I guess it's a double-edged sword. On one hand it's horrible that people are being killed by the police in Belarus. On the other hand giving platform to anyone to put someone's name and address out there possibly leading to innocent people being lynched or killed by the mob because almost no one will verify whether that someone was really to blame is also terrible.
In my view it's one of those situations when Apple is damned if they do, and damned if they don't.
So allow the UN to be on the ground to make sure there's a safe and legitimate elections and transition of power, if indeed if the oppressive regime is somehow being genuine that they truly did win the election.
"Taking no action is action too" - not quite accurate here, but ignoring the nuance that this situation is similar to the Nazi resistance trying to organize, how would we respond if Apple was wanting the removing of communications sharing Nazi command and personnel "secrets"?
That if you're an innocent, mis-identified person and get killed it's ok because you live in a regime where worse things could happen to you?
That identification videos identify the correct person, or often enough that a few killed innocents is "worth it"?
That it's ok to kill police in general in a bad regime?
That it's ok to kill police who are beating up protestors?
(These points combine: The statistical bias is such that if the wrong person is identified, it will tend to pick a police person who wasn't involved in the scene, rather than a non-police person who wasn't involved.)
(Btw, I think it's up to each person to decide for themselves, if at all possible, if being killed is worse than an alternative. It's a very personal decision.)
Why not? If Instagram or Apple censors certain content, consumers can choose to move to Snapchat or Android, etc.
If a government censors certain content, that's the end of the story.
Because whatever they do, Apple's actions or inactions will have an effect on people in the real world.
In the case of videos which might get people beaten or killed or other things, you can argue that Apple shouldn't act to take those down due to anti-censorship principles, or you can argue that Apple should act due to anti-beating-and-killing-or-other principles.
What you can't correctly argue is that Apple should avoid getting involved.
It's literally impossible for them to not be involved. Whatever they do or don't do has the effect of supporting one outcome or the other.
It's not the same as argument for "avoid getting involved".
They can't choose not be involved, there's literally no way to avoid being involved once you're providing facilities.
The act of producing software which "does not moderate user generated content" is an action demonstrating a particular set of values. It's not neutral.
No. Apple just doesn't give away free stuff for the bad guys. When producers enquiry apple if they can get devices without cost, apple only gives them for the good guys. If the bad ones should be seen on camera with iphones, the production has to buy them.
Through what right or means can Apple demand this, though? Telegram is a platform for user-generated content and it seems odd for Apple to single-out those 3 channels/groups specifically - what about the hundreds of thousands of other objectionable groups on Telegram?
And why Telegram in particular? Why doesn't Apple give the same ultimatum to Facebook to pressure them to block access to militant ethnonationalist groups - or for a more-fair comparison: Awful groups on WhatsApp.
If there's one thing worse than burdensome walled-garden rules, it's inconsistent enforcement of them.
The opening steps of that are already in place. Apple is already blocking content in safari by default. It’s currently doing so in the name of privacy, and chances are that what it’s currently doing is ultimately user positive.
The mechanism is already in place and ready to be expanded to include anything more as necessary.
It's not. They don't allow NSFW apps on iOS even if it's user generated. They have to make it explicitly opt in with significant restrictions.
Apple can do whatever they want on their platform. I wouldn't want to be involved in something illegal such as above when using an app on iOS accidentally.
Telegram is Apple's own platform? Are you saying Apple is involved in something illegal by allowing Telegram to distribute software through the App Store, since people use it to dox Putin-aligned police in Belarus?
There is already a precedent for apple to not allow apps that doesn't align with its content policies even if user generated. Anything NSFW is not allowed by default and without explicit warnings. Porn is not allowed. Drug stores are not allowed. Gab is not allowed. Imageboards aren't. Why would this be different?
Apple owns the app store and the iOS platform. They have a duty to protect their customers from clicking on unsightly and wrongful content. Customers expect that from apple. I wouldn't want any kid to end up accessing this channel on telegram.
> They don't allow NSFW apps on iOS even if it's user generated.
Nit: apps may show user-generated adult content (with some restrictions), as long as such content is not the main purpose of the app. So a “porn browser” would not be allowed, but an “internet browser” is.
Some channels on Telegram show up as not accessible to Apple users because they "distribute pornography" even in cases when that was not the main purpose of the channel. There were cases when some users reposted porn gifs to group chats, admins did not delete them, then the whole chat got banned after user reported the chat. Notice: it's not even the _app's_ main purpose, they police the content down to specific channels, so the apps may _not_ show NSFW content it seems. I wonder when they'll start blocking specific websites in Safari.
No, Facebook is not aggressive in moderating anything except their PR. It's full of bots, full of disinformation, and full of hate-filled groups. You have to be smart enough not to use it to be naive enough to believe they police any aspect of it adequately.
The worst ones are all private, so they can't be pointed to. But we do find out about their existence after they're broken up (by law enforcement action, not Facebook). E.g. the domestic terrorists that were planning to overthrow the Michigan State government were coordinating via private Facebook group. So there's one example for you.
I would be surprised if this were not a demand from the Belarus government, threatening sanctions on Apple, possibly with Russian support.
The Belarus government can just block the App store entirely and may, if Apple does not comply.
> The Belarus government can just block the App store entirely and may, if Apple does not comply.
So what???
Protestors are being imprisoned and tortured, they actually hanged protest organizers from trees, as a scare tactic, does Apple really want to go on public record as an enabler of this?
It is ethically abhorrent, disgusting and beyond terrifying.
If the team responsible for this at Apple is reading this thread, you should know you have blood on your hands.
Is the argument you're making "if you see someone doing something bad, you should not only call it out as such, but also be willing to do something bad to stop it"? That doesn't make sense to me unless there's really no other option to prevent a much greater evil. I think we're still at the point in this story where normal consumer and media pressure can be effective.
You said the "logical conclusion" is "doxxing" them. You haven't explained why, and it's not at all obvious why you would say that. So yes people think that's your argument. If you are arguing something different, you need to explain better.
No, that doesn't explain. Why does blood on their hands make doxxing mandatory for everyone that believes that? Nobody has said anything like that except you.
I never said doxing was mandatory for everyone that believes that. Misquoting me and exaggerating what I said isn’t going to lead to a better understanding.
However if you believe that doxing of individual law enforcement officers is justified because of their support for the regime, and you accuse Apple’s team of having blood on their hands for ‘enabling’ the regime, it would be logical to conclude that you support doxing Apple’s employees.
> it would be logical to conclude that you support doxing Apple’s employees.
But your comment didn't just say such a person would conclude it's justified. You said the logical conclusion would be them participating in the doxxing. Those are very different things. The list of actions that I think are justified but don't participate in is enormous.
(And by "mandatory for everyone that believes that" I meant that logic would mandate it, which is the same as it being the logical conclusion.)
But even with your new version, just talking about it being justified, well that's not necessarily the logical conclusion. One reason is that their participation is at a different level, so the justification might not extend to them.
And if you go by the motive in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24738218 then identifying the police is being done for a very direct purpose to level the playing field on the ground. Someone might reasonably feel that this reason doesn't apply to Apple employees, even while saying that Apple employees have blood on their hands.
You have introduced some abstraction and hypotheticals about how people might reason about this that the original commenter was not expressing. I agree these are interesting points.
It is true that some person might have the nuanced sentiments and tactical analysis you hypothesize, but the actual person who I was responding to didn’t seem to be expressing such a complex view in their comment, and my original reply still stands as a reasonable challenge to the implications were of what they wrote, given the sentiment with which they expressed it.
Normal consumer pressure can get out of the way of a nations internal affairs and nothing much else. The number one remedy people are asking of Apple is to back off and be more laissez faire.
Is "this" my parent comment ("Is the argument you're making...")? I edited that immediately after you added more text to your parent comment ("Are you planning to dox Apple employees?"), but not after your other comment ("I don’t know why you would think it’s my argument.").
Anyway, if I understand correctly your position is that if people here believe that Apple's action is wrong, then they must believe that protestors doxxing Belarusian law enforcement is justified. Therefore people here should also believe that doxxing Apple employees is justified.
My response is that any question of "relative badness" changes drastically in the immediate presence of real physical violence. If Belarusian law enforcement is out on the streets cracking demonstrators' skulls, it's more plausible that doxxing is a lesser evil (though of course, I have no idea how credible this doxxing is) -- direct physical violence just makes every response more acceptable.
Apple's response may have the downstream effect of increasing physical violence, but only through a more diffuse chain of events, so it's possible to think that Apple's action is bad but, unlike direct physical violence, not bad enough to warrant doxxing its employees (which, anyway, doesn't seem anywhere near as effective as doxxing Belarusian law enforcement -- how many Apple employees have the power to affect this policy?).
Helpful explanation. I agree there can be a scale of culpability.
Two points I question:
You assume that doxxing Belarusian law enforcement is effective.
You also imply that Belarusian law enforcement have the power to affect Belarusian policy.
These seem like very much unjustified assertions.
You also seem to ignore the possibility that doxing Apple employees could affect Apple’s policy which is what people want when they criticize Apple.
I am not arguing for doxxing. I’m against it.
However if one believes it would be effective at changing Belarusian policy, it raises the question as to why it would not be effective in changing Apple’s policy?
There is also the point made by the parent that Apple’s people have “blood on their hands”, and are “enablers of violence”.
From your statement about the relative badness, I presume you don’t agree with the parent comment about this.
So it doesn’t seem like your view is representative of the one I was replying to.
I stand by my original comment.
If someone thinks Apple’s employees have “blood on their hands”, then it is logical to assume that by the same reasoning they support doxxing of police, they would support doxxing of Apple employees because they equate what Apple employees are doing with violence. That’s what it means to say that someone has blood on their hands.
The fact that you don’t actually think that what Apple is doing is so bad, changes nothing about the original comment. I was replying to a comment that was far less moderate than the opinion you have just expressed.
You just don’t share the views of the person I was replying to.
Do I want the GAFA to have foreign policies? I am not sure about that. I want social networks and IT infrastructure to be just that: infrastructures, belonging to the various countries they operate in.
If Apple is going to enforce moral views on countries and users, I want the board that chooses these views to be elected. Because as soon as you make such a legitimate demand, a thousand others will follow in terms of acceptance or not of hate speech, dissemination of propaganda, harassment, and the various definitions of terrorism.
A way to prevent Apple from conducting immoral actions in some countries would be to accepte universal jurisdiction in some places, so that crimes in country A by entity X can be judged in country B. Unfortunately this has been a thing constantly opposed by USA.
It ended up as the main way Belarussian protesters organize themselves. TG is a huge target for their government and I would not be surprised if Apple is being pressured by them.
Motivated users (which protesters definitely count as) will absolutely manage to successfully sideload an Android app. Especially seeing as how they are all routinely physically meeting up with many other protesters, so all it takes is running into someone who helps them get set up. Back in my Ingress days I had a similar situation where we were doing a big operation using a command and control coordination sideloaded app. Most of the people were able to figure it out ahead of time, but the last few had others help them download, install, and configure it when we met up for the op. Protests would be exactly the same thing.
> the governments would go after whoever hosts the APK.
Have you thought about what that would mean in practice? Given that the APK could be hosted on multiple (TLS-enabled) foreign sites, a government would need a team of people to be constantly monitoring the web for sites containing the APK, who would then send orders to domestic ISPs demanding that they prevent their customers from accessing those foreign sites.
I believe it is also possible to share apps via Bluetooth.
>Have you thought about what that would mean in practice? Given that the APK could be hosted on multiple (TLS-enabled) foreign sites, a government would need a team of people to be constantly monitoring the web for sites containing the APK, who would then send orders to domestic ISPs demanding that they prevent their customers from accessing those foreign sites.
You mean like the MAFIAA[0] has been doing for decades?
My understanding is that the legal and technical process for getting ISPs to block access to a foreign website is one that takes weeks or months. Also, even with this power, I'm not sure how effective the MAFIAA have been at stopping people from downloading copyrighted media:
Belarus is the last European dictatorship considered a pariah state with no international influence and propped up economically by Russia, so I don't think it has much leverage over Apple. The situation would be very different if it was, for example, China.
