But one has to think, if this application was approved, how many other approved applications in the App Store have some form of malicious code or other surreptitious data collection?
It seems the only reason Apple noticed this is because Charlie Miller published it.
This is why Apple's security model is fundamentally flawed. It provides a single point of failure for security. Those of us who work with networks understand that gateway only security doesn't work, so trusting the gateway to get everything and pretending you are secure behind your gateway is foolhardy in the extreme.
Just to be a pendant, Herpes never actually goes away. Once you have Herpes, you have it for life. Only the symptoms of Herpes come and go.
SCO is more like a bad case of clap. You've gotten rid of it using medication, then someone comes along and gets you re-infected.
(Unfortunately, I still have customers on SCO Unix, we're trying to these few onto Red Hat or Centos as quickly as possible as it's getting hard to find replacement HW that works with SCO Unix)
It's because Android devices are marketed for nerds, by nerds. And nerds don't understand marketing or user experience.
Oh, so that's why Android is doing so well.
First off, get over this User Experience thing, it's a bollocks marketing term that has no relation to the science of HCI, if it ever did it's been well and truly lost thanks to marketers and PR drones.
Secondly, phones aren't sold to consumers, they are sold to telco's and then "given" to consumers as part of their contracts. Both Apple and Android manufacturers understand this. HTC and Samsung understand it better then Apple. So you dont market to consumers, you make deals with telco's, this is how HTC sold so many Desires and Samsung sold so many Galaxy S's, they simply made sure they were everywhere on every contract.
Third thing, who will a normal person ask for advice on a technology item such as a phone or computer... That's right, the nearest Nerd. So marketing to geeks and nerds is about creating a word of mouth campaign at a very high level. So once again, you dont need to market to consumers because consumers will be given 3 or 4 handsets to choose from by their Telco, they will then ask a Geek which one is best. Even Apple tries this strategy, albeit they completely fail at it.
Finally, the thing you dont get (and it's clear you dont get it because you keep harping on about User Experience like it's some kind of deity) is that people want their computers and phones to do X, if it can do X badly it's good enough. It doesn't matter if it's the prettiest thing in the universe (including all of the black holes) if it cant do X, it's fail. This is why Windows still dominates over Linux and Mac. Windows does everything, nothing particularly well but it does 99% of what 99% of people want it to. "Do" always wins over "not do".
So is Fallout banned under these guidelines? There are a variety of drugs, including alcohol types, you can take in the game to give you various boosts.
Would "Whiskey" be banned, but "Buffout" OK, because one has the same name as a real drug?
Fallout is available here.
Context is everything in the Australian rating system. When the say "drug based incentives" they mean something clearly identified as a narcotic that has only a positive effect. This is generally restricted to real world restricted drugs, for example a trucking simulator where "Speed" is used as a power up (makes time go faster, reduces fatigue level) would be restricted where as using "Coffee" or "Magic time bending potion" for the same effect would not. To rephrase it, the game must not glorify drug use, Fallout manages this quite nicely as the drugs tend to have negative side effects (including addiction).
Apparently you don't know about the problems with video games down under.
That's not a problem with video games down under. It's a problem with free speech down under. Namely, the lack of it. The Australian government may be giving its subjects a little more chain, but they're still not free.
We're maintaining a lot more freedom then the US at the moment. How are those free speech zones going. I still have the ability to protest in the open and on the steps of parliament.
Meanwhile, the US copyright and trademark laws have subtly stripped what remains of your much vaunted "free speech".
And yes, no one will stop me from calling Tony Abbott a cunt, a wanker, or a nance. It does stop me from saying "Tony Abbott has sex with the corpses of little boys" without evidence.
Apparently you don't know about the problems with video games down under. Many are outright banned right now as they do not meet the requirements for the Australian teen rating (13?)
Actually it's MA (15+) and the M rating allows for:
- Violence.
- Frequent course language.
- Sexual references.
- Simulated Sex.
- Some Nudity.
It's in no way compatible to Teen. That would be our PG rating. It's important, when berating someone else does not understand the classification system, to have an understanding of the classification system for yourself.
Censorship is never a solution. Soviet Union made owning a photo of an erected penis a criminal offense. It is perhaps not a coincidence that Soviet society was plagued with sexual maniacs like Chikatilo.
Meanwhile, the US never had a sexual predators and maniacs like Berkowitz, Gacy, Bundy, Gein, amongst others.
Your point that censorship never works is valid, but your example is horribly flawed. I read the wikipedia article on Chikatilo and one thing immediately stuck out at me, he had the same hallmarks in his childhood as western serial killers. Vicious parents (beatings et al.), early fascination with fire and death, above average intelligence, bullied and above all else, serious sexual problems in adolescence. It strikes me that Chikatilo would have been a serial killer in almost any society, communism had little to do with it, he almost fits the textbook conditions that created most killers in the west.
