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Suspended from Google Play for listing supported subtitle formats

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Re: Suspended from Google Play for listing supported subtitle formats

#251

Post by yholio »

sa1 wrote: post #225
horsawlarway wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good - There's a clear theme in the motivations of both major mobile OS companies here: You, a 3rd party developer making custom software products for a mobile platform, are no longer allowed to have customers yourself. Instead you must grovel and beg and pray that our lords Apple/Google consent to allow you to rent their customers. This consent can be revoked at any time, you will pay through the nose for it (20%+ o…

Me, a customer, is very happy that they play a regulatory role and are taking steps to prevent surveillance of the form GP is proposing. I’m glad that I don’t have a direct relationship with shady 3rd party developers.

Android already has a very fine grained permission system that allows blocking such behavior, you simply revoke an apps right to access location data.

So the argument then becomes an appeal to protect less knowledgeable users that would be tricked to enable advanced features for some eye candy. It has some merit; but there has to be some compromise there for advanced users, short of relegating then to APK install with no security updates, like in the Windows days.

Re: Suspended from Google Play for listing supported subtitle formats

#252

Post by distances »

jimsmart wrote: post #241
aidos wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once had a bug that I traced back to a rule (can’t remember in which part of the stack - though I think it was client controlled IIS) that was striping the “select” from the word “selected” in query string params in an attempt to thwart sql injection. From memory it was naive enough that “sselectelect” was converted nicely in the process.

Similar: Yahoo used to (2002) replace any instance of the character sequence 'eval' (and other 'bad' strings) in their emails, in an attempt to prevent Javascript exploits. Needless to say it created a small amount of havoc! http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2138014.stm https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/medireview

I hadn't heard of this and I'm now flabbergasted. Is it even legal for a service provider to secretly change email contents? It's absolutely outlandish to imagine how someone first thought this could be a good idea, and then found someone capable of executing the plan and apparently agree.

Re: Suspended from Google Play for listing supported subtitle formats

#253

Post by kube-system »

handoflixue wrote: post #203
jaspax wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Religion's got nothing to do with it. Racial slurs are a subset of "profanity", and I wager that you support Google's desire to not have apps in their store which prominently feature racial slurs. Every culture has its "bad words" which are forbidden to use in polite company. (Of course the actual app in question is still completely innocent, because Google's vetting process is a trash fire.)

It seems disingenuous to bring up racial slurs in the context of profanity. They're two very different categories, even if they are both subsets of "words that can get you in trouble." As you acknowledge, the app in question was blocked for profanity, not slurs. As parent comment says, profanity seems to be mostly a religious issue. I can say "fuck" on TV, or in my novel, or even in my Hacker News comment. But I doub…

Generally speaking, profanity is language that is socially offensive. The reasons that the language might be offensive depends on the social makeup and norms of the group you're referring to. Sometimes those norms are driven by religion, sometimes they are driven by other factors, and sometimes it is a combination of reasons.

For example, you can find instances of social groups that:

1. are not religious, but recognize the concept of profanity.

2. do not recognize some slurs as profane.

3. are religious, but do not recognize the same profanity as other social groups that belong to the same religion.

Re: Suspended from Google Play for listing supported subtitle formats

#254

Post by 015a »

vaduz wrote: post #41
015a wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminiscent to me of Call of Duty Warzone; it has loadouts which you can give custom names (that only you see!) which are protected with a profanity filter. Comically, some of the literal names of the guns are banned as being profane, like "MP5".

Isn't it just to double-plus-ensure that no one "accidentally" uses a name that ActivisionBlizzard did not license from the appropriate gun manufacturer? I.e. It has little to do with profanity but a lot to prevent someone from making screnshot of a loadout with a gun that looks like MP5, is named by them as "MP5 whatever" and behaves like an MP5 in some type of legal action?

Unclear. They do absolutely refer to their gun as, say, the "MP5" in-game.

