Apple Lifts Ban On the Word "Jailbreak" 113
Gunkerty Jeb writes "After banning the word 'jailbreak' from its app store and music library, Apple [Friday] reversed course and again permits the term — slang for hacking into a device to download unauthorized content — to appear on iTunes and its App Store. On Thursday bloggers noticed Apple had censored the word, using the Thin Lizzy album 'Jailbreak' as an example. For awhile, the title was listed as 'J******k' in Apple's music library, at least its U.S. version. In other instances, digital content continued to bear the full name Jailbreak."
Apple... (Score:2, Insightful)
What a ridiculous and petty company. The very antithesis of America. It has more in common with Stalinist Russia.
Re:Apple... (Score:4, Funny)
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Who said anything about government? It too seems to be trying it's hardest to align with Stalin, only without the pretense of "to each according to his need".
Re:Apple... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not criticising American ideals or the American people, but this kind of behaviour is made possible by unregulated free-market capitalism. America is not at that extreme, but it is surely closer to it than any other country.
Since Stalinist Russia was all about centralisation, the very fact that Apple is a private company means it has little in common with it.
Pre-empting moderators:
Off-topic: I was responding to this post, which is itself a response to the story.
Troll/Flamebait: I don't think anyone here should be defending Apple in this case. This is a very real and transparent attempt to limit the freedoms of their users which conflict with their own financial interests.
Re:Apple... (Score:5, Insightful)
"I'm not criticising American ideals or the American people, but this kind of behaviour is made possible by unregulated free-market capitalism. America is not at that extreme, but it is surely closer to it than any other country. Since Stalinist Russia was all about centralisation, the very fact that Apple is a private company means it has little in common with it."
So allow me: Apple is a perfect example of what unregulated free markets result in. All those liberarians who want to vote with your feet... look at how many people are quite happy to take censorship and control far out-stepping the federal government, because of a shiny product. Apple has the very real potential of eventually reaching the critical mass of Microsoft, where you are FORCED to do business with them, or be unable to use digital devices. If that happens, then sorry, I'd rather the government than Apple. Corporations do not value your freedom, and for the most part, neither do their consumers; that's why we have regulations and anti-monopoly laws.
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So allow me: Apple is a perfect example of what unregulated free markets result in.
Yeah, because copyrights, patents and the other sticks that Apple uses to beat the competition are products of an 'unregulated free market'.
Apple is a perfect example of what government-mandated monopolies result in.
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Not that copyrights and patents are good; see my signature. They simply are a different matter. I'll remind you, it was corporations that pushed copyright and patent laws for the past hundred years, not random citizens or special interest groups.
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Corporations wouldn't even exist if it weren't for governments passing laws to create them. A truly unregulated market consists only of individuals with full responsibility for their actions.
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Power does what it wants, no matter what the system of government.
SHHHHHH! (Score:1)
This comment is long overdue.
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You're probably getting modded offtopic because you did not clearly link Apple to this bit:
"I'm not criticising American ideals or the American people, but this kind of behaviour is made possible by unregulated free-market capitalism. America is not at that extreme, but it is surely closer to it than any other country. Since Stalinist Russia was all about centralisation, the very fact that Apple is a private company means it has little in common with it."
So allow me: Apple is a perfect example of what unregulated free markets result in. All those liberarians who want to vote with your feet... look at how many people are quite happy to take censorship and control far out-stepping the federal government, because of a shiny product. Apple has the very real potential of eventually reaching the critical mass of Microsoft, where you are FORCED to do business with them, or be unable to use digital devices. If that happens, then sorry, I'd rather the government than Apple. Corporations do not value your freedom, and for the most part, neither do their consumers; that's why we have regulations and anti-monopoly laws.
The problem is that, in the US (as well as many other countries), the government is owned by the corporations.
Until the election process is separated from the influence of large campaign donors, I don't see any possibility of change.
--
dk
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"I'm not criticising American ideals or the American people, but this kind of behaviour is made possible by unregulated free-market capitalism."
No my friend its not. I seriously doubt *anyone* wishes to be told what they can or can't say or do. And considering a true free market is regulated by peoples wishes, and their wishes are to not be censored, you'd be *very* hard pushed to suggest this is a result of a free market.
