Apple bans an iPhone e-reader because it provides access to the Kama Sutra | Hacker News Reader

Apple bans an iPhone e-reader because it provides access to the Kama Sutra

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82 pointstechnologizer47 comments

Stories like this make me wonder what a younger Steve Jobs would think of today's Apple.

The company's 1984 ad now seems a bit ironic.

What's the line from Dark Knight? Every hero either dies young, or lives long enough to become the villain. The older I get, the more I see that pattern replicated.

I guess that makes Bill Gates the exception to the rule.

How? He was certainly decried as a villain by many.

All the people who benefit from his philanthropy?

charity to third world countries doesn't decrease net suffering. when you save a starving man and he has 5 children, all of whom lead miserable lives are you ahead or behind?

charity is about signaling your fitness to others. (like everything else)

You're being downvoted because, by your logic, genocide can decrease net suffering. I'm not sure if that's incorrect, but I'm sure that no one likes hearing that.

I think there comes a point where you have to stop using quantitative measures of happiness or suffering and just commend anyone who makes a genuine effort to do something for what they think is right.

charity is about signaling your fitness to others

While this is undoubtedly a factor, it fails to be a complete explanation, given that much charity is anonymous, and anonymous charity has no obvious utility for signaling. It would also imply that those who are happily married would tend to be significantly less charitable, which AFAIK is not true.

you're making the mistake of thinking that we're fitness maximizers rather than adaptation executers. We don't stop engaging in fitness related activities just because they dont have any utility in our current situation.

Not everyone in the third world is starving. If you give out medicine and a poor person survives and has children, who also survive and live relatively normal lives, then I view that as a net gain. It's a mistake to simplify charity to 'giving starving people food.' Gates does a lot of work in healthcare, financial assistance, disaster relief, and even charity work here in the US. Most of the beneficiaries of these efforts may be impoverished, but that does not mean that they can't lead fulfilling lives.

A number of Gates foundation efforts are toward decreasing the misery of those children. I've also been impressed by the large number of micro-grants given to researchers for far out ideas. That kind of charity takes a page out of the positive Black Swan theory -- if you play a lot of small bets in a field where some random finding has a huge impact, you're maximizing your upside. Your comment makes it sound like the Gates foundation is just setting up food kitchens.

Gosh, I hope that you're trolling. Otherwise, that's a very lonely and unhappy way to view the world. It's also an incredible misinterpretation of modern philanthropy.

Charitable organizations like the Gates foundation aren't interested in quick "band-aid" fixes, for exactly the problem you raised. They're interested in long-term sustainable programs that don't just help today, but also improve life for future generations.

A good example is malaria eradication. The Gates foundation has targeted malaria for complete destruction on a global scale. This means assisting current victims, yes. However, if they meet their goal even partially, the lives of future generations will be improved. Permanently.

A good anecdote about Bill Gates is when Douglas Adams went to solicit funds for a Mountain Gorilla conservation program. Gates asked how much it would cost. Adams started giving him estimates for the first year, and then Gates cut him off. He said, "No. How much to solve the Mountain Gorilla problem. Forever."

That's the current attitude. If it doesn't work past the current generation, it's probably not worth doing. We've acknowledged that, and have moved on.

the amount of funds being devoted to actual philanthropy vs the kind of band aid charity I'm talking about is like david and goliath. charity is a huge industry.

That's a great anecdote. I did a Google search to get more info on that meeting but couldn't find anything. How did you come by it?

You're separating Gates from his company. Microsoft started off as a fresh and exciting company, and it's gotten a bit stinky. So his case is valid.

All companies, given enough time, become stinky. Google already has a malodourous air about it. That Gates built one that still exists, that was formed 34 years ago in the tech space, deserves some measure of respect.

Google was on my mind when I wrote this. They've already lost it.

Microsoft isn't necessarily worthy of contempt, but I don't respect what they do now. They've lost it. Apple hasn't, at least not yet.

That's exactly what they are saying. The original point was that you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain. Someone ventured Gates as a possible exception, but if you look solely at Gates the businessman, he follows the rule too. I'm not sure who you're disagreeing with here.

