? So thats how they'll do it.
The vast majoriy will depend on IT people to keep them safe, and their devices will be quite thoroughly locked down, and their email pretty aggressively filtered. Incidents definitely still happen, though. Same with medicine.
I really don't think it's a stretch to imagine people getting socially engineered en masse to install shady apps in a world where each app store and each app requires an entirely new security assessment on little to no data by end users, or apps getting compromised and not get pulled, or whatever. It's possible to solve that quandary, but it's not going to be as easy as just throwing out all restrictions without devising some other mechanism to take their place in protecting users.
> Because PCs work, right now, and society is not falling apart.
Society isn't falling apart from lots and lots of issues I'd consider quite severe. I'd rather not let anything get to that point if it can be prevented.
They use PCs right now. As of this moment. They are using PCs, just fine.
It is the existing status quo that everyone is using PCs already.
> I'd rather not let anything get to that point if it can be prevented.
There is not "getting" anywhere. We are already here. We are already living in a world where lots and lots of people use the PC.
Thats what you don't understand. This is the status quo. There are no changes. People already use PCs, right now.
> as easy as just throwing out all restrictions
There is no throwing anything out, because people already are using PCs, right now. Lots of people use them.
You keep phasing this as a "change" when it is not. People using PCs is the status quo.
How? And why? Most people won't care. I think disallowing Telegram to operate freely will wipe out Apple's iOS products in countries where real freedom of speech matters.
They're not. They're doing this for maximizing the companie's profit. Which they absolutely don't need to (it's not like if apple was struggling financially, or trying to find an subtle business model that works).
I thought I'd made a pretty strong case to not trust Apple's PR in my first paragraph. To clarify, no, I don't think that is the case, and people should be very miserly with their trust towards orgs like Apple in general.
The thing is, no matter their rationale, their product decisions have far-reaching real-world consequences. This particular decision has obvious real-world consequences to protesters in Belarus, and it is a disgusting decision, and definitely makes for a strong argument against leaving them with that much control.
On the other hand, however, their security stance works really, really well, as far as I can tell, and it keeps their users quite safe from lots of harm, and that's something I keep giving them money for, because I value security highly.
Forcing their walled garden free-as-in-freedom wide open will amend #1, but what about #2? Literally hundreds of millions of iPhone users around the world depend on the ecosystem being safe – my mom has an iPhone mostly because they keep their walled garden clean, so she doesn't have to get a CS degree to do that herself, and also because it's a very nice product that she enjoys a lot, but I'd advise her very strongly to get something else if Apple's security was shoddy. As I've argued, I have very strong doubts that this could be done without breaking much of what makes iPhones so secure.
I'm definitely not arguing that this makes Apple's ability and growing propensity to abuse their power a great thing – I think it's absolutely creepy in a deeply dystopian way – but right now the only way to build such a safe environment that I know of relies on strict centralized control, and having such an environment is one of the prime things that make this technology manageable for everyone and their mother.
If someone comes up with a free-as-in-freedom smartphone that's secure, easy to use, has the necessary polish and all the important apps and isn't laser-focused on people who live inside emacs, I'll be happy to part with a bunch of money for that.
Just go buy a phone running the market leading OS, Android.
It is not possible for other parties to break this market open. Other parties are relegated to niche markets without any power. Using a smartphone from a niche party will give you a very reduced experience and is for most people not a viable option.
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.
> 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.
Apple monopoly on iOS platform must be broken, and Apple should be forced to allow third party appstores and third party push notifications.
I think that the authorities cannot be expected to solve every problem in society there is. A better approach may be to educate people about the alternatives.
What Apple primarily wants, in my opinion, is to keep their users and their profits. Currently, it seems like they can take down apps for almost any reason, restrict independent repair of their devices by making the replacement parts and chips unavailable, force many simple-to-repair devices to be recycled instead of repaired, take huge cuts from the in-app purchase prices and more, with little to no impact on their sales or number of users.
