This article is currently flagged for some reason, but here’s a productive suggestion. Maybe it’ll get unflagged:
If you’re building a phone app, make sure the progressive web app version has feature parity.
I’m extremely late to the party, but recently found react native, and my software runs on android, ios, pwa, macos, windows and linux, “for free”.
This not only bypasses potential future app store censorship, but, with critical mass, is an enabling technology for “daily driver” quality open source (or at least not ios/android) phones.
Are there other enabling technologies like this that I should know about?
> If you’re building a phone app, make sure the progressive web app version has feature parity.
The problem in this specific case is privacy protections:
> Aaron told The Verge ICEBlock is built around a single database in iCloud. When a user taps on the map to report ICE sightings, the location data is added to that database, and users within five miles are automatically sent a push notification alerting them. Push notifications require developers to have some way of designating which devices receive them, and while Aaron declined to say precisely how the notifications function, he said alerts are sent through Apple’s system, not ICEBlock’s, letting him avoid keeping his own database of users or their devices. “We utilized iCloud in kind of a creative way,” Aaron said. [...]
There's supposed to be an open standard for Web Push notifications. ICEBlock would need to build out more tools for themselves, but the same user flow they have now should work with a PWA, using these open universal standards.
Once again Apple mysteriously somehow making sure oh gee huh the web just can't compete with the native ecosystem they have total top down control over. This also means for instance also that the web can't compete for XMPP or messaging apps with native apps. Which came up in the call to run XMPP submission. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45490439
You need a database of everyone who signs up for the service so you can know who to send notifications to. That database needs some kind of unique ID plus a regular location updates.
That's a tempting target to go after, as it's a list of potential ICE targets plus 'political sympathizers'. The app developer does not (AIUI) want the responsibility of keeping that database secure against attack, exposure, or warrant requests.
This reminds me of that incident in 2015 where two police officers were shot and killed in a targeted stack after someone tracked them down using Waze. Police unions put a bunch of pressure on Google to remove the police tracking functionality.
So on one hand, there is a legitimate precedent to be concerned about this being used for targeted attacks. But also Google never caved to pressure in that situation, and the benefits and legal rights seem much more important than the risks.
Apple folded way too easily to authoritarian demands and gives us no option to circumvent their walled garden. I've been a long time iPhone user (since the first one) and I'm not going to be purchasing another one.
Same. I am (1) Moving to GrapheneOS. And (2) exploring other alternatives such as PostmarketOS for when Google makes it impossible for Graphene to operate. And (3) even pairing down my smart phone usage entirely.
But I'm also thinking a lot about the impact on ordinary non-tech-literate folks. They really don't have great options. I think we need some serious technical focus into FOSS and freedom-respecting alternatives
Worth pointing out that Google is doing the same thing Apple is with app removals from their app store, and in the near future it will be harder to install apps outside of their walled garden.
Google has the AOSP. They did remove the ICEBlock app from their store, but unlike iOS, that was never going to fully remove the app from their ecosystem.
If Google forcibly revoked the signature of the app, Android users can still build and access versions of Android with the app. Alternative app stores are a huge boon, but the real coup-de-grace is an Open Source OS.
AOSP is a joke. This is coming from a custom rom user.
Google has been squeezing custom roms for the past 10 years. They barely work, and this is both on purpose and unavoidable. Google shoves DRM anywhere they can get their grubby little hands into.
Also, AOSP doesn't even run on any devices. Anywhere. You need mountains of supplemental proprietary blobs and Google systems to get it onto a phone.
Also, Google is trying to kill all apps outside the play store anyway.
> AOSP is a joke. This is coming from a custom rom user.
Its an open source software right? Free for anyone to do anything. Were you expecting a highly polished, it-just-works with free software? Isnt that being a little entitled?
Yes, I am entitled. No, I don't really care that Google has to put in more effort.
If it were up to me, we would enforce it by law. The consequences of a completely locked down mobile ecosystem are dire for humanity.
Yes, thats the level of things were talking about here. There's those who take the threat seriously, and those who don't. As each year passes by, it becomes more difficult to justify a state of apathy.
Genuine question, not a mobile dev: does this app even work on Android without Google services? The developer said they don't have their own database or location services and had to "[utilize] iCloud in kind of a creative way" to provide alerts that ICE agents were nearby.
It’s easy to blame private companies, like Apple and Disney.
It’s harder to blame politicians, and harder still to blame the root of their power: the people.
And it’s hardest of all to blame yourself. Show me the article that calls these companies evil for caving into political pressure and refusing to immolate themselves, that also argues to neuter government power so that the companies don’t face existential threats from the whims of whatever gang happens to run the show in the moment.
Nope, instead every time there is an implicit argument that even more political power and guns and force are needed.
This kind of apologia seems to be doing rounds lately. It is extension of the "this government has received mandate from the people". A line frequently repeated by this administration. People gave mandate, government acted, company buckled. Now why don't we think of these poor private billion dollar companies - how are they at fault if people elected this government?
Lots of articles out there blaming people who enabled this mess. The divide doesn't exist for nothing.
Even more articles blaming this administration for pressuring private companies. For examples lots of ink has been spent on FCC and Kimmel saga.
So, if there are few posts like these blaming private companies I think it should be fine without this kind of apologia.
I used to think we could argue that, "If we allow our team to do this, then what happens when the other team has power" But at this point I think there's an agreed view that the "other team" is going to abuse and grab for power regardless, so it's only hurting your own agenda / values / team not to when you are in charge. There's no restraint anymore, and most people raging against authoritarianism do so in partisan selective ways. Guess I should just laugh and enjoy the decline. Either way, technology can be used to force decentralization, but tech companies? Not anymore (if ever).
The article states that the government did not have this power to begin with!
> Apple insists that it is only complying with lawful orders, which is patently untrue. Pam Bondi has no authority to order the censorship of this legal speech tool, which is likely why she didn't seek a court order and instead merely rage-tweeted about it. This was sufficient to get Apple CEO Tim Cook [...] to cave in.
Yes. I would say this is true for every corporation. And big corporations must abide by the rules of the system because they have A LOT to lose. They get a lot of free stuff from the government. And then there is pressure to make higher revenue every year.
What mechanism do you propose be used to control the behavior of multi-billion dollar corporations? Many of which have more money and power than most counties.
It's not just Apple vs the government. It's also Apple vs Apple. As a silicon valley tech company, it's likely that fewer Apple employees identify as Republicans than among the general U.S. population. Nevertheless, it must still be a sizable fraction of the company. Anyone deciding policy at Apple has to take that into account.
However, keep in mind that Apple’s rank-and-file employees have virtually no power to effect change, and are no more likely to rock the boat than their counterparts in other Silicon Valley companies. They like their job and their healthcare.
The point is if the most powerful institutions outside the direct government executive branch do not collectively fight back then essentially the executive branch gets more and more power... this is a slippery slope where we see the erosion of institutions it's a Playbook that has played out in countless countries and it's sad to see it happening here. The most powerful brands have enormous power and if they were to put up a fight they can get allies from the very people you point out ultimately are responsible for this dangerous turn of events
How does a corporation fight back when previous administrations have neutered its ability to do so? The Patriot Act (Bush), mass spying on Americans via gag orders (Bush/Obama), proactive anti-trust litigation as a government cudgel (Biden/Trump), jawboning (all of them). Trump's second term is certainly the most brazen and nakedly transparent attempt at control, but the groundwork had been laid decades earlier.
The erosion you speak of happened long before anyone paid attention and the solution people and politicians sought was a further weakening of companies grip on their own assets (more taxes, more regulations, more interference in the market). As an earlier commenter pointed out, the popular political solution to thugs in government has been voting for more thugs in government. In such a circumstance, what does a company owe to those didn't have its interests in mind when it mattered? Even if it can, why should Apple risk becoming a political target against the current administration for the sake of a fickle electorate?