Though, interestingly, in Modern Warfare (2019), many guns have two names; for example, the MP5 is also called SMG Charlie (as in, NATO phonetic alphabet for C). I kind of got the impression that it was laying groundwork for a long-term goal of removing the actual names of the guns; possibly due to licensing fees, or maybe to divorce the ugly reality of killing with video game killing, I don't know.

Re: Suspended from Google Play for listing supported subtitle formats

#255

Post by klyrs »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #201
jaspax wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Religion's got nothing to do with it. Racial slurs are a subset of "profanity", and I wager that you support Google's desire to not have apps in their store which prominently feature racial slurs. Every culture has its "bad words" which are forbidden to use in polite company. (Of course the actual app in question is still completely innocent, because Google's vetting process is a trash fire.)

> Religion's got nothing to do with it. Racial slurs are a subset of "profanity", and I wager that you support Google's desire to not have apps in their store which prominently feature racial slurs. I have no objection. > Every culture has its "bad words" which are forbidden to use in polite company. I'm not so sure that that is true. I do not think there is but a single word in the Dutch language that cannot be feat…

Wikipedia has quite a long list, including wide assortment of racial slurs. Would all of this really be acceptable in kids tv?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_profanity

Also this entry is interesting:

> Kankerlijer means "cancer sufferer". It is a strong insult: an example of its legal status can be found in a 2008 court case, in which using the word kankerlijer to insult a police officer was cited as a serious offense.

Though, little surprise if "offensive to an authority figure" is a lower bar than "offensive to parents"

Re: Suspended from Google Play for listing supported subtitle formats

#256

Post by Triv888 »

ironmagma wrote: post #234
Triv888 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They need to take god out of politics and public schools... from the dollar bill, for example.

I disagree. God is already out of most schools, and it isn’t working well at all. Each school needs its own fully-integrated approach based on the students at the school and what works for them.

Why would it be good to lie to them? What are the consequences when you don't?

Re: Suspended from Google Play for listing supported subtitle formats

#257

Post by alisonkisk »

Google's ML-based ad optimizer was literally called "SmartASS". You may also know the name because the team of the same name was a perennial winner of the ICFP Programming Contest.

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-exec-our-40-billion-s...

Re: Suspended from Google Play for listing supported subtitle formats

#258

Post by wheybags »

015a wrote: post #5
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #2

I guess the Scunthorpe problem is still a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

Reminiscent to me of Call of Duty Warzone; it has loadouts which you can give custom names (that only you see!) which are protected with a profanity filter. Comically, some of the literal names of the guns are banned as being profane, like "MP5".

Maybe I'm being dense here, but what possible profane meaning is there in MP5?

Re: Suspended from Google Play for listing supported subtitle formats

#259

Post by wheybags »

worik wrote: post #66

Some one said, and was downvoted into oblivion (?)... " Yup, that's about how much effort I expected them to put into their app store: absolutely nothing beyond cheap, automated heuristics. Why invest in a decent ecosystem when you're one of the two options in town? I'm about an inch away from throwing my phone in the river and switching to a GPS-only device for navigating in my car. All the convenience a mobile devi…

I use lineageos (pure foss fork of android, with the exception of firmware) without installing google play services. It works pretty well!

Re: Suspended from Google Play for listing supported subtitle formats

#260

Post by thaumasiotes »

emayljames wrote: post #222
grishka wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the hell would it even apply Russian filters to something that isn't written in Cyrillic? And this isn't the best English transliteration of that word either... That's really some dedication.

Yeah, they would have to do literal translation based on phonetics. That is just insane.

> they would have to do literal translation based on phonetics.

That seems pretty unlikely to have happened here; I don't know the Russian word in question, but the Chinese "hui" rhymes with English "clay". (It also rhymes with the more sensibly spelled Chinese "wei"; the 'e' is only omitted when the syllable begins with a consonant. Compare "feng shui".) I'd be surprised if that were a possible reading of any Russian that might be transliterated "hui".

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