If they keep tanking their brand and supposed values in the West with the lack of a backbone, that pile is going to shrink, because the rest of the world is not going to pick up the slack
“We created the App Store to be a safe and trusted place to discover apps. We have learned that an app, HKmap.live, has been used in ways that endanger law enforcement and residents in Hong Kong. Many concerned customers in Hong Kong have contacted us about this app and we immediately began investigating it. The app displays police locations and we have verified with the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau that the app has been used to target and ambush police, threaten public safety, and criminals have used it to victimize residents in areas where they know there is no law enforcement. This app violates our guidelines and local laws, and we have removed it from the App Store.”
I'm as sympathetic to the protests as anyone and I'm definitely not used to defending Apple's behavior, but are we sure that this is spin? Undoubtedly the app is being used for more than just "ambushing and attacking police". But absent a firm belief that this reason from the Chinese government is bullshit, it's actually a pretty tall order (and questionably ethical) for a corporation to push back against a govt demand to remove a tool ostensibly being used to attack police forces.
My views on computing freedom generally skew towards the Stallman side of the spectrum, so I'd actually be fine with a stronger norm that Apple could tell govts to screw off[1]. But I'm very aware that I'm an outlier in this sense, and expecting Apple to push back in the face of a demand like this seems well beyond consistency with the norms that currently exist around tech companies' responsiveness expect to govt demands, on grounds of what the power relationship should be between governmental and corporate entities.
[1] (and ideally stop being so heavy-handed about their own enforcement of App Store apps...but that's another story)
The point is the app is not being used for ambushing and attacking police at all, because there have been no such ambushes in Hong Kong.
The few situations where Hong Kong police have been in danger have come when a small group splits off and is isolated during a protest. In no case have protesters caught the police unawares in an ambush, let alone off-duty police.
By its nature, the app shows large concentrations of police forces. The argument is ridiculous on its face, even if you don't know the situation on the ground in Hong Kong well.
No one has been able to point to a single Hong Kong law this app violates, or to any example of it being misused in the way the statement alleges.
This [1] is the video of the first shooting in the Hong Kong protests - reasonably safe for life for anybody who has not seen it. Something I didn't understand when I first saw the video is how the protesters were able to do what they do. An armed group of protesters moved rapidly towards their target, and manage to ambush him around a blind corner. Their target was a single police officer that seems to have temporarily become separated from other officers. The protesters seemed to know this and all immediately set upon him.
You could make an argument that somehow they used some other technology to carry out their attack, but I'm not sure how much weight it'd have beyond the fact that no we don't have video (to my knowledge) of one of those guys explicitly opening and looking at the app to find the target. In any case, it certainly refutes the argument that no protesters have managed to catch the police by surprise or ambush them - because that is exactly what happened.
Just look at the app. It doesn't have the spatial resolution to do this, nor does it identify individual officers, and it's got a considerable lag in real time.
Or look at the video preceding this incident, and you'll see that the officers ran ahead of their group, and the kids confronting them were not looking at their phones because they were busy trying not to get shot.
Or come and see for yourself.
Or rely on the eyewitness testimony of hundreds of journalists in Hong Kong who have seen this same situation play out—cops run out too far, get isolated, get scared, draw a sidearm.
Or figure it out from first principles on a message board.
> Or look at the video preceding this incident, and you'll see that the officers ran ahead of their group, and the kids confronting them were not looking at their phones because they were busy trying not to get shot.
Are you saying this video is taken out of context? Please do share any available video evidence. I assure you I tried quite hard to try to find more and this all I came up with! This is the thing that most confuses me about these protests. They are, by far, the most widely recorded protests in a developed nation - yet lengthy in context footage of the critical events events is surprisingly difficult to come by. Instead we just get snippets taken out of context that can be framed to show anything you want to show.
For instance this [1] is Reuters reporting of this video entitled "Dramatic footage captures moment when Hong Kong protester was shot." It strips out absolutely all context and splices the video together in a way that even makes it seem like it's an officer charging a protester who is simply trying to defend himself from an officer drawing a gun. It then includes clips from a police statement which, without the context of what that conflict was about, paired with the selected footage they provided sounds comically absurd.
This is absolutely propaganda, and quite ham handed propaganda at that. But of course there is also extensive propaganda coming from the Chinese side as well. It makes it all extremely difficult to have any clue of what is really happening. If you have any recommendations whatsoever on lengthy uninterrupted film footage on these events, I am absolutely all ears.
There are a number of people livestreaming all the protests, including setups where you can watch multiple streams on a page. One of the streamers is a hero who rolls up to protests in a wheelchair.
There's also lots and lots of long-form protest footage available, but you need a Chinese speaker to help you Google your way to it.
The protestors always try to find away to ambushes the police. There is a case that the protesters try to burn a police alive.
The protester definitely monitoring the police movement to vandalize the train stations and the shops
To prevent the protestor to use the app for guerilla tactic. The protestor are known to ambush police if their number is small. And to play cat and mouse with the police to vandalize
> The point is the app is not being used for ambushing and attacking police at all, because there have been no such ambushes in Hong Kong.
> In no case have protesters caught the police unawares in an ambush, let alone off-duty police.
Right, this is what my questions were conditioned on. It's hard to get a complete picture of what's going on in situations like this when the government is so famously fond of misinformation and control of the press, but there's at least claims out there
[1] that this has happened, along with plenty more examples of more general violence from sources that are not credibly controlled by China.
I don't pretend to know that this claim is true, but it's surprising to me that you are so confident that no such incidents have happened, even in the face of (even possibly false) news reports that it has happened.
More importantly, you're free to make whatever wild guesses that the official story is a lie in a way that Apple perhaps isn't: if the reports of ambushes are even somewhat credible, it's not clear to me how they could push back against a gov't claiming that an app is facilitating attacks on police.
Note that I'm not saying that their hands are definitely tied here, my model of this isn't high-confidence and I'd personally be opposed to the takedown of a communications app in most situations (including this one). I'm just trying to reconcile the reactions here to the norms we currently have around corporations' power relative to gov't.
> or to any example of it being misused in the way the statement alleges.
This is fair; I am filling in the blanks with assumptions a little here: namely, that Apple's statement reflects the pretext of the govt's demand for removal. I also figure that isolated incidents of violence are far from difficult to come by in riots as intense as the ones in question (the Wikipedia page for the protests has a handful of examples). But it seems to me that this context in, say, the US, would be such that Apple would be criticized for refusal to remove the app, with plenty of takes about how irresponsible the decision is (it certainly stands on firmer ground than the new consensus that eg platforms are responsible for cracking down on "hate speech"). The difference here seems to be the legitimacy people grant to the gov't being resisted, and it's again not clear to me that that's a call that a company like Apple could or should be making (beyond broad decisions like whether or not to operate in the country).
Thanks for the thoughtful response by the way: my comment doesn't have a strong position but is exploring some nuance I have questions about, and I know HN isn't really the forum for posting anything but the kinds of neatly-wrapped takes that can be swallowed (or rejected) whole by simpletons. It's always nice to get some engagement with the content of the comment instead of the usual mindless pattern-matching + upvote/downvote that most here are limited to.
And how exactly would you know that? There is a great deal of animosity towards police right now in HK. A very small minority of protestors have demonstrated willingness to apply violence, and police (including off-duty officers) have been attacked in the open on more than one occasion. So I don’t think it’s inconceivable that the availability of a crowdsourced map might increase such incidents.
Of course, this is going to end up being a pretext to ban the website too, which is going to introduce China-style internet censorship to HK. Nobody wants that. The way things are going, though, I don’t see how else this can go.
Then by the same logic, WeChat should be banned since it's clearly documented to be used by Chinese Trolls to attack protesters in Australia and Canada.
If WeChat’s primary purpose was to track protestors overseas, then yeah, it should be banned. But that’s not what the app does.
