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Apple May Loosen Restrictions With iPhone 3.0
mr100percent writes "Apple rejected the iPhone aggregator app Newspapers because of a topless photo in one of the app's subscribed-to papers. In the rejection message, Apple noted that Parental Controls have been announced for iPhone OS 3.0, adding that it 'would be appropriate to resubmit your application for review once this feature is available.' Rumor sites are speculating that Apple will relax their content restrictions once the 3.0 update puts parental controls in place. This may mean that apps like NIN will be allowed in the future."
Ya, that makes sense.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I'll be over here using my blackberry to browse porn and run whatever the hell I want. Shame I can't make the copy/paste joke anymore though.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
I wonder if this will mean apps like Newspapers will be labeled as "Mature Content" similar to CDs? It still seems absurd and hyper conservative that a newspaper application would have that label, but I guess it's better than the overt censorship that's going on now.
Even if those changes are forthcoming, it's still ridiculous that an expensive piece of technology used primarily by adults has such puritanical restrictions on it. I realize it does reflect poorly on Apple to have apps that are in very poor taste (e.g. the one where you shake the baby...), but it's pretty obvious that mainstream bands like NIN are an acceptable part of American culture.
I work in technology (but not a tech-only office) and this fiasco is definitely getting noticed and is clearly reflecting badly on Apple.
I'm not sure whether the concept of a parental-controls setting was the product of a deliberate leak to address this issue or if it was just part of the plan all along, but I seriously doubt that a significant portion of the iPhone userbase is comprised of children who might have not been given the phone if the app store weren't policed. It seems pretty clear to me that Apple is more than happy to piss off their users and snub even Trent (who is considered rather avant-garde in the music biz) if there's any risk to their image.
Who the fuck buys their kid an iPhone?
I want to be adopted.
"because of a topless photo in one of the app's subscribed-to papers"
That is indeed a tasteless photo. How could they not be wearing a turtle neck sweater? This reeks of disrespect for The Jobs!
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
used primarily by adults
Really?
I hereby submit my new app for app store approval. My app is aimed at teaching parts of the sacred bible to kid, most specifically Ezekiel 23:19-20.
19 Yet she increased her whoring, remembering the days of her youth, when she played the whore in the land of Egypt and lusted after her paramours there, whose genitals were like those of donkeys, and whose emissions was like that of horses.
Since the app is aimed at little kids, it graphically depicts the holiness and splendid beauty of this biblical moment with the Egyptians' donkey-sizes penises as ejaculating like horses.
AMEN.
from browsing porn using Safari.
Considering they don't have a parental control system in place yet, I'm not surprised they would start by rejecting explicit applications.
The iPhone is a nice technology demonstrator, but it's things like this that make it useless.
The millions of people who bought one because of the functionality it offers may disagree.
Complete control over content
Except that anyone can jailbreak them if that bothers them.
no tethering
Again, jailbreaking if that is important to you.
no background apps
Well, no app store background apps. Some of the built in apps do in fact operate in the background.
no user space that mounts as a USB thumbdrive
As the saying goes, there's an app for that (uses WebDAV to load/unload files).
you can only sync to one computer
Again, if that matters to you there's a workaround. To most people that doesn't matter. Also, even without that workaround you can still have a computer update video without disturbing the music on the device if you select video only (which would be the thing you'd care most about updating from a laptop).
Safari still has that dumb bug where it re-loads pages when you switch between windows
That's called "resource constraint", not a bug.
There's a lot you can do with a hacked phone, but then you're missing out on everything else.
Like what? You can still use the app store from a jailbroken phone.
It works well within its very limited scope
Pretty amusing considering that at this point any other phone has a more limited scope as to what you can actually do with it since they are just getting up to snuff with their own application solutions (even Android is behind on that one).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Restrictions wont be loosened because the restrictions are ambiguous and inconsistent. Racism (pocket god), violence (pick a shooter) and infanticide (baby shaker) are OK but a third party mail client is not?
In simpler terms restrictions will remain the same, applications will be accepted or rejected entirely at Apples whim.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I will *ever* not publish anything in the Apple store, as long as there is any limitation at all. I don't care, even if I lose most of my potential clients because of it. Mod me troll, but I think if they are stupid enough, to buy that crappy piece of shit that the iPhone is, and put up with all those weirdo and hypocrite US-bible-belt-style rules of Apple, that they would not be clients you want to have anyway.
Imagine them approaching your work with that attitude, and then spamming in all the forums and blogs on the net about it, with their retarded attitude. No thanks.
I hope that the USA splits up in retardo-country and a normal country as soon an possible. So good people don't have to be punished for the idiocy of others.
The more you will mod me troll for this, the more I will know how right I am. ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
... Safari? I can find topless photos using that. Or worse. They need to block it until parental controls are released.
