Without reading the blog, I just wanted to comment on Aereo: a lot of us think that this was the wrong decision, and not in a facetious or 'cute' way.
To quote Scalia's dissent in the case:
> In a dissent that expressed distaste for Aereo’s business model, Justice Antonin Scalia said that the service had nevertheless identified a loophole in the law. “It is not the role of this court to identify and plug loopholes,” he wrote. “It is the role of good lawyers to identify and exploit them, and the role of Congress to eliminate them if it wishes.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/26/business/media/supreme-co...
Just one example -- there may have been a group of supporters of the law in question used against Aereo that only supported the law because they realized it had said 'loophole'. The rule would not have become law without the 'loophole'. Now, how should a court interpret those circumstances?
This is not the case in common law systems, which the US and UK have. Judges discover the law through principals and precedent. Legislation can override this, however. The US Constitution is a good example.
EULAs and TOSes are firmly in private law, and we can take England and Wales as the national setting.
Even here, "judges discover the law through principals and precedent" is inaccurate. First and foremost there is overriding statute. Where Parliament has intervened in matters of private law, Parliament wins; the parties may choose to show that Parliament's intervention does not apply for some reason (e.g. it conflicts with a subsequent intervention by Parliament, or it does not apply strictly in the matter before the court). Judges may act sua sponte, but mostly in private law leave such matters up to the parties to draw to the court's attention. Secondly, there's the plain wording of the contract. Finally there's recourse to covering case law established by higher courts and binding on the court of first instance (e.g. the county court or the High Court).
However, Parliament has caused the Civil Rules of Procedure for England and Wales to bind the county courts, and CPR rule 1 is the "overriding objective" which directs judges to be just taking into account the totality of circumstances and the behaviour of the parties, among other things. The UK Human Rights Act 1998 also requires courts to take into account the rights it brought into force, and this applies to all courts. These two features oblige judges to look past statute (or more strictly speaking, to do a reading-down as necessary) and specifics of a contract when assessing liability.
The private law system in England and Wales is (mostly) adversarial with the judges (mostly) paying attention to issues brought up by the parties' advocates. There are specific obligations on the court to act sua sponte as noted, and a court is free to ask questions or consider points not brought up by the parties, and it is also free not to look too deeply into matters of its own volition. This can lead to "judge roulette" to some degree, but the court-appearing legal community in England and Wales is not that large (and it's even smaller in Scotland or Northern Ireland) and good advocates and even good solicitors have some idea of what to expect from a particular judge in terms of case management.
However, I don't think many would agree that judges should "discover the law thorugh principals and precedent". Certainly almost no senior English judges woudl agree with that idea; indeed, the majority is much more likely to say that the parties should draw to their attention every salient aspect of the dispute so as to reduce the court's workload (in principle to do sufficient work that few disputes really need a hearing or a conclusion other than an out-of-court settlement between the parties).
They "discover the law" mostly by having it brought to the attention by the parties. Except in constructive litigation, the adversarial principle supposedly guarantees that one party cannot wholly misrepresent the law to the judge (unfortunately this is often not the case, especially where one party has much deeper pockets than the other, and even less the case when filings are not even dealt with because the cost of litigation exhausts one party even where that party has a good case that the non-exhausted party is misrepresenting the law).
The law stems from several sources. Depending on the area of practice of private law, statute and secondary legislation may have codified many aspects such that no other source of law is required in most cases, or (as in landlord-tenant law) statute law may be highly scattered across many Acts of Parliament, and additionally almost always engages in references to decisions by the Court of Appeals taken to resolve disputes where Parliament has not decided to provide a statutory basis for the resolution. (That's mostly because MPs are terrified of legislating in the area of property law since it is a daunting task to consolidate hundreds of years of various sources of law into one Act; not-so-jokingly the Great Repeal Bill proposed as part of the Brexit process will probably be less involving.)
