Apple Bans RSS Reader Due To Bad Word In Feed Link 254
btempleton writes "It all started when I prepared yet another Downfall subtitle parody. In this one, Hitler is the studio head, upset at all the Downfall parodies, and he wants to do DMCA takedowns on them all. (If you're a DMCA/DRM fighting Slashdotter, you'll like it.) The EFF, which I chair, blogged it on Deeplinks, and hilarity ensued. That weekend, Exact Magic, an iPhone developer, had submitted a special RSS reader app to display EFF news on the iPhone. Apple's iPhone app store evaluators looked at the RSS reader, read the feed it pointed to, and then played the linked-to video. They saw the F-word flash in the subtitles of the video, and then rejected the RSS-reading tool from the App Store. We're up to several levels of meta here — Apple has banned an app over a parody about banning, and is now parodying itself. Bonus: TFA also has the story of just how hard it is to be fully legal in obtaining the famous clip for parody."
Re:Speaking as an Apple fanboi ... (Score:3, Informative)
This is happening often enough, and in a similar enough way each time, that it seems likely to me that someone's doing it as a matter of policy. If it's just individual actions on the part of low-level employees, I'd expect those people to be discovered and fired fairly quickly.
Re:Bad words? (Score:4, Informative)
Well, a lot of people HAVE been trained to be offended by them.
It's time to realize that swearing is only "bad" due to religious baggage, nothing else.
True, although I'd say it's cultural baggage that was influenced by religion. The crucial point is that swearing is also only "good" due to that baggage. If nobody cared about a particular swear word, it would soon fall out of favor for something that would be more offensive.
In other words, if there was no taboo against saying 'fuck', there would be no reason for Hitler to be saying 'fuck' in the first place. (Except maybe to his dear wife.)
Re:Enough already, Apple (Score:5, Informative)
But you can block Safari, if you're a parent and you want control over what your child does with their iPhone. It's under Settings > General > Restrictions.
What you can't do, however, is allow/block each and every application that your child might download from the App Store. You can block the installation of applications altogether, but it's rather obvious that Apple doesn't want you to do that - it cuts off a potential revenue stream for them.
Re:Enough already, Apple (Score:4, Informative)
Should parents not have the choice as to whether to allow their kids to be exposed to bad language, or are you advocating removing that responsibility from the parents?
Parents may believe they have that choice, and in certain domains (e.g. the dinner table) they do. However children are great at finding stuff they aren't allowed to access, and the internet is full of things they shouldn't see, but they will, whether you want them to or not.
As with their exposure to the rest of the outside world, the best thing you can do is to guide them, and indicate what is acceptable, and what is not. Personally I wouldn't let my kids just go and purchase apps on the store themselves till they were old enough to be responsible about it, but that's just me. By the time you allow them to purchase apps with your credit card I think you really have to let go of controlling their decisions.
Quite apart from the futility of parental controls, Apple don't even have parental controls in place for apps - if they did, this sort of thing would not be an issue, as they'd allow some parents to attempt to control what their children can see, and everyone else would ignore them. As it is, they're trying to ban apps for allowing access to the internet or literature. This isn't hard-core porn or something, it's simply swear-words.
By those standards, this page would be adult-only, most sites which young people frequent would be adult-only, in fact most of the internet would be adult-only.
The approvals process is a joke, which in turn makes Apple look like a joke. Really this sort of nonsense should at least wait till they have some 'Adult' rating systems in place, and then they can mark most of the internet as indecent, or adult, or evil, or whatever they want to call them, and any app that access the internet as the same.
Re:Enough already, Apple (Score:3, Informative)
Parental controls/ratings are in iPhone OS 3.0
Re:Hypocritical Apple? (Score:4, Informative)
iTunes music store has explicit warnings for naughty words and parents can block access to those.
The App store doesn't yet have them for anything but games (age ratings are coming for all apps in 3.0) so they are assuming all ages have access to all content. A number of apps have been rejected with the advisory that they are resubmitted when 3.0 is live as they can then be flagged as R rated or similar.