
Apple’s Deleting iCloud Emails That Contain The Phrase 'Barely Legal Teens' - rdl
http://www.cultofmac.com/217557/apples-deleting-icloud-emails-that-contain-the-phrase-barely-legal-teens/
======
rm999
Everything about icloud - from the terrible design to the clunky interface -
is as Steve Jobs liked to say, "shit". I have icloud and I'm not even sure
what it's for; is it a backup service, an e-mail provider, or a way to find my
phone? None of these have much in common, so the fact that they're all bundled
together really confuses me. And its name is a bit of a misnomer, you can't
even do standard cloud stuff like share photos (like you could with mobileme).

I don't mean to stray off-topic, but this article just confirms my intuition
to avoid anything with icloud in the name.

~~~
roc
iCloud is first and foremost just a bit of service glue to make the native
email/calendar/etc apps 'work' without sending people to Google or assuming
they have a work Exchange account. In that capacity, it's as good as it needs
to be. [1]

Similarly the file sharing is just to set a third-party baseline so that
file/save sync'ing between Apps on the mobile devices 'works' without sending
people off to Dropbox. And in that capacity it also works just fine.

Sure, it resists power-user use. But that's just because, in true Apple
fashion, it's not built for it and doesn't care too much about it. But that
only makes it 'shit' inasmuch as about 90% of Apple's services are 'shit' and
places it distinctly outside the way Jobs defined 'shit'.

[1] Though filtering this crude is cause to reassess that.

~~~
mikeash
"True Apple fashion" has only recently been about resisting power users.
Before about five years ago, they were all about _enabling_ power users while
still being friendly to regular people. This was much more compelling than
their current direction. Remember, this is the company that built their OS on
top of UNIX and _shipped a terminal app with it standard_. It all changed
around when the iPhone came out, though.

~~~
roc
While we're keeping history in context, let's also not forget this is also the
company that was borderline irrelevant prior to their current direction.

~~~
skore
I got a 17" Macbook Pro in 2009 (when they were still riding the wave of the
iPhone) because it was a solid piece of hardware and gave me a sweet spot of
down-the-road-choice (I exchanged the cd bay with another hdd, added Ram,
installed Linux). I was looking forward to buying further Macbooks in the
future.

All that was shattered with their new Macbook lineup (which are pretty much
just beefier MB Airs). They flat out killed the 17" (which I still consider
the perfect on-the-go workstation).

I considered Apple very relevant around the iPhone release. The current
direction is not the iPhone direction. It is the iPad direction. That's when
they started to go somewhat batshit on driving away professional users. They
could have maintained both camps pretty handily in my opinion. Both camps were
quite happy and got along great. Why they decided to kill off one is beyond
me. Sure, there is more money in everyday clients, but I doubt they were
actually hurting their business with power users.

Consider this: When I - a staunch defender of FOSS, user of Kubuntu, Free
Software programmer, ardent antagonist of everything Microsoft - got my
Macbook, I actually started recommending Macs as a choice to others. It
actually did seem to me a better choice than going with Microsoft Windows.
These days, I recommend Windows 7.

That's what they have accomplished.

~~~
sixothree
My boss and I both had Early 2008 MBP 15". He spilled a large cup of coffee
into the keyboard. He turned the machine upside down and it was pouring out.

I sprung into action and opened that machine up and started dousing all of the
parts with distilled water then drying them. I didn't need any special tools
or even a service manual.

That generation MBP had the most beautiful design inside and out that I have
ever seen. It was the pinnacle of geekdom beauty and it only lasted a year or
two.

~~~
vacri
Bah, the old IBM Model M keyboards had holes in the bottom, specifically for
coffee draining!

