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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'

#201

Post by smackfu »

robryan wrote: post #175
smackfu wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's anything like my friend, it's because their phone has every single photo they've ever taken, it's set to do an iCloud backup, and it's over 5 GB. Very easy to do.

Or it is possible if someone gets a new phone and doesn't restore off the current backup in iCloud it will make a separate one which will go over 5gig. To be fair most services have to force you to do something one you have ran through your free space.

Or if you have an iPhone and an iPad, it's very easy to use up all your free space.

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

#202

Post by jfoster »

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…

I agree that it's boneheaded, but I'm not convinced this is a privacy issue, assuming the email only gets dropped. Shouldn't something need to reach the eyes of a human in order to be a privacy issue?

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

#203

Post by skore »

scholia wrote: post #180
mturmon wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sense of humor failure?

No, this is HN, where you have to be careful with your Godwin's Law. Particularly when it comes to humor wrapping a weak point.

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

#204

Post by Kylekramer »

bitcartel wrote: post #194
Kylekramer wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Gruber a few months ago, it is legit a technical issue: http://twitter.com/gruber/status/264135810566209537

How does he know? He's not a WebObjects programmer and the tweet is quite vague ("certain types of changes") which implies he's not privy to any real information.

Obviously I can't be 100% sure of the validity, but I am inclined to believe it for a multitude of reasons:

-Outside of Apple employees, you would be hard pressed to find a person with better inside information on Apple than John Gruber

-Additionally, in the tweet, he is corroborating another Apple journalist's similar claim

-Saying it is a technical flaw reflects somewhat poorly on Apple, and Gruber isn't exactly one to go out of the way to claim Apple is doing something poorly without a real reason to say so

-"It is for the PR!" always struck me as pretty weak post hoc reasoning. Sure, it drums up some interest in the tech blogs, but it also means the store just does not work for a period of time for everyone. Including people who don't care and just want to hand Apple money. I presume Apple wouldn't go out of their way to frustrate customers and possibly lose money.

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

#207

Post by beedogs »

mikeash wrote: post #46
roc wrote: 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…

"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.

OS X is going down the same path as iOS, too: Mountain Lion scolds users for downloading apps without going through the App Store; this can be disabled by digging around in the system settings, but I can envision a day where you'll need to open a terminal to set a system property from the command line, and then a day when they simply disable unsigned binaries from running altogether.

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

#208

Post by TallGuyShort »

mistercow wrote: post #173
TallGuyShort wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That's probably just done via host file (or otherwise at the DNS level) for filtering undesirable sites. It's rather sensationalist to call that "forging network traffic". I don't even know if you can reasonably call it "censorship". What Apple does with the internet in their own stores is both inconsequential and also totally their own business. In contrast, deleting email based on content is neither inconsequential…

As trivial as it may be, I consider it censorship when they stop being transparent. Displaying "Blocked!" when someone tries to access the site is, as you said, totally their business. Implying a successful HTTP connection but a missing file? Still, as you said, inconsequential. The attitude that leads someone to make it look like a 404 instead of a blocked site? That's the same attitude that makes them block emails on the presence of a text string.

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

#210

Post by code_chimp »

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.

Ironic this is the same company that produced this ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwT6mgXsZvU
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