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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'

#131

Post by scholia »

taligent wrote: post #77
jonknee wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/iMes…

LOL at taligent. Did you experience that particular Apple disaster? I think that also went in for a certain amount of pleading along the lines of "crap isn't really crap, you just aren't smart enough to understand how superior we are".

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

#132

Post by chollida1 »

nthj wrote: post #73
guelo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow that analogy is way off in left field:). The two things are very, very different.

Running out of storage is an expected occurance. Your microwave door falling off is not expected to happen:)

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

#133

Post by shurcooL »

rayiner wrote: post #86
nsmartt wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is wrong. It goes beyond this. There are various clear examples of Apple exercising far too much authority. It's not a question of whether you should use certain products. It becomes a question of whether you should trust Apple at all.

You shouldn't trust any company. Not Apple, not Microsoft, and not Google. Which is why "the cloud" is a stupid idea.

> You shouldn't trust any company.

Trust them with what, exactly?

There are some things you shouldn't trust them with, but there are also things you _can_/should trust them with.

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

#134

Post by scholia »

unreal37 wrote: post #59
petercooper wrote: post #20

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?

That's a good point. Barely legal is still legal, and why is Apple even blocking emails that contain those words? It might have to do with spam filtering. Trying sending an email that talks about Cialis.

As a man who has the ability to search Google (whooo!), I can add that "Barely Legal" teen movies are published by Hustler, and there appear to be hundreds of them with related names.

Some are sold on Amazon.

Presumably the people who operate in the legal pornography business -- working for Hustler, their distributors (I'm assuming there are several) and US-based retail outlets -- don't use iCloud or it could have an unpleasant impact on their legitimate businesses.

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

#135

Post by bitwize »

petercooper wrote: post #20

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?

It's also possible that "barely legal teens" tripped a spam filter. I hardly encounter that phrase except in porn site promotion.

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

#136

Post by snowwrestler »

mikeash wrote: post #49
snowwrestler wrote: post #30

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.

OS X is a certified Unix that ships with a CLI and admin accounts with sudo powers. To lock it down the way you're fearing, they would have to completely rewrite the userland of the OS.

Oh wait, they already did that: it's called iOS.

iOS is the ultimate proof that Apple does not intend to lock users out of their Macs: they already created a different product to enable that hand-held computing experience.

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

#137

Post by derefr »

mikeash wrote: post #111
rayiner wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OS X and iOS share a lot of the same core code base, so of course there is going to be cross-pollination features-wise. Why should the migration of features to solve problems common to both platforms indicate you should start worrying about Apple locking down the Mac? Guess what: when Macs get touch screens, more Launchpad is going to make more sense, and full screen is going to be even better. That doesn't mean that…

When one of the features they migrate makes it so that the default state of a Mac is to obstruct running any software not approved by Apple, it starts to make sense to think in this direction. Full screen/launchpad are irrelevant.

You know that Windows and (some) Linux desktop environments also have that feature, right? It's not "obstruct running any software not approved by Apple," it's "obstruct running any software marked with the 'downloaded from the Internet' taint flag, unless signed with a certificate in the OS's keychain."

It's a very sensible default for people who can't be trusted to not click on banners telling them to download a "FREE CAT SCREENSAVER", thus the universal adoption. And it doesn't hinder anything like software development at all, since programs you compile yourself aren't marked as tainted. (And you can just pop open a Terminal and drop the taint xattr from any file.)

Nevertheless, in all cases, in all these OSes, the Gatekeeper/Smartscreen-like system can be turned off, and always will be able to be. Otherwise, how would programs get deploy-tested? [You can't require signing with individual device deploy keys like for iOS deploy testing, because IBM-compatible PCs have structural identity--there's nothing equivalent to the UDID to tell them apart by. You could try using a fingerprint with the CPU model, MAC address, etc--but all those can be faked. Unless we get something like a TPM-based PC UDID, trying to do device keying on PCs is moot, and no OS vendor will bother.]

---

Actually, come to think of it, Linux also has this at an even more fundamental level: you can't install a DEB/RPM from the Internet as an automatic dependency unless its signing key is in your keychain, fullstop. There are actual programs I've installed (for example, ESL's distribution of Erlang) which require the user to "curl http://example.com/key.asc | sudo apt-key add -". Ubuntu's PPA system (using apt-add-repository et al) doesn't get around this, it just automates it with a prompt for whether you trust the key.

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

#138

Post by mturmon »

scholia wrote: post #127
mikeash wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..…

Every OS has chauvinistic users, but there's nothing to be gained by trotting them out for strawman arguments.

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

#139

Post by magicalist »

m_eiman wrote: post #124
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.

wait, you're sending from a google apps domain? From the web interface? It always just refused to send if I've tried to do that in the past, with a message explaining why. If you're sending from a different provider, gmail help claims it will bounce it back, not drop it silently, though I've never actually tried that.

In any case, not allowing specific file types as an attachment feels pretty different here, at the very least because the list of filetypes not allowed are enumerated[1], the refusal is explicit, and it's not due to the subject of the exe you're trying to send.

[1] http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

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

#140

Post by UnoriginalGuy »

nicholassmith wrote: post #89

I know everyone is rushing to decry Apple and their draconian behaviour ("first they took my unsigned apps, now they want in my email? TO THE PITCHFORKS!") but the likelyhood is someone has fiddled with the spam filtering and they've broken something. If the first thing you jump to is some conspiracy you're ignoring the simple rule of technology that behind every good wild goose chase is a member of staff who's quick…

Spam should never be deleted. Plus when e-mail is sent OUT (not coming in) it is blocked.

No way to defend this. No spam filter should ever work like that, even if set up overly broadly.

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