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

cultofmac.com

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

#71
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking. Their choices make me worry you'll need a licence to develop for mac in the near future. After that you can only install via the OSX App store, with Apple taking their cut.

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

#72
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud is a hip word. Amazon's got a cloud. Google's got a cloud. Apple couldn't be left with just an iTools/.Mac/MobileMe now could they? I think Apple's inability to run web services is going to really come to pass in the near future. Everything is moving towards that way and Apple is still left in the "just sync with iTunes" world.

Apple's cloud is based on Amazon and Azure... Apple doesn't have an "own" cloud.

This set of comments alone is one of the best examples of the ambiguity of the word "cloud" I've ever seen.

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

#73
post #61
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My girlfriend's iPhone has been complaining about iCloud storage being full with some cryptic lockscreen message and she has no idea what it's complaining about or how to fix it. The "just works" narrative is a lie.

And my microwave door handle fell off the other day. That doesn't mean GE needs to include a disclaimer for that edge case in every 30 second advertisement, nor that they're liars because they fail to do so.

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

#74
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud is a hip word. Amazon's got a cloud. Google's got a cloud. Apple couldn't be left with just an iTools/.Mac/MobileMe now could they? I think Apple's inability to run web services is going to really come to pass in the near future. Everything is moving towards that way and Apple is still left in the "just sync with iTunes" world.

Apple does actually know how to run web services. They run the world's largest media store and one of the world's busiest online stores in addition to iCloud. Just because MobileMe was a piece of junk doesn't mean they are completely clueless.

They know how to run them in that they have web services running, but I'd contend that they're not run very well. They are consistently slow, slow, slow, not to mention buggy.

I just opened the Mac app store application, clicked the "updates" tab/button, and waited 15 seconds to be told that there are no updates available.

When I install app updates on my iPhone (5, running iOS 6), the badge icon does not go away until I re-open the app store app, on a consistent basis (greater than 50% of the time). When the badge icon does show updates, tapping the updates tab produces a wait similar in magnitude to the Mac app store example above, even though the app already knows there are updates available, since it showed me via the badge icon!

Apple's web services, in my experience, are comparatively slow when viewed alongside other major providers of web services.

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

#75

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.

Right, but it does create a barrier to entry if you want laymen to run your software. This is especially annoying if you're a developer who doesn't own an Apple PC.

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

#76
post #68
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. You don't know that. They don't know you've done this and they can't know you've done it, so how you do you if they care or not?

You're acting like Apple has some vast conspiracy to eradicate objectionable material from the face of the planet. That's ridiculous.

Apple has been pretty open about the fact that they just care about what's on their storefront. The only reason that this effectively means they control what's on your phone is because most people can't install apps on their phone except via Apple's App Store. Although, as usual, everyone in the world is free to view whatever objectionable website they want.

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

#77
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple does actually know how to run web services. They run the world's largest media store and one of the world's busiest online stores in addition to iCloud. Just because MobileMe was a piece of junk doesn't mean they are completely clueless.

For most of its existence it was the only store compatible with the far and away market leader for audio players. The store did not win because of its technical chops. To boot their media store is still almost completely cut off from the web (they did try and juice some SEO and have landing pages, but iTunes likes to pop up most of the time). They sure love relying on iTunes... iTools/.Mac/MobileMe and iCloud were al…

Sorry but do you understand technology at all ?

iTunes Music Store is a web service. Whether it delivers HTML or XML to a thick client is irrelevant. It still needs to deliver a tremendous volume of them in addition to managing the downloads. And by and large it has worked tremendously well.

iTools/.Mac etc are all the same thing just rebranding. Ping was a product failure not a technological one. And GameCenter/iMessage use iCloud so not sure why you listed them.

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

#78
post #19

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).

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.

Apparently they're also against criticism of their products, but not against forging network traffic, which is why you get fake 404's if you try to visit "The Best Page in the Universe" from an Apple Store. Interesting sense of morality they have...

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

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a spam folder for outgoing mail?

The sent folder still works as expected. Oddly enough, offending emails even sync in the sent folder across devices. So Apple doesn't delete your original work (they'll even sync it for you), they just won't send it.

This looks like a hint that the mechanism works at the SMTP level (which affects both ingress and egress).

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

#80
post #67
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

While we're keeping history in context, let's also not forget this is also the company that was borderline irrelevant prior to their current direction.

I won't dispute that they're far more relevant today, but I disagree that they were borderline irrelevant circa 2005. They were quite successful selling Macs and had a credible alternative to the Windows monopoly.

The iOS stuff certainly moved them to a whole new plane of success, but I don't have to like it.

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