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Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship

nytimes.com

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Re: Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship

#331

Post by onetokeoverthe »

As much as Trump was/is a clown his point was this. If Apple and other American companies pull out of China, at least we won't be supporting their harvesting of organs from live Falun Gong (yoga) practioners, their eating of dogs boiled alive, and their treating their own citizens like children.

There are a lot of sharp, beautiful people in China.

They've learned to accept all the dictatorial crap.

As Americans, are we going to help these people? How? Those are the questions we should be asking.

I for one will make sure my friends in China have access to vpn. And I won't describe the method here, so those commie motherfuckers are less likely to block it!

Re: Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship

#332

Post by dis-sys »

darpa_escapee wrote: post #326
dis-sys wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. illegal organisations by Chinese laws. 2. illegal organisation by Chinese laws. btw, they spam my mobile all the time, it is pretty rude to call someone's mobile 5-6am on a weekend morning to play prerecorded message like "CCP is bad, they jailed many Falun Gong members". 3. "will" is a very interesting term. Posting here using VPN, let me know when it is actually blocked. 4. I read CNN/BBC/Foxnews quite often, th…

> 1. illegal organisations by Chinese laws. >2. illegal organisation by Chinese laws. btw, they spam my mobile all the time, it is pretty rude to call someone's mobile 5-6am on a weekend morning to play prerecorded message like "CCP is bad, they jailed many Falun Gong members". I'm not sure what any of this has to do with the belief you stated in your OP: >> I strongly believe the GFW is a protectionism tool to prote…

no one ever denied the fact of internet censorship in China. the point is that the biggest impact of GFW is the block of sites like Google/fb/twitter and its largely for protectionism.

blocking WSJ is bad, really bad, but let's be honest, how many Chinese would be reading WSJ? 0.1%? Sure, that 0.1% still counts, they should be allowed to read WSJ or Reuters, but it is not remotely comparable to the impact of blocking, say, youtube. how many Chinese would be watching youtube? I'd argue hundreds of millions could be watching.

With all these numbers in mind, and the fact that there are highly popular replacement services in China for every single one of those blocked one like google/fb/twitter, you tell me what is the primary goal.

it is also worth pointing out that blocking WSJ/Reuters and similar web sites are bad decisions, but blocking Xinjiang/Tibet independence movement sites are totally different matter.

Re: Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship

#333

Post by monkeypizza »

samstave wrote: post #260
coldcode wrote: post #138

You cannot do business in China without doing what they tell you. Period. Either you do it or you leave. I work for a big company (you would all know) and we have a large business unit in China, they own 52% of it. They decide what goes in and how customers can use it. We don't get to decide anything without government approval. It's so easy to claim the West shouldn't do what the leadership of China wants in China,…

> We don't get to decide anything without government approval ELI5: * How does the "decide" process and "approval" process work? * Who is the decider? (What are their qualifications/bkgrd? (Are they ex workers of the tech sector in .CN that have xp in building all the things? * What are the implications to cost/design/[whatever-i-dont-know-to-ask]? * ELI5 'submission for approval' and 'time to approval' * do .cn gov…

Generally, doing business of any kind requires a license. At small scale, the rules aren't enforced very much, but when you get big or someone doesn't like you, they are. Since everything you do can be interpreted as illegal in some way, there's no defense, and there's no recourse, since the courts aren't independent.

About embedding of workers: local employees who are party members will organize a party branch inside the company. The more powerful internal party members you have, the easier it will be to be given permission to do things, get licenses, etc, so they'll gain committee seats and power. So you end up with an internal organization with power in your company whose allegiances are to an outside agency.

Re: Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship

#334

Post by sandstrom »

imron wrote: post #111

Alternative title: Apple complies with law in countries where it operates.

Saying that that it complies with the local laws is a weak argument. This is about moral and ethics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Jewish_legislation_in_pre...

Re: Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship

#335

Post by dreamlayers »

coldcode wrote: post #138

You cannot do business in China without doing what they tell you. Period. Either you do it or you leave. I work for a big company (you would all know) and we have a large business unit in China, they own 52% of it. They decide what goes in and how customers can use it. We don't get to decide anything without government approval. It's so easy to claim the West shouldn't do what the leadership of China wants in China,…

The market is not "too large to leave". The company is making a choice to stay there because to them profit is more important than ethical considerations.

At the same time, the fact that the West generally doesn't care about ethics shows that the West is not necessarily a good model to follow. Maybe China has a better alternative.

