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> unreasonable "safety standards" Are these the same safety standards that cause apple predictive text to refuse to recognise the cuss words I a grown adult us
by rusk 4y ago
> unreasonable "safety standards"
Are these the same safety standards that cause apple predictive text to refuse to recognise the cuss words I a grown adult use and have to go back and fix over and over again. Ducking stupid if you ask me.
- Shank 4y ago> Tumblr says that child pornography was the reason for its app’s sudden disappearance from the iOS App Store. The app has been missing from the store since November 16th, but until now the reason for its absence was unclear — initially Tumblr simply said it was “working to resolve the issue with the iOS app.” However, after Download.com approached Tumblr with sources claiming that the reason was related to the discovery of child pornography on the service, the Yahoo-owned social media network issued a new statement confirming the matter. [0] [0]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/20/18104366/tumblr-ios-app-child-pornography-removed-from-app-store https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/20/18104366/tumblr-ios-app-...
- wombat-man 4y agoHmm, so did tumblr just decide to ban all porn instead of spending energy on identifying the cp for a selective ban?
- coldacid 4y agoYep. The easy, cheap, and in no way forward-looking way out.
- imoverclocked 4y agoForward looking is subjective here. Humanitarian issues should be weighed heavier than technological development. It’s easy to relax rules later but you can’t take back human suffering.
- coldacid 4y agoForward looking in the sense of the organization predicting well what will allow it to continue to thrive.
- vorpalhex 4y agoI don't think they could have won. It wasn't as if CP was allowed to begin with.
- dillondoyle 4y agoSame as pornhub. No one wants revenge porn or CSAM. But FB Messenger is the largest distributor of that material. So long as companies are making a good faith best effort, or minimally the treatment should be the same.
- Macha 4y agoNote that banning "all porn" is easier than accurately sorting child porn from regular porn at that scale as it lets you avoid pissing off petite 20 year olds or getting in trouble because your moderators OKed a report of what turned out to be a more developed 16 year old. So yes, Apple may only have required Tumblr to more effectively moderate to prevent child porn, but from a business feasibility point of view the practical way to do that was ban all porn.
- nathanvanfleet 4y ago
- Macha 4y agoYes. But to remove only child porn and not all porn requires you to have some way of determining what is child porn. So you need to sort it into "child porn, remove" and "porn of consenting adults, allow". Or you do what Tumblr did, and just ban all porn.
- cupofpython 4y agothe person you replied to was being unnecessarily semantic, but in computer science "sort" has a specific meaning which is only the ordering of a set. So 'sorting' cp implies making it easier to find specific cp. The more accurate word might be "categorize" or "filter". It was obvious what was meant by "sort" when reading the full text, but I think the counter-point was more of a tongue-in-cheek retort regarding the above than an actual complaint.
- Macha 4y ago"tongue-in-cheek retort", "pointless pedantry and pointscoring", it's all a matter of perspective I guess.
- oaiey 4y agoIt is called divide and conquer. Sorting is the hard part, filtering/deleting/alerting is the easy part.
- dylan604 4y agoWhy does tumblr need an app in the first place? Make it a website that is mobile friendly, and then Apple has no say. Oh, wait, you want to hoover up all of that user data to do what you want with it instead? Which fight are you actually fighting then?
- Raymonf 4y agoBecause of Safari. Safari works amazingly for small websites, but for websites with infinite scrolling like Tumblr and Twitter, it becomes unbearably slow after the first hundred or so posts. Historically, Safari is slow to adopt new web features, and it STILL doesn't have web push notifications (and more). You can run these same websites on Android Chrome just fine, even on a lower-powered Android phone. I'm not sure if they're using APIs that need to be polyfilled on Safari, or if Safari is just trash. At this time, I'm convinced that if Apple allowed other browser engines on the App Store, this would not be a problem at all, not that I can test it out anyways. So, yes, Apple still has a say.
- dylan604 4y agoI don't build websites with infinite scroll or enough data that would justify it nor attract enough visitors to punish a t2.micro, so I have no first hand experience with any of that. However, curiosity requires that I ask what/how/why does any of that affect mobile-first web deployment in away that it is not addressed when a large chunk of that mobile use is broken? If you program yourself into a dead end, back up and take another turn. Oh, it is easier in a mobile native where you get the benefit of hoovering up personal data on all of your users? Gee, let's not expend effort to make something work universally, let's instead take the easy route and make money on the side too. The fact that losing this large share of users because of one type of content is not enough of a decision to go the other route shows just how much money there is in the hoovering of data. Still putting the blame on Tumblr.
