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Apple censors Lawrence Lessig over warranty information
- r0h1n 13y agoLessig's own post is at #78, in spite of 233 points within 17 hours of submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6627331 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6627331 Did it drop off the home page so fast, or is it being flagged?
- stinos 13y agoSince we currently have a "225 points, 18 hours ago" on the front page at #20, it's obvious something's going on.
- r0h1n 13y agoAre we seeing two different HNs? I see Lessig's post at #80 and 245 points.
- stinos 13y agoSorry should have been clearer. My point was: the "Winter is coming" post was posted around the same time as Lessig's post, has less points and yet is at #20. How does that happen? Btw, only 15 minutes after your original post, and Lessig's post know is upvoted to 245 points already yet is 2 places down...
- mattmanser 13y agopg mentioned in a thread about 'where did X MS post go' that posts can trigger flamewar detectors which penalizes the post heavily. It's not a simple votes/age thing.
- ars 13y agoIt's not total votes that counts, but rather votes per time. So two posts of the same age and same vote count could be in different places if one has recent votes and the other older votes.
- dangrossman 13y agoPG posted the HN ranking algorithm: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781417 The time of the votes is not taken into account. The time-based decay is only based on the submission time. A story with the same votes and same submission time will have the same rank regardless of when the votes occurred, all other factors being equal.
- lostlogin 13y agoI might be missing something here - why would people flag it? HN has never struck me as being this petty. Anal retentive, pedantic, and difficult (citation required, sigh). What am I missing?
- annnnd 13y agoThere is only one explanation I can think of and I am not sure I believe it myself: Apple fan boys at work?
- ars 13y agoI don't think flagging pushes a post down, that would not be in the spirit of how this community was designed. Flagging is just supposed to summon a moderator and that's all.
- dangrossman 13y agoFlagging does push a post down the ranks; I've never heard of summoning a moderator. Flags alone can also kill stories entirely if they come before it gains many points. The voting ring detection and flame-war detection code also push a post down the ranks. So, the Lessig post could've been flagged, the comments on it could've triggered the flame war code, or a moderator did it. What almost definitely didn't happen is "Apple fan boys at work" flagging down anything anti-Apple. When you use the flag link any more than extremely sparingly, you lose the privilege, permanently.
- devx 13y agoYes it does, and PG is allowing everyone to have basically an infinite amount of flagging now. It used to be that if you used it more than 10-20 times (maybe in a period of time), you would have the ability removed.
- Zak 13y agoFlagging does, in fact push posts down. I believe the amount is proportional to the flagger's karma. Psychologically, the UI seems intended to separate "I don't like this" from "I think this content is detrimental to the site". This communicates that users should not attempt to punish links they simply dislike, but may do so with comments.
- simias 13y agoI think the title is a bit too bait-y and trollish for its own good. I almost flagged it on sight and I'm no Apple fanboy by any measure (the only apple product I've owned in my life was an old iPod). I assume it's a slashdot reference but still.
- eli 13y agoUgh, enough with the implied conspiracy theories and the meta-discussion about vote mechanics. It's obviously not a very vast conspiracy since we're discussing the story now.
- r0h1n 13y ago"Ugh"? You're disgusted?
- aclevernickname 13y agoI don't know why your comment was greyed, but I find it interesting that the poisoning the well [1] in the grandparent was granted a nice black font. [1] http://www.logicallyfallacious.com/index.php/logical-fallacies/141-poisoning-the-well http://www.logicallyfallacious.com/index.php/logical-fallaci...
- furyg3 13y agoThis bug is very annoying. Two people in my close circle of friends/family have this issue, which makes me think a) it's pretty common and b) it was catchable in QC. I spent 2 hours this week trying to upgrade, back-up, restore, etc a relative's phone, without success. The fact that you can't downgrade from iOS 7 makes this doubly painful. Support from Apple was pretty straightforward for my friend: "Your phone is out of warranty, sorry, we will not help you." The fact that this warranty is illegal under EU law is left out. Finding that this is an incredibly common problem amongst users with a recent iPhone (4S, still being sold by Apple), and seeing that Apple is actively censoring people for offering warranty help, is very frustrating. It's sad that it takes someone famous ranting about Apple's censorship to solve the issue, when it all could have been avoided by saying "We are aware of the problem, it has to do with the iOS 7 upgrade, we are working on a software fix, if we can't fix it we will replace the affected iPhones."
- crag 13y agoI agree this bug is annoying. But Apple censoring it's forums is nothing new. They've been doing it for years. And frankly, most companies do censor their forums. No one likes it. And Apple is infamous for not responding until an issue reaches the mainstream press. So the best thing anyone can do is reach out to the mainstream press. Get this issue on the evening news programs and trust, it'll be fixed in a couple of days.
- Doctor_Fegg 13y agoIt's not "censorship" if it's Apple's own forums. A censor is a _third party_ who acts as an arbiter of what is morally acceptable elsewhere (OED definition: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/censor http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/censor). Apple are entirely within their rights to remove stuff from their own website... even if they're being dicks by doing so.
- Amadou 13y agoA censor is a _third party_ The definition you linked to says nothing about 3rd parties, only officials without specifying who they work for. In fact, one of the examples given in that definition is film censors which is within scope here - in the US film censorship is done by the MPAA which is an organization composed of movie studios. Most of the films they censor are produced by their own members. The use of the word censor in this discussion is entirely within the common and technical definitions of the term.