------
tolmasky
Its hard to know what to be more amazed about: the fact that with one
boneheaded filter Apple now seems creepier than Google in terms of respecting
your privacy (one of the few things they could boast about), or the fact that
it still seems to be amateur hour over at iCloud. Think about it for a second:
they are literally pushing code into production that amounts to if
(contents.indexOf(bad_phrase) != -1) delete_email();. How is the takeaway not
anything other than "Of course Siri and Maps are a disaster, they can't even
filter email in a more complex fashion than 1993."

~~~
jfoster
I agree that it's boneheaded, but I'm not convinced this is a privacy issue,
assuming the email only gets dropped. Shouldn't something need to reach the
eyes of a human in order to be a privacy issue?

~~~
alxhill
Try telling that to all the people who claim gmail ads are invading your
privacy. Most notably Microsoft.

------
aes
I tested this on my @me.com account, and it's exactly how it works. Email
containing the words "barely legal teens" is simply dropped.

I find it obscene to an Orwellian extent that Apple actually seems to think
that no valid email would ever contain the words "barely legal teens". I
wonder what other things Apple thinks are not worth talking about?

I have no trust in Apple's email services any more.

~~~
cryptoz
Microsoft has been doing this for decades. Ever try to collaborate on a web
project using MSN Messenger? Every message you sent that contained 'index.php'
was mysteriously dropped. It IS Orwellian, but you should not be surprised.
The big communication services all seem to have their own little moral or
technical hacks they use to keep your discussion limited and away from certain
topics / words.

~~~
scott_s
That's so surprising I tried to find evidence of it online, but I couldn't.
Partly because "index.php" is such a common thing that Google won't use it for
a search term, which is ironic. Can you point to anything corroborating that?

~~~
cryptoz
There are a whole bunch of banned words. There used to be a whole slew of
sites that indexed all of the things Microsoft wouldn't let you talk about.
Here's an article about it in the Inquirer:
[http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1041509/microsofts-...](http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1041509/microsofts-
banned-words-in-msn-messenger)

Edit: that article appears to be mostly user names. Here's a forum thread to
get you started: <http://www.amsn-project.net/forums/index.php?topic=157.0>

~~~
seabee
MSN has also banned messages containing certain TLDs e.g. '.info' and '.cx'.
[http://yoast.com/microsoft-censoring-info-domains-in-msn-
mes...](http://yoast.com/microsoft-censoring-info-domains-in-msn-messenger/)

------
belorn
When you let someone else handle your email, they own your email. There is no
postal secrecy law, no rule against reading. They can touch, modify or delete
according to their whims. It's their email now.

So I am not that very surprised to hear a news article like this. It makes
perfectly sense with the current mentality. It also adds another nail in the
coffin about idea that "only a machine is reading my emails. Why should I care
about that?".

Hopefully this will encourage some people enough to run their own mail
servers. It's far less problematic than most people think it is. Maybe it was
hard to install and configure this in 1990s, but this is 2013. You buy a
domain name, install a Debian machine, and do:

    
    
      aptitude install postfix
      aptitude install postgrey
    

Afterward one follows any one of the many simple guides to install either a
webmail (roundcube most commonly), or go to
(<http://www.postfix.org/docs.html>). If a spam gets through, install
blacklisting or spamassassin. Easy 3 step guides exist for both.

It always surprises me that people can use a software library with
complicated, half insane API's, but can't follow a single page of simple
single steps installation. It's not hard and you get the bonus of actually
owning your own emails again. If you are a company, this should not even be a
question. If the options are to give away all your emails and customers emails
to a third-party and thus lose all ownership to them, or asking a
sysadmin/programmer to spend 5-10-30m tops to do an email installation, the
answer should be obvious.

~~~
secure
In my experience, it is not so much the installation itself, but the regular
maintenance and the many subtle errors that can occur, which make running your
own email server NOT as trivial as you make it sound :).

As for a few examples:

1\. Mailservers around the world have different degrees of strictness in what
they accept. Some require the sender’s mailserver to have a valid and matching
PTR and A/AAAA (!) DNS records. Others don’t care. Some check black lists,
some don’t. Some even resolve the MX record of your sender domain, connect to
it and try to start delivery of an email to ensure your address is valid.

2\. By default, postfix doesn’t warn you about undeliverable messages for
quite some time (a week is the default, I think). So if there is any error in
your config (e.g. I changed my DNS resolver config, then didn’t restart
postfix), your mails will be stuck without any notice, for a number of days.

3\. If there are SSL certificates invoked, they should be valid. Some mail
servers will not use TLS at all, some will fall back to plain text, others
will cancel delivery if your certificate is invalid.

These are just a few examples I have encountered recently, but every time they
happen I am incredibly frustrated that emails either did not reach me (usually
I detect that quickly) or are not delivered (detected only after a few days).