And no, I don't hate apple (typing this on my mac) and I'm thinking of getting an iphone but this crap is really starting to piss me off. I don't want to buy a phone thats locked down so badly that I can't do what I want with it without jailbreaking it. Its ridiculous.
Posters should keep in mind that the iphone apps also work on the touch and that is likely to become a very viable video game platform for kids.
There are sound marketing concerns for parental ccontrols.
I mean, here you got hardware with Java native support (processor chosen by Apple got the Jazelle option), with a license that prevent JVM to be installed on it !!!
All right, we all know that "Java is too slow" was touted by Steve simply because he need exclusive application to ensure the success of his pay-per-download platform.
Allowing Java would have simply killed the exclusivity, because Java is né multiplatform and some order of magnitude easier to develop with. Having let people the choice would have make Java the default choice. Thus allowing for instance application to run easilly on Android or other mobile OS with strong Java implementation level (think nokia for instance).
Apple with a great product and well-thinked limitation/contracts have manage to build again a milking-cow : cash on each mobile fee, cash on each application downloaded, cash on very battery renewed ...
This looks pretty cool as a business model ;-)
But how long will it last ? It would be interresting if anybody fill a class action again Apple for not allowing Java :P
Where is the RMS/FSF here fighting for Libre ? Because, this might be a Unix band band, but this looks a prety proprietary one ;-)
My only real complaint with the iPhone comes as the result of having developed a few applications that are currently for sale on the iTunes app store, and it goes like this:
I'm not allowed to interact with my customers.
I frequently get feedback (both positive and negative) on the applications I've written. I'd love an opportunity to comment on this feedback, either to address concerns or to graciously accept the accolades. However, Apple keeps a stranglehold on all feedback from customers, and does not permit you to know much of anything about how to contact the customer directly.
I wish this was different, and is one of the reasons I've taken a break from iPhone development for a while.
We have some company deciding that people should not be able to install an application which contains a graphic of ladies with no blouses. You can buy every day at a newstand in the UK two or three newspapers which have, on page 3, pictures of ladies with no blouses. Anyway, Apple does not want you to see these pictures as part of an application on the phone you have just bought.
But then, after you've bought the phone, you can browse the web to the page 3 sites or others, and see those same pictures.
So what on earth are they thinking? Do they really think there is something terrible that people should not be allowed to see in something as commonplace as ladies without blouses? What exactly is so terrible about it? Do they really think that banning this awful stuff from the apps makes any difference at all to what people look at and see on iPhones?
These people are going completely mad in terms of an obsession with interference which they mistake for control. But worse than that, their values about what they want to control are all screwed up.
Do you all still think this is "cool"?
Initial acceptance can be a little random but stuff that does not meet guidelines does get filtered eventually.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Apple is rumored to possibly, maybe, perhaps, do something, largely inconsequential with a version release of an equally unimportant product embraced only by fanboys, according to unconfirmed rumors by unknown sources!
Is there really that much difference between a horse and a donkey in this regard? I mean, why must the word of God clarify that they had donkey-size penises and ejaculated like horses? Do horses shoot significantly more (or less) "emission" than donkeys? Or are their genitals significantly larger or smaller? What if they had horse-size genitals and had emissions like donkeys -- would that make the girl in this passage more or less of a whore? It just seems like a strange detail to be hung up on, but if it's in the Bible, there must be a good reason for it.
Ballmer's kids: Daddy, Daddy, will you show me how to work my Zune?
Ballmer: Sure, let me see show you...
kids: HAHA just kidding Daddy we have ipods like everyone else in the world!
Why do I need parental controls in any device of mine?
Parental controls just give lazy parents the feeling of doing something when in reality they are doing nothing about the education of their offspring.
I can decide myself if an application is tasteful or not and if I want it in any device of mine.
Which is why I don't have an iPhone, but all the rest of you that feel compelled to be treated like an audience of captive putative children, enjoy your poison (and to think people actually pay for the privilege ....).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
There's lots of alternatives. Even in Soviet USia.
Best Slashdot Co
Just last night I installed a Java stack on my jailbroken iPod touch 2G. I got JamVM for a lightweight JVM, Jikes for a compiler, and JDBC drivers/JocStrap for libraries.
The JVM weighs in at around 2MB, and the libraries were about half a meg each, IIRC. JocStrap is described as a Java/Objective C connection library.
So far as JocStrap goes, I haven't had a chance to look at it; not sure if 'connection' means bindings or wrapper classes or what. However, the fact that the JVM is included makes me assume that you run native Java instead of interpreted java bytecode on top of objective-C.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
This may be slightly off topic but I find myself wondering if Apple has perfected the art of mind control.
For years it's been one thing another...closed hardware, closed OS, and now closed iPhones.