I want to be clear that I’m not trying to side with anyone here - I’m just calling out a knee-jerk response that I don’t believe is actually based in fact. If there’s good evidence that Apple or the HK government is inventing evidence of misuse, I’ll happily take back what I’ve said.
My east european country has been governed by authoritarian rule which was 95% dependent on a totalitarian foreign nation state. You either don't understand what this means or are actively protecting a totalitarian dictatorship.
I did not say that attacks on police were common. Indeed, I believe that any such attacks should be the work of a very small minority of protestors who would definitely not represent the whole.
It’s clear that attacks against off-duty police officers have happened in the past, so I included that aside as an example of the threats that police face. Of course those attacks predate the map app. Those are also the kinds of attacks that tend to make news, because they’re essentially attacks against civilians (similarly, this is why news of police attacks against civilians make news).
One of the problems being faced in HK is that there are times when it's difficult to identify when the police are HK police, or when the police are actually Chinese military in HK uniform.
One of the signs (as it always is) is the footwear used by the officers differs between actual HK police and Chinese military forces in HK police uniform.
Another problem is that there are times when it's difficult to identify when the protestors are HK citizens, or when the protestors are Chinese military in plain clothes.
There was an incident a few weeks back where a fire was set outside Central MTR station which was reported to have been set by HK protestors. There was graffiti on the wall to this effect. The graffiti was written in simplified Chinese, which is used in the mainland. In Hong Kong, they use traditional Chinese in written communications.
The difficulty is in accurate attribution. Terrorist groups will take credit for atrocities they didn't commit because it's beneficial for them and their cause. Which then leads down the rabbit hole of asking who benefits from violence in HK? It's also worth looking at the history of protests in HK, how frequently they have occurred, and how often violence has actually erupted.
It's a country that successfully peacefully protested numerous times, to great effect.
> The way things are going, though, I don’t see how else this can go.
Fortunately, the people in HK don't share this view, and continue to protest for their rights and their freedoms. They're not giving up, they're not giving in. It's easy to be this pessimistic when you live in a western country, where peaceful protests in recent history (~20 years or so) are almost completely ineffective. When you've lived in a place where peaceful protests have historically been effective, it's a different story. Especially when it's literally your own life on the line.
There is zero evidence of covert mainland Chinese participation in the protests on either side, although as you demonstrate the rumors about it are nonstop.
> A very small minority of protestors have demonstrated willingness to apply violence, and police (including off-duty officers) have been attacked in the open on more than one occasion
Haven't the police being doing the very same thing to protestors and innocent civilians?
This sounds like a template blurb, not an actual stance. I wonder why Apple didn't remove WhatsApp from the App Store in India, since it was the platform used to lynch several people in the last few years. Local law in India prohibits people killing people.
This is a slippery slope, and Apple fell right into it quickly instead of being cautious and fighting for what's right!
This rationale focuses on how the app has been used, rather than what it does, which could apply equally well to any text messaging or web browser app that is used illegally.
Imagine if this said:
> We have learned that an app, iMessage, has been used in ways that endanger law enforcement and residents in Hong Kong. Many concerned customers in Hong Kong have contacted us about this app and we immediately began investigating it. The app displays police locations that people send via text message and we have verified with the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau that the app has been used to target and ambush police, threaten public safety, and criminals have used it to victimize residents in areas where they know there is no law enforcement. This app violates our guidelines and local laws, and we have removed it from the App Store.
People only use it because it's enabled by default and takes over from SMS with minimal intervention. There's no point using it when there's also WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal/etc. The competition are largely cross-platform. I'm surprised Apple even bothered to make it in the first place. They could have saved themselves the effort and not got into that market, rather than making an app that makes them look bad.
iMessage is successful as in it makes Android users look bad. It extends and overtakes the SMS standard in such a way that anyone not in the circle appears to be disfunctional. A lock-in situation passing as the new normal for uninformed Apple users.
How does it make them look bad? In any case when it was developed WhatsApp was still early days (and supposed to eventually charge fees), and neither Messenger nor the others existed.
It succeeded well enough that in very iPhone-heavy markets WhatsApp never really became a thing.
This kind of reasoning is applied everywhere, all the time. It seems the majority opinion is that the "bannable" property of a tool depends on the ratio of good vs. evil usage of the tool, with time weakening the effect of evil.
So a tool that's mostly used for evil shortly after it's created is worthy of a ban (e. g. 8chan [1], Gab). But a tool which started with a more favorable ratio and slowly drifted into mostly evil-use territory (e.g. Tor, prepaid phones) isn't seen as being inherently evil and thus gets a pass. Tools that are overwhelmingly used for good will even have negative bannability (they will be actively protected and a ban will be seen as an offense) regardless of them being sometimes used for particularly evil purposes (e.g. Google, Twitter, cash).
In the present case, HKmap.live is mostly used by protesters (good usage as seen from an HN crowd PoV), so Apple's decision is seen as unjust here. But had it been mostly used by criminals early on, the consensus opinion would certainly be different.
There's a lesson for app builders: if your tool is vulnerable to bans by centralized/mob entities, it's especially important to attract enough good usage (as judged by the enforcer) early on in the history of your service.
As someone who has lived under a dictatorship this messaging has a familiar feel. As the now late dictator was clamping (beating and killing) down on opposition parties the press statements would always say something along the lines of, "we are protecting the rights of law abiding citizens". He never ever said I do not like anyone disagreeing with me.
> we are protecting the rights of law abiding citizens
I find it very interesting when people say they only protect the rights of "law abiding citizens", since this is usually just a veiled excuse for "we don't think people who break the law should have rights, actually, you shouldn't have rights because you might break the law too".
I fully agree with you, that is actually the trick being pulled. The words used make it harder for people on the outside to decide who is actually the villain and who the good guys are.
This move comes after Apple re-instated the app into the app store under public pressure. This comes after Apple told Senator Howley that the decision to block the app had been a mistake:
It's important for the discussion that this app does not violate any local laws in Hong Kong. It is a safety tool. You can check out the web version here (click icons and paste text into Google translate if you can't read Chinese) https://hkmap.live/
In a nutshell, it shows where police are (puppy icons), police vehicles, concentrations of demonstrators (construction worker icon), sightings of the special riot squad called the raptors (dinosaur icon), and places where demonstrators can find safe transport (house icon).
There's a lot of rumor flying around Hong Kong that selective website blocking will be the next emergency measure after the mask ban, so it's very important to have a backup version of this site on the app store (and Google store) in addition to the web version.
Using a dog icon for the police isn’t exactly a great look if you’re trying to be neutral. It’s roughly equivalent to using a pig to represent the police in the US. I don’t see why they couldn’t have just used one of the standard emoji for police there - it’d be a lot less likely to offend.
“It’s totally ok, dogs are police too” doesn’t quite work in a culture where dogs are often invoked as insult words. There’s a different cultural context here that you need to be aware of. As I said, the American equivalent would probably be to use a little pig emoji for a police officer, which I doubt would go over well here.
It’s not by a stretch the most controversial aspect of the app, but it doesn’t really help their case much.
For AAPL, revenue from Mainland China is far greater than Hong Kong. I, as a shareholder with fewer than 100 shares, applaud Apple's decision on this issue.
Chinese nationalism? Cause this is definitely not the words of an American Patriot, at best it could be viewed as rutheless capitalism, Pinkertons and all.
>Yesterday, English-language state media outlet China Daily blasted Apple’s decision to allow HKmap.live onto the App Store. “Providing a gateway for ‘toxic apps’ is hurting the feelings of the Chinese people, twisting the facts of Hong Kong affairs, and against the views and principles of the Chinese people,” the op-ed argued.
Wow...this type of language - "toxic apps," "hurting the feelings of the Chinese people," etc. - sounds disturbingly similar to SJW rhetoric in the States.
