Apple is Filtering “Jailbreak” Term in the US iTunes Store | Hacker News Reader

Apple is Filtering “Jailbreak” Term in the US iTunes Store

shoutpedia.com

34 pointsausman18 comments

I suspect someone at Apple is snarking surreptitiously, and making an unauthorized statement about how "jail breaking" is a dirty word at Apple, by adding it to the list of expletives Apple probably uses on the site.

You can still search for the term, and matches still come up, even if the word is "censored". Which is a pretty ineffective way of blocking people from finding things that mention 'jailbreak'.

Guess I won't be able to download that awesome AC/DC song then.

Or the Thin Lizzy song. Or the albums of the same name. Or the TV series.

The items in question are still there, it's just the name itself that is getting formatted.

Side note: Why are the post that are giving apple the benefit of the doubt of this being a mistake getting downvoted? Really guys?

AC/DC isn't on the iTunes store anyways. One of the few holdouts.

I'm inclined to believe this is a mistake and not intentional. We're talking about music here, not apps.

I tend to agree that it is a mistake, but I wouldn't be surprised to find it in the App Store soon. What's next? "Also on *d"?

edit: The above should have multiple asterisks, but HN formatting is a mystery to me.

It's not totally surprising, given how Apple's App Review Guidelines already state that "apps or metadata that mentions the name of any other mobile platform will be rejected" (emphasis mine). It's strange that they would actually filter 'jailbreak' out though.

Oh wow they actually went and made that official now? Christ Apple, every time I come up with something that they might be doing in the future it turns out they're doing it worse than expected right now.

There's no excuse whatsoever for that sort of censorship, it's purely anticompetitive. Good job they didn't grab the whole market when they had the chance.

"All the categories are affected with this filter including Apps, songs, albums, podcast episodes, and iTunes U episodes."

Emphasis mine.

Further proof: http://db.tt/OTqocIJJ (apologies, commenting via mobile.)

Oops. Frankly, I don't know how I missed that. This leads to me believe that it was a mistake on Apple's part to censor "jailbreak" in everything outside of apps. Even then, it's a pretty inane decision. Apple won't approve any jailbreak apps in the first place, so why the censorship?

The podcasts and iTunes U are affected by this as well, so it means that Apple stop people from finding content that talks or teaches about jailbreaking as well.

Nothing of value is lost, almost half of those are scams

The reality distortion field is alive and well.

Really, considering their strict policies and controlling nature how could this be a surprise let alone a mistake?

I'm happy to give Apple the benefit of the doubt here, maybe it was one individual working on their own and not part of some "company policy", but I don't really see how you can "mistakenly" add a word to a dictionary.

This is exactly the sort of thing a programmer might add as a joke when demonstrating on a local copy and forget to take out for the live deploy.

Works fine for me. Apps, music, TV shows, podcasts, iTunes U.

fnord

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