Suspended from Google Play for listing supported subtitle formats
github.com
github.com
10 years ago I was distributing just the apk file. Then I moved to Play store. It turned out that most people on their company owned Android devices don't configure Play Store. App updates are disabled until you log in. So I had to educate my customer employees how to log in to Play Store and install my app. The additional benefit was that people had security updates of Chrome and other apps.
Two months ago my app was suspended after I made all necessary changes to support Android 10. The Gbot claims that background location updates aren't essential for my app. As you may guess I wrote appeal without success. My customers pay mainly for that time report feature but Gbot knows better what my paying customers want.
And I just do not care about securing my customer devices and Play Store any longer. Now I distribute apk files again and train people how to install apk files from unknown sources.
You, a 3rd party developer making custom software products for a mobile platform, are no longer allowed to have customers yourself.
Instead you must grovel and beg and pray that our lords Apple/Google consent to allow you to rent their customers.
This consent can be revoked at any time, you will pay through the nose for it (20%+ of total mobile revenue), and for basically all but the largest of customers - this consent is machine based and you will never be able to get a living person to so much as glance at any content you put into the process.
---
Fuck em both.
I’m glad that I don’t have a direct relationship with shady 3rd party developers.
It amounts to not being able to use features that are available in the API.
Google is LITERALLY a fucking ad company.
Apple is tracking the exact time and location you use any piece of software on their systems (Don't worry guys, it's just for security purposes! /s)
----
I'm no longer sympathetic to the "They're securing my device from the boogeyman!" argument.
It has the same overtures as "Won't anyone think of the children!!!!" in policy debates - It's rhetoric designed to obfuscate the true intentions of the parties involved, and short-circuit real discussion with an immediate emotional response.
Source?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23273247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23281564
True, but it didn't make much difference, since the reports from the thread showed it had a bizarrely short cache time.
>the server didn't keep any logs
Well, that's the rub isn't, it? Part of privacy-centric design is that you shouldn't have to risk such information being exposed or trust such reassurances; if they don't need the information, they shouldn't get it at all. There are privacy-respecting ways to do what they wanted to, which are also more efficient. For example, periodically update the machine's local revoked cert list, and check signatures against that (as several users recommended).
>etc
Was there anything substantively different from my characterization?
>To make sure the certificate hasn’t been revoked, macOS uses OCSP—short for the industry standard Online Certificate Status Protocol—to check its validity.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/mac-certificate-chec...
There is no information tracking the application that is sent.
The protocol is only used to check and see if the developer's certificate is still valid, if the app hasn't been run in some time.
To enable background locations update, a sales rep has to open a check-in screen, wait 10 seconds to see their location on the map and then press the big check-in button. Because people were often forgetting to check-out, my customers requested auto check-out feature which requires background location updates. Once a sales rep leaves the check-in area, background location updates are stopped. Managers and employees see exactly the same time reports. And if some sales rep is suspicious then it is always possible to disable that GPS icon in the quick menu settings after work hours. It is almost like using your batch card to open doors in a workplace.
A popular alternative solution to my app is to use GSP devices which are installed in all corporate cars. And there managers see their employees background location updates 24/7.
So the argument then becomes an appeal to protect less knowledgeable users that would be tricked to enable advanced features for some eye candy. It has some merit; but there has to be some compromise there for advanced users, short of relegating then to APK install with no security updates, like in the Windows days.
I use a burner Huawei for non-essential Android stuff. Every time I click the "Rate App" button on apps, it redirects me to Huawei store instead of Play Store. Every time I click the "Download" or "Install" button on the browser, it sends me to Huawei store. I think we can expect to see more changes in the coming two years as Android keeps updating. Huawei phones up until 2018 are allowed to use the Google SDKs but none are allowed from 2019.
The only one left behind is Samsung, which has the wherewithal to create its own (Apple clone) app store. If they go ahead with that, Google Play will be a fucking joke at that point.
if anything,you're more open to potential exposure of your data ,bad verification practices and CCP intelligence gathering
The new Huawei phones don't have Play store or any Google services.
A huge piece of it is the network effect of starting with a store that lacks a significant number of apps available on the Play store. Sure, a competitor could, over time, grow their store to be competitive, or they could fail to tread water and go the way of Windows phones.
Major difference is that only the Play Store can install apps in the background. That is, unless you root your phone.
A few years ago, I setup my Google My Business listing for my retail location.
Late last year I was trying to do a GSUITE account data export. It requires you to setup 2FA and I couldn't get it to work - so I asked our MSP to help since they help with other stuff. They had better luck, but multiple switching of the 2FA options and recovery emails/phone numbers caused an automatic suspension on the admin account.
