Submitted by We all know Apple’s App Store policies are a bit willy-nilly, inconsistent, and completely unreliable. This issue has been going on for a while now, and it doesn’t see like anything has changed. The latest interesting App Store rejection is especially interesting, as it involves Apple rejecting an application related to one of its detractors: the EFF.
In order to understand this story, I first need to give you some background on a certain internet meme. Yes, I know what you’re thinking – we hate memes. I do too, but I need to explain this one anyway, as it’s crucial to the story, and I don’t want anyone to misunderstand what this is all about.
The film “Der Untergang” (“Downfall” for the linguistically challenged) is a German/Austrian film about the final moments of Hitler’s life in the bunker and the deteriorating city of Berlin on top of him. The film evoked many strong emotions, and some people in and outside of Germany feared that giving Hitler a “3D” personality – instead of always simply regarding him and his henchmen as 2D monsters – would aid neo-Nazi movements around the world. As it turned out, this wasn’t going to happen, as Hitler in his last days was decidedly not someone to look up to, even if you were a die-hard neo-nazi.
The film itself turned out to be really good. In fact, I personally find it my best film of all time. It made me sick, sad, angry, and uncomfortable all at the same time, and the acting of the cast was very close to perfection. It also helped that it was a German/Austrian-made film, with the proper language, and without the usual eagle-chocking sauce of patriotism many Hollywood film makers drape over their WWII films.
However, the biggest accomplishment of this film is without a doubt Bruno Ganz’ depiction of Hitler. Again without a doubt I can say that this is the best acting performance in a film of all time. The accent, the mannerisms, the rhythm of speech, the posture – it’s perfection. The fact that Bruno Ganz did not get an Oscar for his performance is further proof that the Academy Awards are not to be taken seriously, something I already knew the moment American History X didn’t win an Oscar.
Anyway, one of the defining scenes in the film is where Hitler is confronted with the fact that the war is lost, that Das 3. Reich has fallen apart. At this point, Hitler “deafens himself to reality, eloquently savages everyone who cost him his dreams, vows revenge and finally resigns himself to private grief”, as the New York Times put it so fittingly. The internet has taken on this scene, and has created hundreds of spoofs by placing deliberately incorrect subtitles in the scene, about anything from XBox machines to Malaysian politics. One of those spoof videos is amidst of the recent App Store rejection. It’s this one, and it’s about movie studios and DMCA take-down notices; Linux and Stallman also make an appearance:
How would a video like this cause an application to be barred from entry into the App Store? Well, someone made an application which monitors the RSS feed of the EFF’s web page and displays its content. And here it goes wrong: a blog post on the EFF’s page displays the above video, and the App Store reviewer of the day saw Hitler, decided it was objectionable, and turned the application down.
Of course, this is nothing short of idiotic. Using the standard, built-in YouTube application on the iPhone, you can browse to the exact same video and play it – and with it all the other gazillion similar spoof videos. Also, any RSS application can point to the EFF feed, and let’s not forget Safari, which you can use to visit pages that are much, much more “objectionable”.
This story gains an extra dimension of clumsiness on Apple’s end because we’re talking about the EFF here. The EFF and Apple are in a tussle over the DMCA; the EFF is advocating a DMCA exception that would allow the jailbreaking of iPhones, where Apple is obviously against it. This recent rejection by Apple further strengthens the EFF’s argument, which is probably not what Apple had intended.
In any case, it seems like Jon Gruber’s hilarious “Excerpts From the Diary of an App Store Reviewer” is closer to reality than any of us could have imagined.
Apple’s starting to look less and less attractive for me nowadays..
A flavor of the damage this stuff is doing to Apple can be seen from this MSM story
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jun/04/apple-iphone
Apple needs to stop trying to control what its customers do with their software and their machines. The more it tries, the more it loses. It is on a hiding to noplace, attempting to control things that are non of its business, and as far as one can see, purely for the sake of control. There is no discernible reason why people should not read the Kama Sutra on their phones, access EFF materials, or install their purchased copies of OSX on the machines of their choice.
Apple appears to be trying to control what they do simply for the sake of controlling them. Utterly misguided. Unfortunately, the only explanation of the existence of this behavior is a corporate culture that is deeply twisted, and fundamentally opposed to one of the key ingredients in Western intellectual freedom. That is where it becomes not simply ridiculous, but loathsome.
I find it rather ironic that the two biggest offenders in the current software market are both born of a country founded by Hackers (yes, the founding fathers where political hackers and some very much hardware hackers).
It’s more ironic that Steve Jobs and Woz used to hack AT&T’s phone system with blue boxes, and now the iPhone is an AT&T exclusive in the U.S. that we mere mortals aren’t supposed to hack, or else.
Yup, Apple was funded by criminal enterprise. I can’t hold that against them though as it would negate many big businesses.
1. Have a good product
2. Give a lot of stuff away for free(dom)
3. Don’t do braindead shit like this
Companies _I_ like: Red Hat, Google
Companies _I_ avoid (If I can): Microsoft, Apple
This article reminds me of the recent story where Apple banned a Nine Inch Nails app (which streams some of their music) because Apple objected to one of the songs – despite the fact that Apple themselves sell said song on their iTunes store.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8039779.stm
(Trents reply to Apple does make be chuckle)
It really does feel like they have idiots in charge of the iPhone app store.
Edited 2009-06-05 10:47 UTC
It sounds like they’re employing the same geniuses who used to enforce the AOL TOS. AKA, the type of folks who would kick users offline for using the word “breast” in a breast cancer forum.
http://www.iphonelinux.org/index.php/Main_Page
Lets hope the iPhone linux project matures some day soon.
iPhone with Linux,Compiz, KDE4 or Gnome
iPhone is good on the hardware-side of things; it looks good, has a well-working and adequately sized touchscreen and all the bells and whistles you could imagine you’d need on a phone.
