Alternative title:
Apple complies with law in countries where it operates.
Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship
111–120 of 449 posts
Re: Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if killing people is "following the law"? It's happened a few times in history. Or if that is too big a pill to swallow, what if collecting runaways is "following the law", when they are to be executed? What about monitoring communication for death penalty offenses? (speaking against the state)
Apple runs an App Store. If they are ever in the situation where they are going to be responsible for killing millions of innocent people then yes let's make sure the stop doing that instead of blindly following the law. Until then how about we stop with the Nazi references.
You do realize that IBM was not responsible for killing people, right? They only provided the infrastructure that other people used to find the people they wanted to kill. What's wrong with that?
Also, the people nazi germany killed were not innocent. What they were doing was highly illegal, such as being a jew.
Re: Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship
#113What happens in China now could happen in 5 years in the rest of the world. For "security" reasons or "fight agains terrorism", while it's really a fight between those in power and those who want power :-( The need for IPFS, webRTC and other non-centralized protocols becomes more pressing every day, to defend everyone who is stuck in between.
Governments can outlaw those too. We need a p2p internet before it's too late. It doesn't have to be the fastest or the best. It just has to work well enough to bootstrap free access to information whenever the government tries to snuff it out. In Cuba they use thumb drives but we can do better.
There's a fundamental limit to what is blockable.
Even if all strong cryptography is prohibited and all that can legally be utilised is a backdoored version, a steganographic option can be encorporated in a way that is mathematically undetectable - albeit at rather low bit rates relative to the absolute rate of the stream.
The problem for censors is that there is not such thing as optimal compression for a given stream, since the optimality of a given compression codec is a probabilistic function of all data streams that could feasibly be compressed with the given codec.
What do I mean by this? Inoptimality is fundamentally immeasurable (even when a more optimal version is feasibly calculable, it may be inefficient to utilise it due to the increased complexity involved in encoding or decoding - and the possible reasons behind any given encoding choice are indistinguisable from each other), so a sliver of a data stream could potentially be utilised to package encrypted data in a manner that is fundamentally indistinguishable from encoding inoptimalities.
In a world where a huge amount of out data is ultra-high bandwidth multimedia content couple with personal super-computers, crytographically indistinguisable steganographic communication channels of a more than useful bandwidth are well within the realms of feasibility.
Re: Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship
#114Hey Timmy, what was all that talk about customer security? https://www.apple.com/customer-letter/ And here I was, almost believing you. You're a coward.
To nitpick your argument, this doesn't change customer security in the way that letter discusses. Apple is still protecting the devices they sell, it's just unfortunate thay China implements network-level controls at a national level, beyond the device.
This is just unfortunately a step in the wrong direction of free speech that Apple could have combated had they wanted. That said, the great firewall crushes VPNs fairly easy anyway, so I don't think it's as big a loss as people are making out.
Re: Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wikipedia (also apparently expressvpn.com) is already blocked in Turkey, and I am indeed very upset about it, but there's nothing I can do about it and I think it'd be the same with the Chinese. Such oppressive governments really won't mind denying their citizens access to the single greatest source of information for their citizens if it plays into their hand.
could you please stop representing 1.4B Chinese? if the government is so bad, why there is no systematic resistance given the fact that Chinese people had a long history of fighting the repressive regimes?
Fear of the Government that is even in your pocket?!
As someone who grew up in the East Block, reading such naive comments as yours leaves me divided. It's good on one hand that you've never came even close to an oppressive government so not even your imagination allows you to grok. On the other hand facing the development in the world, it's quite concerning.
Re: Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship
#116Seems that Apple is just following, with much delay, the law of People's Republic of China. I don't understand why some people think companies should be above the law.
Apple regularly boast about how they are a privacy focused company and just want the best for their consumers by enforcing tight restrictions on all apps. You have no other possibility to install apps on an Apple device but the App Store. Now they effectively block privacy-focused tools in a country that is known to jail everyone that speaks against authorities. That doesn't line up with their rhetoric and people see the hypocrisy.
Re: Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
I expect Apple to respect universal human rights regardless of the context. Freedom of speech is foundational. And this isn't a China-vs-the-West thing. The idea that people deserve and need to be able to communicate freely predates the current governments of both China and the U.S.
It's a business after all and China is a huge market for Apple. No one ever said that capitalism was very aligned with human rights. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Why bring up capitalism here? The censorship isn't capitalist. Apple could be a non-profit employee cooperative and still be aiding in censorship to comply with local laws.
Re: Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship
#118That's why corporations will never help against dictatorship. They may do it if it's convenient but in the end they will prioritize money over everything else and fall in line with dictatorships. Happened during the Nazi time, it's happening in China now.
> That's why corporations will never help against dictatorship. They may do it if it's convenient but in the end they will prioritize money over everything else and fall in line with dictatorships. Happened during the Nazi time, it's happening in China now. Well, if you want your government to be powerful enough to enforce laws against corporations, then corporations will not be powerful enough to defy your governmen…
This is the same reason why ~70% of US legislation is for benefits of corporations.
https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
Re: Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship
#119This from the company that removed the headphone jack from their phones while crowing about the "courage" involved in making the decision. I'm not going to pretend to believe that Tim Cook's letter (cited elsewhere) was much more than a PR move in a country they were unlikely to face any substantial consequences for (at least publicly) standing up to the government, or that I really believe that corporations have a r…
Aren't they forced to follow Chinese laws when doing business there? Not saying what they did is moral but it seems the moral question here is whether they be doing business in China, not whether they should be following the laws while doing business their because they don't really have a choice once they decide to do business there. Google for example doesn't do business there so they don't have to respect censorshi…
There is no such thing as "once they decide". Once you notice that what you are doing is immoral, you have to revise previous decisions.
Also, it's not that cut and dry: If your product actually contributes to the wealth of the country, they cannot just ban you without hurting themselves. Just because they legally can, does not mean you don't have any leverage.
Re: Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That's why corporations will never help against dictatorship. They may do it if it's convenient but in the end they will prioritize money over everything else and fall in line with dictatorships. Happened during the Nazi time, it's happening in China now. Well, if you want your government to be powerful enough to enforce laws against corporations, then corporations will not be powerful enough to defy your governmen…
I don't necessarily blame corporations for this. My point is that we shouldn't look at corporations as agents for freedom. A lot of people seem to be doing this. In the end they will fall in line with whoever is running the country. As long as there is money to be made.
Who is doing that? Corporations exist only to generate profit for their shareholders and they aren't shy about admitting that