7 ms·

Apple bans an iPhone e-reader because it provides access to the Kama Sutra

82 points by technologizer 17y ago

rufo 17y ago
The developer's blog article is worth a read: http://www.blog.montgomerie.net/whither-eucalyptus http://www.blog.montgomerie.net/whither-eucalyptus
paulgb 17y ago
Stories like this make me wonder what a younger Steve Jobs would think of today's Apple. The company's 1984 ad now seems a bit ironic.
- lukifer 17y ago
  What's the line from Dark Knight? Every hero either dies young, or lives long enough to become the villain. The older I get, the more I see that pattern replicated.
  - chaosmachine 17y ago
    I guess that makes Bill Gates the exception to the rule.
    - swolchok 17y ago
      How? He was certainly decried as a villain by many.
      - DTrejo 17y ago
        All the people who benefit from his philanthropy?
        nazgulnarsil 17y ago
        charity to third world countries doesn't decrease net suffering. when you save a starving man and he has 5 children, all of whom lead miserable lives are you ahead or behind? charity is about signaling your fitness to others. (like everything else)
        derefr 17y ago
        You're being downvoted because, by your logic, genocide can decrease net suffering. I'm not sure if that's incorrect, but I'm sure that no one likes hearing that.
        paulgb 17y ago
        I think there comes a point where you have to stop using quantitative measures of happiness or suffering and just commend anyone who makes a genuine effort to do something for what they think is right.
        dfranke 17y ago
        charity is about signaling your fitness to others While this is undoubtedly a factor, it fails to be a complete explanation, given that much charity is anonymous, and anonymous charity has no obvious utility for signaling. It would also imply that those who are happily married would tend to be significantly less charitable, which AFAIK is not true.
        nazgulnarsil 17y ago
        you're making the mistake of thinking that we're fitness maximizers rather than adaptation executers. We don't stop engaging in fitness related activities just because they dont have any utility in our current situation.
        whughes 17y ago
        Not everyone in the third world is starving. If you give out medicine and a poor person survives and has children, who also survive and live relatively normal lives, then I view that as a net gain. It's a mistake to simplify charity to 'giving starving people food.' Gates does a lot of work in healthcare, financial assistance, disaster relief, and even charity work here in the US. Most of the beneficiaries of these efforts may be impoverished, but that does not mean that they can't lead fulfilling lives.
      - xtho 17y ago
        I thought the punchline rather was that he sometimes was considered a villain when he was young(er) and maybe less so now.
      - shaunxcode 17y ago
        precisely - sometimes garbage just rises to the top. Started out as a villain, became more of a villain, does the world "a solid" by redistributing some of the wealth he essentially bled from it! In the words of alan partidge circa knowing me knowing you: "What a nice man".
- bap 17y ago
  Apple seems to have drifted away from it's carefully trod line of empowering and protecting users into the realm of protecting users from themselves. I tend to think that Apple signed some of it's soul away when making media deals and situations like this may be a part of those legal agreements. Not to troll but I think Microsoft started focusing on it's business to business dealings more than on it's users at one point and eventually became what it did. Unfortunately this is a common pattern for successful corporations. I wonder if it is driven purely by fear (of lawsuit?) or by the types of executives you get when you reach a certain size.
  - zimbabwe 17y ago
    Apple's followed an unusual path because their current tyrannies are much different from typical tech tyrannies. This decision doesn't help them as a company, and it doesn't hedge any corporate maneuver of theirs. It seems absolutely ridiculous and stupid. It implies that the procedure they're using is fucked up on some level. While that's outrageous and really pisses me off, it also gives me hope that Apple will find a way to fix this problem without damaging the idealism of their company regarding their products. This isn't stagnation of thought. It's outright insanity. Perhaps it's curable.
- tvon 17y ago