> The point is if the most powerful institutions outside the direct government executive branch do not collectively fight back then essentially the executive branch gets more and more power...
…even if the company does “the right thing,” it won’t be a decision taken from a moral standpoint. It will be practical. Mercenary. Because that is what is demanded by this technological/capitalist terror we’ve devised for ourselves. That’s the rules of the game. Them’s the breaks. When Apple made the decision to stand firm in the San Bernardino case, it did so not because it was the right thing to do, but because its business reputation relies on its claims of privacy and security.
> The most powerful brands have enormous power and if they were to put up a fight they can get allies
Apple already had a chance to align themselves with the "sideloaders" and Free Software nerds, what did they choose instead?
They went the power-grab route. Tim Cook (and whoever his successor is) depends on informal US protectionism to stop Apple from being litigated into the dirt both by the DOJ and courts abroad. If they try to amend their greedy mistake, America's government has them blackmailed. They're the perfect, profitable lapdog.
From a customer perspective, power is the problem. Apple would have had no incentive to fuck over their users if they didn't desperately desire their App Store revenue to be locked-down and enforced by the state. Now, because America refused to seriously reign-in Apple, they are a fall-guy for the tech industry as a whole. You should not be surprised if Trump tries throwing Cook under the bus as part of the "woke deep state" by the time his admin is up. If you can imagine yourself in Tim's shoes, you're probably just trying to make it a few more years without destroying Silicon Valley in the legal catastrophe that would ensue if you resisted. Emotions like "regret" or "honor" don't even factor into that equation.
You wrote this under an article which literally blames the government and literally opens with the following description of ICE "... masked snatch-squads who illegally terrorize brown people in America's cities, capitulating to a warrantless demand from Trump's DoJ boss Pam Bondi"
I read the article before I posted. It’s essentially 1% blaming the government and 99% blaming the companies for not having backbone and for pursuing profit.
But who is the intended audience? Maybe the author hasn't given up on persuading Tim Cook. I don't think there's much chance, but maybe there's a small chance.
If the article was instead giving a pitch to the government, there'd be 0% chance.
You cannot ever expect any company to have a backbone, but you also can't expect the government to be perfectly honest. The real culprit is our software habits, and companies are the main driver in neutering your software freedom.
This is one reason that it's important to keep the web free and open. In the inevitable one browser vendor future and every site on earth behind Cloudflare, it's not unthinkable that you'd be able to achieve this outside of Apple's walled garden too.
I wouldn't see this issue as a problem if it weren't for Apple's stance that everything that can be installed on iOS has to come through App Store. If multiple stores were possible/viable for iOS, then the answer would have been to get said app elsewhere. Fundamentally, this is an issue not about Apple removing apps from their store that they don't want to host, but one of the right to do what you want with the devices you supposedly own.
This is an old chestnut that's no longer true. Safari's PWA support is better than Firefox's today, on both mobile and desktop. Two examples off the top of my head: Safari has better Web Push support, and supports the W3C's Badging API.
My impression for the last ~10+ years is that you could not depend on index db in safari, not for heavy use cases, and doubly so for ios and there was not a viable alternative whenever I checked.
I would be happy to know that things are looking better for PWAs on ios though if things are now viable.
Thanks for the additional background, I'll dig into that! FYI, based in part on our exchange, I created pwascore.com to scratch the itch of wanting a reasonably-objective "score" for browser PWA support.
Why would we want to limit ourselves to PWAs? Being able to run arbitrary executable file has been the core feature of general-purpose computers since the beginning.
I'd consider smart phones as being general-purposes, same as laptops/desktops/servers.
The way they're lock down make them really not general-purpose. Smart phones really were envisioned as thin-clients to cloud servers. When you start getting too far away from that, everything starts fighting you.
Some entitlements require developer account and getting explicit approval from Apple before you can actually use them in a development build on an actual iOS device.
Granted, the vast majority of apps don't have such needs, but it's something to keep in mind.
The app in question relies on the network effect (lots of people crowdsourcing information) so introducing that much friction would kill its usefulness. 99% of users wouldn’t jump through the hoops, and without enough users the app is useless.
It's rooted in what smartphones are and have been since 2007, locked-down rectangles where the user has minimal control over the software. On a PC anybody can install anything, be it a program or operating system, this wouldn't be an issue if smartphones worked the same way.
I'm afraid it's only a matter of time before somebody tries to extend this to the world of computers.
> Apple also uses its app store control to block rival browser engines (every browser on iOS is just a reskinned version of Safari).
Yeah, that’s a good thing to prevent browser monopoly.
> Apple's own browser engine, Webkit, is riddled with longstanding, grave security vulnerabilities, and there is no way to distribute more secure browsers on iOS.
Adding a new browser will just increase the attack vector. Especially since webkit is used everywhere in iOS, not just in Safari…
> Adding a new browser will just increase the attack vector.
More potential ways to attack? Sure. More actual attacks in practice? Not necessarily.
Let's imagine we have a hypothetical 100% secure browser, and we can get people to use it 50% of the time on on iOS. Then 50% of potential attacks become impossible. It doesn't matter that vulnerable Safari is hanging out in another part of the OS if attackers can't actually get their code to run in that context.
Except you ignored my second point which is the browser is in use throughout the system anyway. Yes it would be less likely to attack but still possible. Also a 100% safe browser does not and will never happen.
I didn't ignore it, but perhaps I wasn't clear. My point is that if Safari is in use throughout the system, but used, say, 50% less often (vs. a hypothetical 100% secure browser), then 50% of the time attacks that were previously feasible become infeasible. Frequency / probability of usage matters, not just whether something is installed.
And yes, a 100% safe browser is a fiction (thus "imagine" and "hypothetical"). But I think it's possible that another browser could be vulnerable to fewer attacks than Safari.
I think we're in agreement: adding a new browser increases the number of vulnerabilities that could potentially be exploited (assuming the new browser isn't 100% secure, which will always be the case in practice). And at the same time, moving some usage to a more secure browser makes attacks less likely in practice. I think the latter is more important than the former.
I am not sure whether people defending Apple (or trying to play the devil's advocate here; or a "rational" voice) is plain simple naivety, or part of the ingrained corporate worship culture, or just good old insensitive. Maybe a bit of all — a healthy mix, you know.
In recent discussions about technology, I've come to feel that there's a persistent and flawed belief in "technical utopianism" - not the beautiful future of 2050 kind - but the idea that we can use technology to solve political problems.
For example, we might think that tools like ICEBlock can solve the issue of ICE, or that duress PINs on GrapheneOS can protect whistleblowers, or that VPNs in China can defeat censorship. While these technologies can certainly help mitigate specific challenges, they don't address the underlying political issues. They also often backfire - ICEBlock could theoretically be subpoenaed, duress PIN use can come with mandatory prison sentences, VPNs in China can be detected and blocked at a network level, then traced back to your SIM card.
Historically, technological solutions alone have not resolved political problems. At best, they act as temporary workarounds. To believe otherwise risks oversimplifying complex social and political dynamics, which contributes to the us-versus-them, good-versus-evil narrative that almost never holds in reality. The banning of technological solutions does not necessarily push us towards a more authoritarian future, but forces us to confront reality without a band-aid.
This also causes any restraint on such technological solutions to become rather confused. For example, the article calls out Apple for blocking and removing VPNs in China as "evil." Tell me, what's the alternative? Apple defies the Chinese government, allows VPNs, gets iPhones blocked from all carrier networks in seconds, has their Chinese employees arrested, and almost everyone is forced to use spyware-infested Huawei devices? Amazing moral stand there. Same with ICEBlock - if Apple didn't ban it, who is to say their server company, or the author himself, wouldn't receive a visit?
It's an issue of fundamental freedoms. Freedom of speech and freedom to control your own device and your own data. Freedom to decide for yourself how you use it to communicate with others.