- Raymonf 4y agoIf I understand what you're trying to say correctly, I need to say that I'm speaking fully from a user experience standpoint as an end user. I am not a Tumblr engineer. Anecdotally, out of the few people I know that still use Tumblr, they use desktop and mobile Chrome to access the website. I don't have any statistics on how many people use the apps. So, to me, Tumblr's website is already the main point of access, and these performance problems don't exist on Firefox or Chrome. I'm not talking about server-side response times, I'm talking about the time to render posts on the client. I find that a lot of times, after scrolling, you have to wait a few seconds before you see anything but the blue background that Tumblr has. So, no, I'm going to pin it on Safari if (even) Firefox can deal with it.
- car_analogy 4y agoChild porn is an excuse. Every site above a certain size will have some, no matter how good their filtering. And sometimes even small sites when they come under attack. Then whoever wants to get rid of the site for unrelated reasons points to it, says "It has child porn", and no matter how quickly it is removed after reported, or how much effort the admins spend removing it, "it has child porn" is technically true, and gives whoever wanted to remove the site the excuse to do so. It's nothing more than ammo that corporations use against each other in the fight for dominance, or sometimes, with the help of cooperative media, against politically disfavored sites like 4chan. In all my time browsing 4chan, I have not once seen child porn, though I did see posts 404'd for having contained child porn. Yet despite their efforts, any time the media talks about 4chan, they will introduce it in the same breath as child porn. In short, child porn has become nothing but a tool for corporations fighting for dominance, or a fnord to tell the masses to stay away. And in all of this no-one gives a crap about the children, since they rarely spend even a word talking about tracking down the uploaders or creators of said porn (i.e. they say a site "has child porn", but not how fast it is removed, or if the site gives the IP of child-porn uploaders to the police, or anything beyond trying to establish in the viewer a bad site <-> child porn association).
- finebalance 4y ago> And in all of this no-one gives a crap about the children, since they rarely spend even a word talking about tracking down the uploaders or creators of said porn (i.e. they say a site "has child porn", but not how fast it is removed, or if the site gives the IP of child-porn uploaders to the police, or anything beyond trying to establish in the viewer a bad site <-> child porn association). Aren't there legal requirements in place for this stuff, at least in the US?
- car_analogy 4y agoI assume so. But this is not a legal attack - complying with the law isn't enough to keep hosting or payment providers from blacklisting you to safeguard their reputation.
- tluyben2 4y agoI moved from android to Apple recently and that is really pathetic indeed. It keeps predicting and correcting words that are obviously not what meant at all.
- bmitc 4y agoThere is something about Apple's keyboard, whether it's software, the physical placement of the on screen keys, or something, but when I use an iPhone, I make many more errors than I do on my LG Android phones. I haven't been able to figure out why really, but it is definitely the case.
- kergonath 4y agoIt has gone significantly worse over the years. About 3 years ago it did not have any issue even when mixing languages in the same message. Now it gets confused all the time and puts stupid suggestions even in the keyboard's language. I am not sure what is happening, but it is very annoying.
- spookthesunset 4y agoI mean they could just make that some option under parental controls. Course even then I’m sure some subset of adults would complain that their phone is suggesting naughty language.
- rusk 4y agoI think you’re right. They hobbled it, and made it less useful because they couldn’t trust it. A fairly solid example of why we’ll never attain the singularity: it’s bad for business.
- rolobio 4y agoYou can add custom words so that your iOS device will suggest them. Go to Settings, search for Text Replacement, add a new replacement with +, enter the same word for both replacement and shortcut.
- Griffinsauce 4y agoThis is practically helpful but asinine. The point is that these words are not "custom" or special, they should be handled like any other normal word.
- jdminhbg 4y agoThere are many words you would not want to send in a text to your coworkers, such as when you ask them to "re jigger the Q2 results." The only question is where the line is drawn for the OS to say "it's better that I never autocorrect into this perfectly real English word."
- Griffinsauce 4y agoIs the problem the specific word or the intention in your example?
- reaperducer 4y agolike any other normal word But they're not normal words. They're expletives. If they have their own category, they're not "normal words." iOS doesn't know a lot of the medical words I use for work, either. But I don't moan about it on social media.
- cypress66 4y agoCan't you install other keyboards such as SwiftKey on Apple devices?
