Apple Defined Ice as a "protected Class" in Blocking Anti-Ice Apps

Have you been following Apple's China policies and decisions?

Apple's Cooperation with Authoritarian Governments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26644216

I’m also not trying to escuse their heavy handedness about “being nice to China”

Apple CEO Tim Cook: 'Privacy Is A Fundamental Human Right'. - https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/10/01/44...

I'm just responding to the part "Don't they serve us?"

> Intentionally disclosing the identity of a U.S. intelligence agent, including a CIA officer, is a federal crime under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA), which can result in up to 10 years in prison and fines. This law applies to individuals with authorized access to classified information and those without access who intentionally expose agents, knowing their actions could harm U.S. foreign intelligence operations.

However a private entity, including Apple, is free to censor whatever they want on their platforms.

For example, I have the right to voraciously criticize or praise the current Administration or the prior Administration without government interference. However if you own a grocery store you are generally free to ban anyone wearing, or not wearing, a garment criticizing or praising either Administration (or any specific combination of praising or criticizing or referring to the current Administration or the prior Administration). Political views, unlike race or religion for example, are not a protected class under federal law even in a public accommodation such as a grocery store.

They could not care less if you, the customer lived or died, as long as your check clears.

Source: Tim Apple sucking up to Trump like he's the antidote. This is even more ironic considering Tim's sexual orientation and Mango Jabba's take on "the gays".

> 1.1.1 Defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content, including references or commentary about religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, national/ethnic origin, or other targeted groups, particularly if the app is likely to humiliate, intimidate, or harm a targeted individual or group. Professional political satirists and humorists are generally exempt from this requirement.

This "ackchyually" behavior from HN is so bizarre.

A lot of folks will have a knee-jerk 'switch to linux' response, but that's not exactly that simple - is it?

Trumps deportation numbers are not out of trend with prior presidents. Its on par with Obama.

Make immigration easier for law abiding productive members of society. Dont reward those who cut in line.

You can't just do this. If you assume 1=2 all of math falls apart, and the same is true when you assume obviously un-true facts: the reason all of this matters at all is only because Apple wants to ban this kind of software from being native AT ALL, not merely because they don't want to themselves distribute something they dislike. I'd happily stand up to defend their right to do the latter if-and-only-if they stop doing the former, and you can't separate these two issues.

> ...the anti-ICE app wants in the App Store because of the marketing and ease of distribution it enables...

And so like, here: I don't care if the app doesn't get to be in the App Store, and I don't care if it gets "marketing" or "ease of distribution" from Apple. I do care that it gets to be a native app. I deeply deeply care about that.

(BTW, the App Store in fact DOES NOT provide marketing, and if you ever go to any developer conference that focuses on mobile apps that's extremely common knowledge. Except in extremely narrow circumstances, users do not discover apps inside the App Store: they discover apps from advertisements, word of mouth / viral features, and searching for things on Google. The search engine inside of the App Store is pitiful and, to the extent to which it works at all, often surfaces your competitor's app before yours.)

> Why is this situation better for the anti-ICE app than just being a web app? This should be a web app, right? It shouldn't really rely on any native capabilities.

I mean, in a perfect world, this app wouldn't be a web app, because a web app makes it really easy to go to the servers and shut it down, allows for a network choke-point to discover its users by traffic analysis, and generally harass (whether legally or illegally) the people who are paying for the service to exist.

What you want here is a peer-to-peer service, which requires a native app that you can download from numerous sources, one that is published anonymously, one which uses DHTs to store information and which builds on a platform capable of hidden services... and yet you also want to have things like push notifications (possible from native apps using local notifications that are surfaced after background updates).

Like, I dunno: this entire discussion is always so broken as it relies on so many assumptions made by people about what actually should happen... but every single one of these assumptions is buying into a narrative frame that Apple themselves have set through the years by choosing what to cripple in their quest to own app distribution.