Methinks this won’t be the last politically-motivated removal from Apple’s App Store; the more apps they remove then the more they weaken their own arguments about how a locked-in walled garden is in consumer interests.
What if the government asks for sentiment analysis? Thoughtcrime detection? Always-on audio collection? Always-on location logging?
All the things we were afraid of are simple technically and the only thing stopping it is a few executives of a trillion dollar company who must report earnings to shareholders.
Well, we're talking not just about "corporations", we are talking about entities with more gross earnings than most countries' GDP, e.g. Apple is sitting on billions of dollars in cash. These guys have the tech, the data, and oceans of money. Heck, some of them even have space forces :)
Maybe in our (very near?) cyber punk future, it's not only goverments that we should be concerned about. After all, we have some measure of input regarding the goverment.
>Maybe in our (very near?) cyber punk future, it's not only goverments that we should be concerned about. After all, we have some measure of input regarding the goverment.
Why shouldn't we already be concerned about the corporations? They've been slurping our data and selling it for a profit for my whole life[0].
Sure, that sort of behavior started with banks and other financial institutions, but has extended, over the decades, to consumer products companies (P&G, General Mills, etc.) and to retailers (Walmart, Target, etc.), then into internet search (Google, Bing), "social" media (the Meta conglomerate, etc.), hardware and software companies (Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.), communication devices (Apple, Google, Samsung, etc.), consumer electronics (LG, Samsung, GE, Maytag), Automobiles (GM, Chrysler, Nissan, Toyota, etc., etc., etc.) and "IoT" devices (Amazon, Google and a host of others) are all hoovering up as much information as they can to both sell (and governments as well as other corporations are buying and paying through the nose) and use for "targeted" ads.
Isn't your refrigerator showing you ads, your TV recording what you're doing while you use it, your phone reporting pretty much everywhere you go, everything you do and everyone with whom you communicate, social media apps recording every key stroke, even if it doesn't end up in a post, your car tracking both your movements and your driving behavior, your internet searches used to create detailed shadow profiles of your interests and purchasing habits. I could go on and on and on. Corporations are collecting levels of private data on people that would have been beyond the Stasi's[1] wildest dreams.
And so I'll ask again, when, exactly, should we "start" to be concerned about corporate surveillance?
Oh, we most certainly should be, but I am just musing about the (not entirely improbable future and possibly inevitable) when corporations are more powerful and lethal than any government.
Yep, anything DNC-labeled or affiliated will be next on the ban list. Truly scary stuff, that tens of millions of fellow Americans are actively cheering on.
The big tech companies bent the knee (or, complied with local policies and laws) to Russia, China, Europe, etc already to do business over there, it's nothing particularly new but we are fully aware that Russia and China are not free countries, and Europe has stricter consumer / data protection laws (so it's less free for companies than the US).
The left did this in the previous admin with Parler. This has been going on for a long time and Apple will not face any repercussions because it is abused by both sides of the political aisle.
It is not illegal to notice actions of government agents in public or to report them to others; it was a legal app designed to facility activity protected by the First Amendemnt.
A) it's not illegal, as evidenced by the fact that not a single person has been prosecuted. There is no law being broken, just the feel-feels of the surveillance state getting hurt.
B) Even if there was a law, its the duty of every American to disobey unjust laws. The government serves at the pleasure of the people, not the other way around. There are a lot of people getting awfully comfortable with weak men ordering other jack booted weak men to systematically tear down what actually makes America great. I thought we settled this last time, but maybe we need to revisit the issue.
>"it's the duty of every American to disobey unjust laws..."
Is this what universities are teaching? Where did you get this from, honestly?
This is a terrible assertion. The subjectivity of what is just or unjust would lead to overwhelming violent lawlessness if this were true. Thankfully, we have no such duty.
Please, stand up for what you believe is right within the legal framework. This is a largely just society, by comparison.
Maybe travel a bit to see what an unjust society looks like. Weigh your options, at least, before resorting to criminality as a lifestyle choice.
>> "it's the duty of every American to disobey unjust laws..."
> This is a terrible assertion. The subjectivity of what is just or unjust would lead to overwhelming violent lawlessness if this were true. Thankfully, we have no such duty.
The United States was founded by people defying unjust tax laws. It wouldn't exist as a country if its people had quietly accepted British law. The idea that it's the duty of Americans to disobey unjust laws is very much in line with its founding.
And when we look to history, the people who advanced freedoms and civil rights, the people we really remember - a great many of them were lawbreakers. Mahatma Gandhi was arrested for defying the British salt tax and colonial rule. Nelson Mandela was arrested for opposing apartheid. Martin Luther King Jr was arrested for breaking segregation laws and marching without a permit. Every person who signed the US Declaration of Independence was committing treason against the British crown.
>"The United States was founded by people defying unjust tax laws."
It is not the duty of every American to establish their own tax laws and form their own confederacy of themselves and do whatever they feel like. You're comparing the establishment of a government to the duty of a citizen. I think you can see how that makes no sense, right?
MLK was a non-violent pacifist, and his march was legal. Overly restrictive permitting laws violate the first amendment and he made that clear by exercising his civil liberties, lawfully, in the face of disagreement and unlawful arrest.
Gandhi was arrested by an opposition government. He broke none of his nation's laws.
Mandela fought a war. He participated in revolution. Are we all supposed to lead revolutions? Every week a new AR-15 carrying psychopath should shoot people up that he disagrees with? - Obviously not.
Disagreeing peacefully with unjust laws is a protected right. But violence and lawlessness is absolutely not a duty. It's not even advisable.
And promoting it as such is completely senseless in a country where peaceful discourse is a protected right. You already won! You have a peaceful way to make a difference! Why would you break laws to make a statement when you can already make a statement without risking a prison sentence?
None of the people you've listed had that option.
I'm very much horrified that a clearly educated person could arrive at such a misguided and dangerous conclusion.
> It is not the duty of every American to establish their own tax laws and form their own confederacy of themselves and do whatever they feel like. You're comparing the establishment of a government to the duty of a citizen.
Does that mean that disobeying an unjust law is acceptable if a lot of people disobey? How many makes it acceptable?
> MLK was a non-violent pacifist, and his march was legal.
Not according to Circuit Judge W. A. Jenkins Jr., who issued an injunction that led to MLK's arrest in Birmingham. Nor were the sit-ins he participated in legal according to the segregation laws at the time.
> Gandhi was arrested by an opposition government. He broke none of his nation's laws.
India at the time was ruled by the British. If we're going to say that colonized or conquered nations don't count, where do we draw the line? How recent does the conquest have to be?
> Mandela fought a war. He participated in revolution. Are we all supposed to lead revolutions?
So again this seems like it comes down to amount of support, at least in your view. People can disobey unjust laws as long as they have enough people agreeing with them. Is that correct?
> And promoting it as such is completely senseless in a country where peaceful discourse is a protected right. You already won! You have a peaceful way to make a difference! Why would you break laws to make a statement when you can already make a statement without risking a prison sentence?
Because non-violent civil disobedience is often more effective than discourse.
Rosa Parks broke the law and was arrested, and that ultimately lead to the law being declared unconstitutional. But if no-one broke the law, would it have been overturned as quickly?
MLK went on marches that there were injunctions against, and participated in sit-ins that were against the segregation laws at the time. Would the campaign for civil rights been as successful if there was no civil disobedience at all?
Suffragettes like Emmeline Pankhurst broke the law to draw attention to their cause. Would women have gotten the vote as soon if they obeyed the law?
> Does that mean that disobeying an unjust law is acceptable if a lot of people disobey? How many makes it acceptable?
No it doesn't. The establishment of government can be done without warfare in most cases, despite the nation's history. There was no framework for diplomacy or democracy within the kingdom. Your argument looks more like you've jumped to violence and lawlessness, even given alternatives. That's just bloodlust. That's not MLK. That's not Ghandi. You know that.
> India at the time was ruled by the British. If we're going to say that colonized or conquered nations don't count, where do we draw the line? How recent does the conquest have to be?
I won't entertain this example because it's irrelevant to the discussion. Is the US occupied by a foreign military, or are you just ignoring the political options at your disposal because you'd prefer to focus on how fast we can jump to arms and shoot each other? Let's skip this tangent.
>So again this seems like it comes down to amount of support
My argument against this example is that it's a last resort, while you're presenting it as the option of choice. A duty, no less.
>Because non-violent civil disobedience is often more effective than discourse.
It's sometimes more effective in the absence of alternatives. And non-violent civil obedience is most often effective and in most cases far more persuasive with the majority. Prioritize your efforts. No need to get violent when we can be disobedient. No need to get lawless when we can participate in democracy. Even fools won't follow a fool.
>Rosa Parks broke the law and was arrested, and that ultimately lead to the law being declared unconstitutional.
It was already unconstitutional. She didn't break the law. The judicial branch doesn't make new laws, it interprets existing ones. Her disobedience was lawful, and only required because she lacked a platform to reach the courts.
>(MLK...) Would the campaign for civil rights been as successful if there was no civil disobedience at all?
Same thing here, it was already unconstitutional to prevent peaceful demonstrations. Opposing local government with the law on your side to get the attention of a superior governing body is disobedience but as we can see by the court rulings, it's in fact not unlawful.
Even if it were unlawful behavior, it is not a duty. I have no imperative to go looking for laws to break, and anyone who tells me I have to is sick. I'm not MLK. There's 10 examples in history that this panned out for. I'm not such a megalomaniac as to think I'm going to be one of them. And I certainly don't think we all are.
> There was no framework for diplomacy or democracy within the kingdom. Your argument looks more like you've jumped to violence and lawlessness, even given alternatives.
Why do you assume that disobeying unjust laws automatically implies violence?
The only example I've given that involves violence is the American War of Independence, and only then because it's particularly pertinent to the idea that Americans have a duty to disobey unjust laws. All my other examples have been non-violent civil disobedience.
When someone tells me that they believe they have a duty to disobey unjust laws, my first thought isn't that they intend to be violent; it's that they intend to engage in non-violent civil disobedience. You can believe that you have a duty to disobey unjust laws and also believe that violence is a last resort.
> Is the US occupied by a foreign military, or are you just ignoring the political options at your disposal because you'd prefer to focus on how fast we can jump to arms and shoot each other?
The US was founded by foreign invaders. This is why I ask how recent a conquest needs to be.
By the time Gandhi was protesting in the 1930s, India had been under British rule for over 170 years. If Gandhi is morally justified to defy laws set by the invading British, then Native Americans are surely morally justified to defy laws set by the invading US government.
And again, you jump to the idea that defying unjust laws automatically means shooting people.
> It's sometimes more effective in the absence of alternatives. And non-violent civil obedience is most often effective and in most cases far more persuasive with the majority. Prioritize your efforts. No need to get violent when we can be disobedient.
Then we effectively agree. How long do you think we should give a government to fix an unjust law before engaging in civil disobedience and disobeying that law? Presumably it depends on the severity of the injustice, but I'm interested to get a feel for your intuition on this.
> It was already unconstitutional. She didn't break the law. The judicial branch doesn't make new laws, it interprets existing ones. Her disobedience was lawful, and only required because she lacked a platform to reach the courts.
So is someone justified in breaking the law if they believe that law will be overturned by a higher one? What if they're wrong?
Also, how would we test laws for constitutionality if no-one ever breaks those laws? Surely there needs to be something that brings the case in the first place.
> Even if it were unlawful behavior, it is not a duty. I have no imperative to go looking for laws to break, and anyone who tells me I have to is sick.
So if someone tells you that you have a duty to behave morally, that person is sick? Doesn't that include the vast majority of Americans, who at least in theory follow religions that advocate people act morally above all else?
You seem to acknowledge that civil disobedience, even violence, can be justified as a last resort. Yet you also seem to hold legal obligations higher than moral ones, and are dismissive of people who'd choose morality over legality.
Breaking laws is not behaving morally. In fact those are nearly always mutually exclusive. Morality is for you to have an opinion on, but it is not an objective truth.
You find yourself in a reality of consequences wherein choosing to break laws is a really bad option in nearly all cases.
Because of that, one cannot call it a duty. A duty obliges ALL citizens to break laws. ALL and seldom/last resort are mutually exclusive, logically.
You have found yourself in contradiction. You can't both believe that breaking laws is a last resort and also believe that it is a duty based on subjective criteria like morality.
It is a logical impossibility.
Can you break unjust laws? Yes. Is that ever the best option? Yes.
Is that a duty? No.
It's almost NEVER a good choice. It is a last resort. It was a good choice in extremely rare cases and a terrible choice for the majority of humanity in the majority of cases so often that it's justified to generalize that it's never going to be good for you as an individual.
You need to be a megalomaniac to believe it's going to be good for you. That you are somehow special like MLK. And let's not forget it wasn't good for him either. Sadly.
Don't let your star struck glamorization of moral icons and historical outliers lead you to make statistically bad decisions. These examples are famous moral icons BECAUSE they are outliers. They aren't MORAL outliers, they are rare examples of cases in society where morality was not overwhelmingly agreed upon. That's the expected course of growth for nearly all legal frameworks of justice.
You are most probably not an outlier and when you are you won't know that you are because legal framework is derived from the same majority opinion from which your understanding of morality originates anyway.
It's safe to assume, if you are breaking laws in a democracy, that you are on the wrong side of morality because the laws themselves, in a democracy, originate in the majority's moral agreement.
There is no way in hell, given that the above is true, that it should be a duty.
That rhetoric of duty throughout history has been used to charge the public for revolutions, and most especially violent ones. It is by no means a rational, or scientific conclusion. That is the objective reality, sir.
Don't be a jackass. Obey the law. You're not smarter than everyone that made the law. When you are, we'll tell you. That's democracy.
> You have found yourself in contradiction. You can't both believe that breaking laws is a last resort and also believe that it is a duty based on subjective criteria like morality.
I don't take the phrase "a duty to disobey unjust laws" as literally as you do. If it's more effective to overturn the law through legal means, then of course do that first.
Calling something a "duty" doesn't mean you get to turn your brain off and follow it blindly. Ships have a duty to help people in distress at sea, but they obviously need to first ensure that they don't put themselves in danger.
> That you are somehow special like MLK.
Believing that you need to be 'special' to act morally is one of the main causes of widespread societal injustice. As MLK said:
"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice"
> Don't be a jackass. Obey the law. You're not smarter than everyone that made the law. When you are, we'll tell you. That's democracy.
I was in favor of gay marriage long before it became law, or even was supported by the majority of people. Yet now it is. So the law at the time was ultimately wrong and I was ultimately right. By your definition, doesn't that mean I am smarter than everyone who made the law?
I don't think you need to be smarter than lawmakers to identify unjust laws. You need only look at the progressive causes of today to find the moral norms of tomorrow.