The problem boils down to Apple's consolidatation of power in their walled garden. The fact that they can unilaterally decide to ban an app that people want to run. The fact that an authotarian government can simply apply pressure to manifest their will.
If Apple didn't have such a closed walled-gardrn, they'd be unable to do it even if they wanted to; even if an authotarian regime demanded it.
I get that opinion, but it's the same utopian view that if Apple doesn't ban the app, it will somehow allow us to defy the government.
This is delusional - the government can easily attack the server, and arrest the people who operate it, using any obscure law from 1790 that does the job. They did it to Silk Road, they did it to The Pirate Bay, they can do it to ICEBlock. Removing it from Apple is just the asking nicely method that doesn't require putting the creator behind bars on a technicality.
The power dynamics for technical solutions are "you can resist the government insofar as the government allows," here and everywhere, and always will be. The solution is not better technical solutions, better band-aids on a severed limb, but better government.
> If Apple didn't have such a closed walled-gardrn, they'd be unable to do it even if they wanted to; even if an authotarian regime demanded it.
If we truly lived under an authoritarian regime, 90% of phones could be open source, and they would still have no qualms about kicking you off the cellular network until you purchased an approved device. No technological solution can truly resist a determined authoritarian regime. Control the infrastructure, control the border letting hardware in, control the manufacturing processes, and who cares about the devices subject to it?
Well ThePirateBay is still up and even when they were deep into the legal fight the site was still finding ways to survive.
So, it doesn't look like a good parallel to me.
Apple does have ridiculous control on what you can run on your phone and they are clearly trying to do the same with Macs nowadays. They are undefendable really.
Why does it have to be one or the other? I agree about better government. But it's also very reasonable to call attention to consolidatation of power and abuses of that power. Doing so doesn't automatically imply that one thinks "tech will save the world". You're constructing a straw-man here.
> This is delusional - the government can easily attack the server
I think you have an uncalibrated frame of reference for what "delusional" means here. My Android phone isn't being DDOSed for having sideloading capabilities, neither would your iPhone.
In a world that runs on technology, where rapid communication is essential to have an advantage, secure and accessible tech is a prerequisite for mass social mobilization. You need secure channels for coordination among organizers, methods for moving funds that aren’t easy to shut down, and channels for engaging with ordinary people and ensuring your message can be heard. You need ways to communicate with journalists and sympathetic foreigners. I see this kind of dismissal of activist tech all the time here, along with FUD and trolling. Enough!
You’re on Hacker News. This is a place where users primarily discuss technology, which includes activist technology. There are plenty of people here interested in that sort of technology, and some who may build it and provide it to the less technically inclined over at Reddit (or some political forum). Then those people can do the work that they are more inclined to do, including the difficult work of organizing and mobilizing popular opposition.
I just don’t get the point of posts like this. Would you prefer that everyone be an organizer even if they lack the skills or personality for that? Or is it some kind of accelerationist argument, and you think that people will be more willing to protest if they lack the tools to organize? We don’t yet live under a regime where technology is completely locked down and restricted; the point is to fight back now before that happens!
You're making the assumption that if you build the tech, people will then use the tech, and then the government can't shut it down, because people are using the tech.
An authoritarian government never cares about the widespread availability of anything. If anything, people using it, only becomes a greater impetus to shut it down before it gets larger. The government holds the cards for shutting it down at any time, regardless of size and popularity.
> We don’t yet live under a regime where technology is completely locked down and restricted; the point is to fight back now before that happens!
If we respond by adding duress PINs on GrapheneOS and encrypting the messaging to the 9s, and then bad actors use said technologies, the government has all the ammunition they need for public opinion. We made it easier to ban with a straight face, not harder.
You build the tech, then people use it as a tool to help execute an overall strategy. The tech is not the strategy, it’s just a tool. Ideally you have multiple overlapping tools, including non-technical tools, and the loss of one does not cripple your movement.
An authoritarian government can also just start rounding up and shooting anyone suspected of being a dissident. Typically that doesn’t end well for the government!
China did it successfully. Violent oppression sometimes does work without consequence - you might even become a WTO member.
Military-grade technologies make you a threat to be dealt with by the military. An opponent with weapons is more directly an opponent to be crushed than an opponent with a microphone. Standing in the streets mourning with candlelight would probably be more effective than an encrypted messaging app. The encrypted messaging app definitely feels cooler though, but feelings don't determine reality.
The most successful revolutions in history that built cultural inertia as morally righteous were never known for their sophisticated weapons and planning. China was more freaked out over blank paper than they would have been if tens of thousands of rebels had been armed. Heck, blank paper probably rattled China more than every citizen having Signal would have.
Activism is about changing hearts and minds. It's never a logistics problem. Enter a direct competition with the government and you've already lost. From that perspective, ICEBlock has done nothing for activism.
Yes, it’s possible to fight and still lose. What you’re arguing for is unilateral disarmament, surrender in fact, due to fears that not surrendering may cause you to lose. Opposition, so long as it is ineffective and poses no real threat to power.
> The most successful revolutions in history that built cultural inertia as morally righteous were never known for their sophisticated weapons and planning.
Maybe you should spend some more time studying revolutions. Often there is a great amount of coordination that must happen, especially when going up against a strong adversary. And it’s important to match or exceed your adversary’s reaction time in order to disrupt their planning and cause them to make tactical errors of judgement. This is what leads to events like in Nepal, where the government overreacted and shut down the tools being used for organizing. This was the breaking point that led to mass mobilization, but the revolution was only possible because of the groundwork that had been laid in advance—through careful planning by activists and organizers. Planning that was carried out using modern technology!
> China was more freaked out over blank paper than they would have been if tens of thousands of rebels had been armed.
A hypothetical “just so” statement that (a) cannot be tested and (b) is unlikely to be true. China would see tens of thousands of armed rebels as an existential threat and would be “freaked out” enough to deploy the military immediately. If the population was unhappy enough and ground was prepared for revolution, this would lead to revolution as it did in the USSR. (The big problem with would-be revolutions in China is that the population is pretty happy overall, for now, thanks to improved standards of living. This effect will likely wear off in the future.)
> It's never a logistics problem.
Wrong. Activists make extensive use of technology in order to coordinate and achieve their aims. For all the reasons explained above.
> Enter a direct competition with the government and you've already lost.
Civil Rights era activists were in direct conflict with the FBI, police, and in some cases the National guard. They won.
Your confusing tactical fear with existential fear.
Encryption, weapons? These create tactical fear. Governments have no fear of your tactics when they can shut down cell towers and roll in the tanks. Governments have no fear when they can also easily identify bad actors, highlight them, and win public opinion.
Blank paper, candlelight? These create existential fear. Governments have no playbook to deal with them without looking absurd. If they try to do so anyway, then it converts into tactical fear. Every successful revolution starts with the existential before the tactical.
China has no tactical fear, at all, if tens of thousands of rebels were armed. They'll be solved by next month. China has enormous amounts of existential fear when tens of thousands of people are putting blank pages everywhere. Blank pages could turn into tactical later, but tactical never leads to existential.
The Civil Rights movement you cite? They won through lunch counter sit-ins and bus boycotts - existential challenges to segregation's legitimacy. The tactics was a side show that didn't contribute much. There never was some defining moment where the Civil Rights Warriors won a victory in the Battle of Seville through the superiority of their communication methods. Same with the Civil War - it didn't start with shooting until after the existential battle had been blazing since the Missouri compromise four decades earlier.
> Governments have no fear of your tactics when they can shut down cell towers and roll in the tanks. Governments have no fear when they can also easily identify bad actors, highlight them, and win public opinion.