  I don't think what you and others are implying is the case at all, I think it's pretty clear that the app store is being mismanaged and that the approval process is severely broken, but I don't think Apple is imposing it's oppressive will upon the masses. If that were the case, I think they would be more consistent. I guess the real question is, did the other ebook readers currently in the App Store that allow access to the same material slip through the cracks, or was this a case of an over zealous App Store employee making a mistake?
  - paulgb 17y ago
    I've been thinking this since before this case. It's not just the isolated cases that make me think it, but also: - The NDA that lasted way too long and frustrated a lot of people working on articles, books, or projects they wanted to open-source. - The fact that these app store rejection stories have been happening for a long time now and Apple has apparently done little to address them. - The fact that there is evidently no good appeal process. - That small developers get shafted while big developers get there apps in. Why was the Kindle accepted and Eucalyptus not? Maybe it was that Kindle got sent to a lenient reviewer and Eucalyptus to a strict one, but the fact that Amazon is a large company and Eucalyptus appears to have a single developer seems more likely.
    - tvon 17y ago
      "(...) but the fact that Amazon is a large company and Eucalyptus appears to have a single developer seems more likely." I think that's nonsense. There are a lot of small-shop ebook readers on the iPhone, Stanza and eReader are two that come to mind, but there are many more.
- alexfarran 17y ago
  I'm not at all surprised by this kind of controlling behaviour from Apple. That's how they've always been.
tlrobinson 17y ago
Next: Apple removes MobileSafari from iPhone because they discovered users could visit pornographic websites.
- chrisbolt 17y ago
  You can disable Safari with iPhone's restrictions. Apparently the new 3.0 firmware will allow apps to be rated Explicit and restricted like music. Once the new firmware is released, these stories will probably go away (or be replaced with stories about apps being unfairly marked as explicit).
  - cstejerean 17y ago
    Why would people complain about apps being marked explicit "unfairly"? Unless one is trying to sell apps specifically to children I doubt that a tag of explicit will do much to hurt sales. I'd imagine it might even help, the same way some people assume a rated R movie is by definition more interesting than a PG-13.
veritgo 17y ago
This will probably be a good thing for the app in the long run. - Eventually it will get into the app store - All the publicity, fovorable reviews, and outrage over it will probably spur quite a few purchases / downloads. Maybe enough to make a top 10 list.
- demallien 17y ago
  Tuth be known, I couldn't help wondering if the author truly was outraged, or if he was just trolling for publicity. I mean, it would have been five minutes work to add a filter to remove Karma Sutra from the list of books, yet instead he preferred to enter a back-and-forth with Apple, a no-win situation, instead of making the quick mod and getting his app out there. Of course, I know that we hackers do like to take a stand for our priciples, so maybe he has a more altruistic motivation, but considering that he takes pains to add the possibility to register to be notified when the app comes out on his website (something which would take way longer to code than to filter the book in the first place), I have my doubts.
- ciupicri 17y ago
  What about the other companies which don't have so much publicity?
anigbrowl 17y ago
Since the rejection is based on the results of a search, it looks like a deliberate attempt to torpedo the review process - maybe on the basis that they don't want users going to content that isn't monetizable? Perhaps a good response would be to put apple on the spot by 'complaining' that Safari (or some other iPhone app) gives access to salacious parts of the Bible or some other cultural shibboleth. With cases like these, Apple is setting themselves up for a class action suit or FTC review. Given that people pay for the development tools, these kind of rejections seem like a deliberate restraint of trade.
- frossie 17y ago
  Since the rejection is based on the results of a search, it looks like a deliberate attempt to torpedo the review process - maybe on the basis that they don't want users going to content that isn't monetizable? Doubt it - I have a reader on my iPhone (Stanza) that can download free eBooks just like this application. The best word to describe Apple's approval process is Kafkaesque. It's not their rules that are the problem; it is the total internal inconsistency.
