Reminiscent to me of Call of Duty Warzone; it has loadouts which you can give custom names (that only you see!) which are protected with a profanity filter. Comically, some of the literal names of the guns are banned as being profane, like "MP5".
My CoD group of friends still occasionally calls the assault rifle "analsault". Stupid, huh? Not as stupid as an earlier version of CoD (Black Ops 1, IIRC) that wouldn't let you name a load out "assault $WHATEVER", 'cuz you know, "ass". But "anal" is so much better so that was allowed.
They fixed it in later versions, but I still have a "penetration" class because I'm immature that way.
Isn't it just to double-plus-ensure that no one "accidentally" uses a name that ActivisionBlizzard did not license from the appropriate gun manufacturer?
I.e. It has little to do with profanity but a lot to prevent someone from making screnshot of a loadout with a gun that looks like MP5, is named by them as "MP5 whatever" and behaves like an MP5 in some type of legal action?
I cannot imagine horror of the precedent it would be set if H&K successfully sued AB over copyright infringement for names that are visible only to the player who entered them. Those names are not shown publicly.
Whilst I agree - and fervently hope we won't have to live in such a world - I thought the same about the API copyrightability and that one is not exactly going the reasonable way at the moment.
H&K has an US trademark consisting of just "MP5" in relation to a ton of things (though not video games!) so they could at least try make a case out of it not being purely nominative use and tie AB in court, if they wished. It would be PR suicide, but still, not the most stupid thing they have done.
It feels like it would be pretty bizarre if a court somewhere actually ruled in favor of a gun manufacturer for lost revenue in a trademark suit because somebody was genuinely confused between a weapon in a video game and ordering an actual physical weapon, that can only be legally ordered by licensed firearm dealers and government organizations.
Unclear. They do absolutely refer to their gun as, say, the "MP5" in-game.
Though, interestingly, in Modern Warfare (2019), many guns have two names; for example, the MP5 is also called SMG Charlie (as in, NATO phonetic alphabet for C). I kind of got the impression that it was laying groundwork for a long-term goal of removing the actual names of the guns; possibly due to licensing fees, or maybe to divorce the ugly reality of killing with video game killing, I don't know.
You're not being dense. Its inexplicable. The only thing I can come up with is that "5" looks like "S", so maybe its banning "MPS", but even that is nearly meaningless; urbandictionary has some explicit things it stands for, though they're not well-upvoted.
Need for Speed Heat doesn't allow you to put "69" or "420" on your car. But "6 9" and "4 2 0" are fine :D Best filter ever, completely defeated by just spaces
I'm just agog that people are still doing dumb pattern matching for profanity filters. I just assumed that YEARS AGO people realized how dumb it is, but apparently: No.
A great many places do this and automatically refuse content based on arbitrary “bad words” regardless the context.
I remember being denied to post a forum post containing the phrase “tardive dyskinesia”, as it appears that it rejected anything with the string “tard” in it.
I'm not sure as to whom they think to be helping with that, but it's entirely possible that their advertisement revenue will actually suffer, if the string “tard” be found on their pages.
We had to give up our privacy to create a highly sophisticated technology that doesn't even work half of the time. I love the future, it was totally worth it.
Not super relevant or anything but I just can't help but share my favorite profanity filter story, so here you go.
I worked at a place that had a profanity filter in two parts.
The first part was in C, several pages of if (!strcmp(x, a)) return 0;
After all that, it then invokes popen() to ssh to another machine and run a shell script there, which contains several more pages of string comparisons, this time in shell.
Hold on, what? Okay, return false if they aren't equal, then open another process to repeat this method once again in the shell... I can't guess the reason. Would you know if there is any reason this might have been done?
I wouldn't know the real reason for sure, but this seems plausible:
1) They got tired of having to modify C code and wait for the deploy cycle to modify the filter
2) Using, for example, the database would be more work than calling a shell script. On top of that, it might actually be beyond the abilities of the programmer involved.
3) The C code executes on an arbitrary machine. Hence the ssh to a specific machine, so that the shell script would only have to be maintained in one place
I might be wrong but I think it's about censoring the 'hell' in 'shell'. Because some parts of the world consider words like 'hell' and 'damn' to be profane.
I once had a bug that I traced back to a rule (can’t remember in which part of the stack - though I think it was client controlled IIS) that was striping the “select” from the word “selected” in query string params in an attempt to thwart sql injection. From memory it was naive enough that “sselectelect” was converted nicely in the process.
I had similar issues, the software is Mod Security that some hosting companies use and some rules will empty out your POST request field if it contained text like ".... select ...from..." where the 2 keywords were paragraphs apart.
Similar: Yahoo used to (2002) replace any instance of the character sequence 'eval' (and other 'bad' strings) in their emails, in an attempt to prevent Javascript exploits. Needless to say it created a small amount of havoc!
I hadn't heard of this and I'm now flabbergasted. Is it even legal for a service provider to secretly change email contents? It's absolutely outlandish to imagine how someone first thought this could be a good idea, and then found someone capable of executing the plan and apparently agree.
FWIW, general profanity detection is a highly nontrivial problem. It’s true that such subword profanity filters aren’t that great, but slightly more sophisticated ones (eg whole word matching or n-grams) tend to have relatively good precision. You could train a fancy neural network, but the overall return on precision and recall tends to be not that great (compared to the exponential change in speed and cost). The problem almost always crops up in out-of-distribution sentences (such as “bone” at a paleontology conference).
Even humans with full general intelligence and domain knowledge will fail at profanity detection. I think the problem here is not so much that there are false triggers, but that there is no way to deal with the false triggers — no way to appeal to reason or utility.
One man's profanity is not another man's profanity.
Of course, the personality trait of desiring censoring “bad words” seems to highly correlate with a belief in objective morality. — the others are wrong about what they find profane!
A long time ago, I saw a guy unable to post on a corporate blog of his own team. Turned out that his name was flagged by a filter.
What made this particularly egregious is that the name in question: "Hui" - wasn't even a swear word in either his own native language - Chinese - nor in English. But it closely resembles a Russian profanity. Turned out that the filter was "multilingual", and applied rules for all languages to all posts...
Why the hell would it even apply Russian filters to something that isn't written in Cyrillic? And this isn't the best English transliteration of that word either... That's really some dedication.
> they would have to do literal translation based on phonetics.
That seems pretty unlikely to have happened here; I don't know the Russian word in question, but the Chinese "hui" rhymes with English "clay". (It also rhymes with the more sensibly spelled Chinese "wei"; the 'e' is only omitted when the syllable begins with a consonant. Compare "feng shui".) I'd be surprised if that were a possible reading of any Russian that might be transliterated "hui".
A native Russian speaker who is familiar with how Russian is usually transliterated, but unfamiliar with Chinese, would read it very similar to the Russian word in question ("khoo-y").
As to why the filter was applied to Latin characters - I'm not sure, but I'm assuming that's to prevent people from using translit to sneak in profanities. Of course, this ends up being a pointless game of whack-a-mole - there's so many possible ways to spell something like that with Unicode...
Looks like Russians and Americans can find common ground on thinking Chinese last names look like "penis", even if we're making fun of Wang and they're making fun of Hui.
What's the mistake? Look up; хуэй is a much better representation of the pronunciation of 会 than хуй would be. The pinyin spelling "hui" omits the primary vowel of the syllable.
As another native Russian speaker, "i" isn't the most common transliteration for "й", and that's what bothers me here. "Hui" would be a plural, with an "и". Й is usually written as "y" or "j". Except when you're getting an international passport, then there's a good chance your name will end with "ii" because the federal migration service hates you.
It's not the most common transliteration, but it's common enough; and even in Cyrillic, if you see "и" where "й" would normally be expected, you'd usually read it like the latter; e.g. "йод" is sometimes spelled "иод", but everybody will read it the same. Given that the written distinction between и/й dates back to Peter's civil script reform, and that it wasn't even considered a separate letter of the alphabet until the 1918 spelling reform, it's not really surprising.