I am wondering why is that the case. But apparently, most people do not care.
The phone makers will either have to comply or leave that country. Either way, the people in that country do not get the app.
Actually I was surprised this morning to see Apple criticized on HN (40% of HN visitors use Apple devices, Windows 21 %, Linux 8% and Android 15% ) as it is rarely the case, the explanation is simple, Apple fanboys were sleeping
I made a post about this. Looks like some filter is taking down all t.me links.
Once again we are reminded that power inevitably corrupts and must have limits. What a sad state to find Steve's scrappy underdog company in.
https://tjournal.ru/tech/221326-apple-zayavila-chto-ne-trebo...
>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.
It's unclear why they would demand this, given that Google seems to not need to make similar demands.
This also seems like it encourages repressive governments to cajole Apple to pressure apps to remove user content in the future.
Telegram not complying means it gets banned from the App Store.
Shame on Apple really. Shame on them for creating a walled garden that has become a liability for multiple parties even those unconnected to the iOS ecosystem.
“Irrelevant” could turn into the mother of all class action lawsuits.
That's a very dangerous path Apple is taking, caving to the demands of dictatorial and corrupt governments.
I'm hoping that this move will put Apple in hot waters, at least it should come under scrutiny.
But I'm not naive enough to believe that this sort of action will not become more prevalent.
I've been following the news out of Belarus even if there isn't much hope at least the world has been witnessing.
How dare they. This is just appalling.
They have used proprietary devices, banned apps, and worked with governments against their customers.
I can only suggest that either you or your wife takes a marketing class to defend yourself from Apple and other companies.
Saying “we don’t feel like we have much choice” is a cop out.
For those that say Apple is morally compromised for collaborating with the oppressors, why is the same not true for Telegram complying with Apple (the oppressor in this case)?
Yes, Apple could remove Telegram from the store in Belarus, but that would definitely be a disproportionate response, and would have much more of an impact on Apple.
Part IV, Chapter 1: Winston could hear the birds through the open window. Julia already had the kettle on, bubbling quietly, and she spoke as she rummaged for the tea tin. "Sleepyhead, you shouldn't fall asleep while reading. Not only did I have to replace your book in the bookshelf this morning, but you woke me up twice, whimpering during the night. Did you have a bad dream, darling?" ...
[1] Compare ancient Theban warnings about regurgitating a media line without double checking its claims: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737221
[2] One of the drones from Sector 7G of MiniTru. They all went to Nottingham, York, etc., so they're certainly not given any important tasks which could be screwed up, but since they do have degrees they still must be given some kind of make work, and (as someone in the work assignment ministry had only skimmed Smith's dossier, putting it down immediately the tea lady came by, and so hadn't realised the effect the nature of this position might have on his innate shaky grip on reality) they are charged with correcting errors in automatically generated transcripts (given the awful state of their cigarette machines is it any wonder the translation machine is so off base so frequently?), which somehow Smith has managed to Mitty up into a fantasy of rewriting, in the grand manner, truth.
[3] Of course Syme isn't listed in the rota on the office bulletin board any longer. He hasn't been disappeared. He's been promoted and now works at MiniPlen, so his name now appears on their office rotas.
[4] What kind of adult male would run to a woman to whom he hasn't been introduced, whose notion of flirting and courtship reduces entirely to exploiting an (alleged) injury in making a drop, as if she were not a lover but a dealer? One would have to be both immature and pretty full of oneself to not run away from that one, double time.
[5] Goldstein does leave us with the question of "why should human equality be averted?" and so Freud might say that Smith's dreams correspond to his subconscious attempting to answer that question. In this case, Smith's id dreams up an insidious totalitarian grand conspiracy theory (paralleling Smith's waking fantasies about his job) in which the Inner Party (which he failed to join entirely due to his poor A-level marks) is motivated exactly like the bullying teenage (they are from the cream of society: both rich and thick) schoolboys of his author's own experience, as a swotter on scholarship at a second-rate boarding school. This motive really consists...