  - anigbrowl 17y ago
    True enough. I've given up trying to figure them out, and instead am thanking myself for not getting caught up in gold rush fever. I'm too thin-skinned to deal with this sort of thing.
rudyfink 17y ago
Well, on one level, I'm kind of amused by the reviewers attention to detail... On another level, this thing reads like a comedy piece someone would make up about the dangers of censorship.
swilliams 17y ago
My suspicion is that Apple outsources the content review process (if not the whole thing). Thus you get completely asinine and inconsistent rejections like this and others.
tophat02 17y ago
As terrible as the App Store situation is today, it will get better starting in June/July. I have a hunch that Apple is going to solve this problem with parental controls.
- KC8ZKF 17y ago
  I don't think that will solve the problem. Why should a book reader with access to Project Gutenberg carry the burden of an adults-only application? And doesn't that kind of prudery render the explicit tag meaningless to parents? The only thing it does is covers Apple's ass^Wbackside.
- rcoder 17y ago
  Repeat after me: censor-ware does not work. It's like spam -- since you can't even define what constitutes offensive content in a consistent, formal way, how in the hell can you expect any system (human or algorithmic) to make an effective, fair determination about what goes in which bucket? Apple does a great job of design, usability, hardware hacking, and recently they've even been pretty effective at getting content owners to move in the direction of reasonable licensing terms for digital distribution. However, they do not have magic pixie dust which makes them immune to brain-dead "content filtering" algorithms, whether human-mediated or not.
chops 17y ago
These stories make me ever more excited for the Pre. Palm's always been extremely open about third party apps. It's one thing to block an app from the "Official store." It's another thing altogether to prevent third party apps from being installed from everywhere except the official store. I suspect if users could install their own apps manually, all this hubbub would go away. Of course, I couldn't possibly see Apple allowing this, for fear of someone else creating their own App Store app and developer submission network, without Apple's complete lack of written guidelines, and apparently inconsistent application of whatever it's own internal guidelines are.
madair 17y ago
I suggest a new meme: Showing banned content on iPhones and blogging photos of the iPhone showing it loud and clear. Or something like that. I mean, come on, is that what they are afraid of?!?? Note the difference between Apple and Craigslist. Craigslist goes out on a limb based on their strongly stated belief structure; Apple actively fights those very same principles, preferring that nothing muck with the pristine image. I think you know which CEO I want in a foxhole with me. Hell, I think Craig should run for public office. Back to the problem at hand, it seems everyone and their brother wants to print cash through some new walled garden, and the apologists will trot out the familiar stinky logic, things like, "well they've got a lot of buyers don't they, how could THAT be wrong?!?" But the computer industry grew with tinkering, hell it grew with HACKING, and even that old devil of a heel, Microsoft, had a big part in the growth of open hardware systems. Don't bother to trot out the exceptions, there will always be exceptions, but big picture is the PC exists and is the mad playground today that it was the instant IBM flew with MS-DOS way back when. Sure the iPhone is a great design, sure the Mac has their beautiful craftmanship. But they are as closed systems as Apple can conceivably get away with, and the fan boys and girls who are also hackers are letting us all down by trying to drown out the calls for more openness. Let's call a spade a spade: the hardware engineering is cool, but the wall-in garden attitude sucks like hell and is harmful to hackers, to consumer, to freedom-lovers of all stripes. You can't argue with profits...unless you think that there are things more important than money.
Dauntless 17y ago
I guess any photo viewer or something users can add content to should be banned also... ridiculous stuff.
vlad 17y ago
At BarCamp, a speaker complained that Apple rejected his quick-links app because the reviewer queried wikipedia for an offensive word, and then followed links in the resulting page onto more offensive topics.

