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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'

#181

Post by venus »

badgar wrote: post #157
mikeash wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should I choose that over disabling Gatekeeper? Your way adds more steps but is not any safer for me.

If you forget to re-enable Gatekeeper, you're hosed. That's the big one - security-related process/workflow should be as idiotproof as possible.

> If you forget to re-enable Gatekeeper, you're hosed

Let's not exaggerate. Everyone got by perfectly well for years and years just using common sense about what to install. Gatekeeper is a welcome layer of defense but I doubt many experienced users would be "hosed" without it.

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

#182

Post by kalleboo »

Someone wrote: post #147
mikeash wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their media stores take hours, sometimes a day, to propagate metadata changes. Any time an App Store app gets released or updated, there's a fun game where you watch it slowly propagate to visibility among your friends and acquaintances. Their store for physical goods goes down every time they make a significant change to the product offerings. Both are highly successful , but all this tells us is that a web service…

"Any time an App Store app gets released or updated, there's a fun game where you watch it slowly propagate to visibility among your friends and acquaintances" Are you sure that is for technical reasons? I don't see a big advantage of pushing such updates to all customers in one go, and I can see an advantage of staggering updates (say 1% every hour over a couple of days): if your update breaks something, it gives yo…

I'd say that's far outweighed by users complaining that they get odd errors when they try to install the app when it's in a half-propagated state. Heck there was a 5-page macrumors thread of people keeping each other updated on what fun error the Mac App Store was telling them for each country when Mountain Lion was being released. Took a day for it to propagate.

If Amazon CloudFront worked that poorly at replication, everyone would rightly tear them a new one.

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

#183

Post by radio4fan »

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?

Yahoo (particularly when providing services for BT) silently delete some spam, even mail with a raw SA score And they don't respond to complaints, even from their own users.

I've been running the same pukka mailing list for 12 years, I'm in their abuse feedback loop, have proved exclusive ownership of the mail server, all mail is DKIM signed with valid SPF records, mail is accepted with a 250 OK, you name it.

Still they bin my emails, but only to some accounts. No rhyme or reason, no bounce, no spam folder. Just never arrives.

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

#184

Post by DanBC »

jfb wrote: post #178
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 a term of the pornographer's art. I had a friend from college who wrote for Larry Flynt's Barely Legal magazine for a while. She went on to bigger but arguably less respectable things (political blogging).

Yes, "Barely legal" is used by many legal pornographers.

The article suggests some connection between the phrase "barely legal" and images of child sexual abuse.

It's clear that "barely legal" has a well-established meaning of "absolutely legal; documented adults; no chance of being under age". The article failed to establish a connection between the term "barely legal" and images of child sexual abuse.

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

#185

Post by DanBC »

bitwize wrote: post #135
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.

I agree that the phrase is unlikely to occur apart from the context of porn sites.

But I'd like to be in control of whether emails are being deleted or not. (Or flagged as spam or not.)

Some people prefer to get everything; others don't care if stuff is silently dropped. But it's important that they get to choose.

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

#186

Post by nicholasjarnold »

Ugh! Let's just list a few reasons why we shouldn't be purchasing these things anymore. (Disclosure: Never owned one, but have played around with them a little.)

- Not upgradable - Super overpriced - Dictator-style company that seemingly caters to grandma more than technical folk - Obnoxious smug ethos created by marketing team - Lots of people complaining about OSX going downhill - The OP story and associated reports of mass censorship - Just look at Objective C for 5 minutes

I'm perfectly happy with my beefy Win 7 box paired with a *nix machine that I can shell into when I need to do something that would suck in Powershell. Just don't install Java/Flash/ect and don't open JessicaAlbaBoob.jpg.exe and you will not get a virus.

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

#187

Post by scholia »

endgame wrote: post #126
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...

Thanks for the links. Very funny piece...

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

#188

Post by ams6110 »

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.

Apple has always been against Porn on their devices.

Heh. Wonder how much of it is produced with iMovie, or FinalCut.

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

#189

Post by yardie »

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.

To be fair, in Windows it's called IESC and it is a joy to have when your an administrator. Like gatekeeper it's simple to deactivate if you know what you are doing.
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