That being said, whenever I read an analysis like yours, it almost always does seem to make sense. You've given me a lot more insight into the book, so thank you.
> “Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?'” - MLK
Considering this and the HKmap.live[2] situations, I’d say that in his case the answer to that question is “not much”.
Belarus’s legal system doesn’t afford them this luxury.
Which is effective primarily because there’s no (practical) way to sideload on iOS!
This is why I’ve always seen the locked-down nature of the iPhone as a threat to free expression first and foremost. Apple is responsible for setting the system up this way.
I agree that we need a solution to monopolistic app stores though.
Isn't Fortnite on Android an example of this? It was in the Play store for a pariod, but IIRC it was not when it was first released and isn't there again after their spat with Google.
Apple is currently literally being a threat to free expression in a situation where it really matters.
You don't need to buy the idea, but they're doing it.
I'd hate it if the big players got to take decisions against human rights under the excuse that an alternative technically exists.
In practice, this can be achieved today for a handful of apps with AltStore.io.
Sideloading does have risks, and so it doesn't need to be too easy. As a point of comparison, I really like how disabling SIP works on the Mac—the user needs to reboot the computer into recovery mode and run a short Terminal command. This process feels dangerous, but it's really quite easy, and it only needs to be done once per machine. I could guide even a very technology-illiterate person through the process, if I absolutely needed to.
These are people trying to save their country, from rigged elections and an oppressive regime. That's what they use communication for, and Apple shutting this down, choosing the side of the party that stole the election through cheating and force.
I'm not a big fan of Google (nor Apple), but I'm having a hard time thinking of something Google did that is so straight up egregious. But maybe there is, and I forgot about it.
And yes, Google has been tightening the noose as well, which many people rightfully criticise, but as of now, you still have options on Android.
Other fanboy examples, Apple does bad thing X, fanboys defends Apple, class action lawsuit forces Apple to stop doing bad thing X , Apple announces that they kindly stopped doing X and fanboys praise Apple for their goodness.
Other example, Apple removes you the choice for alternative payment methods, removes the choice for you to get informed of alternatives and from this articles seems they refuse to inform people where censorship was applied and for some reason fanboys will defend the fact that all users are deprived of mere choices.,
Some other examples is when the fanboys complain about ads, lootboxes and other shitty in app payments but ignroe the fact that Apple gets a cut of the money instead of just banning ads,tracking,lootboxes etc.
Even people here on HN that should be more competent try to push a narrative that a side loaded app is insecure when in fact the same sandbox will protect the user and web notifications seem to be also some extremely hard concept to implement right by Apple engineers, you would think they have competent developers and designers that could find a good UX.
Conclusion, Most Apple users are not fanboys, I seen them on the Apple reddit criticising when Apple does some shit, so when somone uses the word fanboy he means a person that has Apple as part of his identity, criticizing Apple is the same as an attack on him or his mother.
You could simply own neither an Apple nor a Google product and sidestep this whole decision.
edit: oh god look at all these sibling comments, abort, abort!
[0] There is an assumption built in to this that governments censoring their political opponents is bad; I choose not to question it here.
Who do you want to fund? Tim or the Question? Or do you think he should just answer questions if he's paid for it, because Apple has zero responsibility at all...oh right they don't.
Not possible. Exception, don't buy apple products.
I am point to the fact that he lied under oath when he said that no one receives special treatment in the App Store, yet it came out Amazon got special treatment in a "quid pro quo" deal.
No worries, easy mistake
These channels are not about a platform for freedom of speech and rallying for peaceful demonstrations.
Nope. It’s about exposing PII of public officials; names and home addresses? Take pause to appreciate the possible consequences of this. What could possibly go wrong?
