Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cultofmac.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 395 posts

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

#301

Post by MBCook »

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).

Apples an oranges.

As others have pointed out in this thread, gmail silently drops emails that contained zipped EXE files. It doesn't tell you it dropped it, it doesn't tell you it didn't send it, it just vanishes.

This is (sadly) not new behavior. Other email providers drop emails (which is sad), and Apple acting puritanical isn't exactly news.

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

#302

Post by DeepDuh »

rdl wrote: post #243
Volpe wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So this implies there is a market for a simple mailserver that just mimics gmail (or whatever) on your own server: e.g. apt-get install gmail-server

Search is IMO the hard part. I know you can do Lucerne, but getting that working well with email is hard. Until recently Outlook's search was crap compared to gmail. too, and mutt is still essentially "headers only". Still, shouldn't be that hard to do as long as it is your own server and you trust it; I imagine a lot of the difficulty of gmail is scaling, and even a single user with 20-50GB of mail isn't in the same…

How about a good old desktop mail client? I don't really understand why so many people insist on only using webmail and then complain about the lack of certain features and/or GMail lock-in.

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

#304

Post by mindcrime »

belorn wrote: post #227

When you let someone else handle your email, they own your email. There is no postal secrecy law, no rule against reading. They can touch, modify or delete according to their whims. It's their email now. So I am not that very surprised to hear a news article like this. It makes perfectly sense with the current mentality. It also adds another nail in the coffin about idea that "only a machine is reading my emails. Why…

Hopefully this will encourage some people enough to run their own mail servers. It's far less problematic than most people think it is. Maybe it was hard to install and configure this in 1990s, but this is 2013. You buy a domain name, install a Debian machine, and do:

Thanks, but no thanks. I just went in the opposite direction a couple of months ago, switching to a paid Google Apps account so they can handle email for us. I couldn't be happier. Our Postfix / Cyrus / Squirrelmail setup worked fine, but then the server got compromised and taken over by spammers, out IP got blacklisted by most everybody, and right in the middle of trying to fix all that, I got sick and wound up in the hospital.

When I got home, I sat down to start trying to fix this mess and had an epiphany "WTF am I doing this? Hosting email servers is not a core competency for us, there is no competitive advantage to be gained here, and Google Apps is fairly cheap."

I switched over the same night and haven't looked back. After fighting with Postfix and Friends on and off multiple times over the past decade, I'm out. I want no part of hosting email, now, or probably ever again. I have much, much, much better uses for my time than fixing broken email servers.

It always surprises me that people can use a software library with complicated, half insane API's, but can't follow a single page of simple single steps installation.

I have yet to find an email setup that can be described as "following a single page of simple single steps installation". And even if I could, I still don't want to, because there just isn't any real point to it. Email delivery is a commodity, not a core competence. Outsource the hell out of that shit, IMO.

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

#305

Post by veidr »

derefr wrote: post #276
veidr wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are talking about something different than what most people are worried about. Sure, locking down what can run at the behest of the administrator is a feature. What people are talking about is locking down what can run at the behest of the vendor . Like how iOS is. Like how Mac OS X would be, if you couldn't disable Gatekeeper. You think users "always will be" able to disable Gatekeeper, but I don't think there i…

> lock Macs down But that's the thing. OSX, Linux, Windows--they're PC operating systems , and they run on PCs . Any PC. Which also includes virtual machine environments that emulate PCs. Apple could lock Mac hardware down, yes, but they can't stop a Hackintosh from running whatever it likes--because you wouldn't build a TPM chip into your Hackintosh. Now, if your argument is that Apple is going to take OSX and make…

In short: I hope you are right, because since 2006, Macs have been far and away the best general-purpose PCs ('trucks' in your parlance) on the market, and migrating off of the Mac and/or jailbreaking and bootlegging the OS and then running it on my own unsupported hardware, will be a major pain in the ass. Either options sucks.

But yep, Apple could do every single thing you say. Without breaking a sweat.

As for why? I think Apple would prefer that OS X not run on commodity PCs. They already take halfassed measures to control running OS X in a VM, and to prevent booting OS X on non-Apple hardware. If they could do that more reliably, they woudln't care about their slightly higher internal costs, and they definitely don't care about making life miserable for their developers (as I've witnessed being one for the past 12 years). But it's just a hard problem for them and a hard sell to existing users used to PCs being wide-open. But with every single iOS user they add, that sell gets one user easier.

I'd bet that within five years, the percentage of users running unapproved software [EDIT: somehow deleted 2nd half of this sentence:] on new Mac hardware will be about the same as it is on iOS today. It won't probably be impossible, just hard enough to not be feasible for most normal/busy people.

OK, that wasn't short, but in summary: The fact that Mac OS X has been the best power user OS for the last several years wasn't by design, it was just an accident of history and where they got their OS from. Apple doesn't give a fuck about power users, and Apple doesn't give a fuck about trucks. That market is just way too small for Apple to care about -- which is sad for those of us currently in that market.