Hm. I thought Й was being used in the old style (pre-1918) writing as well? At least this[1] translator keeps it in masculine adjectives. Though it doesn't keep the dots on a Ё. I've never seen И substituted for Й, but Ё -> Е is common, especially in names (for example some people write "Артем" but everyone still reads it as if there's a "ё").
It was used before 1918 - it was first standardized in the Civil Script (1710). But it wasn't considered a separate letter until 1918 - so e.g. the standard alphabetic sorting ignored the distinction. For this reason, it wasn't always used consistently, although it was still much more consistent than Ё. And even today, "иод" is still considered valid spelling; indeed, it's the preferred one in scientific context.
This still shows up in some contexts - e.g. Й, like Ё, isn't used in bullet lists; try it in Word - it'll go from И straight to К.
The example where the AFA filtered a news article about Tyson Gay, to replace any instance of his surname to 'homosexual' is an hilarious example of why you need context.
What you're actually saying is: time for government intervention.
There's no planet on which Apple or Google will voluntarily give up the revenue stream produced by their respective app stores.
*If you're going to downvote me, at least provide some evidence that I'm off base. Google and Apple both refuse to allow other app stores and there's absolutely 0 recourse that doesn't involve the government stepping in. F-droid and the rest don't cover anything approaching "all devices".
Why go with anything other than blacklist since people know what it means. It's the peak irony that we're discussing Google banning profanities here and arguing about your puritanical society.
Unfortunately it seems the less religious Americans think it's only the dumb hypocrite Christians acting like that.
We, Silicon Valley liberals, surely don't have anything to do with that culture!
And blacklist doesn't actually mean anything without the context of an archaic idiom; it was a large barrier for me when I was younger, until I eventually learnt what the word means. You can go with “blocklist”, if you'd rather; that's similarly meaningful and sounds similar.
It rolls off the tongue better than blacklist, since a hard consonant in the middle of the word is slightly harder to enunciate than one starting the word.
But, should you instead mean "I don't like it so I'll ridicule it," well, I can't please everybody. Sorry.
Investigate the people that created or are the primary distributors of the childporn because they are trackable on clearnet, and let everyone else make their own choice of not installing or stop being able to access when the servers disappear?
Can you explain why thats not the first thing that came to mind? Why are our realities so different?
Yes. It actually exists and is fairly popular - the web. Unfortunately, Google has squeezed itself into it too and can now block whatever it wants ;( (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25802366)
Yup, that's about how much effort I expected them to put into their app store: absolutely nothing beyond cheap, automated heuristics. Why invest in a decent ecosystem when you're one of the two options in town?
I'm about an inch away from throwing my phone in the river and switching to a GPS-only device for navigating in my car. All the convenience a mobile device offers can't make up for the crap software experience you're forced into—literally ransoming the use of your phone through their company store.
So is this born from plain old moralfaggotry, or is there actually a commercial reason behind this policy?
They say sex sells, so I wonder if there actually is a reason to deny content that is “sexually gratifying”?
I find this to exist in many commercial endeavors and I wonder if there are actually sound financial reasons behind it, or whether it was similar to the strange culture shock tourists in the U.S.A. faced in the 70s, being denied a shared hotel room because they did not have the same surname. Or perhaps that too was actually for commercial reasons rather than being moral guardians?
Does a single soul believe the Google review process is fair and reasonable any more? Only the social media option gets results because it causes them enough PR pain. And there's no sign, at all, of that changing.
Soon as I saw this headline I was like "I bet this is about ASS subtitles". Sad, really. Would have figured the Scunthorpe problem was well enough known that it wouldn't exist in a project of this scale.
It's because of their scale they can afford not to care. So, some app gets kicked out, who cares, they have literally millions more, most of them (like the abovementioned sex game that is all over the ads) actually bringing in the sweet $$$$s. So they can afford to both pretend they are pure guardians of morality and make money, and given their size they don't need to have any customer service, because what you gonna do - go to a different store?
Well luckily this is Google. Which means there are no real human behind the suspension, most likely just an Automated response before some one steps in. ( Or not )
I would be furious if this was coming from Apple. And judging from the current Apple I would not be surprised if they will tell you to not use the "ASS" label in your support format.
Isn't their support service automated too? Isn't making a stink on the internet the only way to deal with issues like this, because it generates bad press for them?
The subtitles are basically adjusted every frame but you don't necessarily have to do it by hand. You can for example generate motion data with Blender or Mocha and import that into Aegisub (the software that is used to create the subtitle files).
Before newer tools automated the process by tracking motion of a target, folks wouldn't have to adjust them frame by frame per se but would instead annotate the subtitle script with keyframe times and positions. The video player would know to interpolate between those annotations.
The ASS format has some basic animation with the \move command (moving subtitles using linear interpolation) and the \t command (changing various properties of a line with the possibility of quadric interpolation). This takes care of some cases, but is often insufficient for complex stuff.
Aegisub however has good automation support, and has (had?) a pretty active scripting community. Scripts can do a lot of stuff and often has simple dialog-box UIs. The base scripting support is in Lua, but a lot of scripts are written in a Lua variant called Moonscript. I've never seen it used anywhere else. And, as was mentioned in a sibling comment, there are scripts for importing motion-tracking files into Aegisub.
The ASS format lacks support for a bunch of stuff that people want to do, or the native support is deficient in some manner, so scripting is very important for Aegisub. For example, a line can be given a color gradient by make a one copy of the line for each shade in the gradient (this can be 100+ times). Each copy is then given a different color according to the gradient, and a \clip command is used on each line to only show a 1-2 pixel wide slice of each line. If all those slices are lined up properly and the lines are displayed simultaneously, it gives the impression of being a single line with a color gradient. Tricks like this can actually cause performance problems in rendering the subtitles!
I think this is an interesting little programming niche, but there isn't much complex typesetting being done these days. Tastes have changed, and due to licensed releases there's less need for fansubbing on all but the most niche titles.
So the translated “fidget” parts are not hardsubbed but actually encoded in a subtitle format and therein animated to move around with the Japanese text?
Quite impressive, notwithstanding the use of bourgeois harem as example material.
Yup. Recently there have been tools that will track selected things for you, but it wasn't too long ago when fansubbers had to manually animate them by annotating keyframes.
I just watched a fansub recently where they replaced some environmental text in the background, and they used the ASS format to render the english text out of focus and seamlessly match the depth-of-field effect used in the show. Some groups really go above and beyond.
Even the old-school analog EIA-608 captioning system can do positional captions. It's all these modern web players (like Youtube's) that have regressed to a single line of text bottom-center.
YouTube actually supports it through a feature called WebVTT [0], though it is rarely used, an example of it is this video [1] where it is used for placement and lighting up text for karaoke.
The actual code for it is looks like this:
00:03:31.485 --> 00:03:31.719 align:start position:0% line:0%
<c.color96D2D3>Hey! nanika ga okoru spe cial </c><c.colorFEFEFE>night</c>
00:03:31.485 --> 00:03:31.719 align:start position:0% line:0%
<c.color96D2D3>Hey! nanika ga okoru spe cial </c><c.colorFEFEFE>night</c>
00:03:31.719 --> 00:03:32.486 align:start position:0% line:0%
<c.color96D2D3>Hey! nanika ga okoru special night</c>
00:03:31.719 --> 00:03:32.486 align:start position:0% line:0%
<c.color96D2D3>Hey! nanika ga okoru special night</c>
Actually most modern systems support image embedding, animations, styling, and positioning with TTML. It’s an official spec, supported by every television, Netflix, Chromecast, etc.
TTML is also supported by pretty much every piece of m pptultimedia equipment out there including chromecast , which is the exact opposite of ASS which is supported by basically nothing.
The fansubbing community is so annoying with its insistence on terrible formats. The community has somehow standardized on 10bit hevc with ASS subtitles. That makes releases so hard to play.
And while there are ways to implement ASS in the browser, those require compiling the one single ASS library that actually works (because it’s an implementation-defined format, ofc) to WASM and running that in the browser. With the expected performance issues.
Now try running that on a Chromecast >_>
The fansubbing community is just so stuck in weird formats which provide no benefit except a virtual moat preventing newcomers.
