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

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

#121

Post by leephillips »

tolmasky wrote: post #60

Its hard to know what to be more amazed about: the fact that with one boneheaded filter Apple now seems creepier than Google in terms of respecting your privacy (one of the few things they could boast about), or the fact that it still seems to be amateur hour over at iCloud. Think about it for a second: they are literally pushing code into production that amounts to if (contents.indexOf(bad_phrase) != -1) delete_emai…

Not amazing. Utterly unsurprising: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4916627

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

#122

Post by qeorge »

tlrobinson wrote: post #17
qeorge wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be server side spam filtering (not all spam messages make it to your spam folder with any provider - the worst offenders are often just thrown out). Just saying it is possible that this is an over-aggressive spam filter vs. Apple taking such an invasive measure. Although, Apple has done similar crazy things before, so who knows.

"not all spam messages make it to your spam folder with any provider - the worst offenders are often just thrown out" This is news to me. Citation needed?

Postini.com (Google), Forefront (Exchange), and Barracuda Networks are some products/vendors in the space - its a whole industry. Just Google around a bit for "server side spam filtering" and such.

Anecdote: we use hosted Exchange from Microsoft. I tried to setup a cron job to email us all at 4:57 with the subject line "Get The Fuck Out". Those don't come through either.

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

#123

Post by lorenzfx »

roc wrote: post #27
rm999 wrote: 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…

Are the people at Apple actually using their own services? I cannot really imagine them using these dumbed down interfaces...

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

#124

Post by m_eiman »

aes wrote: post #14

I tested this on my @me.com account, and it's exactly how it works. Email containing the words "barely legal teens" is simply dropped. I find it obscene to an Orwellian extent that Apple actually seems to think that no valid email would ever contain the words "barely legal teens". I wonder what other things Apple thinks are not worth talking about? I have no trust in Apple's email services any more.

GMail silently drops any emails containing zipped .exe files that I send to my boss. That's despite me being one of his most common correspondents, part of the same GApps domain and whatnot. The problem is the same: spam filtering gone wrong.

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

#125

Post by B-Con »

> After more research, Steven found that under the iCloud terms of service, Apple reserves the right to remove any content at any time that it feels is objectionable, without telling you that they’re going to delete it.

Today it's a bad search filter, but tomorrow... what'll they do tomorrow?

Apple is the epitome of "we'll do what we think is best and you'll like it". For now they usually seem to have admirable (or semi-admirable) goals, even if you don't agree with them on the details. I'm curious how long until they make similar moves that are clearly Evil(TM).

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

#126

Post by endgame »

eykanal wrote: post #10

In reading this, all I can think of is "buttbuttination" and the broader Scunthorpe problem [1] (to use Wikipedia's term). Strange that Apple is using such a crude filtration technique. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

I have also seen it called the clbuttic mistake:

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Clbuttic-Mistake-.aspx

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/2667...

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

#127

Post by scholia »

mikeash wrote: post #100
dman wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you point out an OS that did not come with a terminal app standard?

Mac OS, prior to Mac OS X.

That was when Mac users used to mock Windows for being a GUI perched on top of a character-based operating system.

They generally dropped that line when Mac OS X became a GUI perched on top of a character-based operating system.

Oddly, Mac users have also stopped mocking Windows users for having Intel processors, for not using SCSI and whatever else made Macs special before they turned into a variant of Windows PCs.... ;-)

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

#128

Post by matthuggins »

mhurron wrote: post #19
digitalengineer wrote: post #11

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.

I wouldn't call it a "spam filter" since it doesn't get placed into your spam folder.

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

#129

Post by derekp7 »

cryptoz wrote: post #18
aes wrote: post #14

I tested this on my @me.com account, and it's exactly how it works. Email containing the words "barely legal teens" is simply dropped. I find it obscene to an Orwellian extent that Apple actually seems to think that no valid email would ever contain the words "barely legal teens". I wonder what other things Apple thinks are not worth talking about? I have no trust in Apple's email services any more.

Microsoft has been doing this for decades. Ever try to collaborate on a web project using MSN Messenger? Every message you sent that contained 'index.php' was mysteriously dropped. It IS Orwellian, but you should not be surprised. The big communication services all seem to have their own little moral or technical hacks they use to keep your discussion limited and away from certain topics / words.

It is even worse than that -- it also seems to automatically insert graphical smilies whenever it sees what it thinks is a text smiley. Makes it very hard to cut-n-paste a code fragment. Of course you can turn this off, but only on the receiving side -- if you are sending someone a command or piece of code (that contains parentheses and colons), you have know idea if their end will convert to the graphic smilies, and you end up sounding strange to them.

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

#130

Post by leephillips »

biot wrote: post #92
qeorge wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be server side spam filtering (not all spam messages make it to your spam folder with any provider - the worst offenders are often just thrown out). Just saying it is possible that this is an over-aggressive spam filter vs. Apple taking such an invasive measure. Although, Apple has done similar crazy things before, so who knows.

That doesn't conform to RFC 2821: 4.2.5 Reply Codes After DATA and the Subsequent . When an SMTP server returns a positive completion status (2yz code) after the DATA command is completed with . , it accepts responsibility for: - delivering the message (if the recipient mailbox exists), or - if attempts to deliver the message fail due to transient conditions, retrying delivery some reasonable number of times at inter…

Google also runs an smtp server that violates the relevant RFCs, but nobody seems to care much: http://lee-phillips.org/gmailRewriting/
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