Now I agree that Belarus officials are complicit or actively engaging in violations of personal freedom, violence and persecution.
But calling out individuals with the not-so-subtle encouragement for personal confrontation and violent retribution is illegal and frowned upon in all democratic societies.
“The only way to stop violence is to pull off the masks, in both the literal and metaphorical sense. An officer who is no longer anonymous will think twice before he grabs, beats or kidnaps someone,"
But unmasking violent agents of a violent state won’t do anything except provide the excuse to repress even harder... you’ll just end up with riot police firing live ammo (a bit like in the US, where police will always claim the victim appeared to reach for a weapon before they start hailing bullets.)
It’s simple power game: if you challenge a bully that is much stronger than you, you will be crushed. If you really want to make a dent, you collect the evidence and plea for help from a stronger one. (EU, UN, ICJ...)
Unless the objective is to provoke a violent reaction and use the bruises to mobilize help in sympathy (problem is who “gets to suffer the bruise”... you, or a random protestor caught in a retaliatory strike)
Knowing who breaks the law and applies violence to civil protesters will allow to have a fair trial later.
Why should official working for public money be anonymous? If they have the power to apply force to public, it will not end well (and this is what is happening).
Or maybe, who knows, the violence is being caused by an opressive regime. Since Apple feels it as the right to interveen is it also taking actions agains the Belarus government?
Apple please let me know to which mail should I start sending the mail messages I send from my macbook, so I can get your approval.
Stand up and do what's right. You're an American company doing the bidding of a corrupt organization that's not even as big as you are. Grow a pair.
In the absence of local rule of law, or local laws which are incompatible with the American moral outlook on human rights and civil liberties I would instruct my company to observe American laws. If Iran doesn't like that let Iran figure out a way to stop me locally. I am under no pressure to implement immoral company policies to support something which ultimately goes against the system which enabled my business to thrive.
Apple is big enough to completely disregard an authoritarian regimes wishes and get away with it.
Imagine a world where the big tech companies actually has morals that they upheld. The cost of doing business in China is they're going to steal your proprietary tech. Everyone accepts that cost and still does business with China. Imagine if American companies enforced human rights with the same viritol. The world would be positively incentivized to adopt legitimate democracy or fall by the technological wayside.
With all the talk about how Apple cares about human rights, the CEO and senior management seem to be there as bystanders.
Provide the users with choices! You own the hardware, not the company!
Case in point: digital fundraisers on Facebook are not subject to Apple’s 30% tax, via a special COVID exemption until the end of the year.
Make no mistake, Apple is a very powerful company.
I have admired this company as an aspiring kid growing up in a city in India. It had stories, dreamy stories, things I believed in.
Now it's all money and absolute control. The very things I consider harmful to society. This is no longer that Apple. And, yes 1984.
As we keep on seeing time, and time, and time again.
Add this incident to the rapidly growing body of evidence proving every privacy advocate's arguments against centralized systems. Some time soon I hope the tech community finds its way back to federated/p2p modes of distribution and communication so we can make this kind of censorship -- and the companies which enforce it -- a thing of the past.
What serves the people of Belarus at the moment (and I know some people on the ground there that have had terrible things done to them at the hands of the governments goons) does not serve Apple because their terms of service did not in any way foresee the kind of situation that Belarus finds itself in.
As soon as you step in to an argument like that you may find that your precious principles are going to be tested like they have never been tested before. And Apple just came up wanting, the Belarus authorities are a criminal bunch and do not deserve the protections normally afforded to individuals acting on behalf of the state. They are facing off with the population from the comfort of anonymity, beat them, rape them and sometimes even kill them. Having them identified makes them at least moderately responsible for their actions, and Apple has absolutely no business interfering in this.
Would you be surprised if it devolved into threats, intimidations and people getting shot?
I'd like to plea, not specifically to you but more in general: if each of us can tone down the rhetoric, even a tiny bit, we might become able to relate to each other just slightly more and not to add more weight to the huge wedge of partisonship that divides everyone from their neighbor.