- asiachick 4y agoyou can but Apple decides when you can actually use it and when you can't and have to use the Apple provided keyboard
- kergonath 4y agoNote that there are very good security reasons for this, as the keyboards can read everything you type. There are contexts in which defense in depth is more important than convenience.
- asiachick 4y agoI understand the security issues. I still feel I should be able to choose who I trust. I trust my keyboard maker more than I trust Apple. Further, my keyboard has my completions, my autocorrect history, and I'm used to it. Every time Apple's crappy keyboard appears it's as bad as someone asking me to type an a Dvorak keyboard.
- halostatue 4y agoAccording to an article I read a while back, the predictive text is not supposed to suggest / correct to a different word if you type fuck, but it is not supposed to suggest fuck if you mistype it. That seems eminently reasonable to me, without being "safety standards". Yes, modern English is certainly saltier than what people pretended it was for the last century or so, but the line that Apple took seems to be the right line (allow offence without correction, do not suggest offence by default). There are many things on which I disagree with Apple’s stance (I think that Apple should allow pornographic apps in the store, but that those apps should have tighter controls on them to prevent some of the scammiest behaviours reported against pornographic sites; I also think that Apple should be doing a lot more to prevent abuse of the pricing tools that it does have).
- vorpalhex 4y agoFor comparison, Google keyboard will allow you to have autocorrect fix to fuck, shit, etc but you must opt in. You can of course install any keyboard you want with basically any behavior you want here.
- GekkePrutser 4y agoWhere is that setting? I've never seen that? Edit: Never mind, it's "Block offensive words" under "Text Correction". Easy to find, strange I never noticed it. Thanks!
- pdimitar 4y agoEven with that setting off, the GBoard keyboard routinely corrects it to "duck". Doesn't seem to work. And it ALWAYS refuses to type "fuck" when you do glide / swipe typing.
- skohan 4y agoBut the undeniable experience of many many iPhone users is that you have probably seen the soft keyboard autocorrect to "duck" many times when you intended to write "fuck". The soft keyboard is always using some heuristics to identify which characters you intended to type. In most cases it's quite accurate, but in this case it seems like it's over-counting the probability you would have typed "duck" or "ducking" by a fairly wide margin.
- davesque 4y agoIf you think about it, you're probably glad they do this. Consider the damage that a stray "f*ck" could do if you didn't mean to type it and didn't notice that you did. Could even spell a lawsuit I bet in some cases.
- CharlesW 4y agoYou're exactly right — surprise porn and surprise expletives at Apple scale would probably trigger a congressional hearing. Not only does Messages not censor what you type, but one can easily leverage autocorrect to help you type the naughtiest of words. https://www.macworld.com/article/673861/how-to-stop-an-iphone-autocorrecting-fuck.html https://www.macworld.com/article/673861/how-to-stop-an-iphon...
- robonerd 4y agoApple treating the word 'fuck' like any other would "probably trigger a congressional hearing"? Give me a break.
- Dah00n 4y agoSo Android users have all been fired because of the damage they have done via SMS?
- davesque 4y agoI've got an Android phone and I've never been able to swipe type swear words. And I'm kinda glad too. Yeah, it's a little annoying when I actually intend to type that word, but it would be way more annoying if it showed up when I didn't. I imagine it's this kind of reasoning that's behind why those words aren't available in auto-complete or swipe to type. Some people in this thread seem to be suggesting it's some kind of moral overreach or impulse to censor that's behind this behavior. I think that's an exaggeration and the real reason is the more simple and practical one that I've described.
- sleepybrett 4y agoAdd contacts with curse words as their name.
- daniel-cussen 4y agoStop using predictive text, you get more screen to read and it's just always going to affect your speech somehow.
- CharlesW 4y ago> Are these the same safety standards that cause apple predictive text to refuse to recognise the cuss words I a grown adult use and have to go back and fix over and over again. Only related in the sense that Apple takes steps to prevent surprise adult content. Just as porn is obviously trivial to consume with Apple devices, autocomplete can happily suggest your favorite salty language. https://www.macworld.com/article/673861/how-to-stop-an-iphone-autocorrecting-fuck.html https://www.macworld.com/article/673861/how-to-stop-an-iphon...
- personlurking 4y agoThe Inventor of iPhone’s Autocorrect Explains How It Works - WSJ [7m50s] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ncj3QAKvBBo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ncj3QAKvBBo
- sneak 4y agoSimilar to how Apple replaced the gun emoji with a squirt gun, because a toy is obviously what I meant when I used a symbol for a lethal weapon. Sometimes the agenda goes a bit too far.