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Apple Pulls Anti-Censorship Apps from China's App Store (fortune.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Fortune:Services helping Chinese users circumvent the "Great Firewall of China" have been pulled from Apple's Chinese App Store en masse. On Saturday morning, at least some software makers affected by the sweep received notification from Apple that their tools were removed for violating Chinese law. Internet censorship in China restricts communications about topics including democracy, Tibetan freedom, and the 1989 Tienanmen Square protests. The culling primarily seems to have affected virtual private networks, or VPNs, which mask users' Internet activity and data from outside monitoring. According to a report by the New York Times, many of the most popular such apps are now missing from the Chinese App Store.
We aren't at war with China, obviously. So how, exactly, would imposing the wartime rules you're thinking about work?
When you're in a country - your own, or someone else's - you are expected to obey their laws. If you choose to disobey them for any reason, you should do so knowing that the country will probably punish you if they catch you.
Seriously - how would it go over if the US arbitrarily said "other countries' laws do not apply to our citizens"?
#DeleteChrome
The original "great firewall" was built by Cisco for the Chinese government who then rewarded Cisco by setting up Huawei to compete directly against them.
It's all down to money, if you want to sell in that country you have to abide by their laws.
The Five Eyes are putting visible pressure on their governments to crack open encryption and provide back doors.
That'll be the real test for Apple, will they stand up to FVEY & it's governments or will they buckle?
Take a look at how much of that useless crap you own is made in China. A good portion of the U.S. economy -- your paycheck included -- goes to that repressive regime.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
I'm glad Tim Cook is trying to protect the environment, and that he's trying to avoid using conflict minerals. But I wish he'd stop making things in China, as long as China's government was so repressive. I also wish he wouldn't invest in Chinese companies, or build a "new research and development center" there.
Suppose Xi Jinping repressed only people of a certain race, or only gay people. That would be outrageous discrimination. But since Xi severely limits the freedom of all of his citizens, that's not "discrimination" - it's just "unfortunate". However, it's not unfortunate enough to stop doing business there. (I'm talking about all American companies that do business there, not just Apple.)
I'm very glad to read about the Apple-related manufacturing plants that will be built in India and the US. I hope this is the start of a trend away from manufacturing in China.
It is none of our business and would be ineffective and unenforceable. America is not going to "fix" China. That is up to the Chinese people.
Agreed; OTOH where should we draw the line regarding American companies assisting the Chinese government's abuse of their citizens? e.g. If China had a law on the books demanding that Apple immediately report any private message that mentioned democracy, so that the sender and receiver could be jailed and tortured, would it be morally acceptable for Apple to comply with that law?
IIRC IBM willingly assisted the Nazis with the IT tasks necessary for their roundup and attempted genocide of European Jews and other minorities, and IBM was rightfully criticized afterwards for having done so. How can we avoid a repeat of that sort of thing?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
That's actually a non-sequitur but you offer it as if it were a proper response to the point the grandparent post made. That's no justification for Apple's choices. Be it employing Foxconn, a firm with worker labor standards so low they installed suicide nets on the building outer wall after a spate of worker suicides came to public attention, or Pegatron which seemed to have lower standards than Foxconn, forbidding recycling extractable & usable spare parts from old computers, freeing the source code to systems they're not distributing anymore such as the Newton (distributing non-free code is bad as well), setting up devices to be bricked if non-authorized repair workers work on the device like they do with the iPhone 7, campaigning against right-to-repair laws, practicing censorship, spying on users, or pioneering tax avoidance techniques, there are lots of good reasons to not do business with Apple.
Digital Citizen
Everything you said made sense. And yet I fear the world where any company will roll over and submit the moment the government wants something. A lot of modern rule of law is based on the assumption that a private entity like say your phone company has records and the government needs a warrant to see it. Whether that system is officially broken like in China or unofficially broken like with the NSA in the US, it's getting to the point where you should just assume any information given to any organization for any reason whatsoever is stored and passed to the government willingly or unwillingly. And since most of us have embraced civilization and is dependent on trade to survive it's pretty hard to avoid. It's depressing.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Not true. IBM was sending employees once a month to repair and maintain the machines. The arguement that they didn't know what their customer was doing with their machine doesn't fly because they continued the maintainence schedule!
Indeed. Many of the comments here seem to think the rest of the world is some sort of US colony.
US companies frequently have to censor things in various countries in order to adhere to local laws which are less liberal than those in the US. Facebook, Twitter, youtube, etc. all have special country-specific censorship in order to deal with government requests to block content. Germany particularly has stricter laws on threats and Nazi propaganda which end up being enforced by US companies on a regular basis.
Indeed. And US companies often censor things in order to adhere to US culture, even if the local culture is more liberal than US culture. For instance Facebook and Apple routinely censor tits in Denmark even though they are not compelled to do so by Danish law or Danish culture.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
And the maintenance contract was paid directly to Armonk, NY to boot.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Do you not realize that Apple has already changed China? Keep in mind that millions of Chinese citizens are using iMessage encryption to have communication that their government cannot read. The use of these apps is another good example.