301–310 of 931 posts
Why is an app needed to display things on a map? Isn't that something a website can do just fine? Which brings up an interesting, more general topic: Why do we need apps at all? What is the fundamental difference to websites?
Russia has been trying to block Telegram for a few years no, with no success.
It's time that North Americans take a stand and use economic power for something other than furthering that goal. There are so many places where a simple refusal to kowtow/censor or technical attack on censorship infrastructure could help so many that don't have the luxury of living in our world. If we're not going to use all this economic power for good, what's the point?
Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile.
It helps to know a little bit about what's been going on in Hong Kong, before you all decide to line up and take your daily dump on China. It all started a few months ago when someone committed a crime in Taiwan and fled to Hong Kong. To prevent HK from becoming a safe haven for criminals, the Chief Executive of HK proposed a new law to facilitate extradition of these crime suspects from HK to various jurisdictions i…
Thank you for the context, but I find it hard to believe that the HK Chief Executive was not influenced by or seeking favor with China when making the law. Also, this seems to ignore the question of Taiwan's sovereign status and assume they are part of China. Speaking more factually, China has used unrelated charges to arrest and imprison political dissidents for years now. This is a known phenomenon, and likely the…
> The promise not to use the law for political crimes is worthless knowing that history.
That fear is certainly reasonable. But the HK Chief Executive has officially announced the withdrawal of the law about a month ago. How do you justify the continuing violence and destruction since then?
It helps to know a little bit about what's been going on in Hong Kong, before you all decide to line up and take your daily dump on China. It all started a few months ago when someone committed a crime in Taiwan and fled to Hong Kong. To prevent HK from becoming a safe haven for criminals, the Chief Executive of HK proposed a new law to facilitate extradition of these crime suspects from HK to various jurisdictions i…
And in one fell swoop, Apple has made it effectively impossible to install this app on your phone. There's no realistic workaround. † Apple should never have been capable of making such a drastic decision for all of their customers. It's one thing to make determinations about what products are allowed in your store, but quite another to unilaterally ban software from what is many people's primary computer. We live in…
I know right? It's crazy people pay more money for less.
I'm not sure how to teach Apple users, they seem to find an excuse for every anti-consumer thing they do.
Blizzard and now Apple. I think this is very serious and it should be a wake-up call. As simple citizens we don't have much choices but vote with our wallets and use social networks to attack the most valuable asset of those companies, their reputation.
Easy. So easy.
Blizzard and now Apple. I think this is very serious and it should be a wake-up call. As simple citizens we don't have much choices but vote with our wallets and use social networks to attack the most valuable asset of those companies, their reputation.
I'm done with Apple. From now on Huawei is my phone of choice. #freehongkong /s
You might get downvoted anyway, but this seems to be the HN equivalent of clown makeup, and will encourage some of the srs bsns police to overlook your post.
Blizzard and now Apple. I think this is very serious and it should be a wake-up call. As simple citizens we don't have much choices but vote with our wallets and use social networks to attack the most valuable asset of those companies, their reputation.
I'm done with Apple. From now on Huawei is my phone of choice. #freehongkong /s
Google pulled out of China in 2010 in response to a hack that is widely believed to be state-sponsored by China and probably aimed at getting to the Gmail accounts of dissidents although I've seen no official confirmation of this internally or externally.
I respect the position that Google didn't want to be enable Chinese censorship and essentially support a totalitarian and repressive regime (and before anyone argues China isn't this, ask the Uighurs in Xianjing what they think).
China has decided for better or for worse that they're not going to let any foreign company control any market in China. This is why you have Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, Wechat, Huawei and so on rather than Amazon, Google, Facebook or Apple.
Part of me respects the desire to maintain sovereignty essentially. After all, China has a long history here with the Japanese, the British and countless others and you can't forget that.
But what I don't get is how Western governments and companies simply either don't understand this or don't want to.
No Western company will succeed in China because the Chinese government will ensure that it won't happen. Period.
As soon as you understand this the tantalizing carrot of a market of 1B people is revealed for the lie that it is and your choices actually become a lot easier.
Now obviously for the likes of Apple, this is complicated because we're not just talking about a market to sell goods but their entire supply chain.
I, like others here and elsewhere, have valued Apple's stance on user privacy but make no mistake, it is self-serving and directly entirely at Google's business model. And where you see Apple capitulate to Beijing here (which is exactly what happened) you see why: because Apple's relationship to China is the pillar that their business is built on. I fully expect other tech companies to counter Apple's attack on their business model by attacking Apple on China for exactly the same reasons.
Sometimes the only way to win is not to play and I guarantee you you won't "win in China'.
Blizzard and now Apple. I think this is very serious and it should be a wake-up call. As simple citizens we don't have much choices but vote with our wallets and use social networks to attack the most valuable asset of those companies, their reputation.
Collective action is more effective when it's done via law because that removes the incentive to defect for personal gain. It means that people not paying attention aren't accidentally contributing to immoral causes.
In a case like this collective action means things like putting tarrifs on goods from China, so that their workforce isn't important, and banning exports to China, so that their market isn't important. More direct laws like "no censoring what China wants you to censor" are problematic because it's hard to detect in most cases, and it often violates freedom of speech.
And yes, I'm suggesting a very painful thing to do economically.