What we have now is nothing but heavily regulated, deeply dysfunctional *corporatis
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While I agree that that sort of market can lead to problems like those with Apple, America is certainly not the most free economy. In fact, according to the Index of Economic Freedoms, America barely makes the top ten freest markets:
http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking
Re:Apple... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not criticising American ideals or the American people, but this kind of behaviour is made possible by unregulated free-market capitalism.
Nope. It's made possible by regulated near-free-market capitalism and worse. If it were a truly unregulated free-market, there wouldn't be things like IP that Apple could use to prevent competitors from cloning Apple hardware and software and selling at a lower price or adopting a more free (as in speech) version of iTunes service. Only the power of law keeps the competitors at bay.
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I'm not criticising American ideals or the American people, but this kind of behaviour is made possible by unregulated free-market capitalism.
Nope. It's made possible by regulated near-free-market capitalism and worse. If it were a truly unregulated free-market, there wouldn't be things like IP that Apple could use to prevent competitors from cloning Apple hardware and software and selling at a lower price or adopting a more free (as in speech) version of iTunes service. Only the power of law keeps the competitors at bay.
^ Mod parent up if you value freedom. Most people confuse Libertarians with neo cons. In reality, corpratisim is the exact thing Libertarians are against. A government shouldn't give us regulations, it should give us the tools to regulate ourselves against concentrated power, regardless of its form.
Re:Apple... (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people confuse Libertarians with neo cons. In reality, corpratisim is the exact thing Libertarians are against.
In all fairness, you should probably tell the self-styled "Libertarians" that, first. Judging by the pro-corporate dribble most of them echo incessantly, they missed the memo.
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In all fairness, you should probably tell the self-styled "Libertarians" that, first. Judging by the pro-corporate dribble most of them echo incessantly, they missed the memo.
Funny thing is, the only pro-corporate dribble I hear is from others, talking about the "views" of Libertarians. I personally have never met a Libertarian that was pro-corpratisim. Please do not confuse us for the neo-cons. They like to borrow our rhetoric, but really they are the antithesis of Libertarian philosophy.
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No true libertarian is pro corporatism [wikipedia.org]
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You should be modded "douchebag" just for the "Pre-empting moderators" bit.
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Haha, yeah I know!
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Ah, ha ha, I'm glad you have a sense of humor! Carry on, friend.
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Any monopolistic corporation has strong motivation to become like Stalinist Russia. Stalinist Russia was just one corporation, and used its monopoly ruthlessly. What keeps most large corporations from achieving that kind of power is government regulation.
-- hendrtik
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After banning the word 'jailbreak' from its app store and music library, Apple [Friday] reversed course and again permits the term
This is a very real and transparent attempt to limit the freedoms of their users which conflict with their own financial interests.
what?
Nuspeak (Score:4, Informative)
[jailbreak] - slang for hacking into a device to download unauthorized content
WTF?
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Well, the media has to continue to play the game as good little followers, demonizing anyone that doesn't play by the 'rules'.
Just like hackers are bad.
*nix is a tool for said hackers
Copying any file is piracy.
And of course, god help you if you want to buy software or music not in the 'store'....
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That Ive never seen the media claim that "copying any file is piracy", or that "nix is a tool for hackers", or that using third party stores is somehow illegal.
As for "hackers are bad", seems like you are one of those folks who insist on using a definition that may be technically correct but will inevitably confuse all laypersons. The common definition of a hacker now refers to black-hats; get over it.
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As for "hackers are bad", seems like you are one of those folks who insist on using a definition that may be technically correct but will inevitably confuse all laypersons. The common definition of a hacker now refers to black-hats; get over it.
Thus proving nurb432's original comment:
Well, the media has to continue to play the game as good little followers, demonizing anyone that doesn't play by the 'rules'.
Re:Nuspeak (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like hackers are bad.
*nix is a tool for said hackers
OS X is Unix, so...
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[jailbreak] - slang for hacking into a device to download unauthorized content
WTF?
More like: slang for the ability to download and run unsigned apps because Apple just didn't like that app (or developer) for whatever unexplained reason -this after extensive costs in dollars and time.