But the software side lacks. No support for MMS has already put off many people, and it’s one of the reasons why I wouldn’t buy iPhone. But also the Apple’s tendency to try to limit and control the users is a good reason to avoid it. But when Linux is actually working well and fine on an iPhone it’ll suddenly become every attractive to any homebrew dev, and will most likely very soon have every possible feature you could ask for, including MMS support. At that point I am all for an iPhone myself, too.
EDIT: Forgot to add that I don’t suggest either GNOME or KDE4 for it without heavy modification. As a toolkit for the applications themselves Qt4 would be a good choice in that it is a lot easier to create fluid animations in Qt4 than GTK+, and on a small screen fluid, clear animations actually are useful for making it easier to see what’s happening.
Edited 2009-06-05 13:55 UTC
…Or buy an Android handset and not only have your fully functional phone with a Linux kernel, but also support the companies who are investing into open software.
Exactly! I intentionally avoid all apple consumer products like the plaque. I refuse to support a company that excessively limits what you can do with their products.
Fully functional only after you provide a Google ID, that is. Until then it’s just a brick.
You need to root an Android phone the same way you need to jailbreak an iPhone if you actually want functionality on your terms. There’s no free lunch with Google, or the providers.
True, but you don’t actually need to use any google tools against that ID once you’ve provided
All rooting does is gives you a small handful of additional apps and beta OS updates (some of which aren’t even stable).
And though you might be locked to T-Mobile with the G1, that’s no different to the network locking on the majorety of any other phones these days (smart or bog standard handsets)
I do plan to buy a Android handset soon but I would still love to see it run on the iPhone just too see Apple talk a hit where it counts.
I so want to see iPhone running Android OS. Dual input sensing and everything.. oh that would make me laugh.
I quick thought… What if Apple had the market share of Microsoft?
Oh man.. I think I’m gonna have nightmares tonight!!
If MS had not dominated the software market then someone else or multiple other’s would have braught about the home computer market. Apple would have been a strong contender also but we’d end up with a much more restrictive market and potentially more towards embedded software. Of course, the FOSS folks where a reaction to Unix so that variable would also exist still; potentially more would have been motivated to explore it earlier. Maybe Apple would have put out a Vista in the mid 90s rather than people being motivated by Vista in the last few years.
Every time this idea pops into someone’s head, the variables that didn’t exist in the previous time make it a whole new “what if” outcome.
Other than Steve’s fashion sense, the difference between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates isn’t worth a bucket of warm spit.
There’s an old saying, “I can’t define pornography, but I know it when I see it.”
That, effectively, is one of the drivers in terms of evaluation of an App on the iPhone.
If an App on the iPhone leads to “objectionable material”, then that material may just as well be bundled in within the App itself. At a minimum, the application is a gateway to objectionable material.
Now it’s easy to say “I can surf the most heinous sites on the internet on Safari on the iPhone, what’s the difference?”
Simple, the difference is that Apple doesn’t know or care what you surf, and, specifically, it hasn’t SEEN what you surf.
But if you create an app that acts as a portal to “heinous material”, then the app is effectively that heinous material, and Apple isn’t going to let that application through.
Apple tested this app and “saw” questionable content. If Apple had not see this content, the App would have likely passed. Because later, if someone complained that “I ran this app from the iPhone and got terrible content”, Apple could justifiably say “well, it wasn’t there when we reviewed the applications.” They have reasonable deniability about the content.
But, here, Apple “saw” the content, now it “knows” it’s there, so they’re standing behind their content policy.
I think it’s fair that Apple would allow a dedicated “disney.com” RSS reader rather than a dedicated “sexwithgoatsonfire.com” reader.
Perhaps later if they enable Parental Controls on the phone and app store, you can get your “sexwithgoatsonfire.com” RSS feedreader.
I guess what your saying is that when Apple tested the Safari browser, they did not go to Playboy.com and hence it pass the test. I guess the same logic would be true for their YouTube application also – during all their tests they never tested against material that could have ‘offended’ anyone.
Apple New/SameOld Moto: Your right to express depends on what we think of it.
A: Apple changed their mind and unbanned the NIN app.
B: You really think someone is going to complain to Apple about “terrible content” from the EFF? You really think the EFF puts out content that is heinous and not worthy of being seen? OK fine you object to Downfall parodies. But srsly..
I can only imagine that the App Store approval process is staffed by people who have no technical knowledge at all and cannot separate code from content.
Apple are going to continue to have bad PR mess-ups like this one until they drastically re-think their approval process.
I watched the parody, and while I can’t really claim to know why Apple considers it offensive, I can guess: f-bomb and p word (the latter of which alone can make a movie rated R in the U.S. if it’s said like two or three times). Maybe that’s why? Also, don’t forget that Hitler isn’t exactly a happy image, so most people don’t have any urge to see or hear things about him. (And if you loved this, I guess that means you hated Valkyrie, heh.)
Apple is a monopolistic p.o.s that deserves to go bankrupt. **** of a company to work for too. Oh, and iPhones suck. Sorry, retarded p.o.s hardware imho.
Dave
You guys whined about Eucalyptus, the Book Reader app on the iPhone and upped the irons to fight the power. Where was your follow revealing that Eucalyptus is now available on the iPhone?
http://th.ingsmadeoutofotherthin.gs/eucalyptus/
Edited 2009-06-07 05:13 UTC
I think your fanboyism got the best of you and is making you see things that aren’t there. We never reported on Eucalyptus, nor did we report on the book reader app.
A politically correct, hypocritical company with with a monopolistic bent?
Say it aint so!
lol
Apple has always nauseated me.
I will not own or use ANYTHING of theirs.
In my eyes, they are worse than Microsoft.