~~~
Volpe
So this implies there is a market for a simple mailserver that just mimics
gmail (or whatever) on your own server:

e.g.

apt-get install gmail-server

~~~
rdl
Search is IMO the hard part. I know you can do Lucerne, but getting that
working well with email is hard. Until recently Outlook's search was crap
compared to gmail. too, and mutt is still essentially "headers only".

Still, shouldn't be that hard to do as long as it is your own server and you
trust it; I imagine a lot of the difficulty of gmail is scaling, and even a
single user with 20-50GB of mail isn't in the same league.

If you were to outsource it to a service provider:

I'd love a way to do privacy-protecting search on my mailbox, either by
building/maintaining a local index, or even more amazingly, some kind of
cryptographic/data structure magic: do processing once either pre-encryption
or on the local device, then add it to an index, with a configurable slider
for data leakage vs. search quality. Search could execute locally and
remotely.

(This is to allow you to use webmail with no local persistent storage, or a
new phone, to search your email on a server, without trusting the server).

~~~
adimitrov
> and mutt is still essentially "headers only"

Mutt is more like "everything I can come up with from the command line." Sure,
I won't make my grandma use it, but I've never needed any searching capability
beyond grep and co.

~~~
rdl
Yeah, I end up grepping organized-by-years Maildirs, but that's somewhat
suboptimal.

~~~
pyre
Ever looked at Mairix?

~~~
rdl
No, looks interesting, will check it out.

------
petercooper
Why do they mention "child pornography"? Maybe I'm wrong but isn't "barely
legal" meant to mean 18 year old adults and not "nearly legal"? Or is it just
a common code phrase child pornographers use I wasn't aware of?

~~~
unreal37
That's a good point. Barely legal is still legal, and why is Apple even
blocking emails that contain those words?

It might have to do with spam filtering. Trying sending an email that talks
about Cialis.

~~~
scholia
As a man who has the ability to search Google (whooo!), I can add that "Barely
Legal" teen movies are published by Hustler, and there appear to be hundreds
of them with related names.

Some are sold on Amazon.

Presumably the people who operate in the legal pornography business -- working
for Hustler, their distributors (I'm assuming there are several) and US-based
retail outlets -- don't use iCloud or it could have an unpleasant impact on
their legitimate businesses.

------
eykanal
In reading this, all I can think of is "buttbuttination" and the broader
Scunthorpe problem [1] (to use Wikipedia's term). Strange that Apple is using
such a crude filtration technique.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem>

~~~
endgame
I have also seen it called the clbuttic mistake:

<http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Clbuttic-Mistake-.aspx>

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/2667...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/2667634/The-
Clbuttic-Mistake-When-obscenity-filters-go-wrong.html)

~~~
vacri
I remember reading a judicial response that had consbreastutional
implications.

------
digitalengineer
Scanning _and auto-deleting_ your email, combined with the Gatekeeper
technology wich houses the possibility of Apple telling me what Apps I can or
can not run makes me seriously start to wonder the direction Apple is
headed...

Edit: Gatekeeper is OSX technology. It allows users to only install Apple
certified Apps _on your mac_ , not your phone. It's fairly new and possible to
turn it off (for now at least).

~~~
mhurron
Apple has always been against Porn on their devices. It's no surprise they're
against it on their services as well.