By not taking the word literally you're asking me to take your own opinion of what that word means, so that you can be right. No. My answer to that request is no. You don't get to choose what words mean. Society does. Again, democracy.
You didn't have to break any laws for me to help you vote for gay marriage. We all knew it was wrong that's why it's legal. Not because you punched someone or burned a car, or whatever illegal things you did, or in your revised view, advised people to do using the wrong definition of the word "duty."
Next time just be patient. Wrong laws take time to fix. And they take longer when you derail society into thinking that people who support gay marriage are violent law breakers.
Democracy requires that citizens have a duty to obey the law. Not a duty to break it.
Gay marriage is now the law in your example. I don't want everyone opposed to that law to go ahead and break it! Right? Wouldn't it be better if they just went ahead and tried to overturn it legally so that we normal people can do normal things like not letting them?
So, no, you don't appear to me to be the most intelligent person on the block. Certainly not enough to carry the cause for us tactfully. I wouldn't follow you. Neither would the vast majority of Americans, thankfully.
And don't tell people it's their duty to do illegal things, that is also illegal, especially when it leads to violence.
Just accept that you're not smarter. Have humility. Chill out. Get a law degree if you want to help. Don't be annoying. Don't be an idiot. Don't break the law. Have some respect for society. You didn't single handedly create it. Stop acting like you did.
We all created it; and the laws that run it. And we all need to come together and discuss what laws fit for us today. And we can't do that if you go around breaking them and acting like the conversations we agree on don't matter.
> By not taking the word literally you're asking me to take your own opinion of what that word means, so that you can be right.
No, I'm pointing out that we need to use our brains when considering glib generalizations.
If you want a more accurate phrase, you could say that:
"People have a moral duty to oppose unjust laws, beginning with legal avenues of opposition, followed by non-violence civil disobedience, followed by violent uprising as a last resort, all while giving a reasonable period of time between steps that is governed by the severity of the injustice being perpetrated, weighed against the actions being taken to prevent it."
However, that doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. The point of a phrase like "Americans have a duty to disobey unjust laws" is to trade precision for concision. It's up to you to extrapolate what people mean, or just ask them to clarify. I'm guessing this is something you find difficult?
> You didn't have to break any laws for me to help you vote for gay marriage. We all knew it was wrong that's why it's legal.
What do you mean by this? It was only in 2010 that the majority of Americans finally believed that same-sex marriage should be allowed.
If we accept that same-sex marriage is moral, then we must also accept that the majority of Americans prior to 2010 were wrong. Similarly, people were wrong in the past about racial segregation, women's rights and so forth.
Doesn't this indicate to you that morality is not just what the majority think?
> And they take longer when you derail society into thinking that people who support gay marriage are violent law breakers.
Why are you so obsessed with bringing violence into this? At every point I've emphasized that violence is a last resort, and that breaking the law does not automatically imply being violent.
> Just accept that you're not smarter.
You've missed my point.
I didn't say I was smarter than lawmakers; I pointed out that by your criteria I was, thereby implying that your criteria was flawed.
It was a self-deprecating rhetorical device, but I see it flew over your head, so let me try to speak more plainly:
I don't believe that morality is defined by the majority, because to do so would imply that it was moral in 1950 to persecute people by the color of their skin, and that it was moral in 1980 to persecute people by their sexual orientation. I reject that.
I do believe that people have a duty to act morally, even if this means breaking the law. That's not to say that people shouldn't exhaust legal means of protest first; legal protests are less personally risky and in free societies can be very effective. But I can certainly think of scenarios where doing the right thing would necessitate breaking the law, and in these situations, people have a duty to do what's right.
>I'm guessing this is something you find difficult?
It's not difficult, it's incorrect. It means something completely different.
>Doesn't this indicate to you that morality is not just what the majority think?
No. It indicates that there is no such thing! And you're not qualified to be the arbiter of the subjective devices we call societal justice and morality all by yourself. You must be convincing to the many. And only then can you have a decent hope of being considered moral.
>I don't believe that morality is defined by the majority.
Then you agree with all the most reviled villains in history who also knew better what is moral for everyone else.
>...would imply that it was moral in 1950 to persecute people by the color of their skin...
Again you're assuming that the law dictated what was moral, but it's the opposite causal relationship. Law follows morality over many years. Morality doesn't follow the law. But we must work within the law to adjust it over time to fit what the all consider moral. Until that happens it won't change, and especially not typically by violence. Just the opposite, violence can be used by the law to empower itself, but it cannot be used by the law breaker in the same way because it brands you a villain damaging your ability to convince the majority. That's because the majority gave that power to the law, not to you. Only in a democracy is that true.
>I do believe people have a duty to act morally...
Me too! But clearly that's subjective. Here we are disagreeing on what that is. The law was invented to settle exactly these such cases.
>Why are you so obsessed with bringing violence into this?
To me it looks like you're obsessed with bringing violence into this, and you haven't thought it out far enough to see that.
Let's play this out. You break the law. People, known as law enforcement, who chose of their own free will a violent career path will arrive with loaded firearms. These individuals are intentionally chosen for their lack of mental ability and for their willingness to follow orders and endure violent and dangerous situations, aggressively.
I can guess what the next step looks like. Don't play stupid. So can you.
> And you're not qualified to be the arbiter of the subjective devices we call societal justice and morality all by yourself.
Does this mean that you have no internal conscience? You just go along with what the majority of society considers to be moral?
You've indicated you believe that same-sex marriage is moral, but before that became a majority opinion, did you believe the opposite?
>> I don't believe that morality is defined by the majority.
> Then you agree with all the most reviled villains in history who also knew better what is moral for everyone else.
You mean like Jesus of Nazareth or Buddha?
The belief that morality isn't defined by the majority is an extremely common viewpoint. Probably the most common viewpoint, since its one shared by every major religion.
> Let's play this out. You break the law. People, known as law enforcement, who chose of their own free will a violent career path will arrive with loaded firearms. These individuals are intentionally chosen for their lack of mental ability and for their willingness to follow orders and endure violent and dangerous situations, aggressively.
So America's police force is so corrupt and violent that they'd think nothing of gunning down unarmed protestors in cold blood.
Why do you think that following the law would stop this?
I'm honestly trying to understand your thought process here. On the one hand you imply that most police officers are a hair trigger away from firing on a crowd; on the other, you seem to be insinuating that a individual's adherence to the law is an absolute defense.
>You just go along with what the majority of society considers to be moral?
As pertains to the law. Yes!
>did you believe the opposite?
Did I behave the opposite would be the question. You're talking about duty which implies action. No. I did not break any laws.
>You mean like Jesus of Nazareth or Buddha?
There is no evidence of any Jesus, but that's another discussion. The Buddha is a fantastic example of a man who advised the acceptance of all beliefs in society, showing humility and exemplifying how his beliefs were not the end all doctrine for morality. An opposition to invasion isn't relevant here because invasion isn't an attempt at a societal agreement on morality.
>The belief that morality isn't defined by the majority is an extremely common viewpoint.
No it isn't. All religions attempt to align society on a singular "higher" shared morality provided by the church, which throughout history represented their state and their justice system too.
>police force is so corrupt and violent that they'd think nothing of gunning down unarmed protestors in cold blood.
I didn't say corrupt. But violent, yes. Unarmed protesters aren't breaking any laws.
But if they fail to move when instructed, breaking the law, then that definition no longer applies and they are indeed physically relocated by increasingly violent means.
>Why do you think that following the law would stop this?
The law is the closest thing to a moral agreement of the majority. You're acting against that agreement when you break the law. Any amount of force used by police to protect that moral agreement becomes easy to justify in court. How many cops are sitting in jail? It's not a big number. That should tell you all you need to know. You're giving the opponent a justification for violence if they want it. And as I said before, they are selected from a pool of people who want it. That's a job requirement.
No individual agrees with all laws. But society must agree with that near moral agreement known as the law. It's the best we have.
When people don't have that near moral agreement, the fabric of society is degraded into anarchy, which empowers the most violent. And that's so much worse, isn't it?
>> You just go along with what the majority of society considers to be moral?
> As pertains to the law. Yes!
I'm interested in where you draw the line.
For instance, suppose a doctor is treating an underage rape victim whose pregnancy would put their life in danger, but the doctor practices in a state that outlaws abortion. The doctor decides to prescribe abortion pills anyway, breaking the law but following their oath to do no harm. Do you believe the doctor acted morally or immorally in this case?
To be clear, this isn't me attempting to catch you out - I'm just trying to understand what you personally believe. Are there any instances where you would agree that breaking the law is the right thing to do?
I'm also curious how you view changes to beliefs over time. Was it moral in 1950 to discriminate based on race and sex, because that was the majority opinion at the time? Or is it only today's majority opinion that matters? And if so, what happens in the future when the opinions of the majority shift further?
> No it isn't. All religions attempt to align society on a singular "higher" shared morality provided by the church, which throughout history represented their state and their justice system too.
Christians, Jews and Muslims would say that God is the highest moral authority. That's core to their faith.
How much society influences their interpretation of God's word is up for debate, but their belief is that morality does not stem from majority opinion; it stems from the word of God.
> I didn't say corrupt. But violent, yes. Unarmed protesters aren't breaking any laws.
Unarmed protesters certainly can break laws! You don't need a weapon to block off a highway, break into a building, or deface a wall with graffiti.
But if the police aren't corrupt, then why do you suggest that they're likely to shoot? Because they're stupid or under-trained?
> The law is the closest thing to a moral agreement of the majority. You're acting against that agreement when you break the law. Any amount of force used by police to protect that moral agreement becomes easy to justify in court. How many cops are sitting in jail? It's not a big number. That should tell you all you need to know.
Sure; it tells me that the law is unjust when it comes to punishing police officers who commit crimes.
> No individual agrees with all laws. But society must agree with that near moral agreement known as the law. It's the best we have.
I don't disagree that society needs laws to function, but there are also many laws that are unjust, and they won't change without societal pressure.
Obviously the safest way to change laws is through legal protest and democratic reform, but that isn't always the most effective way. Breaking the law is a good way to make headlines and spread awareness.
Another issue with democratic reform is that democracies are not all equally representative. A system like the USA is less representative than, say, Switzerland. In other words, its more difficult in the US to change laws than in some other democracies, even if the majority agree the law should be changed.
>...whose pregnancy would put their life in danger, but the doctor practices in a state that outlaws abortion...
He doesn't need to break the law. This is legal in all 50 states. Point in fact, law is loosely fit to the morals of the society in which you find yourself. I'll go a step further and point out that you have no way of ever proving that the morals you carry as an individual weren't gifted to you by that same society. Research suggests that they very much were. This is important in some of my other answers.
> Are there any instances where you would agree that breaking the law is the right thing to do?
In court, I trust that in the majority of cases, if someone acts in a way that the majority find to be in alignment with the values of the society that tries them, if that society matches the one in which they align as well, that they will be found innocent, implying that they didn't break the law. This satisfies your MLK examples, and all the others too.
By the way, if you read the above paragraph carefully, you'll find that it is not my opinion, but a logical construct of fact. If we assume that democracy works, its purpose is to create laws that match the majority direction of the moral compass of the people. Therefore, your actions in court are compared against the very morals which you are assumed to expect of yourself. That's also why someone found to have broken the law is referred to as "guilty." In a more archaic definition, guilt is an emotion. The court is finding the accused to have known that they were doing wrong and to feel bad about it.
In other, more pointed words, to have been possessed of the duty to break the agreed upon code of conduct of the morals shared by the accused and their peers. I used the word "duty" here intentionally to point out how logically impossible it would be to consider it moral.
>Was it moral in 1950 to discriminate based on race and sex...
It wasn't, that's why this ended not long after. But I see what you're asking so let me revise your question. 1920: the majority would tell you that it's the nature of humanity and that it's not immoral.
You and I don't agree with that, but we aren't a product of the 20s. If you think you would be an exception, then I'd call you egotistical. That would be statistically very improbable. Your morals are every bit a product of your peers' morals as ChatGPT is a product of the internet.
>Unarmed protesters certainly can break laws! You don't need a weapon to block off a highway, break into a building, or deface a wall with graffiti.
In doing any of those things, they've ceased to be protesters. They are now rioters. Rioting is illegal. And it does warrant a violent response.
>..then why do you suggest that they're likely to shoot?
What kind of person chooses a violent job? A violent person. Violence is not corruption. In fact it's perfectly justified in some cases.
This goes both ways. If you know you're going to interact with violent police when you go sit on the highway, you're also looking for violence. There's nothing peaceful about it.
Let's look even closer; blocking a highway prevents emergency transportation causing loss of life. It's not just beyond protesting, it's beyond rioting. You're out there killing people. I wouldn't think it's a stretch to pin manslaughter and in some cases even murder or serial murder on them.
Preventative, even violent action, is justified here. Notice the law says so too.
And especially if the protesters didn't know that, it makes the point that they can't be trusted to protect the wellbeing of society more than the law and should therefore never be advised to believe it's their "duty" to trust their own judgement of morality over the law. In this example, they've committed a moral atrocity as a protest! They need to be told that they can't trust themselves, and that they are a danger to society.
Was Ghandi a danger to his fellow man? Was MLK? Look how easy it is for them to imagine that they are each as enlightened as MLK when in fact, they've become murderous criminals.
Please, just don't break the law. Don't get shot. Use your brain!
>their belief is that morality does not stem from majority opinion; it stems from the word of God.
Sure but the church will tell them what that is and will ensure that every member knows it. That's a shared morality. It's also malleable over time, just like the legal system.
>it tells me that the law is unjust when it comes to punishing police officers who commit crimes.
It seems society cuts them some slack since they are, after all, removing protesters from the highway so that their grandma can get to the hospital, or their kid doesn't bleed to death in the ambulance.
Herein, the morality of the individual, the protester, led them to kill my grandma, or my neighbor's son. Now they for sure don't appear to be responsible enough to trust their morals. Intentionally or accidentally, it doesn't matter. The outcome is that they've killed people because they thought they know better than the laws that took millions of people thousands of years to create, and they'll do it all while believing themselves to be a peaceful protester that has a duty to break unjust laws.
Just like every villain in history.
>..there are also many laws that are unjust, and they won't change without societal pressure.
Then you should be patient or resign to humbly accept that you may be wrong and that they won't and maybe shouldn't change, otherwise you might do something stupid like sit on the highway, inciting cops to become violent, end up in prison, my grandma will die on the way to the hospital, and you'll plead in court that you didn't mean to kill her, you were making a statement.
Seriously, don't do something selfish like that. Maybe you're really ahead of the moral curve, but in the experience of many millions of people who share the world with you or those who lived before you, we find that to be a very unlikely assessment.
>Breaking the law is a good way to make headlines and spread awareness.
No it's a good way to kill people. See the examples above. You've just lowered your moral standing to less than the law. I don't see how you can come back from that.