I was able to quickly unlock the account with another admin account, but the suspension cascaded to Google My Business, which remains suspended because GSUITE support only support their core apps.
As you can imagine, my appeal went unresponded, and here we are, months later, with no business listing, and literally no ability to contact anyone that can help.
I wonder how many other businesses have stories like this.
I installed a few useful F-Droid apks. Installing from "untrusted" sources seems far more reliable than any "app store". Besides the F-Droid apps I use it like a dumb phone with maps on a different cellular network. I wish there were more reliable sources for apks, like F-Droid, including apks for older Android versions.
You can take it pretty far: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9AgMlHJe7Y
Also wow, I'm guessing you need to adjust the subtitle with every frame, old-school animation style?
https://unanimated.github.io/ts/ts-mocha.htm
https://github.com/TypesettingTools/Aegisub-Motion/wiki/Appl...
Aegisub however has good automation support, and has (had?) a pretty active scripting community. Scripts can do a lot of stuff and often has simple dialog-box UIs. The base scripting support is in Lua, but a lot of scripts are written in a Lua variant called Moonscript. I've never seen it used anywhere else. And, as was mentioned in a sibling comment, there are scripts for importing motion-tracking files into Aegisub.
The ASS format lacks support for a bunch of stuff that people want to do, or the native support is deficient in some manner, so scripting is very important for Aegisub. For example, a line can be given a color gradient by make a one copy of the line for each shade in the gradient (this can be 100+ times). Each copy is then given a different color according to the gradient, and a \clip command is used on each line to only show a 1-2 pixel wide slice of each line. If all those slices are lined up properly and the lines are displayed simultaneously, it gives the impression of being a single line with a color gradient. Tricks like this can actually cause performance problems in rendering the subtitles!
I think this is an interesting little programming niche, but there isn't much complex typesetting being done these days. Tastes have changed, and due to licensed releases there's less need for fansubbing on all but the most niche titles.
Quite impressive, notwithstanding the use of bourgeois harem as example material.
There's a short showcase of them on YouTube (spoilers): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_c-eKTisI0
It's a shame you basically cannot get anything close to the quality of fansubs from any commercial/legal options.
Edit: Are those baked into the video or did they just use the ASS format?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cqqGOvOGfI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvO8kcWFFT0
The actual code for it is looks like this:
00:03:31.485 --> 00:03:31.719 align:start position:0% line:0%
<c.color96D2D3>Hey! nanika ga okoru spe cial </c><c.colorFEFEFE>night</c>
00:03:31.485 --> 00:03:31.719 align:start position:0% line:0%
<c.color96D2D3>Hey! nanika ga okoru spe cial </c><c.colorFEFEFE>night</c>
00:03:31.719 --> 00:03:32.486 align:start position:0% line:0%
<c.color96D2D3>Hey! nanika ga okoru special night</c>
00:03:31.719 --> 00:03:32.486 align:start position:0% line:0%
<c.color96D2D3>Hey! nanika ga okoru special night</c>
And again, set language to Japanese.
It’s also a format no fansubber ever heard of.
The fansubbing community is so annoying with its insistence on terrible formats. The community has somehow standardized on 10bit hevc with ASS subtitles. That makes releases so hard to play.
Now try running that on a Chromecast >_>
The fansubbing community is just so stuck in weird formats which provide no benefit except a virtual moat preventing newcomers.
Which is expected, considering the hardware just isn’t powerful enough for ASS subtitles (to get good performance, even on a desktop you’ll want a recent CPU and at least 1-2GB of RAM): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromecast#Model_comparison
It suggests that the character itself is writing the English text, or that it magically appears.
If it were simple subtitles, it would be clear that these were translations, and that in the actual story there is only Japanese text.
Notwithstanding the impressive technological nature of it, but that also seems the reason they did so. Methinks it's a case of using cool technology because one can, even though it doesn't produce a more convenient result, however cool it might look.
Your argument kinda sounds right when you just imagine it... but doesn't hold weight once you actually experience them.
If this text isn't done like this then you have to either omit it entirely, possibly leaving out relevant details, or just put them next to the normal subtitles. The latter doesn't work at all for me, because I can't distinguish which text relates to what quick enough.
For instance translating the text on a piece of paper by writing the translation above the piece of paper.
How it is written in this case, in charcoal, on the paper, in perspective, seamlessly blending into the paper, makes it seem as if, for whatever reason, the same text was written twice on the paper in English and Japanese.
It's even more unnerving when the text be written and the English pencil charcoal appears out of thin air next to the Japanese charcoal that emerges from a pencil.
