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Apple Removes NYTimes App in China, Shows How Far It Is Willing To Go To Please Local Authority (theguardian.com)
Apple has removed the New York Times app from its store in China after a government request, in an example of how far the company will go to please the authorities in its third-largest market. From a report: China operates what is thought to be the largest internet censorship regime in the world, blocking thousands of foreign websites viewed as a threat by the ruling Communist party. Google, Twitter, Facebook Youtube and Instagram are all inaccessible. Apple removed the English and Chinese-language versions of the New York Times app on 23 December, although it was not immediately clear why. "We have been informed that the app is in violation of local regulations," said Carolyn Wu, an Apple spokeswoman. "As a result the app must be taken down off the China app store. When this situation changes the app store will once again offer the New York Times app for download in China."
Whilst Apple and Apple fans love to portray themselves/the company as doing the right thing it's been very clear for a long time they are solely chasing after their bottom line. Their products have for years now been designed to please the largest share of the market with the least possible work or expenditure. The fact they are willing to do anything needed to please a government which could potentially block off a large portion of their market is to be expected.
Who reads NYT anyway..
Just another propaganda machine.. No better than most media outlets in China. We here learned that from the last election, didn't we!!
You can't not follow the law just because you disagree with it.
Like most companies, Apple follows the law in the places in which they operate.
Unlike Uber...
Their only other option would be to "make a statement" by not doing business in places whose laws they disagree with.
Apple, like any business, is going to do what they are required legally speaking in each of the markets they reside. It is not like they had any real choice since leaving it up would only mean that it would be blocked along with the entire App Store.... The dispute is between the NY Times and the Chinese government, it is not up to Apple to get NY Times unblocked.... it is up to the NY Times and the Chinese government.
You mean... that they go as far as to respect the law of the country they operate in? The nerve!
So lets all capitulate to evil communist overlords, shall we?
uber doesn't have to follow the law why should apple
Apple is making Gab jump through flaming hoops to get their mobile app published. They've repeatedly come up with new reasons that are utterly nonsensical like concern trolling about porn, abusive users, harassment, etc. despite a) allowing Twitter, Tumblr, etc. and b) those allowed services having notorious problems that are cheerfully ignored by Apple. In fact, Apple is all but saying "if your site doesn't work the way we want, your users cannot have an app." One of their responses.
Apple removed the English and Chinese-language versions of the New York Times app on 23 December, although it was not immediately clear why.
Maybe because the NYT was banned in China in 2012?? http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/26/world/asia/china-times-website-blocked/
and
From How the New York Times is eluding censors in China
Using apps: Articles are published on apps targeting the Chinese-language market that have often been ignored by Chinese censors for weeks or months at a time, before being blocked. Often these apps are openly branded with the “New York Times” name.
I'm not saying censoring them is right, but this crap they are peddling about not knowing why their apps were pulled from China is pure bullshit. They know exactly why: They were banned in 2012 by the Chinese government! China just never got around to asking for the apps to be pulled until now.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
How Far Apple Is Willing To Go To Please [ the shareholders ] is the real answer.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
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Their rules are law.
I would like to understand from Tim Cook why he feels privacy rights need to protected even in the case of terror investigation (I agree they do) but access to information and a free and independent press does not require protection?
Is he simply a legalist, we have laws like the 4th amendment here in the US that protect privacy, but China has no laws preventing the government from acting as a censor so it is fine? There are valid philosophical cases to be made on those lines but I did not hear that rhetoric from him around the time of San Bernardino.
Maybe he is a racist or a nationalist an Chinese people are simply less deserving of basic rights in his opinion?
Maybe his only real guiding principle is money and he simply says and does whatever the situation demands in order to make more of it?
Really though I don't want to dump on Tim Cook and Apple, I could ask the same questions and more of just about every company, and individual that does business in main land China. I think as Americans we need to be asking ourselves some hard questions about why we have been willing to prop up and do business with a nasty, oppressive, lawless, violent communist regime for the past 60+ years?
