For current political commentary, see the daily political notes.

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Censorship

Spying

Worker abuse

Right to repair

Tax avoidance

Other reasons

Apple has blocked Telegram from upgrading its app for a month. This evidently has to do with Russia's command to Apple to block Telegram in Russia. The Telegram client is free software on other platforms, but no apps are free on an iThing

Apple appears to be censoring all bitcoin apps for iThings. It should be illegal to make or distribute computers which are platforms for censorship.

Apple demonstrates the arbitrariness of its censorship by blocking an app that tells people with text messages when US drone attacks kill civilians. The author said that this app was meant to raise awareness. I hope Apple's censorship of it raises awareness.

Apple censors information about abortion providers.

As of 2015, Apple systematically bans apps that endorse abortion rights or would help women find abortions. This particular political slant affects other Apple services.

Apple's mail service silently censors the mail people send.

Apple deauthorized a Wikileaks access application, using censorship to support censorship.

Apple censors iTunes ebooks — banning all mention of Amazon. People should not do business with Amazon, which mistreats authors, publishers, its workers, and its customers. Ms Lisle's presupposition that the goal of success is all that matters is not admirable. However, that doesn't justify Apple's censorship. Of course, publishing in iTunes was already bad for other reasons, such as DRM, and requiring users to use nonfree software.

Apple banned from iTunes the erotic novel, The Proof of the Honey, saying it was because of the cover.

Apple censored a game for the iThings called Angry Syrians, which is a political parody of Angry Birds. Apple said it was "defamatory or offensive" — to the dictator Assad, apparently.

Apple cut off access to the app store for Iranian users of iMonsters. The underlying wrong here is that Apple gave itself censorship power over everyone that uses those computers — power that we should not allow anyone to have.

Steve Jobs used Apple's censorship power to impose prudery on the net, and this is part of why Stumblr is now deleting everything that won't be rated G. I tried to view a Tumblr page, but its contents did not appear. It seemed to be totally dependent on nonfee Javascript code. Whatever may disappear from Tumblr, I personally will not miss it. Nonetheless, I am concerned about this issue because creeping prudish censorship is dangerous in general; we should fight it in general. Let us therefore invite Apple to go fuck itself and post a selfie of that act on Stumblr.

Apple has censored an application designed to help Hong Kong protesters communicate. Apple surely did this because of threats from China. (We are not supposed to suggest that a "good corporate citizen" would uphold freedom at the cost of profits.) But the reason Apple could do this is that it gave itself censorship power over applications for iMonsters, through the proprietary code of the operating system.

Apple plans to require that all application software for MacOS be approved by Apple first. Offering a checking service as an option could be useful and would not be wrong. Requiring users to get Apple's approval is tyranny. Apple says the check will only look for malware (not counting the malware that is part of the operating system), but Apple could change that policy step by step. Or perhaps Apple will decide that helping Hong Kong protesters constitutes malware.