EDIT: In case it's not obvious - I am against censoring apps & speech.
When have "SJWs" ever lobbied to pull maps or other public information or safety resources? Can you come up with one example?
The language is only one component in a given scenario. What the language is being deployed to do is very important. Murderers can use the same language in their court defenses as innocent people.
Cancel culture is not remotely related to Apple pulling a maps application off the app store. No one has been cancelled here, unless you count government suppression of speech as "cancel culture".
I don’t know, they seem relatively related. Both are actions / attempts to silence opposing ideas by putting pressure on businesses and consumers.
Calling for someone to be silenced (cancel culture) is closer to actual censorship than the classic “I disagree with what you say but will fight for your right to say it.”
Of course that's in part because China pays attention to what happens in the US, and they try to frame their message in such a way that is more palatable for Westerners.
Woah this is crazy. I don’t buy their excuse. You mean to tell me they didn’t investigate the app the first time it was removed, or when they decided to reinstate it? Come on, give me a fucking break...
Complete speculation, but maybe Apple wants people to use the app while having plausible deniability by removing it from the store. Banning the app for the first time made it incredibly popular, so a huge number of people would have probably downloaded it as soon as it came back on the store. Then, after a bunch of people download it, they ban it again to appease China. I bet more people downloaded the app this way than if they had just banned it today for the first (and only) time.
Some do, some don't. Those who do have not yet found anything nefarious but it certainly is possible for some bad apple to end up in the pile of code which makes up an Android distribution. The difference between the paradigms is that it is possible to tailor an Android distribution to your needs (which includes leaving out Google-proprietary code) where it is not possible to do so for iOS and its derivatives.
Where (AOSP-based) Android users can 'trust but verify' (a contradictio in terminis given that those who trust should not feel the need to verify) iOS users are left nothing but 'trust'. This trust has been broken several times when it comes to the PRC.
> So the lesson here is to rather use the Android platform if you want "freedom".
I doubt you're going to get much more "freedom" from a Google owned platform if you think the two companies are just as bad...unless you're prepared to root the device to hell to the point of almost replacing the OS completely.
SIDEBAR: Facebook is banned in China, partly because FB didn't want to comply with the censorship / surveillance requirements, iirc. Though someone who has more knowledge of the situation could probably clarify. Nevertheless I'm not sure why you lumped them into the actions of Apple or Google.
Facebook and Google are mostly banned in China already, so the CCP has little leverage over them. Apple is significantly more vulnerable to CCP pressure ... and it's showing.
The Chinese Government shakedown works like the mob. First they ask for a small favor, and then as you get deeper and deeper in the web, the demands increase. If you've already censored the NYTimes, then Quartz, why not a maps app?
It's time the world took collective action (which we're beginning to see) to push back before self-censorship with the threat of coordinated "spontaneous patriotism" creates a new norm where apps that empower hate by the Chinese state is "acceptable" like WeChat and all other apps are banned for frivolous reasons.
I met a lot of very self confident American entrepreneurs, over the years, who come to China thinking that they can play their game here.
Believe me, an average CPC section chief by mid-30 will have an arsenal of political stratagem to outplay any of those guys. Even though may look inept, they are on completely different level when it comes to your mindgames.
Your best bet in this game is not to play it. My own take on it as somebody who's been here for quite some time: the less you see them, the better.
I wonder if Apple would ban an app that helped users identity products made in China (so they could buy alternatives). That might be an interesting test.
If I had to guess, the mods are bending the scoring to avoid controversial topics again. They’ve done it before with US politics. Lately there’s been a slew of China news and some of the comments have been incredibly vitriolic.
I for one would support this - I like HN being a hacker’s paradise. People grousing over the latest insanity in world news can always find somewhere else to comment.
> I for one would support this - I like HN being a hacker’s paradise. People grousing over the latest insanity in world news can always find somewhere else to comment.
As long as the insanity is technology or hacker-related it is fine for you? Saying you do not want to see anything political, is apathic and shows you lean towards whatever the status quo is. It is also dishonest (because politics is everywhere). In fact, the very thing I quote from you is a political statement by itself.
Here's how to deal with the issue instead: upvote stories you enjoyed and/or press hide on the links you do not want to read.
> Saying you do not want to see anything political, is apathic and shows you lean towards whatever the status quo is.
That's not what they're saying: they just don't want it on Hacker News.
> Here's how to deal with the issue instead: upvote stories you enjoyed and/or press hide on the links you do not want to read.
This is coincidentally how you deal with spam without a spam filter. At some point, it's not very productive to have to wade through a content stream that's 50% chaff.
> That's not what they're saying: they just don't want it on Hacker News.
They decided that not only they do not want to see it on HN; they don't want anyone to see it on HN.
> You're free to use a website which uses an API to include/exclude based on a whitelist or blacklist. Use RSS with it, et voila.
It is a practical solution which does not require third party tools. Also, it is about more than you; it allows you to cast your vote, thereby taking part of the community.
You're free to use a website which uses HN API to include/exclude based on a whitelist or blacklist. Use RSS with it, et voila, problem solved for you. Because of the sheer amount of volume, this approach (which is easy to make with a blacklist) works quite well with RSS in general.
That doesn't explain other submissions on the same topic floating up and remaining on the front page. It also doesn't explain the Blizzard story being/was very active and is now only on the second page (for me) at this moment.
I wouldn't put it that way. It has more to do with avoiding too much repetition and making sure the front page isn't completely dominated by hot controversies, which would defeat the purpose of the site. (I hope everyone remembers what the purpose is: intellectual curiosity. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.)
Here are some recent explanations I've written about this:
HN has been flooded with China-related stories in the last couple months and most especially the last few days. They have been far and away the dominant topic recently, quite understandably as they are some of the leading events in world affairs right now. Important as these stories are, HN's core value being intellectual curiosity requires going easy on repetition—any repetition about anything.
There's a power-law dropoff in curiosity as a thing gets repeated. Other emotions—such as indignation—work the opposite way, so this is an existential issue for this site: the more repetition we have, the more HN's purpose gets drowned out and replaced by something that is inimical to it. This is the explanation of hamandcheese's conundrum upthread, about how a story about the ongoing struggle in Hong Kong, with lots of upvotes, can possibly be ranked lower than something called "The Origin of the Foot Rail". The answer is that indignation is by far the most powerful force on the internet, and as moderators our main job is literally to moderate that, so quieter, odder, less important but more curious stories have a chance to flourish.
If we didn't do that, HN would simply become a political outrage site like most other places. The front page would always be the top 30 outrages in the world, or more likely the top 5 outrages repeated 6 times each. That's the default, so if you want to run a site for intellectual curiosity, you need countervailing mechanisms. Here the countervailing mechanisms are software and moderators. But software+moderators also get many of these calls wrong, and we rely on users to let us know about those cases.
I know that users who feel strongly about these stories still feel like they're under-represented. But it always feels that way about any topic on HN that you feel strongly about. Frontpage space is the scarcest resource here, and there's never enough to go around. Even if your story is the most-covered story on HN, if you feel strongly about it, you will probably feel like it's being unfairly suppressed. As I've said too many times already: even Rust hackers probably feel that way.
If you read about the significant-new-information test in the first link above, the best way to help us with this is to let us know which stories have the most significant new information, relative to which are the follow-ups and copycat pieces. Then we can downweight the latter and help attention focus on what's significant. hn@ycombinator.com is the best way to let us know things; if you try to tell us things in the comments, odds are we won't see it.
I greatly appreciate the amount of thought that goes into HN moderation. This is one of the very few places where popularity doesn't equal lowest common denominator content.
I think when the story is a suppression campaign, where you see the world's most powerful company do an about-face twice in three days because of political pressure, you should think carefully about the implications of your own decision to suppress coverage and discussion of the event (which I understand is done from unrelated motives).