You seemed like a nice person, and at the very least asked good questions, but you lost my respect when you said this.
> its more difficult in the US to change laws than in some other democracies, even if the majority agree the law should be changed.
You give credit to the law every time you break it and someone dies. That's exactly why it's so hard to change. You're causing the problem and then complaining about it?
The columns are getting too narrow to continue. I wish you well, and I hope you'll change your mind about breaking the law, and if you won't, that you'll be jailed safely.
> I'll go a step further and point out that you have no way of ever proving that the morals you carry as an individual weren't gifted to you by that same society.
Oh sure, I won't deny I'm influenced by the society around me, but my morality can't be entirely a product of that society, otherwise I wouldn't find any laws to be unjust.
> You and I don't agree with that, but we aren't a product of the 20s. If you think you would be an exception, then I'd call you egotistical.
But I was in minority when it came to gay rights in the 1990s, and I'm in the current minority when it comes to trans rights in the 2020s.
Why do you assume that I wouldn't also be in the minority regarding civil rights, were I born earlier? I'm not saying I'd be in the 1%, but I'd like to think I'd at least be in the 40%.
I guess I should at least applaud the honesty of someone who implies they would be supporting the Klan or worse if they were born a century earlier, but I think your mistake is assuming everyone is like you.
> In doing any of those things, they've ceased to be protesters. They are now rioters. Rioting is illegal. And it does warrant a violent response.
I would consider that to be extremely immoral. All this time we've been talking about how violence should be a last resort, and now suddenly it isn't?
> Let's look even closer; blocking a highway prevents emergency transportation causing loss of life.
The emergency vehicles would use the shoulder to pass the traffic, and the protestors could just move out the way when an emergency vehicle came. I'm not saying you don't have a point that lives could be endangered, but it's a leap to say that people would certainly die, even in this hypothetical example of yours.
And what about graffiti? How would that endanger life?
> No it's a good way to kill people. See the examples above. You've just lowered your moral standing to less than the law. I don't see how you can come back from that.
So all non-violent civil disobedience is immoral, because you were able to think of an example of how a specific act of civil disobedience could be the cause of a death.
Fine. Let's use the same logic on laws.
The second amendment guarantees every American a right to bear arms, but this includes Americans who are irresponsible. An irresponsible gun owner might leave their firearm where a child could find it, leading to the death of that child.
Voilà: a example of how a specific law could cause a death, which by your logic means all laws must be immoral.
> The columns are getting too narrow to continue. I wish you well, and I hope you'll change your mind about breaking the law, or that you'll at least wind up in jail before you get someone killed.
Thanks for the discussion. I can assure you that I have no current plans to break the law, but if a dream team of professional criminals recruits me for an ambitious and improbable casino heist, you understand that I can't make any guarantees.
The fact of their being lawless would preclude the argument. If the government is lawless then by definition they are not law enforcing. Not a government.
I don't see that remotely fitting the United States as a generalization.
I would argue that if you do, you are either poorly traveled, or fanatical.
I would hope it's the prior, for everyone's sake. Try hailing a cab at midnight in the middle of Mexico before declaring the US to be ultimately lawless.
Maybe don't actually try that.
Regardless if you find the government to be so unjust as to convince you to break laws and become violent, you belong in prison and the majority of people will help to put you there, make no mistake. Regardless of leadership, I highly value that about the US.
I hope you'll change your mind before that happens.
> Try hailing a cab at midnight in the middle of Mexico before declaring the US to be ultimately lawless.
I've been to Portland, does that count?
> I hope you'll change your mind before that happens.
I don't think you do. I think that you fantasize about throwing your political opponents in prison, and uttering a veiled threat cloaked in empathetic language makes you feel powerful and clever.
In any case, I'm not sure what you took away from my response, but survival isn't a bad thing - at least not for the individual. It's clarifying, putting one in the proper mindset from collaborative to transactional and opportunistic.
Of course, systemic myopia and brain drain can hurt an organization worse than any direct action could ever aspire to, but organizations run by violent thugs aren't known for known for advancement based on competence as opposed to loyalty.
> I hope your assumption isn't projection, but I think it is based on the rest of your comment. You appear to be making an effort to organize violence, so I'm going to step out of the discussion here.
The domestic use of ICE and the military is plainly the actions of an organization of violent thugs by anyone with eyes to see. I do not advocate for violence - to the extent I am advocating for anything, I am explaining to you the foreseeable results of ideology-based institutional rot.
You are aware of this, don't appreciate the implications of what I am saying, and have seemingly resorted to yelling "violence" at the top of your lungs in the hopes that I am intimidated by such an accusation and become defensive.
>resorted to yelling "violence" at the top of your lungs
Shouting at the top of my lungs? If you can hear me shouting through the glass then you can probably hear my eyes rolling right now too. Of course I did neither. You should consider how often you might be doing this in your daily life, because assuming the worst in the people you interact with is a sure way to be treated like garbage (and justly so).
Back to the point, I understood from your commentary that you mean violence when you refer to unlawful behavior. If you don't then you have every opportunity to say so.
I don't think I was presumptuous in my understanding, because I can't think of a way for you to interact with violent, armed forces, unlawfully, without inciting violence. And that's my point.
That and more so that it's not a duty of every citizen to behave unlawfully. In fact, it's been the successful approach of maybe 10 such citizens in history. You can see the other commentor's examples. It's unlikely you're going to be one of them. It would show humility to, in the least, admit as much.
Also because you've made no substantial justification for it to be a duty. Afterall, that's the comment you responded to.
I think not. You already gave away which direction you were intending to steer the conversation and the conclusion you were intending to eventually draw.
Next time, perhaps practice more patience before you jump the gun like that.
And it won't affect their branding in any relevant way.
As "Amusing Ourselves to Death"[1] would explain, what almost all Apple consumers want is just FaceBook, WhatsApp, memes and games. Anything else is "boooring!".
I've started buying refurb, and will be heavily considering my upcoming electronics purchases. I encourage others to reduce consumption from companies which kowtow to this dangerous administration's demands and rhetoric.
I've been boycotting Amazon as best I can for nearly a decade though since they had ambulances outside their warehouses and delivery workers pissing in gatorade bottles but reducing consumption of toxic brands can be done and is effective at sending messages when done en masse.
I also boycott all the social media companies, Disney, Google as much as possible.
Sadly, there's not a ton of options in this space (computer electronics).
I've also e-mailed [email protected] and expressed my opinions in a polite manner. Maybe someone read it. Who knows.
I like the thought, but AFAIK it doesn't really change the bottom line much, as long as you buy a used older product from a brand. Probably because the person selling it is buying a newer model, so you're still helping the company out.
I might be wrong, though. But this was the initial conclusion I arrived at when I was researching whether to buy an iPhone 17, iPhone 15 Pro (used) or Android phone. Only the last option would probably hurt Apple directly. And only a liiiiiittle.
Ah! But, of course, I will also be slowing my purchasing cycles which means I'm buying less products over my lifetime.
I plan to ride my laptop out til it dies, not buy another Apple Watch, ride my phone out until I can no longer use it. Etc.
I'll do the same with work equipment instead of getting available upgrades.
And I still have my Apple One subscription because I got the whole family on it, but maybe one day I'll make the sad choice and cut that off too.
Yea, it's absolutely tough, and it's probably meaningless in the singular sense of it all, but if more and more folk think like I do, that will absolutely hit them in their bottom line. And, selfishly, I get to feel decent about where my money is going.
That's nonsense. The choice is between you purchasing a new phone or you not purchasing a new phone. It's post hoc justification to assume that your dollars from buying a used unit will be used for something in particular. You made the decision you wanted and then built the logic to support it.
I don't change my use of such words for other people, I do it mostly to change my own thinking. If others want to join me and also change their thinking that's also good.
It's called "sideloading" because you're sneakily installing software without the manufacturer's consent.
Remember it's never your device, you just have permission to use it.
I think "sideloading" is a completely ok term. it says what it is,, you load an app, not with the intended method (appstores) but from an alternative source, aside the official store. not a native English speaker, so I might not fully understand the possible connotations with this particular word, but I do not personally see anything wrong with it.
The previous president, Juncker, was the premier who made Luxembourg a taxhaven. Nowadays buying from Amazon in Europe you still get a purchase receipt from Amazon Luxembourg...
I still think we’re better off with the EU than without. Imagine trumps tariff war without the EU. He would have crushed every country individually… The deal is not great but it would have been worse.
I just don’t see how they will enforce it. Will they force telegram and signal to exit the EU app stores? The won’t offer a different app in the EU.
if we're talking about the EU, for a provider the size of Google, not allowing third party application installs is illegal in the EU under the Digital Markets Act
This doesn't necessarily mean they can't introduce developer verification process. (Meaning only Google verified and approved developers would be able to distribute APKs)
It's really quite worrying how all these things (age verification, chat control, side-loading prevention, etc.) seem to be coming to bear in tandem across many countries.
What capabilities do you need that current web browsers don't satisfy? I hear this argument quite a bit with Safari bashing. While Apple does seem to favor the "native" approach, I also use Mobile Safari exclusively for my own apps, and it works fine.
I mean, it's still a valid point even if it's a fixation. The enshittification of the web to work "only on Chrome" while Chrome is controlled by an advertising company whose motivation is to sell ads with it over providing a good consumer-oriented product is a problem.
man... things like this is why I was seeking another mobile OS at one point eg. wanting Pine64 to take off but alas... it needs more money
to clarify I get it's Mobian or Postmarket etc... which you could put on an Android phone but yeah
edit: the other thing was built in ads especially on cheaper phones like what you'd get at say Boost Mobile which I imagine is one of those subsidized costs thing phone is cheap because it's riddled with ads.
A government probably wouldn't have to push very hard for Google to revoke a dev's signing key, blocking apps signed with that key. So I don't see a difference. Technically sideloading will be possible, but Google will still have control of what apps can run on devices.
Unverified developers can still use adb to install whatever they choose per the link:
“How does developer verification impact my use of Android Studio?
We are working to ensure these changes don’t have an impact on your day-to-day workflow so you can continue building your apps as smoothly as possible. Participating in developer verification will not affect your experience in Android Studio, the official IDE for Android app development. You will continue to be able to build and run an app even if your identity is not verified. Android Studio is unaffected because deployments performed with adb, which Android Studio uses behind the scenes to push builds to devices, is unaffected. You can continue to develop, debug, and test your app locally by deploying to both emulators and physical devices, just as you do now.”
Non-developers are not considered here. Users without a PC and terminal know-how are left without any options. I don't believe that's an actual oversight...
> We are working to ensure these changes don’t have an impact on your day-to-day workflow
Lies
The workflow of Free Software developers, developing consumer software (a vital part of the software ecosystem) will be entirely jammed up and subject to the capricious whims of Google
For clarity, they're requiring apps to be signed by a verified developer on certified Android devices. You can still side load, but the verification is still required for the side loaded apps.
Future HN headline: Pam Bondi orders Google to revoke verification status and code signing certificates of authors of {partisan/politically-unfavourable Android app}
Back in 2011, Apple removed apps that crowdsourced warnings about DUI checkpoints. It remains Apple's policy today.
According to Grok, "In March 2011, four Democratic senators—Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), and Tom Udall (D-N.M.)—sent letters to Apple, Google, and Research in Motion (BlackBerry's parent company) urging the removal of such apps […]"
So, we have precedent where four Democratic senators pressured Apple to remove an app that allowed people to evade law enforcement.
> to remove an app that allowed people to evade law enforcement.
No, they continued to allow police location apps (Google maps will even tell you where they are).
The language they added to the app store rules were very specific: "Apps may only display DUI checkpoints that are published by law enforcement agencies, and should never encourage drunk driving or other reckless behavior such as excessive speed."
Whether or not that was a good idea at the time (it wasn't), you can't claim this is covered by the same guidelines.
You don't have to be driving impaired to have a strong desire to avoid the checkpoints. I avoid them because they're intrusive, oppressive, and upsetting.
>What purpose outside abetting in avoiding a DUI is there for publishing a live map of DUI checkpoints?
When Churchill made that famous quip about the "average voter" he was talking about the kind of people who complain out of one side of their mouth about law enforcement going hard on a particular class of laws they don't like while stating out the other that anyone who doesn't want to submit to a papers-please stop on the pretext of catching people engaged in a fairly common misdemeanor that they do want to see hard enforcement on is abetting said misdemeanor.
* You or your friends or family have had negative experiences with law enforcement, so you prefer to minimize contact
* You share a car with family members, one of whom smoked cannabis in it; the smell will result in an extended detention and investigation at a checkpoint
* Your license/registration/insurance is not current
The question was "What purpose outside abetting in avoiding a DUI is there for publishing a live map of DUI checkpoints?".
As a technical point, being an undocumented immigrant is still not a crime in the USA though it can result in law enforcement actions with impact as severe as criminal penalties. Expired registration or insurance is a civil infraction rather than a crime in some jurisdictions.
Edit: I should clarify why it matters that some of these are civil infractions rather than crimes. Navigation apps that Apple allows, including Apple's own maps app informs users about police and speed cameras, which helps people violate the speed limit without being punished. There doesn't seem to be a coherent principle at work here though.
Sometimes I take a legally prescribed stimulant / controlled substance for ADHD. Those medicines can be perfectly safe to drive with once you know how the particular dosage affects you, and driving with them is often even safer at the appropriate therapeutic dosage than driving without them. Further, as a person with ADHD and a tic disorder, I would have a fair chance of failing a field sobriety test even if I'm sober. I'm also not thrilled with the idea of lying to cops, since I know that can be a crime separately from the question of DUI.
So, putting all that together, imagine this sequence: cop at a DUI checkpoint asks me to perform a field sobriety test. I refuse, either without giving a reason or citing my ADHD and tic disorder. They ask me if I'm taking any medicine for ADHD. I don't lie and either confirm that fact or plead the fifth, or even if I do lie they still might not believe me. I probably don't have the pills or the bottle with me since I wouldn't usually be taking it in the car anyway. They then insist on a blood test, either with consent or with a quickly obtained warrant. I then have to accept a long detour going for the blood test, and then spend a lot of time and money proving in court both that I had a legal prescription and that I was not legally impaired by the medicine. (Even if I do have the correctly labeled pill bottle with me in the car, the cop still might incorrectly assume the medicine impairs me.)
Avoiding this hassle is a perfectly legal and legitimate reason to want to know where DUI checkpoints are.
Nothing I'm saying is condoning driving drunk - I certainly don't do that. When I drink, I pay attention to the advice of blood alcohol content calculators to figure out when I'm safe to drive and when it's fully out of my system. And when I take medicines that interact with alcohol, I'm even more cautious with drinking than when I don't.
What purpose outside abetting in avoiding a DUI is there for publishing a live map of DUI checkpoints?