Re: Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship

#336

Post by laydn »

coldcode wrote: post #138

You cannot do business in China without doing what they tell you. Period. Either you do it or you leave. I work for a big company (you would all know) and we have a large business unit in China, they own 52% of it. They decide what goes in and how customers can use it. We don't get to decide anything without government approval. It's so easy to claim the West shouldn't do what the leadership of China wants in China,…

If they somehow decided to stop doing business in China, would that be grounds for Apple investors to sue Apple?

Re: Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship

#337

Post by yellowapple »

dreamlayers wrote: post #335
coldcode wrote: post #138

You cannot do business in China without doing what they tell you. Period. Either you do it or you leave. I work for a big company (you would all know) and we have a large business unit in China, they own 52% of it. They decide what goes in and how customers can use it. We don't get to decide anything without government approval. It's so easy to claim the West shouldn't do what the leadership of China wants in China,…

The market is not "too large to leave". The company is making a choice to stay there because to them profit is more important than ethical considerations. At the same time, the fact that the West generally doesn't care about ethics shows that the West is not necessarily a good model to follow. Maybe China has a better alternative.

I'd hardly claim China cares about ethics, either.

Re: Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship

#338

Post by Bakary »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #271
coldcode wrote: post #138

You cannot do business in China without doing what they tell you. Period. Either you do it or you leave. I work for a big company (you would all know) and we have a large business unit in China, they own 52% of it. They decide what goes in and how customers can use it. We don't get to decide anything without government approval. It's so easy to claim the West shouldn't do what the leadership of China wants in China,…

> If you don't agree to their rules you don't play in their sandbox. And if you make choices they have consequences. Those consequences include that people in the west will lose respect for your company, complain about it, patronize competitors, propose laws to punish it, etc. If that puts the company in a bind, good. They're a multi-billion dollar international corporation. They have to choose between morals and pro…

Consequences and hypothetical punishments are not related to the actual behavior of the company but to its perception by the consumers. If the company can move the spotlight away or otherwise change the narrative, they can easily contain it. It has more to do with the limited amount of attention that can be given to any issue at any one time than with morals themselves.

Re: Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship

#339

Post by KMag »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #206
tziki wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could always do what Google did and abandon China.

Google was aspirational in China when it left: they weren't making much money there...they hoped to in the future. Apple is not aspirational in China today: they are already making a lot of money there. Leaving China would cause an immediate shock to its stock price as well as a huge cut in actual profits.

> Google was aspirational in China when it left: they weren't making much money there...they hoped to in the future.

I was an engineer on Google's web search indexing system for 4 years (including the Aurora attack), leaving shortly before Google's China exit. I listened to several talks by the head of Google China, who came from Baidu.

Even before the Aurora attack, as a matter of national pride, we knew the very best Google could hope for was 30% or 40% market share in China. Even France funded one or two attempts at a Francophone Google killer. I can't imagine the U.S. looking at a dominant search company based out of anywhere except North America (or perhaps the Anglophone Five Eyes) and not butting up significant nationalistic barriers.

Google was hoping to make profits, but they knew they would never be dominant. This made their exit much easier.

If Google was serious about China, they would have had a more obscure non-Google-branded name for their Chinese joint venture and would have branded their front page much differently. The reasons would take a large post, but Chinese web pages tend to be much more "busy", and Chinese language searches have a much higher percentage of "navigational searches". (If you search for [Facebook], you're almost certainly just trying to just get a link to facebook.com, and are basically using the search engine like a bookmark page.) I understand Google's need for a consistent U.I., but they really should have had a non-Google-branded U.I. that was better suited to the Chinese market.

Re: Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship

#340

Post by Bakary »

dreamlayers wrote: post #335
coldcode wrote: post #138

You cannot do business in China without doing what they tell you. Period. Either you do it or you leave. I work for a big company (you would all know) and we have a large business unit in China, they own 52% of it. They decide what goes in and how customers can use it. We don't get to decide anything without government approval. It's so easy to claim the West shouldn't do what the leadership of China wants in China,…

The market is not "too large to leave". The company is making a choice to stay there because to them profit is more important than ethical considerations. At the same time, the fact that the West generally doesn't care about ethics shows that the West is not necessarily a good model to follow. Maybe China has a better alternative.

Yuval Noah Harari wrote about this rather interesting theory that human rights only picked up steam all of a sudden because the industrial revolution created an economic need for a large class of educated and well-fed workers. We only value our current brand of ethics because it coincides with significant economic advantages. However, it's also important to look at the big picture behind your accusation. If the West truly did not value ethics, you would have been unlikely to have voiced your concerns in this way, since you would not have grown in a framework where these criticisms would be commonplace or even considered a worthy problem to investigate. The mere fact that you are making these observations means it's not so bad from an ethical standpoint. It shows there is already an ethical standard in place that is understood as a commendable ideal by most people, to the point where you can refer to it and expect people to know what you're talking about.
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