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Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

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Re: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

#651

Post by userbinator »

skissane wrote: post #584
the_jeremy wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A direct quote of RMS from his website[0]: The nominee is quoted as saying that if the choice of a sexual partner were protected by the Constitution, "prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia" also would be. He is probably mistaken, legally--but that is unfortunate. All of these acts should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal…

A much more recent quote from his website[0]: 14 September 2019 (Sex between an adult and a child is wrong) Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it. Through personal conversations in recent years, I've learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should…

I've always thought of Stallman as the canary --- the extremist at the edge. I don't agree with a lot of things about him, but I think it's important that such people exist in order to "delineate the boundaries". Him changing his views towards "acceptability" should be taken as a bad sign, regardless of what those views are.

Re: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

#652

Post by baddox »

mantap wrote: post #634
baddox wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google doesn't do that because that would be an abuse of their market position and they would get rinsed in the courts. Are you sure that Google doesn't do that because the Android platform is an extremely viable and lucrative alternative to iPhones, and that people who value the ability to sideload software on their smartphones flock to Android for precisely this reason?

Whether they want to or not is beside the point, which is to consider whether it would be anticompetitive for Google to ban other app stores from Android. As far as I can see, what distinguishes Apple from Google is status quo. Apple never did allow app distribution other than through the Apple App Store. i.e. "We've always been doing it"

> which is to consider whether it would be anticompetitive for Google to ban other app stores from Android

That's what I'm getting at. Is it anticompetitive to deliberately make your product worse by removing a key differentiator between your product and its closest competitor?

Or come at it from another angle: would it be "anticompetitive" for Apple to (in new iPhones) completely remove the App Store and thus all reasonable expectation to be able to run third-party software? Is it anticompetitive to sell a handheld computer than can do email, play music and videos, etc., but not run third-party software?

Re: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

#653

Post by userbinator »

lenkite wrote: post #446
enos_feedler wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I trust the device maker more than myself to keep my data safe and secure.

Safety over Liberty - the motto of the world today. Kneel before the master!

I wonder what Franklin would think if he was alive today...

Re: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

#654

Post by burnte »

jimmydorry wrote: post #620
Joeri wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t it a bit naive that we ever believed the notarization feature would not be used to blacklist developers for business reasons? I feel like a chump now. It is definitely clear that apple does not have the best interest of me, their customer, at heart. Epic were being very sneaky towards Apple, but not malicious towards users in any way. Apple is being malicious. If I want to run Epic’s software without disabling…

It cuts both ways though, doesn't it? Either Apple spends time / effort vetting all applications, including those made by people that don't pay Apple and aren't sold through their store. Or Apple doesn't vet all of these apps, and refuses to notarize any app that is not associated with a valid developer account. It's a whole other can of worms if you want to get into the merits of being able to install and run any ap…

Or, a third manner, which is not forcing notarization at all. Not simple making it disableable, but not enforcing it at all.

Re: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

#655

Post by grishka »

burnte wrote: post #645
grishka wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And so that's why I never liked nor trusted this whole idea of code signing with non-self-signed certificates, especially on desktop OSes. This notarization mechanism introduced a single point of failure: Apple. And now there is concrete evidence of how exactly this is bad. On a device I own, there should be no parties that are trusted more than myself. It's ridiculous I even have to write this.

> On a device I own, there should be no parties that are trusted more than myself. It's ridiculous I even have to write this. This is only true if you contain at least the minimum amount of knowledge to built said device yourself. If you cannot design the type of CPU required, you must trust the vendor. If you cannot design the RAM, you must trust the vendor. If you cannot design the motherboard, you must trust the v…

Of course. But from my point of view, Apple designed a capable device and deliberately limited its capabilities for its own advantage. They have the private key to sign apps that iOS will run, but you do not. They empowered themselves, while depriving the user of that power at the same time.

It's as if you bought a house but couldn't repaint the walls and rearrange the furniture to your liking. You'd have to call a special person from the company that built the house.