Untrue. Governments are not all powerful. Armed unrest is a very serious thing to deal with, especially when facing outside pressures. The people in government aren’t generally villains sitting around waiting for their excuse to roll tanks. They have friends and families and take things very seriously when they reach that point. Besides, sending in the tanks most often biases people against, not for, the ruling government—it’s bad optics. Hence why China still forbids discussion of Tianenmen, for example. And why Kent State led to a shift in public opinion, despite preceding violence from the protesters.
> They won through lunch counter sit-ins and bus boycotts - existential challenges to segregation's legitimacy. The tactics was a side show that didn't contribute much.
??? You cite successful tactics (which were carefully planned/coordinated by the way) then you say they were an ineffective sideshow. Not sure how to parse that one.
People are blaming the locked down nature of the App Store but if the government really wanted to stop a specific online activity, making it a website or PWA isn't gonna save it. The issue is the government having this type of control.
> When China turned on Google's users, Google left the country. When the European Union ordered Apple to open up to third party app stores, Apple threatened to leave Europe[.] But when Pam Bondi ordered Apple and Google to help her round up their own customers, Brin and Cook didn't even ask for a court order.
> You could not ask for a better example of the failure of feudal security. Nor could you ask for a better rebuttal to the "Surveillance Capitalism" claim that Google is a "rogue capitalist" (because it spies on you for profit) while Apple is a good capitalist (because they extract money, not private data):
Hear-hear! As always, in many ways this isn't a "bad actor" problem (or at least, not just that) but rather a legal problem of monopolies and individuals not being able to really own what they bought.
> Apple claims that it must be able to override its customers' choices about which software they'd like to run, lest those customers make foolish software choices and compromise their own security
This is putting words in their mouth. Here's their actual statement:
> We created the App Store to be a safe and trusted place to discover apps. Based on information we’ve received from law enforcement about the safety risks associated with ICEBlock, we have removed it and similar apps from the App Store
This is a perfectly reasonable and cogent statement, and you can easily challenge this on multiple points:
1. Apple is being too credulous with the claim about any safety risk. This should meet a high burden such as demonstrated actual harm, not hypothetical ponderings.
2. The current administration has been proven as liars many times, and deals in misinformation, so their claims can be dismissed a priori.
3. There is a legitimate use even for apps that pose a "safety risk". Users can make informed choices whether they want to engage with those apps. Some examples: generative AI can be used to create false and misleading images; ride-sharing and dating apps can put users in risky situations with strangers.
The reality is that Apple has a corrupt financial relationship with the administration, involving both carrots and sticks. Billions of dollars are at stake. Trump can offer Apple exemption from tariffs, protection from regulation and regulatory action (for example, labor laws), threats to the EU to protect Apple from DMA fines, massive corporate tax cuts, etc. Trump can also punish Apple in various ways that we've seen him punish others.
The underlying issue has nothing specifically to do with ICEBlock. The administration wanted to get rid of the app, and Apple did them a favor, helping to preserve Apple's overall financial interests.
Yes I think this is the most likely answer. But I was trying to give Apple a little more credibility. They have the right to police the app store, but they need to be careful with that power.
I will never understand why this bloke's awful hot takes get posted here so often, especially when he's doing the old "Apple" in the headline for the clickbait despite eventually admitting Google have done exactly the same thing.
It is getting harder and harder to continue buying Apple products and I have moved to buying refurbs as the electronics space is quite limited in options and the ecosystem lock in is real.
It's a shame, because I was a huge fan of Apple's privacy stances and their work on accessibility.
I emailed tim.cook@apple.com directly the day he stood behind Trump at his inauguration. Didn't get a bounce back, so maybe someone read it.
Just like the ideal political candidate to vote for generally does not exist for anyone, the ideal company with perfect stances and behavior on everything generally does not exist.
So yes, scale back your purchasing, but as you said: the options are limited, just like political candidates. Choose who matches up best with you, support them, but unlike your relationship to Apple, political participation has a VERY different piece.
You can't just show up and start influencing policy at Apple headquarters.
But you CAN just show up to some local organizing meetings of local grassroots organizations and political parties and influence things. You can have a direct impact, and these groups are usually small enough with few enough participants in your town that you WILL have a decent impact.
Vote and impact them with your money. Just don't buy their stuff.
Buying refurb is not much better, because it still raise the value of their products and brand by showing that devices have a big second hand value so it worth to buy as it will not lose value.
And also, you will be proudly showing off your Apple devices all around instead of setting an example.
I plan to slow purchases to the bare minimum as well. Sadly, there's not a ton of competition in the electronics space.
And yea, refurbs bolster the market since it increases resale value.
That being said, I'm doing something, and all these small actions add up when they're done by many. If we all piss in the wind a little, it can add up to a waterfall.
I'm trying a FuriPhone that is nice so far.
Obviously a few limitations like always but you still have the escape hatch to run android apps in a sandbox when needed.
Lmao, any comments critical of the piece are being flagged immediately, faster than anybody can even write a reply to them. Remind me again how HN isn't just Reddit-lite? This is a political soapbox piece falsely equivocating the author's opinions with facts and reasonable interpretations. Google also deleted ICEBlock, where's Doctorow's "Google's Unlawful Evil" piece? Did anybody seriously still think that mega tech companies are anybody's friends?
This article is currently flagged for some reason, but here’s a productive suggestion. Maybe it’ll get unflagged:
If you’re building a phone app, make sure the progressive web app version has feature parity.
I’m extremely late to the party, but recently found react native, and my software runs on android, ios, pwa, macos, windows and linux, “for free”.
This not only bypasses potential future app store censorship, but, with critical mass, is an enabling technology for “daily driver” quality open source (or at least not ios/android) phones.
Are there other enabling technologies like this that I should know about?
> If you’re building a phone app, make sure the progressive web app version has feature parity.
The problem in this specific case is privacy protections:
> Aaron told The Verge ICEBlock is built around a single database in iCloud. When a user taps on the map to report ICE sightings, the location data is added to that database, and users within five miles are automatically sent a push notification alerting them. Push notifications require developers to have some way of designating which devices receive them, and while Aaron declined to say precisely how the notifications function, he said alerts are sent through Apple’s system, not ICEBlock’s, letting him avoid keeping his own database of users or their devices. “We utilized iCloud in kind of a creative way,” Aaron said. [...]
* https://www.theverge.com/cyber-security/707116/iceblock-data...
The app developer does not want to keep a database of people on who to notify (and track their location for "near-by" locations).
There's supposed to be an open standard for Web Push notifications. ICEBlock would need to build out more tools for themselves, but the same user flow they have now should work with a PWA, using these open universal standards.
Alas, Apple's Web Push implementation has massive problems with it and there's no sign it'll improve. https://webventures.rejh.nl/blog/2024/web-push-ios-one-year/
Once again Apple mysteriously somehow making sure oh gee huh the web just can't compete with the native ecosystem they have total top down control over. This also means for instance also that the web can't compete for XMPP or messaging apps with native apps. Which came up in the call to run XMPP submission. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45490439
The behavior described in the first link is more than adequate for ICEBlock.
A concerted push by third party app developers to promote PWAs solves the user education program.
If people actually use the feature and it only sucks on iOS (no icons, etc), there will be pressure for apple to fix it.
So, turn off the web server logs.
I wonder if there are tor proxies that accept incoming https, and forward to service endpoints that opt in.
That’d help.
Anyway, the first step is getting it working at all.
> So, turn off the web server logs.
You need a database of everyone who signs up for the service so you can know who to send notifications to. That database needs some kind of unique ID plus a regular location updates.
That's a tempting target to go after, as it's a list of potential ICE targets plus 'political sympathizers'. The app developer does not (AIUI) want the responsibility of keeping that database secure against attack, exposure, or warrant requests.
Not really; just tile the data, and have the app poll the tiles.
Or, do something less dumb.
[dead]
This reminds me of that incident in 2015 where two police officers were shot and killed in a targeted stack after someone tracked them down using Waze. Police unions put a bunch of pressure on Google to remove the police tracking functionality.