That's just a theater. If anybody can join a group, there must be a way to distribute the keys to those who joined. Anybody can get a key then, including Whatsapp/Facebook.
The app makes sure only the people it thinks are in the channel get the keys. If you turn on the security notifications you can see how it works, you get a message when someone gets a new phone, that indicates they got a new key.
You can even check if it matches up if you meet in person or if you communicated using another medium.
Right, if the invite link is publicly available anyone can join.
But a Facebook employee would have to join the group and they wouldn't have access to older messages.
It's not like with Telegram, where all the content, including old messages, is stored in plain text on the server.
There's also the fact that any of those messages can be reported for doxxing or screenshotted to show proof that they're doxxing. Also, Telegram group chats are encrypted, just not E2E, so they've also likely been reported by people who visited them. They are public, after all. (Which seems like a puzzling approach when you're doing something illicit but that's a whole other matter.)
App store may be theirs, but this is like after you install some third party e-mail client on your phone, Apple trying to force their way into telling you what e-mails you can receive, or who you can communicate with. (by proxy) Surely that's not reasonable. What does ownership of the phone mean then?
They could. They have the power to. Reasonable doesn't enter into it. That's why some of us object to their control over access to software for all their customers. I personally will not buy Apple products for this reason.
Everyone else's iphone isn't theirs though. Apple's abuse of their users is directly contributing to the consolidation of power in the world, which will likely lead to violence against and abuse of poor people.
Apple operates in Belarus and must respond to the pressures of the government. Americans would find it intrusive if Apple was strong enough to tell the US govt to back off.
Apple has tried in the past, of course. I believe the policy they say they take is “we respect the law in the country we operate in”. It’s not clear if this was something that the law mandated; if it wasn’t to be morally consistent they should have pushed back like they have in the US.
Americans have the right to tell the government to back off when the government breaks the law. We shouldn't hold everyone to the same low standard as Belarus.
I don't think Apple has the strength to tell the US government to back off, and I don't think Americans think so either. When Apple goes through the American legal system, that's the power of the American judiciary.
To be fair, Telegram is a total nightmare. It's like bitcoin or Tor and dark web, it may facilitate anonymous free speech, but in doing so, it facilitates a helluva lot of crime.
There has to be limits on freedom, you can't just be allowed to post bomb making plans on the internet or yelling fire in a crowded theatre
You may not know this but the fire in a crowded theater case was about criminalizing opposition to the draft during WWI. Criminalizing speech always ends with the powers that be using it to stop people saying things inconvenient to them. One year it’s Obama prosecuting whistleblowers, the next it’s Trump. Any power the government has will be used and “abused” almost immediately.
> Holmes, writing for a unanimous Court, ruled that it was a violation of the Espionage Act of 1917 (amended by the Sedition Act of 1918), to distribute flyers opposing the draft during World War I. Holmes argued this abridgment of free speech was permissible because it presented a "clear and present danger" to the government's recruitment efforts for the war. Holmes wrote:
>> The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. [...] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.
> One year it’s Obama prosecuting whistleblowers, the next it’s Trump
I agree with you, but I hope you're not making a false-equivalence between Trump and Obama, or that the Obama administration's actions against free-speech had the same motivations - and lack of conscience - as the Trump administration's.
It would be much fairer to compare Bush Jr to Trump - it was under Bush Jr we got "free speech zones", for example.
I don’t care about their motivations. I care about what they do. Trump is a vulgarian, a clown, a walking affront to civility while Obama was born and raised to the haute bourgeoisie but one fanned the flames of war in Libya and Syria and the other has burned no nations. Obama dedicated his adult life to the quest for power and he’s a liberal at heart. Trump has no principles, just a lust for adulation. They were still both the executive. Seek power, accrue power, use power. Stamp on any inconvenient speech.
> Obama's war on whistleblowers leaves administration insiders unscathed
> Since Barack Obama entered the White House in 2009, his government has waged a war against whistleblowers and official leakers. On his watch, there have been eight prosecutions under the 1917 Espionage Act – more than double those under all previous presidents combined.
> And yet other apparent leaks have gone entirely unpunished or have been treated, as in the case of General David Petraeus, as misdemeanors. As Abbe Lowell, lawyer for one of the Espionage Act eight, Stephen Kim, has argued in a letter to the Department of Justice, low-level officials who lack the political connections to fight back have had the book thrown at them, while high-level figures have been allowed to leak with “virtual impunity”.
> you can't just be allowed to post bomb making plans on the internet or yelling fire in a crowded theatre
one is very different from the other. I agree yelling fire in a crowded place can't be allowed - causes people to panic, because it's not possible to 'unhear' a sound.
But posting bomb-making information (or really, any information) should be allowed. This information is voluntarily consumed, so it has no danger of causing harm without a person acting on said information (in which case, it's not the information but the person acting on it that is the problem). This applies to _any_ information, not just bomb making information.
>Like the information the crowded theater is on fire?
Check Holme's quote. It's not "yelling fire in a crowded theatre." It's "Falsely yelling fire..."
Do you see the difference?
In fact, The Schenk[0] case was partially overturned by Brandenberg[1], where that example was superseded by "incitement to imminent lawless action," as it's more specific.
>
To be fair, Telegram is a total nightmare. It's like bitcoin or Tor and dark web, it may facilitate anonymous free speech, but in doing so, it facilitates a helluva lot of crime.
So what? Freedom of speech isn't meant to be just free speech as long as it's approved by some government.
>There has to be limits on freedom, you can't just be allowed to post bomb making plans on the internet or yelling fire in a crowded theatre
One of those things is not like the other.
From an ethical standpoint, the only limits on freedom should be those that infringe on the rights of others.
As in, "Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins."
> what about the hundreds of thousands of other objectionable groups on Telegram
Exactly! If they want to start policing all content generated through apps that can be installed on iOS... they'll start getting millions of takedown requests from governments around the world.
Very weird decision strategically, and ofc very questionable morally.
With this kind of policy Apple's hypocrisy really shines bright. An app like Reddit is allowed, meanwhile Telegram not only has to not show porn channels to users, but now has to ban content from the whole platform or be removed from the App Store. On Reddit, there by far more porn accessible to users, and probably more "incitement of violence" too. There's no way to support Apple here. Just another example of the tyranny of the App Store.
Yet at the same time it was apple and app store policies that apparently drove the decision to ban porn from Tumblr. If Reddit ever goes on a similar decline, I could see Reddit being suddenly held to those guidelines too.
That’s misleading title: channels doxxed corrupt law enforcers. I’m not saying it is good or bad (I don’t know, what do you think?), just pointing to significantly incomplete title.
And another very interesting question is: who complained to Apple? Obviously it is not Apple itself monitored these channels.
I'm from Belarus. Honestly, I'm surprised Apple gives a shit. Now I'm worried that Apple can cooperate with local police in case they make inquiry. Am I safe?
You've got to just hope that Apple realizes how bad this would blow up in their face if they worked with police in Belarus to identify democratic protestors, especially given their emphasis on "privacy" in their marketing.
I doubt Apple fanboys even know about Belarus, after all the media is pointing them everywhere but where actual tyranny, injustice and oppression occurs.
Pray tell, what domestic issue that I don't like am I trying to minimize? And in answering that, try to not assume the only two places in the world that exists is Belarus and USA.
How would it blow up in their face when Apple's customers don't care?
Apple has handed over the entire operation of iCloud in China to a regime owned company, including all user data and keys (they did warn users that they were going to do that though).
At the same time they do not permit side-loading, thereby handing complete control over what users are allowed to install on their devices to authoritarian regimes.
This is not simply "complying with local laws" as they like to present it.
> Apple has handed over the entire operation of iCloud in China to a regime owned company, including all user data and keys (they did warn users that they were going to do that though).
Woah. I don’t know how I missed this news for so long.
This is unfortunately the only way to operate an online service in China. It’s standard practice (and a legal requirement) to hand off the ownership and control of Chinese servers to a separate Chinese company. Apple has been pretty transparent about this.
One could argue that Apple should have just exited the Chinese market instead of letting the local government spy on their citizens. Google has taken that position.
Is there a Chinese law that requires all cloud services to be operated by regime owned companies? Could they not have provided that service themselves from inside China and comply with the law only to the extent necessary?
Is there a law that requires them to offer iCloud at all if they want to sell their hardware there?
Is there a law that requires them to ban side-loading?
It seems to me that Apple is always doing a bit more than they are required to do under the law. They clearly want to stay in the good graces of those regimes, especially in China.
But I do agree that the problem in general is structural and not specific to Apple. I think there should be something akin to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to limit what those corporations can do in other countries. There has to be a limit to their aiding and abetting human rights violations.
This is the kind of hyprocisy that chips away at a brand's hard earned reputation. You may notice it's currently the top post on Hacker News. It was also the top post on /r/Apple/ earlier today, surely a haven of some of Apple's biggest fans and customers.
> How would it blow up in their face when Apple's customers don't care?
There are multiple of different negative actions that can be taken against a company, beyond just customers refusing to buy the product.
These potential actions have the ability to cause Apple, and their employees, lots of harm.
For example, in America, one negative action that many people are taking against Apple is lawsuits (Apple has lots some lawsuits, in the past, and lost a bunch of money over it).
But, there could be many other ways to harm Apple, beyond those examples. EX negative publicity, people or companies refusing to work with Apple, and many other things.
Why would this blow up in their face? Have you seen the lines outside Apple stores whenever they launch a new product?
Apple customers do not care. There is a small minority of people who care (like people on this site) but I bet even they will continue to buy Apple products.
We are talking about a mind bogglingly rich company with arrogance to match. Even if this gets them bad PR, it will be forgotten in a few minutes.
But you are in the minority. Also, what other alternatives do we have? Google, Amazon, Microsoft... all equally bad or worse. I can't think of any big tech company really standing up to authoritarian (or even democratic) governments, can you?
I agree. But Google's phones are better (in my opinion), the only reason I bought an iPhone is for privacy reasons - if Apple is going to renege on that branding, then no reason not to go back to the better product.
Apple was banking on privacy marketing as a competitive edge. I think that was a good strategy. Since they appear to be worse at executing on that strategy than I thought they would be, they are losing that segment of the market.
Android makers and telegram could make huge PR/marketing campaign out of this.
I mean huge. Outdoor posters and slogans. TV shows.
I mean, this is truly Orwellian stuff, but in real world. Old uncharismatic dictator recruits huge soulless machine of most powerful corporation in the world to rule small poor country. I know this is not entirely true, but people will love this.
Looking at the video, on the one hand, I can see why that could be a sort of public service against the most egregious of brutal policing.
On the other hand... that AI/ML looks like it has immense potential for wrongful identification.
"AI hallucinating" the wrong person's face into the scene using totally convincing feature interpolation.
In a high stakes scene where people feel the need to fight back, it's not hard to imagine such false positives ruining an innocent person's life.
Edit: If the other comment about people being killed as a result of identification videos is true, "ruining" only scratches the surface. Getting people killed due to an algorithm false positive would be a terrible thing to facilitate. We are talking about an algorithm where the "recognise face" part is known to make errors as well as subject to many kinds of bias (and that's even without a mask); and the "project the face into the video part" is optimised for making the most convincing deep fakes. Especially in the most high stakes scenes, somebody will inevitably convince themselves or others that the interpolated face is really the person who was there behind that mask. Heck, even experts misjudge pattern-matching evidence: https://www.cebm.ox.ac.uk/news/views/the-prosecutors-fallacy "The Prosecutor’s Fallacy is most often associated with miscarriages of justice."
Noone was killed. They are safe. We have peaceful protests. Noone even using something like a bat and we don't have weapons in the arms of regular people
Fair enough. Based on news I completely agree with you. I found no evidence online of any Belarus police being killed or even harmed. (I'd edit my GP message to clarify that if I could but the time limit has passed.)
In referring to identified people being killed I contemplated a worst case scenario, following up on comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737255 "in Hong Kong similar channels were used to kill police" and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737546 "possibly leading to innocent people being lynched or killed by the mob because almost no one will verify whether that someone was really to blame".