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That's the same thing, only you spelled out that the content is "unauthorized" by Apple, as opposed to a legally-constituted authority.
Re:I wonder how AC/DC weathered this storm. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I wonder how AC/DC weathered this storm. (Score:4, Informative)
Don't forget telling others why they should vote the same way.
Hanlon's Razor (Score:3, Funny)
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Re:Hanlon's Razor (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet discounting malice without even verifying is the height of stupidity.
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Obviously you dont understand the saying. People are far more often stupid vs malefic
Obviously you don't understand the saying. Malicious peoples are far more likely to disguise themselves as incompetent.
Whereas stupid people are likely to try to appear benign and fail (even if they are benign). Hanlon's razor still works.
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Problem is, they are often the indistinguishable.
Say facebook decides to track their users physical whereabouts and makes them automatically 'like' a profile that is attached to an establishment they entered. People revolt (well, hopefully), and then.. what?
Was it malice? Well it certainly was intentional. I'm sure they didn't mean any harm, just that people took offense to it.
Was it stupidity to think that people wouldn't take off
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Sorry, i didn't understand your example. Can you use a car analogy? Thanks.
Re:Hanlon's Razor (Score:4, Interesting)
Sorry, i didn't understand your example. Can you use a car analogy? Thanks.
Let's say you did something the mechanic didn't like, say you had a different mechanic work on your car. The next time he changes your oil, he adds a special oil plug that only he has the tool to remove. Sometime later, you go to change your own oil and you can't, even though you rightfully should be able to so -- That prick is artificially forcing you to come back to him. Now, It COULD have been a mistake, he could have just grabbed the wrong oil plug, but it's highly unlikely attributed to just stupidity -- They had a motive for malice, and had to go out of his way to use a special wrench to install the incorrect plug.
People "jailbreak" their phones, Indeed, we got a DMCA exemption to do so, and it's legal. Apple doesn't like that so they censor the term making it harder to jail break, and the effect is that more people keep using their service instead of going to another app store. Now, it COULD have been a mistake: Apple could have accidentally entered a term in its censor list, but it's highly unlikely attributed to a stupid accident -- They had a motive for malice, the term censored just happens to be the thing that lets you use someone else's service, and they had to go out of their way to make sure censored terms apply to everything, not just apps in their app store which they already screened for offensive terms...
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Apple doesn't like that so they censor the term making it harder to jail break, and the effect is that more people keep using their service instead of going to another app store.
Has anyone, in the entire history of the iPhone, searched the app store looking for a way to jailbreak their iPhone / iPad? Or, do you think it more likely that they search Google?
Besides, I'm pretty sure that any JailbreakMyDevice.app that gets submitted to the app store would be roundly rejected.
I really really do not like censor
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The stupidity is easy to spot: some assnuts put "jailbreak" in the list of words censored, and some other assnuts thought it was a good idea and approved it.
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Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by corporate greed.
There, fixed.
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The two are not mutually exclusive.
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it was malice done with stupidity.
malice in pretending it's a good idea to ban words from their store.
stupidity in choosing the words.
stupid malice in combining the censorship to try to hide information about jailbreaking in instances where things had nothing to do with the "jailbreaking" they were trying to ban access to, malice in using a system meant to protect people from offensive things to achieve that. end result is just more people knowing the right word to google, even those who wouldn't have cared
This had so much potential... (Score:2)
Re:This had so much potential... (Score:4, Funny)
They should have called it a common word, like "Orange".
Yeah, but that would've made comparisons difficult.
Re:This had so much potential... (Score:4, Funny)
They should have called it a common word, like "Orange".
Yeah, but that would've made comparisons difficult.
True.
Also there was an Orange computer at one time. They got peeled and squeezed out of business though.
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Never thought of it: "Orange now provides Apple devices"...
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Throw an Apple, and few Blackberries in a blender and serve with Orange, Blendtec guy [willitblend.com]!
Call the interns! (Score:2)
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*paid* interns? You're fired.
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Please tell me I'm not the only one who was thinking Thin Lizzy had an album called 'Jailfuck'.
Nope. I checked with everyone on /. (and Ars and Digg, too) and you are, in fact, the only one who was thinking that.