Fansubbers work for the shows they love while the commercial distributors just pick the cheapest option to get the thing done ASAP, don't matter how sh*tty the result is. There is no chance for quality here.
The same happens with Blurays x rips streams: piracy is the best option (no DRM, no unskippable screens, no ads, no regional restrictions).
But also, Crunchyroll uses the fansub toolset and SSA subtitles.
Case in point, I remember watching "Is the Order a Rabbit S3" in Crunchyroll, the English subtitles are pretty basic but the Portuguese (Brazillian) subtitles are great, including things like Karaoke in opening and ending.
I wouldn’t call subtitles that require about a GB of RAM to process and don’t even get 20fps on an i7-6700 "quality". That’s just a bunch of shitty hacks people accept because there’s no alternative.
ASS is a horrible format (three implementations, only a single well-working implementation, performance hungry, etc), and almost all of the benefits of ASS can also be had with e.g. TTML without the issues.
And stuff like rendering the same line hundreds of times to get a gradient effect or blurred background is absolutely wasteful, especially because it’s just a hack to work around the broken ASS limitations.
But now that HS is gone, I'm not sure what's happening to the scene. There is a power vacuum and I'm not sure if anyone took up the space.
Mostly they seem to work on shows that haven't been licensed by official simulcast sources, or that are licensed but aren't being released on a timely schedule (ahem Netflix), or projects that for whatever reason they think the official releases haven't done justice to.
Those are just "SSA" subtitles. The difference mattered (ASS was an "Advanced SSA") once but now people just call it "ASS" as a joke. So Google is sort-of right, he could leave it out of the description.
I doubt this guy knows this since it's impossible he implemented SSA on his own due to how complex it is.
The Play Store was supposed to be only an interface for searching and installing packages, like aptitude or yum.
Then it started taking arbitrary decisions "for the benefit of the users" (of course, Google always knows what's best for its users, even more than the users themselves).
Then, like the guy who loves the smells of his own farts even when everybody around him disagrees, they decided that their process was indeed so good that it could have been completely automated, with almost no human touch and no possibility for developers and users to appeal.
And now it ended up being this Kafka novel where you're stuck in the gears of the process and you don't know why, nor when a real human will actually take a look at your case.
And, in the meantime, you lose traffic and users, but Google doesn't seem to care.
Time to start boycotting the Play Store. There's plenty of alternative stores, it's easy to set up one yourself for your apps, and you can always distribute your apk files through your website.
" Yup, that's about how much effort I expected them to put into their app store: absolutely nothing beyond cheap, automated heuristics. Why invest in a decent ecosystem when you're one of the two options in town?
I'm about an inch away from throwing my phone in the river and switching to a GPS-only device for navigating in my car. All the convenience a mobile device offers can't make up for the crap software experience you're forced into—literally ransoming the use of your phone through their company store. "
Me too! I have ordered and am awaiting my Pine Phone for this exact reason.
F-Droid provides those features only if you're able to root your phone, which manufacturers actively try to stop users from doing. Also, rooting your phone opens it up to vulnerabilities and exploits.
But there are (a) services I cannot turn off and (b) apps I really need on android.
Perhaps F-Droid would help with (a) but not (b)
SO I plan to have a cheep android for the one app I cannot do without and the Pine phone for everything else...
But time will tell
They fixed it in later versions, but I still have a "penetration" class because I'm immature that way.
I.e. It has little to do with profanity but a lot to prevent someone from making screnshot of a loadout with a gun that looks like MP5, is named by them as "MP5 whatever" and behaves like an MP5 in some type of legal action?
H&K has an US trademark consisting of just "MP5" in relation to a ton of things (though not video games!) so they could at least try make a case out of it not being purely nominative use and tie AB in court, if they wished. It would be PR suicide, but still, not the most stupid thing they have done.
Though, interestingly, in Modern Warfare (2019), many guns have two names; for example, the MP5 is also called SMG Charlie (as in, NATO phonetic alphabet for C). I kind of got the impression that it was laying groundwork for a long-term goal of removing the actual names of the guns; possibly due to licensing fees, or maybe to divorce the ugly reality of killing with video game killing, I don't know.
I remember being denied to post a forum post containing the phrase “tardive dyskinesia”, as it appears that it rejected anything with the string “tard” in it.
I'm not sure as to whom they think to be helping with that, but it's entirely possible that their advertisement revenue will actually suffer, if the string “tard” be found on their pages.
The neural network may have taken millions of core-hours to learn to be as dumb (here) as a blind keyword search.
I worked at a place that had a profanity filter in two parts.
