Apple censors Lawrence Lessig over warranty information
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
I spent 2 hours this week trying to upgrade, back-up, restore, etc a relative's phone, without success. The fact that you can't downgrade from iOS 7 makes this doubly painful. Support from Apple was pretty straightforward for my friend: "Your phone is out of warranty, sorry, we will not help you." The fact that this warranty is illegal under EU law is left out.
Finding that this is an incredibly common problem amongst users with a recent iPhone (4S, still being sold by Apple), and seeing that Apple is actively censoring people for offering warranty help, is very frustrating. It's sad that it takes someone famous ranting about Apple's censorship to solve the issue, when it all could have been avoided by saying "We are aware of the problem, it has to do with the iOS 7 upgrade, we are working on a software fix, if we can't fix it we will replace the affected iPhones."
But Apple censoring it's forums is nothing new. They've been doing it for years. And frankly, most companies do censor their forums.
No one likes it. And Apple is infamous for not responding until an issue reaches the mainstream press. So the best thing anyone can do is reach out to the mainstream press. Get this issue on the evening news programs and trust, it'll be fixed in a couple of days.
The definition you linked to says nothing about 3rd parties, only officials without specifying who they work for. In fact, one of the examples given in that definition is film censors which is within scope here - in the US film censorship is done by the MPAA which is an organization composed of movie studios. Most of the films they censor are produced by their own members.
The use of the word censor in this discussion is entirely within the common and technical definitions of the term.
http://variety.com/2013/film/news/new-york-theater-will-admi...
Though most theaters do abide by the ratings, and therefore movies will continue to modify their content until they get at least an 'R' rating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Association_of_...
The MPAA issues ratings; it's up to the studio to decide whether to make cuts to a film in order to attain a particular rating. No-one forces the studio to make the cuts (Wikipedia: "The MPAA rating system is a voluntary scheme not enforced by law and films can be exhibited without a rating").
Sure, it might be commercial suicide to issue a film with a particular rating, but the right to free speech != the right to make lots of money.
In your face, boss!!!
A senior electronics engineer where I used to work 'had to have' an iPhone, so one was duly supplied. He immediately had problems connecting reliably to Exchange to pick up his emails and after the IT support guys had tried several times to make it work more reliably, the phone was handed back with the (valid) comment that this was currently a 'known problem'.
The engineer's reply was that he didn't accept that response because it was an Apple product and they'd not have problems making something as simple as email 'just work'.
In most EU countries, it's the responsibility of the store that you bought it from, not the manufacturer. http://www.apple.com/uk/legal/statutory-warranty/
I own all categories of Apple devices but I never had a good experience at an Apple Store, not even when buying stuff. I realise I'm an exception though.
I really hope Apple abandons their overly-rigid release schedules in favor of quality once again.
By contrast, in iOS 6, if the BT keyboard disconnected for any reason, (i.e. power-off/range) the software keyboard would instantly reappear.
Most people expect that their new phone will be built to last more than one year, but understand that if something breaks after that period they will need to pay to fix it, even if it is a factory defect (say, a home button or battery which should last 2 years, but in some cases doesn't). They also expect to benefit from software updates after their warranty period, but understand new features may not always be available.
What they aren't expecting is that Apple will pro-actively break a core feature of their phone with an update, which can't be reversed, and can't be repaired, without replacing the whole device.
Edit: that said, the warranty in Australia is legally probably two years, though Apple advertises only one year.
Did it drop off the home page so fast, or is it being flagged?
Btw, only 15 minutes after your original post, and Lessig's post know is upvoted to 245 points already yet is 2 places down...
It's not a simple votes/age thing.
The time of the votes is not taken into account. The time-based decay is only based on the submission time. A story with the same votes and same submission time will have the same rank regardless of when the votes occurred, all other factors being equal.
Flagging is just supposed to summon a moderator and that's all.
So, the Lessig post could've been flagged, the comments on it could've triggered the flame war code, or a moderator did it.
What almost definitely didn't happen is "Apple fan boys at work" flagging down anything anti-Apple. When you use the flag link any more than extremely sparingly, you lose the privilege, permanently.
Psychologically, the UI seems intended to separate "I don't like this" from "I think this content is detrimental to the site". This communicates that users should not attempt to punish links they simply dislike, but may do so with comments.
Company screws up some software upgrade, hundreds of uses swam their forums and complain. Who would be served from 100s of threads about the same thing with no solutions?