82 points by technologizer 17y ago

rufo 17y ago

The developer's blog article is worth a read: http://www.blog.montgomerie.net/whither-eucalyptus http://www.blog.montgomerie.net/whither-eucalyptus

paulgb 17y ago

Stories like this make me wonder what a younger Steve Jobs would think of today's Apple. The company's 1984 ad now seems a bit ironic.

lukifer 17y ago
What's the line from Dark Knight? Every hero either dies young, or lives long enough to become the villain. The older I get, the more I see that pattern replicated.
- chaosmachine 17y ago
  I guess that makes Bill Gates the exception to the rule.
  - swolchok 17y ago
    How? He was certainly decried as a villain by many.
    - DTrejo 17y ago
      All the people who benefit from his philanthropy?
      - nazgulnarsil 17y ago
        charity to third world countries doesn't decrease net suffering. when you save a starving man and he has 5 children, all of whom lead miserable lives are you ahead or behind? charity is about signaling your fitness to others. (like everything else)
        derefr 17y ago
        You're being downvoted because, by your logic, genocide can decrease net suffering. I'm not sure if that's incorrect, but I'm sure that no one likes hearing that.
        paulgb 17y ago
        I think there comes a point where you have to stop using quantitative measures of happiness or suffering and just commend anyone who makes a genuine effort to do something for what they think is right.
        dfranke 17y ago
        charity is about signaling your fitness to others While this is undoubtedly a factor, it fails to be a complete explanation, given that much charity is anonymous, and anonymous charity has no obvious utility for signaling. It would also imply that those who are happily married would tend to be significantly less charitable, which AFAIK is not true.
        nazgulnarsil 17y ago
        you're making the mistake of thinking that we're fitness maximizers rather than adaptation executers. We don't stop engaging in fitness related activities just because they dont have any utility in our current situation.
        whughes 17y ago
        Not everyone in the third world is starving. If you give out medicine and a poor person survives and has children, who also survive and live relatively normal lives, then I view that as a net gain. It's a mistake to simplify charity to 'giving starving people food.' Gates does a lot of work in healthcare, financial assistance, disaster relief, and even charity work here in the US. Most of the beneficiaries of these efforts may be impoverished, but that does not mean that they can't lead fulfilling lives.
    - xtho 17y ago
      I thought the punchline rather was that he sometimes was considered a villain when he was young(er) and maybe less so now.
    - shaunxcode 17y ago
      precisely - sometimes garbage just rises to the top. Started out as a villain, became more of a villain, does the world "a solid" by redistributing some of the wealth he essentially bled from it! In the words of alan partidge circa knowing me knowing you: "What a nice man".
bap 17y ago
Apple seems to have drifted away from it's carefully trod line of empowering and protecting users into the realm of protecting users from themselves. I tend to think that Apple signed some of it's soul away when making media deals and situations like this may be a part of those legal agreements. Not to troll but I think Microsoft started focusing on it's business to business dealings more than on it's users at one point and eventually became what it did. Unfortunately this is a common pattern for successful corporations. I wonder if it is driven purely by fear (of lawsuit?) or by the types of executives you get when you reach a certain size.
- zimbabwe 17y ago
  Apple's followed an unusual path because their current tyrannies are much different from typical tech tyrannies. This decision doesn't help them as a company, and it doesn't hedge any corporate maneuver of theirs. It seems absolutely ridiculous and stupid. It implies that the procedure they're using is fucked up on some level. While that's outrageous and really pisses me off, it also gives me hope that Apple will find a way to fix this problem without damaging the idealism of their company regarding their products. This isn't stagnation of thought. It's outright insanity. Perhaps it's curable.
tvon 17y ago
I don't think what you and others are implying is the case at all, I think it's pretty clear that the app store is being mismanaged and that the approval process is severely broken, but I don't think Apple is imposing it's oppressive will upon the masses. If that were the case, I think they would be more consistent. I guess the real question is, did the other ebook readers currently in the App Store that allow access to the same material slip through the cracks, or was this a case of an over zealous App Store employee making a mistake?
- paulgb 17y ago
  I've been thinking this since before this case. It's not just the isolated cases that make me think it, but also: - The NDA that lasted way too long and frustrated a lot of people working on articles, books, or projects they wanted to open-source. - The fact that these app store rejection stories have been happening for a long time now and Apple has apparently done little to address them. - The fact that there is evidently no good appeal process. - That small developers get shafted while big developers get there apps in. Why was the Kindle accepted and Eucalyptus not? Maybe it was that Kindle got sent to a lenient reviewer and Eucalyptus to a strict one, but the fact that Amazon is a large company and Eucalyptus appears to have a single developer seems more likely.
  - tvon 17y ago
    "(...) but the fact that Amazon is a large company and Eucalyptus appears to have a single developer seems more likely." I think that's nonsense. There are a lot of small-shop ebook readers on the iPhone, Stanza and eReader are two that come to mind, but there are many more.
alexfarran 17y ago
I'm not at all surprised by this kind of controlling behaviour from Apple. That's how they've always been.

tlrobinson 17y ago

Next: Apple removes MobileSafari from iPhone because they discovered users could visit pornographic websites.

chrisbolt 17y ago
You can disable Safari with iPhone's restrictions. Apparently the new 3.0 firmware will allow apps to be rated Explicit and restricted like music. Once the new firmware is released, these stories will probably go away (or be replaced with stories about apps being unfairly marked as explicit).
- cstejerean 17y ago
  Why would people complain about apps being marked explicit "unfairly"? Unless one is trying to sell apps specifically to children I doubt that a tag of explicit will do much to hurt sales. I'd imagine it might even help, the same way some people assume a rated R movie is by definition more interesting than a PG-13.

veritgo 17y ago

This will probably be a good thing for the app in the long run. - Eventually it will get into the app store - All the publicity, fovorable reviews, and outrage over it will probably spur quite a few purchases / downloads. Maybe enough to make a top 10 list.

demallien 17y ago
Tuth be known, I couldn't help wondering if the author truly was outraged, or if he was just trolling for publicity. I mean, it would have been five minutes work to add a filter to remove Karma Sutra from the list of books, yet instead he preferred to enter a back-and-forth with Apple, a no-win situation, instead of making the quick mod and getting his app out there. Of course, I know that we hackers do like to take a stand for our priciples, so maybe he has a more altruistic motivation, but considering that he takes pains to add the possibility to register to be notified when the app comes out on his website (something which would take way longer to code than to filter the book in the first place), I have my doubts.
ciupicri 17y ago
What about the other companies which don't have so much publicity?

