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Apple’s Deleting iCloud Emails That Contain The Phrase 'Barely Legal Teens'

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41–50 of 395 posts

Re: Apple’s Deleting iCloud Emails That Contain The Phrase 'Barely Legal Teens'

#41

Why do they mention "child pornography"? Maybe I'm wrong but isn't "barely legal" meant to mean 18 year old adults and not "nearly legal"? Or is it just a common code phrase child pornographers use I wasn't aware of?

The child pornography bit just sounds like the journalist speculation.

It sounds to me more like spam cleanup.

Re: Apple’s Deleting iCloud Emails That Contain The Phrase 'Barely Legal Teens'

#42
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What possible reason would there be for Apple to care one whit about the apps that are installed to your phone? There, fixed that for you.

Because they feel (rightly or wrongly) that they can practically provide a better, more secure, etc. experience for their customers by controlling/curating what executes on their devices.

Right. So it obviously stands to reason that they might think that's true for the email services too.

Re: Apple’s Deleting iCloud Emails That Contain The Phrase 'Barely Legal Teens'

#43
post #24
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you inclined to believe this isn't the case? What possible reason would there be for Apple to care one whit about the email that goes to iCloud accounts? The only thing that makes any sense at all is virus/spam filtering.

> What possible reason would there be for Apple to care one whit about the apps that are installed to your phone? There, fixed that for you.

No you didn't. They don't care what's on your phone. They care about two things:

1) What's on their store, and

2) How apps get on your phone, e.g. they must be codesigned by Apple.

The former is where they apply their content standards. The latter is a (very effective) security measure.

But, for example, Apple doesn't care in the slightest if I make a hardcore pornography app, sign it with my own developer cert, and install it on my phone. They only care if I try and submit it to their store. Similarly, they don't care if I open up Safari and visit some pornographic website, even if it uses HTML5 offline mode and gets added as an independent icon to my home screen.

Re: Apple’s Deleting iCloud Emails That Contain The Phrase 'Barely Legal Teens'

#45

Scanning and auto-deleting your email, combined with the Gatekeeper technology wich houses the possibility of Apple telling me what Apps I can or can not run makes me seriously start to wonder the direction Apple is headed... Edit: Gatekeeper is OSX technology. It allows users to only install Apple certified Apps on your mac , not your phone. It's fairly new and possible to turn it off (for now at least).

It's easy to temporarily disable Gatekeeper, install what you want, and then turn it back on. In no way does it prevent you from running what you want on your own computer. The point is to put another wall against unintended installs (aka exploits), and corrupted/infected versions of known-good software.

> The point is to put another wall against unintended installs (aka exploits)

Unintended installs may be a type of exploit, but they're not synonymous with them, as 'aka' indicates. Gatekeeper does nothing to protect against, say, your browser being compromised remotely, as you can run unsigned code in a signed application. Gatekeeper raises the barrier to entry, but only slightly.

Re: Apple’s Deleting iCloud Emails That Contain The Phrase 'Barely Legal Teens'

#46
post #27
post #9

Everything about icloud - from the terrible design to the clunky interface - is as Steve Jobs liked to say, "shit". I have icloud and I'm not even sure what it's for; is it a backup service, an e-mail provider, or a way to find my phone? None of these have much in common, so the fact that they're all bundled together really confuses me. And its name is a bit of a misnomer, you can't even do standard cloud stuff like…

iCloud is first and foremost just a bit of service glue to make the native email/calendar/etc apps 'work' without sending people to Google or assuming they have a work Exchange account. In that capacity, it's as good as it needs to be. [1] Similarly the file sharing is just to set a third-party baseline so that file/save sync'ing between Apps on the mobile devices 'works' without sending people off to Dropbox. And in…

"True Apple fashion" has only recently been about resisting power users. Before about five years ago, they were all about enabling power users while still being friendly to regular people. This was much more compelling than their current direction. Remember, this is the company that built their OS on top of UNIX and shipped a terminal app with it standard. It all changed around when the iPhone came out, though.

Re: Apple’s Deleting iCloud Emails That Contain The Phrase 'Barely Legal Teens'

#47
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What possible reason would there be for Apple to care one whit about the apps that are installed to your phone? There, fixed that for you.

Because they feel (rightly or wrongly) that they can practically provide a better, more secure, etc. experience for their customers by controlling/curating what executes on their devices.

The security implications of only allowing codesigned code to execute is completely divorced from the decision to control what content is allowed on Apple's storefront. The former limits what's on your phone, but does not make any judgement about the content. The latter makes a judgement about the content, but doesn't limit what you can run on your phone if you can find some other avenue to run stuff (e.g. self-signed with a dev cert, or web apps).

Re: Apple’s Deleting iCloud Emails That Contain The Phrase 'Barely Legal Teens'

#49

Scanning and auto-deleting your email, combined with the Gatekeeper technology wich houses the possibility of Apple telling me what Apps I can or can not run makes me seriously start to wonder the direction Apple is headed... Edit: Gatekeeper is OSX technology. It allows users to only install Apple certified Apps on your mac , not your phone. It's fairly new and possible to turn it off (for now at least).

It's easy to temporarily disable Gatekeeper, install what you want, and then turn it back on. In no way does it prevent you from running what you want on your own computer. The point is to put another wall against unintended installs (aka exploits), and corrupted/infected versions of known-good software.

iOS devices effectively run Gatekeeper full-time with no way to turn it off (aside from jailbreaking). I don't think it's unreasonable to think that the Mac's current Gatekeeper is just a stop along the way toward that.

Re: Apple’s Deleting iCloud Emails That Contain The Phrase 'Barely Legal Teens'

#50
post #21
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has always been against Porn on their devices. It's no surprise they're against it on their services as well. Of course this could be a really poorly working spam filter, but I'm inclined to believe this isn't the case.

Why are you inclined to believe this isn't the case? What possible reason would there be for Apple to care one whit about the email that goes to iCloud accounts? The only thing that makes any sense at all is virus/spam filtering.

Because of Apples previous stance on porn on 'their' devices. I bet all sorts of spammy messages get marked as spam and filed in SPAM or JUNK, but porn related just disappears.
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