Of course this could be a really poorly working spam filter, but I'm inclined
to believe this isn't the case.

~~~
eridius
Why are you inclined to believe this isn't the case? What possible reason
would there be for Apple to care one whit about the email that goes to iCloud
accounts? The only thing that makes any sense at all is virus/spam filtering.

~~~
cryptoz
> What possible reason would there be for Apple to care one whit about the
> apps that are installed to your phone?

There, fixed that for you.

~~~
glhaynes
Because they feel (rightly or wrongly) that they can practically provide a
better, more secure, etc. experience for their customers by
controlling/curating what executes on their devices.

~~~
cryptoz
Right. So it obviously stands to reason that they might think that's true for
the email services too.

~~~
taligent
It really doesn't.

It is illogical to block just this phrase and not the many others that would
be far worse.

~~~
lmm
What makes you think they're not blocking other phrases?

------
mikestew
Great, now I'm tempted to spend way too much time experimenting to find other
banned phrases. :-P But sure enough, whether it's buried in a bunch of lorem
ipsum or standing alone, that phrase will send your mail to the ether. It
never showed in Junk, it just never came across the wire at all. Edit: this
behavior goes in both directions, BTW; receive or send.

I'd be willing to write it off as a one-time error on the part of some
individual contributor, but what else will get your mail deleted? Since there
are no checks in place for "rogue" ICs adding phrases on server-side, what
will cause stuff to go missing tomorrow?

~~~
runarb
If you need some dirty words to test with, have a look at Searchdaimons list
of adult words phrases: <http://www.searchdaimon.com/wiki/Adult_words>

------
nicholassmith
I know everyone is rushing to decry Apple and their draconian behaviour
("first they took my unsigned apps, now they want in my email? TO THE
PITCHFORKS!") but the likelyhood is someone has fiddled with the spam
filtering and they've broken something. If the first thing you jump to is some
conspiracy you're ignoring the simple rule of technology that behind every
good wild goose chase is a member of staff who's quickly hitting 'roll back
changes'.

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
Spam should never be deleted. Plus when e-mail is sent OUT (not coming in) it
is blocked.

No way to defend this. No spam filter should ever work like that, even if set
up overly broadly.

~~~
nicholassmith
Spam should never be deleted, it should be triaged and left to the user to
deal with but it's definitely possible someone has screwed up. What I'm saying
is it's probably a fuck up, what I'm not doing is defending it.

------
B-Con
> After more research, Steven found that under the iCloud terms of service,
> Apple reserves the right to remove any content at any time that it feels is
> objectionable, without telling you that they’re going to delete it.

Today it's a bad search filter, but tomorrow... what'll they do tomorrow?

Apple is the epitome of "we'll do what we think is best and you'll like it".
For now they usually seem to have admirable (or semi-admirable) goals, even if
you don't agree with them on the details. I'm curious how long until they make
similar moves that are clearly Evil(TM).

------
nicholasjarnold
Ugh! Let's just list a _few_ reasons why we shouldn't be purchasing these
things anymore. (Disclosure: Never owned one, but have played around with them
a little.)

\- Not upgradable \- Super overpriced \- Dictator-style company that seemingly
caters to grandma more than technical folk \- Obnoxious smug ethos created by
marketing team \- Lots of people complaining about OSX going downhill \- The
OP story and associated reports of mass censorship \- Just look at Objective C
for 5 minutes

I'm perfectly happy with my beefy Win 7 box paired with a *nix machine that I
can shell into when I need to do something that would suck in Powershell. Just
don't install Java/Flash/ect and don't open JessicaAlbaBoob.jpg.exe and you
will not get a virus.

~~~
chrisdevereux
> Just look at Objective C for 5 minutes

I'm willing to bet you've looked at it for much less than that.

~~~
nicholasjarnold
Have I tried to develop anything using it? No.

Have I looked at the source code on numerous occasions, trying to come to
terms with it's verbosity and ugliness? Yes.

~~~
pyre

      | verbosity and ugliness
    

Subjective metrics to define objective reality? Say it ain't so.