That is easy to answer - letting law abiding citizens going about their personal business know that if they go through an area they are likely to be stopped and subjected to being searched by police without cause.
I’m returning home from the store with cold medicine for my toddler late at night and I don’t want to have my trip increased by 15mins due to some police state bullshit.
As useful data for sober civil libertarians who want the choice to route through a DUI checkpoint to exercise their rights.
I wouldn't code it because there's no way to disallow the service for the set of people over the legal limit trying to avoid a DUI checkpoint. But if, say, a group of sober civil libertarians find a way to tell each other how to always choose right-exercising routes, I don't see any obvious ethical problems with that.
We do not have DUI checkpoints in my country, but I would assume they delay the travel due to being, you know, checkpoint. So it might be desirable to take alternative route if you do not want to spend time waiting for the check. I guess?
I strongly doubt this was a reason for the app though.
And it was wrong then too. Preventing people from sharing publicly available, literally visible from the street, information has got to be the brightest line violation of 1A. I'm really over how much the supreme court—not just this supreme court—has let the government end run around the constitution using tricks like this. Especially with the tax and spend power. If the government couldn't pass a law doing X then the government shouldn't be allowed to achieve X by any means.
Congressional dysfunction isn't an excuse to allow the creation of a shadow government orchestrated by the executive but here we are.
Why did you ask an LLM which is manipulated by a single person when he doesn't like facts?
> So, we have precedent where four Democratic senators pressured Apple to remove an app that allowed people to evade law enforcement.
Yes, senators sent letters to several companies. Apple listened. What would have happened if it didn't? What would happen to Apple if they don't listen now?
Do you sincerely believe that both situations are comparable?
> Do you sincerely believe that both situations are comparable?
How are they not? In both cases US government officials applied pressure and implied legal action to force private companies to act in ways that enabled law enforcement to act with less resistance. It’s why we should always push back against government overreach and bullying. Because the “slippery slope” might be a logical fallacy, but that doesn’t stop it from also being the most likely outcome of the government pushing the boundaries.
Oh, please. Senators do not head the department of justice and requested, not demanded under threat of retribution under a "unitary executive". For them to do anything would require a quorum of 50% of the entire government to make a law.
Sure but Senators actually have the power to make law, unlike the executive. Also let’s be honest, if any government official “requests” anything it is always under the threat of retribution. See also the Jimmy Kimmel situation.
I’m reasonably confident that if a sitting US senator called you up personally and “requested” that you stop posting on HN or stop contributing to some open source encryption tool that you would find that event threatening, no matter who was currently president.
> In both cases US government officials applied pressure and implied legal action to force private companies to act in ways that enabled law enforcement to act with less resistance.
That's like saying cooking is comparable with stabbing someone because both involve moving a knife back and forth. Give me a break.
The intent of using a knife to cut flesh when cooking and the intent of using a knife to cut flesh when stabbing someone is different. Are you saying you believe that the intended outcome of the senator’s request was different?
The exact verbiage is this: "Apps may only display DUI checkpoints that are published by law enforcement agencies, and should never encourage drunk driving or other reckless behavior such as excessive speed."
While it's still bad, you can see how it's worse when it's coming directly from a regulator top-down from the president, right?
Senators gave no individual direct control over regulation. They can influence appointments or influence legislation, which is still power backing the implied threat, but that's a much more roundabout threat than a single person with direct power to destroy your business.
This creeping authoritarianism is why Google's play to force developer registration (before allowing a developers apps to be installed on android) is so irresponsible of Google:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45017028
It's like they don't understand what's possible to be coerced into from there. They cite "danger to users" as the rationale, but their imagination of danger is so damn limited
I wouldn't pretend to understand the Android app ecosystem better than Google.
A charitable guess would be that Google understands that forcing developer registration will introduce more risk for some people, but overall the total risk over the entire population is reduced. It's a net benefit.
There is even more massive fraud taking place within Google's ecosystem of approved apps on Android. Google does nothing at all about it for the simple reason that Google cashes in on a percentage of the loot. I myself have been scammed by two apps that claimed to offer specific services, but they didn't offer them.
Most privately installed apps are for open source degoogled software that doesn't want to bother with Google.
Not surprising. The media hyped up the app and the admin hyper focused on it. Was bound to happen eventually since Apple wants to play nice with the government. Nice thing is it isn't the only one and others are multiplatform instead of iOS only. I'm doubtful we'll be seeing ICEblock show up in the iOS side load community.
I'd love for all tech reviewers at future product launches to go: "Yeah cool new iPads thanks... why did you guys block and remove an app that wasn't illegal? One that helped people know if armed forces that could search them and tear apart their homes were in the area?".
Just refuse to report on or post about new product launches without mentioning it.
Press is an large thing for Apple. Multiple times now they've only sprung into action when the press got on their arse about something (faulty HDD cables/video cards in Macbook Pros, faulty keyboards, etc). Press getting on them could push them to take an actual stance, or at least explain why (bowing to the dictator in this case).
Yeah most companies want good PR for access. Apple takes this to the extreme where the first whiff of negatives things to say and you're cut off. Now you won't get invited to events or given devices early. So you'll have to wait until release and buy it yourself. Then take the time to review a device. By that point most people have already seen the other coverage and made up their mind. So you will get very little motion which translates to income.
These corporations have effectively built their own club of chosen mouthpieces who are willing to excuse negatives about a product to make money.
What if all the youtubers eg. MKBHD, Justine, etc. all piss off Apple at the same time? Or one big one goes against Apple and others follow as an act of solidarity?
Which is why all of them should, every single one. Ones who don't should be called out by others.
Same thing at White House press conferences, push push push them relentlessly with questions that make them uncomfortable... make them squirm.
Press who always allow the other side to control the narrative deserve to die out. I know this is all easier said than done, but holy crap we are making it so easy for them to walk over us right now, we could at least do something.
Capital does what serves it best. Values are little more than a fig leaf in capitalism. After all, how many of us sacrifice our income for our values? A very few, indeed.
Which is why people going back and forth about incentives has always driven me nuts. Attempting to make assurances based on this handle we crank called "human incentive" that may map to human behavior in the expected direction, the opposite direction, or no direction at all, is madness! We don't know. Humans are unsolved.
Give me guarantees, or the closest approximation. Federation, distribution, dispersion of authority, interoperability.
Yes, exactly, which is why counting laws as a part of the incentive mechanism is wrong to do. "They won't do that because they don't want to break the law." Laws are impossible to perfectly enforce and States are changeling things. Communities should create more dependable guarantees.
Why do you need one? Or why is there always a presumption of an incentive that maps to capitalist modes?
I want decentralization because States oppress people and I want resistance to that to persist, others think like me such as the inventor of the Signal protocol hence why it was invented. If you need to describe that as incentive, cool beans.
> Why do you need one? Or why is there always a presumption of an incentive that maps to capitalist modes?
it could be that I'm misinterpreting your angle, but I would just point out that "incentives" are not tied to a particular economic model. Incentives are simply things that motivate or encourage people to do something, acting as either a reward for desired behavior or a penalty for unwanted actions.
Apple has always stood up to the government when there was money to be made. Claiming privacy protections sells iPhones.
The people in China see nothing of the "standing up to the government" reputation and never really have. At least Google decided to pull out when the government started demanding they hand over data and apply censorship, Apple just complied and started storing data where the CCP can get to it.
I'm not saying it is the case, but considering other tactics employed by ICE, this sounds like something they could deploy as a honeypot to profile potential targets.
They could and they could even make it a PWA so it would be on the home screen and able to send notifications.
But they only want to support native iOS for whatever reason (they've listed their reasons: https://www.iceblock.app/android, I just don't personally believe them to be technically accurate/truthful).
Why are we asking for profits companies to fight our fights? I am reading lots of comments from keyboard warriors. For profits companies are not there to fight citizens fights. You don't want this kind of stuff to happen, then people need to fight their governments and demand better and stop relying on for profits entities to do so.
For-Profit companies have an outsized impact on our day-to-day and have the ear of the current administration. Citizens United allows their voice to be heard politically (where they again have an outsized impact). I'm curious why they can lobby to impact the lives we live and our access to information, and their CEO can donate a million to the inauguration but suddenly they deserve the right to fade into the background and stay out of it all?
> Why are we asking for profits companies to fight our fights?
Maybe we're not asking them to fight our fights, but to stop tipping the scales one way or the other. There's a difference between asking them to aid progressive or regressive causes vs. actually staying neutral. If it's too big a moral burden on Apple or Google, then allow us to run whatever we want on our devices.
Apple makes huge claims about their involvement in advancing things like inclusion and diversity, workers rights, privacy rights, equity and justice. They literally sell pride merch which they make a profit from.
Apple market themselves as being an ethical choice of companies regarding human rights, when they throw that out the window with shit like this, people get pissed.
Do you know a good way to do geofencing on PWAs? I'm not saying you can't, but I don't know of any API that can accomplish that (without constantly running GPS location updates in the browser, which no standard phone will allow).
I'm unfamiliar with these apps. What is geofencing used for? Automatically alert you if there is ICE activity nearby so that you can drop what you're doing to converge ?
There's an alerting feature and an attempt to stop false reports. The map part is trivial (and I think someone is already scraping the locations into a web app), but the geofencing capabilities are more difficult.
Maybe have the app server contact a service that knows the user's location? You can probably somehow get the user's location on Google Maps, or Find My. Or... I don't know, Yelp check-ins with a particular hashtag?...
The neat thing about the US is that governments are overthrown regularly by automatic operation of law: 12pm on the 20th of January 2028, in the case of the 47th president. I'm sure you know this but I feel everyone needs to remind themselves of this immutable fact regularly until then.
Do not make the mistake of believing laws are as concrete as code. There are many, many instances throughout history of the powerful people who are responsible for enforcing the laws, deciding to suddenly change or ignore them.
You are 8 months in since your last 20th of January and your chief turd already collected all top military officials and started his speech by intimidating them. There is no such thing as "automatic operation of law".
An "overthrow" would be highly undemocratic and it's very curious to hear the same people that claim Trump is literally Hitler talk about "overthrowing" their (democratically elected) political enemies and then "punishing collaborators". Is there no sense of self-awareness at all?
The majority, of course, can decide to get rid of democracy and transform the country into a fascists dictatorship. But in this case they can't expect democrats to treat them by their democratic rules. This is not how it works, sorry. Your self-awarness is broken, I'm afraid.
Well, native apps are more popular among non tech savvy people because they’re easier to find and install. I was talking to the guy who works on our backyard and they don't even know what a browser is on their phone.
yeah? and what are they gonna do when they get to safari, type the website, and accept geo location?. You don't know humans.
you lost me at "if you told them", who's gonna tell them?
You can't send a push notification without a certificate that apple controls from a website. Push notifications seem to be key here so that you don't have the constantly open the app/webpage.
I have looked into developing a PWA. For starters:
1. Decent storage API. Last time I checked, there were serious limitations on the amount of storage you can use, especially in iOS
2. Mechanism for the user to save a certain . Analogous to saving and running a .exe and being able to compare the file hashes and run different versions of a file without the app developer's intent. This would include the ability to write and edit web apps from your device.
3. Some way of sending TCP/UDP packets directly, and doing port forwarding through UPnP.
4. Mechanism to run processes in the background, and for inter-app communication.
For example, you could not make a decent bittorrent app as a PWA. This is an example of an app which is prohibited on the app store despite having Apple having no legal basis for doing so.
I've often wondered if it would be possible to make some sort of "PWA Browser" that would give web apps hooks to some of this functionality, but it would probably get banned (There are no real rules on the app store, they can just ban you for whatever they want).
this is what I dont understand.
so many apps are almost website-like in functionality, and you can save a shortcut to the desktop / main screen and it will launch / look like an app. complete with notifications (if enabled).
What's the barrier? (another poster mentioned not knnowing anything outside of the appstore, but then "Share -> Add to Home screen" is a pretty damn simple flow.
Hmm, would be a shame if a major mobile operating system provider also ran a website-blocking service used by the largest web browser (Chrome) and the largest open-source web browser (Firefox).
They could even call it something like Google Safe Browsing to make it sound good to people.
Apple is working hard to make sure the answer is no (by not implementing advanced PWA APIs in WebKit and by not allowing other browser engines on iOS).
I don't see the problem. It was an app specifically developed to help people evade American law and attack people who work for the government, how is it a shock that they took it down?
Those should be removed too then. I don’t think they were nearly as effective as the ice block app was though. Every time I saw an alert in Waze there was nothing or it’s where they park an empty police car.
You need to be careful, the word "incite" does not mean what you think it does here.
Maybe the app enabled violence against law enforcement - but Waymo does that too by telling you where traffic cops are. Or Google Maps and Yellow Pages for documenting the location of police stations. Undercover officers, ICE or otherwise, aren't given any special exemptions to the law here.
This is exactly what's wrong with Apple's app store exclusivity. It's also what's wrong with mandatory notarization where regulations forbid that, and Google's plan to require developer verification.
Most people don't know they can "install" a website on their phone, let alone that it allows that website to act like an app.
Discoverability of PWAs is quite bad. I'd love them to become more popular, but attempted solutions range from "user manually needs to hit the install button in a menu" to banners capable of saying "install freewhatsappupdate.xyz for exclusive whatsapp deals"/"click install to verify you're human".
Microsoft actually tried to bring more attention to web apps by adding them to their app store, but nobody uses the MS app store.
Somewhat roundabout, but WEI can make it so you need to have an allowed device-OS-browser combo for important services like banking. The device can then make it impossible to install another OS, and the OS can make it impossible to install another browser. Then the browser (or the OS) just receives blacklists (and possibly eventually whitelists after everything is entirely corporate captured) from Google/Microsoft/Apple.
I keep wondering how all of this ICE stuff will eventually play out. Number of illegal emigrants in the USA is estimated to be between 11-20 millions. How much does it cost to send ICE team after a single emigrant? Then holding this emigrant in custody, then costs of deportation to the country of origin.
This looks like another enterprise like "war on terror" that costed trillions, hasn't given anything USA, but lack of money for infrastructure, healthcare, education and degradation of the middle class, which is in every democracy a stabilizing power - they have a lot of to lose, so they don't vote on extremists.
Current administration is very right about bringing back manufacturing back to USA, but they forget that without roads, railways, electricity lines and, the most important, workforce, they will not be able to do that.
Only about 20% of people deported have been rounded up by ICE, etc - the rest have chosen self deportation.
If I had to mind read the admin, I would imagine they intend ICE to go after the hardened criminals who, making a profit or being wanted, won't self deport under any circumstance.
Meanwhile most people who have just migrated illegally will generally self deport or do a really good job of blending in.
Obviously ICE is still going to sweep up anyone and everyone they can. The fed exists, and has always existed, to be a boot not a scalpel.
In theory local law enforcement is supposed to be the more targeted localized tool but because immigration enforcement has become partisan, they are either restricted from doing anything migration related or are going overboard to suck up to the fed.
