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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'

#341
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud is a hip word. Amazon's got a cloud. Google's got a cloud. Apple couldn't be left with just an iTools/.Mac/MobileMe now could they? I think Apple's inability to run web services is going to really come to pass in the near future. Everything is moving towards that way and Apple is still left in the "just sync with iTunes" world.

Apple's cloud is based on Amazon and Azure... Apple doesn't have an "own" cloud.

That's not quite true, Apple offloads some of its static assets to Amazon, MS's (Azure-based) & Akamai CDNs. There's as yet no evidence that Apple's cloud-based software (like iCloud) runs off anything but their own datacentres.

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

#342
Perfect situation for applying Hanlon's razor - I see no reason to assume anything other than just a (really stupid) spam rule bug which is deleting messages when it should be filing them as spam.

Never attribute to malice ... you know the rest.

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

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My iPad disallows me to do tethering, functionality that's available on the iPad but that can be enabled/disabled by the career. My Android phone, from the same career, allows me to do pretty much whatever I want. iOS doesn't have a terminal. And considering the recent moves with the Mac app store, how long before terminals will stop shipping with OS X?

> iOS doesn't have a terminal. And considering the recent moves with the Mac app store, how long before terminals will stop shipping with OS X? Why not take this illogical train of thought even further? iOS tries to hide the filesystem from the user, so how long will it be before OSX does the same? iOS doesn't allow generic USB devices like 3G modems, so when can we expect that support to be removed from OSX? I purch…

OS X already hides the ~/Library folder, it's not far-fetched to think they might hide everything but the Photos, Documents, etc. folders.

I wouldn't say iOS is a terrible product, just that it's terrible for someone that knows how to use a computer. Apple is trying to get users that don't know what they are doing at the expense of the experience for users that do. I know I shall never buy another Apple computer if the trend continues.

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

#344
post #9

Everything about icloud - from the terrible design to the clunky interface - is as Steve Jobs liked to say, "shit". I have icloud and I'm not even sure what it's for; is it a backup service, an e-mail provider, or a way to find my phone? None of these have much in common, so the fact that they're all bundled together really confuses me. And its name is a bit of a misnomer, you can't even do standard cloud stuff like…

Back then I had a paid me.com account - just for syncing the OS X keychain and preferences between my Macs.

Ironically with iCloud they removed that one feature that made the whole service worthwhile for me.

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

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pah. I'm old enough to remember DOS users mocking mac users for using GUIs and mice.

I've heard tales of woe from old geezers of having to toggle their pdp8 bootloader in with panel-switches, in the snow, uphill, both ways. In a related matter, I have it on good authority that this very website runs on a computer only slightly more modern than the pdp8. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229488

Thanks for posting that, I hadn't seen that thread... Best pg response ever :-)

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

#346
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…

I've written about this before, but I used to run my own mail server and it's no cake walk. I used to do greylisting with spamd and ended up silently losing quite a lot of email. (Many mail hosts do not re-send from the same IP, meaning messages essentially get stuck forever.) Doing spam checks at DATA time and rejecting obviously bad emails outright seemed much more effective and less dangerous. I never managed to g…

I used to have same reaction regarding greylisting, but changed my mind around 5 years ago. Have yet to see any issue with it, and I assume this is because homebrew email servers are no longer common or even uncommonly in use. I guess it could happen, but I have yet to find this at work for those I host email for, and same goes for all my private emails. It can be that because many commercial email providers uses greylisting, users of homebrew mail servers has either fixed it or gone over to postfix/exim/sendmail by now.

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

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have icloud and I'm not even sure what it's for As far as I can tell, you pay $99 or whatever, and it periodically sends a text to your iPhone telling you it hasn't actually backed up anything in XX weeks. Kind of a weird business model but then they didn't ask me.

iCloud's free* now, actually. It became a free service when they transitioned away from the MobileMe branding. * You need a Mac or iOS device to join, though. And you can pay for additional storage if you want ($20, $40, or $100 per year), but that's not necessary.

Free for a year. If you register it from an iDevice or some hardware bought from Apple.

And then next year to keep iCloud "free", you need to buy more overpriced goods from Apple.

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

#348
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.

Nothing silent about it, in my experience, at least. I was trying to send a self-extracting encrypted archive (full of documents) to my tax guy. Google wouldn't accept the .exe attachment until I added .remove to the end of the name.

The intent is to require the receiver to take some affirmative action (e.g. deleting the .remove) before blindly running the attachment and getting pwned. Seems perfectly reasonable.

Unlike what Apple just got caught doing. I'm ripe for a new phone. I don't think it's going to be an iPhone ...

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

#349
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…

//" install a Debian machine, and do: aptitude install postfix aptitude install postgrey install either a webmail (roundcube most commonly), or go to ( http://www.postfix.org/docs.html ). If a spam gets through, install blacklisting or spamassassin.// You seriously think this is simple for non IT people?

No, I don't think this is simple for non IT people. Same goes for my web site code, or my python projects, or my shell scripts. If I gave either of those to an non IT person, they would have no clue what is going on.

This is as expected, as most people require some expertise to do technical work. I would have no idea how to fix the electrical system in a car, but I do expect that the mechanic knows how to figure it out if it one broke. Same, I expect a sysadmin or a programmer has the expertise to follow single steps installation guides.

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

#350
post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>While we're keeping history in context, let's also not forget this is also the company that was borderline irrelevant prior to their current direction. You're retconning. Apple hasn't been 'borderline irrelevant' since before they launched the iPod in 2001. There's a six year gap there in between the iPod and the iPhone, and imho they didn't really change their direction until 2010 or 2011, with the release of OSX L…

I partially agree with you, but I'd like to point out that, from some points of view, launching the iPod was Apple's first step in their current direction.

I would venture to say that launching the iMac was turning point A, the iPod was turning point B, and the iPhone was turning point C.

The TiBook was also quite nice, though I wouldn't call it as significant as the iMac in pushing Apple toward stylish and well designed consumer devices.

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