Sure, but only the english subtitle, and you can’t disable it. For Chromecast, you have to use the burned-in subtitles.
Which is expected, considering the hardware just isn’t powerful enough for ASS subtitles (to get good performance, even on a desktop you’ll want a recent CPU and at least 1-2GB of RAM): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromecast#Model_comparison
I honestly find the idea of the English text inside of the picture as such, blending in perfectly with the scene to be most disorienting.
It suggests that the character itself is writing the English text, or that it magically appears.
If it were simple subtitles, it would be clear that these were translations, and that in the actual story there is only Japanese text.
Notwithstanding the impressive technological nature of it, but that also seems the reason they did so. Methinks it's a case of using cool technology because one can, even though it doesn't produce a more convenient result, however cool it might look.
I cannot agree after watching shows which embedded text well.
Your argument kinda sounds right when you just imagine it... but doesn't hold weight once you actually experience them.
If this text isn't done like this then you have to either omit it entirely, possibly leaving out relevant details, or just put them next to the normal subtitles. The latter doesn't work at all for me, because I can't distinguish which text relates to what quick enough.
It can be overlayed at the correct place, without blending into the picture.
For instance translating the text on a piece of paper by writing the translation above the piece of paper.
How it is written in this case, in charcoal, on the paper, in perspective, seamlessly blending into the paper, makes it seem as if, for whatever reason, the same text was written twice on the paper in English and Japanese.
It's even more unnerving when the text be written and the English pencil charcoal appears out of thin air next to the Japanese charcoal that emerges from a pencil.
The most popular subtitling software has a script/plugin to export video, which can then be used in a motion tracking program, the data from which can be fed back into the subtitling program.
> It's a shame you basically cannot get anything close to the quality of fansubs from any commercial/legal options.
Fansubbers work for the shows they love while the commercial distributors just pick the cheapest option to get the thing done ASAP, don't matter how sh*tty the result is. There is no chance for quality here.
The same happens with Blurays x rips streams: piracy is the best option (no DRM, no unskippable screens, no ads, no regional restrictions).
Hardware decoders have memory limits and can't render SSA subtitles, which were designed by an insane person and require emulation of quirks of the Win32 font APIs plus a custom buggy implementation of 3D text rendering. (As far as I know, there are only three implementations and I wrote one of them.)
But also, Crunchyroll uses the fansub toolset and SSA subtitles.
The quality of fansubbing varies greatly depending on the translator too. For example, Crunchyroll uses ASS format for their own subtitles (things licensed from other studios seems to use a simpler format), and some translators do a really good job very similar to the fansubbers.
Case in point, I remember watching "Is the Order a Rabbit S3" in Crunchyroll, the English subtitles are pretty basic but the Portuguese (Brazillian) subtitles are great, including things like Karaoke in opening and ending.
> Fansubbers work for the shows they love while the commercial distributors just pick the cheapest option to get the thing done ASAP, don't matter how sh*tty the result is. There is no chance for quality here.
I wouldn’t call subtitles that require about a GB of RAM to process and don’t even get 20fps on an i7-6700 "quality". That’s just a bunch of shitty hacks people accept because there’s no alternative.
ASS is a horrible format (three implementations, only a single well-working implementation, performance hungry, etc), and almost all of the benefits of ASS can also be had with e.g. TTML without the issues.
And stuff like rendering the same line hundreds of times to get a gradient effect or blurred background is absolutely wasteful, especially because it’s just a hack to work around the broken ASS limitations.
The few groups that used to do that have stopped making fansubs. Mostly because HorribleSubs took a lot of the market share by just ripping CruncyRoll subs and re-packaging with RAWs.
But now that HS is gone, I'm not sure what's happening to the scene. There is a power vacuum and I'm not sure if anyone took up the space.
Aside from HorribleSubs, these days you can hardly throw a rock without hitting a major streaming service that offers anime. Setting aside whatever free episodes you can get from Crunchyroll et al., Netflix, Amazon, Hulu... the list goes on. And for the majority of people, the services are convenient enough to outweigh whatever video quality advantage that HS or subtitle quality advantage (some) fansub groups offered.
Isn't that basically crunchyroll taking most of the market by doing sub translations in the first place? Kind of like the netflix / spotify effect on piracy.
The show I watched was a recent release, but it went through Netflix jail so I guess that's why it got the high-quality fansub treatment. There weren't any official subtitles for groups like HorribleSubs to yoink day of release which bought time for a high-effort group to do their thing.
There are definitely still anime fansub groups active, although not nearly as many as there used to be.
Mostly they seem to work on shows that haven't been licensed by official simulcast sources, or that are licensed but aren't being released on a timely schedule (ahem Netflix), or projects that for whatever reason they think the official releases haven't done justice to.
> ASS subtitles are particularly popular in anime fansubbing as it allows for advanced typesetting.
Those are just "SSA" subtitles. The difference mattered (ASS was an "Advanced SSA") once but now people just call it "ASS" as a joke. So Google is sort-of right, he could leave it out of the description.
I doubt this guy knows this since it's impossible he implemented SSA on his own due to how complex it is.
(Shameless plug for an abandoned project.) If you want to try out the ASS format for yourself in the comfort of your web browser: https://arnavion.github.io/libjass/demo/
Just wanna make sure I got this right. "ASS", automatic instant suspension with 0 human review.
"King's Throne: Game of Lust.", with advertised gameplay content such as "I, [the King], shall interrogate this female prisoner privately in my bed chambers", is one of the top advertised games on google play.
The world we live in is strange. On one hand, it's trivial to find and consume content full of profanity, violence, sex and other things deemed 'inappropriate' yet on the other hand we live in a world where this old George Carlin classic still applies
Everyone is well within their rights to want to support creators by tolerating some ads, while simultaneously complaining about ads they do not tolerate.
And can we please stop turning every discussion, no matter how trivial, into a discussion about rights? Did I say anything that would suggest that I want to take any rights from someone?
regarding watching ads on channels to support them, I'm using an extension called `YouTube Channel Whitelist for uBlock Origin`, which allow to whitelist specific YT channels but also block advertisers.
Yes. This is the current state of "AI" at Google: a faulty regexp that matches "ASS" in "SSA, ASS, TTML" but not, from the issue description, in "(SSA/ASS)".
As an extensive and long-time user of Google Assistant, it's painfully obvious that a large percentage of "NLP" they're supposedly doing is actually regexp/keyword searching.
It is infuriating that Google's default action for these automated takedowns is to remove the app and ask the developer to upload a new build with a new package name, which means not keeping any of the existing users.
It's happened to two of my clients in the past 6 months based on small infractions in the app metadata, but no issue with the app itself.
In both cases the app was taken down with no advance notice, and eventually reinstated after an appeal and several very stressful days of waiting.
Apple seems to be very selective during the approval process, and is often inconsistent so a minor update can get rejected for something that was approved many times before. I guess different people review and interpret the rules differently so maybe this is unavoidable.
Google (from what I can tell) seems to take a very different approach and relies much more on automated enforcement. The process is on average much lower friction for the developer, but getting previously approved app listings removed at any time without warning is not a good experience.
Edit: I forgot to mention that you can't actually edit the metadata while the app is suspended and re-submit it for review. The only two choices are to appeal and edit the description after the app is reinstated, or create a completely new app listing.
> They were the champions of the open web for a long time.
Because that's what you say when you're the underdog.
Remember Apple's 1984 ad?
Microsoft's "a computer on every desk"?
The tech industry seems to support a rotating cast of monopolists riding atop whatever gate-keeping function emerges, each one holding on as long as it can until replaced by something that ends up looking a lot like the last top dog.
I'm quite confident you can't run a company as big as Google without being evil but it seems useful to ponder why does it happen.
Corpo structure seems to have something to do with it, separate things into categories, then teams get categories and optimize locally without taking bigger picture into account (or even knowing what the picture is). Some regulations, maybe some pressures from some agencies about which they are not allowed to talk about. Etc.