I think we need to ask not why we have a one China policy but why that one China is not the one with its capital in Taipei! As a citizen of the US I am damn tired about hearing about how great our role in the world is why we sit by and not only tolerate but enable the very worst actors! You can't claim to support freedom and human rights while shoveling money into the coffers of Communists and Islamists.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Aluminum machining for iPhone cases produces combustible metallic dust that can cause classic thermite reactions. This dust ignited in the Chinese manufacturing facility, turning it into a crematorium that killed four people.
Responsible management, union regulations, and OSHA largely make that impossible in the United States.
Apple should insist on higher standards. And this is hardly their only excess that has taken lives.
Propaganda arm of the Democrats and poster-child of the liberal news media. Good riddance.
They had a real choice. They had, and have, a choice in almost every nation, and definitely WRT doing business in China.
If a country does evil, by law or custom, and further, makes you complicit in that evil, then you don't have to do business there (and you shouldn't, obviously.) The fact that you do means that you have decided that your own goals are more important than whatever the evil consists of. In this particular Apple's v. China v. people case, they want money a lot more than they want freedom of speech. They have laid those cards out quite plainly.
Also, speaking of Apple, they do plenty of "not in our app store" discarding / refusing various applications based on their own biases. This isn't in any way new behavior for them. The only questions really on the table are, (a) is a person aware of this? and (b) will a person tolerate it?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
should of said go our way or we will pull out the factory's
Is not the local authority in this case the most populous sovereign nation on the planet? You make it sound like Andy of Mayberry said 'no'
Agree or disagree it is the policy makers choice in that country
And from the article - "Chinese users trying to access the News app are greeted with the message: “News isn’t supported in your current region.”"
Well it is not supported in Canada either, probably because of our odd language laws
This /. article is nothing more than flamebait
But they will not help the FBI unlock an phone maybe it's time for tim cook to go to trumps reeducation camp!
It wouldn't go over well if Apple just said, "Sorry, we don't support this, so we're going to stop selling apps and iThings in China." There's a market of billions of people to sell things to, and I doubt they're willing to fight with the Chinese government over their censorship policy.
I think reaction to this is actually bigger than Apple -- it's the way the US in general acts towards the rest of the world. We have no tolerance for anyone who does anything differently and are convinced that our way is superior and everyone else is just backwards. This happened during the Cold War (the containment policy) and is happening now in the Middle East (refusing to close the power vacuum and insisting that democratic governments be installed in places that aren't ready for them.)
China has chosen a system where they have total central control over the population, media and economy. Honestly, the country has beneifted greatly from it -- there's no opposition when huge projects are undertaken, for example. When the recession hit in 2008, the government plowed untold sums of money into infrastructure to prop things up. Try doing that here -- it's impossible given the stalemate we have today. The government also directly supports industry, another thing that would be impossible to do in the US. I think in the long run they're going to be better off for it because they can just make tough decisions by fiat rather than arguing over it for years. Honestly, I don't care whether or not they let their citizens read the New York Times -- it doesn't affect me.
It's what a 3 billion person market. China would not have much problem blocking the whole app store.
Yes, I don't like that Apple is part of censorship like this.
But it is the law. It isn't upon request, it is surely under threat of action. I know everyone would like to indicate how they'd stand up to China but if Apple weren't to take this down then China would just kill the entire app store in China and then the app still would be down.
It is frustrating that Apple has no way to convince China to knock this off.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Apple Removes NYTimes App in China, Shows How Far It Is Willing To Go To Please...
...its shareholders, to whom it is beholden to make as much moolah as it can.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
That obey the law, only seems to be a big deal when it applies to people in the US breaking US laws? When it applies to people in other countries following the laws of other countries, it is a violation of rights, freedom, etc. Anyone else notice that?
They should remove that Liberal propaganda rag from the US app store as well.
and nothing of value was lost...
China has had them crack an iPhone yet ?
... of being inconsistent. China complains, the app's removed. The US asks for data, "the server's not in the US, therefore no.". Why not just tell China that the server's not in China??
Oh, yes, silly me. Money.