~~~
nicholasjarnold
True. It is inherently subjective. I knew I would receive some flak making
that last argument about ObjC being ugly, but I felt the urge to be a little
sloppy to see if it resonated with anyone.

Also, my verbosity argument would be hard to defend without concrete examples
of equivalent functionality being performed more succinctly (while still
maintaining readability) in another language. That would be hard given my
ignorance of ObjC. I withdraw that argument.

------
erode
Isn't the point of "barely legal teens" that they are indeed legal? On what
grounds can they delete discussions of legal content?

~~~
cynwoody
On what grounds can they delete discussions of illegal content?

~~~
erode
That might even be a better point than I made.

~~~
ralfd
Do you guys really not understand, that this was not censorship, but just an
over-aggressive spam filter?

------
ianstallings
Solution: Don't use iCloud.

~~~
nsmartt
This is wrong. It goes beyond this. There are various clear examples of Apple
exercising far too much authority.

It's not a question of whether you should use certain products. It becomes a
question of whether you should trust Apple at all.

~~~
rayiner
You shouldn't trust any company. Not Apple, not Microsoft, and not Google.
Which is why "the cloud" is a stupid idea.

~~~
shurcooL
> You shouldn't trust any company.

Trust them with what, exactly?

There are some things you shouldn't trust them with, but there are also things
you _can_/should trust them with.

~~~
nsmartt
It all depends on what we mean by "trust." Realistically, you should be
cautious when trusting any company with anything.

~~~
CountSessine
Exactly - since when has 'trust' ever been absolute?

Do I trust Apple to make awesome laptops and cell phones? Yes.

Do I trust Apple to keep OS X open to third party development? Yes, I do.
Mostly.

Do I trust Apple to keep my personal email, email that might contain passwords
and account names, secure and safe? Probably not, which is part of the why I
don't use my iCloud email account.

Do I trust Apple to not sunset iCloud email in a few years, invalidating my
@icloud.com address that I would have handed out to everyone, leaving me high
and dry? No, I don't - and I think that's a much more potent danger for anyone
using their @icloud.com email account.

------
arn
Isn't this a spam blocking technique?

~~~
sp332
It should send the messages to your spam folder, then.

~~~
qeorge
It could be server side spam filtering (not all spam messages make it to your
spam folder with any provider - the worst offenders are often just thrown
out).

Just saying it is possible that this is an over-aggressive spam filter vs.
Apple taking such an invasive measure. Although, Apple has done similar crazy
things before, so who knows.

~~~
tlrobinson
"not all spam messages make it to your spam folder with any provider - the
worst offenders are often just thrown out"

This is news to me. Citation needed?

~~~
lloeki
Greylisting, for one.

You could also reasonably configure a filter to not land emails over a spam
threshold.

Given the amount and type of spam in my Gmail Spam label, I'm quite sure
there's a hard filter in place there too.

~~~
haroldp
Greylisting does not throw anything out. It does the exact opposite. The mail
server simply says, "I have a temporary problem, so I can't take this right
now. Try again later" Mail servers are supposed to (and do) try again, at
which time a greylisted message will be delivered. Accepting a message for
delivery _In Go Faith_ and then dropping it on the floor, is poor, lazy,
cheap, RFC-breaking spam filtering.

~~~
lloeki
What I mean is that greylisting is a trick mechanism where some mails,
declared spam based on an unrelated and technical criteria, never reach the
user's spam folder. This contradicts the 'spam should go to spam folder'
point.

------
chrisdevereux
Just tried sending this to myself from another account and received the email.

All the other experiments on here were from a few hours ago. Does this still
happen for other people? If it does, it'd suggest it's more complicated than a
simple filter on emails containing the phrase.

That said, deleting user data without user input _at all_ is completely
insane. It's probably a good thing that iCloud sync sucks so much and
developers aren't using it.