So on one hand, there is a legitimate precedent to be concerned about this being used for targeted attacks. But also Google never caved to pressure in that situation, and the benefits and legal rights seem much more important than the risks.
Apple folded way too easily to authoritarian demands and gives us no option to circumvent their walled garden. I've been a long time iPhone user (since the first one) and I'm not going to be purchasing another one.
Same. I am (1) Moving to GrapheneOS. And (2) exploring other alternatives such as PostmarketOS for when Google makes it impossible for Graphene to operate. And (3) even pairing down my smart phone usage entirely.
But I'm also thinking a lot about the impact on ordinary non-tech-literate folks. They really don't have great options. I think we need some serious technical focus into FOSS and freedom-respecting alternatives
Reach out and let's talk.
Worth pointing out that Google is doing the same thing Apple is with app removals from their app store, and in the near future it will be harder to install apps outside of their walled garden.
Google has the AOSP. They did remove the ICEBlock app from their store, but unlike iOS, that was never going to fully remove the app from their ecosystem.
If Google forcibly revoked the signature of the app, Android users can still build and access versions of Android with the app. Alternative app stores are a huge boon, but the real coup-de-grace is an Open Source OS.
AOSP is a joke. This is coming from a custom rom user.
Google has been squeezing custom roms for the past 10 years. They barely work, and this is both on purpose and unavoidable. Google shoves DRM anywhere they can get their grubby little hands into.
Also, AOSP doesn't even run on any devices. Anywhere. You need mountains of supplemental proprietary blobs and Google systems to get it onto a phone.
Also, Google is trying to kill all apps outside the play store anyway.
> AOSP is a joke. This is coming from a custom rom user.
Its an open source software right? Free for anyone to do anything. Were you expecting a highly polished, it-just-works with free software? Isnt that being a little entitled?
> Isnt that being a little entitled?
Yes, I am entitled. No, I don't really care that Google has to put in more effort.
If it were up to me, we would enforce it by law. The consequences of a completely locked down mobile ecosystem are dire for humanity.
Yes, thats the level of things were talking about here. There's those who take the threat seriously, and those who don't. As each year passes by, it becomes more difficult to justify a state of apathy.
Spoken like someone who has never open sourced anything.
Why should others work for free for you?
> If Google forcibly revoked the signature of the app, Android users can still build and access versions of Android with the app.
The admin would effectively achieve their goals if they took the user base down to the 6 people willing to do this for ICEBlock
Genuine question, not a mobile dev: does this app even work on Android without Google services? The developer said they don't have their own database or location services and had to "[utilize] iCloud in kind of a creative way" to provide alerts that ICE agents were nearby.
Same here
It’s easy to blame private companies, like Apple and Disney.
It’s harder to blame politicians, and harder still to blame the root of their power: the people.
And it’s hardest of all to blame yourself. Show me the article that calls these companies evil for caving into political pressure and refusing to immolate themselves, that also argues to neuter government power so that the companies don’t face existential threats from the whims of whatever gang happens to run the show in the moment.
Nope, instead every time there is an implicit argument that even more political power and guns and force are needed.
This kind of apologia seems to be doing rounds lately. It is extension of the "this government has received mandate from the people". A line frequently repeated by this administration. People gave mandate, government acted, company buckled. Now why don't we think of these poor private billion dollar companies - how are they at fault if people elected this government?
Lots of articles out there blaming people who enabled this mess. The divide doesn't exist for nothing.
Even more articles blaming this administration for pressuring private companies. For examples lots of ink has been spent on FCC and Kimmel saga.
So, if there are few posts like these blaming private companies I think it should be fine without this kind of apologia.
A lot of people aren't against the government having the power to do this; they're simply against the current government doing it.
I used to think we could argue that, "If we allow our team to do this, then what happens when the other team has power" But at this point I think there's an agreed view that the "other team" is going to abuse and grab for power regardless, so it's only hurting your own agenda / values / team not to when you are in charge. There's no restraint anymore, and most people raging against authoritarianism do so in partisan selective ways. Guess I should just laugh and enjoy the decline. Either way, technology can be used to force decentralization, but tech companies? Not anymore (if ever).
That sounds accurate
Truer words have never gone so hard. Damn this hits.
> that also argues to neuter government power
The article states that the government did not have this power to begin with!
> Apple insists that it is only complying with lawful orders, which is patently untrue. Pam Bondi has no authority to order the censorship of this legal speech tool, which is likely why she didn't seek a court order and instead merely rage-tweeted about it. This was sufficient to get Apple CEO Tim Cook [...] to cave in.
sorry, this is just self-righteous axe-grinding. the linked article in no way advocates for giving more power to the government
No. He does have a point. You can't put all the blame on companies when we implicitly consent to this without holding our politicians accountable.
Either companies must face existential threat from the government or the government must face existential threat from the companies.
Yes. I would say this is true for every corporation. And big corporations must abide by the rules of the system because they have A LOT to lose. They get a lot of free stuff from the government. And then there is pressure to make higher revenue every year.
> And big corporations must abide by the rules of the system
This wasn’t about written rules. Obeying a social media post by a joke of an attorney general is apparently now the standard Apple hold themselves to.
Politics is rarely about written rules.
You’re reading an awful lot into this post but it’s not your fault for being able to read it.
What mechanism do you propose be used to control the behavior of multi-billion dollar corporations? Many of which have more money and power than most counties.
Yes, hidden in this post that complains against violent government thugs, there is actually an argument for more violent government thugs!
It's not just Apple vs the government. It's also Apple vs Apple. As a silicon valley tech company, it's likely that fewer Apple employees identify as Republicans than among the general U.S. population. Nevertheless, it must still be a sizable fraction of the company. Anyone deciding policy at Apple has to take that into account.
It likely aligns with California generally:
However, keep in mind that Apple’s rank-and-file employees have virtually no power to effect change, and are no more likely to rock the boat than their counterparts in other Silicon Valley companies. They like their job and their healthcare.Also a huge % of them are likely on guest worker visas, meaning if they do push back, they can be fired and deported.
The point is if the most powerful institutions outside the direct government executive branch do not collectively fight back then essentially the executive branch gets more and more power... this is a slippery slope where we see the erosion of institutions it's a Playbook that has played out in countless countries and it's sad to see it happening here. The most powerful brands have enormous power and if they were to put up a fight they can get allies from the very people you point out ultimately are responsible for this dangerous turn of events
How does a corporation fight back when previous administrations have neutered its ability to do so? The Patriot Act (Bush), mass spying on Americans via gag orders (Bush/Obama), proactive anti-trust litigation as a government cudgel (Biden/Trump), jawboning (all of them). Trump's second term is certainly the most brazen and nakedly transparent attempt at control, but the groundwork had been laid decades earlier.
The erosion you speak of happened long before anyone paid attention and the solution people and politicians sought was a further weakening of companies grip on their own assets (more taxes, more regulations, more interference in the market). As an earlier commenter pointed out, the popular political solution to thugs in government has been voting for more thugs in government. In such a circumstance, what does a company owe to those didn't have its interests in mind when it mattered? Even if it can, why should Apple risk becoming a political target against the current administration for the sake of a fickle electorate?
Lobbying. They do it left and right focused on their pet issues. Congress can be an ally
> The point is if the most powerful institutions outside the direct government executive branch do not collectively fight back then essentially the executive branch gets more and more power...
Apple is not going to save us. https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/10/apples-iceblock-capitulat...
…even if the company does “the right thing,” it won’t be a decision taken from a moral standpoint. It will be practical. Mercenary. Because that is what is demanded by this technological/capitalist terror we’ve devised for ourselves. That’s the rules of the game. Them’s the breaks. When Apple made the decision to stand firm in the San Bernardino case, it did so not because it was the right thing to do, but because its business reputation relies on its claims of privacy and security.