However, a bit of Googling later and I haven't found any confirmation that any police in Hong Kong were killed either. Perhaps the HN commenter was a bit overzealous to say so. Only death threats to them... and their children (which is pretty bad in its way).
Meanwhile, the same Googling revealed a lot about Belarus: Shooting protestors with live ammo, horrendous abuse, medical abuse, torture, and some death; it sounds pretty bad there. I can see why doxxing them is compelling and perhaps moral.
Some police resigning in disgust too. That's good to hear.
The possibility of innocents getting harmed due to false identification remains though. Those AI face recognition and deep fake reconstruction techniques really are prone to errors that look convincing. I hope the committed doxxers have high standards of review and understanding, and are able to correct mistakes. I've read enough stories about innocents being attacked and sometimes killed in the past due to an angry vigilante group's lack of care that I think it's a genuine concern if AI-assisted doxxing ever escalates to violence.
> "There is power in being able to name those who have wronged you. Doxxing may not be good practice -- the pro-democracy camp has the moral high ground right now -- but few condemn it while the police operate with impunity. Right now, the police doxxing channel on Telegram has more than 242,000 subscribers. As a comparison, the movement's fact-check channel has 60,000."
> "Unsurprisingly, the police have found ways to hide their identities. Since late June, their helmets have had one-way-mirror privacy film adhered to what were see-through visors. Almost none wear their warrant cards or produce them when requested, even under circumstances where force regulations compel them to."
>In referring to identified people being killed I contemplated a worst case scenario, following up on comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737255 "in Hong Kong similar channels were used to kill police"
That is some biggest BS right there. Luckily that comment was flagged.
>Only death threats to them...
Alleged.
>and their children (which is pretty bad in its way)
There were never any, alleged or not death threat to their Children. But there were definately peer pressure and bullying. ( Which is pretty bad as it causes mental health issues )
Strength to you, these are very difficult times and the same tech that can help you can just as easily be used against you. Apple is very much in the wrong here but dollars tend to be more important than principles so I hope that this will end well. Be careful!
Well, just like apple can auto remove applications that were pushed out from their app store, they certainly can install new application signed with privileged entitlements on your phone that can spy on you without you even knowing. Remember that when apple advertises that "built for security" garbage on you.
At least with most androids you can unlock the bootloader and install something like linageos and remove google services to stop their ability to spy on you.
Curious why dont you use Signal? Is Telegram more convinient? If so, in what aspects? Signal has group chats that are fully end to end encrypted so that noone can demand to take something down because noone is able to see inside the chat (except participants).
Don't be so optimistic. Apple and Google are a duopoly to control mobile messaging (outside of China).
Not for me, I use a Linux phone (Sailfish OS) with no Google. Not for real activists (criminals in the eyes
es of oppressive governments like Chaina, Belarus, Russia, Iran, Turkey, ...) who will always find their way. But for 98% of any population.
Allowing sideloading for Android makes Google much harder to control the platform. I’d not be surprised though if sideloading would be not allowed in the future.
Not really. Normal people don't sideload. The people who do know how to sideload aren't in danger of getting forced by the monopolies anyways because they're tech-savyy enough.
I don't see them disallowing side-loading soon but what I do expect is an expansion of the SafetyNet [1] test which will flag devices with any side-loaded software as 'suspicious', upon which banking and electronic ID apps will refuse to run. Since this will render the device all but useless for many people it will either force them to carry two devices - one for such 'official' stuff, the other for the rest - or to try to find a way around SafetyNet. This is a cat-and-mouse game which has been going on for a number of years and will continue to do so until either Google goes full Apple by locking down the platform or some sort of 'safe enclave' is created which can run on any device no matter its status. Google clamping down too hard will give extra impetus to the further development of alternative mobile operating systems, the viability of which increases with the rise of web-based alternatives for native apps.
It is interesting that people don't think that their western governments are oppressive too. In fact they are slowly adopting techniques used in China and other countries who try them first. People are the same everywhere. They want power and those who take pleasure from harming others get to find their way into governments.
But not in a sense that Google or Apple would directly decide what I cannot see.
Indirectly they already do, because a lot of public and commercial services, banking, public transport tickets, corona tracking are available only via those. But that's because the general public does not understand the threats of being dependent on the duopoly.
This is a complete double-standard. Telegram messages are user-generated content. Is Apple going to start blocking websites in the Safari app? I'm sure one could find a lot worse things than doxxing by using Safari.
If China would threaten to ban iPhones, surely Apple will block websites.
The difference is that governments can block websites without Apple approval. But governments can't block app content without blocking the entire AppStore, so they have to reach Apple.
And most servers nowadays are behind CDNs, so blocking an IP might block more than you actually wanted. And with eSNI being pushed, that might become even more difficult to effectively filter a specific service.
Telegram uses advanced techniques to avoid blocking. You can't just block few IP addresses and call it a day. AFAIK Telegram servers deliver IP addresses of proxy servers via silent Apple Push Notification. Censors have no way of blocking or intercepting those messages. They can only block Apple servers thus disrupting the entire Apple ecosystem from work.
That really isn't an advanced technique, that's just hiding behind Apple's skirts. The govt is no doubt quite willing to block Apple notifications, and Apple is obviously willing and able to kick apps from its notifications platform.
Russia for example is blocking all ESNI traffic... You either downgrade or get blocked. Which makes the big services shutdown of domain fronting so inexcusable, just kowtowing to China and every other regime.
We browsers are specifically excepted from the App Store rules on content. That’s basically because browser vendors don’t have a direct relationship with web site publishers, the way that a service provider like Facebook or Telegram has a relationship with their users that post content. That relationship creates a chain of responsibility.
Well, yes it does. If you have signed up users with accounts, and you own the infrastructure for disseminating the content they produce, youre responsible for their posts and presence on your platform, and the content you are disseminating. None of that applies to web browsers, or IRC clients, or RSS feed clients, or podcast apps, or plenty of other client apps on the App Store.
It's a double standard in that web browsers are not considered responsible for the content they display while chat apps are considered responsible. These are two different standards being applied just because of a technicality about whose servers the data is hosted on (whether app owner = server owner). Would Apple be okay with allowing a third-party front-end to the Telegram servers? Safari can be that if you use the web app version of Telegram.
Messaging and content apps that are decoupled from distributed back end infrastructure are ok - IRC, Mastodon, email and there are many others. It’s a clear and consistent principle.
Just off the top of my head, Apple allows for apps supporting IRC, RSS and Mastodon protocols. The latter came about in 2016, when these topics were just as relevant as they are now. Adding another protocol doesn’t seem difficult.
> Previously, when removing posts at Apple’s request, Telegram replaced those posts with a notice that cited the exact rule limiting such content for iOS users. However, Apple reached out to us a while ago and said our app is not allowed to show users such notices because they were “irrelevant”.
It´s like Apple wants to enforce censorship on behalf of oppressing dictatorships, but doesn´t want to deal with the consequences of enforcing censorship on behalf of oppressing dictatorships.
It hurts their PR. They can't be out there doing ad campaigns taking a dig at the Facebooks and the Googles of the world whilst overtly abiding to the whims of totalitarian regimes.
But it's Belarus, the government is highly unpopular in the West and not really popular anywhere else. And it's not like China where they'd lose a giant market if they decided to stand up to the government, Belarus has a population of under 10m with an average income of under $6k a year.
It might just be about doxxing, but the PR problem remains, of course.
I would be very surprised this being just it, the chance of them finding out about obscure chat channels in a country across the ocean without somebody from Apple having a job monitoring them full time is infinitesimal.
This very much reminds me how Google disappeared websites of Russian opposition (weeks after signing some memorandum with kremlin,) and then told "maybe they need to improve their search engine friendliness?"
Oh, I wasn't suggesting that Apple monitors them or actively looks for doxxing, but that somebody (potentially from the police) informed them about it, they took a look and concluded that it's against their policy.
I don't know whether that's a common thing, and I expect many companies wouldn't go the Telegram route and publish the demands because they don't want to put stress on their relationship with Apple.
Discord apparently has channels that are used for similar activities, but I don't know whether Apple has asked Discord to hide those channels from the app, or whether anyone complained to Apple in the first place.
I don't think somebody reporting content for policy review (Apple's content policy, not foreign policy) is affected by any US laws. That person wouldn't have to be an Apple customer, they wouldn't have to be a user, they wouldn't have to be outside the US.
I doubt there are any laws that would forbid Apple from taking or acting on a report of content policy violations.
It probably is just about doxxing, but it still shows how scummy and so far up their own ass Apple is. Just think about the lenght of the reach - trying to regulate what content somebody on a messenger app should post, not even social media platform like twitter/facebook (do they monitor those too? Telling them which groups to have?) They feel like they're creating their own little world, their own universe. And it's not some unambiguous situation like posting nudes of your ex gfs, it's very complicated what's happening in Belarus, at the very least they shouldn't interfere. But they couldn't care less about democracies of the world, if there's a slightest chance that Apple very very remotely might burn - they're OUT. And on top of that they want you to be clueless about it.
Not only are you forced to follow whatever Apple tells you to do, you’re not allowed to communicate as such because it might make Apple look bad to users who don’t know any better. It’s really a quite inconvenient situation.
That's been a technique that apple have been using quite a bit. Forbid apps to be transparent with their customers around apple rules. This way app users are pissed at the app makers not apple.
Interesting. I have always found NDA stuff some of the grosses legal concepts emerging, and in this case it's not even an agreement, it's pure blackmail.
The sheer chutzpah of claiming "Apple eats 30% of all charitable donations made on the app" is an irrelevant piece of information to the end-user.
This is the kind of behavior that only comes from a company that knows they can get away with murder, and when that happens, it's time to tighten the screw a bit before things get waaay out of hand.
These must be the Information Purification Directives, it seems :)
To wit:
"Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology [...]"
But those notices really are irrelevant, right? I mean, there is nothing I can do to bypass them. It's bad UX, like showing a disabled button that I can't enable by any means.
Having said this, you can still use Telegram Web on Safari to bypass these restrictions.
No, they're not irrelevant. These notices tell people why they can't access certain information. They improve the user experience, otherwise the users will not know why certain information is suddenly inaccessible to them.
Visible but disabled items are only useful if they can be enabled in a more-or-less obvious way. Showing a disabled item that you can't enable in any way is bad UX. Am I wrong?
Knowing that Apple is preventing you from accessing it gives you a way to enable it again: By pressuring Apple to stop doing these shitty things. Same thing with displaying Apples 30% app cuts, if it was clearly shown everywhere likely people would pressure Apple to reduce it which is why you aren't allowed to show it.
Edit: Reading the article again, there is actually a very simple fix to view these posts: Go over to your friend with an android and access them to there, and then remember to buy android in the future to avoid censorship like this. This is surely the main reason Apple doesn't let them show this note.
A notice is not a disabled item. It's information. It would only be disabled if it was visible but the text was obscured. 'Enabledness' in the context of a notice is legibility. The intended user experience is reading the notice and understanding more about the world.
You are right this time and now you know why Telegram put those messages there: to allow users who need those messages to go online on the Internet or swap to an Android phone.
The definitions of "irrelevant" and "bad UX" are obviously very subjective. Personally, I don't think good UX means stripping out the ability to see user intent and context just because it reduces friction.
Showing where user generated content has been censored and the rational as to why is definitely a feature I would want to have regardless of how inconvenient it might be - especially in the context of political discussions.
You can't use Telegram Web if government blocked Telegram website. App have a way around government blocking (they use server push to deliver proxy addresses, so the only ultimate way to block Telegram is to block Apple servers).
I don't think they're irrelevant at all, but anyway why would it be forbidden for a developer to include some irrelevant information in their app if they want to?
Please stop worshipping this company. It's not a force for good.
They've kicked us out of open computing by locking down the only computer a lot of folks own (iPhone). And now look what kind of shit they can pull because they own the entire stack! This shouldn't be possible!
We really have to push against this and hope the DOJ forces all phone providers to allow "side-loading" (what a bizarre term!)