There seems to be a large market for people who want pretty appliances with certain "limitations" that work painlessly.
I've heard this argument before and it's been wrong oh, so many times.
Users expect their devices to do what they expect it to, not a limited subset of functions.
This is a not-uncommon encounter with end users who dont understand the technology they buy. I had it many times when I worked in Tech support. User: Can you make my DerpPhone do Herp. Me: The DerpPhone does not support the Herp function, it can only do Derp. User: But the phone guy said the DerpPhone does everything. Make it do Herp. Me: The phone guy lied to you. User: No, make it do Herp. Me: Sure, I'll just walk on water and break the laws of physics at the same time. User: [blink]. Me: Its sarcasm, DerpPhones are not on the list of supported Hardware. Thanks you, come again.
The user will cry to her boss, who cries to his boss, who cries to my boss who explains that this is why we maintain a list of supported HW. We cant afford to support every single device under the sun, I'll provide some precursory support but beyond that, you're on your own with unsupported devices. I've had this many times since 2008 when the Iphone was released in Australia.
Users dont care about limitations until they hit them, then they care very much. If users loved restricted system, the IT department would be the most loved part of any organisation (rather then being refereed to as the Department of No).
There's nothing wrong with the sandboxing model per se. It's probably the only way to make our computers more secure.
Bollocks.
There is no such thing as idiot proof because idiots are so ingenious.
Sandboxing (locking out of most other functions, not isolating programs from other programs) is only security theatre. It only provides a false sense of security. The user who does not know what they are doing will still manage to download things that spy on them or send spam from their machines. Remember that virus makers dont bother following the "sandbox" rules and more viruses are interested in collecting info then doing damage these days.
All that this "sandboxing" model will do, is make most computers unusable.
and you can't really have security and idiot friendliness
You cant have this regardless.
The only way to make computers more secure is better education. The dumbing down of security will ultimately make is easier to break. Giving the user a false sense of security means they will ignore obvious problems out of the false belief that they could never happen.
a trusted 3rd party to sort out the nitty-gritty details.
In crypto, there is no such thing as a trusted third party. Definitely not one who should be trusted enough to be given 100% control over _your_ computer and _your_ security as third parties have designs of their own which are often less then honourable.
In the Sandboxing model, You are Bob, the application author is Alice and the third party is Eve except you're 100% reliant on Eve being trustworthy for security to work.
The Sandboxing security model here, isn't sandboxing, it's the ancient gateway security model which we know doesn't work. Back in the days of the first windows IP networks, a computer that was behind a firewall positioned on the network perimeter or the "gateway" was considered safe. This theory held water until floppy disks became popular and people would bring in infected floppies from home. The point to this anecdote is that relying on a gate keeper for security is a bad model as anything bad that gets passed the gate keeper has free reign.
I tried the stuff they do in Apple's Siri adds with Vlingo.
No you didn't.
The only thing Vlingo doesn't do that Siri does is the pointless gimmicks like quotes out of 2001.
One thing that Vlingo can do that Siri categorically cannot, is understand non-US accents. Siri failed on the Dutch, Indian, Welsh, Geordie, Polish, Irish, Chinese and Filipino accents we have in the office without fail. It also had trouble with the Australian and English accents we have here. Only the two Americans could get it to work semi-consistently (meaning about 50% of the time).
Vlingo worked with all of those accents. It had trouble with Chinese English, but it worked.
BTW, Geordie's are sub species from northern England,
Given the level of cognitive dissonance that surrounds Apple products, this could simply mean some people ignored the problem because they didn't want to acknowledge that they might have a problem.
No, you are confusing debt with interest. Islamic finance allows debt, but not the interest on top of it. A debt can only be repaid by the principle. Interest is treated as something akin to the slavery bondage you mentioned above, and hence disallowed.
A lot of people call them "clips" though and it is fairly commonly understood.
But this is Slashdot, where pedantic people reign and any slight ambiguity must be highlighted and thoroughly expunged. Go sit in the end-user's corner until you can play with the other/.ers.
Maybe someone should advise Apple that being seen as a bully is not very fashionable.
Have you not seen fanboys defending actions like this?
Sycophantic people like bullies as long as they think bullies are on their side. The problem with that is bullies are never on any side except their own.
4. No Mac Support (the iPod did Mac and Windows support)
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
/wipes tear from eye.
Good one, haven't laughed that hard in ages.