> The most powerful brands have enormous power and if they were to put up a fight they can get allies
Apple already had a chance to align themselves with the "sideloaders" and Free Software nerds, what did they choose instead?
They went the power-grab route. Tim Cook (and whoever his successor is) depends on informal US protectionism to stop Apple from being litigated into the dirt both by the DOJ and courts abroad. If they try to amend their greedy mistake, America's government has them blackmailed. They're the perfect, profitable lapdog.
From a customer perspective, power is the problem. Apple would have had no incentive to fuck over their users if they didn't desperately desire their App Store revenue to be locked-down and enforced by the state. Now, because America refused to seriously reign-in Apple, they are a fall-guy for the tech industry as a whole. You should not be surprised if Trump tries throwing Cook under the bus as part of the "woke deep state" by the time his admin is up. If you can imagine yourself in Tim's shoes, you're probably just trying to make it a few more years without destroying Silicon Valley in the legal catastrophe that would ensue if you resisted. Emotions like "regret" or "honor" don't even factor into that equation.
You wrote this under an article which literally blames the government and literally opens with the following description of ICE "... masked snatch-squads who illegally terrorize brown people in America's cities, capitulating to a warrantless demand from Trump's DoJ boss Pam Bondi"
I read the article before I posted. It’s essentially 1% blaming the government and 99% blaming the companies for not having backbone and for pursuing profit.
You can't have an article that is 100% one content and at the same time 100% the other content.
It's an article criticizing Apple for caving in to dictatorial demands, and for other failures. It's not an article on government failures.
And it's not an article that claims that government needs more guns as you claim that every article is.
But who is the intended audience? Maybe the author hasn't given up on persuading Tim Cook. I don't think there's much chance, but maybe there's a small chance.
If the article was instead giving a pitch to the government, there'd be 0% chance.
We, the people, cannot regulate NSA activities we never knew about. We couldn't protest Apple and Google's warrantless Push Notification system until Wyden blew the whistle on it: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
You cannot ever expect any company to have a backbone, but you also can't expect the government to be perfectly honest. The real culprit is our software habits, and companies are the main driver in neutering your software freedom.
This is one reason that it's important to keep the web free and open. In the inevitable one browser vendor future and every site on earth behind Cloudflare, it's not unthinkable that you'd be able to achieve this outside of Apple's walled garden too.
I wouldn't see this issue as a problem if it weren't for Apple's stance that everything that can be installed on iOS has to come through App Store. If multiple stores were possible/viable for iOS, then the answer would have been to get said app elsewhere. Fundamentally, this is an issue not about Apple removing apps from their store that they don't want to host, but one of the right to do what you want with the devices you supposedly own.
> f multiple stores were possible/viable for iOS
Or if PWA's were reasonably supported
What APIs is Safari/iOS lacking for ICEBlock to function as a website?
Many, but one that comes to mind right now - you cant have an "app" icon on the home page. Which reduces discoverability a lot.
Yes you can. You’ve been able to do that since before the App Store.
This is an old chestnut that's no longer true. Safari's PWA support is better than Firefox's today, on both mobile and desktop. Two examples off the top of my head: Safari has better Web Push support, and supports the W3C's Badging API.
I could not find the indexdb bug on safari that stopped me from using it at work, but I was able to find something from 2021: https://gist.github.com/pesterhazy/4de96193af89a6dd5ce682ce2...
My impression for the last ~10+ years is that you could not depend on index db in safari, not for heavy use cases, and doubly so for ios and there was not a viable alternative whenever I checked.
I would be happy to know that things are looking better for PWAs on ios though if things are now viable.
Thanks for the additional background, I'll dig into that! FYI, based in part on our exchange, I created pwascore.com to scratch the itch of wanting a reasonably-objective "score" for browser PWA support.
Why would we want to limit ourselves to PWAs? Being able to run arbitrary executable file has been the core feature of general-purpose computers since the beginning.
I'd consider smart phones as being general-purposes, same as laptops/desktops/servers.
In this case, so that you don't get kicked out of the App Store with no recourse.
The way they're lock down make them really not general-purpose. Smart phones really were envisioned as thin-clients to cloud servers. When you start getting too far away from that, everything starts fighting you.
Related. Others?
Legal experts condemn Apple bowing to White House's request to remove ICEBlock - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45480422 - Oct 2025 (32 comments)
Google removes ICE-spotting app following Apple's ICEBlock crackdown - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45472799 - Oct 2025 (128 comments)
Apple takes down ICE tracking apps after pressure from DOJ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45457333 - Oct 2025 (560 comments)
Perhaps someone could release a source code app that fills this gap.
Apple provides the tools to sideload software you build from source in Xcode, whether it’s your own code or someone else’s.
You have to use a Mac, and with an unpaid account there are limitations like app signing timing out after a week.
It’s much more hassle than the App Store, but you can run whatever you want for free if you build it yourself.
I know it’s not the same as ‘download app and tap on it’, but it’s possible. iPhone developers do it all the time.
Some entitlements require developer account and getting explicit approval from Apple before you can actually use them in a development build on an actual iOS device.
Granted, the vast majority of apps don't have such needs, but it's something to keep in mind.
The app in question relies on the network effect (lots of people crowdsourcing information) so introducing that much friction would kill its usefulness. 99% of users wouldn’t jump through the hoops, and without enough users the app is useless.
It's rooted in what smartphones are and have been since 2007, locked-down rectangles where the user has minimal control over the software. On a PC anybody can install anything, be it a program or operating system, this wouldn't be an issue if smartphones worked the same way.
I'm afraid it's only a matter of time before somebody tries to extend this to the world of computers.
> Apple also uses its app store control to block rival browser engines (every browser on iOS is just a reskinned version of Safari).
Yeah, that’s a good thing to prevent browser monopoly.
> Apple's own browser engine, Webkit, is riddled with longstanding, grave security vulnerabilities, and there is no way to distribute more secure browsers on iOS.
Adding a new browser will just increase the attack vector. Especially since webkit is used everywhere in iOS, not just in Safari…
> Yeah, that’s a good thing to prevent browser monopoly.
What a joke. You're cheering for monopolistic behavior while claiming to be against monopoly.
Its the same logic as "Yeah, get those _bad_ immigrants out. I'm one of the good ones"
> Adding a new browser will just increase the attack vector.
More potential ways to attack? Sure. More actual attacks in practice? Not necessarily.
Let's imagine we have a hypothetical 100% secure browser, and we can get people to use it 50% of the time on on iOS. Then 50% of potential attacks become impossible. It doesn't matter that vulnerable Safari is hanging out in another part of the OS if attackers can't actually get their code to run in that context.
Except you ignored my second point which is the browser is in use throughout the system anyway. Yes it would be less likely to attack but still possible. Also a 100% safe browser does not and will never happen.
I didn't ignore it, but perhaps I wasn't clear. My point is that if Safari is in use throughout the system, but used, say, 50% less often (vs. a hypothetical 100% secure browser), then 50% of the time attacks that were previously feasible become infeasible. Frequency / probability of usage matters, not just whether something is installed.
And yes, a 100% safe browser is a fiction (thus "imagine" and "hypothetical"). But I think it's possible that another browser could be vulnerable to fewer attacks than Safari.
I think we're in agreement: adding a new browser increases the number of vulnerabilities that could potentially be exploited (assuming the new browser isn't 100% secure, which will always be the case in practice). And at the same time, moving some usage to a more secure browser makes attacks less likely in practice. I think the latter is more important than the former.
> Working VPN apps for the entire nation of China.
And Russia: https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2024/09/25/apple-removes-ne...
There's only one government that Apple fights with every single weapon in its arsenal: the EU.
People in Europe that buy Apple products are acting against their own best interests.
Apple wouldn't need to make fake threats of leaving EU if people just didn't buy their shitty toys.
