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> 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 Nov

by 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 ago
Hmm, so did tumblr just decide to ban all porn instead of spending energy on identifying the cp for a selective ban?
- coldacid 4y ago
  Yep. The easy, cheap, and in no way forward-looking way out.
  - imoverclocked 4y ago
    Forward 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 ago
      Forward looking in the sense of the organization predicting well what will allow it to continue to thrive.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  I don't think they could have won. It wasn't as if CP was allowed to begin with.
  - dillondoyle 4y ago
    Same 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 ago
Note 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 ago
    Yes. 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 ago
      the 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 ago
    It is called divide and conquer. Sorting is the hard part, filtering/deleting/alerting is the easy part.
dylan604 4y ago
Why 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 ago
  Because 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 ago
    I 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 ago
      If 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 ago
Child 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 ago
    I 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.

by Shank 4y ago

wombat-man 4y ago

Hmm, so did tumblr just decide to ban all porn instead of spending energy on identifying the cp for a selective ban?

coldacid 4y ago
Yep. The easy, cheap, and in no way forward-looking way out.
- imoverclocked 4y ago
  Forward 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 ago
    Forward looking in the sense of the organization predicting well what will allow it to continue to thrive.
vorpalhex 4y ago
I don't think they could have won. It wasn't as if CP was allowed to begin with.
- dillondoyle 4y ago
  Same 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 ago

Note 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 ago
  Yes. 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 ago
    the 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 ago
  It is called divide and conquer. Sorting is the hard part, filtering/deleting/alerting is the easy part.

dylan604 4y ago

Why 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 ago
Because 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    If 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 ago

Child 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 ago
  I 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.