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Apple Bans RSS Reader Due To Bad Word In Feed Link
btempleton writes "It all started when I prepared yet another Downfall subtitle parody. In this one, Hitler is the studio head, upset at all the Downfall parodies, and he wants to do DMCA takedowns on them all. (If you're a DMCA/DRM fighting Slashdotter, you'll like it.) The EFF, which I chair, blogged it on Deeplinks, and hilarity ensued. That weekend, Exact Magic, an iPhone developer, had submitted a special RSS reader app to display EFF news on the iPhone. Apple's iPhone app store evaluators looked at the RSS reader, read the feed it pointed to, and then played the linked-to video. They saw the F-word flash in the subtitles of the video, and then rejected the RSS-reading tool from the App Store. We're up to several levels of meta here — Apple has banned an app over a parody about banning, and is now parodying itself. Bonus: TFA also has the story of just how hard it is to be fully legal in obtaining the famous clip for parody."
I'm an Apple fanboy and even I'm sick of this.
If they're not careful, pretty soon the PSP Go App Store is going to be the one making all the money. Hey Sony, PSPhone in the works?
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
... I can think of two possibilities here.
1. Someone high up in the App Store hierarchy is completely batshit insane. They're a fundie wacko, or they're deathly afraid of the Think Of The Chiiildren wackos, or something like that. I really just can't believe that the orders to ban anything that can get dirty words from anywhere on the internet came down from upper management; they can't be that ignorant. So it's someone on a personal crusade who has just enough pull to make it work.
2. Apple basically wants to own every internet-enabled app on the iPhone, and they're using these dumb excuses to get rid of any competition. Sooner or later, they think, everything you do on the iPhone that isn't strictly local will go through an app bearing the Apple logo.
Either way, it's a dumb move. I'm one of those irritating smug Mac users everyone loves to whine about. The last five computers I've bought have been Macs, and the next five probably will be as well. Whenever anyone asks me about what to do with their malware-ridden PCs, I say, "get a Mac." And I was seriously considering getting an iPhone to go with my iPod and iEverythingElse ... but I'm not going to even think about it until Apple fixes whatever the hell is going on with the App Store. I really doubt I'm the only one.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
.. I am actually happy that Microsoft dominates the market over Apple. Microsoft is bad enough, but Apple is a control-freak of a company :/
Of course, when the year of linux-on-the-desktop-comes, it will all be better. Right?
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
Apple tries to suppress something it doesn't like, in a way sure to show everyone what a bunch of pricks they are, and yet no one will do a thing about it. News at 11.
Fuck apple!
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
Or in this case, sees the swear word if they watch the Hitler video.
Though, another possible explanation is that whoever review the app hates either the EFF or the Downfall subtitle meme.
Doesn't iTunes sell songs that have cuss words in them?
Seems a little hypocritical. Apple will sell songs with cuss words for money, but won't let free apps with cuss words be put on their app store? (I am assuming the RSS feed app was free)
note: I am not an iPhone user, I don't know how all that works, just guessing here
There's slightly more to it than that:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BcdY_wSklo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyNmGHpL11Q
How we know is more important than what we know.
I managed to avoid the whole Apple experience; never bought an iPod, never bought a song from iTunes, never had any desire to get an iPhone. I'm feeling a bit relieved. The whole thing feels like a trap. If I had a thousand bucks tied up in all this interconnected web of apps, platforms, and media, with it's seemingly ever-constricting chains, I'd be pretty irritated.
Lesson I've learned? Always buy IP-violating, unregulated, cheap Chinese knockoffs.
How did I not know about these?
Thank you a thousand times over.
No, it's subtitle advertising.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
"We might as well all become communists... Like Stallman!"
ROFLMAO!
... but with the employees who are doing the reviews. It really seems that some of these reviewers are your "average Joe" user, and may not actually be the most computer-literate users out there.
Time after time, we have seen apps rejected for content that the app simply links to or obtains from the Internet, and it appears that the reviewers do not understand this... they seem to believe that the "inappropriate content" that they are obtaining is actually an inherent part of the application, and therefore reject it.
As has been stated before, I also think that Apple simply puts forth base guidelines for the reviewers to follow, and leaves it up to their discretionary tastes beyond that. At some point, someone higher up at Apple needs to take accountability for this and ensure that the process is redefined, across the board. And it would be in Apple's best interest for that to happen sooner than later, or they will soon find that other solutions will be much more attractive to developers because everyone else has their act together.
Who cares if someone says/hears a swear word, really? It surely doesn't hurt anyone, unless they've been trained to be offended by them.