The first part was in C, several pages of if (!strcmp(x, a)) return 0;
After all that, it then invokes popen() to ssh to another machine and run a shell script there, which contains several more pages of string comparisons, this time in shell.
1) They got tired of having to modify C code and wait for the deploy cycle to modify the filter
2) Using, for example, the database would be more work than calling a shell script. On top of that, it might actually be beyond the abilities of the programmer involved.
3) The C code executes on an arbitrary machine. Hence the ssh to a specific machine, so that the shell script would only have to be maintained in one place
One man's profanity is not another man's profanity.
Of course, the personality trait of desiring censoring “bad words” seems to highly correlate with a belief in objective morality. — the others are wrong about what they find profane!
https://www.vice.com/en/article/dyzamj/a-profanity-filter-ba...
Once I confirm to them I'm an adult, I should be able to choose to see everything.
What made this particularly egregious is that the name in question: "Hui" - wasn't even a swear word in either his own native language - Chinese - nor in English. But it closely resembles a Russian profanity. Turned out that the filter was "multilingual", and applied rules for all languages to all posts...
That seems pretty unlikely to have happened here; I don't know the Russian word in question, but the Chinese "hui" rhymes with English "clay". (It also rhymes with the more sensibly spelled Chinese "wei"; the 'e' is only omitted when the syllable begins with a consonant. Compare "feng shui".) I'd be surprised if that were a possible reading of any Russian that might be transliterated "hui".
As to why the filter was applied to Latin characters - I'm not sure, but I'm assuming that's to prevent people from using translit to sneak in profanities. Of course, this ends up being a pointless game of whack-a-mole - there's so many possible ways to spell something like that with Unicode...
Looks like Russians and Americans can find common ground on thinking Chinese last names look like "penis", even if we're making fun of Wang and they're making fun of Hui.
This still shows up in some contexts - e.g. Й, like Ё, isn't used in bullet lists; try it in Word - it'll go from И straight to К.
"King's Throne: Game of Lust.", with advertised gameplay content such as "I, [the King], shall interrogate this female prisoner privately in my bed chambers", is one of the top advertised games on google play.
Got it.
And if this really is the case then stop complaining about it.
And can we please stop turning every discussion, no matter how trivial, into a discussion about rights? Did I say anything that would suggest that I want to take any rights from someone?
I'd rather be in that situation because there would be something I could do to make progress, even if I didn't agree with the decision.
In my case, I have no idea how long this is going to take - and I've seen horror stories on the Apple Developer forums of people being in review for months. It's also clear that a person hasn't actually been reviewing my app for 2 weeks straight, even though its been in the "In Review" state for that long. There's just not enough functionality in the app -- and previous updates to this app have only spent an hour or two in review. Maybe it's just my personality, but waiting in limbo with no end in sight really drives me nuts.
EDIT: to be clear, neither situation is good, but if I had to pick one, I'd pick the former.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/gkvic1/podcast_add...
You can ask for an expedited review, which I did on day 6. I got a form letter back saying that my request was "escalated for continued handling". But it doesn't seem to have made any difference.
How To Make A Mathematically Perfectly Infuriating Traffic Jam 101 :(
> [...] [M]y request was "escalated for continued handling". But it doesn't seem to have made any difference.
Your status was upgraded to "waiting faster" :D
Hides
I re-built it with a newer version of Xcode, bumped the version the number, resubmitted. It was approved the next day.
What the fuck is "profanity"? Are we a religious society? Why shouldn't we able to say "ass" (!) or show nipples??
The ban on porn is defensible outside of any moral framework because once you allow porn then all what's left is porn (although it would be useful to think about why that is).
But "profanity"? Come on.
That said, Android seems to be doing better outside the US than in the US.
I wouldn't be very surprised if US revenue was dominant within the Android BU (or whatever they call it today).
Last time I heard (probably outdated) there were at least 2 billion non-US Google Play devices active; compared to the 120 million US Google Play devices figure that's widely available.
Also: Wouldn't surprise me if Google makes more from licensing the Google Play store to non-US markets than they do from the Google Play sales revenue globally.
Therefore, it is commercially more viable to keep the authoritarian happy.
(Of course the actual app in question is still completely innocent, because Google's vetting process is a trash fire.)
I have no objection.
> Every culture has its "bad words" which are forbidden to use in polite company.
I'm not so sure that that is true.
I do not think there is but a single word in the Dutch language that cannot be featured even on children's programming. Some cultures have a concept of “taboo words”, and others seem to lack it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_profanity
Also this entry is interesting:
> Kankerlijer means "cancer sufferer". It is a strong insult: an example of its legal status can be found in a 2008 court case, in which using the word kankerlijer to insult a police officer was cited as a serious offense.
