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Apple Banned an App That Simply Archived Videos of ICE Abuses
- garyfirestorm 1y agoi guess this one trick can help us ban facebook and instagram :)
- ratelimitsteve 1y agoI love when coders run into fascists because we tend to think that deep knowledge of the rules and mechanisms will help us here the way it does everywhere else, but we're in a sphere where every rule is mutable by anyone who is capable of organizing enough violence.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoFacebook won't let me make an account, so those videos are already gone from FB from my perspective
- valleyer 1y agoTim Cook is a Trump supporter.
- beefnugs 1y ago"Just following orders" "Just participating in corruption" "Just watching out for the children"
- ratelimitsteve 1y agoI don't think Tim Apple is anything but a Tim Apple supporter at the end of the day, it's just that this administration has shown that will abuse the civil litigation system to tie up your time and money endlessly without ever actually reaching a verdict until you finally just give up and pay Trump to go away...ahem, make a donation to the presidential library fund
- lovich 1y agoA reluctant supporter is still a supporter at the end of the day
- ratelimitsteve 1y agobut an enthusiastic supporter can be counted on to be a supporter tomorrow. he'll cow to whomever it is in his best interest to cow to, just like how Zucc banned Trump then paid him or how WaPo went from liberal leaning to only publishing pro-free market editorials as a matter of policy
- GuinansEyebrows 1y agosure, but there is damage being done today by people who support trump today, enthusiastically or not.
- ratelimitsteve 1y agono one is arguing that. this isn't about whether tim apple is a good guy, it's about how we get him to stop hurting us and recognizing his motivations as opposed to, say, peter thiel who is all-in trump-plenary-dominionist-authoritarian under all circumstances and can't be bargained with.
- raw_anon_1111 1y agoI think Apple has enough money to fight civil actions if Cook had a spine.
- CursedSilicon 1y ago[dead]
- ratelimitsteve 1y agothink like him: they can fight but is fighting the most profitable thing to do? Depends on how many bites at the apple (pun intended) that Trump intends to take. If you can count on someone to extort you once then paying them is a good option, if you think they're gonna come back for more then not paying them is a good option, and if you're not sure then letting someone else try both options and seeing how it works out for them is a great option and if you have to make a decision now you can pay once and then watch.
- yieldcrv 1y agoThey want something from the government that is at the government's discretion, such as semiconductor access, data facilities, subsidies, clearances, inclusion in circular partnerships that's why they are not challenging this
- Braxton1980 1y agoThat makes him a Trump supporter
- nocoiner 1y ago[flagged]
- -_-_-_-_-_- 1y agoWhat do you call the guy who abhors the tenets of national socialism but joins the Nazi party solely for the opportunity to sabotage the movement from within? Are they also a Nazi? Would you consider all members of group X to be represented by X?
- nocoiner 1y agoThat’s an interesting question. I’m not sure I’ve ever thought about it, but definitionally, I think I’d have to say they’re a Nazi. Especially if they’re, like, presenting golden trophies to curry favor with higher-ups in the organization. The obvious counterexample is a deep undercover cop - are they a member of the mafia or a biker gang? I’d say no since they’re operating under the color of law, but it’s a pretty analogous situation. This leaves aside the question of partisans, members of the resistance or just surly shop stewards enforcing union work rules to the letter were more effective Nazi opponents than a guy who aimed to take the organization down from the inside. I have my suspicious.
- adfm 1y agoHow about IBM? They supplied nazis the punch cards they needed to process the data they collected to round up jews and other marginalized groups and put them into concentration camps through a subsidiary and refuse to this day to be transparent about it. Are they Nazis? The number tattooed on every concentration camp prisoner was an IBM number. https://teachingsocialstudies.org/2024/02/19/ibm-and-auschwitz-new-evidence/ https://teachingsocialstudies.org/2024/02/19/ibm-and-auschwi...
- nocoiner 1y agoThe German IBM subsidiary was, in my book, a collaborator for sure and morally culpable. I don’t have a view on whether a private enterprise can be a Nazi.
- polski-g 1y agoTim Cook doesn't want the legal liability when this app is named in a civil suit regarding an assassination. It simply isn't worth it. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/24/dallas-ice-shooting-texas-immigration-center-latest https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/24/dallas-ice-s... https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/defendants-in-prairieland-detention-center-attack-appear-in-federal-court/3922107/ https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/defendants-in-prairieland-...