By your own logic, if China (god forbid) invades Hong Kong, there would be even more China/tech coverage, and therefore Hacker News will be even less likely to cover it, in favor of stories about ancient Albanian cartography or whatever else is novel and not divisive.
I urge you to reflect more on the way your "downvote stuff we talked about already" interacts with escalating crises, particularly around the topic of online censorship. I know you already reflect a lot!
The point you're making about escalating crises seems to me to be covered by the 'significant new information' test that I've described elsewhere (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). In the case of the current story, we're not suppressing coverage of it or discussion of it; it's the other way around. What is true, though, is that it sometimes takes time to figure out, from the flurry of stories, which are the submissions that best represent new developments. My first impression on this one was "oh, another HKMap.live story"; because there had already been a prominent thread about this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21159872), it seemed to go in the follow-up bucket. This is a good example of how moderation is guesswork and we often guess wrong. Closer inspection revealed otherwise. User feedback, especially from users who know about the situation, helps us a lot to make better calls. But I think the principle itself is solid.
By the way we came up with the significant-new-information thing after the Snowden avalanche of summer 2013, when users legitimately complained that too many stories on HN's front page were only repeating what had already been said before, rather than reporting anything new. Discussion quality tends to get worse on such stories, too, which makes sense because there isn't new information to sink mind-teeth into. In any case, our goal is not to suppress coverage of these important stories (as anyone who's been reading HN in the last week should know). It's to keep the proportions balanced. Unfortunately for us, one consequence of the proportions being balanced is that nobody's happy with them. C'est le HN.
If there's something I'm still missing, I'd be happy to hear about it and do more reflecting. It will have to be tomorrow though (here) as I'm getting mushy.
Everyone sees stories they prefer getting flagged really fast and stories they dislike hanging around. This is a mechanical consequence of HN's frontpage space being so limited, combined with the human tendency to pay more attention to negatives.
Yes, we've manually set this as an exception. The problem is that we can't set every story as exception, or even every important story. So the complaint—"why is X, which is important, off the front page with massive points while Y, which is trivial, is on the front page with pathetic points?"—will ever be with us.
Its not really a political topic, its an alarm clock that went off. With the big tech firms openly collaborating with regimes that dont shy away from military solutions to democratic self determination the future of the internet looks rather bleak. Its one step further to no longer being able to share information on the internet that powerful regimes dont want to be found. That your ability to share information is at will in a lot of platforms should interest the users here. Its the core problem we are facing if we want to keep any free software ideas alive in todays internet.
Differently put, this news is about Apple and the state of the internet, not the CCP.
It doesn't appear there's much battling here. It seems to be nearly unanimous opposition to Apple's decision. Ideological battle seems to imply two competing and popular opinions.
We rarely classify things that are bi-partisan as political. And Blizzard (which carries a substantially analogous version of events) has been condemned for their actions from Democrats and Republicans alike.
HN is pretty much a mono-ideological site, from what I've witnessed. Any topic which triggers ideological discussion could be good for HN in my opinion.
When the app is removed from the App Store, does it mean that it disappears from all phones, or it means that the new sales of the app are not possible?
In my understanding, this depends on what action Apple exactly takes. If it just removes it from the App Store, all existing installations on devices would remain and continue to work. If Apple revokes the developer's certificate, then the app would likely fail to launch sometime soon and would be removed.
I'm sure there are gaps in my understanding. Corrections are welcome.
I believe these are the different levels they have at their disposal:
- Remotely delete from everyone's devices (Apple has never used this capability, they say the ability is there in the case of malware)
- Remove from the App Store completely (keeps running if you had it installed, you can back it up to iTunes and reinstall from there, can't download from the store. I think they did this with apps that worked their way around AT&T tethering restrictions back in the day when that was a thing)
- Removed from sale (if you installed it before, you can still re-download it from your App Store purchase history)
I don't think certificate revocation is applicable to app store apps - e.g. I can revoke my own dev distribution certificate and it only kills self-hosted Ad Hoc builds. They may have per-developer app store certs only available internally as well but I think they'd use one of the capabilities above instead
When Apple removes an app from the App Store, you cannot download it anymore but it will continue to run on your device if you had it already. Apple also has the power to "blacklist" applications and prevent them from running on your device even if you've installed them (https://iphone-services.apple.com/clbl/unauthorizedApps), but this list looks empty for now. Usually what happens in the latter case is that the violation is so egregious that they will instead terminate the developer's Apple Developer account, which will have the same effect.
Couldn't the maker of the app argue that this app is also used by people who want to avoid protests and violence? And that Apple is now directly hurting citizens by taking that protection away?
Apple also recently pulled the app of the American news organization Quartz from the App Store in China. Quartz has been covering the Hong Kong protests.
I think Apple's action here provides a good case for breaking up platforms. If the App Store were decoupled from the main hardware-making and hardware-selling part of Apple, then there wouldn't be a conflict of interest between providing a neutral app-selling platform and retaining access to foreign markets.
I don't think I see how merely separating the App Store from the hardware division provides that benefit, unless you're meaning something different than the way I'm reading it (that is, just making the App Store the responsibility of a separate App Store Company but changing nothing else).
Allowing iOS to sideload apps would be a more direct cure for this, because Apple's decisions about what belongs in the App Store wouldn't necessarily translate to decisions about what belongs on the platform. That would solve a fair number of problems for other developers, actually -- and in the long run would probably benefit Apple, too, by virtue of improving the overall health of the iPhone/iPad platform.
Right now, it seems that Apple has a lot to lose if the CCP were to suddenly cut off access to China -- both in terms of supply chain and in terms of market access. With an independent App Store, the CCP would have less leverage over the platform, since as a services-only company, it would be far less dependent on China. (In this scenario however, the Apple hardware division as a separate entity will still be very beholden to the whims of the CCP as they still depend on China for its supply chain and market access.)
If you look at Google right now, their Play Store still has the app available, mostly I believe, because the CCP has little or no leverage over Google to force their hand.
I do agree, tho that allowing side loading apps would also sidestep this issue altogether.
In this scenario, I was thinking the federal government either through legislation, or executive action.
However, I'm not trying to push any political agenda, I just thought it was interesting that this was a good example of tech platforms being too powerful.
Something like the "browser choice" that the EU forced Microsoft to implement for a while would do the trick. During initial iOS setup you'd have to choose which app store to use (from the currently most popular choices).
The law suit that resulted in "browser choice" started in 1993 and "browser choice" was started 2010, so this may happen "soon".
As someone who has appreciated the privacy stance Apple has had and the privacy assisting steps it has taken for a long time (long before iPhone), I believe Apple is coming out to be completely hypocritical and anti-privacy/anti-freedom on this app. I cannot believe that Tim Cook and other senior executives haven't examined this deeper and taken a bold stance to let the app stay! Shame on you, Apple!
Even John Gruber agrees: [1]
> I still haven’t seen which local laws it violates, other than the unwritten law of pissing off Beijing.
> This is a bad look for Apple, if you think capitulation is a bad look.
While there are privacy concerns from the precedent it sets (can a journalist trust Apple not to bend to CPP information requests?), I agree that this seems to conflate privacy with an only indirectly-related subject.
Privacy is good. By being better for privacy than the worlds largest advertising company/consumer spy agency, Apple announced its intent to be for all that is good in the world. That it's a shining beacon of morality. Protector of Italian virginity.
China is bad. By capitulating to them after having declared themselves the enforcer of all that is good and holy, Apple has thus committed hypocrisy.
There's that and then there's being minimally consistent in one's efforts.
Kind of like someone who would make a fuss about not using plastic straws but systematically takes their car for <500 meters trips and washes their pants 5 times a week.
It's not a bad idea to remind people that if they make the effort of not using online services which compromise for China, they also should make the similar effort of reducing their physical Made in China goods consumption.
