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Apple Censors Consumer Report iPhone4 Discussions
An anonymous reader writes "Apple has done it again. All threads about Consumer Report's iPhone4 non-recommendation are removed or deleted.
If it happened once, maybe you'd say it was a glitch. But what if it happened twice? Three times? Four times, five, six?"
Yeh, when Jobs said his control over every Apple-user's computing was about "freedom from porn", we could have guessed that "porn" was just being dragged up as a convenient excuse.
I don't know, when you see how excited some slashotters get about anti-Apple or anti-Microsoft news it looks like they are about to cream themselves.
It's hard to know if this is censorship or if they just violated the terms of service and hatebois are flying off the handle. There are still lots of posts about the consumer reports unrecommendation on discussions.apple.com:
http://discussions.apple.com/search.jspa?search=Go&q=consumer+reports
Still, if it's true it wouldn't be the first time Apple flew off the handle with the censorship (remember the Ulysses app flap?).
Why would it not be defensible? It's their forum on their website. They moderate it however they want. Aren't we in a free world or is the "free" only refers to customers, not to vendors?
I mean, if the product is crap, get it back, get a refund and be done with it! Why all the fuss?
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Try it some time. I picketed a computer store that took a $300 deposit on a $3,000 computer, with a promised delivery date, missed the date, then admitted they couldn't deliver it and wanted to make substitutions, and wouldn't refund the money. I handed out flyers to every customer who walked in the door. They called the cops. I told the cops I was exercising my constitutional right to free speech and wasn't impeding people from entering or exiting. They called their supervisor - who turned out to have had a similar bad experience with that store. Got the refund within the hour.
Moral of the story - don't treat your customers like filth and they won't have cause to display YOUR filth in front of your store.
human spammers. when spambots are ineffective, you start paying people to spam for you (the chinese government does it for instance; also, I assume all parties do it before elections).
and yes, someone please mod "studyabroaduniversit" down, and delete their account too.
and you should be appalled.
new sig
They want a cool, sharp, designed world where everything is taken care of, by the caring giant that is Steve Jobs. He cares. He makes the world a better place. You don't have to worry about it.
Didn't someone write a book about that?
Indeed. They wrote a series of books.
Naturally, as soon as I read the Slashdot summary, I read the original at TUAW. The TUAW posting was as represented by the Slashdot summary: Apple is said to have killed all mention of the CR article in its forums. Being an Apple support forum member, I logged in. Yes, the particular posts were indeed labelled "you do not have permission...". EVIL, I thought. But then I poked around -- there are massive threads discussing the antenna in the Apple Support Forum, many dumping vile on the antenna engineering. So what was so offensive to Apple in the handful of posts that they did censor? TUAW helpfully pointed out that Bing had cached the offensive posts. Well, let's have a look there. The deleted posts were less about the antenna issue, and more about the quality and accuracy of CR testing. Expressed in highly emotional fan-boy terms. It would seem that Apple has not touched the real ongoing discussions of the antenna issue, but just taken down the threads that strayed into CR bashing. BTW, as a CR subscriber, I read the original article there, too. Yes, after giving good marks to most iPhone 4 features, it considers the antenna issue to be a fatal flaw. But it does not discuss the claims that the signal must be marginal in the first place, for the hand grip to make a difference. Nor discusses the possible smokescreen of bar generation algorithms.
-- Perhaps I see less than some, but more than many.
Ass. Censorship is suppressing information you don't want people to see. Coercion is when you make people do what you want against their will. Imprisonment is when you lock up people you don't want to see. They are different words because they are not the same thing.
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors - Plato
Just as freedom of speech protects the content on the speech but not the means of delivery (eg. throwing a brick with a message into a window is not protected speech), censorship is removing speech because of the content and not because of the means of delivery. For example:
-slashdot.org closing itself down would not be censorship, since the removal is done because hosting is getting too expensive, something which is inherent in the act of posting messages on the internet.
-You cleaning your car is not censorship - your intent is to remove the paint, not the message (you'd still do it if someone wrote something neutral, eg. the word "banana", on your car). This is more murky than the previous example, since having "motherf*cker" on your car is more unpleasant than "banana" but it's leaning more on the "not censorship" side.
-Apple removing all posts about a specific topic is censorship - it's about the content.
This is my definition, not the Webster dictionary one, so feel free to disagree.
In the Wiki article you cited:
what would you do if you were Apple?
Remind myself that at one time, Apple was viewed as liberators from companies who were trying to subvert their users? Remind myself that hackers used to view Apple as a friend who was ending the age of begging for computer time? Remind myself of the days when customers were not viewed as sheep whose wallets need fleecing, and when Apple employees were not tasked with finding ever more effective ways to extract money from the customers?
Maybe I would take notice that the Free Software Foundation mentions "Apple" before "Microsoft" when describing threats to user freedom. Perhaps I would take a moment to notice that Apple's own attempt at building a hacker community failed miserably because of the level of control that Apple insisted on. If Apple has to censor its forums to maintain its image, they are in a very precarious position.
Palm trees and 8
I RTFBingCache of the removed posts, and there was nothing useful there. Yes, it pointed to the consumer reports article, but after that there was nothing but trolling.
This is SOP for Apple.
When Airport Express units started dropping like flies, all reports about the problem were deleted from their forums.
They don't like criticism of their products, true or not.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
The question is, do you read Slashdot? http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/10/07/12/225227/Consumer-Reports-Cant-Recommend-iPhone-4