Exposing identities of individuals is problematic. There are examples of bad things happening when these kind of messages spread through messaging apps.
This stuff Apple does is what happens when someone gets on a power trip. What they gonna do next, attemp to censor forums available in Safari?
It doesn't really matter where exactly Apple would draw a line, from absurd extremes like "you are free to talk about Roman officials infamous for sentencing innocents to the cross, but please do so without mentioning PII" when someone types in Pontius Pilate, to pragmatic, maybe even lazy "don't use the channel for illegal communications (but we can't really police them)". But they should at least try to be somewhat consistent about it and, even more importantly (but much easier!), by no means require secrecy. A secrecy requirement is just lame and reeks of foul play, horribly.
Not for me, I use a Linux phone (Sailfish OS) with no Google. Not for real activists (criminals in the eyes es of oppressive governments like Chaina, Belarus, Russia, Iran, Turkey, ...) who will always find their way. But for 98% of any population.
[1] https://www.xda-developers.com/safetynet-hardware-attestatio...
Seems funny: proprietary OS plus the company cooperate with Russian government.
But not in a sense that Google or Apple would directly decide what I cannot see.
Indirectly they already do, because a lot of public and commercial services, banking, public transport tickets, corona tracking are available only via those. But that's because the general public does not understand the threats of being dependent on the duopoly.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/30/apple-removes-two-rss-feed...
In belarus it’s about 3 to 1. Globally it’s about 10 to 1.
This isn’t to say any of this is good, but I wonder if Telegram can behave differently by platform (ex. A blacklist of channels on iOS).
But what do I know
Using these platforms is responsible, if it doesn't affect you it will affect vulnerable people.
If you're doing something that hurts their bottom line, don't be surprised when they take measures to curtail those actions. They're a company.
If you don't want to support their actions, don't buy their products. It's that simple. Maybe the Belarussians concerned by this can now actually get rid of their Apple products and buy something else.
Does the desktop app support groups? If it does, then get the desktop app.
First, yes, buying iOS is a partial lock-in. But so is almost every other consumer choice: only if you stick to FOSS and open document formats, and are technical enough to convert your own documents once your apps are no longer supported, you may consider yourself free. Otherwise, lock-in is a given.
The lock-in isn't full, either: pictures, email, videos, bookmarks, etc. can be exported to other devices.
Second: if you buy Apple, you don't give up the right to protest them. Since the company depends on its customers, pressure can be effective. This is in contrast with free products, where customer pressure can turn counter-productive.
Why should one product be the answer to all situations? You know that apple is a walled garden. You know that walled gardens have their limits of usage. How does that mean that walls must be destroyed? It is non-sequitur.
Saying that apple interferes with your freedom is like saying a kitchen glove interferes with your right to defend against a knife. It is just an instrument with a narrow usage area, which may or may not fit your current needs.
Let's suppose that I don't support apple's political stances on many things for various reasons, but I will buy new iphone once it is out, because I see value in it. Not surprised if it fails at uprisings, not a problem, that simple. Where the flaw is?
https://www.change.org/p/apple-asking-apple-to-not-block-tel...
Yesterday's discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24722130
>The size limit is 150 members.
The affected channels on Telegram have tens of thousands of members and it's not possible to directly post to the timeline.
And another very interesting question is: who complained to Apple? Obviously it is not Apple itself monitored these channels.
Using the App Store, Apple is making the Belarus' dictatorship's censorship apply even in democracies.
The curve favors the individual not the corporation or the state.
You would think Apple would be content with its billions and could care less whether authoritarians are mad it them because protesters are evading abuse in prisons.
To understand the situation in Belarus by example, imagine former Nazi concentration camp guards, protesting against exposing their identities, because Israeli security forces may come after them. Crazy analogy you would say, but Belarusian people call their police and KGB Nazis.