Scalia's argument is overly idealized and focuses on the legal aspect of the system of justice, to the detriment of the justice side. A system of justice should lead to a finding of liability on wrongdoers, but should hold non-wrongdoers harmless from liability. (Unfortunately there are several aspects of the system of justice in England where that falls down, but at least there aren't many professionals in the justice system who think it should be even less just, finding non-wrongdoers unjustly liable simply because that is what the law says to do.)
But your focus on advocates bring the law to the judges attention seems to support the parent comment, judges "discover" the law. Certainly statute overrides all, but the point of common law is that the statute is always insufficient. It is not enough to deal with the facts of any given case. I don't know much about the UK legal system, but in the US rulings on statute become codified as "precedent". Important and relevant decisions are published, circulated, cataloged, studied and effectively become the law. Any case that is litigated starts with a series of briefs on what the parties feel is relevant case law. It also might include briefs filed by interested parties, studies of the legislative process to determine intent and so on. That is all very much in the realm of "discovery".
And yet judges talk about the "spirit of law", as distinct from the "letter of the law", all the time.
No, they don't; I've read lots of legal decisions, and that phrase or anything like it is rarely invoked. Pundits, not judges, are prone to talk about the spirit of the law as opposed to the letter; judges are more prone to talk about legislative intent (not "spirit of the law"), not distinct from the letter of the law, but as part of the analysis of which of several facially plausible meanings the letter of the law should be given in the context of the specific fact pattern presented in the case they are dealing with.
I think this has manifested at its peak with Ethereum.
>evolution of the law (which involves creating new portions of the law to cover previously created portions which are considered lacking)
And argue that electronic privacy vis-a-vis wiretapping laws is creating a new portion of the law to cover previously created portions which are considered lacking. We can quibble about definitions, but that strikes me as very much in the area of "evolution".
In common law systems it is precisely their job to do so.
The reality in Common Law legal systems is nothing like this, and judge made law through interpretation and application of precedent is a very real thing, even in the USA. As a particularly blunt example, in some parts of the UK such as Scotland, the traditional common law crimes such as murder/theft etc aren't even defined in primary legislation ("laws"), and exist solely as judge made and applied creations through decades of precedent. Even where there exists primary legislation, the scope of judicial interpretation gives a great deal of freedom to judges to establish precedents that the drafters might not have foreseen or intended.
Heck even the definition of the term "Common Law" is normally interpreted to mean "Case Law" as developed by judges.
Also, as I've seen in other comments, we're going to get on the merry-go-round of defining "create law".
EDIT: Or Congress can get involved and change the law. Checks and balances.
You may disagree with this, but the fact remains that the law works like this in the US and UK and has since 1066.
In the Aereo case, the law was clear. The court was supposed to uphold the law, but didn't.
FWIW I agree that the court got it wrong, but Scalia's reasoning in supporting Aereo's position is flawed.
Scalia went too far with his dissent. Language is imprecise, and in common law it is always coupled with precedent and intent.
I don't want anyone pushing code updates to the apps that have been reviewed. Whilst that isn't foolproof, compromising the deployment mechanism with this approach is very scary.
Exactly!
Apple has always been adamant that they see _all_ code that goes onto devices. Live patching is so bloody obvious against their EULA.
It is surprisingly simple to make an interpreter that is "accidentally" Turing complete (this IMHO so often happens by accident that I love to say that if an interpreter is not "obviously" more restricted than a Turing machine, it probably is Turing complete).
This is not just my opinion - there lots of pages in the internet of things that are "accidentally" Turing complete, for example:
http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/accidentally_turing_complet...
Apple has decided that, and you're not going to get around their policies with a clever rhetorical question.
> Apple has decided that, and you're not going to get around their policies with a clever rhetorical question.
Apple cannot change mathematical facts by "decisional" rhetoric.
I just don't understand how Apple is supposed to draw a line here.
> With Rollout’s SDK you can update and modify your Objective-C methods with logic written in JavaScript so we’re good on the first condition.
I think that is the problem with Rollout.
"Code" is another term for what you are referring to as "binary".