Well, a lot of people HAVE been trained to be offended by them.
It's time to realize that swearing is only "bad" due to religious baggage, nothing else.
True, although I'd say it's cultural baggage that was influenced by religion. The crucial point is that swearing is also only "good" due to that baggage. If nobody cared about a particular swear word, it would soon fall out of favor for something that would be more offensive.
In other words, if there was no taboo against saying 'fuck', there would be no reason for Hitler to be saying 'fuck' in the first place. (Except maybe to his dear wife.)
I suppose this could all be fixed by having more than one app reviewer look at each app before approval/denial. That could raise costs a little but at the same time apple faces a bigger risk should any single employee approve something truly objectionable. I can't imagine 2 random apple app reviewers would both find these silly reasons to reject apps, so it seems to me the easiest solution to have multiple internal reviewers, I can't believe they don't do this already...
Just get a Blackberry.
... whose eyes sort of glossed over on reading the summary? It reads like something you'd expect some valley girl to be gossiping about over the phone on a teen drama programme.
In other words, if there was no taboo against saying 'fuck', there would be no reason for Hitler to be saying 'fuck' in the first place. (Except maybe to his dear wife.)
Would a pissed-off Hitler saying
"My dear Himmler, I am thoroughly bothered by those irksome developments on the eastern front"
sound better to you than
"Fuck those damn Russians" ?
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
You say, "it would soon fall out of favor for something that would be more offensive." That's technically true, but I think that looking at the way it would happen is revealing. The new word, Belgium, for example, wouldn't be intrinsically offensive. Some words were created offensive because somebody wanted a word that was "filthy." Consider fornication versus fucking or feces versus shit.
Some other words are offensive because of religious objections, but in fairness, the ideas behind the words wouldn't exist if it weren't for religion. Consider, for example, "God damn it." You hear it often enough that you don't think about it, but it's a curse. The speaker is asking God to condemn the object of his wrath. It's become rather commonplace and nobody really thinks about that meaning anymore, but consider how offended you'd be if somebody said it and actually meant it. That's some pretty bitter hatred!
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
I have an iMac and they don't control what you do on OS X at all. I wouldn't buy an iPhone, etc. seeing all the problems they are causing there though.
Publish all your contents under a license that says "you are not allowed to read/view/listen to this for purposes of reviewing or censorship", then sue their ass off when they do censor it. That would put the DMCA to good use, for once.
loop_point:
Apple rejects an app for stupid reasons.
This will spread across the web.
Apple will looks bad.
Apple will "reconsider" and accept the app.
Lots of people will completely miss the point and think it's all okay.
Apple will then reject another app for stupid reasons.
goto loop_point;
If Apple didn't feel the need to control absolutely everything that goes on on the iPhone with its iron fist, then there wouldnt be a problem. As long as you try to block apps based on subjective criteria like 'obscenity', you will have reviewers that will mis-classify them, whether they're average joes, or experienced, technically-minded people who just happen to be prudes.
The solution is to stop trying to babysit your customers, and let them make up their own minds about what to run on their iPhones. If you're a parent worried about your kids being exposed to "bad stuff", then take a more active interest in what they're looking at and who they're talking to, instead of leaving the parenting up to some random company that you can shout at later if your kids turn into hooligans.
Except if Apple stopped reviewing apps, someone could write a better app than theirs and sell it cheaper, or, someone could write an app that unlocks some retarded network-restricted feature that the network paid Apple a huge chunk of money to block. So at the end of the day, Apple is crippling the products they sell to their customers, in order to make more money from them.
Sure it's capitalism, but it's definitely entirely Apple's fault, not the dumb reviewer that mistakenly blocked the app. I own an ipod, I may buy a macbook at some point in my life, but I'll never buy an iphone while Apple dictates what I can and cannot do with it. If Apple wants to keep all the apps on the istore "clean" then that's fine, but they should then allow rejected apps to be installed anyways from the vendors site or whatever. But by controlling every aspect of the iphone, they deserve every last bit of criticism they get for it.
Apple introduces special i-sunglasses that go completely opaque when near a beach, in case there are any topless women around (not sold in Europe).
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Or Steve Jobs will lose his temper ... turtle necks are the new uniforms. Apples the new swastikas ... want proof: http://www.apfelfront.de/propaganda.html
Quit normal to be banned from using the wrong words. I experience it again and again. http://www.lust4asia.com/ http://www.spunkjunks.com/
And every one of those fucking idiots uses the word fuck on a fucking hourly basis and the hypocritical fucks can't stand to see the word fuck in a fucking RSS feed?