I am not sure whether people defending Apple (or trying to play the devil's advocate here; or a "rational" voice) is plain simple naivety, or part of the ingrained corporate worship culture, or just good old insensitive. Maybe a bit of all — a healthy mix, you know.
In recent discussions about technology, I've come to feel that there's a persistent and flawed belief in "technical utopianism" - not the beautiful future of 2050 kind - but the idea that we can use technology to solve political problems.
For example, we might think that tools like ICEBlock can solve the issue of ICE, or that duress PINs on GrapheneOS can protect whistleblowers, or that VPNs in China can defeat censorship. While these technologies can certainly help mitigate specific challenges, they don't address the underlying political issues. They also often backfire - ICEBlock could theoretically be subpoenaed, duress PIN use can come with mandatory prison sentences, VPNs in China can be detected and blocked at a network level, then traced back to your SIM card.
Historically, technological solutions alone have not resolved political problems. At best, they act as temporary workarounds. To believe otherwise risks oversimplifying complex social and political dynamics, which contributes to the us-versus-them, good-versus-evil narrative that almost never holds in reality. The banning of technological solutions does not necessarily push us towards a more authoritarian future, but forces us to confront reality without a band-aid.
This also causes any restraint on such technological solutions to become rather confused. For example, the article calls out Apple for blocking and removing VPNs in China as "evil." Tell me, what's the alternative? Apple defies the Chinese government, allows VPNs, gets iPhones blocked from all carrier networks in seconds, has their Chinese employees arrested, and almost everyone is forced to use spyware-infested Huawei devices? Amazing moral stand there. Same with ICEBlock - if Apple didn't ban it, who is to say their server company, or the author himself, wouldn't receive a visit?
That's not the issue in my view.
It's an issue of fundamental freedoms. Freedom of speech and freedom to control your own device and your own data. Freedom to decide for yourself how you use it to communicate with others.
The problem boils down to Apple's consolidatation of power in their walled garden. The fact that they can unilaterally decide to ban an app that people want to run. The fact that an authotarian government can simply apply pressure to manifest their will.
If Apple didn't have such a closed walled-gardrn, they'd be unable to do it even if they wanted to; even if an authotarian regime demanded it.
It's about separation/distribution of power.
I get that opinion, but it's the same utopian view that if Apple doesn't ban the app, it will somehow allow us to defy the government.
This is delusional - the government can easily attack the server, and arrest the people who operate it, using any obscure law from 1790 that does the job. They did it to Silk Road, they did it to The Pirate Bay, they can do it to ICEBlock. Removing it from Apple is just the asking nicely method that doesn't require putting the creator behind bars on a technicality.
The power dynamics for technical solutions are "you can resist the government insofar as the government allows," here and everywhere, and always will be. The solution is not better technical solutions, better band-aids on a severed limb, but better government.
> If Apple didn't have such a closed walled-gardrn, they'd be unable to do it even if they wanted to; even if an authotarian regime demanded it.
If we truly lived under an authoritarian regime, 90% of phones could be open source, and they would still have no qualms about kicking you off the cellular network until you purchased an approved device. No technological solution can truly resist a determined authoritarian regime. Control the infrastructure, control the border letting hardware in, control the manufacturing processes, and who cares about the devices subject to it?
Well ThePirateBay is still up and even when they were deep into the legal fight the site was still finding ways to survive.
So, it doesn't look like a good parallel to me. Apple does have ridiculous control on what you can run on your phone and they are clearly trying to do the same with Macs nowadays. They are undefendable really.
Why does it have to be one or the other? I agree about better government. But it's also very reasonable to call attention to consolidatation of power and abuses of that power. Doing so doesn't automatically imply that one thinks "tech will save the world". You're constructing a straw-man here.
> This is delusional - the government can easily attack the server
I think you have an uncalibrated frame of reference for what "delusional" means here. My Android phone isn't being DDOSed for having sideloading capabilities, neither would your iPhone.
In a world that runs on technology, where rapid communication is essential to have an advantage, secure and accessible tech is a prerequisite for mass social mobilization. You need secure channels for coordination among organizers, methods for moving funds that aren’t easy to shut down, and channels for engaging with ordinary people and ensuring your message can be heard. You need ways to communicate with journalists and sympathetic foreigners. I see this kind of dismissal of activist tech all the time here, along with FUD and trolling. Enough!
You’re on Hacker News. This is a place where users primarily discuss technology, which includes activist technology. There are plenty of people here interested in that sort of technology, and some who may build it and provide it to the less technically inclined over at Reddit (or some political forum). Then those people can do the work that they are more inclined to do, including the difficult work of organizing and mobilizing popular opposition.
I just don’t get the point of posts like this. Would you prefer that everyone be an organizer even if they lack the skills or personality for that? Or is it some kind of accelerationist argument, and you think that people will be more willing to protest if they lack the tools to organize? We don’t yet live under a regime where technology is completely locked down and restricted; the point is to fight back now before that happens!
You're making the assumption that if you build the tech, people will then use the tech, and then the government can't shut it down, because people are using the tech.
An authoritarian government never cares about the widespread availability of anything. If anything, people using it, only becomes a greater impetus to shut it down before it gets larger. The government holds the cards for shutting it down at any time, regardless of size and popularity.
> We don’t yet live under a regime where technology is completely locked down and restricted; the point is to fight back now before that happens!
If we respond by adding duress PINs on GrapheneOS and encrypting the messaging to the 9s, and then bad actors use said technologies, the government has all the ammunition they need for public opinion. We made it easier to ban with a straight face, not harder.
You build the tech, then people use it as a tool to help execute an overall strategy. The tech is not the strategy, it’s just a tool. Ideally you have multiple overlapping tools, including non-technical tools, and the loss of one does not cripple your movement.
An authoritarian government can also just start rounding up and shooting anyone suspected of being a dissident. Typically that doesn’t end well for the government!
China did it successfully. Violent oppression sometimes does work without consequence - you might even become a WTO member.
Military-grade technologies make you a threat to be dealt with by the military. An opponent with weapons is more directly an opponent to be crushed than an opponent with a microphone. Standing in the streets mourning with candlelight would probably be more effective than an encrypted messaging app. The encrypted messaging app definitely feels cooler though, but feelings don't determine reality.
The most successful revolutions in history that built cultural inertia as morally righteous were never known for their sophisticated weapons and planning. China was more freaked out over blank paper than they would have been if tens of thousands of rebels had been armed. Heck, blank paper probably rattled China more than every citizen having Signal would have.
Activism is about changing hearts and minds. It's never a logistics problem. Enter a direct competition with the government and you've already lost. From that perspective, ICEBlock has done nothing for activism.
Yes, it’s possible to fight and still lose. What you’re arguing for is unilateral disarmament, surrender in fact, due to fears that not surrendering may cause you to lose. Opposition, so long as it is ineffective and poses no real threat to power.
> The most successful revolutions in history that built cultural inertia as morally righteous were never known for their sophisticated weapons and planning.
Maybe you should spend some more time studying revolutions. Often there is a great amount of coordination that must happen, especially when going up against a strong adversary. And it’s important to match or exceed your adversary’s reaction time in order to disrupt their planning and cause them to make tactical errors of judgement. This is what leads to events like in Nepal, where the government overreacted and shut down the tools being used for organizing. This was the breaking point that led to mass mobilization, but the revolution was only possible because of the groundwork that had been laid in advance—through careful planning by activists and organizers. Planning that was carried out using modern technology!
> China was more freaked out over blank paper than they would have been if tens of thousands of rebels had been armed.
A hypothetical “just so” statement that (a) cannot be tested and (b) is unlikely to be true. China would see tens of thousands of armed rebels as an existential threat and would be “freaked out” enough to deploy the military immediately. If the population was unhappy enough and ground was prepared for revolution, this would lead to revolution as it did in the USSR. (The big problem with would-be revolutions in China is that the population is pretty happy overall, for now, thanks to improved standards of living. This effect will likely wear off in the future.)