Though, little surprise if "offensive to an authority figure" is a lower bar than "offensive to parents"
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_profanity
Absolutely. They simply feature such swearwords as well as genitals.
> > Kankerlijer means "cancer sufferer". It is a strong insult: an example of its legal status can be found in a 2008 court case, in which using the word kankerlijer to insult a police officer was cited as a serious offense.
> Though, little surprise if "offensive to an authority figure" is a lower bar than "offensive to parents"
It isn't about offending, but insulting.
It isn't legal in the Netherlands to insult police officers in function regardless of how polite the language is. One can't walk up to one and say “I find your face most æsthetically displeasing.” for instance.
Certainly not a law I agree with, in any case, and thankfully it's becoming more and more of a dead letter, but occasionally people are prosecuted for it.
As parent comment says, profanity seems to be mostly a religious issue. I can say "fuck" on TV, or in my novel, or even in my Hacker News comment. But I doubt I'd get away with such language in church, or a show I wanted to sell to a Puritanical USA audience.
None of that has anything to do with slurs, which are much more widely agreed as "wrong." You can reasonably expect a service or file extension that turned out to accidentally be a slur would get a lot more attention, unlike "ASS"
For example, you can find instances of social groups that:
1. are not religious, but recognize the concept of profanity.
2. do not recognize some slurs as profane.
3. are religious, but do not recognize the same profanity as other social groups that belong to the same religion.
In the same sense that Thanksgiving is a holiday of the American civic religion, Martin Luther King, Jr. is a martyred saint of that religion. He has statues and a day of remembrance; any attempt to separate this from religious observance is going to have its work cut out for it.
I expect this will be interpreted as disrespecting the tenets of that religion, but I revere the Reverend Doctor and abstain from saying slurs out of piety, as well as ordinary fear.
I offer this as evidence: if the prohibition were part of a more general idea that we shouldn't insult other people, the use-mention distinction would still apply. Yet many lecturers have been dismissed for mentioning the n-slur, without directing it at anyone. The only conclusion which fits the facts is religious taboo.
Reddit and 8chan allow the creation of pornography subboards and never even approached that state.
It's basically a "mini internet".
[edit]The dangers of such filters can be observed at this link http://bash.org/?178890 [/edit]
Surely other companies can be more efficient with the 30% cut or less that Google takes, without forcing users to put up with the poor service that's exemplified by the article in the OP.
How does Apple do it with macOS? What about Microsoft with Windows?
Surely if there was real competition in the mobile app distribution market, we could see how efficient competitors can be with that 15% or less cut compared to Apple.
> and has a really good review process (updates are reviewed by humans within a day or two)
In this very thread, an iOS developer is lamenting the fact that their iOS app has been held in limbo for weeks by Apple reviewers[1]. It's responsible for 100% of their income, and Apple's arbitrary rules and reviewers are cutting into that.
That doesn't instill confidence in me that Apple has a really good review process at all. To me, it shows that we need real competition in the mobile app distribution space.
The fact that no other actor has done that speaks to the fact that it's probably not as straightforward as you might think. Go one step further and take any product in killedbygoogle.com and see how many other actors have benefited from recreating and living off a better version of any of those services... I'm curious how you think that breaking down Google or Apple would help us the end users in this case? Surely a smaller company with less assets/employees will spend even less time doing manual reviews for the same amount of apps.
Meanwhile while HN seems focused on gov to put pressure on big tech to break, I keep getting reminders that my family of 5 using video conferencing for school/work is about to hit its monthly data cap of 1.2TB imposed by Comcast in the middle of the pandemic...
https://translate.google.com/?sl=lv&tl=en&text=ass%20nazis&o...
Never appealed since it's mostly a time sink with Google when you're nobody.
I imagine whoever is in charge of the review machine, though, reads Kafka for enjoyment and inspiration.
It's happened to two of my clients in the past 6 months based on small infractions in the app metadata, but no issue with the app itself.
In both cases the app was taken down with no advance notice, and eventually reinstated after an appeal and several very stressful days of waiting.
Apple seems to be very selective during the approval process, and is often inconsistent so a minor update can get rejected for something that was approved many times before. I guess different people review and interpret the rules differently so maybe this is unavoidable.
Google (from what I can tell) seems to take a very different approach and relies much more on automated enforcement. The process is on average much lower friction for the developer, but getting previously approved app listings removed at any time without warning is not a good experience.
Edit: I forgot to mention that you can't actually edit the metadata while the app is suspended and re-submit it for review. The only two choices are to appeal and edit the description after the app is reinstated, or create a completely new app listing.