> Do you think it is ethical for a company to require it's employees to break the law?
Unless Apple happened to be a Chinese company I'm having a trouble at finding the law that Apple is breaking. I'm sure the customers can decide if a shiny iPhone produced by an company subject to Chinese law is worth it and employees can decide if they want to be employed by a Chinese company.
It might be a bit much to require employees to break a law as it might expose individual employees to some legal consequences. But there are plenty of laws that are immoral. There are a number of good examples in the peer comments (some of the laws of Hitler's Germany for example). Any company manager or officer that insists on enforcing such laws is themself immoral. But it takes some skill to craft a company policy that could address the situation adequately.
I think you're being a bit cavalier with the distinction between complying with a law and enforcing it. If complying with a law is morally equivalent with enforcing it, you're tarring a lot of Jews in Nazi Germany with a very nasty smelling brush.
I really don't get this. Apple has done far more than any other company in the whole industry to fight for privacy rights. They have gone right up against the legal limits every time, while all the other vendors rolled over belly up at the slightest chance.
iMessage is one of the most secure messaging systems available anywhere and is very widely used in China. For most Chinese it's the only practical secure communications system they can buy. It puts industrial strength end to end encryption in the hands of millions of Chinese.
So I get you're angry about china, that's fine. I have family over there, so I know what it's like. But going after Apple, of all the companies doing business in China you could go after, just makes no sense to me whatever.
I was trying draw the distinction between being forced to comply and enforcing, but I guess I did not get it right, or maybe I can't really get it right. I feel like enforcing is making someone else do something, while complying is doing it personally yourself, perhaps wilfully, perhaps not. So the managers are enforcing by coercing their employees to comply with immoral laws, and I think that is immoral.
"Compromising the security of our personal information can ultimately put our personal safety at risk. That is why encryption has become so important to all of us."
Nothing in Twitter photo statement talks about privacy. It's clear why the app is problematic: It's being used to target law enforcement, putting those people into danger. The debate here should be between the tradeoff of said danger versus the dangers to the protesters, factoring in the standing-up-to-China.
Apple only cares about privacy because it's a threat to Google and Facebook's business model. They don't care about privacy, they only care about "caring about privacy" when it is good for their business.
Right, and in marketing-speak it's called positioning. Taking a privacy stance allowed Apple to differentiate against their competitors without actually innovating.
At a more basic level, apple doesnt see people as customers. They have already maxed out thier target market. Expansion now turns on access to new markets: the will of governments. Governments are now the customer. Any app that angers them is for the block.
Well the same can be said about human rights, they only care about it when it affects their business model in a positive way. if it cost them money they are very willing to turn their backs on it.
privacy is not possible in a world where governments are free to suppress the speech and will of the people. any company claiming otherwise simply sees their bottom line as more important than people, whether they are employees or customers.
To me Apple is the worst here because Tim and team have no shame, they will strut upon their stage at their own conferences about how they stand for rights but when the show lights are off they act completely different.
If I took a slightly less black and white stance, I would say that totally stand for privacy and human rights, in the United States.
Isn't is possible (yes) for people to care about principles in their homeland, where it matters to them more and impacts them more? I care a lot more about my hometown than BFE Chinese countryside, even though in principle I want them to have a living wage, decent time off, and good health care.
I am still angry at Apple, the NBA, Blizzard and the rest. I think this is a darker shade of grey, though.
Privacy is cheap to engineer because it involves not doing things or hiring more people. They won't allow actions, won't sync data, won't pursue advanced ML, etc etc. It's a clever way to say, "Keeping up with Chrome/Android is hard".
This is the worst take here. Whether Apple is sincere or not about privacy long term, they've created dedicated hardware IPs for doing ML on-phone to get around doing it in the cloud. This is not easier than just shipping all the data to AWS.
I can tell you from the inside that everything I've seen is genuine, even though it makes doing ML-based projects very difficult. That said, I'm very disappointed in this removal as to me it flies against the value.
They are fine to piss off US government, because they know US government will play by the rules and let them do it. China won't, so as soon as China gives them a dirty look, they wet their pants and bend over.
Agreed! If Apple caves in to Chinese pressure on this, what else will they do? Does Xi Jinping's brutal authoritarian regime now effectively make decisions for Apple abroad, since they can always threaten to cut Apple out of the lucrative mainland market?
"Apps must comply with all legal requirements in any location where you make them available (if you’re not sure, check with a lawyer). We know this stuff is complicated, but it is your responsibility to understand and make sure your app conforms with all local laws, not just the guidelines below. And of course, apps that solicit, promote, or encourage criminal or clearly reckless behavior will be rejected. In extreme cases, such as apps that are found to facilitate human trafficking and/or the exploitation of children, appropriate authorities will be notified."
There is also a sub-section, which states:
"(iii) Apps should not attempt to surreptitiously build a user profile based on collected data and may not attempt, facilitate, or encourage others to identify anonymous users or reconstruct user profiles based on data collected from Apple-provided APIs or any data that you say has been collected in an “anonymized,” “aggregated,” or otherwise non-identifiable way."
Obviously, with HK and China, the stringency of Apple adhering to their guidelines on decisioning is politically contentious.
From a broader perspective though, there is something about this type of app functionality that is interesting for other cases - What are Apple's rules about app users tracking other people without their knowledge/consent, and then sharing that information with others?
This is also important because it influences levels of privacy protection.
As a low-level example, Waze tracks locations of police, cameras, roadwork, etc., which helps drivers avoid tickets for speeding (generally, this seems pretty accepted and I don't know of any major complaints).
However, say I have an app that tracks celebrities, musicians, businesspeople, athletes, etc., and I share that location data on a live map for others to see, and also contribute to. I imagine that would not go over too well with the people being tracked, even if they were being tracked out of admiration. This presents its own set of problems too for app abilities.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 397 ms ] threadTim Cook should just resign at this point with all his hypocrisy. I don't know how he looks himself in the mirror with a straight gaze these days.
I see what you did there. Well played Sir!
“We created the App Store to be a safe and trusted place to discover apps. We have learned that an app, HKmap.live, has been used in ways that endanger law enforcement and residents in Hong Kong. Many concerned customers in Hong Kong have contacted us about this app and we immediately began investigating it. The app displays police locations and we have verified with the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau that the app has been used to target and ambush police, threaten public safety, and criminals have used it to victimize residents in areas where they know there is no law enforcement. This app violates our guidelines and local laws, and we have removed it from the App Store.”
My views on computing freedom generally skew towards the Stallman side of the spectrum, so I'd actually be fine with a stronger norm that Apple could tell govts to screw off[1]. But I'm very aware that I'm an outlier in this sense, and expecting Apple to push back in the face of a demand like this seems well beyond consistency with the norms that currently exist around tech companies' responsiveness expect to govt demands, on grounds of what the power relationship should be between governmental and corporate entities.
[1] (and ideally stop being so heavy-handed about their own enforcement of App Store apps...but that's another story)
The few situations where Hong Kong police have been in danger have come when a small group splits off and is isolated during a protest. In no case have protesters caught the police unawares in an ambush, let alone off-duty police.
By its nature, the app shows large concentrations of police forces. The argument is ridiculous on its face, even if you don't know the situation on the ground in Hong Kong well.
No one has been able to point to a single Hong Kong law this app violates, or to any example of it being misused in the way the statement alleges.
You could make an argument that somehow they used some other technology to carry out their attack, but I'm not sure how much weight it'd have beyond the fact that no we don't have video (to my knowledge) of one of those guys explicitly opening and looking at the app to find the target. In any case, it certainly refutes the argument that no protesters have managed to catch the police by surprise or ambush them - because that is exactly what happened.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN4MvOrPotk
Or look at the video preceding this incident, and you'll see that the officers ran ahead of their group, and the kids confronting them were not looking at their phones because they were busy trying not to get shot.