It's generally not "censhorship" unless the government does it. Your speech is not being suppressed by Apple not wanting spam in their forums. It's not some deep conspiracy to drive up Apple stock price.
So who really cares? Someone who has not upgraded to the latest iOS and needs WiFi access to drive his life critical system?
It's actually [citation needed]. ;).
The fact that someone is trying so hard to make this become controversial and news-worthy is the only interesting thing here.
[1] http://www.logicallyfallacious.com/index.php/logical-fallaci...
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
In short, "do it in your own forum, I reserve the right to delete your posts in mine, and by participating, you're acknowledging my right."
If you did any real-life engineering, you know there isn't anything that can be produced without any glitches. You are aware that your product isn't perfect, but you still wouldn't want to support aggression in your own forums. Due to the different laws in different countries, who should you personally contact to solve the problem varies so even such answers in globally-read thread which should be purely technical can be inappropriate. In European countries it's very regulated and clear, for example. I don't know how it's in US.
What's certainly clear is that nobody would even want the forums without the active moderation, except the spammers and the insane.
That's fine, but a polite legitimate enquiry about a genuine problem doesn't meet with those characteristics - it is "censorship". Apple Computers are censoring the speech of their users seeking support from other users (and Apple).
So I guess what you're saying is "don't expect Apple to offer support or act ethically towards their users". Fair enough.
>Due to the different laws in different countries, who should you personally contact to solve the problem varies so even such answers in globally-read thread which should be purely technical can be inappropriate. //
Yeah 'cause that's why the posts were deleted. Not like you could simply add a comment "these returns are only available in the EU".
>What's certainly clear is that nobody would even want the forums without the active moderation, except the spammers and the insane. //
Which is a strawman. You can have a moderated forum without deleting posts simply because they'd affect your profits.
http://www.macrumors.com/2013/10/28/owners-of-late-2013-reti...
No need to think twice at all.
I'm a software-developer and my livelihood depends on being able to write code freely, without getting censored and threatened with litigation, bullshit patents and rounded corners.
Thus patent trolls and people abusing software patents for anti-competitive purposes is a direct threat to my livelihood and supporting that is directly unintuitive, borderline madness.
I have an ethical code of software conduct and it's very simple: I don't deal with patent-trolls. None. That includes not buying anything from Apple.
Then I'm sure you don't buy any products that contain Samsung NAND NVRAM, nor do you purchase anything with Qualcomm chips, as a significant portion of their revenue comes from aggressive patent licensing, right?
Listen, I hate patent trolls as much as the next guy, but patent licensing is a very common business tactic everywhere. Don't make broad, over reaching comments if you don't actually mean them. You're perfectly fine with not buying Apple products because you don't like Apple. I don't like LG products, so I try not to buy LG. But, lets be realistic here.
Definitely adding them to my list of companies to not buy, thanks for the tips.
At this point I offer to pay out of pocket for a new logic board even though I am covered under AppleCare. 3 days after first calling Apple, I just want my machine working. They tell me they won't even do that unless their iMemoryTester comes back with an error. So, they offer to mail it to a repair facility to see if they can figure out what's wrong. So, I'm now into a process that they tell me will take an additional 5 days, and they may still elect to not fix the problem unless they can reproduce a problem that is intermittent in the OS and is reliably flagged by memtest86.
I used to believe that a laptop and AppleCare was a way to have a worry-free three-year cycle. What I'm going through right now is making me reconsider that.
This isn't germane to the topic of censorship, but appears consistent with Apple not giving a crap about certain classes of problems.
We refused to pay Apple to replace her phone and I bought her a friend's spare phone in the meanwhile. My first and only bad experience with Apple so far but quite disappointing to say the least.
For example, should we have to do vigilante investigation of every company everywhere?
Obviously consumer rights have to be balanced with the first amendment - and for this reason, I don't think your parent's proposal is clear enough to become a law. It's super-vague.
But don't for a second be so generous in saying that we should take the burden on instead.
I don't want to have to read about underage workers, credit card fraud by companies, carcinogenic additives, gross marketing misrepresentation, or any number of other practices that are simply illegal. Moreover even if someone did want to read about them here, we couldn't police the world's 125M companies.
This is totally literally what laws are for.
(And yes, it's a vague quick suggestion, this is a discussion board, we're not writing laws here)