The Zune failed for one reason and one reason only. It was a bulky HDD based player when everyone wanted smaller Flashed based players. End of story, Apple wasn't even a player in the HDD media player space when the Zune was released, it competed against Cowon and Archos (who had HDD and flash based players).
El-Keib is an expert in education and 'Islamic Banking'. He's the perfect person to introduce the kind of debt terrors the west are facing now in order to control and mine Libya.
Oddly enough, one of the tenants of Islamic banking is that you cant get into debt as we would consider it in the west (which is a form of bondage (slavery bondage, not sexual bondage)). This prevents the hardcore Muslims in the west from buying much land and prevents Mohamed Q Public in hardcore Muslim nations from buying much land off the rich and/or royal.
That being said, not all Muslims are as "strict" (just look at Dubai). Also there are Muslim friendly loans, although I dont know how they work (Atheist myself).
I don't know what anyone's crying about. This is how it works. You put your product out there and hope someone sees it and likes it. If it's good enough it will succeed. If not, oh well.
Everyone was deceived by Apple marketing and fanboys that the App store was some kind of gold mine. They flooded the media with headlines like "Game makes 20K" whilst neglecting to mentioning that it took six months, the author only received 14K and the costs to develop the game were 15K. The level of fallacious marketing made it difficult for most people to do real market research.
Also remember that Apple's App store is not a free market, it's a manipulated market. Apple picks what applications get advertised, can adjust rankings and outright reject or even remove an application after release. You are 100% on Apple for any success, and you have to give them 30% of everything before paying for your own costs.
The casino analogy is accurate because the overwhelming majority of people lose money on the app store whilst Apple makes money off every developer regardless of whether they make any money themselves.
Hence the old saying, the only way to win at a casino is to own one. It's the same with the app store, over 90% of developers walk away with less then what they came with, just like 90% of casino punters.
I can only speak as a game developer, but I have yet to be pointed to a game on the App Store that didn't make any money but had all the pieces together to be a commercially successful game.
Slashdot Mirror
App redacted in 3...2...1.
But one has to think, if this application was approved, how many other approved applications in the App Store have some form of malicious code or other surreptitious data collection?
It seems the only reason Apple noticed this is because Charlie Miller published it.
This is why Apple's security model is fundamentally flawed. It provides a single point of failure for security. Those of us who work with networks understand that gateway only security doesn't work, so trusting the gateway to get everything and pretending you are secure behind your gateway is foolhardy in the extreme.
SCO keeps coming back just like herpes.
Just to be a pendant, Herpes never actually goes away. Once you have Herpes, you have it for life. Only the symptoms of Herpes come and go.
SCO is more like a bad case of clap. You've gotten rid of it using medication, then someone comes along and gets you re-infected.
(Unfortunately, I still have customers on SCO Unix, we're trying to these few onto Red Hat or Centos as quickly as possible as it's getting hard to find replacement HW that works with SCO Unix)
Don't forget to pay your $699 licensing fees you cock-smoking teabaggers!
And they say Slashdot trolling has gone downhill in recent years.
Now if I only encountered a GNAA troll, my day would be complete.
Oh, so that's why Android is doing so well.
First off, get over this User Experience thing, it's a bollocks marketing term that has no relation to the science of HCI, if it ever did it's been well and truly lost thanks to marketers and PR drones.
Secondly, phones aren't sold to consumers, they are sold to telco's and then "given" to consumers as part of their contracts. Both Apple and Android manufacturers understand this. HTC and Samsung understand it better then Apple. So you dont market to consumers, you make deals with telco's, this is how HTC sold so many Desires and Samsung sold so many Galaxy S's, they simply made sure they were everywhere on every contract.
Third thing, who will a normal person ask for advice on a technology item such as a phone or computer... That's right, the nearest Nerd. So marketing to geeks and nerds is about creating a word of mouth campaign at a very high level. So once again, you dont need to market to consumers because consumers will be given 3 or 4 handsets to choose from by their Telco, they will then ask a Geek which one is best. Even Apple tries this strategy, albeit they completely fail at it.
Finally, the thing you dont get (and it's clear you dont get it because you keep harping on about User Experience like it's some kind of deity) is that people want their computers and phones to do X, if it can do X badly it's good enough. It doesn't matter if it's the prettiest thing in the universe (including all of the black holes) if it cant do X, it's fail. This is why Windows still dominates over Linux and Mac. Windows does everything, nothing particularly well but it does 99% of what 99% of people want it to. "Do" always wins over "not do".
Even after this article you still believe that?
Yes,
Just because it went wrong does mean that it wasn't intentional.
They had people who could impersonate police officers... available at short notice.