FUCK 'EM IF THEY CAN'T TAKE A FUCKING JOKE!
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Why do people seem to be willing to accept abusive behaviour from technology companies that they would not accept from any other provider of goods or services?
I got tired of being ignored, and even antagonized, by Apple when it came to the iPod. So I sold mine on Ebay and bought something that works with Linux without having to wait for somebody to crack the asinine encryption the controls freaks at Apple insist in throwing at us,
Honestly, there are many music managers out there, why give Apple the satisfaction of counting one more download?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Apple is pushing this as a way for companies to invest in some software effort and gain some practical results, but how can you expect a company to commit resources to developing an iPhone app if it can be denied for such petty and silly reasons? The best-laid plans of an entire corporation can be wrecked by the petty actions of someone outside of their control? Really not a sound business strategy. Why not just develop for the Google phone where you don't need permission or clearance from anyone?
... but with the employees who are doing the reviews. It really seems that some of these reviewers are your "average Joe" user, and may not actually be the most computer-literate users out there.
Certainly, but their actions can and do effect Apple's reputation. For this reason it is important for their employees to to be trained to do the job right. If their are any doubts about the system, then they should be having two separate people verifying the same application and if differences in opinion come up, then a flag should be raised.
The problem here is we have one vendor being the gateway yo everything on the platform. We are seeing this big time with Apple, but we also forget that this is not a new business model, especially when you consider how games consoles have the same process in place. It does not make it right, but it isn't new. There is a catch in being the only vendor, since you might want to sell just about anything, but when the wares that are sold through you can impact your reputation you have to pay attention.
The only way to avoid this issue is to either chooses a smart phone which doesn't suffer from this or jail break you iPhone. There are other possibilities, but these are the ones I want to mention.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
This was only an example RSS feed shipped with the app for checking, and I presume that the actual app would have been empty of pre-installed feeds. The reviewer had no way of knowing that though.
A feed reader isn't exactly a kid-friendly app, so this is a "whoopsie" along the same kind of lines as, say, an adult-targeted podcast about fishing or video games saying "f*ck" and then forgetting to set the "explicit" flat. A technical slipup, nowhere near as bad as accidentally putting porn links on an XO.
I don't blame apple for the reaction though. It was a little dumb not to take 2 seconds to submit the app with a known-inoffensive feed like disney.com (or for brownie points, apple's own news feed :) )
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
The new word, Belgium, for example, wouldn't be intrinsically offensive.
hehe.. ya know, in France, Belgium is a perfectly good swear word. No patriotic french man wants to think about Belgium so you yell it at him is an affront.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Nope. They'd love that word.
It's parents wringing their hands at the thought their 5th grader might see it and be corrupted. It's like that twilight zone episode, something like (horribly paraphrased) "Oh yeah? Well, when *I* was a kid, Chestnut Street was THE lion's roar, yesirree!!!". (He later finds out, he was making it up, because he used to get his a$$ kicked.)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
They have to program it, you know. If you want to see it grouped by songs based on last radio airplay or lyrics with rude words in, then you're SOL, aren't you.
And if you ever play your music via something that ISN'T that application, how will your app know you listened to that song yesterday?
Now, your filesystem could, like, have a link based just on rating, last play time can be from the "atime" property and you can just order by time all files in your "links_four_stars_rating/* links_five_stars_rating/*" and get the same thing. Best of all, you can do that in ANY APPLICATION!!!
great, now my penis got blisters from all the burns all over it....
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
People young enough to be offended by things like this shouldnt be carrying Cellphones.
I would give everything i own for a little bit more.
If it weren't for such news, I would believe that NOBODY in the entire u.s.a. EVER had used the word "fuck"...
Making kids believe this word didn't exist seems to be the life-task for too many people there... you even feel pressured not to use it in online discussions although everyone uses it all the time in offline discussions...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Just dont buy next iF!@k. This iDUDEs finally understand (form their own ads) that fat boy in glasses and suit makes more money then hipster in jeans.
it's not quite clear cut in this case. If they rejected general purpose RSS reader it would be atrocious. But they didn't. They rejected special purpose RSS reader that is used to view content that contains "obscene" words/content (what ever that is).
It would be the same as if I modified Firefox code and made "porn" browser that knows all about juicy links only.
Now, we could argue about where does one draw the line, but that's something else completely that most people here are not discussing.
iPhone is used by a lot of kids and I don't know if app store has any kind of rating and parental controls of what can be installed on the iPhone based on the age of the owner (from the device itself).