But at some point I have to wonder about the mind of someone decisive in the company when "are we the baddies" question appears. Do they rationalize and think that "well, we need to do this because security botnets blahblah users have no idea what we are dealing with here and it's for their own good even if they don't understand it yada yada", or do they just don't give a shit. Or maybe it's like with me disliking my government - I definitely don't like it but I don't feel like fighting that giant machine at the moment, I can't do anything on my own, it would require cooperation and a plan and I have some stuff to do.
There's a lot of reasons. Building a closed guarden that locks people in feels a lot safer from a competition standpoint than the alternative, if you can make it hard to steal your customers and only a few (always remember that being on and reading HN means you're not much of an average user), it's also just easier than being open, a closed system can make changes much faster than an open one that has to get concensus before adding a new feature for example.
In this specific case and most of the time where Google's complete lack of support shows up it's because having manual review costs money and the process that screws the app developer is easier than having a secondary process that needs more people to decide if the first automated or rote manual scan made a mistake.
All these people rushing in to Silicon Valley with hat-in-hand going from VC to VC talking about how they care so much about the user or the product. It's all a giant colossal fucking sham. You're there to become a billionaire. Can we all stop dancing around this fact already? Paul Graham and his fucking essays. The pretentious VC Twitterverse. It's always been about the money. Facebook's earliest slide deck tells the story of how they are going to harvest their users' private data and offer it up to advertisers:
This is back when they were still "The Facebook" and a tiny startup. They didn't suddenly become evil and greedy. Greed and evil was the plan. It's right there. Google is no different.
Many people at the top are set up for life (and maybe next few generations). Why would they care about money?
Yes of course you can tell the tale how it's not ever enough, how money equals power and people want power, but I don't really buy that. These are highly intelligent and creative individuals. They probably also know that power is responsibility and have enough of that.
Additional millions/billions have zero impact on their life and I really doubt many of them playing a game between themselves about who has the biggest number. Popular media probably care more about that.
If you want to scream at the rich, I think you won't find names of those most interesting in any rankings and not much in tech. They have they patents, oil wells, gov contracts, connections, HFTs and wealth well hidden from the public eye.
Most of companies you list offered something that people wanted and that's why they got a lot of money*. That's how the money is supposed to work. Compare it to trading companies that got money from banks which got money from Fed which was created out of thin air. Those at the top of banks and big funds effectively get money from everyone else, without providing them any value, without their consent. Even innocent real estate investment seem to involve more evil and greed than making a and running a huge company without pretty much any realistic vacation.
I'm not saying that your point is completely without merit, there is a lot of greed especially in the startup world. I just think that's a huge oversimplification.
* more realistically they won at something new that was growing fast
You could replace “the tech industry” with “capitalists” and it would only gain in correctness. There is no market incentive to be “good” past a certain size, and plenty of incentives to be “evil”.
They automated everything in order to not have to invest in human labor, in order to profit most greatly from scale while paying the fewest people they can get away with. Their original index was just an algorithm that distilled human labor from webrings and indexes, that supposedly was great on its own (hint: nope, they crawled the entire Internet, and yet they still remain critically dependent on blogs and news sites for the volunteer labor their algorithm depends on).
Google uses blacklists of words to demonetize Youtube channels. They have similar blacklists to ban Play apps. I found it the hard way when they removed my video recording app after I simply added "spy cam" in the list of features.
Lesson of life learned, so I implemented ways to keep in contact with my users in case of sudden ban and ask them to move to a new app or another channel.
That's correct, but my app didn't have any specific feature that makes it a "spy cam", it's just a funny feature, indeed you can use any video recording app as a "spy cam". So according to Google the difference between one and the other is mentioning those words. That shows how their automatic ban system works.
Apple at least keep your app up, and it's obvious there's a human on the other end. The responses are usually pretty quick (often within minutes if you reply straight away), and you can pinky-promise to fix the issues in the next release if it's an update.
You have to be very careful about doing that. Every rejection is a potential strike against your developer account (especially for serious offenses like trademark violation). Get too many strikes and your dev account will get banned.
Yeah, this is what doesn't make sense to me. Why not leave the current approved app listing up? Why, during an update would they completely remove the listing for previously approved versions?!? Is the process really that broken?
At least you got a reason from Google. I have an update to an iOS app that's been stuck in review for two weeks now with zero feedback from Apple other than boilerplate responses from support. This is causing me serious stress as I have no idea how long it's going to be in this state and I rely on this and another app for 100% of my income.
Would you rather have your whole app suspended indefinitely from a random google's bot decision or have a human reviewing your update and possibly rejecting it ? From my last 3 rejections on iOS, they always provided me screenshots and I could discuss with the Apple reviewers.
Same story for youtube (bots everywhere...), the only Google service where I could talk to human was Google Ads.
In this case it's not an indefinite suspension. The email said exactly what he needs to do to resolve the issue.
I'd rather be in that situation because there would be something I could do to make progress, even if I didn't agree with the decision.
In my case, I have no idea how long this is going to take - and I've seen horror stories on the Apple Developer forums of people being in review for months. It's also clear that a person hasn't actually been reviewing my app for 2 weeks straight, even though its been in the "In Review" state for that long. There's just not enough functionality in the app -- and previous updates to this app have only spent an hour or two in review. Maybe it's just my personality, but waiting in limbo with no end in sight really drives me nuts.
EDIT:
to be clear, neither situation is good, but if I had to pick one, I'd pick the former.
I see and understand your point, but I think most people would rather choose the later.
Some business just can't afford to have their app suspended/users acquisitions stopped until their appeal is approved by someone at Google (and it can also takes some time).
Then when you appeal, you only have 1 try. If this one appeal is denied you can say goodbye to your application forever (except if you can make enough noise on social medias[1]).
Imagine knowing that each update could stop your business because a bot made a mistake. What a nightmare...
No, you can only appeal after you've been rejected. This update has neither been approved nor rejected -- it's just stuck "In Review".
You can ask for an expedited review, which I did on day 6. I got a form letter back saying that my request was "escalated for continued handling". But it doesn't seem to have made any difference.
Google and Apple have inhibited the growth of the mobile app distribution market for over a decade now, and it's developers and users like ourselves that are punished to maintain their monopoly.
I used this before. Some seven years ago I needed to hard-sub something, and the way to do the rendering from my .srt file involved some libass plugin to ffmpeg, or something like that.
This tracks. One of the things that always gets me about US media is that gratuitous rape - even fairly graphic rape scenes on TV - is just fine as long it doesn't involve visible nipples.
I was actually thinking about writing a blog post about one of the more culturally transgressive things Google has done lately: they stopped banning naked yoga videos on YouTube:
There's absolutely nothing wrong with videos showing the human form, but people doing yoga without wearing a single thing—on YouTube—is definitely going to surprise some people. I'm honestly quite surprised that Google permits it, but I'm glad that they do.
Someone has to challenge the ridiculous American cultural taboos surrounding the human form. I think YouTube is a terrible dangerous tarpit of censorship, a sort of societal "attractive nuisance", but they should be credited with challenging ridiculous unnecessary censorship norms when they take steps in the right direction for once.
Somebody recently sent me a link to a video on YouTube about the infamous prickasso [1]. I was very surprised to see YouTube hosting a video of him, well, painting on camera.
It doesn't seem true to me, as well as that rape scenes are common in U.S.A. fiction. They seem to be avoided, whereas all other crimes are liberally shown.
It seems to be a subject that often makes the U.S.A.-man extremely uncomfortable, especially when it pertains children, whereas other crimes such as child murder are seemingly discussed and shown with little issue.
Could it be because when it comes to nudity, the rules can be clearly defined? "No nipples" is a pretty simple rule that doesn't leave room for interpretation.
"No violent rape", "no violent murder" not so much. These are fairly subjective, and even tautological.
Not saying it's not a funny paradox, just trying to figure out why.
Interesting article, but I don't think that applies to TV media. People don't share their content on TV, it is very easy for TV censors to say "no female nipple on screen, period". For sure this becomes a problem on social media where there are plenty of reasons to share pictures with nudity (arts, breast feeding, etc), but not for movies/tv shows.