It doesn't matter whether it's effective. This is all about riling up emotions, propaganda, winning (or preventing) the next election. Actual effect is barely relevant. Brown-skinned people aren't the enemy team - they're the ball.
> Authorities said the suspect, Joshua Jahn, searched his phone for tracking apps, including ICEBlock, before opening fire on the facility from a rooftop.
Thats weird because you dont need iceblock to know that ICE is at an ICE facility
We don't need to respect those companies or the people inside it. They will gladly suck up to any government if it earns them a dollar more. They're trash.
FWIW, everyone who claims that Apple fundamentally needs the centralized ability to control apps on their platforms "for everyone's safety" -- despite how that obviously and repeatedly makes them become patsies for governments all over the world to enforce their censorship regimes -- are complicit in this stuff (in addition, of course, to the people who build it at Apple...).
This framing is designed to shame people into feeling guilty for their point of view, rather than their actions.
Being complicit means to be knowingly involved in or facilitating an illegal or wrongdoing act. In my books, it requires a level of participation that I don’t think your characterization meets.
You're dismissing the parent argument merely based on a narrow interpretation of the word complicity. The way they use it is common and correct in English language. All it needs is to aid the wrongdoing in some manner. That's exactly what you do when you choose to support and lend credence to Apple's flawed arguments on safety and thus blunt the opposition to their hostile practices. This is significant because Apple has been forced on occasions to backtrack on bad decisions in the face of public backlash. (Anybody remember their plan to scan all photos in the phone for CSAM?)
Now even if you want to go the pedantic or legal route, the meaning of complicity changes according to jurisdictions. Many legal jurisdictions consider interference in the opposition to a crime or even silence in the face of a crime to be complicity if you had sufficient knowledge about wrongdoer's intent. In this particular case, people had been warning for decades of this exact outcome, down to the details of the headline.
You could argue that this is policing of thought and opinion. Obviously, we're talking about moral responsibility here, which is just another opinion too as far as consequences are considered. (Except in cases of astroturfing and sock puppeting where the complicity is more direct. But we will ignore that possibility for now.)
I don't know about this line of thinking. If you truly believe this, then you could point to just about anyone on earth and state they're complicit in some atrocity or oppression.
I would concede there are degrees of proximity, but this particular example, that if you are in any way contributing to Apple's success (not matter the size) that you are complicit, and by implication be held responsible, for fasicm is truly whacky in my books.
> If you truly believe this, then you could point to just about anyone on earth and state they're complicit in some atrocity or oppression.
Ah! I see where it's going now. You can't reinterpret and dismiss others' statements to your liking. If you choose to vocally support an activity that you know to be harmful in some way, then you're actively complicit in it. That's a choice. And not one that everyone takes to end up fighting with their own conscience. And even those who do, weigh their actions against a moral boundary they maintain.
> I would concede there are degrees of proximity, but this particular example, that if you are in any way contributing to Apple's success (not matter the size) that you are complicit, and by implication be held responsible, for fasicm is truly whacky in my books.
Misinformation peddlers actively frustrate and defeat the efforts of those who try to raise awareness and alarm about the problem. That's plenty enough for them to be held morally responsible for the results.
>> everyone who claims that Apple fundamentally needs the centralized ability to control apps on their platforms "for everyone's safety"
This is an action. If you go around defending Apple or advocating for their position then yes, you are complicit. You are not just a bystander, you are actively participating in their propaganda. This is especially true on HN where we expect the average user to be fairly technically literate. Everyone here should know how phones are not unique computers that need extra central authority control to make them safe when compared to your desktops and laptops.
Sure, Apple probably wants to have control over that too, but are we really going to let them destroy the very thing that made these systems magic? Computers are "magic" because we can program them. Because they are environments. You cannot make a product for everybody. But you can make an environment in which everyone can adapt to their individual needs and use cases. That's what makes the computer magical and so special. A smart phone is nothing without its apps.
Okay. So your point was not really: "I disagree on moral philosophy, responsibility and the attribution of guilt", it was: "I support Apple's centralized control on all apps you can run, but I don't want to be criticized for the moral implications of state control, censorship and authoritarianism, nor do I want to defend my position on the merits". That's cheap.
I don't know if that's necessarily a charitable interpretation of the comment, keeping in mind the HN commenting guidelines. Despite differences in opinion we should give everyone the chance to state their view, no matter what it is, as long as it generates "curious" discussion.
It's more like: "I support Apple's centralized control on all apps you can run, as long as that monopoly is only used to squeeze out competition and not for censorship."
Of course government censorship becomes a lot easier if you only need to put pressure on one company.
Bud Tribble was shaming Apple cronies in 1981 when he put "reality distortion effect" in circulation. You can feel however you want, but everyone can see the truth for what it is. Been that way for a while now.
If you buy apple products, work for the company or own its stock then you are financially facilitating this. I don't know who you are and I don't care, I am just saying this is the basic cause and effect.
Things cannot improve unless stakeholders use their levers to change or abandon the company.
I do 2/3 of those things and have no problem with what Apple is doing. There is no universal right side in this. This being a top comment here doesn't make it true.
FWIW, if you have no problem with what Apple is doing--and a lot of people might not: they might even actively cheer Apple on if they went out of their way to help ICE... not my jam, but a lot of people want to simultaneously be anti-ICE or anti-Trump and pro-Apple--then I don't think my comment becomes "untrue": the point simply would have no serious effect on you, as I guess you are simply OK being "complicit"... today <- which is key, as it isn't like this is the first or last time Apple has become a patsy to governments around the world, restricting access or removing content and software that challenge authoritarian control. I gave an entire talk in 2017 at the Mozilla Privacy Lab on how this happens to centralized systems all the time called "That's How You Get a Dystopia", though Apple is only one segment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsazo-Gs7ms.
The thing is these are all your opinions and you have a right to them... but you are choosing these words (my guess is they are chosen for you based on your source material) words like "complicit", "patsy", "authoritarian control". Using these words doesn't make them true.
I give you credit for speaking up for what you believe in publicly.
My opinion is that it is pretty self evident that a large or small company would remove an app at the request of the US Government that actively tracks federal agents that are attempting to enforce the law.
Ah, OK, so, that isn't actually the issue I am pointing at directly, which might be the confusion! I am not saying that--if you believe that such apps being pulled is, itself, a bad thing (and, a lot of people do, as they want to claim they are anti-ICE or anti/Trump), the reason that happens at all is not because Apple didn't fight back hard enough today (somehow): it is because Apple didn't make the correct choices years ago, and now they have no choice. Apple is only in a position to do this at all and be asked to remove stuff due to the government's wishes because they set themselves up to have no choice in the matter.
In fact, it is because of just how obviously "self evident" it is that the point can even be made in the first place: if you construct a giant centralized bottleneck on the distribution of software and information, you will end up being asked to use that bottleneck to filter content by governments... not just in the United States, but around the world. If that is truly "self evident" to you, you do not build the centralized bottleneck unless you like the idea of the eventual possible results of such.
And, in that analysis, if you like the result, then you can argue with the tone of the wording, but I don't think the point is "untrue". Apple doesn't really have any choice in the matter, so they are a patsy here. And if you argued to help Apple obtain their centralized position, you are complicit in said result. You might be proud to be complicit, or you might be happy that Apple is a patsy, but that doesn't change the truth of the situation.
So like, great: you say that is self-evident... did you like what happened today? If not, do you like it when Apple does the same thing for counties all over the world--when I said "authoritarian control" it was me talking about other countries, such as China, where I think you would be hard-pressed to argue otherwise--and pulls apps like VPNs and protest coordination tools? If so, again, very not my jam... but it certainly makes sense for you to be happy Apple has no choice and proud of any prior involvement you have with such...
...but, if you ever think Apple is doing stuff that makes your stomach lurch because they have no choice but to follow the edict of a government, the question is: what does that imply for moral product development in this world? Do you build--and then advocate for, or defend on forums--a centralized App Store and deny the ability for third-party software? Or do you, as a principled stance... not do that?
To refrain one more time: we are in intense and powerful agreement that "it is pretty self evident that a large or small company would remove an app at the request of the US Government that actively tracks federal agents that are attempting to enforce the law". That isn't only "your" opinion: that is "our"
opinion! ;P
As the moment of agency then happens well before this moment today, we then can't shy away from the real question: do you like Trump and how he's running ICE, and the result it has on families? If you do, again: not my jam ;P, but I totally get why you'd be happy about the result today or confused as to why you should feel differently about it.
However, it isn't obvious to me you do, as you want to hide behind the action today being "self evident", as if that obviates the need to even verify someone's (I want to say "yours" but you might technically be arguing on behalf of an anonymous third party, and I don't want to leave opening to pivot the discussion into whether or not you personally ever advocated for Apple) opinion on ICE: in fact, that is why that political opinion matters so very very much!
In a world where we decide one company has a bottleneck on information and freedom strong enough to quickly remove access to content and tools from a large percentage of the population, suddenly we must care deeply about how that tool will get used. If you don't like how that tool gets used, you really have to be advocating for that tool to not exist.
> If you buy apple products, work for the company or own its stock then you are financially facilitating this.
I don't know that saying to someone: "hey, you're complicit in fascism because you bought an iPhone" is a reasonable stance.
Imagine you're a factory worker who builds a component for Apple products. Is it fair to shout to that person you're enabling the US government's clampdown on peaceful resistance?
Do you think it makes sense to say to the tens of millions of Americans (and foreign investors) who hold positions in S&P 500 that they are complicity in fascism because Apple decided to remove apps?
I can appreciate your passion and conviction, but I don't know that the world is that black and white.
Everyone in this forum seems to be obsessed with personal guilt and blame because the idea that they are responsible for their actions hurts their feelings. I am just talking about the cause and effect here.
The cause is that you are supporting a company that thinks it has the right to control what its users do on their devices, and the effect is that this relationship is easily hijacked by the government. It actually is very straightforward.
If you want to stop the company, you have to convince the stakeholders to change/abandon the company or disempower the stakeholders themselves directly. This is why I make the case here: I can either convince you or oppose you directly.
>I don't know that saying to someone: "hey, you're complicit in fascism because you bought an iPhone" is a reasonable stance.
Don't worry, I do know that it is a reasonable stance. There are a ton of phones on the market that don't enable this type of control, and they are more affordable and useful than iphones. The barrier to entry is slight inconvenience.
>Imagine you're a factory worker who builds a component for Apple products. Is it fair to shout to that person you're enabling the US government's clampdown on peaceful resistance?
Factory workers are probably living in some third world country where they have very little leverage in negotiating the terms of the company, and they are probably too poor to afford iphones and don't care about US politics, but they still have some leverage. So you could shout that to the factory worker but they probably wouldn't care. It would be futile
>Do you think it makes sense to say to the tens of millions of Americans (and foreign investors) who hold positions in S&P 500 that they are complicity in fascism because Apple decided to remove apps?
I don't use this language of fascism because it has because been overused by the left. But my answer is simply yes. Shareholders are responsible for the actions of their companies.
You are just playing this game of deferring responsibility to some non-existent person. The consumer defers blame onto the company. The worker defers blame onto the management. Management defers blame onto the shareholders. The shareholders can pass the blame onto management. At the end of the game we can all shrug and say "well there was nothing I could have done".
The reality is that all stakeholders are to blame. Everyone has some leverage over the company, and many stakeholders have pivotal positions.
If you can buy individual stocks, then you absolutely do have access to the Dow in the form of a myriad of ETFs [1][2][3]. There are also numerous standard mutual funds which consist of all the companies in the DJIA. This is what I thought you were referring to when you said you'd invest in the Dow, hence my comment.
Whatever the word is, the cause and effect is this:
1. Apple users tolerate the status quo through inaction, which is the centralized distribution of software.
2. Governments take advantage of this status quo to control apple users.
If it was the case that the OS was open, then the US Gov. would have no leverage to prevent the distribution of the software mentioned in the article. However apple's stakeholders enable and justify the centralized software distribution as a feature rather than a bug.
Developers are in on it too: the locked-down ecosystem is more lucrative for them because there are higher entry costs to producing software, and thus reduced competition. It prevents piracy for example, at the cost of preventing the distribution of pretty much all open source software.
There's a difference between having a view and spreading apologia for public consumption.
For example, surely anti-abolitionists' apologia made them more complicit in the continued institution of slavery than those who chose not to make excuses for it did, even if they themselves did not own or facilitate the sale of people.
We don't seem to have a problem with assigning some responsibility for abolition with abolitionists' own apologia, some of it still read in schools today.
They knowingly created the systems they built around having centralized control, everyone told them the consequences of doing that, they did it anyway, this is the result, they are responsible.
It’s happened many times before, and people heard about it and aren’t that stupid or forgetful. They just want to believe something incompatible, so they permit themselves a little internal dishonesty: maybe it’s a separate issue that somebody else will surely figure out, or there’s a better solution (that we won’t pursue), or everybody always exaggerates (but we won’t verify that), or they find a way to hate and dismiss everybody who talks about it. Declaring your own shamelessness is more of the same: you’re reframing the problem from the consequences of your actions to your feelings about those consequences, then addressing only your feelings. It’s the same sort of behavior as heroin addicts, who find a route to happiness that doesn’t push them through the good things that the pursuit of happiness was meant to.
> This framing is designed to shame people into feeling guilty for their point of view, rather than their actions.
Having a point of view and then using that point of view to make public claims, often counter-claims in face of precisely this type of criticism, is an action. Examples are easily found on this forum.
Would have Apple done the same if it was any another country?
Probably not. They would have courts and the democratic processes to help them resist.
But in face of authoritarian government who can hurt Apple's sales the company always bows. Be it actions in China or now action in US. The motive is simply profit.
The company cannot have a centralized control to make it "safer" and then give that way if the profits are under threat. Companies should be shamed for that.
I'm skeptical of this angle. If the app in question is being used by some to commit targeted violence, is it really a question of profit and not safety? Does it really take much pressure to want to get out of that position?
Does Apple publish apps designed for reporting locations of immigrants or minority groups? Is that a line of business they want to be in at all?
Please show where these apps have been used to commit targeted violence.
Your second paragraph reads to me like you’re equating the desire to protest and document the atrocities being committed by government agents to physical threats and violence being committed by unhinged private citizens against minority groups. This is a disingenuous argument.
You do not understand. I am equating the desire of unhinged private citizens to commit violence to the desire of other unhinged private citizens to commit violence. Reasonable people aren't the problem.
"An app that gives you real-time updates on the location of people you deeply dislike" is
It's extremely unlikely that there are not more people out there
The point is that If you're in Apple's position it doesn't especially matter who is being targeted and how many people are actually using the app that way. If they don't want to be in the anonymous people-reporting app game on the basis that it may make people unsafe vis a vis said unhinged private citizens, that's not unreasonable or inconsistent, and it doesn't necessarily take an extraordinary government threat to the business for Apple to want to distance themselves from that kind of app.