> It's never a logistics problem.
Wrong. Activists make extensive use of technology in order to coordinate and achieve their aims. For all the reasons explained above.
> Enter a direct competition with the government and you've already lost.
Civil Rights era activists were in direct conflict with the FBI, police, and in some cases the National guard. They won.
Your confusing tactical fear with existential fear.
Encryption, weapons? These create tactical fear. Governments have no fear of your tactics when they can shut down cell towers and roll in the tanks. Governments have no fear when they can also easily identify bad actors, highlight them, and win public opinion.
Blank paper, candlelight? These create existential fear. Governments have no playbook to deal with them without looking absurd. If they try to do so anyway, then it converts into tactical fear. Every successful revolution starts with the existential before the tactical.
China has no tactical fear, at all, if tens of thousands of rebels were armed. They'll be solved by next month. China has enormous amounts of existential fear when tens of thousands of people are putting blank pages everywhere. Blank pages could turn into tactical later, but tactical never leads to existential.
The Civil Rights movement you cite? They won through lunch counter sit-ins and bus boycotts - existential challenges to segregation's legitimacy. The tactics was a side show that didn't contribute much. There never was some defining moment where the Civil Rights Warriors won a victory in the Battle of Seville through the superiority of their communication methods. Same with the Civil War - it didn't start with shooting until after the existential battle had been blazing since the Missouri compromise four decades earlier.
> Governments have no fear of your tactics when they can shut down cell towers and roll in the tanks. Governments have no fear when they can also easily identify bad actors, highlight them, and win public opinion.
Untrue. Governments are not all powerful. Armed unrest is a very serious thing to deal with, especially when facing outside pressures. The people in government aren’t generally villains sitting around waiting for their excuse to roll tanks. They have friends and families and take things very seriously when they reach that point. Besides, sending in the tanks most often biases people against, not for, the ruling government—it’s bad optics. Hence why China still forbids discussion of Tianenmen, for example. And why Kent State led to a shift in public opinion, despite preceding violence from the protesters.
> They won through lunch counter sit-ins and bus boycotts - existential challenges to segregation's legitimacy. The tactics was a side show that didn't contribute much.
??? You cite successful tactics (which were carefully planned/coordinated by the way) then you say they were an ineffective sideshow. Not sure how to parse that one.
People are blaming the locked down nature of the App Store but if the government really wanted to stop a specific online activity, making it a website or PWA isn't gonna save it. The issue is the government having this type of control.
How so? This was a clearly illegal takedown order from a government agency with zero authority in this matter.
Also, plenty of sites survive legitimate US court orders.
> When China turned on Google's users, Google left the country. When the European Union ordered Apple to open up to third party app stores, Apple threatened to leave Europe[.] But when Pam Bondi ordered Apple and Google to help her round up their own customers, Brin and Cook didn't even ask for a court order.
> You could not ask for a better example of the failure of feudal security. Nor could you ask for a better rebuttal to the "Surveillance Capitalism" claim that Google is a "rogue capitalist" (because it spies on you for profit) while Apple is a good capitalist (because they extract money, not private data):
Hear-hear! As always, in many ways this isn't a "bad actor" problem (or at least, not just that) but rather a legal problem of monopolies and individuals not being able to really own what they bought.
Related discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45457333
This article is a bit hyperbolic.
> Apple claims that it must be able to override its customers' choices about which software they'd like to run, lest those customers make foolish software choices and compromise their own security
This is putting words in their mouth. Here's their actual statement:
> We created the App Store to be a safe and trusted place to discover apps. Based on information we’ve received from law enforcement about the safety risks associated with ICEBlock, we have removed it and similar apps from the App Store
This is a perfectly reasonable and cogent statement, and you can easily challenge this on multiple points:
1. Apple is being too credulous with the claim about any safety risk. This should meet a high burden such as demonstrated actual harm, not hypothetical ponderings.
2. The current administration has been proven as liars many times, and deals in misinformation, so their claims can be dismissed a priori.
3. There is a legitimate use even for apps that pose a "safety risk". Users can make informed choices whether they want to engage with those apps. Some examples: generative AI can be used to create false and misleading images; ride-sharing and dating apps can put users in risky situations with strangers.
Or:
4. Apple is simply lying.
The reality is that Apple has a corrupt financial relationship with the administration, involving both carrots and sticks. Billions of dollars are at stake. Trump can offer Apple exemption from tariffs, protection from regulation and regulatory action (for example, labor laws), threats to the EU to protect Apple from DMA fines, massive corporate tax cuts, etc. Trump can also punish Apple in various ways that we've seen him punish others.
The underlying issue has nothing specifically to do with ICEBlock. The administration wanted to get rid of the app, and Apple did them a favor, helping to preserve Apple's overall financial interests.
Yes I think this is the most likely answer. But I was trying to give Apple a little more credibility. They have the right to police the app store, but they need to be careful with that power.
> I was trying to give Apple a little more credibility
Why? They are known to bend their knees to authoritarian governments, more than any other company. See "Apple in China".
It is just that Apple, unlike most other companies, has a good PR department.
I will never understand why this bloke's awful hot takes get posted here so often, especially when he's doing the old "Apple" in the headline for the clickbait despite eventually admitting Google have done exactly the same thing.
I personally despise Doctorow's writing, but this seems pretty damn pertinent to the status quo of computing.
Thank you for writing this!
It is getting harder and harder to continue buying Apple products and I have moved to buying refurbs as the electronics space is quite limited in options and the ecosystem lock in is real.
It's a shame, because I was a huge fan of Apple's privacy stances and their work on accessibility.
I emailed tim.cook@apple.com directly the day he stood behind Trump at his inauguration. Didn't get a bounce back, so maybe someone read it.
Stand up, fight back!
Just like the ideal political candidate to vote for generally does not exist for anyone, the ideal company with perfect stances and behavior on everything generally does not exist.
So yes, scale back your purchasing, but as you said: the options are limited, just like political candidates. Choose who matches up best with you, support them, but unlike your relationship to Apple, political participation has a VERY different piece.
You can't just show up and start influencing policy at Apple headquarters.
But you CAN just show up to some local organizing meetings of local grassroots organizations and political parties and influence things. You can have a direct impact, and these groups are usually small enough with few enough participants in your town that you WILL have a decent impact.
100 percent!
Emailing Tim is like pissing in the wind...
Vote and impact them with your money. Just don't buy their stuff. Buying refurb is not much better, because it still raise the value of their products and brand by showing that devices have a big second hand value so it worth to buy as it will not lose value. And also, you will be proudly showing off your Apple devices all around instead of setting an example.
Absolutely!
I plan to slow purchases to the bare minimum as well. Sadly, there's not a ton of competition in the electronics space.
And yea, refurbs bolster the market since it increases resale value.
That being said, I'm doing something, and all these small actions add up when they're done by many. If we all piss in the wind a little, it can add up to a waterfall.
Although Android followed the same path.
With them out of the way we have Jolla? Which banking services support them because I don't think anything else is practical, is it?
I'm trying a FuriPhone that is nice so far. Obviously a few limitations like always but you still have the escape hatch to run android apps in a sandbox when needed.
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Lmao, any comments critical of the piece are being flagged immediately, faster than anybody can even write a reply to them. Remind me again how HN isn't just Reddit-lite? This is a political soapbox piece falsely equivocating the author's opinions with facts and reasonable interpretations. Google also deleted ICEBlock, where's Doctorow's "Google's Unlawful Evil" piece? Did anybody seriously still think that mega tech companies are anybody's friends?
I don’t care for the sneering tone either, but the fact is people expect more from Apple due to their marketing.
He literally mentions google doing the same in the article...