- daraosn 13y agoSimilar story for 2011 Q1 MBP, it seems like the Graphics are defect for several models and suddenly started to fail for several customers about now... +800 posts, NO RESPONSE AND CENSORSHIP FROM APPLE!! Think twice before buying a new Macbook Pro: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4766577 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4766577
- kalleboo 13y agoThe new just Retina MacBook Pros are having issues as well http://www.macrumors.com/2013/10/28/owners-of-late-2013-retina-macbook-pros-reporting-keyboard-and-trackpad-freezes-boot-camp-install-issues/ http://www.macrumors.com/2013/10/28/owners-of-late-2013-reti...
- josteink 13y agoThink twice before buying a new Macbook Pro No need to think twice at all. I'm a software-developer and my livelihood depends on being able to write code freely, without getting censored and threatened with litigation, bullshit patents and rounded corners. Thus patent trolls and people abusing software patents for anti-competitive purposes is a direct threat to my livelihood and supporting that is directly unintuitive, borderline madness. I have an ethical code of software conduct and it's very simple: I don't deal with patent-trolls. None. That includes not buying anything from Apple.
- i386 13y agoYou know various organisations hold patents to protect open source projects and some of them have used patents to litigate? No one is clean.
- uxp 13y ago> I don't deal with patent-trolls. None. Then I'm sure you don't buy any products that contain Samsung NAND NVRAM, nor do you purchase anything with Qualcomm chips, as a significant portion of their revenue comes from aggressive patent licensing, right? Listen, I hate patent trolls as much as the next guy, but patent licensing is a very common business tactic everywhere. Don't make broad, over reaching comments if you don't actually mean them. You're perfectly fine with not buying Apple products because you don't like Apple. I don't like LG products, so I try not to buy LG. But, lets be realistic here.
- rmc 13y agoThings like this make me wish there was a law against companies attempting to counter or restict information on customers legal rights.
- MichaelApproved 13y agoWe don't need laws against this. We already have existing and satisfactory avenues that expose these types of business practices. Good journalism and websites like Hacker News do a better job than a law regarding this type of practice ever could.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- logicallee 13y agoI'm not saying you're wrong, but please don't be so casual with this audience's time. For example, should we have to do vigilante investigation of every company everywhere? Obviously consumer rights have to be balanced with the first amendment - and for this reason, I don't think your parent's proposal is clear enough to become a law. It's super-vague. But don't for a second be so generous in saying that we should take the burden on instead. I don't want to have to read about underage workers, credit card fraud by companies, carcinogenic additives, gross marketing misrepresentation, or any number of other practices that are simply illegal. Moreover even if someone did want to read about them here, we couldn't police the world's 125M companies. This is totally literally what laws are for.
- rmc 13y agoThis original story was about information about the warranty in the EU. So I don't think the first amendment of the US constitution applies in this case. (And yes, it's a vague quick suggestion, this is a discussion board, we're not writing laws here)
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- acqq 13y agoIt's not censorship at all, it's the moderation of the forum maintained by the company. If I would maintain my forum I'd also delete the comments that are aggressive, overblown, conspiracy-insane etc, for example. I'd also know it's hard to win: only a few weirdos (and internet makes it really easy for them to be visible) are enough to waste the time of more people, but it's still a nice goal: better a few people on the payroll deleting the comments than the thousands or even millions of users being distracted, creating the new conspiracy theories or organizing lynching. http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 In short, "do it in your own forum, I reserve the right to delete your posts in mine, and by participating, you're acknowledging my right." If you did any real-life engineering, you know there isn't anything that can be produced without any glitches. You are aware that your product isn't perfect, but you still wouldn't want to support aggression in your own forums. Due to the different laws in different countries, who should you personally contact to solve the problem varies so even such answers in globally-read thread which should be purely technical can be inappropriate. In European countries it's very regulated and clear, for example. I don't know how it's in US. What's certainly clear is that nobody would even want the forums without the active moderation, except the spammers and the insane.
- pbhjpbhj 13y ago>If I would maintain my forum I'd also delete the comments that are aggressive, overblown, conspiracy-insane etc, for example. // That's fine, but a polite legitimate enquiry about a genuine problem doesn't meet with those characteristics - it is "censorship". Apple Computers are censoring the speech of their users seeking support from other users (and Apple). So I guess what you're saying is "don't expect Apple to offer support or act ethically towards their users". Fair enough. >Due to the different laws in different countries, who should you personally contact to solve the problem varies so even such answers in globally-read thread which should be purely technical can be inappropriate. // Yeah 'cause that's why the posts were deleted. Not like you could simply add a comment "these returns are only available in the EU". >What's certainly clear is that nobody would even want the forums without the active moderation, except the spammers and the insane. // Which is a strawman. You can have a moderated forum without deleting posts simply because they'd affect your profits.
- drderidder 13y agoOne thing is clear: Jony Ive is no great software designer. He's stuck in a paradigm of modernist functionalism that works well for physical objects but doesn't translate well to the screen.
- webology 13y agoMy girlfriend's iPhone 4s updated to iOS7 and refused to activate. After four or five hours of going through support and then a trip to the Apple store, Apple confirmed that the hardware was fine but something went wrong on the upgrade. The "Genuis" told us that's it's "unfortunate" that things like wifi sometimes break when you upgrade your phone's OS because of the stress that it puts your phone through. Their only solution was to buy a used phone of the same model for $200 from them. Our request to have downgrade back to iOS6 (we have both an iTunes backup and an iCloud backup) was refused because the "Genuises" can't even do it. I even offered to pay them to fix that phone and we were told they couldn't do it. We refused to pay Apple to replace her phone and I bought her a friend's spare phone in the meanwhile. My first and only bad experience with Apple so far but quite disappointing to say the least.
- vor_ 13y agoFlamebait headline, check. Author with history of flamebaiting, check. Submitted to HN, check.
- duncan_bayne 13y agoAd-hominem attack, check.