However, you said: "If the app in question is being used by some to commit targeted violence, ..."
Was this a pure hypothetical? If so, I don't think it needs to be addressed until it actually becomes a real problem. Apple itself ships an app that alerts me when a police officer is nearby (Maps), but I haven't heard about any police being targeted with violence because of that.
If it was not a pure hypothetical, I'd be interested to see a link, as I'm not aware of any violence committed due to the existence of ICE-tracking apps. To my previous point though, I am aware of private citizens committing violence against the same groups that ICE targets with kidnapping and trafficking.
It's a hypothetical in that while a) the primary purpose of the app is to locate a certain group and b) people have died due to attacks targeting that group (i.e. Dallas) there is no concrete causative connection between the two.
While it might better satisfy our sense of justice to wait until we can definitely say that a enabled b, the hazard is obvious, and Apple can reasonably determine that they don't want to be party to it.
> I am aware of private citizens committing violence against the same groups that ICE targets ..
Of course. Does Apple host apps whose primary purpose is reporting the location of those groups?
> It's a hypothetical in that while a) the primary purpose of the app is to locate a certain group and b) people have died due to attacks targeting that group (i.e. Dallas) there is no concrete causative connection between the two.
Cool, then I stand by what I said previously: it doesn't need to (and actually shouldn't) be addressed now. The app has value for journalists, protesters, people looking to prevent family or friends from being kidnapped, and others. All of those benefits outweigh purely hypothetical concerns around possible violence.
May be not complicit, but I think people need to be reminded that the context that Apple claims privacy is a fundamental human right and they are the defender of it. Both PR and in court.
And this centralised censorship regimes isn't new. It is exactly the same during Hong Kong protest in 2019.
Okay, but that's not what's being asked now is it? What's being asked is the explanation. They aren't telling saying to the public "we love the taste of boots" even if it is true.
Okay, but you haven't answered the question either.
Do you not think I'm not aware that Apple is bending the knee? I'm pretty confident JumpCrissCross knows that too.
The question isn't about what's underneath the mask. The question is about what the mask is. What they're pretending the actual reason is. No one here is asking for the real reason because we're already aware. We're indicating it in the comments too. So by trying to tell us what's beneath the mask you're just creating more noise and making it harder to identify the mask
Oh, well, a quick Google gives you the answer I think you're looking for:
> In an email to ICEBlock creator Joshua Aaron, Apple wrote that “upon re-evaluation,” the app does not comply with its app store guidelines around “objectionable” and “defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content,” according to a copy of the message viewed by CNN.
> Oh, well, a quick Google gives you the answer I think you're looking for
The reason I made the first comment was not because I was unable to find the answer myself but because I wanted to push back against this type of commenting. To respond to what people are actually asking. Pressure to help push the culture of our community to be more productive.
It seems to me that the best way to "help push the culture of our community to be more productive" is to be more productive yourself, instead of engaging in meta-discussion about the community not being productive enough for your tastes. In other words, you could have just actually posted the answer to the question instead of scolding two other commenters for not doing so.
I have no hope that the solution can be solved through lawfare. The ability of one company to control what the vast majority of people can do with their phones is unacceptable, regardless of what happens with this one app.
The vast majority of the people on this planet have never touched an iphone. Android dominates basically everywhere outside north america and, interestingly, the DPRK.
I lost--not on the facts, or even on the relevant law, and not even in the district court where we were being heard, but in appeals on a narrow technicality of statute of limitations that we bet our case on (I am explicit about this as Apple didn't "win", so much as "we failed"; I even feel like our case just wasn't argued very well once we got to that level, which hurts)--over a year and a half ago... so, never :(.
Sorry to hear it, that's the justice system for you.
IMO, you're in a unique position where you can make your case to the public, not only is it intensely relevant now, but people will listen to you. Your name/brand carries good will for many.
Even a blog post that can be shared would be valuable. If that's something you'd be interested in, of course.
It’s a shame too, because Apple has the money and brand wherewithal to fight the government. See the FBI vs Apple stuff that happened years ago. That actually won them some real converts.
Capitulating over this is Apple showing their supposed core values have significantly hollowed
Isn’t Apple mostly interested in making more money, though, instead of spending money?
The way I see it of all the top tech giants, Apple has the most to lose with all the tariff shenanigans, so it’s in their [shareholders] interest to stay friends with the current administration.
Apple has never had moral values other than earning money by making great products.
And I say this as someone who is deeply embedded in the Apple ecosystem.
Part of the brand after the FBI fiasco was about being a privacy forward company that didn’t simply capitulate to government demands on a whim. They demonstrated in smaller tests they were willing to put up a fight for those principles.
That of course was now almost a decade ago. They seem to have changed their entire messaging and with it, seemingly their interest in being more than a ROI machine.
It’s a regression not a step forward. Apple was never a paragon but this was legitimately a step in the right direction I felt, but alas, I suspect in today’s culture I am increasingly in the minority position
> but this was legitimately a step in the right direction I felt
I'll steelman against this, but only because I really enjoy entertaining the idea. Even back then, it was a branding farce. The San Bernadino event was in 2015, pretty close proximity to the Snowden leaks which disclosed Apple's 2012 cooperation with PRISM. Best-case scenario, it was an extremely lucky press junket; worst case scenario it was a false-flag operation designed to manufacture trust from the ground-up. In the aftermath, Apple cooperated with local police and federal authorities perfectly well, and the passcode to the shooter's phone did eventually come out. Apple continued providing device access in situations where warrants were issued. They even dropped their eventual charges against NSO Group.
If your tinfoil hat isn't tight enough yet, we're talking about events that happened over a decade after the Halloween documents. Apple's executives (and the three-letter spooks) know that Open Source can ship attestable and secure software that trounces their best paid UNIX or Windows Server subscription on the open market. If the goal is to expand surveillance and you've got a coalition of sycophantic tech executives (somehow, imagine that haha), then it would almost be trivial to program endless RCEs into the client-side with "secure" binary blobs. All the "E2EE" traffic can get copied onto tapes and sent to a warehouse in Langley. Would be like taking candy from a baby.
And the number of shares you personally own is irrelevant. The only public companies that ever take long term bets are those that are still founder led.
> Cook, clearly trying to remain calm, shot back: “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI [return on investment]. When I think about doing the right thing, I don’t think about an ROI.”
> Cook then offered his own bottom line to Danhof, or any other critic, one which perfectly sums up his belief that social and political and moral leadership are not antithetical to running a business. “If that’s a hard line for you,” Cook continued, “then you should get out of the stock.”
Making devices accessible cost pennies compared to their revenue and didn’t take any real courage. Come back to me when they stand by their convictions when it can cost them billions in tariffs
The thing is no one really stand by conviction against overwhelming force. Apple take billions in loss, cut supply globally resulting in hundred of thousands laid off at vendor or Apple locations.
These grandstanding activists will move on but real people will suffer due to Apple's action.
Tim Cook is a very shareholder-friendly CEO. One of the first things he did after he became CEO, which jobs always refused, was to start stock buybacks.
I have a hard time believing Apple getting in legal fights with the current administration is something that shareholders will appreciate, even if it’s better in the long term.
Regardless, if shareholders care about long term instead of short term, shareholders - as a whole - put the wrong CEO in charge.
> “Steve Jobs created a loyalty with users that is unparalleled in the consumer technology world. What Tim Cook has done, he’s built a loyalty with shareholders,” Sculley said on “Squawk on the Street.”
> Regardless, if shareholders care about long term instead of short term, shareholders - as a whole - put the wrong CEO in charge.
FWIW, while I keep wondering just how different the entire world would have ended up if Scott Forstall had ended up in charge of Apple instead of Tim Cook, I believe he was also one of the big reasons the App Store ended up as evil as it was (not Steve) :(. Is there anyone whom we could take seriously as having been in serious contention who actually would have done a better job?
> Cook's aim since becoming CEO has been reported to be building a culture of harmony, which meant "weeding out people with disagreeable personalities—people Jobs tolerated and even held close, like Forstall," although Apple Senior Director of Engineering Michael Lopp "believes that Apple's ability to innovate came from tension and disagreement." Steve Jobs was referred to as the "decider" who had the final say on products and features while he was CEO, reportedly keeping the "strong personalities at Apple in check by always casting the winning vote or by having the last word", so after Jobs' death many of these executive conflicts became public.
The tragedy of Apple, and perhaps Steve's biggest oversight, was his own irreplaceability. He failed to procure a suitable successor. Or perhaps there was not enough time. People are Culture. And Steve was a big part of it. The hopes of Apple living on without him are just that, hopes. He built Apple like an orchestra with himself as the conductor; when he left, the music didn’t fall apart immediately, but the score became safer, flatter, more repetitive.
I'm also a shareholder and I'd say I'm pretty happy with Apple not needlessly getting involved in fights. The most important thing is not getting tariffed.
Their reputation will be fine, no one but the terminally online are going to stop buying an iPhone because of this.
Pretty sure most of their shareholders feel similarly.
I agree that most people will not hear about this app being removed. (Though note that it's being reported here in "normal people" news, not tech news.)
But it's far from the only way Cook has aligned himself with Trump in just the last few months. The dumb gold-glass plaque and the UK royal visit are two much more visible examples.
> Doing what he needs to avoid tariffs is fine in my book.
And from above:
> The most important thing is not getting tariffed.
I am curious where your personal line is. Surely you have one. If the only way Cook could avoid tariffs were to go on live TV and swear his allegiance to the KKK, would you still support that? What if the only way were for him to pursue direct legal action against you and your family until you’re bankrupt? Eating live puppies? What exactly would you consider to be “too much”?
Exactly this, we are not talking the normal cycle of 4 years and then they are out, we are talking a possible "forever" fascism in the US so sticking to points of "I'm happy as long as my sticks are fine" is completey sticking your head in the sand hopping this all goes away soon.
the only time apple fights the government is when they want to keep illegally firing people and then the NLRB just goes, well sorry they just have too much money to stop them. They use bribe money for everything else.
Steve was never tested like this was he? Everyone’s about values until they are put into a fucked up situation like Tim Cook. The man had to literally deliver a Roman tribute to this president personally.
And that shouldn't have happened either. Apple doesn't need the US government, and Tim is himself a billionaire— he sure as hell doesn't personally need them either.
FWIW, you are legally required to pay your taxes, and there are going to be serious consequences to your life and your family's life if you don't; the moral decisions in that situation are much more difficult. However, Apple obviously is not and never was legally required to build a centralized App Store... hell: it isn't even clear that that it is legal that they did it, and these arguments are still playing out in court!
And, certainly, no one is legally required to put copious effort into defending the thing Apple did which directly and predictably leads to these results (which are not new or surprising). Even if Apple is, now, legally required to remove this app (and I don't know if they even are: many companies are just cowing to political, not legal, pressure), they carefully and intentionally set themselves up to be in that position.
FWIW, this much should at least be pretty obvious: if you go far far far out of your way to do something that no one required you to do to defend something that pretty clearly leads to a specific result, you are certainly MORE complicit in the results of that action than if you take an action that you are required to do at gunpoint and which only very indirectly and at very low impact causes the result (to the point where I don't even think the analogy of the Nurenberg Defense applies... but, I guess you aren't claiming to understand it well).
Like, I dunno... it just feels like such an ingenuous argument to try to claim that paying taxes -- of which only a very small percentage could possibly be claimed to cause this specific problem, particularly so as this exact same issue happens with iPhones in other countries (such as China, where Apple has become a very clear patsy to the regime and "complicit" barely scratches the surface of their involvement anymore) -- is somehow similar to actively defending the existence of a bottleneck on information and access to software that has time and again been used for censorship and authoritarian control.
Well to start with no one requires anyone to get a job and pay taxes. You could just as well live off food banks and take as much money from government. Knowing that the government does this, one need not give them any money any longer. You could spend down your balance and start eating from the food bank.
It's a pretty active act to go earn money that you then fully know (completely ahead of time) that you are giving to an immoral government. Especially when you know you can draw out of that government instead.
I think what is pretty obvious is that everyone has a story where they're somehow not villains but the guy epsilon more involved in the subject is 100% the villain.
Well, I'm only taking the notion of complicity to its logical conclusion. I disagree with the premise and a valid way to argue that is to show it reaches absurdity.
It's obvious what's actually happening. It's not so surprising that Apple-haters believe that Apple is complicit in everything. They'd say that about anything Apple. The fact that the argument concludes in 'bottom' is evidence.
Most people have their taxes withheld directly from their pay by their employer, and don't get the option to not pay their taxes, because the government gets the money before they do.
Because I have no interest in attracting the apocalyptic ire that is the Internal Revenue Service. You don't fuck with the organization that took down Al Capone or that even the _Joker_ is deathly afraid of.
It’s simply not that easy to do, nor is it the best approach per se, as it’s wrought with foot guns everywhere. Frankly it’s a big risk from a number of angles, one of the most obvious is such a movement being co-opted by special interests
Unironically it's because liberals actually like paying taxes. Every state and local school board tax increase passes where I live because it's a bunch of pot smoking hippies who unironically believe in wealth redistribution through progressive taxation.
Well, it's a wealth distribution from adults in a community to kids in the community, but a very good one that almost always benefits the whole community.
I do get what you're saying, but at the risk of being overly pedantic, this doesn't really make sense as written.
Usually "wealth redistribution" implies actual money or other liquid or semi-liquid assets being transferred from one group to another, and the kids in the community aren't receiving any of the money being put into school taxes.
I suppose one could argue that school taxes are wealth redistribution from the community to the _teachers and staff_. As someone who counts quite a few teachers among my friends and family, I wholeheartedly support this redistribution of wealth.
The governments will always have the power, that's pretty much built into the definition of government.
Not the definition of our government. Our founding documents state that "Congress shall make no law" along the lines of what Apple is being pressured to do here.
And the executive branch isn't supposed to be making laws at all, even though that's what they're doing.
As the GP says: the problem is the power. But when some of us argue that maybe the government shouldn't have this kind of power, we get shouted down with "HURR DURR MOVE TO SOMALIA THEN," and worse.
It isn't just our government: Apple sells these devices around the world and they pull the same shit in every jurisdiction, and so the Chinese government has been granted by them an extremely powerful axe to just ban software they dislike, a tool they use quite often, forcing Apple to pull apps for VPNs and other P2P tools used by protesters to coordinate in a world where the Internet is locked down. If you are going to create a device and sell it in this world, you have to understand how this world works, and in this world, if you create and defend a centralized bottleneck, you WILL become a patsy.
> Not the definition of our government. Our founding documents state that "Congress shall make no law" along the lines of what Apple is being pressured to do here.