They were the champions of the open web for a long time. What happened?
Because that's what you say when you're the underdog.
Remember Apple's 1984 ad?
Microsoft's "a computer on every desk"?
The tech industry seems to support a rotating cast of monopolists riding atop whatever gate-keeping function emerges, each one holding on as long as it can until replaced by something that ends up looking a lot like the last top dog.
Corpo structure seems to have something to do with it, separate things into categories, then teams get categories and optimize locally without taking bigger picture into account (or even knowing what the picture is). Some regulations, maybe some pressures from some agencies about which they are not allowed to talk about. Etc.
But at some point I have to wonder about the mind of someone decisive in the company when "are we the baddies" question appears. Do they rationalize and think that "well, we need to do this because security botnets blahblah users have no idea what we are dealing with here and it's for their own good even if they don't understand it yada yada", or do they just don't give a shit. Or maybe it's like with me disliking my government - I definitely don't like it but I don't feel like fighting that giant machine at the moment, I can't do anything on my own, it would require cooperation and a plan and I have some stuff to do.
In this specific case and most of the time where Google's complete lack of support shows up it's because having manual review costs money and the process that screws the app developer is easier than having a secondary process that needs more people to decide if the first automated or rote manual scan made a mistake.
It's simple survival of the fittest. The lion who feels compassion for his prey will not pass his genes to the next generation.
Ooooh. I know this one! Because that's what VCs want. AirBNB, Uber, Postmates, Google, Facebook, Apple.
VCs want to invest in winner-takes-all platforms and markets with incredibly strong network effects. But don't say any of that out loud: https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/08/07/google-doc...
All these people rushing in to Silicon Valley with hat-in-hand going from VC to VC talking about how they care so much about the user or the product. It's all a giant colossal fucking sham. You're there to become a billionaire. Can we all stop dancing around this fact already? Paul Graham and his fucking essays. The pretentious VC Twitterverse. It's always been about the money. Facebook's earliest slide deck tells the story of how they are going to harvest their users' private data and offer it up to advertisers:
https://app.slidebean.com/p/s15UZQkE7T/Facebooks-original-pi...
This is back when they were still "The Facebook" and a tiny startup. They didn't suddenly become evil and greedy. Greed and evil was the plan. It's right there. Google is no different.
Yes of course you can tell the tale how it's not ever enough, how money equals power and people want power, but I don't really buy that. These are highly intelligent and creative individuals. They probably also know that power is responsibility and have enough of that.
Additional millions/billions have zero impact on their life and I really doubt many of them playing a game between themselves about who has the biggest number. Popular media probably care more about that.
If you want to scream at the rich, I think you won't find names of those most interesting in any rankings and not much in tech. They have they patents, oil wells, gov contracts, connections, HFTs and wealth well hidden from the public eye.
Most of companies you list offered something that people wanted and that's why they got a lot of money*. That's how the money is supposed to work. Compare it to trading companies that got money from banks which got money from Fed which was created out of thin air. Those at the top of banks and big funds effectively get money from everyone else, without providing them any value, without their consent. Even innocent real estate investment seem to involve more evil and greed than making a and running a huge company without pretty much any realistic vacation.
I'm not saying that your point is completely without merit, there is a lot of greed especially in the startup world. I just think that's a huge oversimplification.
* more realistically they won at something new that was growing fast
It was a con.
People fell for it.
Lesson of life learned, so I implemented ways to keep in contact with my users in case of sudden ban and ask them to move to a new app or another channel.
> Apps must not present themselves as a spying or secret surveillance solution.
If your application could be accurately described as a "spy cam", it's likely that you were already in violation of their stalkerware policies.
Apple was going to remove the app itself.
If there is enough of other people who are annoyed by this, can we please start doing something about this?
I can't easily find the exact passage, but The Better Angels of Our Natue talks about how it's improper in English culture to use a knife to help eat peas. He credits these kind of arbitrary rules for helping reduce violent impulses. (Note: I read the book a while back so I'm probably misrepresenting the author's point in some way, but I think that's the general idea.)
Where I am from prostitution is not illegal. On line tools are a real boon for the workers.
Pornography is entirely normal, and pornographers need all the protection other workers have, attitudes like this make that hard.
I really thought we were over prurience! Silly me.
Silly Google. If you are going to be Evil (TM) at least be grown up about it!
I would be furious if this was coming from Apple. And judging from the current Apple I would not be surprised if they will tell you to not use the "ASS" label in your support format.
https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.22.3?ven=Tanakh:_The_Holy_Sc...