- vlod 1y agofull: https://archive.is/20251008205650/https://www.404media.co/apple-banned-an-app-that-simply-archived-videos-of-ice-abuses/ https://archive.is/20251008205650/https://www.404media.co/ap...
- nebula8804 1y agoI think with the case of Iceblock the developer talked about how the app is super simple by design so that it can be used by 80 year old grandmas. I believe thats part of the reason it wasn't a PWA or something of that nature (among other reasons) In the case of this application, the circle of users may shift more towards technically savvy. If we assume this to be true, I could see how it may make sense to provide the application as a sideloadable APK or as open source so that it can be compiled and installed using TestFlight. Its unfortunate that we've reached the point that users can't even run software on their own computing devices. I wonder if things continue to get bad will we start to see a greater number of people refraining from installing updates to their devices just because prior versions allow more things like jailbreaks. Apple is burning their reputation with these moves so it may happen.
- OGEnthusiast 1y ago> Apple is burning their reputation with these moves so it may happen. I highly doubt there will be any noticeable backlash against Apple for removing ICEBlock, sans negative online commentary (which to be fair isn't exactly zero, but doesn't have enough noticeable effect by itself).
- nebula8804 1y ago>I highly doubt there will be any noticeable backlash against Apple for removing ICEBlock, sans negative online commentary (which to be fair isn't exactly zero, but doesn't have enough noticeable effect by itself). No not just IceBlock but overall increasing the blocking of users from running the software that they want to run. In the past we've just had niche applications blocked (emulators, some porn applications and apps maybe hackers would use). Everything else was fair game to be in the app store. Now that semi-mainstream applications are getting banned, it encourages more people to find ways to get the software they want to run.
- lenkite 1y agoIts not ICEBlock specifically, but that a precedent has been now been fully set against the First Amendment, where the government can lean on monopolies and the monopoly will comply to destroy rights.
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoRelated: Apple defined ICE as a "protected class" in blocking anti-ICE apps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45520407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45520407
- Dig1t 1y agoIf you want to archive videos isn’t YouTube (or Vimeo or Rumble) the best place to do that? What’s the point of a dedicated app?
- hackable_sand 1y agoResilience. Archive the videos on all the platforms. Seed the torrents.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoAllowing preferences or downloaded videos to be stored in local storage. Downloading from YouTube is hard, Google keeps trying to kill yt-dlp. You can download manually from your own site using a web browser, but the app wrapper would make it easier to search by metadata ("Find ICE videos from my town") and to make sure you don't accidentally download the same thing twice. Plus YouTube might take those down for ToS violations sooner or later. Anyway it doesn't matter - We should have the right to have apps like this and make them available to the general public. If you can't get it from the App Store, and you can't install an apk on Android, and you can't install an alternate store trivially, then it's as good as dead.
- metalman 1y agoapple sorbet
- guywithahat 1y agoI'm not sure this article would say it but I wonder if it was, at least in part, banned because it's "stealing" content from other apps? It seems like their could be a privacy or usage policy violation in there. That said, any app who's end goal is to doxx federal agents for doing their job is probably not going to last long on the app store.
- foxyv 1y ago> That said, any app who's end goal is to doxx federal agents for doing their job is probably not going to last long on the app store. So what you are saying is that federal police should be anonymous? Like some sort of, secret type of police?
- lunias 1y agoWhy are we not avoiding apps and app stores altogether? I understand the desire to tap the captive audience, but we're teaching people that the only software worth running is found in the app store and runs on your phone. Make a web version, make a desktop version, make it work in whichever way affords you and your users the most control over the software. Stop asking Apple for permission and stop getting upset when they deny you.
- taraindara 1y agoPeople must choose to avoid it. I’m currently on this path. I prefer to use web versions of apps I need access too. If there is no web version, it’s most likely a service I don’t need anyway. My phone is slowly turning back into just a phone with a web browser.
- pabs3 1y agoThere are more ethical sources of apps, like F-Droid, but it sounds Google's changes to Android will shut that down for most people, but there will be other Android variants like GrapheneOS where F-Droid will still be usable.