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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'

#211

Post by FireBeyond »

derekp7 wrote: post #200
JeremyBanks wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not "even worse", that is relatively insignificant. An IM client converting text to smilies by default is standard and easily disabled, or avoided by a different using client. On the other hand, the issue above represents a horrible failing on the part of MSN as a network/protocol. Silently dropping messages without giving error to either party is insanely stupid behaviour, and MSN's done it frequently for as…

Actually, any mangling of the text is bad. It is bad to drop text, and it is bad to change a line of code to have cartoon graphic images randomly scattered (which you, the sender, don't see but only the receiver does), which makes you look stupid in the eyes of the person receiving it. At least dropping a message makes it look like a network error, the other can make the message sender look like an ignorant fool. (I'…

No, MSN Messenger did change it for the sender, too. The receiver of a message's settings determined whether they saw the image. You could turn it off in the Text Formatting options, just a simple checkbox.

So I'd disagree with the 'utterly useless' aspect.

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

#212

Post by nsmartt »

pyre wrote: post #155
rayiner wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You're doctor's medical practice is a company. Do you trust your doctor?

It depends on your definition of trust.

I would trust my doctor to some extent, but I wouldn't blindly assume that anything s/he said was correct.

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

#213

Post by nsmartt »

shurcooL wrote: post #133
rayiner wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It all depends on what we mean by "trust." Realistically, you should be cautious when trusting any company with anything.

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

#214

Post by joenathan »

onli wrote: post #191
papsosouid wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>else why mention the barely at all? Because they are specifically promoting porn featuring women as young as legally possible. "Legal teens" would include 19 year olds, and they are trying to create the specific expectation of women who very recently turned 18. >Why barely, which also means "not really"? That is not what barely means at all. Barely means "only just". Barely legal means legal, but very close to the c…

>That is not what barely means at all. Barely means "only just". Not at all? Well, it is possible my translator (leo) is wrong. I think i have a fairly good understanding of the english language, but i am not a native speaker, so i tried to check my understanding. I still think it has in this case at least the connotation.

It doesn't, your translator is wrong.

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

#215

Post by mich41 »

mark-r wrote: post #209

Any reason to believe this is deliberate on Apple's part and not just some Bayesian filter trained with real spam?

They silently delete such emails, not mark them as spam.

Also, I've never seen real spam advertising porn - mostly it's fake watches, penis enlargement and fake social media or other identity theft scams.

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

#216

Post by bitcartel »

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.

In other news today:

"Kim Dotcom... plans to launch an end-to-end encrypted email service to go with his Mega encrypted file storage offering." http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/feb/26/kim-dotcom-...

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

#217

Post by bitwize »

DanBC wrote: post #185
bitwize wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Certainly iCloud's is the wrong approach for your purposes (or mine). I'm not denying that; just offering a possible alternative to the explanation that "Apple thought these messages were child porn".

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

#218

Post by bitcartel »

beedogs wrote: post #207
mikeash wrote: 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.

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.

Sadly, there's a very real possibility that this could happen as Nanny Computing (anyone coined a better term?) is proving to be quite profitable.

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

#220

Post by chrisdevereux »

Just tried sending this to myself from another account and received the email.

All the other experiments on here were from a few hours ago. Does this still happen for other people? If it does, it'd suggest it's more complicated than a simple filter on emails containing the phrase.

That said, deleting user data without user input at all is completely insane. It's probably a good thing that iCloud sync sucks so much and developers aren't using it.

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