Let's not forget about Bill Gates' famous 1976 letter to the Homebrew Computer Club http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V2_...

I thought the punchline rather was that he sometimes was considered a villain when he was young(er) and maybe less so now.

precisely - sometimes garbage just rises to the top. Started out as a villain, became more of a villain, does the world "a solid" by redistributing some of the wealth he essentially bled from it! In the words of alan partidge circa knowing me knowing you: "What a nice man".

Apple seems to have drifted away from it's carefully trod line of empowering and protecting users into the realm of protecting users from themselves.

I tend to think that Apple signed some of it's soul away when making media deals and situations like this may be a part of those legal agreements.

Not to troll but I think Microsoft started focusing on it's business to business dealings more than on it's users at one point and eventually became what it did.

Unfortunately this is a common pattern for successful corporations. I wonder if it is driven purely by fear (of lawsuit?) or by the types of executives you get when you reach a certain size.

Apple's followed an unusual path because their current tyrannies are much different from typical tech tyrannies. This decision doesn't help them as a company, and it doesn't hedge any corporate maneuver of theirs. It seems absolutely ridiculous and stupid. It implies that the procedure they're using is fucked up on some level.

While that's outrageous and really pisses me off, it also gives me hope that Apple will find a way to fix this problem without damaging the idealism of their company regarding their products. This isn't stagnation of thought. It's outright insanity. Perhaps it's curable.

I don't think what you and others are implying is the case at all, I think it's pretty clear that the app store is being mismanaged and that the approval process is severely broken, but I don't think Apple is imposing it's oppressive will upon the masses. If that were the case, I think they would be more consistent.

I guess the real question is, did the other ebook readers currently in the App Store that allow access to the same material slip through the cracks, or was this a case of an over zealous App Store employee making a mistake?

I've been thinking this since before this case. It's not just the isolated cases that make me think it, but also:

- The NDA that lasted way too long and frustrated a lot of people working on articles, books, or projects they wanted to open-source.

- The fact that these app store rejection stories have been happening for a long time now and Apple has apparently done little to address them.

- The fact that there is evidently no good appeal process.

- That small developers get shafted while big developers get there apps in. Why was the Kindle accepted and Eucalyptus not? Maybe it was that Kindle got sent to a lenient reviewer and Eucalyptus to a strict one, but the fact that Amazon is a large company and Eucalyptus appears to have a single developer seems more likely.

"(...) but the fact that Amazon is a large company and Eucalyptus appears to have a single developer seems more likely."

I think that's nonsense. There are a lot of small-shop ebook readers on the iPhone, Stanza and eReader are two that come to mind, but there are many more.

I'm not at all surprised by this kind of controlling behaviour from Apple. That's how they've always been.

Next: Apple removes MobileSafari from iPhone because they discovered users could visit pornographic websites.

You can disable Safari with iPhone's restrictions. Apparently the new 3.0 firmware will allow apps to be rated Explicit and restricted like music. Once the new firmware is released, these stories will probably go away (or be replaced with stories about apps being unfairly marked as explicit).

Why would people complain about apps being marked explicit "unfairly"? Unless one is trying to sell apps specifically to children I doubt that a tag of explicit will do much to hurt sales. I'd imagine it might even help, the same way some people assume a rated R movie is by definition more interesting than a PG-13.

The developer's blog article is worth a read: http://www.blog.montgomerie.net/whither-eucalyptus

Since the rejection is based on the results of a search, it looks like a deliberate attempt to torpedo the review process - maybe on the basis that they don't want users going to content that isn't monetizable?

Perhaps a good response would be to put apple on the spot by 'complaining' that Safari (or some other iPhone app) gives access to salacious parts of the Bible or some other cultural shibboleth. With cases like these, Apple is setting themselves up for a class action suit or FTC review. Given that people pay for the development tools, these kind of rejections seem like a deliberate restraint of trade.

Doubt it - I have a reader on my iPhone (Stanza) that can download free eBooks just like this application.

The best word to describe Apple's approval process is Kafkaesque. It's not their rules that are the problem; it is the total internal inconsistency.

True enough. I've given up trying to figure them out, and instead am thanking myself for not getting caught up in gold rush fever. I'm too thin-skinned to deal with this sort of thing.

