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Apple Bans Iran from the App Store (bleepingcomputer.com)
Iranian users have not been able to access Apple's App Store all day today, in what appears to be a ban put in place by the US company. From a report: According to reports and sources who spoke with Bleeping Computer, the ban appears to have been put in place earlier today, around noon, GMT. Users were not able to connect to the Apple App Store to install or update applications. When visiting the App Store, they were instead greeted with the message "The App Store is unavailable in the country or region you're in." This ban appears to be IP-based. Meysam Firouzi -- an Iranian security researcher -- told Bleeping Computer that he successfully connected to the App Store while using a VPN, despite having Iran-related details set on his account.
What baffles me the most is the fact that we know that there is a unicode whitelist. I get that allowing all of unicode causes all sorts of issues, but why is it so hard to add the few smart quotes to the whitelist? That alone would solve most of the problems. If you then add like maybe 5-10 other common used unicode characters to the list and it would probably fix 99% of the remaining problems. Is it really that hard?