Or come and see for yourself.
Or rely on the eyewitness testimony of hundreds of journalists in Hong Kong who have seen this same situation play out—cops run out too far, get isolated, get scared, draw a sidearm.
Or figure it out from first principles on a message board.
Are you saying this video is taken out of context? Please do share any available video evidence. I assure you I tried quite hard to try to find more and this all I came up with! This is the thing that most confuses me about these protests. They are, by far, the most widely recorded protests in a developed nation - yet lengthy in context footage of the critical events events is surprisingly difficult to come by. Instead we just get snippets taken out of context that can be framed to show anything you want to show.
For instance this [1] is Reuters reporting of this video entitled "Dramatic footage captures moment when Hong Kong protester was shot." It strips out absolutely all context and splices the video together in a way that even makes it seem like it's an officer charging a protester who is simply trying to defend himself from an officer drawing a gun. It then includes clips from a police statement which, without the context of what that conflict was about, paired with the selected footage they provided sounds comically absurd.
This is absolutely propaganda, and quite ham handed propaganda at that. But of course there is also extensive propaganda coming from the Chinese side as well. It makes it all extremely difficult to have any clue of what is really happening. If you have any recommendations whatsoever on lengthy uninterrupted film footage on these events, I am absolutely all ears.
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-anniversary-hongkon...
There's also lots and lots of long-form protest footage available, but you need a Chinese speaker to help you Google your way to it.
I don't speak Chinese or have links handy but it is not hard to find with some help from a native speaker. Dig around LiHKG.
So then why ban the app?
> In no case have protesters caught the police unawares in an ambush, let alone off-duty police.
Right, this is what my questions were conditioned on. It's hard to get a complete picture of what's going on in situations like this when the government is so famously fond of misinformation and control of the press, but there's at least claims out there [1] that this has happened, along with plenty more examples of more general violence from sources that are not credibly controlled by China.
I don't pretend to know that this claim is true, but it's surprising to me that you are so confident that no such incidents have happened, even in the face of (even possibly false) news reports that it has happened.
More importantly, you're free to make whatever wild guesses that the official story is a lie in a way that Apple perhaps isn't: if the reports of ambushes are even somewhat credible, it's not clear to me how they could push back against a gov't claiming that an app is facilitating attacks on police.
Note that I'm not saying that their hands are definitely tied here, my model of this isn't high-confidence and I'd personally be opposed to the takedown of a communications app in most situations (including this one). I'm just trying to reconcile the reactions here to the norms we currently have around corporations' power relative to gov't.
> or to any example of it being misused in the way the statement alleges.
This is fair; I am filling in the blanks with assumptions a little here: namely, that Apple's statement reflects the pretext of the govt's demand for removal. I also figure that isolated incidents of violence are far from difficult to come by in riots as intense as the ones in question (the Wikipedia page for the protests has a handful of examples). But it seems to me that this context in, say, the US, would be such that Apple would be criticized for refusal to remove the app, with plenty of takes about how irresponsible the decision is (it certainly stands on firmer ground than the new consensus that eg platforms are responsible for cracking down on "hate speech"). The difference here seems to be the legitimacy people grant to the gov't being resisted, and it's again not clear to me that that's a call that a company like Apple could or should be making (beyond broad decisions like whether or not to operate in the country).
Thanks for the thoughtful response by the way: my comment doesn't have a strong position but is exploring some nuance I have questions about, and I know HN isn't really the forum for posting anything but the kinds of neatly-wrapped takes that can be swallowed (or rejected) whole by simpletons. It's always nice to get some engagement with the content of the comment instead of the usual mindless pattern-matching + upvote/downvote that most here are limited to.
[1] https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-and-crime/article/30...
Apple has shown incredible little spine in relation to china, probably because they are 100% dependent on them to make their phones.
Of course, this is going to end up being a pretext to ban the website too, which is going to introduce China-style internet censorship to HK. Nobody wants that. The way things are going, though, I don’t see how else this can go.
I want to be clear that I’m not trying to side with anyone here - I’m just calling out a knee-jerk response that I don’t believe is actually based in fact. If there’s good evidence that Apple or the HK government is inventing evidence of misuse, I’ll happily take back what I’ve said.
Off-duty police are not even tracked on the map, so I don't get your argument even if I accepted the false premise that attacks on police are common.
It’s clear that attacks against off-duty police officers have happened in the past, so I included that aside as an example of the threats that police face. Of course those attacks predate the map app. Those are also the kinds of attacks that tend to make news, because they’re essentially attacks against civilians (similarly, this is why news of police attacks against civilians make news).
One of the signs (as it always is) is the footwear used by the officers differs between actual HK police and Chinese military forces in HK police uniform.
Another problem is that there are times when it's difficult to identify when the protestors are HK citizens, or when the protestors are Chinese military in plain clothes.
There was an incident a few weeks back where a fire was set outside Central MTR station which was reported to have been set by HK protestors. There was graffiti on the wall to this effect. The graffiti was written in simplified Chinese, which is used in the mainland. In Hong Kong, they use traditional Chinese in written communications.
The difficulty is in accurate attribution. Terrorist groups will take credit for atrocities they didn't commit because it's beneficial for them and their cause. Which then leads down the rabbit hole of asking who benefits from violence in HK? It's also worth looking at the history of protests in HK, how frequently they have occurred, and how often violence has actually erupted.
It's a country that successfully peacefully protested numerous times, to great effect.
> The way things are going, though, I don’t see how else this can go.
Fortunately, the people in HK don't share this view, and continue to protest for their rights and their freedoms. They're not giving up, they're not giving in. It's easy to be this pessimistic when you live in a western country, where peaceful protests in recent history (~20 years or so) are almost completely ineffective. When you've lived in a place where peaceful protests have historically been effective, it's a different story. Especially when it's literally your own life on the line.
Haven't the police being doing the very same thing to protestors and innocent civilians?
This is a slippery slope, and Apple fell right into it quickly instead of being cautious and fighting for what's right!
Imagine if this said:
> We have learned that an app, iMessage, has been used in ways that endanger law enforcement and residents in Hong Kong. Many concerned customers in Hong Kong have contacted us about this app and we immediately began investigating it. The app displays police locations that people send via text message and we have verified with the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau that the app has been used to target and ambush police, threaten public safety, and criminals have used it to victimize residents in areas where they know there is no law enforcement. This app violates our guidelines and local laws, and we have removed it from the App Store.
Green Bubbles: How Apple Quietly Gets iPhone Users To Hate Android Users https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150211/05455029985/green...
So a tool that's mostly used for evil shortly after it's created is worthy of a ban (e. g. 8chan [1], Gab). But a tool which started with a more favorable ratio and slowly drifted into mostly evil-use territory (e.g. Tor, prepaid phones) isn't seen as being inherently evil and thus gets a pass. Tools that are overwhelmingly used for good will even have negative bannability (they will be actively protected and a ban will be seen as an offense) regardless of them being sometimes used for particularly evil purposes (e.g. Google, Twitter, cash).
In the present case, HKmap.live is mostly used by protesters (good usage as seen from an HN crowd PoV), so Apple's decision is seen as unjust here. But had it been mostly used by criminals early on, the consensus opinion would certainly be different.
There's a lesson for app builders: if your tool is vulnerable to bans by centralized/mob entities, it's especially important to attract enough good usage (as judged by the enforcer) early on in the history of your service.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20616055
I find it very interesting when people say they only protect the rights of "law abiding citizens", since this is usually just a veiled excuse for "we don't think people who break the law should have rights, actually, you shouldn't have rights because you might break the law too".