First they want to control your speech (Score:5, Insightful)
First they want to tell you what you can and cannot say. Then they want to tell you what you can and cannot do. Then they will want to tell you what you can and cannot think.
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Re:First they want to control your speech (Score:5, Informative)
You realize this is Apple we're talking about, right? I think they followed that list exactly in reverse;
> Reality distortion field, army of fanboys ready to stand up for the stupidest decisions (I am still amazed at the instant turnover that was the end to the years of "PowerPC is better!" when Apple moved to iX86), heavy marketing to make you believe it is something it isn't.
> Walled garden that goes almost totally unquestioned by users. An unfortunate tendency for Apple to offer "official" (and mangled) versions of open source libraries, making use of the real ones more difficult. Heavily locked down hardware, even on desktops, compared to non-Apple computers.
> THEN censorship like this.
I am not really sure what they hoped to gain, making it quite possible this specific case was just a screwup of some middle-manager. However, that does not absolve Apple of their other sins; it simply illustrates how much unwarranted power Apple wields, with no oversight, over a growing segment of the computing world. Truly frightening.
Re:First they want to control your speech (Score:5, Insightful)
"First they want to tell you what you can and cannot say. Then they want to tell you what you can and cannot do. Then they will want to tell you what you can and cannot think."
You realize this is Apple we're talking about, right? I think they followed that list exactly in reverse;
> Reality distortion field, army of fanboys ready to stand up for the stupidest decisions (I am still amazed at the instant turnover that was the end to the years of "PowerPC is better!" when Apple moved to iX86), heavy marketing to make you believe it is something it isn't.
> Walled garden that goes almost totally unquestioned by users. An unfortunate tendency for Apple to offer "official" (and mangled) versions of open source libraries, making use of the real ones more difficult. Heavily locked down hardware, even on desktops, compared to non-Apple computers.
> THEN censorship like this.
I am not really sure what they hoped to gain, making it quite possible this specific case was just a screwup of some middle-manager. However, that does not absolve Apple of their other sins; it simply illustrates how much unwarranted power Apple wields, with no oversight, over a growing segment of the computing world. Truly frightening.
Goodness me. Quite a bit to get to here.
"PowerPC is better! followed by switch to x86"
Yes, PowerPC *was* better at the time the commercials ran. They weren't quite as fast as Apple made them out (the Pentium had a snail on it) but at the time PPC did have an advantage. This advantage quickly evaporated, however, to an almost laughable degree - especially regarding memory bandwidth, and the brick wall that IBM ran into with the PPC970. In the meantime, Intel made enormous strides with x86 and left PPC in the dust, so Apple switched. The fact that the facts bore this out meant that people weren't still shouting about how PPC was better - they changed their opinion based on facts. How this is controversial to you is quite perplexing, unless you were expecting their heads to explode because "the Apple mothership" now held a contradictory position to one it had previously expressed.
Not sure how you can bash Apple or Apple users for that one, given that they did the exact opposite of what most of you haters claim Apple users do (blindly stick to things they a mindless fans of). x86 moves ahead of PPC so much that Apple went though a potentially painful total architecture switch - a non-trivial thing to do.
"Heavily locked down hardware, even on desktops"
Mhhmmm. People often trot this one out alongside the utterly diametrically opposed argument that Macs are just standard PC parts in a nice case. It's not really possible for both to be true. For the record, it's much closer to the latter.
I'd also question "heavily locked down" when all of the various pieces are pretty standard - you can swap out pretty much all of the parts as you need to on most of their machines. They switched from fixed CPUs and GPUs on the iMac to socketed whitebox Intel CPUs (you can buy an i5 or i7 off newegg and drop it in), and MXM 3.0 for the GPU (you can buy an MXM graphics card and slot it in, although they are rare and expensive). RAM is standard, hard drives are standard, optical drives are standard, the logic board uses PCIe, USB, SATA, etc.
Honestly, other than the custom firmware they had on iMac hard drives to be able to read the temperature (that was factory designed to be switched back to "standard" SATA behaviour with a jumper setting if a non-Apple drive was installed), I'm having a hard time seeing how "heavily locked down" applies? Maybe if you gave me some examples?