------
jopt
Spam filter. It's disappointing someone seriously believes this is some sort
of "objectionable content" censorship. Namely because that's easy enough to
test:

"barely legal teens" isn't delivered (edit: now does)

"actually illegal teens" arrives

...along with everything else of the sort (that I've tested).

Surely the phrase was blacklisted by some algorithm after it occurred verbatim
in massive amounts of spam.

------
lignuist
Censorship is always stupid. Censorship based on nothing than words or phrases
is simply embarrassing.

------
glasshead969
Just tried to reproduce the issue but I was able to send the email with the
said phrase with no issues. They may have fixed the issue. Seems like some
aggressive server side spam filtering which went wrong.

------
kenferry
Did anyone try to reproduce this? It doesn't replicate for me.

------
mellamoyo
I'm a bit surprised there's no discussion yet about PGP/GnuPG (GPG). If we all
encrypted our mails would this be such a big deal? No. Is client-side
encryption difficult? Not really. I think there's a big market for a desktop
email app that does PGP/GPG really well and does so _with other people_.

~~~
5partan
Add an PDF-attachment to your mail and it becomes a big deal.

------
celerity
This is great news, actually. It's a free "get out of jail" card. Now you know
you shouldn't trust Apple with your email.

Using other people's software or services which you don't control should be
based on trust, in my opinion. What I mean is that you should build up
evidence about different service providers, and choose whether or not they are
trustworthy.

This is essentially why I am OK with closed source software. In many aspects
of life (from the obvious, like banking, to more abstract, like personal
relationships) we have to act based on our degree of confidence in something.
The downside is that this thing is obscured (hence the need for trust), the
upside is that through obscurity it was made possible (in this case, email
providers make money by having a unique, high-quality offering).

------
edouard1234567
Apple trying to be data-mining company reminds me of apple trying to become a
mapping company.

------
da_n
Tangentially related, but emails are often auto-deleted by 'cloud' email
services (Hotmail, Google etc) when the email is sent from a server-side
script like PHP mail(), therefore it is not unheard of for emails to be auto-
deleted when it is very likely to be spam. I don't know how the iCloud spam
filtering works, but I wonder if there is a block filter being run before the
check is done to see if the sender is a known contact (to bypass the spam
check). 'barely legal teens' seems like a phrase that would almost certainly
be flagged as spam. Perhaps this is just a badly implemented spam system at
work (which wouldn't surprise me given Apple's reputation for web services)?

------
epaga
Perfect situation for applying Hanlon's razor - I see no reason to assume
anything other than just a (really stupid) spam rule bug which is _deleting_
messages when it should be filing them as spam.

Never attribute to malice ... you know the rest.

------
bdcravens
This is why I don't trust things like email to Apple. Email is a universal
thing: whether I'm on my computer, an iDevice (I've owned several), an Android
device (I've owned a few), or something entirely different (who knows what the
future holds?) iCloud is great for backing up iOS specific things (many apps
rely on it for syncing between your devices, etc) but for those things which
merely consume "universal" things like mail and photos, I rely on universal
solutions.

------
spython
A few days ago it was reported that they also delete mails with subject
"Аренда", meaning "rent" or "lease" in russian, and the subject of many spam
mails.

------
mukundmr
I just tested this with my @me.com account and it didn't delete anything. How
many people responding to the post actually tested this?

------
danso
So, does this filter work for "not legal teens" or "totally illegal teens"?
Because if not, that would be highly ironic.

------
cji
They also (used to) block you from receiving e-mail with "fuck" in the subject
line. I had an amusing conversation with support about this and they said it's
part of their spam filter. I just re-tested this and the e-mail eventually
came through to my spam folder.

------
js2
Non-swipe [http://www.cultofmac.com/217557/apples-deleting-icloud-
email...](http://www.cultofmac.com/217557/apples-deleting-icloud-emails-that-
contain-the-phrase-barely-legal-teens/?onswipe_redirect=never)

------
tapatio
And this is why I switched to an android phone. I can't stand the puritan
bullshit.

------
damoe
I note that the original InfoWorld article is 3 months old. In the comments
here one person has said that they still see the deletion and two say that
they don't.

So, does anyone else have test results to report?

------
lukejduncan
First thing this made me think of were the "scroogle" ads Microsoft put up on
the 101.

I don't care if someone reads my email to sell me an ad. I do care if someone
reads my email to censor it.

------
mmagin
This reminds me of how Yahoo! mail screwed up over a decade ago:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medireview>

------
lorenzfx
One more reason why you should run your own mail server. I guess if it would
take less time more people were doing it (I'm not either at the moment).