So, Apple has decided to do the policing themselves, which is really a thankless job, and extremely error prone as we have seen time and time again.
I'm sure there is a better solution to this problem, that would not be too hard to implement.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Some words were created offensive because somebody wanted a word that was "filthy." Consider [...] or feces versus shit.
Yes, those protoindoeuropeans creating the word "skheid-" for "to seperate" probably did it to have a filthy word. I'm sure that was their reason. Unless you mean that "feces" was created to be filthy, which is just as wrong.
Consider, for example, "God damn it." You hear it often enough that you don't think about it, but it's a curse. The speaker is asking God to condemn the object of his wrath. It's become rather commonplace and nobody really thinks about that meaning anymore, but consider how offended you'd be if somebody said it and actually meant it.
Offended because somebody asked their imaginary friend to condemn me? Why would I be offended? I might feel sorry for the poor deluded fellow, but not offended.
I think this is appropriate.
http://daringfireball.net/2009/05/diary_of_an_app_store_reviewer
There ARE other options out there.
Why do people buy iPhones? If you have one... you paid for that piece of equipment. It's yours. It belongs to you. And someone else gets to dictate what you install on it? I would have thought most Slashdot readers would be totally against something like that and yet so many seem to be Apple fanboys. I just don't get it!
It was from a rather famous advert in the 1980s, and the quote was supposed to represent an evil dictatorship that needed to be smashed so that people could be free. The company spouting this anti-totalitarian philosophy?
Apple (source)
Times change.
Eric Baird
They did not ban it because of the f-bomb. They banned it because the video sucked. It barely makes sense and it is not funny at all. Apple isn't worried so much about family values as they are about good taste.
Apple is becoming like the CCP (that's the Chinese PRC gov't for the great uneducated), with the App Store like the Great Firewall. Both seem to be run rather arbitrarily and reactionary. While Apple has some nice hardware and software, their practices and the drooling fanboys completely turn me cold. I'd rather buy something, anything, else even if it has less functionality overall.
No there's not really more to it; that lecture is just listing manifestations of the same stupidity.
Does anyone else feel that the cast of Downfall were ROBBED when denied their Oscar?
In the 1930s Hitler actually sued a US senator (Alan Cranston) for copyright infringement, for distributing copies of "Mein Kampf" he had printed, to warn the US about Hitler's intentions. Hitler won that one.
You are being forced to use an all Apple technology and you don't feel trapped.
You may not like Linux in the desktop, some of us use it for other reasons that go beyond aesthetics (usability is a non issue, usability is a relative term, there is not such a thing as an objectively user friendly system).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Come now, lets all be fair, it is commendable that Apple are hiring mentally diseased retarded people! They need jobs too!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Bottom line, Apple has opened up the iPhone enough that people can build their own software for it with a model that protects the vast majority from malicious code.
Apple had already demonstrated that ability with Mac OS X, and later versions of Mac OS (once they disabled autorun). Microsoft demonstrated that with MS-DOS. Most people were at no risk from malicious code because there was no mechanism for automatically installing or executing untrusted content in the OS or applications shipped with the OS, and the majority of users never installed untrusted code. In the handheld realm, Palm OS, Symbian, Windows CE, all of these handheld operating systems supported the execution of native code without most people being at risk of running untrusted code.
The problem that you're concerned about is so minor that the digital equivalent of washing your hands after handling biotoxins is enough to keep you safe.
Ya know it's not the first time they (Apple) have done this. SO it would seem that if you are gonna submit a feed reader to Apple, you would point it at a feed that has not profanity in it. It's a configurable parameter after all.
This is not news it's stupidity admitted in public. I'd be embarrassed to admit publicly I did something this stupid.
Why bother
But that's the point here. Hitler is screaming and angry. Of course he would be expected to be using strong words there. While we think of Hitler as the greatest villain of the modern age, strangely, it is still funny for a subtitle to have him say fuck. So it was added. It was appropriate. It was, however, quite rare for the EFF feed, but not impossible. It was not actually in the feed anyway. So Apple was just plain silly, and we have to assume this is happening other times where we don't hear about it. That's worth understanding as we want to understand how different software ecosystems, including walled gardens, work.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
the sight of European topless girls doesn't cause anguish, disgust and general trauma.
Cool, can we have those shown on US television then? ;-)
Damn. It's completely impossible to read the text in the Downfall parodies, when your brain constantly gets hooked on interpreting the German speech. And it's also not funny anymore, because the spoken words make sense... :(
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.