Because if/when Apple finally abandons Intel and power users (timing that makes sense to me) it will be years before Ubuttnu or any other plausible player is anywere near as good as Mac OS X 10.7. 10.8 still has too many bugs and stability issues, but it will get there. Probably 10.9, too. But after that? I don't think anybody knows, but I am very skeptical.

(I think Microsoft will move in this direction, too, so those Surface RT users are probably right to worry.)

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

#306

Post by fpgeek »

tnorthcutt wrote: post #74
taligent wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple does actually know how to run web services. They run the world's largest media store and one of the world's busiest online stores in addition to iCloud. Just because MobileMe was a piece of junk doesn't mean they are completely clueless.

They know how to run them in that they have web services running, but I'd contend that they're not run very well. They are consistently slow, slow, slow, not to mention buggy. I just opened the Mac app store application, clicked the "updates" tab/button, and waited 15 seconds to be told that there are no updates available. When I install app updates on my iPhone (5, running iOS 6), the badge icon does not go away unt…

On the "slow, slow, slow" point, I didn't realize how slow iTunes was until just now.

I recently got a couple of HD movies for my Nexus 7 from Google. I didn't really think that much about downloading them, just stuck the pin and they were downloaded reasonably quickly and painlessly in the background.

But now that I think about it, the contrast with my wife's experience downloading HD TV shows and movies from iTunes could not be more stark. The downloads take hours. She'll often check and be frustrated about how little had downloaded. She'd sometimes end up reshuffling her downloads. Until our recent wireless upgrade, she'd worry about where to place her laptop, sometimes resorting to a network cable. And probably more frustrations I'm forgetting.

To top it off, this is in a country Apple officially supports and Google doesn't. From my (admittedly limited, external perspective) I'd say Apple still has a long way to go with web services, including iTunes.

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

#307

Post by nonamegiven »

belorn wrote: post #227

When you let someone else handle your email, they own your email. There is no postal secrecy law, no rule against reading. They can touch, modify or delete according to their whims. It's their email now. So I am not that very surprised to hear a news article like this. It makes perfectly sense with the current mentality. It also adds another nail in the coffin about idea that "only a machine is reading my emails. Why…

Putting a scalpel in your drawer is a simple one-step operation. Anyone can install a scalpel.

Using it effectively, and knowing the dark corners of scalpeling, is quite another thing. It would be easy to get into deep trouble with a scalpel.

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

#308

Post by jasonlingx »

Volpe wrote: post #235
secure wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, it is not so much the installation itself, but the regular maintenance and the many subtle errors that can occur, which make running your own email server NOT as trivial as you make it sound :). As for a few examples: 1. Mailservers around the world have different degrees of strictness in what they accept. Some require the sender’s mailserver to have a valid and matching PTR and A/AAAA (!) DNS recor…

So this implies there is a market for a simple mailserver that just mimics gmail (or whatever) on your own server: e.g. apt-get install gmail-server

There already are several solutions like this that have been around for years. Check out Zimbra. But still a pain to maintain and moving over to Google Apps several years ago, I never looked back.

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

#309

Post by 5partan »

mellamoyo wrote: post #274

I'm a bit surprised there's no discussion yet about PGP/GnuPG (GPG). If we all encrypted our mails would this be such a big deal? No. Is client-side encryption difficult? Not really. I think there's a big market for a desktop email app that does PGP/GPG really well and does so with other people .

Add an PDF-attachment to your mail and it becomes a big deal.

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

#310

Post by niggler »

mindcrime wrote: post #304
belorn wrote: post #227

When you let someone else handle your email, they own your email. There is no postal secrecy law, no rule against reading. They can touch, modify or delete according to their whims. It's their email now. So I am not that very surprised to hear a news article like this. It makes perfectly sense with the current mentality. It also adds another nail in the coffin about idea that "only a machine is reading my emails. Why…

Hopefully this will encourage some people enough to run their own mail servers. It's far less problematic than most people think it is. Maybe it was hard to install and configure this in 1990s, but this is 2013. You buy a domain name, install a Debian machine, and do: Thanks, but no thanks. I just went in the opposite direction a couple of months ago, switching to a paid Google Apps account so they can handle email f…

There are a few things to note here:

1) in some industries (like in finance) the regulatory requirements make it near impossible to use external email services. For example, there needs to be a record of every email sent out of accounts in the company that needs to be presented to regulators when they demand it.

2) People within the same company may slip up and send emails to coworkers that shouldn't be read outside the company. When you run the email servers, no other party reads them. It stays in the family, so to speak. When you use google or whatever service, they get a peek at the emails.

3) AFAICT Gmail is not HIPAA compliant, making it inappropriate for health care businesses.

Post reply on HN