The iPhone is a computer, not some gaming console. It has to be free for freedom. You should be able to install straight off the web.
And before you downvote me, please look again how much Apple gives a damn about democracy in the world. And look what it's doing because of its power. Double plus ungood.
It's a shame that anti-trust enforcement has been so effectively neutered in the US. This is exactly the type of thing it's designed to protect us from.
But I think with the current high bar for anti-trust, it can be argued that Apple is "hurting consumers" through the lock-down of their platform.
It's fine that Apple should offer a safe, curated experience of using their devices through the App Store. I'm even fine with the App Store having some OS-level integrations which would not be available to 3rd parties. But the App Store should have to compete on its own merits for how it delivers value to the customer - it should not be the only option by fiat. Maybe at the beginning, but not when smartphones are the dominant computing platform and the main way people use software on a daily basis.
The 30% cut which Apple requires is simply not justified for how much value Apple offers to businesses which drive revenue through the App Store. Again, maybe at the beginning, but the App Store no longer offers any meaningful benefit in terms of discoverability. Losing almost 1/3 of revenue out of the gate can make the difference between viability and not for a lot of companies at the margins, meaning this policy costs the user access to all those products which might be able to exist were it not for the "apple tax".
Even under the current legal framework, I just don't see how it's justified.
> Even under the current legal framework, I just don't see how it's justified.
In general, prices don't need a legal justification. That's a big part of free enterprise.
> This is exactly the type of thing it's designed to protect us from.
What makes you so optimistic? In practice, complicated laws with lots of reach usually work in favour of the party that can afford more and better lawyers. (Or, sometimes, the party that is winning the PR battle for the hearts and minds of public opinion.)
> In general, prices don't need a legal justification. That's a big part of free enterprise.
Well it would need a legal justification if the alternative is that Apple would be penalized under anti-trust regulation for using its market share to hurt consumers for its own benefit. Even "free enterprise" operates within a legal framework.
> In practice, complicated laws with lots of reach usually work in favour of the party that can afford more and better lawyers.
I mean this is an incredibly defeatist and cynical view. Don't get me wrong, I'm not overly optimistic that things will change based on the way laws have been applied in the last few decades, but the fact that people see laws as primarily a tool for the powerful - and don't even have an expectation for legal enforcement to operate on behalf of the consumer - seems to me to be a large part of the reason the US is looking more and more like a failed state.
Some interesting thoughts on rail freight transport at https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/SurfaceFreightTransporta... If all you did was follow casual online discussions about the state of American rail transport, you'd think it's in shambles. What's interesting is that the deregulated freight part of the industry is actually doing great. It's the transportation of people part that's not so hot.
I have no ready answer for Apple's walled garden. But as I stated earlier, I'm afraid heavy handed interference might do more harm than good, since Apple has so much money to through at lobbyists and lawyers.
I’m guessing you’re speaking about the “freedom” meme but there’s nothing uniquely American about freedom. If anything, capitalism tends to trump “freedom” and any pressures to equal the balance (like government oversight) almost always gets heavily condemned. So from that regard, iPhones (and Apple in general) are very much American entities. Not that I have anything against iPhones (I have one myself) but this is “just business”, as they say.
Yes, don't worship any company or organisation, not Apple, not SpaceX, not Bell Labs, not the United States of America, none at all. Even if they do the right things now, future leadership may decide to do the opposite and lie about it, values may change, goals shift. Try to treat them as groups of strangers that change every few years, not as individuals with a personality that you somehow feel like you really really know.
Still, free-as-in-freedom iPhones? Hell no! I give them money because they are not free-as-in-freedom, but provide a walled garden and defend it for me. I don't think I could do this myself; I know lots and lots of people absolutely certainly couldn't in the same way that I couldn't perform open-heart surgery. On iOS right now it's really, really hard to inadvertently give one's data, money or identity to any random app, and even for people who are not in the cohort that somehow always accumulates browser toolbars, the security measures by device/OS and browser vendors are the only thing that keeps them safe. This is an absolutely huge thing. If they break that, it'll wipe out their mobile products.
I do wholeheartedly agree that they lock down too much and too hard. I get that it shouldn't be easy to side-load software, but making it utterly impossible is a bit too advanced-user-hostile. And this particular action of theirs is wayyy over any line one could draw, and I absolutely think their brand should suffer big time for this.
But taking things to the other extreme – free as in freedom – I really don't see how that could end well. Give the big app vendors easy, convenient ways to bypass all restrictions and they'll make use of it, if only to make development cheaper, and then the small vendors and eventually the shady vendors will follow suit, and we're essentially back at the Windows 95 security model with some permission nag screens that no one really cares about anyway, and then everyone gets scammed and flocks to whatever vendor still has a properly secured walled garden. If there is a way to open things up completely while keeping the platform safe and usable for absolute laypeople, I haven't read or heard of it. Right now, I vastly prefer a locked-down but completely usable platform to some abstract notion of freedom.
Nobody wants to remove all security policies etc from iOS. I'm not sure what gave you that idea in this thread.
Requiring permissions from users to access data is good, and an actually well curated app store is just as useful.
That doesn't mean that it shouldn't be possible to install through different avenues as well (still requiring the users permission).
Yes you would get a lot of shitty software if you started installing everything you stumble upon, but the apple store quality would probably increased significantly, because they could deny significantly more apps, as they'd have an alternative approach to get to users that really want it
> Nobody wants to remove all security policies etc from iOS. I'm not sure what gave you that idea in this thread.
I think you misunderstood me there. Of course permission systems are going to stay, who in their right mind would give up this crucial innovation?
But free-as-in-freedom implies that I, the owner and user, can do whatever I want, including triggering all sorts of footguns – if I get tricked into installing CriminalBankrobberApp and giving it all sorts of permissions because I believe it legitimately needs those and won't abuse them, it's game over. A non-free iOS can simply make this impossible or so inconvenient that I'll never bother – an app that actively attacks banking apps on my device wouldn't even get on the App Store I guess – but I don't think a free-as-in-freedom iOS could possibly keep that sort of tight control, not with a 30%-of-revenue economic incentive for everyone else to normalize arbitrary distribution channels.
> That doesn't mean that it shouldn't be possible to install through different avenues as well (still requiring the users permission).
How does the user know what avenues are safe and what aren't? Isn't this just a rehash of downloading software from arbitrary websites, just with lots of app stores instead?
> but the apple store quality would probably increased significantly, because they could deny significantly more apps
And lots and lots of others, big names too, would decide to forgo the App Store entirely (even assuming some loss of visibility, those are some really easily-earned (30-x)% in revenue!), so you'd end up with an Epic store and a Steam store and a EA store and a Facebook store and an app store for each media outlet (NYT Recipes now at the NYT App Store!) and possibly for each bank and national app stores and regional app stores and a CoolBeansAppStore with neat UI tweaks and skins and a SuperDuperAppStore with all sorts of small indy apps and a SuperSecureAppStore that distributes copies of other apps with added tracking and tons of Indydev Inc App Stores, and FreeXXXAppStore that has some well-known copyright-agnostic porn apps and absolutely no rules at all and all kinds of malware and scams... pretty much like the internet back then, but with much leakier sandboxes, because there are lots of things apps must be able to do if allowed to that websites pretty much never need(ed?) to do ...
And good luck with crafting a permission system that makes all of this really transparent and clear and actionable and still isn't a huge hassle that everyone just clicks through and works even for disinterested, impatient laypeople ... That's reducing the depth of security to pretty much this single thing that people hate in its current form already.
I mean, really, I am sometimes struggling to tell what's safe and what isn't on the web, and I should tell, I'm building some of the stuff that's on the web – how is someone who's busy being a lawyer, or is elderly and kinda struggling with the latest generation of gadgets, or a stressed-out parent with zero time for ITSec studies on top, or 15 years old, etc. pp. supposed to make that call that in a similarly confusing environment, on similarly bad data – possibly worse data.
The only reason this works on Android so far is probably that the UX of using other stores or sideloading is so bad; some have tried to establish their own, but churn is just too brutal for next to everyone.
I'm not saying free and open mobile platforms cannot be done, or that there's absolutely no way to open up iOS without wreaking havoc, and I'm definitely not saying that wouldn't be really worthwhile, because I think it would be absolutely fantastic to have an open and free mobile platform – but I believe that's going to be much, much more difficult than just throwing out all the restrictions and calling it a day, because we've been there in the early internet and security-wise it was an absolut...
Do you think that people are incapable of using personal computers then? Just the regular old PC.
This argument falls flat on its face, because it is blatantly obvious, that, for some reason, people are capable of using PCs, and don't explode from the confusion of doing so.
Every single argument that you are making, could apply to the PC. But people still do alright using PCs. Phones should not be any different.
> good luck with crafting a permission system
How are they doing that on the PC? PCs work fine.
> how is someone who's busy being a lawyer
Thats an interesting question. Which has an answer. How does a lawyer use a PC, right now? So thats how they'll do it.
> pretty much like the internet back then
Why do we have to talk about the internet from a long time ago? Just talk about the current internet. Which people use. On the PC. Right now.
> t there's absolutely no way to open up iOS without wreaking havoc
Just do it the same way that PCs currently work. Right now. Because PCs work, right now, and society is not falling apart.
> because we've been there in the early internet and security-wise it was an absolute nightmare.
We don't need to talk about the early internet. Just make the iPhone the same as modern day PCs. Which people are already capable of using just fine.
> How are they doing that on the PC? PCs work fine.
> Just make the iPhone the same as modern day PCs. Which people are already capable of using just fine.
Ransomware attacks are absolutely rampant, though you'll never hear about the vast majority of incidents of course, and pretty much all of those start with someone running thingycorp_salaries_full_list.xlsx.exe, enabling macros for a fishy .docx, opening an infected .pdf, downloading and running infected installers, plugging in random USB keys, and so on. Then there's lots and lots of phishing attacks going on, and that's with most companies already clamping down on attack vectors really hard — if people used private PCs as much as they use their private smartphones, for sensitive things like banking, without an IT department to shield them from the worst of it, I guess consumer Windows would get a lot more locked down really quickly.
> people are capable of using PCs, and don't explode from the confusion of doing so.
People may not explode from confusion, but if they had a better idea of how complex IT security has become, they might at least feel somewhat uneasy. Even people in IT roles screw up and get pwned, or build systems in a way that lets them get pwned easily, all the time really. Bad actors have become pretty sophisticated over the last decade as well, and Covid-19 is only making things worse as lots of unsavory individuals with money and resources find that real-world crime doesn't quite deliver the returns it used to, and everyone and their mother now conduct large parts of their lives through their smartphone and move lots of money through those devices. Personally, I've definitely noticed both attack volume and sophistication going up few notches already.
> How does a lawyer use a PC, right now? So thats how they'll do it.
The vast majoriy will depend on IT people to keep them safe, and their devices will be quite thoroughly locked down, and their email pretty aggressively filtered. Incidents definitely still happen, though. Same with medicine.
I really don't think it's a stretch to imagine people getting socially engineered en masse to install shady apps in a world where each app store and each app requires an entirely new security assessment on little to no data by end users, or apps getting compromised and not get pulled, or whatever. It's possible to solve that quandary, but it's not going to be as easy as just throwing out all restrictions without devising some other mechanism to take their place in protecting users.
> Because PCs work, right now, and society is not falling apart.
Society isn't falling apart from lots and lots of issues I'd consider quite severe. I'd rather not let anything get to that point if it can be prevented.
> This is an absolutely huge thing. If they break that, it'll wipe out their mobile products.
How? And why? Most people won't care. I think disallowing Telegram to operate freely will wipe out Apple's iOS products in countries where real freedom of speech matters.
You're framing this debate as if apple PR statements "we're doing all of this for our user's best interests" were true.
They're not. They're doing this for maximizing the companie's profit. Which they absolutely don't need to (it's not like if apple was struggling financially, or trying to find an subtle business model that works).
> You're framing this debate as if apple PR statements "we're doing all of this for our user's best interests" were true.
I thought I'd made a pretty strong case to not trust Apple's PR in my first paragraph. To clarify, no, I don't think that is the case, and people should be very miserly with their trust towards orgs like Apple in general.