That's been my impression for as long as I can remember. Very puritanical compared to, say, Europe... and yet violence is no problem. I honestly don't think that I'll ever understand what the hangup with nipples is all about.
It seems to be compared to most places that aren't Anglo-Saxon, even Canada seems to be excluded, and the U.K. seems to be quickly moving away from the nudity puritanism as of late. — Australia is very much still the iron bastion of Anglo-Saxon purity with it's censorship laws.
Even the many developing nations that have very strict moral standards on such matters seem to have no problem featuring it as an evil in fiction, in the same way the U.S.A. might feature murder as an evil in fiction, for the point is for the audience to condemn it.
But rape cannot actually be shown, as that would be too sensitive.
It's a rather interesting thing. It does not seem to be entirely isolated to the U.S.A., but definitely more common there. I remember reading an interview with a Dutch criminal defence attorney, who talked about the principle that every man deserves a trial and the best legal defence, but also said that even though he personally feels that a man suspected of a sex crime should get a legal advocate, he would personally præfer it not be he, as he had moral problems with it that would make him less effective.
This was a man that regularly defended murderers, who no doubt confess to the crime within the seal of attorney–client confidentiality to him, but sex crimes are the limit? — it seems an odd standard to me.
Which was exactly the argument that the Dutchmen in the comments raised, so the mentality seems les common in the Netherlands, but not nonexistent either.
The rules might not apply, but the subject matter is avoided all the same for commercial reasons, since the audience finds it very sensitive.
The rules, of course, exist as a reflexion of the sensibilities of the people.
It's similar to how in Germany anything related to the Third Reich is treated with the utmost sensitivity, with many rules; these rules exist as the people willed it so. The end result was that the videogame Wolfenstein 3D had to be significantly edited ere it could be legally sold on the German market, as it depicted Third Reich soldiers in accurate uniforms, which was considered too sensitive, even though they are the opposing side the player is fighting against.
Several very popular US shows come to mind: Weeds, Game of Thrones, Orange is the New Black, just to take the first three that come to mind.
I admittedly don't watch a whole lot of TV, so I may be off base here, but my impression is that, here in the USA, on TV, onscreen depictions of rape are more common than onscreen depictions of positive sexual activity.
In a general sense yes. The instant there's a (female) nipple on screen there's basically no way you're going to show up on broadcast TV and largely get relegated to paid cable or internet streaming. You don't get onscreen rape but a lot of sex on TV is really rape adjacent and perpetuates the kind of "when she says no you really need to keep asking" thing that's messed up so much of the US's sex culture.
I must say that I find it rather tame compared to Japanese fiction.
Though, I suppose there the perspective is invariably reversed. It is almost always the perspective character that is the defending party, so perhaps it doesn't have the same influence.
It's an interesting difference. I find that in U.S.A. romance fiction, more often than not, the protagonist is the party who falls in love, and the story is about the protagonist courting and succeeding in winning the love interest, whereas in Japanese romance fiction, the protagonist usually starts out strongly disliking the love interest, who is the offensive party, but eventually is won over.
I find that say, Boston Legal is essentially a clichéd Japanese teenage girl's romance fiction from the other perspective. If one think of Alan Shore's many love interests as the protagonists of such stories, who are initially quite disgusted and annoyed by his antics and sexual harassment, but more and more find themselves falling for him, it's actually quite similar but reversed.
> I must say that I find it rather tame compared to Japanese fiction.
It's definitely shades all over the world. I only really know about Japan's culture 12th hand honestly so the only thing that's really filtered down is that it seems kind of repressed in public having gotten a big infusion of US laws and ideas post WW2 and there's some issues with creeps in public?
> I find that in U.S.A. romance fiction, more often than not, the protagonist is the party who falls in love
I think a lot of that is due to the target audience being largely women so it's written from and towards what the audience wants to read. Most TV and movie romances show a predominantly predatory almost (sometimes explicitly) coercive romance especially in media aimed at men.
> It's definitely shades all over the world. I only really know about Japan's culture 12th hand honestly so the only thing that's really filtered down is that it seems kind of repressed in public having gotten a big infusion of US laws and ideas post WW2 and there's some issues with creeps in public?
Japan is a civil law country with an entirely different legal system than the U.S.A..
Japanese law knows the principle of “one witness is no witness” as many others do. In particular in sexual assault cases it is often the word of the accuser vs. that of the accused, in Japan as a matter of law that cannot result into a conviction absent further evidence, in the U.S.A. it can.
Another issue is that in Japan, confessions are treated far more seriously and the police is permitted to interrogate in quite extreme ways, often without a defence attorney.
So it often comes down to willpower, whether the defendant can keep protesting innocence when being sleep deprived and mentally worn down, without such a confession, a conviction is almost impossible, but with it, it is assured.
> I think a lot of that is due to the target audience being largely women so it's written from and towards what the audience wants to read. Most TV and movie romances show a predominantly predatory almost (sometimes explicitly) coercive romance especially in media aimed at men.
And in Japanese fiction the target audience's sex is irrelevant for this.
Romance fiction targeted at females will typically feature a female protagonist who initially despises the love interest, but is eventually won over, often still having rather mixed feelings about the latter.
This story is more or less the same in male-targeted Japanese romance fiction, except the protagonist is now male.
The only real difference is that, quintessentially, the female protagonist is conflicted and indecisive, on some level attracted to the love interest, but on another considering him very unsuitable, and in male-targeted stories, the protagonist is implausibly dense and fails to realize the love interest is in love with him, despite all the cues obvious to the audience.
One of the longest running dramas on American television is Law & Order, a crime drama. The most popular spinoff of this series, Law & Order:SVU has focused on this topic for the entirety of twenty-two (!!!!!!) season run. That's nearly 500 episodes of detectives investigating and describing some pretty brutal rapes and sexual assaults of people of all ages, genders, and walks of life.
Pretty much any crime drama is going to hit on this subject pretty regularly. Based on the stuff I've seen on shows that run on broadcast TV during primetime, there is not really much taboo around the subject. Comedian John Mulaney has a very popular skit that focuses entirely on the ridiculous things that are said on this subject during day-time TV.
But do they show the rape scenes, or do they merely discussed that they happened?
As I find that a great deal of violence is often shown rather than merely referenced, but rape never is. This also seems to apply to The Practice, with which I am more versed.
I'm confused how USA Media tends to avoid rape but Game of Thrones, which has plenty of rape (and even implied rape of a teenager) was massively popular in USA?
Got some pages on my site banned from displaying Google ads because the user generated content on the pages includes a discussion on "Penisilin" (Penicillin in Turkish).
Never appealed since it's mostly a time sink with Google when you're nobody.
Some one said, and was downvoted into oblivion (?)...
" Yup, that's about how much effort I expected them to put into their app store: absolutely nothing beyond cheap, automated heuristics. Why invest in a decent ecosystem when you're one of the two options in town?
I'm about an inch away from throwing my phone in the river and switching to a GPS-only device for navigating in my car. All the convenience a mobile device offers can't make up for the crap software experience you're forced into—literally ransoming the use of your phone through their company store. "
Me too! I have ordered and am awaiting my Pine Phone for this exact reason.
Google put limits in Android such that the Play Store is the only app distribution method that can implement background installation of apps, batch installations of apps and automatic upgrading.
F-Droid provides those features only if you're able to root your phone, which manufacturers actively try to stop users from doing. Also, rooting your phone opens it up to vulnerabilities and exploits.
If you have root and/or install an alternative store as a privileged system app, it will be able to install apps in the background just like Play Store.
Once companies become monopolies like Google, Facebook etc, I believe the government should impose regulations like mandatory SLAs for customer support.
Right now, companies like Google can completely ignore customer service because they are a monopoly. And they do this, because it saves them billions of dollars. If they had actual competition, they would spend more on customer support because it would be a point of contention, but since they have no competition, they just let bots handle everything and they completely ignore their customers who have no choice but to continue to use their products. This is a form or monopolistic behavior that needs to be addressed by regulations.