This will probably be a good thing for the app in the long run.

- Eventually it will get into the app store

- All the publicity, fovorable reviews, and outrage over it will probably spur quite a few purchases / downloads. Maybe enough to make a top 10 list.

Tuth be known, I couldn't help wondering if the author truly was outraged, or if he was just trolling for publicity. I mean, it would have been five minutes work to add a filter to remove Karma Sutra from the list of books, yet instead he preferred to enter a back-and-forth with Apple, a no-win situation, instead of making the quick mod and getting his app out there.

Of course, I know that we hackers do like to take a stand for our priciples, so maybe he has a more altruistic motivation, but considering that he takes pains to add the possibility to register to be notified when the app comes out on his website (something which would take way longer to code than to filter the book in the first place), I have my doubts.

What about the other companies which don't have so much publicity?

These stories make me ever more excited for the Pre. Palm's always been extremely open about third party apps. It's one thing to block an app from the "Official store." It's another thing altogether to prevent third party apps from being installed from everywhere except the official store. I suspect if users could install their own apps manually, all this hubbub would go away.

Of course, I couldn't possibly see Apple allowing this, for fear of someone else creating their own App Store app and developer submission network, without Apple's complete lack of written guidelines, and apparently inconsistent application of whatever it's own internal guidelines are.

My suspicion is that Apple outsources the content review process (if not the whole thing). Thus you get completely asinine and inconsistent rejections like this and others.

Well, on one level, I'm kind of amused by the reviewers attention to detail... On another level, this thing reads like a comedy piece someone would make up about the dangers of censorship.

I suggest a new meme: Showing banned content on iPhones and blogging photos of the iPhone showing it loud and clear. Or something like that. I mean, come on, is that what they are afraid of?!??

Note the difference between Apple and Craigslist. Craigslist goes out on a limb based on their strongly stated belief structure; Apple actively fights those very same principles, preferring that nothing muck with the pristine image.

I think you know which CEO I want in a foxhole with me. Hell, I think Craig should run for public office.

Back to the problem at hand, it seems everyone and their brother wants to print cash through some new walled garden, and the apologists will trot out the familiar stinky logic, things like, "well they've got a lot of buyers don't they, how could THAT be wrong?!?"

But the computer industry grew with tinkering, hell it grew with HACKING, and even that old devil of a heel, Microsoft, had a big part in the growth of open hardware systems. Don't bother to trot out the exceptions, there will always be exceptions, but big picture is the PC exists and is the mad playground today that it was the instant IBM flew with MS-DOS way back when.

Sure the iPhone is a great design, sure the Mac has their beautiful craftmanship. But they are as closed systems as Apple can conceivably get away with, and the fan boys and girls who are also hackers are letting us all down by trying to drown out the calls for more openness. Let's call a spade a spade: the hardware engineering is cool, but the wall-in garden attitude sucks like hell and is harmful to hackers, to consumer, to freedom-lovers of all stripes.

You can't argue with profits...unless you think that there are things more important than money.

At BarCamp, a speaker complained that Apple rejected his quick-links app because the reviewer queried wikipedia for an offensive word, and then followed links in the resulting page onto more offensive topics.

As terrible as the App Store situation is today, it will get better starting in June/July. I have a hunch that Apple is going to solve this problem with parental controls.

I don't think that will solve the problem. Why should a book reader with access to Project Gutenberg carry the burden of an adults-only application? And doesn't that kind of prudery render the explicit tag meaningless to parents? The only thing it does is covers Apple's ass^Wbackside.

Repeat after me: censor-ware does not work. It's like spam -- since you can't even define what constitutes offensive content in a consistent, formal way, how in the hell can you expect any system (human or algorithmic) to make an effective, fair determination about what goes in which bucket?

Apple does a great job of design, usability, hardware hacking, and recently they've even been pretty effective at getting content owners to move in the direction of reasonable licensing terms for digital distribution. However, they do not have magic pixie dust which makes them immune to brain-dead "content filtering" algorithms, whether human-mediated or not.

I guess any photo viewer or something users can add content to should be banned also... ridiculous stuff.

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