China doesn't import fake news. *A-Boom-Tish*
Like always, fuck Apple, and now I include everybody who owns Apple products. Fuck you too!
It's all about money.
With the Chinese Communist Party Bosses controlling the Communist Party Bank Accounts and with Timmy's >$300 Billion (in dollar valuation) controlled by Communist Party Bosses, when the Boss talks, Timmy runs.
With Timmy's combined (>$200 Billion sitting in Mafia Banks in Ireland, Netherlands and Italy) >$500 Billion Apple can begin a systematic brokering campaign with Big Pharma to develop drugs that will eradicate Heterosexuals (male and female) from Earth and fulfill Timmy's dream of a Queer Race of Homosexuals, reproducing with the mechanical and drug aids from Big Pharma.
The realization of Timmy's Queer World Order is beginning.
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Yes, but that doesn't mean you have to be complicit in actively helping them do it. That is a choice.
In Montana, generally. ;-) But if you mean, do I think the US does evil with its laws and customs? Oh, yes. Absolutely. Deeply so. On a regular and profoundly impactful basis.
That would be flat-out awesome. They do a great deal of harm in general, and as a search engine, they are the largest driving force behind mediocrity in our society that I can think of, what with their popularity- and advertising-based search engine biases. Perhaps we should try to force them them to move to North Korea. Now there's a country, that if mediocrity were the driving force, would be uplifted. In the US, it just keeps the country down. Because while we suck, we don't suck as bad as almost anywhere else in a lot of ways (medical care, sexual sanity, and minding our own business notably excepted... we really suck at those things.)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Klingens, just accurately criticized a failure of US due process. And he's right.
But it's not like the Klingon High Council is better!
The US makes up reasons all the time: "parallel construction" should be a known term.
I don't think that any assertion that Apple's app store promotes "information getting to China's citizens that normally wouldn't be there" holds up under even mild scrutiny.
Apple is not an information vendor; and its app stores (OSX/MacOS, iOS) in particular are notably lacking in freedom of expression. Those stores are terrible examples of freedom of any kind, generally speaking. Quite the opposite, in fact. If I wanted something pretty much guaranteed to have been filtered for content, looks and behavior for my computer (I do have a Mac) or my devices (I have an iPad, too), Apple's app stores would be the first place I'd look. But I don't want that. At all. So I don't look in those places. At all.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
And the US government should help by charging a hypocrite tax on imports from China.
If companies want to export manufacturing to China, they'll have to pay taxes on imports of 350%. This is especially true in the tech sector where for years leaders claimed to stand for freedom, but have not deigned to support freedom in China.
Capitalism without an ethical/moral guide is a disaster.
I think people been reading to much of that pro-communism propaganda if they are surprised by this and blame Apple for it.
Its nice to see that Apple takes this seriously
The NY Times is nothing but a liberal propaganda mouth piece, they have every right to ban it. The NY Times has done everything to hype up their is some HUGE conflict coming between the US and China, which there won't be.
They remove the app hoping there will be protest in china as well as in the "western world", so the government gets some pressure to stop the broad censorship (of apps).
"Shows how far it was willing to go to obey local laws and government"?
instead of
"Shows How Far It Is Willing To Go To Please Local Authority"
There. I fixed it for you.
"Should of said" makes no sense whatsoever. You're confusing the contraction "should've" with "should of".
As in "should HAVE said"
should of been obvious that the parent poster has a poor grasp of written language's
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Keep it in there because Murica!
yup.. they are evil
Can't get other countries to accept our fake news
Thanks Obama, you simpering wimp.
Thanks Tim Cook, you communist tool.
Thanks Apple, you fascist conspiracy.
Thanks NYT, you source of fake news.
This is definitely a free trade issue. We should retaliate by banning Chinese products. They should not get to decide which American products they get to ban unless we can decide which Chinese products we get to ban.
More blowhard hot air from amicusNYCL CTO vaporware inc located in phantasyland "ne'er-do-well"-ville! Bugfree code but zero lines not doing anything useful hahahahaha!