Monopolies should be forced to spend money on real humans or some form of effective customer support, with a regulated SLA. It's the only way to keep these companies in check once they have completely starved any form of competition away from them.
You've really got to enjoy the walled garden experience which at least half of the HackerNews commenters claims to be ultra-supremely-superior for the end user.
I imagine whoever is in charge of the review machine, though, reads Kafka for enjoyment and inspiration.
344 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 298 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
They fixed it in later versions, but I still have a "penetration" class because I'm immature that way.
I.e. It has little to do with profanity but a lot to prevent someone from making screnshot of a loadout with a gun that looks like MP5, is named by them as "MP5 whatever" and behaves like an MP5 in some type of legal action?
H&K has an US trademark consisting of just "MP5" in relation to a ton of things (though not video games!) so they could at least try make a case out of it not being purely nominative use and tie AB in court, if they wished. It would be PR suicide, but still, not the most stupid thing they have done.
Though, interestingly, in Modern Warfare (2019), many guns have two names; for example, the MP5 is also called SMG Charlie (as in, NATO phonetic alphabet for C). I kind of got the impression that it was laying groundwork for a long-term goal of removing the actual names of the guns; possibly due to licensing fees, or maybe to divorce the ugly reality of killing with video game killing, I don't know.
I remember being denied to post a forum post containing the phrase “tardive dyskinesia”, as it appears that it rejected anything with the string “tard” in it.
I'm not sure as to whom they think to be helping with that, but it's entirely possible that their advertisement revenue will actually suffer, if the string “tard” be found on their pages.
The neural network may have taken millions of core-hours to learn to be as dumb (here) as a blind keyword search.
I worked at a place that had a profanity filter in two parts.
The first part was in C, several pages of if (!strcmp(x, a)) return 0;
After all that, it then invokes popen() to ssh to another machine and run a shell script there, which contains several more pages of string comparisons, this time in shell.
1) They got tired of having to modify C code and wait for the deploy cycle to modify the filter
2) Using, for example, the database would be more work than calling a shell script. On top of that, it might actually be beyond the abilities of the programmer involved.
3) The C code executes on an arbitrary machine. Hence the ssh to a specific machine, so that the shell script would only have to be maintained in one place
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2138014.stm
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/medireview
One man's profanity is not another man's profanity.
Of course, the personality trait of desiring censoring “bad words” seems to highly correlate with a belief in objective morality. — the others are wrong about what they find profane!
https://www.vice.com/en/article/dyzamj/a-profanity-filter-ba...
Once I confirm to them I'm an adult, I should be able to choose to see everything.
What made this particularly egregious is that the name in question: "Hui" - wasn't even a swear word in either his own native language - Chinese - nor in English. But it closely resembles a Russian profanity. Turned out that the filter was "multilingual", and applied rules for all languages to all posts...
That seems pretty unlikely to have happened here; I don't know the Russian word in question, but the Chinese "hui" rhymes with English "clay". (It also rhymes with the more sensibly spelled Chinese "wei"; the 'e' is only omitted when the syllable begins with a consonant. Compare "feng shui".) I'd be surprised if that were a possible reading of any Russian that might be transliterated "hui".
As to why the filter was applied to Latin characters - I'm not sure, but I'm assuming that's to prevent people from using translit to sneak in profanities. Of course, this ends up being a pointless game of whack-a-mole - there's so many possible ways to spell something like that with Unicode...
Looks like Russians and Americans can find common ground on thinking Chinese last names look like "penis", even if we're making fun of Wang and they're making fun of Hui.
[1] http://slavenica.com
This still shows up in some contexts - e.g. Й, like Ё, isn't used in bullet lists; try it in Word - it'll go from И straight to К.
There's no planet on which Apple or Google will voluntarily give up the revenue stream produced by their respective app stores.
*If you're going to downvote me, at least provide some evidence that I'm off base. Google and Apple both refuse to allow other app stores and there's absolutely 0 recourse that doesn't involve the government stepping in. F-droid and the rest don't cover anything approaching "all devices".
Also, maintain a public denylist of packages with an transparent process for overriding or correcting the list?
see https://grahamcluley.com/blacklist-whitelist-terminology/
I would've gone with yeslist/nolist - due to being shorter in writing and speech.
Unfortunately it seems the less religious Americans think it's only the dumb hypocrite Christians acting like that.
We, Silicon Valley liberals, surely don't have anything to do with that culture!
But, should you instead mean "I don't like it so I'll ridicule it," well, I can't please everybody. Sorry.
Are you in the habit of reporting serious crimes to the nearest advertising agency?
Can you explain why thats not the first thing that came to mind? Why are our realities so different?
https://nypost.com/2021/01/21/twitter-sued-for-allegedly-ref...
I'm about an inch away from throwing my phone in the river and switching to a GPS-only device for navigating in my car. All the convenience a mobile device offers can't make up for the crap software experience you're forced into—literally ransoming the use of your phone through their company store.
They say sex sells, so I wonder if there actually is a reason to deny content that is “sexually gratifying”?
I find this to exist in many commercial endeavors and I wonder if there are actually sound financial reasons behind it, or whether it was similar to the strange culture shock tourists in the U.S.A. faced in the 70s, being denied a shared hotel room because they did not have the same surname. Or perhaps that too was actually for commercial reasons rather than being moral guardians?
I would be furious if this was coming from Apple. And judging from the current Apple I would not be surprised if they will tell you to not use the "ASS" label in your support format.
You can take it pretty far: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9AgMlHJe7Y
Also wow, I'm guessing you need to adjust the subtitle with every frame, old-school animation style?
https://unanimated.github.io/ts/ts-mocha.htm
https://github.com/TypesettingTools/Aegisub-Motion/wiki/Appl...
Aegisub however has good automation support, and has (had?) a pretty active scripting community. Scripts can do a lot of stuff and often has simple dialog-box UIs. The base scripting support is in Lua, but a lot of scripts are written in a Lua variant called Moonscript. I've never seen it used anywhere else. And, as was mentioned in a sibling comment, there are scripts for importing motion-tracking files into Aegisub.
The ASS format lacks support for a bunch of stuff that people want to do, or the native support is deficient in some manner, so scripting is very important for Aegisub. For example, a line can be given a color gradient by make a one copy of the line for each shade in the gradient (this can be 100+ times). Each copy is then given a different color according to the gradient, and a \clip command is used on each line to only show a 1-2 pixel wide slice of each line. If all those slices are lined up properly and the lines are displayed simultaneously, it gives the impression of being a single line with a color gradient. Tricks like this can actually cause performance problems in rendering the subtitles!
I think this is an interesting little programming niche, but there isn't much complex typesetting being done these days. Tastes have changed, and due to licensed releases there's less need for fansubbing on all but the most niche titles.
Quite impressive, notwithstanding the use of bourgeois harem as example material.
There's a short showcase of them on YouTube (spoilers): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_c-eKTisI0
It's a shame you basically cannot get anything close to the quality of fansubs from any commercial/legal options.
Edit: Are those baked into the video or did they just use the ASS format?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cqqGOvOGfI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvO8kcWFFT0
The actual code for it is looks like this:
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebVTT [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AufydOsiD6MAnd again, set language to Japanese.
It’s also a format no fansubber ever heard of.
The fansubbing community is so annoying with its insistence on terrible formats. The community has somehow standardized on 10bit hevc with ASS subtitles. That makes releases so hard to play.
Now try running that on a Chromecast >_>
The fansubbing community is just so stuck in weird formats which provide no benefit except a virtual moat preventing newcomers.
Which is expected, considering the hardware just isn’t powerful enough for ASS subtitles (to get good performance, even on a desktop you’ll want a recent CPU and at least 1-2GB of RAM): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromecast#Model_comparison
It suggests that the character itself is writing the English text, or that it magically appears.
If it were simple subtitles, it would be clear that these were translations, and that in the actual story there is only Japanese text.
Notwithstanding the impressive technological nature of it, but that also seems the reason they did so. Methinks it's a case of using cool technology because one can, even though it doesn't produce a more convenient result, however cool it might look.