~~~
DanBC
Really, running your own email server is a bad idea for most people.

Even on HN it's only good as a learning exercise or for a small number of
people who have the use for it.

The problem isn't with the length of time it takes to set it up. The problem
is with making sure you have all the quirks sorted out so your mail can get
delivered through other people's set ups.

------
seivan
This is bad, I actually like iCloud, even the email client, calendar and
address book. But I don't want them deleting emails like this... hm.

------
mark-r
Any reason to believe this is deliberate on Apple's part and not just some
Bayesian filter trained with real spam?

~~~
mich41
They silently delete such emails, not mark them as spam.

Also, I've never seen real spam advertising porn - mostly it's fake watches,
penis enlargement and fake social media or other identity theft scams.

------
plg
seems to me this is a perfect example that could be used to promote widespread
adoption of email encryption

------
squozzer
Some of us are old enough to remember the Calvin Klein ads with the girl in
the "Catholic schoolgirl" uniform with her white panties showing. I had to
admit at first glance I thought CK was using someone underage. It provoked a
bit of reaction from the demagogues. Since then, the "barely legal" motif has
had a bit of radioactivity hanging on it. The popularity of Manga didn't seem
to help.

------
Falling3
Is anyone else being driven crazy by the cursor style on this page? I think
it's hitting on a new ocd...

------
jijji
That's one way to prevent spam from coming in. Next you'll find them blocking
all chinese netblocks.

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eagsalazar2
Why in god's name would anyone use iCloud Email? Please Apple junkies, snap
out of it.

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kmfrk
Isn't this Mobile Me all over again?

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rjempson
They are going to call it iNanny

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snarfy
But, they're legal...

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ishansharma
This is shit!

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JagMicker
"You just got iPlowed"

(Scroogle satire)

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opminion
M-x spook

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largesse
This may sound weird to say, but I'm starting to think that most of Apple's
problems come from the fact that it is a hardware company rather than a
software company. In a very real way, it seems that they don't _get_ software.
I think it comes from pervasive product focus.

They are great with products. Less so with the area around the product. Can't
have something as nebulous as a cloud without trying to control the product
experience.

~~~
MBCook
Apple gets software. The problem is they have never gotten _network software_
or _network services_.

It's nice that I can use iCloud to find my iPhone and that it keeps my
contacts in sync.

Except that it can't keep notes in sync correctly. Which shouldn't be
surprising because notes aren't actually notes, they're stored in an email
box. That's why you need an @me.com account to sync them.

Really there is no iCloud. There is an email service, a calendar service, a
contacts service, a layer _on_ the email service, a file storage service, a
network transparent CoreData sync service (that is supposed to be _very_
problematic), a todo service, a photo sharing service, and probably other
things.

If it doesn't involve a network service, Apple can do wonderful things. If it
does... well... it might work well enough; most of the time.

~~~
cageface
Not really. Most of their software is bad. Their native iOS apps are inferior.
iTunes is junk. HFS is garbage. Their office suite is poor except for maybe
Keynote. iLife is marginal. They have a solid foundation in Cocoa but I'm
increasingly unimpressed with what they do with it.

I think GP has it exactly right. Their hardware is great but their software is
an embarrassment for a company with such resources.

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brunorsini
Clarke has just sold his afterlife iPhone.

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NicoJuicy
Haha, the Dictator Apple is going to mess with your mails... Awesome, you get
what you pay for, i guess :P