The thing is, no matter their rationale, their product decisions have far-reaching real-world consequences. This particular decision has obvious real-world consequences to protesters in Belarus, and it is a disgusting decision, and definitely makes for a strong argument against leaving them with that much control.
On the other hand, however, their security stance works really, really well, as far as I can tell, and it keeps their users quite safe from lots of harm, and that's something I keep giving them money for, because I value security highly.
Forcing their walled garden free-as-in-freedom wide open will amend #1, but what about #2? Literally hundreds of millions of iPhone users around the world depend on the ecosystem being safe – my mom has an iPhone mostly because they keep their walled garden clean, so she doesn't have to get a CS degree to do that herself, and also because it's a very nice product that she enjoys a lot, but I'd advise her very strongly to get something else if Apple's security was shoddy. As I've argued, I have very strong doubts that this could be done without breaking much of what makes iPhones so secure.
I'm definitely not arguing that this makes Apple's ability and growing propensity to abuse their power a great thing – I think it's absolutely creepy in a deeply dystopian way – but right now the only way to build such a safe environment that I know of relies on strict centralized control, and having such an environment is one of the prime things that make this technology manageable for everyone and their mother.
If someone comes up with a free-as-in-freedom smartphone that's secure, easy to use, has the necessary polish and all the important apps and isn't laser-focused on people who live inside emacs, I'll be happy to part with a bunch of money for that.
The market for smartphones is broken, period. You can choose for Apple, which is all about power politics like this news article is demonstrating, they are not here for you. Or you can choose for Android, which is one big privacy invading monster, they are not here for you either. It is a duopoly, which should (and probably does) fall under the same rules as a monopoly: the governments should fix this, the market cannot fix this.
It is not possible for other parties to break this market open. Other parties are relegated to niche markets without any power. Using a smartphone from a niche party will give you a very reduced experience and is for most people not a viable option.
Two companies fighting for monopoly, one side saying the other side is worse instead of fixing the system, middle class getting squeezed. Sounds pretty American to me.
I think it's a pure evil move. Seeing Cook indeed hobnobs with the likes of MBS I won't be surprised if there's more to what's visible, especially beneath this veneer of being privacy champions. Esp. considering their entire platform is closed source.
You are locked in, they genuinely don't care about your opinions.
Getting government contracts and keeping a market open is vastly more important.
Plus the whole privacy thing is just marketing, they have worked with the US government with PRISM. They will keep running the advertisements regardless if they sell your data to a government or corporation.
You skipped a few paragraphs. Here’s the beginning:
> Apple released a statement saying they didn't want us to take down the 3 channels run by the Belarusian protestors, but just specific posts "disclosing personal information."
> This sly wording ignores the fact that channels like @karatelibelarusi and @belarusassholes consist entirely of personal information of violent oppressors and those who helped rig the elections – because that is why those channels exist.
So wait, the issue foremost is the doxing. Doxing is against the clearly stated rules of their platform, so they don’t want you doxing people in apps on their platform. Which is okay with me, because the mob (The “majority”, note Durov even cites a very high consensus percentage for us to feel good about it) deciding who is ok to dox and who is not ok to dox is always dangerous for humanity.
Now, Belarus is without doubt (in my view) run by “violent oppressors”, and there is no rule of law by which protestors can seek redress, but the notion that it’s okay to dox people because you took a poll somewhere that included some percentage of Belarusians is downright naive and scary, and doesn’t smell much better at all than the government itself, however true it may be.
That Apple steps in and micromanages at this level is the disturbing element in my opinion, because certainly they’re only doing it because they were notified by Belarusian authorities, but to me the greater issue is the mob justice, against which there is also no appeal or redress, which to me is very scary, even if in this instance it is correct.
"Do this or you're banned! But don't mention that it is us telling you to do it, or you're banned, because that might mean our PR team has to do some damage control!"
Apple is a US company. If Belarus people want those channels, they should build their own device or get an android. I fully support apple taking action on violence and doxing rather than bending down to other country's people or apps like telegram.
If tiktok refused to take down doxing of officials in US, it would get banned.
When looking at Apple's ads and knowing that it is a US company, I kind of expect that in my oppressive post-soviet country I can get a glimpse of power of US constitution and that they won't bend under demands of third world dictators...
The relevant piece is this: "Apple is requesting that Telegram shut down three channels used in Belarus to expose the identities of individuals belonging to the Belarusian authoritarian regime that may be oppressing civilians"
Exposing identities of individuals is problematic. There are examples of bad things happening when these kind of messages spread through messaging apps.
Apple is no relevant party in this conflict. This should be a case between the people who are allegedly being doxxed (who go to the police) and the alleged doxxers.
This stuff Apple does is what happens when someone gets on a power trip. What they gonna do next, attemp to censor forums available in Safari?
Exposing identities is indeed a very wide spectrum, ranging from identities of sentenced terrorists (nobody'd question that, usually the legalities revolve around the concept of "public figure" which greenlights a lot of publication that would not be allowed about just any random person) on one extreme to identities of people who were found voting for X in an illegal interception of mail ballots on the other extreme.
It doesn't really matter where exactly Apple would draw a line, from absurd extremes like "you are free to talk about Roman officials infamous for sentencing innocents to the cross, but please do so without mentioning PII" when someone types in Pontius Pilate, to pragmatic, maybe even lazy "don't use the channel for illegal communications (but we can't really police them)". But they should at least try to be somewhat consistent about it and, even more importantly (but much easier!), by no means require secrecy. A secrecy requirement is just lame and reeks of foul play, horribly.
Apple prohibit them from saying that Apple made them block it because it's "irrelevant". So they must censor those message without any info to the user so the user won't know Apple is oppressing them.
By allowing itself to overreach into user-content, Apple is setting enough precedents that it will not be able to refuse blocking more and become a moderator for all apps, threatening any with removal if they don't comply.
That's a very dangerous path Apple is taking, caving to the demands of dictatorial and corrupt governments.
I'm hoping that this move will put Apple in hot waters, at least it should come under scrutiny.
But I'm not naive enough to believe that this sort of action will not become more prevalent.
The problem is not that a private company can prevent democracy, the problem is that said company is also the only choice when it comes to free speech and communication.
It's pretty unfortunate that Apple is willing to support an authoritarian regime to the point of requiring an app to censor its users. I wonder how this came to Apple's attention; was it requested by Belarus's government? And I wonder what the consequences of Telegram not complying would be.
It's unclear why they would demand this, given that Google seems to not need to make similar demands.
This also seems like it encourages repressive governments to cajole Apple to pressure apps to remove user content in the future.
People will never learn: don't buy Apple products. You're locking yourself in. It's your own damn fault you bought their device. It's their device and their OS. They can and will dictate whatever they like.
If you're doing something that hurts their bottom line, don't be surprised when they take measures to curtail those actions. They're a company.
If you don't want to support their actions, don't buy their products. It's that simple. Maybe the Belarussians concerned by this can now actually get rid of their Apple products and buy something else.
Does the desktop app support groups? If it does, then get the desktop app.
These issues are unrelated, or: it's not a choice between Apple and freedom.
First, yes, buying iOS is a partial lock-in. But so is almost every other consumer choice: only if you stick to FOSS and open document formats, and are technical enough to convert your own documents once your apps are no longer supported, you may consider yourself free. Otherwise, lock-in is a given.
The lock-in isn't full, either: pictures, email, videos, bookmarks, etc. can be exported to other devices.
Second: if you buy Apple, you don't give up the right to protest them. Since the company depends on its customers, pressure can be effective. This is in contrast with free products, where customer pressure can turn counter-productive.
Or you just buy something else for that exact period, in addition to apple. If you go to a war, do you get yourself a gun or just walk there in your kitchen gloves? If you want to make a tasty omelet, do you put your bulletproof vest on?
Why should one product be the answer to all situations? You know that apple is a walled garden. You know that walled gardens have their limits of usage. How does that mean that walls must be destroyed? It is non-sequitur.
Saying that apple interferes with your freedom is like saying a kitchen glove interferes with your right to defend against a knife. It is just an instrument with a narrow usage area, which may or may not fit your current needs.
Let's suppose that I don't support apple's political stances on many things for various reasons, but I will buy new iphone once it is out, because I see value in it. Not surprised if it fails at uprisings, not a problem, that simple. Where the flaw is?
This is obscene overreach by Apple. I know I shouldn't be surprised at this point, but Apple using their power as the distributor of Telegram's app to censor legal user-generated content on the platform is just outrageous.
Add this incident to the rapidly growing body of evidence proving every privacy advocate's arguments against centralized systems. Some time soon I hope the tech community finds its way back to federated/p2p modes of distribution and communication so we can make this kind of censorship -- and the companies which enforce it -- a thing of the past.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 345 ms ] threadI made a post about this. Looks like some filter is taking down all t.me links.
Because in Hong Kong similar channels were used to kill police.
This isn't a simple question of censorship.
In my view it's one of those situations when Apple is damned if they do, and damned if they don't.
I don't know if that is the case, but if it is then they aren't taking sides.
"Taking no action is action too" - not quite accurate here, but ignoring the nuance that this situation is similar to the Nazi resistance trying to organize, how would we respond if Apple was wanting the removing of communications sharing Nazi command and personnel "secrets"?
That if you're an innocent, mis-identified person and get killed it's ok because you live in a regime where worse things could happen to you?
That identification videos identify the correct person, or often enough that a few killed innocents is "worth it"?
That it's ok to kill police in general in a bad regime?
That it's ok to kill police who are beating up protestors?
(These points combine: The statistical bias is such that if the wrong person is identified, it will tend to pick a police person who wasn't involved in the scene, rather than a non-police person who wasn't involved.)
(Btw, I think it's up to each person to decide for themselves, if at all possible, if being killed is worse than an alternative. It's a very personal decision.)
That's why we can't let corporations decide on that
Apple can censor content on the App Store. They should not do anything inside the apps on App Store.
In the case of videos which might get people beaten or killed or other things, you can argue that Apple shouldn't act to take those down due to anti-censorship principles, or you can argue that Apple should act due to anti-beating-and-killing-or-other principles.
What you can't correctly argue is that Apple should avoid getting involved.
It's literally impossible for them to not be involved. Whatever they do or don't do has the effect of supporting one outcome or the other.
It is not possible for Apple to start moderating all user generated content in all apps. They shouldn't do it.
I gave another example below-
Imagine if Chrome decides to stop connecting to a site because the Govt asks Google to do it. They can do it. But they shouldn't
It's not the same as argument for "avoid getting involved".
They can't choose not be involved, there's literally no way to avoid being involved once you're providing facilities.
The act of producing software which "does not moderate user generated content" is an action demonstrating a particular set of values. It's not neutral.
If you make a claim, you have to back it up with reasons. Your statement is not self-evident.
Imagine if Chrome decides to stop connecting to a site because the Govt asks Google to do it. They can do it. But they shouldn't
I think if you weighed them overall you ll find however that ‘fanboiism’ is overweight
And why Telegram in particular? Why doesn't Apple give the same ultimatum to Facebook to pressure them to block access to militant ethnonationalist groups - or for a more-fair comparison: Awful groups on WhatsApp.
If there's one thing worse than burdensome walled-garden rules, it's inconsistent enforcement of them.
Because they are usually pretty aggressive about acting on inciteful content.
Also known as accountability for their own actions.
The mechanism is already in place and ready to be expanded to include anything more as necessary.
Plus they make and sell communication apps subject to carrying the exact same sentiments. Content policing a chat app is asinine.
Apple can do whatever they want on their platform. I wouldn't want to be involved in something illegal such as above when using an app on iOS accidentally.
Apple owns the app store and the iOS platform. They have a duty to protect their customers from clicking on unsightly and wrongful content. Customers expect that from apple. I wouldn't want any kid to end up accessing this channel on telegram.
If you believe democracy to be unsightly and wrongful, then your believes are reactionary, and must be subject to rectification.
Somehow in your definition democracy is something only allowed to happen organically, if forcefully torn from you by corruption and guns, "oh well".
They don't.
