Saturday, July 29, 2017

Apple's Not the Liberal Institution It Claims to Be

I have mentioned before that when Apple stopped doing business in North Carolina because the legislature overturned local transgender bathroom laws, they were still doing business in countries that execute homosexuals.  Now 7/29/17 New York Times:
HONG KONG — China appears to have received help on Saturday from an unlikely source in its fight against tools that help users evade its Great Firewall of internet censorship: Apple.
Software made by foreign companies to help users skirt the country’s system of internet filters has vanished from Apple’s app store on the mainland.
One company, ExpressVPN, posted a letter it had received from Apple saying that its app had been taken down “because it includes content that is illegal in China.”
Another tweeted from its official account that its app had been removed.
A search on Saturday showed that a number of the most popular foreign virtual-private networks, also known as VPNs, which give users access to the unfiltered internet in China, were no longer accessible on the company’s app store there.
Remember progressives see totalitarianism as a feature, not a bug.

4 comments:

  1. And the beauty of that for progressives is it doesn't matter what the particular flavor of totalitarianism is. They'll support it regardless.

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  2. However, I have read that the Macs and iPads on display at the Apple Store in Beijing have unfiltered internet access.

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  3. That may be technically "true" in the sense that there is nothing in the computer when it's on display that blocks it, but if you can't load fully functional web search engines into your Mac or iPad to actually access the internet, then it is functionally false, and parts of the internet are inaccessible to the Chinese, which this story indicates is the case.

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