On the softer side, shutter sound can’t be muted on the camera app for JP sold iPhones, I can’t find any offical doc (not customer discussion) mentioning it.

edit: there was some doc, just with a vague “shutter sound might be disabled depending on your region” mention.

In the meantime any pervert (the claimed reason for the law) can use any non-phone camera or for that matter any other camera app than the built in one

It's par for the course. Laws in response to moral panics tend to suck and inconvenience reasonable people while having simple workarounds.

Only yesterday I was reading a Reddit thread where someone new to Japan asked whether to inform the police of the apparently violent arguments his neighbours were having and the responses varied from "don't bother, the police won't care" to "make a noise complaint, at least the police will be interested". That's the least scary anecdote I have.

⁎ Probably not about Japan specifically :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fastest_production_mot...

As far as I remember Jphone, the company first heavily advertising camera phones, forced the shutter on its own to preemptively clear itself from any potential issue.

Every phone carrier from there had the choice to forgo the mandatory shutter sound but risk backlash if anything were to happen, as Jphone set a precedent. And they choose the safety move.

When the iPhone came, it would have just been a marketing quagmire to go with a mutable sound.

But of course that's also part of the issue. If 3rd party apps don't have to make a sound then what was the point of the law? The perverts can just use a 3rd party app and 99.999% of users have to deal with a stupid for no actual protection.

2nd, if you are in Japan pretty much everyone is used to the shutter sound.

Here's the thing you refuse to acknowledge (or perhaps didn't think through before writing) -- when someone is holding a P+S camera or bigger, everyone knows they're taking a picture. But when someone is holding a smartphone, you assume they are not taking a picture because 99.9% of the time phones are not in camera mode.

The point wasn't to ensure that all cameras made noise, it was to ensure that a phone couldn't be used as a secret camera in public.

Seriously, I struggle to parse the logic here: Do you think that creepers are taking actual full size cameras into subways for creepshots? Or are you thinking they're using "Spy Camera" type devices? Because the people the law was meant to deter generally aren't that level of creeper, and their creepshots are a crime of convenience not a premeditated act of sexual assault.

Their whole argument boils down to regular users not being able to download an app from the app store?

Wow. You're right, I assumed their argument was a lot better than that. Oof.

I require consistency, so either EVERYONE is inconvenienced, or EVERYONE can circumvent it without issue.

The part I missed is the justification for inconsistent and illogical arguments where magically your ability to be inconvenienced is based only on your desire to be a creep.

Where the hell did this come from?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204170

In the safe browsing example, you'd just lose it completely because it would be replaced by Google's safe browsing list (also used by Chrome and Firefox), which you couldn't connect to from within China. So the end result is the same as turning off safe browsing.

You cannot begin to understand what it means to be forced to use one of those non-Google Play stores. Even if you set your device to English, Firefox will be in Chinese and you get a weird Skype version as well.

I mean it is a pretty interesting experience living Google-free on Android, and you could resort to APKPure to install some stuff like Whatsapp. But honestly, unless you get a Xiaomi phone or equivalent that you can switch to an international ROM, the whole experience is pretty annoying. Spam calls and text blockers on Android are the main highlight though.

[0] https://f-droid.org/docs/Reproducible_Builds

[1] https://f-droid.org/docs/Verification_Server/

However, I don't anything about it. Maybe you can share.

Gab's apps weren't accepted to either app store, they were booted by several hosting companies, had to switch domain registrar and their stripe account was suspended. Switch to a Mastodon fork is a recent development.

Gab ,It's essentially only used by and caters to white supremacists now.

Any sources you can share?

To my mind, no good-faith claim that such things do not need to be ostracised exists.

Like Gab- can't use Twitter? We'll make our own echo chamber.

Them being on Twitter is bad, but being on their own platform is arguably worse.

   > To my mind, no good-faith claim that such things do not need to be ostracised exists.

(BTW, I really don't like it, either.)

I fully agree with this. It will end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy for those arguing against true freedom of speech. When you deplatform a viewpoint entirely, then the people with that viewpoint are going to coalesce onto a much smaller platform, which will end up being an echo chamber for the viewpoints that the rest of the world desires to quash. Then, it will end up becoming an argument to prevent such echo chambers from even forming in the first place, which would effectively make it impossible for smaller players to get an inroad, as they'll just be preemptively accused of being inherently alt-right.

These people don't understand that, when you centralize control over avenues of speech like that, then one day that centralized control can do a 180 and start banning any type of speech, and not just "harmful" or "problematic" speech.

It's literally the same type of tactic that China uses to suppress dissent, just on a different scale (and with a different culture behind it). It's so transparent, yet the prevailing "public narrative" is still highly supportive of deplatforming.

F-Droid would need coporate backing or SEO to get popular in China, not free software activism.

Get an Amazon Fire device

But just sideloading would not do much.

So, if you set Traditional Chinese for language and United States for region (https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ma...), [[NSLocale currentLocale] countryCode] (which Apple compares to "CN" for this feature according to this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21242628) will return US, and [[NSLocale currentLocale] localeIdentifier] will return zh_US.

localeIdentifier also returns some other interesting things, e.g. mine is "en_US@currency=EUR", because I customized Region formats.

(Can't argue with the second point.)

They seem to be different settings and you can have Chinese language with (for example) US region.