Re: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

#656

Post by krapp »

skissane wrote: post #631
krapp wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, that disavowal came after his former behavior and views - which went not only accepted but defended by his peers and followers for years (including on HN following his "cancellation") finally became too much for people around him to bear. No other public figure with a history like his would be given even a shadow of a benefit of the doubt over nothing but a brief blog entry. If he were a politician or a c…

When I was a teenager, back in the 1990s, I idolised RMS. The GNU project and FSF were what I idolised him for, back then I'd never heard his views on these issues. As I grew older, I started to think that the hardline position of the FSF was impractical, at least for my own life. I wouldn't say I idolise him any more. I think his former views were completely wrong, but I try to understand where he was coming from: R…

For what it's worth I think the right thing happened to him for possibly the wrong reason, and the community around him is as much to blame as he for enabling the damage he's done for as long as they did. If not for that whole debacle of an email conversation being leaked and made public, he would still be in a position of authority and still be normalizing the acceptance of behavior like his in tech culture.

There should always be room in society for someone to see the error of their ways and amend, but it's going to take more than a tweet's worth of text to make up for decades of - and let's be honest - sometimes passionate advocacy for reprehensible behavior, and the anecdotal evidence of creepy behavior towards women IRL, and that's not unreasonable. Sympathy doesn't mean one shouldn't expect growth.

Re: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

#657

Post by rsanek »

darkwizard42 wrote: post #621
bob1029 wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am still not seeing the argument relative to mine. If the ability to side load an app is not enabled by default, how would novice users accidentally install apps they may not have intended to?

Step 1: User clicks ad that says they can download this app super easily and improve their phone's battery performance. Step 2: User clicks and navigates to a side-load page/alternate store. Step 2a: Pop-up appears - please adjust your settings to enable access to this app Step 3: User does so and now downloads malware. Step 4: Gets upset and blames Apple or calls up their more tech informed Hacker-News-using family…

What if the permission enablement was made more difficult? Perhaps like how you get to access Android developer tools only after tapping the build number a bunch of times. Or even, making it something you have to run from a CLI while connected to a computer.

My point is, there are many options that preserve safety for the vast majority of users without making it a total non-starter to use alternative app stores.

Re: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

#658

Post by dkersten »

StevePerkins wrote: post #567
Waterfall wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you find him wrong about?

He has expressed skepticism that "willing participation" in pedophilia harms children. And given a couple of bizarre quotes on bestiality (essentially, "if the animal initiates it then what's the problem?"). More recently, he was pushed out of MIT and the FSF last year for questioning whether one of Jeffrey Epstein's victims was truly a victim or not. He prefers Emacs over Vim. There are probably other examples, but…

> questioning whether one of Jeffrey Epstein's victims was truly a victim or not.

I’ve never really been much of an RMS fan beyond admiration for what he has done for free software, but this is not what he said, at least according to his words as quoted in the post that initiated his cancellation[1]. I’ve pasted it from that post below [2]. The author of that post quoted this and then somehow inferred this [3]. How she (and everyone reading it thereafter) went from one line to the next from “she PRESENTED herself as willing” (not that she actually was willing), “assuming she was being COERCED by Epstein” somehow got reinterpreted as “she was entirely willing”.

Nothing RMS said stated he thought she wasn’t a victim, just that Minsky may not have known due to how Epstein coerced her to present herself.

But hey, the witch hunters got their burning.

[1] https://medium.com/@selamjie/remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec2...

[2] We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates.

[3] and then he says that an enslaved child could, somehow, be “entirely willing”.

Re: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

#659

Post by dkersten »

usui wrote: post #623
StevePerkins wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He has expressed skepticism that "willing participation" in pedophilia harms children. And given a couple of bizarre quotes on bestiality (essentially, "if the animal initiates it then what's the problem?"). More recently, he was pushed out of MIT and the FSF last year for questioning whether one of Jeffrey Epstein's victims was truly a victim or not. He prefers Emacs over Vim. There are probably other examples, but…

> He prefers Emacs over Vim I wasn't expecting to laugh, haha. This is great, good stuff! ...But seriously why? How could such a thing be possible?! I would like to know his reasons.

You get irrationally attached to things you are one of the authors of, I guess.

Re: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

#660

Post by burnte »

misnome wrote: post #310
ProAm wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they were not kicked from the app store for doing so.

Come on, I don't think anyone is pretending that this wasn't a deliberate provocation by Epic

It was an invitation for Apple to screw up. They could have just banned the app. Instead they went full nuclear. Apple stepped in the trap.
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