I give a nod that Apple has opened up a bit over the years. But what has me baffled is why people gobble up Apple products like starving lions on a gazelle when most of their products are overpriced, and tightly controlled.
Why do users tolerate this kind of control and pay more for it? Is there some kind of unconscious comfort knowing that I'm in a safe little box? Is Apple injecting pheromones into their plastics?
I'm mainly curious what the community thought on this is.
I'm just overjoyed that someone on the internet used "loose" correctly.
It's very simple. Steve Jobs has a sense of style, and a good idea of what appeals to people in general. He also has the authority and personality to get what he wants. Speaking in general, those are two things we geeks tend to lack.
For example, most people aren't interested in having a computer, they're interested in using a computer, and don't care about open or closed as long as it does what they want (email, Facebook, Twitter, word processing, surfing for porn, that sort of thing). Almost everybody has Microsoft Windows or Mac OSX on their personal computers. One difference is that Mac OSX is safer, and that's something you can sell, as long as you don't try to do it rationally. (People in general suck at risk assessment.)
Nor is Apple stuff as closed as you imply. Every Mac ships with development software (although it's not shipped installed). It costs about a hundred bucks to get what you need to test iPhone apps and send them to the iPhone store. (You can develop them for free, and test them on the simulator, for whatever that's worth.) It's apparently not that hard to get apps accepted for the Apps Store, based on the variety I've seen. Sure, Apple will filter some things out, but that didn't stop the people behind iFart from making a lot of money. There's limits on what you can do with a non-jailbroken iPhone, but I haven't seen Apple going after jailbreakers, and in any case there are no really open smart phones available in the US market.
I think you're comparing Apple openness to Linux openness, and it falls short. (Not that I've modified my Ubuntu boxen in ways I can't modify a Mac; it's just that for me, personally, Ubuntu feels a bit nicer than OSX, and it's less expensive.) You can write any sort of app you want for the Mac, and Apple will provide you with what you need, free. You can spend a hundred bucks (which isn't expensive for language software) for the ability to put your own programs on your own iPhone, although there are restrictions after that.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Guess you better ban national geographic then, and the discovery channel.
Oh, and your mother too as I'm sure you have seen breasts at least once when you were hungry...
Nanny state in a corporate form.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Newspaper app: allows a user to see an image of a topless woman. Status: denied.
Mobile Safari: allows a user to see as much hard-core porn as he/she wants. Status: open for all users, baby!
NIN app: allows a user to hear disturbing lyrics from one of the band's albums. Status: denied.
Mobile Safari: allows access to Nazi hate sites, al Qaeda recruiting sites, any other hateful site you can think of, and oh, by the way - the same song lyrics that appear in the NIN application. Status: all systems go!
If there's a clearer example of how fucked up Apple's App Store approval policies are, I can't think of what it could be.
Even the leader of NIN is mulling over releasing the app as a jailbroken app. Estimates of jailbroken phones venture north of a million units now, far beyond the usual tech-nerd crowd as a percentage of device sales - and that's because the mechanism is so easy that even my Mom could do so and I would not hesitate if there were a compelling app in the non-Apple Cydia app store.
The fact is that if any of the things he listed are limits, anyone can opt to jailbrake to solve if they are truly impediments, doubly so for any technically savvy user - and technically savvy users are the only ones that actually care about the limitations the iPhone currently has.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think a lot of people DON'T WANT choice. And what I mean by that is, they want there to be one way to do something, one app to use for this, one process for doing that. Apple has always marketed and positioned themselves as a platform for simplicity and an easy user experience.
Windows / Linux provide you with a billion choices for how to do everything. A lot of the software you need, doesn't come on the OS, you are forced to go out and research all the choices and choose one, usually uninformed (for the general public). With Apple, you get almost all of what you need (for most people, it's all you need) in the OS, and they make it such that there is only one right way to do something and it walks you right though.
And if you're not an old-school geek, you don't have the notion that a lack of complete flexibility and choice is a bad thing. You just want to get online, do what you need to do, and be done. You don't have to go through the analysis paralysis of choosing all your software, buying it, and hoping it's the right choice.
THE MAGIC WORDS ARE SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE
I've already bought the damn iPhone and I'm locked into a two-year contract. So now my choices are to just live with a policy that is quite simply insanely stupid, or cough up a bunch of cash to get out of the contract... which is doubly bad, because in a lot of ways the iPhone is a great device. It's just frustrating because it could be nearly perfect if Apple wasn't being so ham-handed about their management of it.
Iboob being allowed back on would probably see iphone sales soar _
Now that apps for the Iphone are ubiquitious, including ones not blessed by Apple, and given Apple has milked the last ounce of profit from the acknowledged ones, it is time to increase Iphone sales by allowing everyone to develop applications for it. A truly great marketing strategy. Leslie
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada