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Apple Blocks Lawrence Lessig's Comment On iOS 7 Wi-Fi Glitch
destinyland writes "A glitch in iOS7 has cost "a significant number" of Apple users their Wi-Fi access, according to ZDNet. But they also report that Apple is now censoring posts in their "Apple Support Communities" forums where users suggest possible responses to their loss of WiFi capabilities (including exercising their product warranty en masse). "We understand the desire to share experiences in your topic, 'Re: wifi greyed out after update to ios7,'" read one warning sent to Lawrence Lessig, "but because these posts are not allowed on our forums, we have removed it." Lessig — who co-founded Creative Commons (and was a board member of the Free Software Foundation) has been documenting the ongoing "comments slaughter" on his Twitter feed, drawing attention to what he says is the Borg-like behavior of Apple as a corporation. Lessig "is now part of an angry mob in Apple's forums who upgraded to iOS 7 and lost Wi-Fi connectivity," ZDNet notes, adding that as of this morning their reporter has been unable to obtain an official response from Apple."
Don't you Slashdorks get bored of this?
Walled garden is walled.
What did you expect?
(EVE Online oblig: Damage Control II works in PvP!!11one)
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Apple is really strict about not letting people give out certain kinds of technical advice or speculation on their support forums, on the not-unreasonable basis that things posted there have Apple's tacit approval. When I hung out on Nokia's support boards it was similar.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
The first post has been removed by Apple
Inquiring minds want to know.
I just upgraded my iPhone 4S from iOS 6 to 7, and I haven't experienced any issues with my WLAN connections. I am sure that this whole posting is about the comment censorship, but this doesn't highlight which Apple products are supposedly being disrupted.
Kind of like coming around here and commenting anything at all that reflects poorly on the chocolate Jesus or the extremist socialist Democrat party.
Feh.
.
I, for one, applaud Apple's efforts to keep the Apple support forums all singing praises for Apple and its products. When I visit those forums, I do not want to see critique of Apple and its products. I want my visit to be positive and cheerful.
I am so happy that Apple is providing such a wholesome environment for me to visit and discuss Apple's products.
It's funny that they'd censor the iOS7 forums given the nasty language bandied about in the iWork forums about the evisceration of the office suite. I suppose that they don't care about iWork (it certainly shows).
If you buy an iPhone, you have already given up most of your freedoms (regarding your phone), so what's the point bitching about it afterwards.
Please mod this "+1 Insightful Troll" -- oh wait, this category doesn't exist. :O
Maybe their wi-fi doesn't work.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
I've read about glitches when one does an update, so I wonder if the Wi-Fi problem would go away if someone backed up their device (would have to be dumped to a computer with iTunes), did an erase all, then followed it up by a DFU restore. This method pretty much ensures that all data stored on the device is erased. Then the device can be restored, apps/music reinstalled, and things back to normal.
This also stems from a general IT lesson I learned. If possible, when it comes to OS upgrading time with major number versions [1], one is best off rebuilding a server from scratch than updating it, due to cruft left behind from the previous OS, and other inconsistencies which might cause issues later on. Sometimes this isn't possible, other times, it is easily done.
[1]: The cautious exception are RPM based Linux distros which are really just stacks of filesets snapshotted and regression tested at a certain point in time. Those, I can just increment the version number, run yum upgrade, and be done with it, since it is more of a large update than a major version upgrade. Even with these, it doesn't hurt to install from scratch since it seems that RPM databases tend to get corrupted over time.
IOS7 == Win8 == UNITY == BARF
Applies to the guy who owns the press.
Apples behavior is pretty much expected, I doubt few if any companies would ever let people use their resources to organize action against them. It seems Lessig is going a little over the top in his reaction to this. It can hardly come as a shock to him.
are you seriously braindead to buy Apple products with your world view AND think it will work differently?
When every story on slashdot was "Microsoft sucks" and every comment was "If only Apple could get enough momentum to crush Microsoft."
Oh how the times have changed... different companies, same bitches. You people are never happy. LOL.
I, for one, welcome my new Apple Overlords.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
Especially if you write that everyone should return their phones.
Use another forum to get your word out Lessig. You know how this game is played.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
all that matters is that I look cool when I hold it.
all that matters is that I look cool when I hold it.
I think Samsung took all the cool. Although the wind of coolness is definitely with LG right now.
I'm pretty serious with that statement. Steve Jobs would have never let that update out without testing it on every device model. He also would have probably quashed the problems within a couple days by releasing an official statement with an official "fix" to at least rollback the device to an older version (i.e. would have removed the version control checks from the updater). And then the majority of the angry mob would have calmed down since they have a working phone again, and given them time to fix the real problem in the new version.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Buy a new iPhone........
I wanted to like apple, but after 3 broken cables, not being able to use better cables from Belkin but not apple licensed, I give up. iOS7 made my hotspot useless and 80 percent not being able to connect to it, battery life went to charging three times daily. No thanks.
When every story on slashdot was "Microsoft sucks" and every comment was "If only Apple could get enough momentum to crush Microsoft."
What days you are referring to? Microsoft still produces second quality software to the competition, but is a monopoly. Something they still are in the Legacy Desktop Software. Everybody was aware that Apple were/is going nowhere. There model simply does not allow it. They bundle their OS with commodity hardware and double the price...make lots of money, "crush"(sic) not so much.
Most here have lamented the dull duopoly(I still do). Which hasn't changed. The fact that Apple is now an electronics company is proof of the fact.
the number5. Th>e
at broken shiny things I wodner if they would do the same against NSA supplied iphones.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Check with Apple if you're holding your iPhone correctly.
Disclosure: I am an Apple fan -- but I absolutely will not defend the practice of purging negative comments from community forums. I think censorship is probably the single most frustrating experience anyone can have in a forum, warranted or not. I speak from experience: I've been censored recently as well -- in an entirely different forum, and for reasons which seemed entirely unreasonable to me. Ironically, I had made the egregious error of trying to help.
In responding to a thread about a bug, I described one software development methodology (scrum, if that matters) to a crowd of discontent gamers in the Steam forum. I then painstakingly crafted a reasoned explanation for why that process necessitates that this particular bug in an older game (Half-Life: Opposing Force, which had been recently ported to both Linux and Mac) simply won't be fixed anytime soon, because the Steam developers are almost certainly entirely wrapped up in the development of Half Life 3. I then went on to speculate (and I suspect this is where I went wrong) that as soon as we see a fix to that bug, we should all be on the lookout for the impending release of HL3. A short time later, that entire thread had suddenly vanished from the Steam forum, with no explanation.
And the problem crops up elsewhere as well; forum admins are frequently overzealous, especially when they see something that they view as a potential slight to their corporate overlords. It's a very unfortunate trend, and as I see it, the only way to avoid being unreasonably censored is to post your comments elsewhere, where -- hopefully -- unbiased management will leave your commentary on controversial matters intact. (Slashdot might qualify as such a haven... I know I haven't been censored here. Yet.)
We looked into this, but couldn't find a way to officially issue iPhones without running afoul of HIPAA/HITECH, GLB, SOX, and FDA regs on security and privacy.
The stock iPhone and Android offerings aren't much better than Blackberries without BES. In the USA, you can't store privileged information on some random other company's servers unless you have a contract with the hosting company that transfers your legal responsibilities, and no telco (or Google, or Apple) is going to take on our legal obligations given the extremely harsh penalties for failure. With a BES server that's no big deal, since you have your own mail storage, etc.
We can issue androids with tuned software that don't let the end-users screw up, but if users want iPhones they have to buy their own and sign a document that says they take personal responsibility for managing any legally privileged information that they can access through their position with the company.
Everybody's happy now. The people who want the company to do the right thing legally, the Apple junkies who have their shiny, the users who have company androids, it's all good. The Apple users grumble about cost but they understand they could have had free androids so the grumbling's just for show.
Come on Mr Lessig with your pedigree I would have peg you as an Android user likely somebody running a custom rom at least.
At times like this, I am reminded that the alternative to fragmentation and forking and all manner of inconsistencies is monoculture. When monoculture works, it works nicely and that's all that most people have in mind when they strive for it. But the other side of that coin? What affects one, generally affects them all.
I've noticed my iPhone switches to 3G when I'm at home, which it never used to do. If I'm in the same room as the AP then it rarely does it, but otherwise it's a bit hit and miss. Thankfully I get a reasonable 3G signal where I live, and I have a pretty good data plan so I've not seen a huge impact. But I am looking forward to Apple fixing this.
Posters are not allowed to attempt to compromise the lingering Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field, Apple is perfect, and perceived issues are figments of your imagination. Please remit all your money to Apple and thank us for the privilege to partake in our excellence. Thank you. :p
I find it annoying apple has time to delete posts like this but almost never actually help people in their support forums. When I bought a new Mac Mini last year, there was a known issue with their shitty HDMI adapter included with the device and Ivy Bridge chip in the unit. Apple did eventually fix it, but their support people denied it's existence while the forms were full of complaints. If they guy would have said "it's a problem and we're working on it" I would have been a happy guy. Instead, I got some bullshit about reinstalling OS X on a brand new computer I had for 2 hours.
I've had wifi problems with Apple TV on and off for years and apple never fixes it. It's no shock their weird in kernel DHCP would freak out right? Apple probably did some new speed hack in iOS 7 and broke that too.
he was made whole (got a 5 instead of the 4s he purchased in July 2013 (a 4s? this year? really?)
and continued to complain (in a non constructive/technical way) despite the fact that he was made whole by his carrier... so if it works for the VAST majority of users, and his problem was resolved by getting new hardware.. why continue?
stopped reading after the first few lines - Lessig is a fucking crybaby.
http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/65338904338/wow-or-from-the-when-apple-became-the-borg-department
There are far too many of us affected for this to be a coincidence or consumer caused problem, I had a 16gb white 4s purchased in July 2013 and wifi was completely greyed out no matter what fixes I was advised to try.
I have been successful in my claim and am now in receipt of a brand new iPhone 5, this was provided to me by the phone shop I signed my O2 contract with last year.
Good luck and persevere
Later, I tried to post a question to the post — basically asking whether Apple indeed scrubbed comments, meaning it was worth it for them to censor the community, just not respond to it — but it wouldn’t post.
Apple has no reason to censor anything, there's lots of complaints on the forums already
And yet they do it. Frequently. Here's a few more examples.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Why would a man like Lawrence Lessig, who obviously values openness and freedom, use a locked down, walled-in garden device?
I have a 2011 Macbook Pro.
This machine has the architechture which involves the Intel CPU with an onboard
GPU which is used for basic graphics and an external AMD Radeon which is used
for more intensive graphics.
The "geniuses" at the Apple Store have tested my computer three times and failed to
reproduce the issues I am having with this machine, which include kernel panics,
bizarre mutations of the on-screen graphics, and outright lockups. So far I have
invested well over 20 hours of my time in calling Applecare reps, visiting the Apple Store
Genius Bar, and driving to and from the Apple store. Apple has refused to install RAM which
is "known good" and let me take the machine home for a few days to use the machine and
see if the faults continue, yet the problems for some reason only occur when I use the machine
for extended periods ( 12 - 14 hours is routine usage ) and so using the machine is the only
way to determine if the machine works properly or not.
Essentially Apple has done everything to make this experience unpleasant, time-consuming,
and thus far there has been no resolution to the machine's problems. Apple has steadfastly refused
to consider that the problems my machine is having are hardware-related, and has instead insisted
on doing not one but two "clean installs" of OS X. After both of these clean installs, the machine has
continued to have problems and thus the clean installs have solved nothing.
I have had many other issues with Apple hardware resolved quickly and easily at the same Apple store,
but I sense there has been a "sea change" in how Apple directs its store employees and Applecare
employees to deal with problems. The company which used to consistently provide me with a customer
service experience which was among the best I have ever experienced has changed, and the experience
they are providing me now is unnecessarily difficult and has worked against solving the problems my Macbook
is having. Of course, those people who have been following Macbook Pro model issues for some time
will be aware that the Macbook Pro which uses software-enabled graphics switching and an AMD or Invidia
graphics processor will be aware that these Macbook Pros are infamous for having problems.
I suppose all of you who hate Apple will laugh at this story.
It seems I will soon be going the ranks of people who used to buy Apple products,
because the practical reality is that Apple stuff costs too much for me to subject myself
to this poor customer service. I can get this kind of idiotic "genius" service most anywhere,
while paying perhaps a third as much as I would pay for a Macbook Pro. I reckon this is
also as good a time as any to ditch the iPhone and all the rest of the nice looking Apple hardware
I have which doesn't actually work as well as I'd like.
.
Or rather it used to.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Oh okay, now that a celebrity is involved I should care more than I did before? I'm glad apple treated him evenhandedly-- just like any other commenter they want to nullify. Is Slashdot now a check-out like celebrity rag for nerds?
Mod this +1
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Apple needs to hire an old priest and a young priest and exorcise the demon spirit of Jobs from the forums!
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Oh wait, http://apple.slashdot.org/story/12/08/07/0250248/how-apple-and-amazon-security-flaws-led-to-mat-honans-identity-theft?sdsrc=rel
Look I hate the "security questions" bit much more than the next guy, but as long as Apple doesn't secure your account with proper two factor authentication you've got to consider that someone could steal your AppleID and change the password.
Of course, if they can do that then they can also change your "security questions" ... which is part of why I hate that model.
I handed out 23 5Cs to my staff a week after it was released. I also updated 10 iPads of various models to iOS 7. I've yet to have anyone complain about WiFi problems either on our work network or in the field on client networks.
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
It's like a microcosm of the country as a whole
I thought the big attraction of iOS 5 (two versions ago) was the ability to backup to iCloud and do further system software upgrades without needing to buy a Mac, buy Windows for your PC, or even buy a PC in the first place.
I've had lots of problems before and after 7.0.3. More than once I have had to reboot to regain sending email (receiving is fine). My 2nd phone, a Blackberry using activesync just like my iPhone, was still sending and receiving email no problem so I know it wasn't something with the server.
Other problems include buggy podcast playing. I've updated the podcast app so I hope it will be more stable.
I also REALLY do not like the way a "hard reset" no longer closes all apps. This is a big deal for businesses where users just aren't going to close all the apps themselves. Come on Apple, what are you doing to us?
If you're stuck on 5 GB/mo cellular or 10 GB/mo satellite Internet, every bit of server-side filtering helps. Not everyone is in a position to buy cable or fiber Internet.
Dr. Lessig has long since moved on from copyright advocacy to researching a fix for the regulatory capture that led to imbalanced copyright laws in the first place.
Yup...
My iPhone 4S and my wife's iPhone 4S both have been upgraded to iOS 7 and have no issue with WIFI at all. Where did they come from?
According the my cult of Apple colluges Apple never delivers any products with bugs and software on Apple devices never crashes. So this wifi not working problem on IOS 7 does not exist thus is heresey and his comments absoulty deserve to be censored. He is lucky he isn't flogged to death in public for his blasphemy. It would serve him right and serve as a reminder to others who speak out of turn.
Well, How can anyone expect anything else from Apple. People that likes Free software and Open Source shouldn't use their products, as again and again Apple screws them.
People spend entirely too much time connected to the internet and not enough time admiring the intrinsic beauty that is the iPhone.
For more than a decade, every time Apple does something unpopular or questionable, there's at least one guy who comes in saying "now if this were Microsoft, you'd all be up in arms."
Taking shots at Apple has been as much a part of Slashdot's history as hot grits and goatse. From back in their belagured days, through the first iMac, through the first iPod, straight on through the post-Jobs era.
Its true that Apple is a walled garden, and also true that Apple fubared the wifi in their new OS, and should have tested it before releasing it. Now they have attempted to bully pulpit their detractors by attempting censorship. Enter out-of-band anger and the "Streisand Effect"(tm). They could have done a mea culpa, stated that they were working on a fix and apologized to users. Instead they go all borg and attempt using sticks and censorship. Oh that will fix things. So now everyone on /. knows, the pitchforks are out and torches are lit Apple has earned full Streisand. Let the rants and dumping begin.
Arguably the most ethical response is to leave the original comment there, but preface it with a note from tech support suggesting that the recommendation is not correct and giving reasons why.
Did they also censor Barbara Streissand's comments? Just kidding, it's such a given to make that joke about Apple, she practically works in their PR department, lol.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5460803 for "How to locally sync an iPhone with OS X Mavericks? iCloud is NOT an option."
Not everyone wants to use the clouds!!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Just because you worked in one department long ago doesn't mean you know what's going on in the others now, or even have much of a grasp of the other industries your corporate overlord was involved in.
The factories at Foxconn and elsewhere who manufacture parts for gadgets like the iPhone "bin" those parts according to levels of failure risk. Apple strong-arms or buys their way into use of the higher-binned parts. That is why many more Mac Pros from 2006 are still humming along than the boxen slapped together for HP, Dell, Sony, and so on for the same year.
I worked at Apple for over five years. I flew to Shanghai and assisted with diagnostics in the factories. I was there. You were wedged in a call center booth collecting hearsay to gripe anonymously about later online. Figures that you'd be doing it here in the forgotten wastelands of Slashdot.
The first computer I ever owned was a Mac. From then on, even though I always also had a PC, (with BeOS and Windows both, incidentally).. I always switched to doing my stuff on the Mac when I wanted to de-stress myself. It wasn't really suitable for serious work except audio and graphics though, because OS 8x was prone to bringing down the entire farm when it crashed. When OSX appeared, having had some experience with unix-y systems already (I know.. i know.. BeOS is not unix related.. regardless) I soon got to like this BSD based system. Each major upgrade was better, faster, and more compatible than the previous.. and nothing was ever changed simply for "changes' sake". Even after classic compatibility was dropped in 10.5, there were workarounds (like Sheepshaver) that seemed to work, and the swich to Intel did open up the door for new opportunites. About the time that Steve Jobs first got sick, and (entirely understandably!) lost some of his focus, Snow Leopard (10.6) came out. No significant new features except the app store, but lots of functions were dumped, such as things power users had come to depend on being able to alter, for instance, contextual menus, and other tweaks that allowed for a smoother and faster workflow. Themes and other modifications, which can be very helpful also, as some were helpful in reducing eye fatigue, were completely blocked, putting some companies which had been the staunchest Apple supporters, entirely out of business.And, boy oh boy was it slower. On an iMac which was 3 months old when 10.6 came out, it ran more than four times as slow,. Finder windows would take 5 or 6 seconds to open, on a good day. In fact the Finder was worse than it had ever been before. I swear it felt as responsive as my old days with a 386 felt. My Vista partition on the same machine feels very snappy, in fact as responsive as Win95 feels on a P4. Not surprising, as the windows "experience index" showed 5.8, which, I gather, is a pretty good number. Anyways, every upgrade since then has been worse, and due to forced obsolescence, such as minimum requirements for an application, where there was no good reason for having to make the upgrade, other than due to the compiler they chose to use. Every upgrade since 10.6 has introduced more bugs, incompatibilities, etc. I get that Apple doesn't like Java. But so what? I need it online. Why disable everybody's choice? Java now does not work at all online. Apps I bought not that long ago, are now useless. I get crashes again that bring down the whole PC, again. 8 gigs of memoryisn't even enough for the newest versions of OSX. If you think this comment is long you should see my list of all the thingts rthat were changed for chang's sakle, or functions that have been removed altogether. Did you know you no longer can even choose to do a search for *either* file name OR contemnts?. And because they have an extremely closed attitude to their programming, no third party tweaks appear any more. And soo much more wrong. The reason I wrote such a long comment is to show I am not a "mindless" Apple hater. I supported them for many many years. , and it is their current completrely disrespectful ,arrogant, inefficiently coded, and poorly thought out attitude to their desktop OS (all recent traits that never would have appeared in the Jobs era) that raised my hackles., and I haven't even gone into the iMac graphics bug...Their attitude towards their devices is, also, I see, rubbing a lot of poeople the wrong way. Currently, however, I am willing to give all one more "good old college try" with Mavericks 'Nuff said..
...just commenting the wrong way. If they would just comment the right way as our dear lord Steve originally intended, then these problems wouldn't arise.
You are just holding it wrong! It seems that apple is the Big Brother that they were against in the commercial in 1984.
I keep trying to get help on their support forum, but they are deleting my post over and over. Here it is:
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
Apple's wifi glitches are as old as the 802.11 protocol itself, and they've always covered them up with cloak-and-dagger. OS X wifi was buggy in Lion, and the "fix" in Mountain Lion made it even worse. The college kids working the Genius Bar have been holding the company line that "it must be the router". Now that censorship is involved, we have a slashdot story and a scandal. The Streisand Effect has been well documented. In the age of digital reproduction, censorship just plain doesn't work anymore. It didn't work for Barbara, it didn't work against Wikileaks, and it sure as hell isn't going to work for crApple. Some PR manager in Cupertino is probably--hopefully--losing his job right now.
As a former IT manager at a "mac shop" iOS development company, this story surprises me... not at all.
Oh gosh. Now Slashdot knows. You do realize that, while a decade ago that meant something, now it's meaningless. There aren't enough eyeballs here anymore to Slashdot an IIS4 server running on a 128bps fractional T1. Okay, maybe if it was running NT 3.5.1.