They are also always championing freedom and expression and the like. But they must appease China to keep that market open to phone sales sadly.
https://twitter.com/HawleyMO/status/1180214941867036672
It's important for the discussion that this app does not violate any local laws in Hong Kong. It is a safety tool. You can check out the web version here (click icons and paste text into Google translate if you can't read Chinese) https://hkmap.live/
In a nutshell, it shows where police are (puppy icons), police vehicles, concentrations of demonstrators (construction worker icon), sightings of the special riot squad called the raptors (dinosaur icon), and places where demonstrators can find safe transport (house icon).
There's a lot of rumor flying around Hong Kong that selective website blocking will be the next emergency measure after the mask ban, so it's very important to have a backup version of this site on the app store (and Google store) in addition to the web version.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGruff_the_Crime_Dog
Also worth noting that K9 Units are heavily utilized by police
https://www.police.gov.hk/ppp_en/11_useful_info/pdu/index.ht...
There is a historical precedent of that association.
It’s not by a stretch the most controversial aspect of the app, but it doesn’t really help their case much.
So if it makes you a buck, a billion people should suffer under the rule of a despot?
Wow...this type of language - "toxic apps," "hurting the feelings of the Chinese people," etc. - sounds disturbingly similar to SJW rhetoric in the States.
EDIT: In case it's not obvious - I am against censoring apps & speech.
The language is only one component in a given scenario. What the language is being deployed to do is very important. Murderers can use the same language in their court defenses as innocent people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call-out_culture#Cancel_Cultur...
Calling for someone to be silenced (cancel culture) is closer to actual censorship than the classic “I disagree with what you say but will fight for your right to say it.”
So Apple are just the same as Google , Facebook and the rest of them , top please their shareholders for the almighty buck.
So the lesson here is to rather use the Android platform if you want "freedom".
> So the lesson here is to rather use the Android platform
..... do people even read the scripts they're given
Where (AOSP-based) Android users can 'trust but verify' (a contradictio in terminis given that those who trust should not feel the need to verify) iOS users are left nothing but 'trust'. This trust has been broken several times when it comes to the PRC.
> So the lesson here is to rather use the Android platform if you want "freedom".
I doubt you're going to get much more "freedom" from a Google owned platform if you think the two companies are just as bad...unless you're prepared to root the device to hell to the point of almost replacing the OS completely.
SIDEBAR: Facebook is banned in China, partly because FB didn't want to comply with the censorship / surveillance requirements, iirc. Though someone who has more knowledge of the situation could probably clarify. Nevertheless I'm not sure why you lumped them into the actions of Apple or Google.
Apple must be coerced by law to allow app sideloading and third-party app stores on iOS devices.
So not "the same" as google.
Police/Gov't can use apps/devices to spy on citizens, but how dare we reciprocate. Dark times.
It's time the world took collective action (which we're beginning to see) to push back before self-censorship with the threat of coordinated "spontaneous patriotism" creates a new norm where apps that empower hate by the Chinese state is "acceptable" like WeChat and all other apps are banned for frivolous reasons.
I met a lot of very self confident American entrepreneurs, over the years, who come to China thinking that they can play their game here.
Believe me, an average CPC section chief by mid-30 will have an arsenal of political stratagem to outplay any of those guys. Even though may look inept, they are on completely different level when it comes to your mindgames.
Your best bet in this game is not to play it. My own take on it as somebody who's been here for quite some time: the less you see them, the better.
- Oct 6th: Apple first rejected the app [0],
- Oct 8th: Apple then approved it after criticism for rejection [1]
- Oct 9th: Apple removed it after criticism from the CPC (this story)
[0]: https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/apple-hk-protest-map...
[1]: https://www.scmp.com/tech/apps-social/article/3032001/apple-...
- Oct 6th: Apple first rejected the app [0],
- Oct 8th: Apple then approved it after criticism for rejection [1]
- Oct 9th: Apple removed it after criticism from the CPC (this story)
[0]: https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/apple-hk-protest-map...
[1]: https://www.scmp.com/tech/apps-social/article/3032001/apple-...
"HKmap.live, [...], received approval from Apple on October 4 and was made available for download on October 5, according to the developer"
Currently 117 points in 1 hour, yet somehow behind “The Origin of the Foot Rail” with 39 points in 7 hours.
I for one would support this - I like HN being a hacker’s paradise. People grousing over the latest insanity in world news can always find somewhere else to comment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21207057
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-10-08
As long as the insanity is technology or hacker-related it is fine for you? Saying you do not want to see anything political, is apathic and shows you lean towards whatever the status quo is. It is also dishonest (because politics is everywhere). In fact, the very thing I quote from you is a political statement by itself.
Here's how to deal with the issue instead: upvote stories you enjoyed and/or press hide on the links you do not want to read.
That's not what they're saying: they just don't want it on Hacker News.
> Here's how to deal with the issue instead: upvote stories you enjoyed and/or press hide on the links you do not want to read.
This is coincidentally how you deal with spam without a spam filter. At some point, it's not very productive to have to wade through a content stream that's 50% chaff.
They decided that not only they do not want to see it on HN; they don't want anyone to see it on HN.
> You're free to use a website which uses an API to include/exclude based on a whitelist or blacklist. Use RSS with it, et voila.
It is a practical solution which does not require third party tools. Also, it is about more than you; it allows you to cast your vote, thereby taking part of the community.
You're free to use a website which uses HN API to include/exclude based on a whitelist or blacklist. Use RSS with it, et voila, problem solved for you. Because of the sheer amount of volume, this approach (which is easy to make with a blacklist) works quite well with RSS in general.
Right, which as far as I can tell is essentially the Kacker News guidelines in what to submit.
Or perhaps your (wishful) interpretation of the guidelines?
Quoting [1]:
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys intellectual curiosity, the value of the site.
(Emphasis mine.) This is also my last post on this subject with you. Have a good one.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Here are some recent explanations I've written about this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21208169
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21199248
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21197771
HN has been flooded with China-related stories in the last couple months and most especially the last few days. They have been far and away the dominant topic recently, quite understandably as they are some of the leading events in world affairs right now. Important as these stories are, HN's core value being intellectual curiosity requires going easy on repetition—any repetition about anything.
There's a power-law dropoff in curiosity as a thing gets repeated. Other emotions—such as indignation—work the opposite way, so this is an existential issue for this site: the more repetition we have, the more HN's purpose gets drowned out and replaced by something that is inimical to it. This is the explanation of hamandcheese's conundrum upthread, about how a story about the ongoing struggle in Hong Kong, with lots of upvotes, can possibly be ranked lower than something called "The Origin of the Foot Rail". The answer is that indignation is by far the most powerful force on the internet, and as moderators our main job is literally to moderate that, so quieter, odder, less important but more curious stories have a chance to flourish.
If we didn't do that, HN would simply become a political outrage site like most other places. The front page would always be the top 30 outrages in the world, or more likely the top 5 outrages repeated 6 times each. That's the default, so if you want to run a site for intellectual curiosity, you need countervailing mechanisms. Here the countervailing mechanisms are software and moderators. But software+moderators also get many of these calls wrong, and we rely on users to let us know about those cases.
I know that users who feel strongly about these stories still feel like they're under-represented. But it always feels that way about any topic on HN that you feel strongly about. Frontpage space is the scarcest resource here, and there's never enough to go around. Even if your story is the most-covered story on HN, if you feel strongly about it, you will probably feel like it's being unfairly suppressed. As I've said too many times already: even Rust hackers probably feel that way.
If you read about the significant-new-information test in the first link above, the best way to help us with this is to let us know which stories have the most significant new information, relative to which are the follow-ups and copycat pieces. Then we can downweight the latter and help attention focus on what's significant. hn@ycombinator.com is the best way to let us know things; if you try to tell us things in the comments, odds are we won't see it.
