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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'

#361

Post by onli »

hughlomas wrote: post #322
onli wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The connotations is not. The translation may be. That is the link: http://dict.leo.org/ende/index_en.html#/search=barely&se...

It doesn't have that connotation, "barely legal" implies "fully legal".

I will explain it once again and in full and then let it go.

This is a special case. I know that normally barely meanst "only just" (though i believed leo that it sometimes - in special cases when used in a specific way - can mean "only almost"). But if someone hears a sentence like "that is barely visible", one always implies that it is not visible at all for someone seeing a degree worse. Now, if you vist a pornsite with usergenerated content - take 4chan as example - I'd bet a lot of money that one would find a mod-guideline or at least a discussion about such a guideline to delete any threads with "barely legal teens" as topic because a lot of users would post pictures of underage girls in such a thread. In such a case, barely implies not really. And therefore such a term can have another connotation than its formal meaning.

It is really a stretch to say "it doesn't have that connotation", connotations can vary even in one language for every speaker.

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

#362

Post by goblin89 »

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?

Russian mail provider Mail.ru did that, maybe still does. I blame white-listing, as perfectly valid mail from custom domains could become missing.

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

#364

Post by jopt »

Spam filter. It's disappointing someone seriously believes this is some sort of "objectionable content" censorship. Namely because that's easy enough to test:

"barely legal teens" isn't delivered (edit: now does)

"actually illegal teens" arrives

...along with everything else of the sort (that I've tested).

Surely the phrase was blacklisted by some algorithm after it occurred verbatim in massive amounts of spam.

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

#365

Post by gonzo »

rayiner wrote: post #96
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.

Counter narrative: nothing has changed. Apple has just expanded their business. If Apple made toasters, whether they were locked down or not wouldn't affect my opinion of what was likely to happen to my Mac. iPhones are toasters, not computers.

I think the idea is that GP computers are trucks, iOS devices are cars, and not everyone needs a truck.

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

#366

Post by StavrosK »

cryptoz wrote: post #37
scott_s wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's so surprising I tried to find evidence of it online, but I couldn't. Partly because "index.php" is such a common thing that Google won't use it for a search term, which is ironic. Can you point to anything corroborating that?

There are a whole bunch of banned words. There used to be a whole slew of sites that indexed all of the things Microsoft wouldn't let you talk about. Here's an article about it in the Inquirer: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1041509/microsofts-... Edit: that article appears to be mostly user names. Here's a forum thread to get you started: http://www.amsn-project.net/forums/index.php?topic=157.0

> Four letter words of a naughty nature are also banned, as well as contentious areas of the world like Scunthorpe.

That is hilarious.

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

#367

Post by StavrosK »

signed0 wrote: post #64
cryptoz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has been doing this for decades. Ever try to collaborate on a web project using MSN Messenger? Every message you sent that contained 'index.php' was mysteriously dropped. It IS Orwellian, but you should not be surprised. The big communication services all seem to have their own little moral or technical hacks they use to keep your discussion limited and away from certain topics / words.

That makes me want to use Skype (owned by Microsoft) even less now.

Nobody seems to say it: There were phishing/malware scams that propagated by sending links to all your friends, and banning common page names was Microsoft's way of combatting that.

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

#368

Post by mindcrime »

arthurrr wrote: post #335
mindcrime wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely true, and I wouldn't argue against hosting your own email is there are such very specific constraints on your organization. We don't have any of that, and hosting our own email makes zero sense for us. Or to put it another way... we're a 2 person, self-funded, bootstrapped startup. Our most precious resource right now is the time of myself and my cofounder. Every minute we spend tweaking and tuning an emai…

And yet, here you are on HN responding to this thread. Just a little bit ironic :)

Heh, maybe, in a sense. But realistically, I can't "work" 24x7, and taking a break to check/post HN is part of how I stay sane.

That and then there are periods throughout my day (especially at the $DAYJOB, like right now) when there isn't anything productive I can really do on the startup, and there aren't any pressing assignments, so reading HN is about as productive as anything else. :-)

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

#369

Post by exodust »

jfoster wrote: post #202
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?

If the email is deleted, that's an extension of the original issue where your email is scanned in the first place, whether by machine or human.

Then comes deletion, making the issue worse than before. Call it privacy, personal data control issue, doesn't matter.

Apple will likely correct this anyway. Two academics could be chatting over email about the potential social harm of "barely legal teens" categories in mainstream porn. They argue the slogan as a provocative, predatory gesture towards all young women. Often the category strives towards "as young looking as possible while legal" which is poor taste and creepy, yet sits alongside "brunette". They might be emailing about that, in which case Apple is wrong to delete the email.

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

#370

Post by BCM43 »

ams6110 wrote: post #262
rdl wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

notmuch for search. http://notmuchmail.org/

Agreed. I've handled over 100,000 messages with it with no problem, and I know people that have handled well over that. Instant full-text search, no matter how much mail you throw at it.
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