Telegram has been used to share some very bad COVID disinformation.
My father who is older and lives in Iran shared with me this video about how to treat COVID. It was produced really nicely in the Farsi (Persian) language.
Anyone who has ever read the book "Made to Stick" (highly recommended) would immediately that this video was designed to be a viral disinformation campaign.
The video started so credibility talking about the virus, the family of virus it belongs to, it talked about genetics similarities, etc. All seem very credible. Then it comes the disinformation gotcha:
To defeat COVID (with some beautiful inside the lungs animation ) talking about alveoli and how they function, when you are indoor you need to laugh deeply and very hard. This laughing hard gets rid of the virus, etc. etc.
Great idea, right? Seems like a way to exacerbate the spread of a deadly virus.
To me the quality of video made me think it was probably produce by a state or entity working for a state with budget.
If that is so I considered this incident as one of the first examples of using disinformation to commit genocide.
The problem with Telegram team working from the United Arab Emirates, it's unclear to me if it's being used to weaponize disinformation for evil means or not. From what I have seen, I believe, Telegram is being misused and it needs to be removed from the App Store.
This is part of the 2020 Belarusian Protests [4]. Three Telegram accounts, dedicated to doxing police officers associated with the authoritarian regime of Alexander Lukashenko, have been requested to be taken down by Apple.
Durov is politically libertarian and is in self-imposed exile after his own struggle with the regime in his Russian homeland.
Both track your every move/conversation and share ALL your data with government agencies via the PRISM surveillance program led by the NSA (Google joined PRISM in 2009; Apple in 2012).[1] These BigTech companies/PRISM members are beyond the law because they are defacto extensions of Big Brother Surveillance. If Apple were to make a PRISM break from membership, then it would likely receive lawsuits for tax evasion and monopoly behavior (antitrust). Understand the game?
Consider This About Apple:
• Apple uses offshore quasi-indentured-servant labor to bypass labor- and wage-laws;
• The rotten fruit evades the spirit of taxation by setting up shell companies in Ireland, tiny islands, Nevada, etc. to hoard billions of un-taxed dollars in these vehicles;
• The BigTech Global Company uses monopoly-like power to control its users behavior and even inserts forms of malware to make the OS perform slower and/or drain the battery to encourage users to upgrade their phone! . . .
>> Remember, freedom (Liberty) requires continual effort lest one becomes enslaved.
Google, to its credit, still provides open source software of the Android OS for anyone to port and modify. It’s called Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Anyone who makes a modest effort can install AOSP on a non-apple device – even many older phones.
There are a myriad of open-source and partial open-source custom ROMs that are often built using AOSP, but not exclusively – Ubuntu Touch, Replicant, Resurrection Remix, PureOS, LineageOS, TizenOS, ParanoidAndroid, KaiOS, PostmarketOS, etc.[2]
One may simply flash a custom ROM on their used or new non-Apple device. Take 30 minutes to read instructions on any number of tech forums such as xda-developers.com, for one example. What you will realize is stable custom ROMS are more secure than native stock OS by Apple and Google. And, one may modify the custom ROMS as any lover of freedom chooses.
There are also devices coming to market that have kill switches that disable cellular tracking by PRISM, etc.: Purism’s Librem 5, Pine64's PinePhone, OpenPandora’s DragonBox, etc. And, these organizations are honorable and community-driven, either partly or entirely.
So, just because a lot of people won’t make the tiny effort to liberate themselves from evil (and continue to justify a “walled garden” implemented by said evil rotten fruit), doesn’t mean the small number of people who choose liberty over security should be sacrificed at the alter of evil.
No laws or regulations are necessary. Vote with your dollars and actions.
Wake the Flock Up, People!
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_custom_Android_distrib...
And, they used craptacular Telegram instead of Signal. Dumb.
If tiktok refused to take down doxing of officials in US, it would get banned.