Apple Lifts Ban On the Word "Jailbreak"

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Apple Lifts Ban On the Word "Jailbreak"

Posted by timothy on Sunday May 20, 2012 @04:33AM from the sweet-of-them dept.

Gunkerty Jeb writes "After banning the word 'jailbreak' from its app store and music library, Apple [Friday] reversed course and again permits the term — slang for hacking into a device to download unauthorized content — to appear on iTunes and its App Store. On Thursday bloggers noticed Apple had censored the word, using the Thin Lizzy album 'Jailbreak' as an example. For awhile, the title was listed as 'J******k' in Apple's music library, at least its U.S. version. In other instances, digital content continued to bear the full name Jailbreak."

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Apple... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-05-20 04:35 · Score: 2, Insightful

What a ridiculous and petty company. The very antithesis of America. It has more in common with Stalinist Russia.
1. Re:Apple... by Severus+Snape · 2012-05-20 04:40 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  Yes, because the American government is so lovely.
2. Re:Apple... by cupantae · 2012-05-20 05:04 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  I'm not criticising American ideals or the American people, but this kind of behaviour is made possible by unregulated free-market capitalism. America is not at that extreme, but it is surely closer to it than any other country.
  Since Stalinist Russia was all about centralisation, the very fact that Apple is a private company means it has little in common with it.
  Pre-empting moderators:
  Off-topic: I was responding to this post, which is itself a response to the story.
  Troll/Flamebait: I don't think anyone here should be defending Apple in this case. This is a very real and transparent attempt to limit the freedoms of their users which conflict with their own financial interests.
  
  --
  --
3. Re:Apple... by bky1701 · 2012-05-20 06:02 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  You're probably getting modded offtopic because you did not clearly link Apple to this bit:
  
  "I'm not criticising American ideals or the American people, but this kind of behaviour is made possible by unregulated free-market capitalism. America is not at that extreme, but it is surely closer to it than any other country. Since Stalinist Russia was all about centralisation, the very fact that Apple is a private company means it has little in common with it."
  
  So allow me: Apple is a perfect example of what unregulated free markets result in. All those liberarians who want to vote with your feet... look at how many people are quite happy to take censorship and control far out-stepping the federal government, because of a shiny product. Apple has the very real potential of eventually reaching the critical mass of Microsoft, where you are FORCED to do business with them, or be unable to use digital devices. If that happens, then sorry, I'd rather the government than Apple. Corporations do not value your freedom, and for the most part, neither do their consumers; that's why we have regulations and anti-monopoly laws.
  
  --
  Great Intellect...
4. Re:Apple... by freeweaver · 2012-05-20 06:11 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  "I'm not criticising American ideals or the American people, but this kind of behaviour is made possible by unregulated free-market capitalism."
  No my friend its not. I seriously doubt *anyone* wishes to be told what they can or can't say or do. And considering a true free market is regulated by peoples wishes, and their wishes are to not be censored, you'd be *very* hard pushed to suggest this is a result of a free market.
  What we have now is nothing but heavily regulated, deeply dysfunctional *corporatism*.
5. Re:Apple... by Culture20 · 2012-05-20 06:15 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  I'm not criticising American ideals or the American people, but this kind of behaviour is made possible by unregulated free-market capitalism.
  Nope. It's made possible by regulated near-free-market capitalism and worse. If it were a truly unregulated free-market, there wouldn't be things like IP that Apple could use to prevent competitors from cloning Apple hardware and software and selling at a lower price or adopting a more free (as in speech) version of iTunes service. Only the power of law keeps the competitors at bay.
6. Re:Apple... by 0123456 · 2012-05-20 07:02 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  So allow me: Apple is a perfect example of what unregulated free markets result in.
  Yeah, because copyrights, patents and the other sticks that Apple uses to beat the competition are products of an 'unregulated free market'.
  Apple is a perfect example of what government-mandated monopolies result in.
7. Re:Apple... by geminidomino · 2012-05-20 07:52 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Most people confuse Libertarians with neo cons. In reality, corpratisim is the exact thing Libertarians are against.
  
  In all fairness, you should probably tell the self-styled "Libertarians" that, first. Judging by the pro-corporate dribble most of them echo incessantly, they missed the memo.
8. Re:Apple... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-05-20 08:15 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  You're probably getting modded offtopic because you did not clearly link Apple to this bit:
  "I'm not criticising American ideals or the American people, but this kind of behaviour is made possible by unregulated free-market capitalism. America is not at that extreme, but it is surely closer to it than any other country. Since Stalinist Russia was all about centralisation, the very fact that Apple is a private company means it has little in common with it."
  So allow me: Apple is a perfect example of what unregulated free markets result in. All those liberarians who want to vote with your feet... look at how many people are quite happy to take censorship and control far out-stepping the federal government, because of a shiny product. Apple has the very real potential of eventually reaching the critical mass of Microsoft, where you are FORCED to do business with them, or be unable to use digital devices. If that happens, then sorry, I'd rather the government than Apple. Corporations do not value your freedom, and for the most part, neither do their consumers; that's why we have regulations and anti-monopoly laws.
  The problem is that, in the US (as well as many other countries), the government is owned by the corporations.
  Until the election process is separated from the influence of large campaign donors, I don't see any possibility of change.
  --
  dk
9. Re:Apple... by drkstr1 · 2012-05-20 08:27 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  In all fairness, you should probably tell the self-styled "Libertarians" that, first. Judging by the pro-corporate dribble most of them echo incessantly, they missed the memo.
  Funny thing is, the only pro-corporate dribble I hear is from others, talking about the "views" of Libertarians. I personally have never met a Libertarian that was pro-corpratisim. Please do not confuse us for the neo-cons. They like to borrow our rhetoric, but really they are the antithesis of Libertarian philosophy.
  
  --
  Fanboy Status: Apache Flex, C#, Eclipse, KDE, Pirate Party, Ron Paul, Slackware, Windows 7
10. Re:Apple... by Pf0tzenpfritz · 2012-05-20 10:07 · Score: 2
  
  Exept the fact that Apple does not hold any "government-mandated monopolies". AT&T de facto did. Some defense contractors might (I don't even say they do!) But Apple? "Government mandated monopolies"? I actually hate Apple. They're worse than MS ever were, IMHO. I'd call them a dozen nasty things, but not that one.
  
  --
  Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
11. Re:Apple... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-05-20 10:26 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  No true libertarian is pro corporatism
12. Re:Apple... by bryan1945 · 2012-05-20 13:51 · Score: 2
  
  You should be modded "douchebag" just for the "Pre-empting moderators" bit.
  
  --
  Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Nuspeak by Anonymous Coward · 2012-05-20 04:37 · Score: 4, Informative

[jailbreak] - slang for hacking into a device to download unauthorized content
WTF?
1. Re:Nuspeak by nurb432 · 2012-05-20 05:33 · Score: 2
  
  Well, the media has to continue to play the game as good little followers, demonizing anyone that doesn't play by the 'rules'.
  Just like hackers are bad.
  *nix is a tool for said hackers
  Copying any file is piracy.
  And of course, god help you if you want to buy software or music not in the 'store'....
  
  --
  ---- Booth was a patriot ----
2. Re:Nuspeak by shutdown+-p+now · 2012-05-20 11:37 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Just like hackers are bad.
  *nix is a tool for said hackers
  OS X is Unix, so...
Hanlon's Razor by BasilBrush · 2012-05-20 04:50 · Score: 2, Funny

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
1. Re:Hanlon's Razor by Anonymous Coward · 2012-05-20 04:57 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Yet discounting malice without even verifying is the height of stupidity.
2. Re:Hanlon's Razor by QuasiSteve · 2012-05-20 05:22 · Score: 2
  
  Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
  Problem is, they are often the indistinguishable.
  Say facebook decides to track their users physical whereabouts and makes them automatically 'like' a profile that is attached to an establishment they entered. People revolt (well, hopefully), and then.. what?
  Was it malice? Well it certainly was intentional. I'm sure they didn't mean any harm, just that people took offense to it.
  Was it stupidity to think that people wouldn't take offense to it? Perhaps, but certainly the implementation wasn't the result of that stupidity. The stupidity there is only tangentially related.
  In this particular case, what would the stupidity be? That the censoring was applied to the wrong item (an album, rather than, say an app that offers jailbreaking)? Because that still smells an awful lot like malice to me.
  The only way it could be actual stupidity is if whoever writes their censorship words list was meant to enter e.g. 'cocksucker' and ended up entering 'jailbreak' instead. A common typo, I'm sure.
3. Re:Hanlon's Razor by hjf · 2012-05-20 06:40 · Score: 2
  
  Sorry, i didn't understand your example. Can you use a car analogy? Thanks.
4. Re:Hanlon's Razor by VortexCortex · 2012-05-20 09:49 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Sorry, i didn't understand your example. Can you use a car analogy? Thanks.
  Let's say you did something the mechanic didn't like, say you had a different mechanic work on your car. The next time he changes your oil, he adds a special oil plug that only he has the tool to remove. Sometime later, you go to change your own oil and you can't, even though you rightfully should be able to so -- That prick is artificially forcing you to come back to him. Now, It COULD have been a mistake, he could have just grabbed the wrong oil plug, but it's highly unlikely attributed to just stupidity -- They had a motive for malice, and had to go out of his way to use a special wrench to install the incorrect plug.
  People "jailbreak" their phones, Indeed, we got a DMCA exemption to do so, and it's legal. Apple doesn't like that so they censor the term making it harder to jail break, and the effect is that more people keep using their service instead of going to another app store. Now, it COULD have been a mistake: Apple could have accidentally entered a term in its censor list, but it's highly unlikely attributed to a stupid accident -- They had a motive for malice, the term censored just happens to be the thing that lets you use someone else's service, and they had to go out of their way to make sure censored terms apply to everything, not just apps in their app store which they already screened for offensive terms...
Re:I wonder how AC/DC weathered this storm. by bhagwad · 2012-05-20 04:50 · Score: 5, Insightful

Nothing wrong with calling them out as jerks in addition to not buying any of their products.
Re:I wonder how AC/DC weathered this storm. by Nerdfest · 2012-05-20 05:03 · Score: 3, Informative

Don't forget telling others why they should vote the same way.
First they want to control your speech by Anonymous Coward · 2012-05-20 05:04 · Score: 5, Insightful

First they want to tell you what you can and cannot say. Then they want to tell you what you can and cannot do. Then they will want to tell you what you can and cannot think.
1. Re:First they want to control your speech by cultiv8 · 2012-05-20 05:45 · Score: 2
  
  and then, profit!
  
  --
  sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
2. Re:First they want to control your speech by bky1701 · 2012-05-20 05:56 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  "First they want to tell you what you can and cannot say. Then they want to tell you what you can and cannot do. Then they will want to tell you what you can and cannot think."
  
  You realize this is Apple we're talking about, right? I think they followed that list exactly in reverse;
  
  > Reality distortion field, army of fanboys ready to stand up for the stupidest decisions (I am still amazed at the instant turnover that was the end to the years of "PowerPC is better!" when Apple moved to iX86), heavy marketing to make you believe it is something it isn't.
  
  > Walled garden that goes almost totally unquestioned by users. An unfortunate tendency for Apple to offer "official" (and mangled) versions of open source libraries, making use of the real ones more difficult. Heavily locked down hardware, even on desktops, compared to non-Apple computers.
  
  > THEN censorship like this.
  
  I am not really sure what they hoped to gain, making it quite possible this specific case was just a screwup of some middle-manager. However, that does not absolve Apple of their other sins; it simply illustrates how much unwarranted power Apple wields, with no oversight, over a growing segment of the computing world. Truly frightening.
  
  --
  Great Intellect...
3. Re:First they want to control your speech by jo_ham · 2012-05-20 08:15 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  "First they want to tell you what you can and cannot say. Then they want to tell you what you can and cannot do. Then they will want to tell you what you can and cannot think."
  You realize this is Apple we're talking about, right? I think they followed that list exactly in reverse;
  > Reality distortion field, army of fanboys ready to stand up for the stupidest decisions (I am still amazed at the instant turnover that was the end to the years of "PowerPC is better!" when Apple moved to iX86), heavy marketing to make you believe it is something it isn't.
  > Walled garden that goes almost totally unquestioned by users. An unfortunate tendency for Apple to offer "official" (and mangled) versions of open source libraries, making use of the real ones more difficult. Heavily locked down hardware, even on desktops, compared to non-Apple computers.
  > THEN censorship like this.
  I am not really sure what they hoped to gain, making it quite possible this specific case was just a screwup of some middle-manager. However, that does not absolve Apple of their other sins; it simply illustrates how much unwarranted power Apple wields, with no oversight, over a growing segment of the computing world. Truly frightening.
  Goodness me. Quite a bit to get to here.
  "PowerPC is better! followed by switch to x86"
  Yes, PowerPC *was* better at the time the commercials ran. They weren't quite as fast as Apple made them out (the Pentium had a snail on it) but at the time PPC did have an advantage. This advantage quickly evaporated, however, to an almost laughable degree - especially regarding memory bandwidth, and the brick wall that IBM ran into with the PPC970. In the meantime, Intel made enormous strides with x86 and left PPC in the dust, so Apple switched. The fact that the facts bore this out meant that people weren't still shouting about how PPC was better - they changed their opinion based on facts. How this is controversial to you is quite perplexing, unless you were expecting their heads to explode because "the Apple mothership" now held a contradictory position to one it had previously expressed.
  Not sure how you can bash Apple or Apple users for that one, given that they did the exact opposite of what most of you haters claim Apple users do (blindly stick to things they a mindless fans of). x86 moves ahead of PPC so much that Apple went though a potentially painful total architecture switch - a non-trivial thing to do.
  "Heavily locked down hardware, even on desktops"
  Mhhmmm. People often trot this one out alongside the utterly diametrically opposed argument that Macs are just standard PC parts in a nice case. It's not really possible for both to be true. For the record, it's much closer to the latter.
  I'd also question "heavily locked down" when all of the various pieces are pretty standard - you can swap out pretty much all of the parts as you need to on most of their machines. They switched from fixed CPUs and GPUs on the iMac to socketed whitebox Intel CPUs (you can buy an i5 or i7 off newegg and drop it in), and MXM 3.0 for the GPU (you can buy an MXM graphics card and slot it in, although they are rare and expensive). RAM is standard, hard drives are standard, optical drives are standard, the logic board uses PCIe, USB, SATA, etc.
  Honestly, other than the custom firmware they had on iMac hard drives to be able to read the temperature (that was factory designed to be switched back to "standard" SATA behaviour with a jumper setting if a non-Apple drive was installed), I'm having a hard time seeing how "heavily locked down" applies? Maybe if you gave me some examples?
  "Official "mangled' versions of OS libraries"
  Examples?
4. Re:First they want to control your speech by jo_ham · 2012-05-20 09:31 · Score: 2
  
  My goodness, so much hate.
  "One button shitmouse." Hah. I can almost ignore anything you just said, since it's clearly not based on facts, but basing my opinion on one clearly hilariously outdated piece of misinformation would be wrong. You're also ignoring all of the salient points about my PPC vs x86 argument, but whatever; it did contain some quite long words.
  You question my assertion that "heavily locked down" applies to the hardware that Apple sells, then claim this article is about them banning the word jailbreak (hint: they didn't, they had a word censor, which is a different thing, but it was incorrectly applied in the store - a problem that was fixed on the same day it arose, not in response to negative feedback as the summary claims). They sell iOS devices that are locked down. We all know this. I did not question that. I questioned the original commenter's assertion "even on desktops" (go check, it's right there, I'll wait), and the proceeded to give a selection of arguments as to why that statement was incorrect.
  I assume that you've simply failed to understand my post or that you lack reading comprehension. I suspect that you merely skimmed my post and then rushed to post a frothing reply designed to "own" me or something. I assume that's what you kids do on the internet, right? You should probably look at the points I am addressing before you come steaming in so that you don't look quite so silly.
  Also, the word is "taboo", although you did use it correctly. I assume it's a word you've heard frequently but not seen written out very often.
What. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-05-20 05:05 · Score: 4, Interesting

>slang for hacking into a device to download unauthorized content
What.
1. Re:What. by bky1701 · 2012-05-20 05:57 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  The reality distortion field works on words, too.
  
  --
  Great Intellect...
Re:This had so much potential... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-05-20 05:06 · Score: 4, Funny

They should have called it a common word, like "Orange".
Yeah, but that would've made comparisons difficult.
Re:This had so much potential... by Sulphur · 2012-05-20 05:41 · Score: 3, Funny

They should have called it a common word, like "Orange".
Yeah, but that would've made comparisons difficult.
True.
Also there was an Orange computer at one time. They got peeled and squeezed out of business though.
Re:Pathetic.. by jo_ham · 2012-05-20 05:44 · Score: 2

I'm not sure that it was a case of listening to their customers so much as realising the mistake and reversing it. I saw this story a couple of days ago, and Apple had fixed it on the same day it was reported. I think it was a case of automated censorship gone awry. Whether they have totally eliminated the censorship or merely confined it back to the original box it was meant to operate in (the App Store one presumes), is another thing entirely.
Either way, censoring words really doesn't get you very far.
Why would they uncensor a word like Jailbreak? by idbeholda · 2012-05-20 08:23 · Score: 2

Won't someone please think of the children?