I suggest read up on NSLs.
Sure, that should not be legal if the constitution meant anything, but there it is.
> the problem is the power
Tell me about a single government ever in history that has not abused its power at least sometimes?
While you're right, we should strive for that, we also need to strive for not building centralization that can be abused. Because it will always be abused.
The government is a centralization of power, it doesn't matter if our devices are "decentralized" if the government can simply make it illegal to use unlocked devices. Or encryption. Or VPNs. Etc.
But that isn't how this has worked, even in places like China where the regime would seem to have that level of power: while they absolutely require Apple--who went out of their way to create a bottleneck on software and information that is just too juicy not to assert external control over--to remove various apps from their store, it is not actually illegal to own or use unlocked devices.
> The government is a centralization of power, it doesn't matter if our devices are "decentralized" if the government can simply make it illegal to use unlocked devices.
That is a very binary view of the world, but the world is nothing but shades of gray.
At the very extreme of the most totalitarian government, you're right. Such a government can ban one thing or ban everything.
But in nearly every country, it's vastly easier to go choke a single neck (Apple) and tell them to shut something down, than to chase after tens of millions of individual people with individual devices, if all of them can run whatever they want from wherever they want.
It's both. Apple very intentionaly designs their phones so that they can immediately cut off their user's access to various apps with the flip of a switch and no recourse. It's obvious that this has and will continue to be abused.
At the same time the government of an ostensibly free country that values free speech should absolutely not be making these demands.
At this point I expect such behavior from this administration, they aren't pretending to be anything other than incompetent and corrupt.
Shame on Apple for helping these scumbags, now and in the future.
> I think that Apple is a company that has to obey the rule of law.
Right, so the fundamental problem is having a device where the software that runs on it is controlled by a single company. It creates the attractive nuisance of being able to choke off anything the government doesn't like because, as you said, that single point of contact can't avoid obeying the government.
Computing needs to be open and controlled only by each individual owner of each device, so anyone can run whatever they like sourced from wherever they like.
> That’s your belief and there is a platform that allows just that.
A platform that's just about to take it away with user registrations. And that isn't just a 'belief' - that's what a lot of people do with their phones.
But the problem here isn't about an alternative. Apple platform is popular enough to make it a juicy target for tyrannical regimes. And when that happens, millions of people find their devices useless or outright hostile towards them, due to lack of user-controlled escape hatches.
> The fundamental problem here is not specific to Apple; It’s specific to a regime that is overstepping its bounds daily.
Would you have predicted the current situation two years ago? Regimes go rogue unpredictably all the time. That's why people argue against this sort of device lock down all the time! It's meaningless to shift the entire blame on to the regime after Apple failed to take precautions in the face these warnings.
> Would you have predicted the current situation two years ago?
Yes. There is nothing surprising to me about the current situation.
> Apple platform is popular enough to make it a juicy target for tyrannical regimes.
Agreed, if for nothing else than its size alone. It is also a target for so many folks to say, "if it was different in this one way, it would be amazing (for me.)"
> Yes. There is nothing surprising to me about the current situation.
That would mean that you willfully defended a vulnerability that you could foresee being exploited.
> It is also a target for so many folks to say, "if it was different in this one way, it would be amazing (for me.)"
Apple has been consistent in their messaging. You have to give up your freedom over your devices to ensure security. Not make it hard or explicit to override safety measures. Not make it safe through careful design. But you have to give up your freedom. And there is no limit to the steps they took in this direction.
People had already pointed out that all those measures were for profit squeezing, disguised as security measures. The most important observation though, was that it's a very flawed argument. Security by centralized control is a vulnerability in itself, as evidenced by this incident.
Apple and its supporters fought this argument in a consistent manner too. With shallow dismissals of the concerns, accompanied by the contemptuous implication that the detractors are overreacting. As if the critics should be ashamed for even bringing them up. They never really address the concern directly. You can see this in action in interviews where their top management justify such decisions. I don't see that having changed much.
But, Apple or any other company doesn't deserve to be let off the hook for incidents like this. There is no reason to consider all their decisions as enlightened, especially when corporate profit seeking is involved.
The point is that if you could install the app by side loading it, or from a third party app store, then a Government order to remove an app doesn't make it impossible to use that app. But Apples actions, ostensibly to protect its users, but in reality to protect its profits, has put it in a situation where it is a much more effective tool for government censorship.
So you're suggesting that prior restraint on constitutionally protected speech is justified because Pam Bondi, mouthpiece for the president, asserts that publishing publicly observable information about federal officers is designed to put them at risk from waves hands, and not that the risk, if there actually was one, should be dealt with from whatever she's waving her hands about?
It's always funny when people are willing to toss the first amendment completely under the bus because of made-up risks but god help you if you suggest putting guardrails on the scope of the second amendment because of actual risks.
> So you're suggesting that prior restraint on constitutionally protected speech is justified
I have no idea how you got there but if you brought a case with a team of lawyers to get the apps re-instated based on the 1st amendment, I'd be happy about it. It would be interesting precedent too.
However, my point is nothing about that. What should Apple do while following laws and being accused of hosting apps that endanger law enforcement?
Some people crave authoritarianism, and the feeling of safety it provides them (at the expense of others), and will repeat any words that make them feel better about doing so, even if the words are lies obvious even to themselves.
If that opinion had legal weight, then it could have been laundered through a legal instrument like a court order. It is complete nonsense legally. People who have wanted to find ICE agents to attack have succeeded in finding their headquarters and attacking them there. The more obvious purpose of the app is to identify ICE agents in order to avoid being victimized by them. Regardless of the actual purpose of the app, simply identifying a person's location does not legally constitute a threat, and is protected by the first amendment.
There's a irony here. Google recently was stuck in front of congress and had to apologize for censoring people at the behest of the previous presidential administration despite not being legally required to. Now we have the current administration pressuring companies to censor their users, and those companies readily complying. Nothing has changed except for the political orientation.
Agreed. However, the weight of the DOJ and DOD (aka: DOW) are enough to make even Apple flinch, unsurprisingly.
> There's a[n] irony here
There are so many ironies and strange twists. If I remember the previous apologies, it was because conspiracy theories were being suppressed along with bad vaccine information. It was predominantly Republican lines of questioning during these hearings even though it was "under Biden."
The current administration wants to now censure in the opposite direction, weaponizing the very thing Republicans fought against in order to push current agendas. Nothing has really changed, it has just progressed.
The idea of "rule of law" is a shorthand for the set of norms and practices understood by everyone under a single regime, including both specific laws and authorities and more general principles. One of those, notably, is "the government shouldn't force private companies to censor their app stores".[1]
The rule of law is indeed being violated here, but in the other direction.
[1] Or "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech", if you swing that way.
This is the problem with the modern "app" way of doing things. This sort of thing would be best handled as a website so that users need not run specific software on thier phones. Reports can come in as basic emails parsed for a lat/long or grid. Then a kml file can be pushed as needed to a basic web-facing map. The bandwidth would be minimal and very resistant to shutdown. Heck, share the kml files via torrents or put the map server in tor if necessary. No apps required.
Ya, the pirate bay is still online, so too innumerable similar sites once targeted by various agencies. A smallish map running on a RP plugged into tor would be very resiliant. But there is a bittorent protocol that allows for rolling updates to a torrent. That would be the best way to distribute kml files imho.
What’s this updatable BitTorrent protocol? I wished for something like this years ago as an auto-updating torrent for downloading Wikipedia with live (or daily or whatever) changes.
this is really neat. I've been looking for this sort of functionality with IPNS, but it seems like bittorrent could be better. Do clients implement this yet?
In practice this seems much more difficult to do than going after the app in the app store, particularly if you choose your registrar and hosting provider carefully.
Website can't provide notification on iOS. You may find workaround but that would be either expensive or under Apple's control. This use-case without notifications is quite useless.
No surprise here, all companies would do the same. But I was planning on moving to Apple once my current Android fails, not now.
I am hoping the Linux Phone I hear about advances to the point where my Cell Service supports it. Will see because I am pretty much done with Android and Apple.
Being able to instantly know the locations of our friends and of threats to them (whether in the form of other people, natural disasters, fires, anything!) is such an obvious benefit to public safety in the information age.
It's one of the things that will finally allow us to supplant the yoke of the state, by having our own decentralized emergency response systems.
When will we realize this benefit? Do we really have to wait for Apple to fall?
Wouldn't it technically be possible to setup a website instead and use PWA push[1]? You would still need a certificate from Apple which I guess they can terminate as well...
I'm not a lawyer and I have no insider information, but I wouldn't be surprised if Apple is concerned that if anything happened to an ICE agent, they could be criminally and civilly liable if it could be shown that the attacker became aware of the location of the agent through use of the app.
17 years on from the App Store we're still trying to get people to wrap their heads around just using websites. And to think probably all of the users of the app are finding out about it via a LINK in a message or social post.
If Russian sanctioned banks regularly manage to get their updated apps through App Store “review”, surely ICEBlock devs can register a shell company and do the same, then text the install link to all current users..
They also removed app that tracked us drone strikes all over the world IIRC like 13 years ago. So probably nothing new under the sun. The joy of appstores and walled gardens.
I don't want to fall into the fallacy of implying that this is somehow justified because of something "the left" did a few years ago but I would like to highlight the hypocrisy of how many people were totally okay with this sort of executive censorship when Biden was in charge.
> "We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store — and Apple did so," Bondi said in a statement to Fox News Digital.
I don't think this is something that trump or biden should be allowed to do, but the classic argument that your constitutional right to free speech ends when the president "politely" asks a software company to censor you on his behalf and they acquiesce is equally [in]valid in both situations.
I have never voluntarily owned an Apple smartphone or tablet, and a huge reason why is because I care a lot about being able to run software on it that Apple doesn't approve of for whatever reason.
Make ICE spotting a plausibly deniable covert subtext via an otherwise popular medium.
Like (probably apocryphal) Jesus fish.
Both Pokemon and Polytopia have ice themed combatants, right?
Whenever you see some masked thugs staging for another round of terror, start a match as one of those tribes, trainers, or whatever. Build a certain kind of (creature) deck recognizable by anyone "in the know". Use some kind of slang. Like WWII's code talkers.
I don't actually know how Pokemon and the multiplayer Polytopia work. But y'all get the idea.
I keep thinking of the "slug bug" game bored kids play in the back seat. See a VW Beetle, yell "slug bug" first, and then punch your sibling. I think "Eye Spy" is the nice version.
Do mobile games like that exist? Surely someone's done it. A Foursquare for kids. Or something.
So let’s level set… ICE can buy data from data brokers, and has active contracts with Cellubrite and Pegasus… but an organized opposition can only use rocks and spears. This isn’t a fascist regime at all.
another day, another example of why we must all vigorously reject the campaign to stop users from installing software on their computers. stallman was right!
In a society with rule of law, it is generally understood that adhering to laws, even ones you don't personally like, is a good thing; and that it would be a bad thing to pick and choose which laws to follow and enforce.
I suppose you're making the argument that current US immigration law is unjust and immoral to begin with and therefore should be actively circumvented?
We no longer have a society with the rule of law. The fish rots from the head. You can thank everyone who voted for the wanton criminal promising everything yet nothing but destruction, now creating cruel spectacle after cruel spectacle to distract from the fundamental fact that he should be in prison. And additionally his enablers in Congress and on the Supreme Council who've decided that our Constitution is worth less than toilet paper.
> Surely an app designed to help circumvent the law is a bad thing, even if it doesn't make one legally a criminal merely by association?
Much like Miranda rights. Surely outright informing people in custody they have the right to remain silent is a bad thing, right? Actually, thinking about it now, there's a whole lot of things people have the right to do that make enforcing the law way harder than it needs to be.
Or maybe it's more important to maintain your rights as a human being and citizen, especially in the face of an overreaching executive branch willing to justify anything in order to overreach a little more.
VPNs can serve a legitimate purpose, like shielding your traffic while using a public network. Seems to me the better technology analogue to ICEBlock is The Pirate Bay; maybe there's some flimsy pretext of it being used for a legitimate purpose, and maybe it's not outright illegal, but everyone knows that it's almost always used for an illegal purpose.
> but everyone knows that it's almost always used for an illegal purpose
And I would argue that to the general population (non-HN/tech types) a VPN is the "Pirates Bay" of banned or ID law content. Porn ID law goes into effect, tens of thousands of people suddenly sign up for a VPN. If they thought of it as "shielding your traffic while using a public network" they wouldn't be signing up en masse when laws happen that they want to circumvent; they would have already been using it.
As for ICEBlock et al, knowing they are raiding in a part of a city that happens to be on someones running or cycling/walking route while being a darkly pigmented citizen is a valid use of the app to know to stay clear of the area. It should not be a thing, but it is.
ICE is abducting citizens and generally stirring up chaos to make pretexts for escalating federal occupations. Anyone would be an utter fool to voluntarily put themselves in the presence of the new "American" Gestapo. And since the number of citizens is much larger than the number of iLlEgAlS (regardless of what the fearmongering on boomers' TVs would have you believe), an app to help avoid the lawless thugs is in the same exact category as a VPN.
I haven't heard about ICE detaining any US citizens who weren't either actively interfering with ICE activity as part of a deliberate anti-immigration-law-enforcement protest, or closely associating with actual illegal immigrants.
Detaining people who are actively interfering with ICE activity as part of a deliberate protest is something I think it's reasonable for any kind of police to be able to do - there's no reason why fellow citizens in a democracy should inherently privilege the violence protesters do in order to prevent the enforcement of a law over the violence that the police do to in order to carry out that enforcement, it all comes down to your political opinion of the law.
Detaining US citizens while in the process of detaining illegal immigrants also seems reasonable, since there's no way to tell if a suspected illegal immigrant claiming to be a US citizen is lying or not until law enforcement actually checks. This is no different than cops being able to arrest a person on suspicion of a crime and then let them go with no charges when they realize they were mistake, which is a power cops already have in our society.
> The new lawsuit describes repeated raids on workplaces despite agents having no warrants nor suspicion that specific workers were in the U.S. illegally, and a string of U.S. citizens — many with Latino-sounding names — who were detained.
Working at a workplace that has a large immigration workforce is also not a crime or a reason to be detained. Yes, these things are working their way through the legal system -- as it should. But US citizen rights are being violated and sticking one's head in the sand or hand waving away these things is crazy to me, a US citizen, it's not how I was raised in the South. I can understand non-citizens/residents thinking that way though. They have their own experience
Having brown pigmented skin, working with brown pigmented skin people or speaking spanish doesn't weaken a citizens rights to make these rights violations "reasonable". If someone is "actively interfering" with ICE that's not immigration enforcers job to deal with, and should be handled/handed over to the local police force and taken to a police center, not immigration detention.
> Working at a workplace that has a large immigration workforce is also not a crime or a reason to be detained.