> Customers expect that from apple
They shouldn't
> I wouldn't want any kid to end up accessing this channel on telegram.
It's parent's duty to protect their kid however they see fit, not Apple's.
Actually no they can’t much of the world has laws to prevent such abuses of power.
Nit: apps may show user-generated adult content (with some restrictions), as long as such content is not the main purpose of the app. So a “porn browser” would not be allowed, but an “internet browser” is.
So what???
Protestors are being imprisoned and tortured, they actually hanged protest organizers from trees, as a scare tactic, does Apple really want to go on public record as an enabler of this?
It is ethically abhorrent, disgusting and beyond terrifying.
If the team responsible for this at Apple is reading this thread, you should know you have blood on your hands.
That seems like the logical conclusion if you think they have blood on their hands.
It seems like a little much to call Apple an ‘enabler’ for being against doxing.
Just because protesters use a tactic doesn’t mean everyone needs to support it, especially if it is a tacit call to violence.
It seems a lot closer to the argument DoingIsLearning is making about why “Apple employees” have blood on their hands.
Here’s a real quote from my comment, rather than a few words out of context in quote marks:
“That seems like the logical conclusion if you think they have blood on their hands.”
It’s obvious that I am not saying they should be doxed.
But sure - if people are just reacting to a few words without reading the whole comment or what is a reply to, then they won’t understand.
However if you believe that doxing of individual law enforcement officers is justified because of their support for the regime, and you accuse Apple’s team of having blood on their hands for ‘enabling’ the regime, it would be logical to conclude that you support doxing Apple’s employees.
But your comment didn't just say such a person would conclude it's justified. You said the logical conclusion would be them participating in the doxxing. Those are very different things. The list of actions that I think are justified but don't participate in is enormous.
(And by "mandatory for everyone that believes that" I meant that logic would mandate it, which is the same as it being the logical conclusion.)
But even with your new version, just talking about it being justified, well that's not necessarily the logical conclusion. One reason is that their participation is at a different level, so the justification might not extend to them.
And if you go by the motive in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24738218 then identifying the police is being done for a very direct purpose to level the playing field on the ground. Someone might reasonably feel that this reason doesn't apply to Apple employees, even while saying that Apple employees have blood on their hands.
It is true that some person might have the nuanced sentiments and tactical analysis you hypothesize, but the actual person who I was responding to didn’t seem to be expressing such a complex view in their comment, and my original reply still stands as a reasonable challenge to the implications were of what they wrote, given the sentiment with which they expressed it.
I, too, can cheer on HK, whatever that means...
Anyway, if I understand correctly your position is that if people here believe that Apple's action is wrong, then they must believe that protestors doxxing Belarusian law enforcement is justified. Therefore people here should also believe that doxxing Apple employees is justified.
My response is that any question of "relative badness" changes drastically in the immediate presence of real physical violence. If Belarusian law enforcement is out on the streets cracking demonstrators' skulls, it's more plausible that doxxing is a lesser evil (though of course, I have no idea how credible this doxxing is) -- direct physical violence just makes every response more acceptable.
Apple's response may have the downstream effect of increasing physical violence, but only through a more diffuse chain of events, so it's possible to think that Apple's action is bad but, unlike direct physical violence, not bad enough to warrant doxxing its employees (which, anyway, doesn't seem anywhere near as effective as doxxing Belarusian law enforcement -- how many Apple employees have the power to affect this policy?).
Two points I question:
You assume that doxxing Belarusian law enforcement is effective.
You also imply that Belarusian law enforcement have the power to affect Belarusian policy.
These seem like very much unjustified assertions.
You also seem to ignore the possibility that doxing Apple employees could affect Apple’s policy which is what people want when they criticize Apple.
I am not arguing for doxxing. I’m against it.
However if one believes it would be effective at changing Belarusian policy, it raises the question as to why it would not be effective in changing Apple’s policy?
There is also the point made by the parent that Apple’s people have “blood on their hands”, and are “enablers of violence”.
From your statement about the relative badness, I presume you don’t agree with the parent comment about this.
So it doesn’t seem like your view is representative of the one I was replying to.
I stand by my original comment.
If someone thinks Apple’s employees have “blood on their hands”, then it is logical to assume that by the same reasoning they support doxxing of police, they would support doxxing of Apple employees because they equate what Apple employees are doing with violence. That’s what it means to say that someone has blood on their hands.
The fact that you don’t actually think that what Apple is doing is so bad, changes nothing about the original comment. I was replying to a comment that was far less moderate than the opinion you have just expressed.
You just don’t share the views of the person I was replying to.
> does Apple really want to go on public record as an enabler of this?
They just did. They are. And I shall treat them as such.
If Apple is going to enforce moral views on countries and users, I want the board that chooses these views to be elected. Because as soon as you make such a legitimate demand, a thousand others will follow in terms of acceptance or not of hate speech, dissemination of propaganda, harassment, and the various definitions of terrorism.
A way to prevent Apple from conducting immoral actions in some countries would be to accepte universal jurisdiction in some places, so that crimes in country A by entity X can be judged in country B. Unfortunately this has been a thing constantly opposed by USA.
I don't think so. IT is 5% of Belarusian GDP.
It ended up as the main way Belarussian protesters organize themselves. TG is a huge target for their government and I would not be surprised if Apple is being pressured by them.
As long as they operate an app store, they will be a target. Just might not be the only target.
That's kinda the point that having a single controlling entity makes the ecosystem vulnerable to this kind of pressure.
I wish it weren’t so.
Have you thought about what that would mean in practice? Given that the APK could be hosted on multiple (TLS-enabled) foreign sites, a government would need a team of people to be constantly monitoring the web for sites containing the APK, who would then send orders to domestic ISPs demanding that they prevent their customers from accessing those foreign sites.
I believe it is also possible to share apps via Bluetooth.
You mean like the MAFIAA[0] has been doing for decades?
[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/MAFIAA
https://www.mobiles24.co/downloads/s/96965-m1769-speak_softl...
My point was that any similar attempt would likely be just as unsuccessful.
You can even check if it matches up if you meet in person or if you communicated using another medium.
But a Facebook employee would have to join the group and they wouldn't have access to older messages. It's not like with Telegram, where all the content, including old messages, is stored in plain text on the server.
The App Store is theirs and they will kick you out if they don't like you. Isn't that good enough?
Are you sure? I remember people backing Apple when they were protecting users phones from FBI hacking.
The reality was their phone did get "hacked" and Apple participated in PRISM.
But Belarus?
There has to be limits on freedom, you can't just be allowed to post bomb making plans on the internet or yelling fire in a crowded theatre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
> Holmes, writing for a unanimous Court, ruled that it was a violation of the Espionage Act of 1917 (amended by the Sedition Act of 1918), to distribute flyers opposing the draft during World War I. Holmes argued this abridgment of free speech was permissible because it presented a "clear and present danger" to the government's recruitment efforts for the war. Holmes wrote:
>> The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. [...] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.
I agree with you, but I hope you're not making a false-equivalence between Trump and Obama, or that the Obama administration's actions against free-speech had the same motivations - and lack of conscience - as the Trump administration's.
It would be much fairer to compare Bush Jr to Trump - it was under Bush Jr we got "free speech zones", for example.
> Obama's war on whistleblowers leaves administration insiders unscathed
> Since Barack Obama entered the White House in 2009, his government has waged a war against whistleblowers and official leakers. On his watch, there have been eight prosecutions under the 1917 Espionage Act – more than double those under all previous presidents combined.
> And yet other apparent leaks have gone entirely unpunished or have been treated, as in the case of General David Petraeus, as misdemeanors. As Abbe Lowell, lawyer for one of the Espionage Act eight, Stephen Kim, has argued in a letter to the Department of Justice, low-level officials who lack the political connections to fight back have had the book thrown at them, while high-level figures have been allowed to leak with “virtual impunity”.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/16/whistleblowe...
one is very different from the other. I agree yelling fire in a crowded place can't be allowed - causes people to panic, because it's not possible to 'unhear' a sound.
But posting bomb-making information (or really, any information) should be allowed. This information is voluntarily consumed, so it has no danger of causing harm without a person acting on said information (in which case, it's not the information but the person acting on it that is the problem). This applies to _any_ information, not just bomb making information.
Like the information the crowded theater is on fire?
I mean I agree, information should be free, but that's a bad way to phrase the argument.
Check Holme's quote. It's not "yelling fire in a crowded theatre." It's "Falsely yelling fire..."
Do you see the difference?
In fact, The Schenk[0] case was partially overturned by Brandenberg[1], where that example was superseded by "incitement to imminent lawless action," as it's more specific.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio
So what? Freedom of speech isn't meant to be just free speech as long as it's approved by some government.
>There has to be limits on freedom, you can't just be allowed to post bomb making plans on the internet or yelling fire in a crowded theatre
One of those things is not like the other.
From an ethical standpoint, the only limits on freedom should be those that infringe on the rights of others.
As in, "Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins."
Exactly! If they want to start policing all content generated through apps that can be installed on iOS... they'll start getting millions of takedown requests from governments around the world.
Very weird decision strategically, and ofc very questionable morally.
I imagine that it's through the terms of the contract signed by Telegram to be allowed into the App Store.
That Apple is flexing its market share (and walled garden) to enforce those terms on Telegram isn't even unusual.
But that doesn't make it ethical or right.
And another very interesting question is: who complained to Apple? Obviously it is not Apple itself monitored these channels.
Here is the link to one group that uses ML to de-anonymize people: https://youtu.be/FAJIrnphTFg
Apple has handed over the entire operation of iCloud in China to a regime owned company, including all user data and keys (they did warn users that they were going to do that though).
At the same time they do not permit side-loading, thereby handing complete control over what users are allowed to install on their devices to authoritarian regimes.
This is not simply "complying with local laws" as they like to present it.
Woah. I don’t know how I missed this news for so long.
https://www.androidcentral.com/apple-may-have-ditched-encryp...
One could argue that Apple should have just exited the Chinese market instead of letting the local government spy on their citizens. Google has taken that position.
It’s a similar situation for Microsoft Teams and Skype.
If Facebook does the same, they will be available in China too. Google tried to do it with their Project Dragonfly, but bad publicity made them stop.
Is there a law that requires them to offer iCloud at all if they want to sell their hardware there?
Is there a law that requires them to ban side-loading?
It seems to me that Apple is always doing a bit more than they are required to do under the law. They clearly want to stay in the good graces of those regimes, especially in China.
But I do agree that the problem in general is structural and not specific to Apple. I think there should be something akin to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to limit what those corporations can do in other countries. There has to be a limit to their aiding and abetting human rights violations.
It's very important to remember that a big part of Belarusian protesters work in IT and even in Apple
There are multiple of different negative actions that can be taken against a company, beyond just customers refusing to buy the product.
These potential actions have the ability to cause Apple, and their employees, lots of harm.
For example, in America, one negative action that many people are taking against Apple is lawsuits (Apple has lots some lawsuits, in the past, and lost a bunch of money over it).
But, there could be many other ways to harm Apple, beyond those examples. EX negative publicity, people or companies refusing to work with Apple, and many other things.
Apple customers do not care. There is a small minority of people who care (like people on this site) but I bet even they will continue to buy Apple products.
We are talking about a mind bogglingly rich company with arrogance to match. Even if this gets them bad PR, it will be forgotten in a few minutes.
No reason for me to buy any new Apple products and after this news, I won’t.
Apple was banking on privacy marketing as a competitive edge. I think that was a good strategy. Since they appear to be worse at executing on that strategy than I thought they would be, they are losing that segment of the market.
I mean huge. Outdoor posters and slogans. TV shows.
I mean, this is truly Orwellian stuff, but in real world. Old uncharismatic dictator recruits huge soulless machine of most powerful corporation in the world to rule small poor country. I know this is not entirely true, but people will love this.
Wonderful!
On the other hand... that AI/ML looks like it has immense potential for wrongful identification.
"AI hallucinating" the wrong person's face into the scene using totally convincing feature interpolation.
In a high stakes scene where people feel the need to fight back, it's not hard to imagine such false positives ruining an innocent person's life.