Some of the asses in the bible talk!
Same issue with third party sellers on Amazon getting destroyed when Amazon irrationally shuts down their products or entire account.
It's crazy. This has been screaming for government regulation for years.
- playing card name,
- tennis rule
- or some medical advice on acetylsalicylic acid (Acetylsalicylsäure/ASS)
and derived tradenames that also leave german language context as tradenames and the likes.
Right now, companies like Google can completely ignore customer service because they are a monopoly. And they do this, because it saves them billions of dollars. If they had actual competition, they would spend more on customer support because it would be a point of contention, but since they have no competition, they just let bots handle everything and they completely ignore their customers who have no choice but to continue to use their products. This is a form or monopolistic behavior that needs to be addressed by regulations.
Monopolies should be forced to spend money on real humans or some form of effective customer support, with a regulated SLA. It's the only way to keep these companies in check once they have completely starved any form of competition away from them.
Seriously, "ass" is probably one of the mildest of vulgar words.
And of course Google won’t even tell me the exact reason why they made a decision, so I can’t do anything about it. Their policies are super vague and broad, so in some sense almost anything could be interpreted to be against their guidelines as well. And they told me to not even try creating another account with either another name or email, because they’ll find them and block them as well.
Given there isn’t really a true alternative to google ads (no other company is allowed to run ads on Google results), and they dominate 80%+ of the search market. Actions like what happened to me, especially without a clear explanation, definitely feels like an abuse.
Being a bit cynic, if I had to guess the real reason behind the suspension of my account, I would say it’s because I didn’t implement almost any of their BS “enhancement” recommendations, which really were just thinly disguised efforts to get me to increase my spend.
Google aren't running AI on these listings. Its just a regex and perhaps some graph queries to pick up suspicious activity. I doubt any appeal will work unless the social media angle gets large enough. Maybe they should try twitter as well.
Think yourself lucky in these circumstances that you even know the actual reason for the suspension and not just some generic message like "it violates our T&Cs".
Nothing to worry about, they also expect this from you, simply act first and if you are doing it wrong they will act...and ban...and disable your account...wait.
(They are the big, you are the small, they can, you don't)
In the meantime, they're doing this.
(And no saying that App Store reviews are perfect by any stretch)
At the very least, incorrect (frivolous) DCMAs need to lead to huge payouts for the victims.
There's no planet on which Apple or Google will voluntarily give up the revenue stream produced by their respective app stores.
*If you're going to downvote me, at least provide some evidence that I'm off base. Google and Apple both refuse to allow other app stores and there's absolutely 0 recourse that doesn't involve the government stepping in. F-droid and the rest don't cover anything approaching "all devices".
Also, maintain a public denylist of packages with an transparent process for overriding or correcting the list?
see https://grahamcluley.com/blacklist-whitelist-terminology/
I would've gone with yeslist/nolist - due to being shorter in writing and speech.
But, should you instead mean "I don't like it so I'll ridicule it," well, I can't please everybody. Sorry.
Are you in the habit of reporting serious crimes to the nearest advertising agency?
Can you explain why thats not the first thing that came to mind? Why are our realities so different?
https://nypost.com/2021/01/21/twitter-sued-for-allegedly-ref...
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-exec-our-40-billion-s...
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=naked+yoga
There's absolutely nothing wrong with videos showing the human form, but people doing yoga without wearing a single thing—on YouTube—is definitely going to surprise some people. I'm honestly quite surprised that Google permits it, but I'm glad that they do.
Someone has to challenge the ridiculous American cultural taboos surrounding the human form. I think YouTube is a terrible dangerous tarpit of censorship, a sort of societal "attractive nuisance", but they should be credited with challenging ridiculous unnecessary censorship norms when they take steps in the right direction for once.
It seems to be a subject that often makes the U.S.A.-man extremely uncomfortable, especially when it pertains children, whereas other crimes such as child murder are seemingly discussed and shown with little issue.
"No violent rape", "no violent murder" not so much. These are fairly subjective, and even tautological.
Not saying it's not a funny paradox, just trying to figure out why.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190503/17322942136/conte...
Anything related to sex, nudity and swearwords is held to the utmost standards of censorship.
Even the many developing nations that have very strict moral standards on such matters seem to have no problem featuring it as an evil in fiction, in the same way the U.S.A. might feature murder as an evil in fiction, for the point is for the audience to condemn it.
But rape cannot actually be shown, as that would be too sensitive.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RapeIsASpecialKi...