Your argument kinda sounds right when you just imagine it... but doesn't hold weight once you actually experience them.
If this text isn't done like this then you have to either omit it entirely, possibly leaving out relevant details, or just put them next to the normal subtitles. The latter doesn't work at all for me, because I can't distinguish which text relates to what quick enough.
For instance translating the text on a piece of paper by writing the translation above the piece of paper.
How it is written in this case, in charcoal, on the paper, in perspective, seamlessly blending into the paper, makes it seem as if, for whatever reason, the same text was written twice on the paper in English and Japanese.
It's even more unnerving when the text be written and the English pencil charcoal appears out of thin air next to the Japanese charcoal that emerges from a pencil.
Fansubbers work for the shows they love while the commercial distributors just pick the cheapest option to get the thing done ASAP, don't matter how sh*tty the result is. There is no chance for quality here.
The same happens with Blurays x rips streams: piracy is the best option (no DRM, no unskippable screens, no ads, no regional restrictions).
But also, Crunchyroll uses the fansub toolset and SSA subtitles.
Case in point, I remember watching "Is the Order a Rabbit S3" in Crunchyroll, the English subtitles are pretty basic but the Portuguese (Brazillian) subtitles are great, including things like Karaoke in opening and ending.
I wouldn’t call subtitles that require about a GB of RAM to process and don’t even get 20fps on an i7-6700 "quality". That’s just a bunch of shitty hacks people accept because there’s no alternative.
ASS is a horrible format (three implementations, only a single well-working implementation, performance hungry, etc), and almost all of the benefits of ASS can also be had with e.g. TTML without the issues.
And stuff like rendering the same line hundreds of times to get a gradient effect or blurred background is absolutely wasteful, especially because it’s just a hack to work around the broken ASS limitations.
But now that HS is gone, I'm not sure what's happening to the scene. There is a power vacuum and I'm not sure if anyone took up the space.
Mostly they seem to work on shows that haven't been licensed by official simulcast sources, or that are licensed but aren't being released on a timely schedule (ahem Netflix), or projects that for whatever reason they think the official releases haven't done justice to.
Those are just "SSA" subtitles. The difference mattered (ASS was an "Advanced SSA") once but now people just call it "ASS" as a joke. So Google is sort-of right, he could leave it out of the description.
I doubt this guy knows this since it's impossible he implemented SSA on his own due to how complex it is.
"King's Throne: Game of Lust.", with advertised gameplay content such as "I, [the King], shall interrogate this female prisoner privately in my bed chambers", is one of the top advertised games on google play.
Got it.
https://youtu.be/5ssJtD08vCc
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=7291
And if this really is the case then stop complaining about it.
And can we please stop turning every discussion, no matter how trivial, into a discussion about rights? Did I say anything that would suggest that I want to take any rights from someone?
Where I am from prostitution is not illegal. On line tools are a real boon for the workers.
Pornography is entirely normal, and pornographers need all the protection other workers have, attitudes like this make that hard.
I really thought we were over prurience! Silly me.
Silly Google. If you are going to be Evil (TM) at least be grown up about it!
It's happened to two of my clients in the past 6 months based on small infractions in the app metadata, but no issue with the app itself.
In both cases the app was taken down with no advance notice, and eventually reinstated after an appeal and several very stressful days of waiting.
Apple seems to be very selective during the approval process, and is often inconsistent so a minor update can get rejected for something that was approved many times before. I guess different people review and interpret the rules differently so maybe this is unavoidable.
Google (from what I can tell) seems to take a very different approach and relies much more on automated enforcement. The process is on average much lower friction for the developer, but getting previously approved app listings removed at any time without warning is not a good experience.
Edit: I forgot to mention that you can't actually edit the metadata while the app is suspended and re-submit it for review. The only two choices are to appeal and edit the description after the app is reinstated, or create a completely new app listing.
They were the champions of the open web for a long time. What happened?
Because that's what you say when you're the underdog.
Remember Apple's 1984 ad?
Microsoft's "a computer on every desk"?
The tech industry seems to support a rotating cast of monopolists riding atop whatever gate-keeping function emerges, each one holding on as long as it can until replaced by something that ends up looking a lot like the last top dog.
Corpo structure seems to have something to do with it, separate things into categories, then teams get categories and optimize locally without taking bigger picture into account (or even knowing what the picture is). Some regulations, maybe some pressures from some agencies about which they are not allowed to talk about. Etc.
But at some point I have to wonder about the mind of someone decisive in the company when "are we the baddies" question appears. Do they rationalize and think that "well, we need to do this because security botnets blahblah users have no idea what we are dealing with here and it's for their own good even if they don't understand it yada yada", or do they just don't give a shit. Or maybe it's like with me disliking my government - I definitely don't like it but I don't feel like fighting that giant machine at the moment, I can't do anything on my own, it would require cooperation and a plan and I have some stuff to do.
In this specific case and most of the time where Google's complete lack of support shows up it's because having manual review costs money and the process that screws the app developer is easier than having a secondary process that needs more people to decide if the first automated or rote manual scan made a mistake.
It's simple survival of the fittest. The lion who feels compassion for his prey will not pass his genes to the next generation.
Ooooh. I know this one! Because that's what VCs want. AirBNB, Uber, Postmates, Google, Facebook, Apple.
VCs want to invest in winner-takes-all platforms and markets with incredibly strong network effects. But don't say any of that out loud: https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/08/07/google-doc...
All these people rushing in to Silicon Valley with hat-in-hand going from VC to VC talking about how they care so much about the user or the product. It's all a giant colossal fucking sham. You're there to become a billionaire. Can we all stop dancing around this fact already? Paul Graham and his fucking essays. The pretentious VC Twitterverse. It's always been about the money. Facebook's earliest slide deck tells the story of how they are going to harvest their users' private data and offer it up to advertisers:
https://app.slidebean.com/p/s15UZQkE7T/Facebooks-original-pi...
This is back when they were still "The Facebook" and a tiny startup. They didn't suddenly become evil and greedy. Greed and evil was the plan. It's right there. Google is no different.
Yes of course you can tell the tale how it's not ever enough, how money equals power and people want power, but I don't really buy that. These are highly intelligent and creative individuals. They probably also know that power is responsibility and have enough of that.
Additional millions/billions have zero impact on their life and I really doubt many of them playing a game between themselves about who has the biggest number. Popular media probably care more about that.
If you want to scream at the rich, I think you won't find names of those most interesting in any rankings and not much in tech. They have they patents, oil wells, gov contracts, connections, HFTs and wealth well hidden from the public eye.
Most of companies you list offered something that people wanted and that's why they got a lot of money*. That's how the money is supposed to work. Compare it to trading companies that got money from banks which got money from Fed which was created out of thin air. Those at the top of banks and big funds effectively get money from everyone else, without providing them any value, without their consent. Even innocent real estate investment seem to involve more evil and greed than making a and running a huge company without pretty much any realistic vacation.
I'm not saying that your point is completely without merit, there is a lot of greed especially in the startup world. I just think that's a huge oversimplification.
* more realistically they won at something new that was growing fast
It was a con.
People fell for it.
Lesson of life learned, so I implemented ways to keep in contact with my users in case of sudden ban and ask them to move to a new app or another channel.
> Apps must not present themselves as a spying or secret surveillance solution.
If your application could be accurately described as a "spy cam", it's likely that you were already in violation of their stalkerware policies.
Apple was going to remove the app itself.
I'd rather be in that situation because there would be something I could do to make progress, even if I didn't agree with the decision.
In my case, I have no idea how long this is going to take - and I've seen horror stories on the Apple Developer forums of people being in review for months. It's also clear that a person hasn't actually been reviewing my app for 2 weeks straight, even though its been in the "In Review" state for that long. There's just not enough functionality in the app -- and previous updates to this app have only spent an hour or two in review. Maybe it's just my personality, but waiting in limbo with no end in sight really drives me nuts.
EDIT: to be clear, neither situation is good, but if I had to pick one, I'd pick the former.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/gkvic1/podcast_add...
You can ask for an expedited review, which I did on day 6. I got a form letter back saying that my request was "escalated for continued handling". But it doesn't seem to have made any difference.