It's not a crime to work at a workplace with a large immigration workforce, but it is a reason why you might reasonably be detained by federal officers specifically investigating workplaces with large numbers of immigrants where it's widely known that many of those immigrant workers are not legally in the country.
> If someone is "actively interfering" with ICE that's not immigration enforcers job to deal with, and should be handled/handed over to the local police force and taken to a police center, not immigration detention.
In a lot of places where ICE is operating the local police have been ordered by local political leadership not to assist ICE because local political leadership is anti-immigration-law-enforcement. There have been cases in New York, Portland, the Bay Area, probably other places too where local law enforcement refused to assist ICE, or did assist ICE in violation of local law banning this. There are reasonable constitutional justifications for states or localities to be able to pass laws banning local law enforcement from assisting with federal law enforcement, but that also implies that detaining people actively interfering with their investigation is in fact part of the job of federal law enforcement.
Depends on the law and how it's enforced. You could argue the current status-quo is law breaking by law enforcement, so circumventing them is enforcing the law.
I assume your point is that not all laws are just only by virtue of being laws. I agree with this. And of course, not all lawbreaking is equal in severity. We all can tell that jaywalking is not the same as vehicular homicide. At the same time, we should also be able to agree that selective following and enforcement of laws is disparaging to the spirit of a nation of laws.
Do you find the current American immigration laws, and the enforcement thereof, to be unjust? Do you see it as your moral duty to abrogate them, and help others do so? If so, can you explain why?
Yes, the current American immigration laws are dysfunctional and thus unjust - they do not offer a clear path to citizenship for folks who have been here for multiple decades, who are productive members of society, who have obeyed (non immigration) laws and paid tax to the American government.
Sure, you can kick out the criminals and gang-bangers - no issues there. But kicking out restaurant owners and other tax-payers is ridiculous.
Also, unilaterally revoking Temporary Protected Status for folks is also a bridge too far. Those were originally issued by Obama for very valid reasons - the catastrophic 2010 earthquake and later humanitarian crises.
Sure, you can argue that Americans elected Trump and so he can do whatever he wants, but the cruelty has gone off the deep end now. The power given by his electoral win has not been applied judiciously.
From a constitutional point of view, I also see this App as simply representative of the right given by the First Amendment. If you block this app, one has set an extremely dangerous precedent.
> they do not offer a clear path to citizenship for folks who have been here for multiple decades, who are productive members of society, who have obeyed (non immigration) laws and paid tax to the American government.
The question of whether it is good to give a path to citizenship for people who immigrated illegally and have lived illegally in the US for many years is a major point of partisan political disagreement in the US. There are huge numbers of people who think that it is very bad that these illegal immigrants weren't arrested and deported many years ago, and want immigration enforcement to make up for the lax polcies of previous administrations, not give a path to citizenship to people who were by law not allowed to be present in the US to begin with.
> Also, unilaterally revoking Temporary Protected Status for folks is also a bridge too far. Those were originally issued by Obama for very valid reasons - the catastrophic 2010 earthquake and later humanitarian crises.
If you think that the presence of people given Temporary Protected Status many years ago by a previous president is bad for the united states, then not only do you want your elected officials to remove this temporary protected status, you probably want your legislators to repeal the law giving presidents the authority to grant this status at all. In any case, there are many voting citizens in the US who clearly do not believe it is a bridge too far, and want the president to revoke this status and not offer it in the future.
No need for actual free speech. Host it in Russia, China, Venezuela, Iran, DPRK, or any other strategic adversary of the United States. The success of ICEBlock is 100% inline with their information warfare goals. The more strife they can spread, the more protests, the more violence, the more confrontations, and the more 'noise' that gets made about ICE in the US, the better for them.
That doesn't mean the developer of ICEBlock is anti-American, just that there's a common interest in seeing his project succeed.
IMHO, this is just another example of something that would be better off as a website/webapp than a native app. If anything, having an app that tracks ICE agents installed on your device seems more like a liability than an asset.
There you have it. The thing everyone has been warning about regarding Apple's walled garden 10 years ago and now you have Google working on implementing the same walled garden.
Everything in the ICE tracking apps can be done as a web page. Good luck to MAGA trying to stop this, but the ugliness of ICE tactics will inspire a lot of people to build some very good technology to stop it.
Reading the comments on that Fox site is depressing. A lot of hate for Apple, but for the wrong reasons (as in, completely missing the danger of centralized app stores..).
If I had to guess who was most likely to be illiterate between:
- employees of major American tech companies like Apple
- ICE agents
- illegal immigrants
I would bet on illegal immigrants every time, especially if we're restricting the question to literacy in English specifically.
Take a breath. Obama drone-struck and killed more than one American citizen. Biden's rhetoric against his political opponents was no less "fascist" than Trump's. Do you find yourself nostalgic for the civility of the McCain-era Republicans? He was called a Nazi by his detractors, as well.
Trump doesn't hold a candle to FDR when it comes to being an authoritarian.
So now you’re going to list times when Biden sent armed forces into American cities, withheld funds passed by Congress, personally extorted companies to give him
money and targeted conservative “non woke organizations” or spread propaganda on government websites…
Let’s not forget you also need to list times that he fired DAs for not going after his “enemies” and installed his personal attorney with no courtroom experience.
>that talk about sending troops to republican majority cities
not that specifically but he did actually threaten to use nuclear weapons against american citizens. although FWIW it looks to me more like a manifestation of his advanced-stage alzheimer's than an intentional threat.
FDR is the one who illegally imprisoned 120k ethnically-japanese people (including at least 80k US citizens) in concentration camps solely on the basis of a hypothesized loyalty to the country their ancestors came from.
> not that specifically but he did actually threaten to use nuclear weapons against american citizens. although FWIW it looks to me more like a manifestation of his advanced-stage alzheimer's than an intentional threat.
The video showed he said people who wish to use arms against the government need F-15s and may need nuclear weapons. And versions of this claim are common from all ages.
Okay I was trying to be charitable there but the point is that he threatened to deploy nuclear weapons against people who don't comply with gun control legislation. If he actually meant to say that then that would make him look worse not better.
It gives people a heads up that constitution-hating armed forces are in the area, forces that can search you and tear up your home without a warrant. This is happening now.
Armed and masked intruders who don't have to identify themselves should be forced out of cities. Those federal employees should be shunned for the rest of their lives for blindly enforcing the whims of a dictator.
With a name like ICEBLOCK, how would one ever come to the conclusion that the app might be blocking federal law enforcement from carrying out their sworn duties!
> enforcing the whims of a dictator.
You mean a president that was elected twice. The hysteria really does make me laugh.
Federal law enforcement officers who swore an oath to the country… not the president. They can and should push back against this shit.
The app doesn’t block them in any way, it just lets people see where they are active. There is no issue or law against that.
He actively disregards laws and standards to push his own agenda. He’s been indicted multiple times, and is a felon. It’s not hysteria, some people can simply see what’s happening in front of them.
He openly admires dictators and desperately seeks what they have, with varying success.
I think it’s more about liability that specifically breaking a law. I’m not a lawyer but Apple is knowingly publishing an app that is openly helping people evade and/or break the law AND is putting Law Enforcement in danger. Seems there is some liability there.
>>Avoiding being where ICE agents are is not against the law.
Sure if you are the one avoiding arrest. How about if you rob a bank and I help you evade arrest? You could make a case that these apps are doing something similar. With a good prosecutor I wouldn't want to take my chances defending myself against that.
>>Crossing the border not at a designated point of crossing is against the law; this app is not for that.
True - but to argue the point - it could be used for that. If you had a map of where ICE/Border Patrol was it might aid in a successful crossing. Probably a bit OT though.
Being arrested is fine if due process is followed. ICE isn't following due process because they are pieces of shit.
Multiple times now they've been found to have removed innocent people with little chance of recourse. Only after huge public outcry have ICE been shamed into returning a select few.
So 100% people should be avoiding potential removal without due process.
> There's nothing stopping ICE from raiding where you live and destroying your shit.
This isn't specific to ICE, and sovereign immunity especially around law enforcement is a topic that has been contested for a while. Every now and then there's a story that pops up of some innocent's house being destroyed due to a clerical error leading the local SWAT team to look for drugs at the wrong address.
It absolutely is specific to ICE when they get to do it to 125 apartment units at once by taking everybody in an entire building, regardless of immigration status, and detaining them for hours, then leaving them with smashed doors and broken possessions.
But, oh, it's "been contested for a while", so let's definitely downplay it.
The power to detain a bunch of people for hours when it's not clear if any of them have committed a crime is a power the cops already have, and use from time to time. And ordinary city cops, not just ICE specifically.
Right but the difference is in both scale and rationale. Do you believe it would be acceptable for your door to be broken down and all of your stuff confiscated because you happened to live in the same building as an illegal immigrant? Because that is the literal event we're talking about here.
Of course that's not acceptable, but my point is that it's the same level of unacceptable that has occurred countless times by all levels of law enforcement entities, be it local or federal. It's just as unacceptable as if your door was broken down and your stuff confiscated because you happened to live in the same building as a drug dealer.
I'm just pushing back on the whole "fascism", "end of the republic" narrative on the grounds that the problem is not specific to this particular administration.
> narrative on the grounds that the problem is not specific to this particular administration.
Can you tell me how much budget ICE had prior to this administration, and how often prior admins conducted very specific raids into cities that they deemed to be against their interest? Because I think this line of argumentation is incredibly stupid; it may have held true during the prior Trump admin where he was mostly continuing a neoliberal agenda but this is a clear escalation on multiple levels.
If you created an app that essentially doxed police and schemed ways to circumvent their ability to enforce the law, I'd hope you would get in trouble for that, especially if it compromised the safety of those you care about, don't you agree?
What word games is he playing? You're making a factual claim about the legality of something, and you're being directly queried on the veracity of that claim.
Given that it's legal (in the US) to film/livestream cops so long as they are not obstructed in the commission of their duties, and in the wider context of the First Amendment, I find it relatively hard to believe that merely reporting cop sightings is illegal. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/yes-you-have-right-fil...
It is widely agreed that transparency and accountability in policing makes for better policing.
I'd address your argument but it's based on false pretenses. police scanners are legal in all states and under federal law, using one while committing a crime leads to additional penalties and 5 states restrict their use while driving for safety purposes, much like cell phones.
>police scanners are legal to own and listen to under U.S. federal law. However, five states restrict mobile use while driving and ten more add penalties if a scanner is used while committing a crime.
You're confidently asserting things that are legally unsupported, while accusing everyone else of being dumb. Rein it in, champ.
Using police scanners to listen to unencrypted radio chatter is legal in all states.
In minority of states, using police scanners is not legal while driving, and in all states it is not legal to use police scanners to aid in the commission of a crime. This is not that different from the laws that apply to, say, cellphones. You generally can't use those to commit crimes or while driving either. And yet, saying that 'cellphones are illegal' is obviously not an accurate representation of reality.
The bottom line here is that it is deeply unlikely that a court would find ICEBlock illegal. You may very well dislike that outcome, but it rather seems like your problem is with the Bill of Rights. In which case I can only recommend moving to a country without one - there are sadly very many.
aiding and abetting is already a crime, and a very different one. we already have case law that warning people about the presence of police does not amount to aiding and abetting from people flashing their lights to warn others about a speed trap. even if the flasher and/or flashee are breaking the law, as long as they don't physically interfere with the police its within the realm of free speech even though it could potentially hinder them. (https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/headlight-flashing/#...).
Flashlights weren't created with the intent to aid and abet criminal behavior. ICEBlock was. If it's being used primarily for that purpose, there's a strong case to be made that it should be shut down, especially if it's found to create significant challenges for law enforcement, either leading to their harm, or enabling criminals to evade or escape justified enforcement.
Stepping back from the legal / Constitutional considerations, this just seems like common sense: person commits crime, others make app to help criminals escape, therefore the app itself is aiding and abetting.
I think really, its proponents are using "free speech" as a roundabout way of saying they support these criminals. I really wish they'd just be honest instead.
This entire article is subject to the whims and misinterpretations from Trump's staunchest opponents who gleefully lie and twist almost everything he and his administration does — everyone should take this with a giant grain of salt.
ICE tracking apps put ICE agents in danger, and the same kind of app for, say, tracking Meta employees or “people who wear Team Blue T-shirts” or any other group would obviously be a danger as well. How on earth do people find this controversial..?
There's individual cases of unconstitutional behaviour, but ICE itself isn't unconstitutional. It was unconstitutional to effectively lock people in their homes during covid, but it was done anyway.
It’s unconstitutional to raid an entire apartment building and force everyone out as they search for potential “illegals” to take away without due process.
We are far beyond a couple an individual cases, it’s become the norm.
Stay at home orders for health reasons are constitutional. Also, in countries that had stricter rules far fewer people died.
When bringing comparisons to a discussion… check if you’re right, and maybe check if it’s even a good comparison.
Just to be clear, you are cool with and believe it’s constitutional for an entire building of residents to be forced to leave and have their homes searched?
They need a warrant for each place of residence (each apartment), they did not have that.
Let's say there are "illegals" in Utah .. that seems a certainty.
It appears you are stating as fact that it's A-OK and constitutional to force every resident of Utah from their home in a search for rumored "illegals".
I would take this as more confirmation that the administration will be taking action to counter the European shakedown of Apple. I would expect 50%+ tariffs on LVMH before the end of the year.
i strongly disagree with the notion that apple is being shaken down and am thankful somebody is doing something to keep them (at least partially) in check..
As gets pointed out, that justification is post hoc; the argument wasn't made when the app was introduced, only after the ban. It's also leaning hard on "can be" and just letting the reader infer what "malicious" means. Clearly the intent is that protestors can show up to disrupt enforcement actions. Is that what you mean? If so, you should say so.
But it's also just plain overbroad: the same logic applies to Waze flagging of speed traps, which are also "crowd sourced law enforcement location data".
Basically this is bunk. The app got banned because the government doesn't want its enforcement actions disrupted by protestors, and whined[1] to Apple to coerce them into a ban.
[1] Plausibly threatened. It's not alleged here but they did it to Disney and Paramount already.
> People use Waze to avoid speed traps. Not protest them.
Exactly! So it is about protest then? You don't want people to show up and display their displeasure at the execution of a particular policy? Y'know, peaceably assembling and petitioning for redress of grievances and all? You don't maybe see a first amendment argument here?
Upthread commenter dropped "malicious" to imply something presumably worse, like threats to law enforcement officers that haven't been made. But if it's just about protest then we have a prior restraint on speech. And that's worse.
That same justification can be applied to block web browsers, any social media platform, and any navigation app that allows user alert inputs.
The entire thing reeks of the same Biden-era pressures on companies that had pandemic misinformation that Republicans were so vehemently opposed to. Somehow harming law enforcement is a better justification than harming random citizens.