"Official "mangled' versions of OS libraries"
Examples?
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the shit it was better. or it was "better" but was slower in just about everything? it was "better" because they had a nice deep sleep fast wakeup on their lappies, which had nothing to do with it being ppc really? same way how arm is now "better" except that it's not better in any measurable way?
hard time understanding heavily locked down? ON A FUCKING ARTICLE ABOUT HOW THEY HAD BANNED THE WORD JAILBREAK for a while, come on sissyfitpants. you've always been able to switch gpu's on more expensive macs for
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My goodness, so much hate.
"One button shitmouse." Hah. I can almost ignore anything you just said, since it's clearly not based on facts, but basing my opinion on one clearly hilariously outdated piece of misinformation would be wrong. You're also ignoring all of the salient points about my PPC vs x86 argument, but whatever; it did contain some quite long words.
You question my assertion that "heavily locked down" applies to the hardware that Apple sells, then claim this article is about them banning the wor
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"One button shitmouse." Hah. I can almost ignore anything you just said, since it's clearly not based on facts
Wait, Apple makes a two-button mouse now? Or do you just count "right click" support since you can press control? Or are you trying to pretend that the Apple "Mightily Random" Mouse isn't a shitmouse? Because the one I had would just randomly decide you're right clicking if your finger got too close to the right side, and the last time I tried one in a store they'd added this horrible multi-touch that made it so that just touching the mouse did random things.
Thankfully I can now ignore everything you said t
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Err, yes... Apple has been making two button mice and input peripherals for some years now. I know this is slashdot, but how is this news to you?
The Mighty Mouse (with the terrible scroll ball that gunks up and stops working ) and Magic Mouse (with the touch sensitive top surface) both have right click without needing to use the control key. The touch sensitive controls on the surface can be disabled or tweaked easily in the settings if you find them too sensitive or just plain useless - I know people who h
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Except the mice Apple makes all have one physical button (and play dumb-ass horrid "touch sensitive" tricks for the right button, which barely works) and they're all really shitty mice. Which makes them one-button shitmice.
The Mac at work I have I use a Logitech mouse with. It's pretty nice, minus the lack of auto-scroll support.
Trackpads aren't mice, but I will give Apple credit for making the most useable trackpad I've ever used. Well, not Apple, but the company that they bought that actually created them
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Only while accessing their store. They don't control what you say outside of that.
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Then they will want to tell you what you can and cannot think.
Think different (but within the narrow parameters we've set).
So go ahead, break some rules! (except don't break any rules)
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Think Different (TM)
What. (Score:4, Interesting)
>slang for hacking into a device to download unauthorized content
What.
Re:What. (Score:5, Informative)
"J*******k" for unrelated contexts (Score:2)
Someone at A***e has their h**d up their a*s.
Why would they uncensor a word like Jailbreak? (Score:3)
Corporations and free speech (Score:2)
1984 (Score:1)
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I'm sure Apple fanboys like evil_aaronm will fawn all over this, but it goes to show you just how pathetic this company and its buttboy users really are.
Wrong.
I, too, rolled my eyes at Apple making a common-use word like "Jailbreak" an "unword", as if it was going to keep knowledge of iOS Jailbreaks hidden from public view!!! Utterly ridiculous, and it smacks of overzealous middle-management.
My suspicion is that this was not properly "vetted" as a decision, or surely-to-Diety SOMEone would have pointed out not only the absurdity of the idea, but also the negative press that such a ridiculously heavy-handed example of censorship (yes, it's their store an
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I'm not sure that it was a case of listening to their customers so much as realising the mistake and reversing it. I saw this story a couple of days ago, and Apple had fixed it on the same day it was reported. I think it was a case of automated censorship gone awry. Whether they have totally eliminated the censorship or merely confined it back to the original box it was meant to operate in (the App Store one presumes), is another thing entirely.
Either way, censoring words really doesn't get you very far.
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--- I, too, rolled my eyes at Apple making a common-use word like "Jailbreak" an "unword", ----
It was an unword from the beginning. It's not a "jailbreak" it's a goddamn security hole.
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When the security is meant to prevent you from using the device in the way that you wish to as the lawful owner, then it's a good thing to have a way to break that security.
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