It's a rather interesting thing. It does not seem to be entirely isolated to the U.S.A., but definitely more common there. I remember reading an interview with a Dutch criminal defence attorney, who talked about the principle that every man deserves a trial and the best legal defence, but also said that even though he personally feels that a man suspected of a sex crime should get a legal advocate, he would personally præfer it not be he, as he had moral problems with it that would make him less effective.
This was a man that regularly defended murderers, who no doubt confess to the crime within the seal of attorney–client confidentiality to him, but sex crimes are the limit? — it seems an odd standard to me.
Which was exactly the argument that the Dutchmen in the comments raised, so the mentality seems les common in the Netherlands, but not nonexistent either.
The rules, of course, exist as a reflexion of the sensibilities of the people.
It's similar to how in Germany anything related to the Third Reich is treated with the utmost sensitivity, with many rules; these rules exist as the people willed it so. The end result was that the videogame Wolfenstein 3D had to be significantly edited ere it could be legally sold on the German market, as it depicted Third Reich soldiers in accurate uniforms, which was considered too sensitive, even though they are the opposing side the player is fighting against.
I admittedly don't watch a whole lot of TV, so I may be off base here, but my impression is that, here in the USA, on TV, onscreen depictions of rape are more common than onscreen depictions of positive sexual activity.
I must say that I find it rather tame compared to Japanese fiction.
Though, I suppose there the perspective is invariably reversed. It is almost always the perspective character that is the defending party, so perhaps it doesn't have the same influence.
It's an interesting difference. I find that in U.S.A. romance fiction, more often than not, the protagonist is the party who falls in love, and the story is about the protagonist courting and succeeding in winning the love interest, whereas in Japanese romance fiction, the protagonist usually starts out strongly disliking the love interest, who is the offensive party, but eventually is won over.
I find that say, Boston Legal is essentially a clichéd Japanese teenage girl's romance fiction from the other perspective. If one think of Alan Shore's many love interests as the protagonists of such stories, who are initially quite disgusted and annoyed by his antics and sexual harassment, but more and more find themselves falling for him, it's actually quite similar but reversed.
It's definitely shades all over the world. I only really know about Japan's culture 12th hand honestly so the only thing that's really filtered down is that it seems kind of repressed in public having gotten a big infusion of US laws and ideas post WW2 and there's some issues with creeps in public?
> I find that in U.S.A. romance fiction, more often than not, the protagonist is the party who falls in love
I think a lot of that is due to the target audience being largely women so it's written from and towards what the audience wants to read. Most TV and movie romances show a predominantly predatory almost (sometimes explicitly) coercive romance especially in media aimed at men.
Japan is a civil law country with an entirely different legal system than the U.S.A..
Japanese law knows the principle of “one witness is no witness” as many others do. In particular in sexual assault cases it is often the word of the accuser vs. that of the accused, in Japan as a matter of law that cannot result into a conviction absent further evidence, in the U.S.A. it can.
Another issue is that in Japan, confessions are treated far more seriously and the police is permitted to interrogate in quite extreme ways, often without a defence attorney.
So it often comes down to willpower, whether the defendant can keep protesting innocence when being sleep deprived and mentally worn down, without such a confession, a conviction is almost impossible, but with it, it is assured.
> I think a lot of that is due to the target audience being largely women so it's written from and towards what the audience wants to read. Most TV and movie romances show a predominantly predatory almost (sometimes explicitly) coercive romance especially in media aimed at men.
And in Japanese fiction the target audience's sex is irrelevant for this.
Romance fiction targeted at females will typically feature a female protagonist who initially despises the love interest, but is eventually won over, often still having rather mixed feelings about the latter.
This story is more or less the same in male-targeted Japanese romance fiction, except the protagonist is now male.
The only real difference is that, quintessentially, the female protagonist is conflicted and indecisive, on some level attracted to the love interest, but on another considering him very unsuitable, and in male-targeted stories, the protagonist is implausibly dense and fails to realize the love interest is in love with him, despite all the cues obvious to the audience.
One of the longest running dramas on American television is Law & Order, a crime drama. The most popular spinoff of this series, Law & Order:SVU has focused on this topic for the entirety of twenty-two (!!!!!!) season run. That's nearly 500 episodes of detectives investigating and describing some pretty brutal rapes and sexual assaults of people of all ages, genders, and walks of life.
Pretty much any crime drama is going to hit on this subject pretty regularly. Based on the stuff I've seen on shows that run on broadcast TV during primetime, there is not really much taboo around the subject. Comedian John Mulaney has a very popular skit that focuses entirely on the ridiculous things that are said on this subject during day-time TV.
As I find that a great deal of violence is often shown rather than merely referenced, but rape never is. This also seems to apply to The Practice, with which I am more versed.