anigbrowl 17y ago

Since the rejection is based on the results of a search, it looks like a deliberate attempt to torpedo the review process - maybe on the basis that they don't want users going to content that isn't monetizable? Perhaps a good response would be to put apple on the spot by 'complaining' that Safari (or some other iPhone app) gives access to salacious parts of the Bible or some other cultural shibboleth. With cases like these, Apple is setting themselves up for a class action suit or FTC review. Given that people pay for the development tools, these kind of rejections seem like a deliberate restraint of trade.

frossie 17y ago
Since the rejection is based on the results of a search, it looks like a deliberate attempt to torpedo the review process - maybe on the basis that they don't want users going to content that isn't monetizable? Doubt it - I have a reader on my iPhone (Stanza) that can download free eBooks just like this application. The best word to describe Apple's approval process is Kafkaesque. It's not their rules that are the problem; it is the total internal inconsistency.
- anigbrowl 17y ago
  True enough. I've given up trying to figure them out, and instead am thanking myself for not getting caught up in gold rush fever. I'm too thin-skinned to deal with this sort of thing.

rudyfink 17y ago

Well, on one level, I'm kind of amused by the reviewers attention to detail... On another level, this thing reads like a comedy piece someone would make up about the dangers of censorship.

swilliams 17y ago

My suspicion is that Apple outsources the content review process (if not the whole thing). Thus you get completely asinine and inconsistent rejections like this and others.

tophat02 17y ago

As terrible as the App Store situation is today, it will get better starting in June/July. I have a hunch that Apple is going to solve this problem with parental controls.

KC8ZKF 17y ago
I don't think that will solve the problem. Why should a book reader with access to Project Gutenberg carry the burden of an adults-only application? And doesn't that kind of prudery render the explicit tag meaningless to parents? The only thing it does is covers Apple's ass^Wbackside.
rcoder 17y ago
Repeat after me: censor-ware does not work. It's like spam -- since you can't even define what constitutes offensive content in a consistent, formal way, how in the hell can you expect any system (human or algorithmic) to make an effective, fair determination about what goes in which bucket? Apple does a great job of design, usability, hardware hacking, and recently they've even been pretty effective at getting content owners to move in the direction of reasonable licensing terms for digital distribution. However, they do not have magic pixie dust which makes them immune to brain-dead "content filtering" algorithms, whether human-mediated or not.

chops 17y ago

These stories make me ever more excited for the Pre. Palm's always been extremely open about third party apps. It's one thing to block an app from the "Official store." It's another thing altogether to prevent third party apps from being installed from everywhere except the official store. I suspect if users could install their own apps manually, all this hubbub would go away. Of course, I couldn't possibly see Apple allowing this, for fear of someone else creating their own App Store app and developer submission network, without Apple's complete lack of written guidelines, and apparently inconsistent application of whatever it's own internal guidelines are.

madair 17y ago

I suggest a new meme: Showing banned content on iPhones and blogging photos of the iPhone showing it loud and clear. Or something like that. I mean, come on, is that what they are afraid of?!?? Note the difference between Apple and Craigslist. Craigslist goes out on a limb based on their strongly stated belief structure; Apple actively fights those very same principles, preferring that nothing muck with the pristine image. I think you know which CEO I want in a foxhole with me. Hell, I think Craig should run for public office. Back to the problem at hand, it seems everyone and their brother wants to print cash through some new walled garden, and the apologists will trot out the familiar stinky logic, things like, "well they've got a lot of buyers don't they, how could THAT be wrong?!?" But the computer industry grew with tinkering, hell it grew with HACKING, and even that old devil of a heel, Microsoft, had a big part in the growth of open hardware systems. Don't bother to trot out the exceptions, there will always be exceptions, but big picture is the PC exists and is the mad playground today that it was the instant IBM flew with MS-DOS way back when. Sure the iPhone is a great design, sure the Mac has their beautiful craftmanship. But they are as closed systems as Apple can conceivably get away with, and the fan boys and girls who are also hackers are letting us all down by trying to drown out the calls for more openness. Let's call a spade a spade: the hardware engineering is cool, but the wall-in garden attitude sucks like hell and is harmful to hackers, to consumer, to freedom-lovers of all stripes. You can't argue with profits...unless you think that there are things more important than money.

Dauntless 17y ago

I guess any photo viewer or something users can add content to should be banned also... ridiculous stuff.

vlad 17y ago

At BarCamp, a speaker complained that Apple rejected his quick-links app because the reviewer queried wikipedia for an offensive word, and then followed links in the resulting page onto more offensive topics.