In this specific situation there’s a pretty obvious power imbalance where the public do not wear masks and the authorities would be able to track them down and oppress them later (or just do what they currently do and grab them from the streets at the time). The threat of unmasking is one of the few things the people have to use against the authorities: when a policeman has his mask removed he will typically run away for fear of being identified. (The only other things they have are sheer numbers and the moral superiority of being basically peaceful against a violent government).
A similar argument about law enforcement safety was used by Apple to remove a map app in Hong Kong which showed people where large groups of police (and eg tear gas releases or which small coloured banners announcing illegal assemblies had been raised). The claim was that the app could be used to target individual policemen even though it only showed larger units and mainly helped people to get around the city without getting gassed by the police. Meanwhile the Chinese government were funding a site offering money for doxxing protestors but it wasn’t in the App Store so I guess it was ok.
And Liang is vice-chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. What it means is he is not officially CCP but a very trusted person to be included as decision maker of CCP.
I don't know should we be 'realistic' or should we be 'accurate' when we make a point. This is a strange time.
When people tried to avoid government funded software, let say a communication app, what is the reason? Because we want to avoid state-owned software violating user privacy and sent all my personal data for their profiling database.
You will trust a private company for that more, why? Because even a private company have to obey court order to disclose personal information to law enforcement, they usually have the right to deny it before the issue escalated to the court.
Now what is the case for autocratic government? Are there any real private company? Using China as an example, any person have to right to inform the government about secret information obtained, so China government have the right to get any information obtained from any Chinese private company without court order. In addition, any large organization including public company have to setup a party branch and have CCP member to oversee the organization. Including Huawei, claiming to be a private company.
So, using any product from any private Chinese company has equivalent disadvantage to a 3-letter agency funded VPN network.
Now back to the issue of if Liang is CCP or not. I won't quote unconfirmed source about Liang is a hidden CCP member. Just use the opened fact, Liang is a formal governor of Hong Kong, which means Liang has taking oath to CCP and CCP trusted this person to rule HK. Liang is currently a decision maker inside CCP's committee, and if Liang has conduct issue from CCP's point of view, then Liang can be secretly prosecuted by party order and put in jail in China.
Another example is Teresa Cheng, Hong Kong Secretary for Justice. For some reason she has been to UK but being taken back to China for investigating her conduct and possibility for applying political asylum by party secret police. She was then released and continued her work in Hong Kong. Detailed is not confirmed, but one thing is clear. Any Hong Kong official can be threatened by party secret police and they must do their job according to CCP plan.
Also, the issue with getting the gome adresses of police officers in that case is that the intent was to bomb them, not getting their address per se, as that really is quite easily done and not something the state would notice.
Not only that, the stance they are taking is with a dictator who stole the election ...
To throw a dumb example your electricity company is not policing you for how you are using your killowats.
(Not stating my personal examples, too contentious, but I'm sure you could find your own).
My point is that violence may not be a good fit for every situation, but that doesn't mean it never is. Gandhi was an effective non-violent protester, against the British in Africa when backed by large numbers. How effective would Gandhi have been protesting against the Nazis?
I don't know anything about Belarus, so I don't know anything about what is or isn't justified, it just seems wrong to me to suggest that violence is categorically less effective. Political violence is a tool and like any other has moments where it should and shouldn't be used.
How ineffective was that protest?
This is precisely why lack of choice in app stores is so harmful. The phones belong to the people. Without the app store, the manufacturer has no grounds to allow or disallow behavior.
Is Apple a law enforcing agency with jurisdiction in that region? If the answer to that is no, then the answer to your (rhetorical) question is equally no.
Even more, Apple might very well be the one legally at fault here, for assuming authoritative powers for which it has absolutely no legal mandate or justification.
So, if anything, it is rather Apple that is likely the one braking the law here, despite all the rhetoric about Apple having some kind of moral duty (absolute hogwash).
It isn't so much about meddling, but more about Apple assuming powers it should never have in the first place (legally speaking).
Applying "doxxing" rules to police on the job in public must be the most absurd perversion of the term ever. Why on earth would we grant privacy to public servants entrusted with the force monopoly?
We're talking about a brutal police force serving a corrupt and delegitimized regime, that is involved in extrajudicial detention, torture, and murder of peaceful protesters. This unit, the OMON, was specifically established to serve as Lukashenko's beatstick against the opposition. Now, the overwhelmingly peaceful protest movement in Belarus has turned towards intimidation (no actual violence has been reported, afaik) against these people specifically, as a way of fighting back.
And then you see people on HN referring to this as "doxxing", as if this was some kind of pithy Twitter fight. I understand that Twitter fights are what people around here can more easily relate to their own life experience than what is currently going on in Belarus, but for Christ's sake, let's try and put things in perspective here.
Apple doesn't have any good options here; I think their strategy of a toothless demand with no follow through might well be the least worst option for Apple, and for Telegram.
Apple have a really good, straightforward option: Don't police user-generated content in iOS apps. Or, at the very least not the ones intended specifically for communication. They aren't listening to people's phone calls or reading their messages in search of ToS-breaching content after all.
It simply shouldn't be any of their business what Telegram's users post on Telegram's platform. Telegram should be able to independently make the decision what it wants to permit therein.
I don't see any part of the comment doing that. Can you quote it?
I see internet terms being applied to the actions against the police, and those actions aren't brutal at all.
Apple could do something really simple if they wanted to not interfeer with how people organize their fight: allow to install apps outside of the app store. This would force law enforcement to deal with Telegram directly rather than being able to take advantage of apple's own authoritarian way to run its platform.
Now it's a question of what's apple highest priority, people freedom or profit.
They are already requiring entitlements to develop things that use the network extension framework (no sideload for VPNs and proxies bypassing the Chinese firewall).
This is just them being forced (again) to make visible the negative sides of such a centralized platform.
It’s not simple.
Presumably Belarus would then make a demand that Apple delete Telegram from people's phones as it is "malicious", but I'd hope that forcing a company to delete things from someone's phone is legally harder than forcing them to hide things on their own servers.
Rather than blacklisting the app's name or hash, Apple would probably have to blacklist the Developer ID, which it would be hard for Belarus to generate quicker than Apple could blacklist.
And let's not pretend that Apple has shown any willingness to stand up to the Chinese government.
Police officers must not be able to act anonymously. This is not like "doxxing" anonymous Internet trolls or forum users or whatever.
> Apple says it didn’t require any channels to be removed. But they demanded to immediately remove any information
If they don't like published information, they are welcome to sue the people who published it. That is, if they are in cahoots with the US government's foreign meddling initiatives.
> that discloses someone's data on the Internet without the consent of these persons, as well as content aimed at specific people in accordance with the rules of the App Store.
Can't break the rules of the all-powerful Apple app store, now can we? Tsk tsk tsk.
> This refers to the efforts of the Belorussian opposition to 'unmask' members of the riot police by posting their personal details online.
> So what do you do if you are Apple?
Exploit my users, perform mass surveillance for the US government, breath down the neck of app makers, produce cheaply with poor employment conditions in China, and manipulate the media to fawn over me. That is, if I were Apple.
Luckily I'm not Apple and neither are you, so don't think about what you would do in a place in which you should never get to.
Belarus is on the brink of civil war.
Doxxing regime supporters can easily end up as a "murder todo list" if things heat up.
This is just one tool, and there will be killing with or without it.
Right or wrong, when people are abused repeatedly, and or they cease to believe in governance, they will act out and it won't all be nice.
The root cause here is an authoritarian regime failing to justify their authority. People acting out is a symptom.
Yes, but the discussion here is about whether Apple should facilitate or hinder particular kinds of act by people.
That's not a symptom for Apple, that's a dilemma for Apple, and there is no truly neutral option.
Regarding apple...
Do you give an innuendo that this is somehow wrong?