Edit: If the other comment about people being killed as a result of identification videos is true, "ruining" only scratches the surface. Getting people killed due to an algorithm false positive would be a terrible thing to facilitate. We are talking about an algorithm where the "recognise face" part is known to make errors as well as subject to many kinds of bias (and that's even without a mask); and the "project the face into the video part" is optimised for making the most convincing deep fakes. Especially in the most high stakes scenes, somebody will inevitably convince themselves or others that the interpolated face is really the person who was there behind that mask. Heck, even experts misjudge pattern-matching evidence: https://www.cebm.ox.ac.uk/news/views/the-prosecutors-fallacy "The Prosecutor’s Fallacy is most often associated with miscarriages of justice."
In referring to identified people being killed I contemplated a worst case scenario, following up on comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737255 "in Hong Kong similar channels were used to kill police" and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737546 "possibly leading to innocent people being lynched or killed by the mob because almost no one will verify whether that someone was really to blame".
However, a bit of Googling later and I haven't found any confirmation that any police in Hong Kong were killed either. Perhaps the HN commenter was a bit overzealous to say so. Only death threats to them... and their children (which is pretty bad in its way).
Meanwhile, the same Googling revealed a lot about Belarus: Shooting protestors with live ammo, horrendous abuse, medical abuse, torture, and some death; it sounds pretty bad there. I can see why doxxing them is compelling and perhaps moral.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/09/15/belarus-systematic-beati...
Some police resigning in disgust too. That's good to hear.
The possibility of innocents getting harmed due to false identification remains though. Those AI face recognition and deep fake reconstruction techniques really are prone to errors that look convincing. I hope the committed doxxers have high standards of review and understanding, and are able to correct mistakes. I've read enough stories about innocents being attacked and sometimes killed in the past due to an angry vigilante group's lack of care that I think it's a genuine concern if AI-assisted doxxing ever escalates to violence.
I found this article about Hong Kong interesting for how doxxing and counter-doxxing are evolving: https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Hong-Kong-protesters-are-nam...
> "There is power in being able to name those who have wronged you. Doxxing may not be good practice -- the pro-democracy camp has the moral high ground right now -- but few condemn it while the police operate with impunity. Right now, the police doxxing channel on Telegram has more than 242,000 subscribers. As a comparison, the movement's fact-check channel has 60,000."
> "Unsurprisingly, the police have found ways to hide their identities. Since late June, their helmets have had one-way-mirror privacy film adhered to what were see-through visors. Almost none wear their warrant cards or produce them when requested, even under circumstances where force regulations compel them to."
That is some biggest BS right there. Luckily that comment was flagged.
>Only death threats to them...
Alleged.
>and their children (which is pretty bad in its way)
There were never any, alleged or not death threat to their Children. But there were definately peer pressure and bullying. ( Which is pretty bad as it causes mental health issues )
At least with most androids you can unlock the bootloader and install something like linageos and remove google services to stop their ability to spy on you.
https://signal.org
Not for me, I use a Linux phone (Sailfish OS) with no Google. Not for real activists (criminals in the eyes es of oppressive governments like Chaina, Belarus, Russia, Iran, Turkey, ...) who will always find their way. But for 98% of any population.
[1] https://www.xda-developers.com/safetynet-hardware-attestatio...
Seems funny: proprietary OS plus the company cooperate with Russian government.
But not in a sense that Google or Apple would directly decide what I cannot see.
Indirectly they already do, because a lot of public and commercial services, banking, public transport tickets, corona tracking are available only via those. But that's because the general public does not understand the threats of being dependent on the duopoly.
The difference is that governments can block websites without Apple approval. But governments can't block app content without blocking the entire AppStore, so they have to reach Apple.
Servers/databases have IP addresses that can be blocked just as easy to stop and App.
Russia for example is blocking all ESNI traffic... You either downgrade or get blocked. Which makes the big services shutdown of domain fronting so inexcusable, just kowtowing to China and every other regime.
> Previously, when removing posts at Apple’s request, Telegram replaced those posts with a notice that cited the exact rule limiting such content for iOS users. However, Apple reached out to us a while ago and said our app is not allowed to show users such notices because they were “irrelevant”.
Fucking hell, Apple.
----
cough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four#Ministry_...
It might just be about doxxing, but the PR problem remains, of course.
This very much reminds me how Google disappeared websites of Russian opposition (weeks after signing some memorandum with kremlin,) and then told "maybe they need to improve their search engine friendliness?"
I don't know whether that's a common thing, and I expect many companies wouldn't go the Telegram route and publish the demands because they don't want to put stress on their relationship with Apple.
Discord apparently has channels that are used for similar activities, but I don't know whether Apple has asked Discord to hide those channels from the app, or whether anyone complained to Apple in the first place.
So, "even" by the word of US law, Apple has no permission to engage with Belarus government.
I doubt there are any laws that would forbid Apple from taking or acting on a report of content policy violations.
This is the kind of behavior that only comes from a company that knows they can get away with murder, and when that happens, it's time to tighten the screw a bit before things get waaay out of hand.
This is worthy of the Ministry of Truth
To wit: "Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology [...]"
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I
(Talk about a "walled garden" ...)
Having said this, you can still use Telegram Web on Safari to bypass these restrictions.
Second, them being irrelevant is certainly not a good reason to forbid those notices.
Third, that they are forbidden makes them all the more relevant.
Visible but disabled items can be important for discoverability.
Knowing when and where to apply which ux rules is probably more important than knowing all the rules.
FTR: I'm happy to work with what I think are good ux-ers so they certainly do exist.
Edit: Reading the article again, there is actually a very simple fix to view these posts: Go over to your friend with an android and access them to there, and then remember to buy android in the future to avoid censorship like this. This is surely the main reason Apple doesn't let them show this note.
Showing where user generated content has been censored and the rational as to why is definitely a feature I would want to have regardless of how inconvenient it might be - especially in the context of political discussions.
They've kicked us out of open computing by locking down the only computer a lot of folks own (iPhone). And now look what kind of shit they can pull because they own the entire stack! This shouldn't be possible!
We really have to push against this and hope the DOJ forces all phone providers to allow "side-loading" (what a bizarre term!)
The iPhone is a computer, not some gaming console. It has to be free for freedom. You should be able to install straight off the web.
And before you downvote me, please look again how much Apple gives a damn about democracy in the world. And look what it's doing because of its power. Double plus ungood.
It's an American device. It should act like it!
I don't think what the USA is doing is something that should be followed. See anything privacy endangering in the US.
That's a really random nitpick though and I get what you meant.
Source: The people he engages with as he attempts to increase Apple's market cap.
https://vid.alarabiya.net/images/2018/04/07/6f86bd65-aefa-4a...
But I think with the current high bar for anti-trust, it can be argued that Apple is "hurting consumers" through the lock-down of their platform.
It's fine that Apple should offer a safe, curated experience of using their devices through the App Store. I'm even fine with the App Store having some OS-level integrations which would not be available to 3rd parties. But the App Store should have to compete on its own merits for how it delivers value to the customer - it should not be the only option by fiat. Maybe at the beginning, but not when smartphones are the dominant computing platform and the main way people use software on a daily basis.
The 30% cut which Apple requires is simply not justified for how much value Apple offers to businesses which drive revenue through the App Store. Again, maybe at the beginning, but the App Store no longer offers any meaningful benefit in terms of discoverability. Losing almost 1/3 of revenue out of the gate can make the difference between viability and not for a lot of companies at the margins, meaning this policy costs the user access to all those products which might be able to exist were it not for the "apple tax".
Even under the current legal framework, I just don't see how it's justified.
In general, prices don't need a legal justification. That's a big part of free enterprise.
> This is exactly the type of thing it's designed to protect us from.
What makes you so optimistic? In practice, complicated laws with lots of reach usually work in favour of the party that can afford more and better lawyers. (Or, sometimes, the party that is winning the PR battle for the hearts and minds of public opinion.)
Well it would need a legal justification if the alternative is that Apple would be penalized under anti-trust regulation for using its market share to hurt consumers for its own benefit. Even "free enterprise" operates within a legal framework.
> In practice, complicated laws with lots of reach usually work in favour of the party that can afford more and better lawyers.
I mean this is an incredibly defeatist and cynical view. Don't get me wrong, I'm not overly optimistic that things will change based on the way laws have been applied in the last few decades, but the fact that people see laws as primarily a tool for the powerful - and don't even have an expectation for legal enforcement to operate on behalf of the consumer - seems to me to be a large part of the reason the US is looking more and more like a failed state.
I have higher hopes for simple laws. And also for efforts to lower barriers to entry.
See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_deregulation and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedoms_of_the_air for a legislative efforts that did much good.
Some interesting thoughts on rail freight transport at https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/SurfaceFreightTransporta... If all you did was follow casual online discussions about the state of American rail transport, you'd think it's in shambles. What's interesting is that the deregulated freight part of the industry is actually doing great. It's the transportation of people part that's not so hot.
I have no ready answer for Apple's walled garden. But as I stated earlier, I'm afraid heavy handed interference might do more harm than good, since Apple has so much money to through at lobbyists and lawyers.
For what it's worth, the default historical case people always cite in favour of trust busting, Standard Oil, actually shows the opposite. See eg https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-standard-oil-was-a-pr...
> It's an American device. It should act like it!
I’m guessing you’re speaking about the “freedom” meme but there’s nothing uniquely American about freedom. If anything, capitalism tends to trump “freedom” and any pressures to equal the balance (like government oversight) almost always gets heavily condemned. So from that regard, iPhones (and Apple in general) are very much American entities. Not that I have anything against iPhones (I have one myself) but this is “just business”, as they say.
Still, free-as-in-freedom iPhones? Hell no! I give them money because they are not free-as-in-freedom, but provide a walled garden and defend it for me. I don't think I could do this myself; I know lots and lots of people absolutely certainly couldn't in the same way that I couldn't perform open-heart surgery. On iOS right now it's really, really hard to inadvertently give one's data, money or identity to any random app, and even for people who are not in the cohort that somehow always accumulates browser toolbars, the security measures by device/OS and browser vendors are the only thing that keeps them safe. This is an absolutely huge thing. If they break that, it'll wipe out their mobile products.
I do wholeheartedly agree that they lock down too much and too hard. I get that it shouldn't be easy to side-load software, but making it utterly impossible is a bit too advanced-user-hostile. And this particular action of theirs is wayyy over any line one could draw, and I absolutely think their brand should suffer big time for this.
But taking things to the other extreme – free as in freedom – I really don't see how that could end well. Give the big app vendors easy, convenient ways to bypass all restrictions and they'll make use of it, if only to make development cheaper, and then the small vendors and eventually the shady vendors will follow suit, and we're essentially back at the Windows 95 security model with some permission nag screens that no one really cares about anyway, and then everyone gets scammed and flocks to whatever vendor still has a properly secured walled garden. If there is a way to open things up completely while keeping the platform safe and usable for absolute laypeople, I haven't read or heard of it. Right now, I vastly prefer a locked-down but completely usable platform to some abstract notion of freedom.
Requiring permissions from users to access data is good, and an actually well curated app store is just as useful.
That doesn't mean that it shouldn't be possible to install through different avenues as well (still requiring the users permission).
Yes you would get a lot of shitty software if you started installing everything you stumble upon, but the apple store quality would probably increased significantly, because they could deny significantly more apps, as they'd have an alternative approach to get to users that really want it
I think you misunderstood me there. Of course permission systems are going to stay, who in their right mind would give up this crucial innovation?
But free-as-in-freedom implies that I, the owner and user, can do whatever I want, including triggering all sorts of footguns – if I get tricked into installing CriminalBankrobberApp and giving it all sorts of permissions because I believe it legitimately needs those and won't abuse them, it's game over. A non-free iOS can simply make this impossible or so inconvenient that I'll never bother – an app that actively attacks banking apps on my device wouldn't even get on the App Store I guess – but I don't think a free-as-in-freedom iOS could possibly keep that sort of tight control, not with a 30%-of-revenue economic incentive for everyone else to normalize arbitrary distribution channels.
