My competitor is in this list and I'm not, even though my site is more popular. There even are some small Dutch campings, municipalities and regional football clubs on this list. It's a strange list for sure.
How could they realistically do that?
They could use a similar tool plus human review to maintain the list.
Moderation is a hard problem because it isn't just a matter of someone filtering between the polite posts and the less polite posts, it's a matter of filtering between the polite posts and the content that will sear your soul, no joke.
But that's not what this is. This is just, is the website still there and look correct? With the correct software setup it's roughly a person-month by my estimate to gets eyes on every site in the list.
(Though most people usually don't set write this sort of software very well, making someone laboriously click this, scroll around some, click some more, click a tiny radio button, click the tiny submit button, wait for the next thing to load, etc. It'll be longer & more work with this style. Someday I hope to have the chance to write some sort of classification program and implement the UI I've wanted for a while, which amounts to "right -> ham, left -> spam", and everything as pre-rendered as I can get it before it gets to the human. I'm sure some people out there have done something like this, but it makes me honestly sad how few I've seen.)
That would be a good point if this were the halting problem. It's not. It's a list of domains that you're suggesting to users.
For starters, a VERY basic solution might be to look up the domain name ownership information and see if that has changed. If so, flag for review.
Secondly, you can store the public SSL certificate and make sure that's still the same. If it changes, flag for review.
Thirdly, screencap the site, save it, periodically re-cap and compare how similar the images are. If it changes, flag for review.
> I can't begin to imagine how they would do what you're suggesting.
Did you try?
> They need to detect when a website changes in kind, but ignore day-to-day changes or normal UI revamps.
The solution doesn't need to be perfect, it needs to be good enough.
The only realistic option I can think of is some combination of:
• Make autocomplete operate on a blacklist instead of whitelist, with a more limited goal of only removing e.g. known porn sites.
• Make the list of potential matches machine-generated, without human intervention. (Aside, are we sure the current list isn't just the 250K most-visited sites on the internet, or something like that?)
Either of these would remove culpability since it's no longer a curated list. And yet, would that make it more safe in a meaningful way?
If Apple wants to protect users then autocompleting porn site domains seems like the place to start, not avoid.
The absence of porn domains raises the question of Apple’s intent.
Because if I’m sharing my screen on a business call, and I start typing something into my browsers’s address bar, I don’t want it to autocomplete something nsfw which just happened to share the same first letter.
Furthermore, we now know that in practice "machine-generated" seems to be even worse, because too many people are fooled by the "the machine did it" 'excuse'. (Like you seem to be doing here ?)
For instance : https://thedataist.com/book-review-automating-inequality/
2: Did the owner information change since last time?
2n: No action required. Maybe select some sites randomly to have a human compare, but it's probably fine.
2y: Have a human check the site. Did it simply get purchased by another (similar) organization, or is it no longer relevant to its original purpose?
3: Do the needful.
It might be a list that was made by each company request? Based on some form or authentication or as such? And the companies who didn’t approach Apple aren’t there. Just guessing. But I can imagine Apple doing such hacky things, though most of those remain behind the orchard curtain.