So is Fallout banned under these guidelines? There are a variety of drugs, including alcohol types, you can take in the game to give you various boosts.
Would "Whiskey" be banned, but "Buffout" OK, because one has the same name as a real drug?
Fallout is available here.
Context is everything in the Australian rating system. When the say "drug based incentives" they mean something clearly identified as a narcotic that has only a positive effect. This is generally restricted to real world restricted drugs, for example a trucking simulator where "Speed" is used as a power up (makes time go faster, reduces fatigue level) would be restricted where as using "Coffee" or "Magic time bending potion" for the same effect would not. To rephrase it, the game must not glorify drug use, Fallout manages this quite nicely as the drugs tend to have negative side effects (including addiction).
Apparently you don't know about the problems with video games down under.
That's not a problem with video games down under. It's a problem with free speech down under. Namely, the lack of it. The Australian government may be giving its subjects a little more chain, but they're still not free.
We're maintaining a lot more freedom then the US at the moment. How are those free speech zones going. I still have the ability to protest in the open and on the steps of parliament.
Meanwhile, the US copyright and trademark laws have subtly stripped what remains of your much vaunted "free speech".
And yes, no one will stop me from calling Tony Abbott a cunt, a wanker, or a nance. It does stop me from saying "Tony Abbott has sex with the corpses of little boys" without evidence.
Actually it's MA (15+) and the M rating allows for:
- Violence.
- Frequent course language.
- Sexual references.
- Simulated Sex.
- Some Nudity.
It's in no way compatible to Teen. That would be our PG rating. It's important, when berating someone else does not understand the classification system, to have an understanding of the classification system for yourself.
Censorship is never a solution. Soviet Union made owning a photo of an erected penis a criminal offense. It is perhaps not a coincidence that Soviet society was plagued with sexual maniacs like Chikatilo.
Meanwhile, the US never had a sexual predators and maniacs like Berkowitz, Gacy, Bundy, Gein, amongst others.
Your point that censorship never works is valid, but your example is horribly flawed. I read the wikipedia article on Chikatilo and one thing immediately stuck out at me, he had the same hallmarks in his childhood as western serial killers. Vicious parents (beatings et al.), early fascination with fire and death, above average intelligence, bullied and above all else, serious sexual problems in adolescence. It strikes me that Chikatilo would have been a serial killer in almost any society, communism had little to do with it, he almost fits the textbook conditions that created most killers in the west.
There seems to be a large market for people who want pretty appliances with certain "limitations" that work painlessly.
I've heard this argument before and it's been wrong oh, so many times.
Users expect their devices to do what they expect it to, not a limited subset of functions.
This is a not-uncommon encounter with end users who dont understand the technology they buy. I had it many times when I worked in Tech support.
User: Can you make my DerpPhone do Herp.
Me: The DerpPhone does not support the Herp function, it can only do Derp.
User: But the phone guy said the DerpPhone does everything. Make it do Herp.
Me: The phone guy lied to you.
User: No, make it do Herp.
Me: Sure, I'll just walk on water and break the laws of physics at the same time.
User: [blink].
Me: Its sarcasm, DerpPhones are not on the list of supported Hardware. Thanks you, come again.
The user will cry to her boss, who cries to his boss, who cries to my boss who explains that this is why we maintain a list of supported HW. We cant afford to support every single device under the sun, I'll provide some precursory support but beyond that, you're on your own with unsupported devices. I've had this many times since 2008 when the Iphone was released in Australia.
Users dont care about limitations until they hit them, then they care very much. If users loved restricted system, the IT department would be the most loved part of any organisation (rather then being refereed to as the Department of No).
Bollocks.
There is no such thing as idiot proof because idiots are so ingenious.
Sandboxing (locking out of most other functions, not isolating programs from other programs) is only security theatre. It only provides a false sense of security. The user who does not know what they are doing will still manage to download things that spy on them or send spam from their machines. Remember that virus makers dont bother following the "sandbox" rules and more viruses are interested in collecting info then doing damage these days.
All that this "sandboxing" model will do, is make most computers unusable.
and you can't really have security and idiot friendliness
You cant have this regardless.
The only way to make computers more secure is better education. The dumbing down of security will ultimately make is easier to break. Giving the user a false sense of security means they will ignore obvious problems out of the false belief that they could never happen.
a trusted 3rd party to sort out the nitty-gritty details.
In crypto, there is no such thing as a trusted third party. Definitely not one who should be trusted enough to be given 100% control over _your_ computer and _your_ security as third parties have designs of their own which are often less then honourable.
In the Sandboxing model, You are Bob, the application author is Alice and the third party is Eve except you're 100% reliant on Eve being trustworthy for security to work.