> That doesn't mean that it shouldn't be possible to install through different avenues as well (still requiring the users permission).
How does the user know what avenues are safe and what aren't? Isn't this just a rehash of downloading software from arbitrary websites, just with lots of app stores instead?
> but the apple store quality would probably increased significantly, because they could deny significantly more apps
And lots and lots of others, big names too, would decide to forgo the App Store entirely (even assuming some loss of visibility, those are some really easily-earned (30-x)% in revenue!), so you'd end up with an Epic store and a Steam store and a EA store and a Facebook store and an app store for each media outlet (NYT Recipes now at the NYT App Store!) and possibly for each bank and national app stores and regional app stores and a CoolBeansAppStore with neat UI tweaks and skins and a SuperDuperAppStore with all sorts of small indy apps and a SuperSecureAppStore that distributes copies of other apps with added tracking and tons of Indydev Inc App Stores, and FreeXXXAppStore that has some well-known copyright-agnostic porn apps and absolutely no rules at all and all kinds of malware and scams... pretty much like the internet back then, but with much leakier sandboxes, because there are lots of things apps must be able to do if allowed to that websites pretty much never need(ed?) to do ...
And good luck with crafting a permission system that makes all of this really transparent and clear and actionable and still isn't a huge hassle that everyone just clicks through and works even for disinterested, impatient laypeople ... That's reducing the depth of security to pretty much this single thing that people hate in its current form already.
I mean, really, I am sometimes struggling to tell what's safe and what isn't on the web, and I should tell, I'm building some of the stuff that's on the web – how is someone who's busy being a lawyer, or is elderly and kinda struggling with the latest generation of gadgets, or a stressed-out parent with zero time for ITSec studies on top, or 15 years old, etc. pp. supposed to make that call that in a similarly confusing environment, on similarly bad data – possibly worse data.
The only reason this works on Android so far is probably that the UX of using other stores or sideloading is so bad; some have tried to establish their own, but churn is just too brutal for next to everyone.
I'm not saying free and open mobile platforms cannot be done, or that there's absolutely no way to open up iOS without wreaking havoc, and I'm definitely not saying that wouldn't be really worthwhile, because I think it would be absolutely fantastic to have an open and free mobile platform – but I believe that's going to be much, much more difficult than just throwing out all the restrictions and calling it a day, because we've been there in the early internet and security-wise it was an absolut...
Do you think that people are incapable of using personal computers then? Just the regular old PC.
This argument falls flat on its face, because it is blatantly obvious, that, for some reason, people are capable of using PCs, and don't explode from the confusion of doing so.
Every single argument that you are making, could apply to the PC. But people still do alright using PCs. Phones should not be any different.
> good luck with crafting a permission system
How are they doing that on the PC? PCs work fine.
> how is someone who's busy being a lawyer
Thats an interesting question. Which has an answer. How does a lawyer use a PC, right now? So thats how they'll do it.
> pretty much like the internet back then
Why do we have to talk about the internet from a long time ago? Just talk about the current internet. Which people use. On the PC. Right now.
> t there's absolutely no way to open up iOS without wreaking havoc
Just do it the same way that PCs currently work. Right now. Because PCs work, right now, and society is not falling apart.
> because we've been there in the early internet and security-wise it was an absolute nightmare.
We don't need to talk about the early internet. Just make the iPhone the same as modern day PCs. Which people are already capable of using just fine.
> Just make the iPhone the same as modern day PCs. Which people are already capable of using just fine.
Ransomware attacks are absolutely rampant, though you'll never hear about the vast majority of incidents of course, and pretty much all of those start with someone running thingycorp_salaries_full_list.xlsx.exe, enabling macros for a fishy .docx, opening an infected .pdf, downloading and running infected installers, plugging in random USB keys, and so on. Then there's lots and lots of phishing attacks going on, and that's with most companies already clamping down on attack vectors really hard — if people used private PCs as much as they use their private smartphones, for sensitive things like banking, without an IT department to shield them from the worst of it, I guess consumer Windows would get a lot more locked down really quickly.
> people are capable of using PCs, and don't explode from the confusion of doing so.
People may not explode from confusion, but if they had a better idea of how complex IT security has become, they might at least feel somewhat uneasy. Even people in IT roles screw up and get pwned, or build systems in a way that lets them get pwned easily, all the time really. Bad actors have become pretty sophisticated over the last decade as well, and Covid-19 is only making things worse as lots of unsavory individuals with money and resources find that real-world crime doesn't quite deliver the returns it used to, and everyone and their mother now conduct large parts of their lives through their smartphone and move lots of money through those devices. Personally, I've definitely noticed both attack volume and sophistication going up few notches already.
> How does a lawyer use a PC, right now? So thats how they'll do it.
The vast majoriy will depend on IT people to keep them safe, and their devices will be quite thoroughly locked down, and their email pretty aggressively filtered. Incidents definitely still happen, though. Same with medicine.
I really don't think it's a stretch to imagine people getting socially engineered en masse to install shady apps in a world where each app store and each app requires an entirely new security assessment on little to no data by end users, or apps getting compromised and not get pulled, or whatever. It's possible to solve that quandary, but it's not going to be as easy as just throwing out all restrictions without devising some other mechanism to take their place in protecting users.
> Because PCs work, right now, and society is not falling apart.
Society isn't falling apart from lots and lots of issues I'd consider quite severe. I'd rather not let anything get to that point if it can be prevented.
They use PCs right now. As of this moment. They are using PCs, just fine.
It is the existing status quo that everyone is using PCs already.
> I'd rather not let anything get to that point if it can be prevented.
There is not "getting" anywhere. We are already here. We are already living in a world where lots and lots of people use the PC.
Thats what you don't understand. This is the status quo. There are no changes. People already use PCs, right now.
> as easy as just throwing out all restrictions
There is no throwing anything out, because people already are using PCs, right now. Lots of people use them.
You keep phasing this as a "change" when it is not. People using PCs is the status quo.
How? And why? Most people won't care. I think disallowing Telegram to operate freely will wipe out Apple's iOS products in countries where real freedom of speech matters.
They're not. They're doing this for maximizing the companie's profit. Which they absolutely don't need to (it's not like if apple was struggling financially, or trying to find an subtle business model that works).
I thought I'd made a pretty strong case to not trust Apple's PR in my first paragraph. To clarify, no, I don't think that is the case, and people should be very miserly with their trust towards orgs like Apple in general.
The thing is, no matter their rationale, their product decisions have far-reaching real-world consequences. This particular decision has obvious real-world consequences to protesters in Belarus, and it is a disgusting decision, and definitely makes for a strong argument against leaving them with that much control.
On the other hand, however, their security stance works really, really well, as far as I can tell, and it keeps their users quite safe from lots of harm, and that's something I keep giving them money for, because I value security highly.
Forcing their walled garden free-as-in-freedom wide open will amend #1, but what about #2? Literally hundreds of millions of iPhone users around the world depend on the ecosystem being safe – my mom has an iPhone mostly because they keep their walled garden clean, so she doesn't have to get a CS degree to do that herself, and also because it's a very nice product that she enjoys a lot, but I'd advise her very strongly to get something else if Apple's security was shoddy. As I've argued, I have very strong doubts that this could be done without breaking much of what makes iPhones so secure.
I'm definitely not arguing that this makes Apple's ability and growing propensity to abuse their power a great thing – I think it's absolutely creepy in a deeply dystopian way – but right now the only way to build such a safe environment that I know of relies on strict centralized control, and having such an environment is one of the prime things that make this technology manageable for everyone and their mother.
If someone comes up with a free-as-in-freedom smartphone that's secure, easy to use, has the necessary polish and all the important apps and isn't laser-focused on people who live inside emacs, I'll be happy to part with a bunch of money for that.
Just go buy a phone running the market leading OS, Android.
It is not possible for other parties to break this market open. Other parties are relegated to niche markets without any power. Using a smartphone from a niche party will give you a very reduced experience and is for most people not a viable option.
Getting government contracts and keeping a market open is vastly more important.
Plus the whole privacy thing is just marketing, they have worked with the US government with PRISM. They will keep running the advertisements regardless if they sell your data to a government or corporation.
> Apple released a statement saying they didn't want us to take down the 3 channels run by the Belarusian protestors, but just specific posts "disclosing personal information."
> This sly wording ignores the fact that channels like @karatelibelarusi and @belarusassholes consist entirely of personal information of violent oppressors and those who helped rig the elections – because that is why those channels exist.
So wait, the issue foremost is the doxing. Doxing is against the clearly stated rules of their platform, so they don’t want you doxing people in apps on their platform. Which is okay with me, because the mob (The “majority”, note Durov even cites a very high consensus percentage for us to feel good about it) deciding who is ok to dox and who is not ok to dox is always dangerous for humanity.
Now, Belarus is without doubt (in my view) run by “violent oppressors”, and there is no rule of law by which protestors can seek redress, but the notion that it’s okay to dox people because you took a poll somewhere that included some percentage of Belarusians is downright naive and scary, and doesn’t smell much better at all than the government itself, however true it may be.
That Apple steps in and micromanages at this level is the disturbing element in my opinion, because certainly they’re only doing it because they were notified by Belarusian authorities, but to me the greater issue is the mob justice, against which there is also no appeal or redress, which to me is very scary, even if in this instance it is correct.
If tiktok refused to take down doxing of officials in US, it would get banned.
Exposing identities of individuals is problematic. There are examples of bad things happening when these kind of messages spread through messaging apps.
This stuff Apple does is what happens when someone gets on a power trip. What they gonna do next, attemp to censor forums available in Safari?
It doesn't really matter where exactly Apple would draw a line, from absurd extremes like "you are free to talk about Roman officials infamous for sentencing innocents to the cross, but please do so without mentioning PII" when someone types in Pontius Pilate, to pragmatic, maybe even lazy "don't use the channel for illegal communications (but we can't really police them)". But they should at least try to be somewhat consistent about it and, even more importantly (but much easier!), by no means require secrecy. A secrecy requirement is just lame and reeks of foul play, horribly.
That's a very dangerous path Apple is taking, caving to the demands of dictatorial and corrupt governments.
I'm hoping that this move will put Apple in hot waters, at least it should come under scrutiny.
But I'm not naive enough to believe that this sort of action will not become more prevalent.
It's unclear why they would demand this, given that Google seems to not need to make similar demands.
This also seems like it encourages repressive governments to cajole Apple to pressure apps to remove user content in the future.
Telegram not complying means it gets banned from the App Store.
As we keep on seeing time, and time, and time again.
If you're doing something that hurts their bottom line, don't be surprised when they take measures to curtail those actions. They're a company.
If you don't want to support their actions, don't buy their products. It's that simple. Maybe the Belarussians concerned by this can now actually get rid of their Apple products and buy something else.
Does the desktop app support groups? If it does, then get the desktop app.
First, yes, buying iOS is a partial lock-in. But so is almost every other consumer choice: only if you stick to FOSS and open document formats, and are technical enough to convert your own documents once your apps are no longer supported, you may consider yourself free. Otherwise, lock-in is a given.
The lock-in isn't full, either: pictures, email, videos, bookmarks, etc. can be exported to other devices.
Second: if you buy Apple, you don't give up the right to protest them. Since the company depends on its customers, pressure can be effective. This is in contrast with free products, where customer pressure can turn counter-productive.
Why should one product be the answer to all situations? You know that apple is a walled garden. You know that walled gardens have their limits of usage. How does that mean that walls must be destroyed? It is non-sequitur.
Saying that apple interferes with your freedom is like saying a kitchen glove interferes with your right to defend against a knife. It is just an instrument with a narrow usage area, which may or may not fit your current needs.
Let's suppose that I don't support apple's political stances on many things for various reasons, but I will buy new iphone once it is out, because I see value in it. Not surprised if it fails at uprisings, not a problem, that simple. Where the flaw is?
Add this incident to the rapidly growing body of evidence proving every privacy advocate's arguments against centralized systems. Some time soon I hope the tech community finds its way back to federated/p2p modes of distribution and communication so we can make this kind of censorship -- and the companies which enforce it -- a thing of the past.