- Killing a "regime supporter", meaning someone targeted only because of their political beliefs. It is not right that political beliefs should be punished like that. Ideally they shouldn't be punished at all, they should be tolerated but simply lose an election.
You can't claim to "protest for democracy" while being happy to facilitate murdering people who vote for the other side! That would be mad hypocrisy.
- Killing a police officer whose crime, even if violent, fell significantly short of killing someone themselves. Punishment should fit the crime, not be 10x worse.
You can't claim to "protest for justice" while being happy to facilitate extra-judicial killings that aren't even based in justice.
- Killing an innocent person who is mis-identified, whether by accident or not so much.
See above.
The third point, killing an innocent person seems even more likely due to automated facial recognition software like what's running on Facebook, with its biases and a mask to add more noise too, integrated with deepfake image reconstruction technology to produce convincing "unmasked" images, combined with vigilantes often not being too bothered about accuracy and statistics.
However wrong or right you think it is, surely everyone agrees it's wrong if it ends up getting the wrong people.
But no apparently. I've spoken with people in other situations (at other times) who said, basically, it's ok for "a few innocents" to die if that's what it takes to rid the world of guilty people. And others taking the view that it's ok for "police" to die because police are bad. Both views strike me as boneheaded AF.
It is clear AF from the reports that the Belarus authorities think it's ok for some number of innocents to die and suffer for the sake of policing and intimidation. If I were there I would certainly want the authority to "die", by being thoroughly dismantled asap.
If you don't see the power imbalance between the government and the people, then you are very lucky that you had not experienced it.
Not trying to justify murdering, but some kind of deterrence for oppressing peaceful, freedom-loving people is not a bad thing. Of course if it become French Revolution style execution after taking power, that is wrong and it must be stopped. For the moment, that is before that state, so anything can be bearable.
At least being transparent and willing to take a part of responsibility of this action?
> (google translate)
DeepL is a much better translator, at least for the languages I know and according to all comparisons I’ve heard others make, btw (though I don’t know if Yandex Translate is better for Russian).
"I cannot believe you would say that to me."
It came up with:
私にそんなことを言うなんて信じられないわ
Holy crap, complete with a disparaging なんて, and a nice わ sentence-ender to make it a feminine sounding complaint.
I'm almost sensing like the thing is tying to tell me, "here is how your boring English sounds if it is turned into line from a J-drama."
Was this trained using subtitle databases, I wonder. It's as if a mediocre English subtitle was found, similar to my text, and the corresponding original line had been retrieved.
Nothing because Apple has ZERO, no place meddling in this business.
Just hear yourself, "it's against the TOS" versus people on the streets trying to save their own country from a stolen election and a dictator??
OF COURSE the TOS of a tech company is completely irrelevant in this situation.
TOS aren't even laws, they were just created by a profit driven corporation for legal protection. Of course they aren't relevant here.
Just because Apple can say this, and can pressure Telegram, doesn't mean they aren't absolutely in the wrong here.
I don't agree that you should be allowed to post people's private, identifying data to a public forum without consent.
This HAS to apply equally, because the idea that there is a universal set of right and wrong is incredibly naive.
A better argument here is how the laws aren't applied equally.
TrueCaller was used by the Chinese to harass and attack human rights activists, and it is essentially an index of everyone's contact list.
Yet, somehow, this doesn't bother Apple. 100% financially motivated.
But my point stands. These telegram channels that exist to distribute public data of people merely accused of being involved with the regime should be shutdown. The term here is witch hunt and I'll take a lot of convincing that innocent people haven't already been falsely accused
Apple as a distributor should have NO relevance to this. Apple is like a landlord who legally rented his shop to people who run it as a bar in which some people might meet to discuss protests. Should the police even call the landlord? Should the landlord act on this info?
If, as you say Apple is like a landlord, Apple can demand specific things in the contract (ie no pets) and the person renting needs to comply.
Not getting into the moral side of the argument of Apple Vs Telegram but want to point out that the landlord example isn't applicable in my opinion.
> Even if there were something, certain things are typically protected in law; in most western countries, for example, a landlord cannot forbid a shop from serving members of a specific religion or of a specific ethnicity
Of course, but the landlord can forbid a shop from having any animals inside the shop for example, except the service animals ofc or to say that only specific type of shop can operate on the ground (prior to signing the contract). This is a more complex issue than "landlord example"
Those channels exist to spread private, identifiable data and this breaks the law.
A better version of your argument is Apple is the landlord where people are planning lynchings.
Again, I side with the Belarusians. But pretending this is different to China's doxxing of Uighurs is naive
The worst part is that this isn't even accurate. What this is really like is Apple sells a bunch of residences, the users are buying their homes, but for some reason all utilities/cable/internet/etc. has to go through the real estate company that the house was purchased from as they dictate what you can and cannot do in that house. Even stranger, it is now somehow the real estate company's place and responsibility to tell a telephone company that the real estate company allows to drop conference calls that mention the private information of some third party, whether the phone calls are coming from the houses purchased from them or not.
Out of curiosity, to which law are you referring?
I'm not being snarky here, I'm just not clear about which law(s) are being broken.
According to the Wikipedia page for Telegram[0], Telegram's team is based in Dubai, and the company is registered in the UK and the US.
IANAL, nor am I any sort of expert on US, UK or Dubai law. If you could expand on this, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_(software)#History
Is Tim Cook really qualified to be the ultimate authority of what speech is allowed or not allowed on a global basis, at least for all the billions of people who use their devices?
Similarly for Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. We cannot allow a very small number of corporate CEOs to make unilateral decisions about how to police speech across the globe.
Tim Cook is not qualified. No single person is.
That suggests either:
Apple stay out and the discussion moves to Telegram
, or
Apple and others need a formalized process, just like we use for other conflicts.
A case needs to be made, rules of order, etc... and a decision comes from all of that, not what makes more money, or what might cost money.
The problem with that belief is enforcement.
Because illegal numbers [0] are trivially shared, the only viable enforcement to prevent their sharing must have incredibly broad reach.
This ultimately collapses down into "users cannot be allowed to own and operate their own general purpose computer."
And while I'm open to arguments as to why the above is a straw man (I disagree), if you believe the above enforcement scheme is for the greater good then we have very different ideas about individual freedom and the relative value thereof.
Which is only a fallacy because data is a commodity, not because it's technically impossible.
And yes you can't really be forgotten, copies can always exist but it shouldn't be hosted readily if you don't want it to be.
Unless I'm missing something?
It's not always possible to make people do the right thing. But when it's not possible, it doesn't cease to be the right thing to demand, continuously, hoping to use the power of pressure or persuasion.
Both of which are contingent on end users not being allowed to possess strong encryption.
No, it really doesn't. IMO it has to apply consistently. And it's easy to maintain cohesion / consistency here: If you have different rights, you get different rights.
Police have additional rights, particularly when acting in the course of their jobs - specifically, they have the right of violence. Seems reasonable to give up the "right" of protection-from-griefing.
No, police exercise and are protected by powers of government, these are not the same kind of thing as rights, and do not belong to the individual the way rights do. Moreover, the legitimacy of such powers is exactly dependent on the legitimacy of the government and the extent to which it observes the rights of the people subject to it's powers.
That doesn't characterize a general record of numbers/addresses, which more or less ensures some basic anonymity as connecting names to numbers doesn't do much outside some other qualifier, like, these people are the police who are suppressing our cause
This is literally the "just comply with the police and you'll be fine" argument.
Yes, we KNOW everyone clicked through the ToS, but it _completely_ misses the point of the discussion.
Not meddling means enforcing its TOS in an evenhanded way. Otherwise it's playing favorites.
I won't pretend I know what Apple should do here. But I certainly don't agree with the cavalier assertion that unrelated organizations need to confidently pick sides in moral and political battles. Just because you're so certain what the answer should be doesn't mean that you're right. And your lack of visibility and accountability means you risk much less when you quickly come to strong moral conclusions than do large organizations.
It's weird how people in this thread are zigzagging between saying Apple has too much corporate power and Apple needs much more.
Does every country in the world really have to be a democracy? Remember how the Arab Spring turned out?
They don't.
Does every country in the world really need to have racial equality and an even-handed police force? They don't either.
Don't worry, Apple doesn't have to decide anything here. The US government already did.
https://www.axios.com/us-lukashenko-president-belarus-353ed2...
It seems to me that this offers a clever way out for Apple: If Lukashenko isn't the legitimate president of Belarus, then the "police" following his orders to attack protesters are not police at all, but terrorists; and Telegram is helping to bring them to the attention of the legitimate authorities of the president in exile.
Would people object if Apple told Telegram they had to remove a channel that was being used by white supremacists to coordinate terrorist attacks?
The answer to that question matters, because if users in this thread succeed in making iPhones less of a walled garden, terrorists will be able to use their iPhones to coordinate terror repeatedly on a large scale, and there won't be anything Apple can do about it. Is that really the world you want to live in? Personally, 2020 has satiated my appetite for craziness, and I'm ready for a little stability.
And? If they're using (say) Signal or even Messages, it's already end-to-end encrypted and there's nothing Apple can do about it.
> Is that really the world you want to live in?
You mean like they're able to use GPG/PGP, Tor browser, and Tails Linux distribution to potentially have secure encrypted communications now? Terrorists, drug dealers, pedophiles, and organized crime have been the boogeymen against strong crypto for decades:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
We've been through this before in the 1990s, and the techies (who tend to often lean libertarian) have generally sided with opening things up even if that meant the baddies also got the same capabilities:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars
Coming at it form the opposite end: should the IETF weaken TLS with backdoors so the government agencies can monitor the bad people? Is that really the world you want to live in?
Going in a different direction, you could also look at the state of Windows malware (and adware, eg toolbars) as a potential outcome to the un-walled garden approach: you end up with malware and thus the existence of an anti-malware industry.
It's why I like(d) Linux and Mac OS X (macOS) as well: I can set up my parents with a non-admin default account on their system and not worry too much about them hosing things too greatly (especially with off-machine backups). Windows caught up with that paradigm eventually.
If sideloading comes to iOS I hope that a similar mechanism is introduced: not just "please confirm" dialogue and/or Touch/FaceID pop-up, but a separate 'login'.
But yes, the safeguards that prevent sideloading today make me confident in recommending an iOS device even to someone that downloads malware anytime an ad shows up promising free gift cards.
I'm happy that GPG/PGP etc. are a bit difficult to use, because it makes the IQ threshold necessary to coordinate nastiness secretly a bit higher.
Remember how great the blogosphere was prior to the advent of social media? Social media made "blogging" a little more accessible and it became a cesspool. Speed bumps can be a very good thing.
There is research on this in the field of existential risk. I don't remember where exactly but it's formulated as the number of people one person can kill with easily accessible products. In particular biotech is becoming more and more accessible, which great, but has a big impact on that index. There is a great defcon talk by a doctor working at Intel I think.
I don't want white supremacists being able to carry out terror attacks, but I want people to be able to coordinate demonstrations and civil resistance, and I'm not aware of a way to do this without also enabling white supremacists, and I think that's a valid tradeoff.
Precisely, there is no difference between oppressing white supremacist minority and any other minority that wants to overthrow the status quo. It’s not going to be easier or harder depending on how the anti state elements are hiding their communication, because their conflict has to become public to have the effect you desire, which is some systemic change that you agree with ( making you part of this group by the way).
I’m not saying privacy is not important. I’m wondering whether unmitigated privacy is more important to people you and I most probably do not support.
I don't agree that that characterisation of a state is true.
I mean, it's sort of true, but it misses out some essential features which are directly relevant to that description, for some states anyway.