The Sandboxing security model here, isn't sandboxing, it's the ancient gateway security model which we know doesn't work. Back in the days of the first windows IP networks, a computer that was behind a firewall positioned on the network perimeter or the "gateway" was considered safe. This theory held water until floppy disks became popular and people would bring in infected floppies from home. The point to this anecdote is that relying on a gate keeper for security is a bad model as anything bad that gets passed the gate keeper has free reign.
*cheers* Long live our metallic green overlords!
I wish,
They're our green plastic overlords as metallic ones were to expensive to produce.
No you didn't.
The only thing Vlingo doesn't do that Siri does is the pointless gimmicks like quotes out of 2001.
One thing that Vlingo can do that Siri categorically cannot, is understand non-US accents. Siri failed on the Dutch, Indian, Welsh, Geordie, Polish, Irish, Chinese and Filipino accents we have in the office without fail. It also had trouble with the Australian and English accents we have here. Only the two Americans could get it to work semi-consistently (meaning about 50% of the time).
Vlingo worked with all of those accents. It had trouble with Chinese English, but it worked.
BTW, Geordie's are sub species from northern England,
Some people have had problems. Others have not.
Given the level of cognitive dissonance that surrounds Apple products, this could simply mean some people ignored the problem because they didn't want to acknowledge that they might have a problem.
No, you are confusing debt with interest. Islamic finance allows debt, but not the interest on top of it. A debt can only be repaid by the principle. Interest is treated as something akin to the slavery bondage you mentioned above, and hence disallowed.
I sit corrected :)
I think that he meant "magazines."
A lot of people call them "clips" though and it is fairly commonly understood.
But this is Slashdot, where pedantic people reign and any slight ambiguity must be highlighted and thoroughly expunged. Go sit in the end-user's corner until you can play with the other /.ers.
Maybe someone should advise Apple that being seen as a bully is not very fashionable.
Have you not seen fanboys defending actions like this?
Sycophantic people like bullies as long as they think bullies are on their side. The problem with that is bullies are never on any side except their own.
Apple already sued New York them over their recycling program which featured a logo that had an apple in it. Apple lost.
They sued Woolwoths in Australia over the same thing... and lost it.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
/wipes tear from eye.
Good one, haven't laughed that hard in ages.
The Zune failed for one reason and one reason only. It was a bulky HDD based player when everyone wanted smaller Flashed based players. End of story, Apple wasn't even a player in the HDD media player space when the Zune was released, it competed against Cowon and Archos (who had HDD and flash based players).
El-Keib is an expert in education and 'Islamic Banking'. He's the perfect person to introduce the kind of debt terrors the west are facing now in order to control and mine Libya.
Oddly enough, one of the tenants of Islamic banking is that you cant get into debt as we would consider it in the west (which is a form of bondage (slavery bondage, not sexual bondage)). This prevents the hardcore Muslims in the west from buying much land and prevents Mohamed Q Public in hardcore Muslim nations from buying much land off the rich and/or royal.
That being said, not all Muslims are as "strict" (just look at Dubai). Also there are Muslim friendly loans, although I dont know how they work (Atheist myself).
Hey guys, where else can we find more drivel to dilute our search results?
homoeopathic.google.com
That functionality and usability testing by the app-store staff must have been extra rigorous with this app, or something.
What makes you think they tested it. It's not like the App store can audited by a third party.
I don't know what anyone's crying about. This is how it works. You put your product out there and hope someone sees it and likes it. If it's good enough it will succeed. If not, oh well.
Everyone was deceived by Apple marketing and fanboys that the App store was some kind of gold mine. They flooded the media with headlines like "Game makes 20K" whilst neglecting to mentioning that it took six months, the author only received 14K and the costs to develop the game were 15K. The level of fallacious marketing made it difficult for most people to do real market research.
Also remember that Apple's App store is not a free market, it's a manipulated market. Apple picks what applications get advertised, can adjust rankings and outright reject or even remove an application after release. You are 100% on Apple for any success, and you have to give them 30% of everything before paying for your own costs.
Nope.
The casino analogy is accurate because the overwhelming majority of people lose money on the app store whilst Apple makes money off every developer regardless of whether they make any money themselves.
Hence the old saying, the only way to win at a casino is to own one. It's the same with the app store, over 90% of developers walk away with less then what they came with, just like 90% of casino punters.
I can only speak as a game developer, but I have yet to be pointed to a game on the App Store that didn't make any money but had all the pieces together to be a commercially successful game.
http://www.gamepolitics.com/2009/06/08/iphone-dev-appstore-games-not-selling
This is the norm, he's in the top 1000 and not making any money.
Enjoy.