How To Make A Mathematically Perfectly Infuriating Traffic Jam 101 :(
> [...] [M]y request was "escalated for continued handling". But it doesn't seem to have made any difference.
Your status was upgraded to "waiting faster" :D
Hides
I re-built it with a newer version of Xcode, bumped the version the number, resubmitted. It was approved the next day.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=naked+yoga
There's absolutely nothing wrong with videos showing the human form, but people doing yoga without wearing a single thing—on YouTube—is definitely going to surprise some people. I'm honestly quite surprised that Google permits it, but I'm glad that they do.
Someone has to challenge the ridiculous American cultural taboos surrounding the human form. I think YouTube is a terrible dangerous tarpit of censorship, a sort of societal "attractive nuisance", but they should be credited with challenging ridiculous unnecessary censorship norms when they take steps in the right direction for once.
[1] https://youtu.be/4oDT99KKvdE
It seems to be a subject that often makes the U.S.A.-man extremely uncomfortable, especially when it pertains children, whereas other crimes such as child murder are seemingly discussed and shown with little issue.
"No violent rape", "no violent murder" not so much. These are fairly subjective, and even tautological.
Not saying it's not a funny paradox, just trying to figure out why.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190503/17322942136/conte...
Anything related to sex, nudity and swearwords is held to the utmost standards of censorship.
Even the many developing nations that have very strict moral standards on such matters seem to have no problem featuring it as an evil in fiction, in the same way the U.S.A. might feature murder as an evil in fiction, for the point is for the audience to condemn it.
But rape cannot actually be shown, as that would be too sensitive.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RapeIsASpecialKi...
It's a rather interesting thing. It does not seem to be entirely isolated to the U.S.A., but definitely more common there. I remember reading an interview with a Dutch criminal defence attorney, who talked about the principle that every man deserves a trial and the best legal defence, but also said that even though he personally feels that a man suspected of a sex crime should get a legal advocate, he would personally præfer it not be he, as he had moral problems with it that would make him less effective.
This was a man that regularly defended murderers, who no doubt confess to the crime within the seal of attorney–client confidentiality to him, but sex crimes are the limit? — it seems an odd standard to me.
Which was exactly the argument that the Dutchmen in the comments raised, so the mentality seems les common in the Netherlands, but not nonexistent either.
The rules, of course, exist as a reflexion of the sensibilities of the people.
It's similar to how in Germany anything related to the Third Reich is treated with the utmost sensitivity, with many rules; these rules exist as the people willed it so. The end result was that the videogame Wolfenstein 3D had to be significantly edited ere it could be legally sold on the German market, as it depicted Third Reich soldiers in accurate uniforms, which was considered too sensitive, even though they are the opposing side the player is fighting against.
I admittedly don't watch a whole lot of TV, so I may be off base here, but my impression is that, here in the USA, on TV, onscreen depictions of rape are more common than onscreen depictions of positive sexual activity.
I must say that I find it rather tame compared to Japanese fiction.
Though, I suppose there the perspective is invariably reversed. It is almost always the perspective character that is the defending party, so perhaps it doesn't have the same influence.
It's an interesting difference. I find that in U.S.A. romance fiction, more often than not, the protagonist is the party who falls in love, and the story is about the protagonist courting and succeeding in winning the love interest, whereas in Japanese romance fiction, the protagonist usually starts out strongly disliking the love interest, who is the offensive party, but eventually is won over.
I find that say, Boston Legal is essentially a clichéd Japanese teenage girl's romance fiction from the other perspective. If one think of Alan Shore's many love interests as the protagonists of such stories, who are initially quite disgusted and annoyed by his antics and sexual harassment, but more and more find themselves falling for him, it's actually quite similar but reversed.
It's definitely shades all over the world. I only really know about Japan's culture 12th hand honestly so the only thing that's really filtered down is that it seems kind of repressed in public having gotten a big infusion of US laws and ideas post WW2 and there's some issues with creeps in public?
> I find that in U.S.A. romance fiction, more often than not, the protagonist is the party who falls in love
I think a lot of that is due to the target audience being largely women so it's written from and towards what the audience wants to read. Most TV and movie romances show a predominantly predatory almost (sometimes explicitly) coercive romance especially in media aimed at men.
Japan is a civil law country with an entirely different legal system than the U.S.A..
Japanese law knows the principle of “one witness is no witness” as many others do. In particular in sexual assault cases it is often the word of the accuser vs. that of the accused, in Japan as a matter of law that cannot result into a conviction absent further evidence, in the U.S.A. it can.
Another issue is that in Japan, confessions are treated far more seriously and the police is permitted to interrogate in quite extreme ways, often without a defence attorney.
So it often comes down to willpower, whether the defendant can keep protesting innocence when being sleep deprived and mentally worn down, without such a confession, a conviction is almost impossible, but with it, it is assured.
> I think a lot of that is due to the target audience being largely women so it's written from and towards what the audience wants to read. Most TV and movie romances show a predominantly predatory almost (sometimes explicitly) coercive romance especially in media aimed at men.
And in Japanese fiction the target audience's sex is irrelevant for this.
Romance fiction targeted at females will typically feature a female protagonist who initially despises the love interest, but is eventually won over, often still having rather mixed feelings about the latter.
This story is more or less the same in male-targeted Japanese romance fiction, except the protagonist is now male.
The only real difference is that, quintessentially, the female protagonist is conflicted and indecisive, on some level attracted to the love interest, but on another considering him very unsuitable, and in male-targeted stories, the protagonist is implausibly dense and fails to realize the love interest is in love with him, despite all the cues obvious to the audience.
One of the longest running dramas on American television is Law & Order, a crime drama. The most popular spinoff of this series, Law & Order:SVU has focused on this topic for the entirety of twenty-two (!!!!!!) season run. That's nearly 500 episodes of detectives investigating and describing some pretty brutal rapes and sexual assaults of people of all ages, genders, and walks of life.
Pretty much any crime drama is going to hit on this subject pretty regularly. Based on the stuff I've seen on shows that run on broadcast TV during primetime, there is not really much taboo around the subject. Comedian John Mulaney has a very popular skit that focuses entirely on the ridiculous things that are said on this subject during day-time TV.
As I find that a great deal of violence is often shown rather than merely referenced, but rape never is. This also seems to apply to The Practice, with which I am more versed.
- playing card name,
- tennis rule
- or some medical advice on acetylsalicylic acid (Acetylsalicylsäure/ASS)
and derived tradenames that also leave german language context as tradenames and the likes.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ass
Never appealed since it's mostly a time sink with Google when you're nobody.
" Yup, that's about how much effort I expected them to put into their app store: absolutely nothing beyond cheap, automated heuristics. Why invest in a decent ecosystem when you're one of the two options in town?
I'm about an inch away from throwing my phone in the river and switching to a GPS-only device for navigating in my car. All the convenience a mobile device offers can't make up for the crap software experience you're forced into—literally ransoming the use of your phone through their company store. "
Me too! I have ordered and am awaiting my Pine Phone for this exact reason.
F-Droid provides those features only if you're able to root your phone, which manufacturers actively try to stop users from doing. Also, rooting your phone opens it up to vulnerabilities and exploits.
But there are (a) services I cannot turn off and (b) apps I really need on android.
Perhaps F-Droid would help with (a) but not (b)
SO I plan to have a cheep android for the one app I cannot do without and the Pine phone for everything else...
But time will tell
Right now, companies like Google can completely ignore customer service because they are a monopoly. And they do this, because it saves them billions of dollars. If they had actual competition, they would spend more on customer support because it would be a point of contention, but since they have no competition, they just let bots handle everything and they completely ignore their customers who have no choice but to continue to use their products. This is a form or monopolistic behavior that needs to be addressed by regulations.
Monopolies should be forced to spend money on real humans or some form of effective customer support, with a regulated SLA. It's the only way to keep these companies in check once they have completely starved any form of competition away from them.
I imagine whoever is in charge of the review machine, though, reads Kafka for enjoyment and inspiration.