One of those is: Some states (maybe the USA?) believe in more than just acting out the wishes of the majority at any given time.
Some of them believe in ideals, which outlive an ephemeral majority. Things like "rule of law" (which doesn't mean clobbering minorities, it means the government is held to account rather than acting like a rogue king), "human rights" (in theory, things like the Magna Carta), "justice" (as defined by a long history of institutions and systems whose learned principles are studied by people that practice in it).
You can certainly argue that sort of thing still comes down to some level of majority oppressing a minority. But I think the character of that ruling is very different in ways that matter, if it demonstrates a decent attempt at those attributes and builds them into stable institutions, than if it doesn't bother or just pays lip service.
Stability comes with slowing down the progress and the top taking ever so more and getting more corrupt. So there always need to be some upwards pressure.
I can't judge you personally, but history will.
Governments have found it convenient to offload policing to communication companies, via putting liability on them unless they do.
I don't think this is the way to go.
If Apple wants to change their TOS and say "publishing personal information is now OK", that is one thing. Maybe publishing personal information should be allowed. The point is that there is an intelligent human being weighing tradeoffs and trying to make a good decision as we muddle our way through the 21st century.
Infrastructural changes, on the other hand, aren't as reversible. Screwups are more likely to be permanent. You're flipping a switch that can't be flipped back. That is the point I was trying to make by mentioning terrorism--there can be unintended consequences which you don't necessarily anticipate, so retaining flexibility is good.
I'm having trouble understanding your point. Apple makes devices. They sell (not rent or lease) those devices.
As such, just as if I were to buy a gun or a knife or a dozen chicken wings, what I do with such a device isn't anyone else's business. It's mine.
If I use that gun or knife to injure or kill someone, is the gun or knife manufacturer involved? No. Because I, not the manufacturer, am responsible for my actions. They have nothing to do with it.
If I insert those chicken wings into orifices other than my mouth, is that any business of the restaurant who sold them to me? No. For the same reasons.
As such, Apple is no more part of the "comms infrastructure" (and especially in this case, as it isn't Apple software -- like iMessage -- being used) than the knife manufacturer is part of my circus knife throwing act.
This issue is broader than the awful stuff going on in Belarus.
Who owns the stuff you purchase? If the manufacturer (and/or other private entities) can unilaterally decide what you can or cannot do with your own property, then you don't really own it.
And there will always be some folks who object to the use of, well, just about anything.
Should the folks at PETA[0] be able to block communications between a group of friends going hunting for deer or quail?
In their understanding, that's exactly the same as a group plotting to kill humans.
The situation in Belarus is more complicated, as it pits the the government against the governed. Even so, I say it's not the place of a manufacturer to tell someone what they may or may not do with a product once it has been sold.
What's more, Telegram needs to decide what happens on their infrastructure and Apple has no business being involved at all.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_for_the_Ethical_Treatme...
Those are very different things, and it is necessary to differentiate between the two.
I dont think that is an accurate analogy. It would more accurate to describe AWS / GCP asking Twitter to take down a tweet. Because Apple in your example Apple should be replaced with Telegram.
No, this is Microsoft telling Twitter to take down that tweet, because they have a Windows app. Or threatening to block access to the app or twitter.com.
> Apple says it didn’t require any channels to be removed. But they demanded to immediately remove any information that discloses someone's data on the Internet without the consent of these persons, as well as content aimed at specific people in accordance with the rules of the App Store.
This refers to the efforts of the Belorussian opposition to 'unmask' members of the riot police by posting their personal details online. Without going into the moral weeds, from the terms-of-service point of view that's basically griefing, no?
So this is a very curious quandary Apple finds itself in. Let's assume that griefing Belorussian law enforcement is a good thing. But at the same time griefing people (regardless of whether they are bad/good/chaotic neutral) is against the TOS.
So what do you do if you are Apple?
[0] https://tjournal.ru/tech/221326-apple-zayavila-chto-ne-trebo...