An example that comes to mind is a high speed image compression app for taking rapid sequences of photos. Apple bought the company or the rights so they could include it themselves.
Software is only easier to write than read if you have an idea what it's supposed to do. If you've ever googled "how do I do X?", then you likely have reverse engineered the answer you found to fit your particular use case.
In addition, and in some countries, you can't patent software (thankfully), and so innovation comes through reverse engineering naturally.
Apple has close relationships with those companies so it's often a case of them reaching out to the developers rather than just blinding rejecting the app.
But any idea that Apple would allow them to run ruff shot over the platform and do whatever they wanted is a bit ridiculous.
"Rough shod", before we get another mondegreen propagating across the internet.
Roughshod means the horseshoes have their nails sticking out the bottom to help prevent slipping, so you can imagine trampling someone with those could be painful.
The idiom refers more to what a roughshod horse will do to a road or trail surface; the nailheads dig in and scatter surface material every which way, leaving behind a hell of a mess that'll turn to deep slush or sticky mud, depending on the temperature, with the next precipitation.
Apple uses private APIs (http://sourcedna.com/blog/20151018/ios-apps-using-private-ap...) to build some of their software and reject apps doing the same, effectively killing competition.
But Google and facebook uses them because they want to create products that can compete with apple's features. E.G: https://daringfireball.net/2008/11/google_mobile_uses_privat...
Yet they are not rejected, because they are "big enough".
Apple often uses immature frameworks internally - like the extensions framework - to to polish them or to dog food them before making them official.
That being said, it's hard to argue that Apple (or Android) shouldn't be able to set boundaries on behaviors which are only allowed to be done by the OS as a opposed to an app. Apple's tight control of device screen characteristics makes it pretty understandable that they don't want one app able to control how another app looks on the screen.
The optics of the f.lux situation is just really, really bad. But considering the f.lux never really charged, they have a claim to fame that few can match: creating a feature good enough that Apple incorporated into both iOS and MacOS (now in beta).
It's really not. The argument for user freedoms is almost as old as software.
Security premise: when you are looking at Facebook, you are looking at Facebook. You are not looking at a third party app drawing over Facebook and pretending to be Facebook.
I do not see the above as a slippery slope. Phishing is a capability apps should not have. Even if they have the best of intentions.
Please?
...pretty please?
If MS had taken a harder line then at least hundreds of millions of people would have had faster computers... And arguably safer ones. But it would be hypocrisy for MS, given they gave us IE, ActiveX, DLLs, VB macros, etc.
Most third party firewalls are just GUIs using the OS API for filtering, not parsers written in C running in the kernel.
The point is not that these APIs exist; the problem is when vendors actively block others from using them, with hacks and/or policy bans. That's extremely hypocritical and anti-competitive. I can see why unofficial APIs must be discouraged (because let's be honest, developers will bitch and moan when they change -- Microsoft in particular was strong-armed into legacy support for decades by the likes of Adobe and Symantec), but it should never be an excuse to ostracize or tilt the playing field.
It is perfectly reasonable, and so far, any other interpretation seems to be a skewed view to facilitate some sort of non-compliant piece of software.
The only reason I know they do is because some of my friends working on mobile video games regularly complain they can't get some features because they are private while google and facebook do. They analyzed some apps to try to copy said features and realized the unfairness of their situation.
Those are lunch chit chats, not hard facts. But they got seldom reasons to lie.
I'm not sure if Apple made it available to other companies privately though.
And then they got double screwed because the US copyright office declared that no matter what the supreme court said they were not a cable company and couldn't get compulsory licensing either.
As far as I can tell it's legal to run one antenna for one person, and I have absolutely no idea where the line is that you start violating copyright. I don't think the guidelines are well written.
I hate the app store review process and a lot of apple policies around the app store and I feel for you and I totally think there should be a less onerous update/review process ... but ... you clearly and blatantly circumvented a core policy, and what happened to you was absolutely predictable.
Get your money back from the lawyer that told you Apple wouldn't shut you down. You got bad advice.