By your own logic, if China (god forbid) invades Hong Kong, there would be even more China/tech coverage, and therefore Hacker News will be even less likely to cover it, in favor of stories about ancient Albanian cartography or whatever else is novel and not divisive.
I urge you to reflect more on the way your "downvote stuff we talked about already" interacts with escalating crises, particularly around the topic of online censorship. I know you already reflect a lot!
The point you're making about escalating crises seems to me to be covered by the 'significant new information' test that I've described elsewhere (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). In the case of the current story, we're not suppressing coverage of it or discussion of it; it's the other way around. What is true, though, is that it sometimes takes time to figure out, from the flurry of stories, which are the submissions that best represent new developments. My first impression on this one was "oh, another HKMap.live story"; because there had already been a prominent thread about this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21159872), it seemed to go in the follow-up bucket. This is a good example of how moderation is guesswork and we often guess wrong. Closer inspection revealed otherwise. User feedback, especially from users who know about the situation, helps us a lot to make better calls. But I think the principle itself is solid.
By the way we came up with the significant-new-information thing after the Snowden avalanche of summer 2013, when users legitimately complained that too many stories on HN's front page were only repeating what had already been said before, rather than reporting anything new. Discussion quality tends to get worse on such stories, too, which makes sense because there isn't new information to sink mind-teeth into. In any case, our goal is not to suppress coverage of these important stories (as anyone who's been reading HN in the last week should know). It's to keep the proportions balanced. Unfortunately for us, one consequence of the proportions being balanced is that nobody's happy with them. C'est le HN.
If there's something I'm still missing, I'd be happy to hear about it and do more reflecting. It will have to be tomorrow though (here) as I'm getting mushy.
I hope this is manually set as an exception. This is an extremely important topic in the tech world and needs to be discussed.
Differently put, this news is about Apple and the state of the internet, not the CCP.
We rarely classify things that are bi-partisan as political. And Blizzard (which carries a substantially analogous version of events) has been condemned for their actions from Democrats and Republicans alike.
I'm sure there are gaps in my understanding. Corrections are welcome.
- Remotely delete from everyone's devices (Apple has never used this capability, they say the ability is there in the case of malware)
- Remove from the App Store completely (keeps running if you had it installed, you can back it up to iTunes and reinstall from there, can't download from the store. I think they did this with apps that worked their way around AT&T tethering restrictions back in the day when that was a thing)
- Removed from sale (if you installed it before, you can still re-download it from your App Store purchase history)
I don't think certificate revocation is applicable to app store apps - e.g. I can revoke my own dev distribution certificate and it only kills self-hosted Ad Hoc builds. They may have per-developer app store certs only available internally as well but I think they'd use one of the capabilities above instead
https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1182153976873148416
Allowing iOS to sideload apps would be a more direct cure for this, because Apple's decisions about what belongs in the App Store wouldn't necessarily translate to decisions about what belongs on the platform. That would solve a fair number of problems for other developers, actually -- and in the long run would probably benefit Apple, too, by virtue of improving the overall health of the iPhone/iPad platform.
If you look at Google right now, their Play Store still has the app available, mostly I believe, because the CCP has little or no leverage over Google to force their hand.
I do agree, tho that allowing side loading apps would also sidestep this issue altogether.
Which monopoly breaks up the monopoly upbreakers?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Trade_Commission
However, I'm not trying to push any political agenda, I just thought it was interesting that this was a good example of tech platforms being too powerful.
The law suit that resulted in "browser choice" started in 1993 and "browser choice" was started 2010, so this may happen "soon".
Even John Gruber agrees: [1]
> I still haven’t seen which local laws it violates, other than the unwritten law of pissing off Beijing.
> This is a bad look for Apple, if you think capitulation is a bad look.
[1]: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/10/10/apple-pulls-hkm...
China is bad. By capitulating to them after having declared themselves the enforcer of all that is good and holy, Apple has thus committed hypocrisy.
Kind of like someone who would make a fuss about not using plastic straws but systematically takes their car for <500 meters trips and washes their pants 5 times a week.
It's not a bad idea to remind people that if they make the effort of not using online services which compromise for China, they also should make the similar effort of reducing their physical Made in China goods consumption.
E.g. It was ethical but illegal for some to refuse participation in the holocaust.
Law encodes what those in power want you to do. Ethics encodes what society wants you to do. The two are rarely entirely aligned.
“One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” ― Martin Luther King Jr.
Unless Apple happened to be a Chinese company I'm having a trouble at finding the law that Apple is breaking. I'm sure the customers can decide if a shiny iPhone produced by an company subject to Chinese law is worth it and employees can decide if they want to be employed by a Chinese company.
I really don't get this. Apple has done far more than any other company in the whole industry to fight for privacy rights. They have gone right up against the legal limits every time, while all the other vendors rolled over belly up at the slightest chance.
iMessage is one of the most secure messaging systems available anywhere and is very widely used in China. For most Chinese it's the only practical secure communications system they can buy. It puts industrial strength end to end encryption in the hands of millions of Chinese.
So I get you're angry about china, that's fine. I have family over there, so I know what it's like. But going after Apple, of all the companies doing business in China you could go after, just makes no sense to me whatever.
But China doesn't allow stuff like that, surely there is a backdoor.
"Compromising the security of our personal information can ultimately put our personal safety at risk. That is why encryption has become so important to all of us."
https://www.apple.com/customer-letter/
That to me is hypocritical as to what Apple is doing in China.
[1]: https://www.apple.com/privacy/
The chances that they keep up an app that people use to gain unwanted transparency into any state is exactly 0%
privacy is not possible in a world where governments are free to suppress the speech and will of the people. any company claiming otherwise simply sees their bottom line as more important than people, whether they are employees or customers.
To me Apple is the worst here because Tim and team have no shame, they will strut upon their stage at their own conferences about how they stand for rights but when the show lights are off they act completely different.
Isn't is possible (yes) for people to care about principles in their homeland, where it matters to them more and impacts them more? I care a lot more about my hometown than BFE Chinese countryside, even though in principle I want them to have a living wage, decent time off, and good health care.
I am still angry at Apple, the NBA, Blizzard and the rest. I think this is a darker shade of grey, though.
The framework needs to change. It's possible for the value of a company to be judged on more than just revenues.
This does not mean they should be pulled. Nor does the app break any local laws.
This is spin. This is putting the value of money above the value of individual freedom. This is shameful.
The Legal Section states:
"Apps must comply with all legal requirements in any location where you make them available (if you’re not sure, check with a lawyer). We know this stuff is complicated, but it is your responsibility to understand and make sure your app conforms with all local laws, not just the guidelines below. And of course, apps that solicit, promote, or encourage criminal or clearly reckless behavior will be rejected. In extreme cases, such as apps that are found to facilitate human trafficking and/or the exploitation of children, appropriate authorities will be notified."
There is also a sub-section, which states:
"(iii) Apps should not attempt to surreptitiously build a user profile based on collected data and may not attempt, facilitate, or encourage others to identify anonymous users or reconstruct user profiles based on data collected from Apple-provided APIs or any data that you say has been collected in an “anonymized,” “aggregated,” or otherwise non-identifiable way."
Obviously, with HK and China, the stringency of Apple adhering to their guidelines on decisioning is politically contentious.
From a broader perspective though, there is something about this type of app functionality that is interesting for other cases - What are Apple's rules about app users tracking other people without their knowledge/consent, and then sharing that information with others?
This is also important because it influences levels of privacy protection.
As a low-level example, Waze tracks locations of police, cameras, roadwork, etc., which helps drivers avoid tickets for speeding (generally, this seems pretty accepted and I don't know of any major complaints).
However, say I have an app that tracks celebrities, musicians, businesspeople, athletes, etc., and I share that location data on a live map for others to see, and also contribute to. I imagine that would not go over too well with the people being tracked, even if they were being tracked out of admiration. This presents its own set of problems too for app abilities.