You can read the German source version of the article, or the English translation.
A CCC made Apple TV App for displaying CCC-talks may not be released on the platform. According to Apple the app is in breach of developer terms and conditions because it enables access to content of which the company disapproves: Apple criticizes that the CCC’s app allows watching publicly given talks, which among others deal with security holes in the widely used Bluetooth technology, or help “jailbreaking” Apple devices – enabling the use of applications that have not been approved by Apple. The talks criticized by Apple are all available under the website media.ccc.de and can also be watched through the Apple TV YouTube app, which is not criticized by Apple.
Still feel comfortable with letting Apple police the news you read?
Yes. I will take Apple curated content any day. And if you had children, you would too think that way.
Panthros,
I have children, and I don’t believe in this kind of censorship.
Yeah, it would be pretty easy to set up some parental controls in the app store if they really wanted to. (Assuming they don’t do this already.)
I would not. The world is a harsh place, and just like how my parents raised me, I will raise my kids to make sure they know the world’s a harsh place, why it is so, and how they should always strive to be better than that.
Shielding children from the world, only to then kick them into the deep end at 18 or 21 is cruel and bad parenting.
There have been extensive studies that show that exposure to certain media depictions – violence, for example – has a negative impact on the development of children.
This document for example (which is very balanced) lists numerous such studies:
https://www-inst.cs.berkeley.edu/~cs10/fa09/dis/02/extra/funk_violen…
That’s not to say that children should not ultimately be exposed to all that is prevalent in the world so they understand it, but when and how you do so is important, which in-turn requires controlled access to media.
( All that said this is NOT a comment on this particular article which is unrelated to this topic IMO )
It’s all about how the parents handle it with their children. Some children are overly sensitive because they are sheltered at a young age, so they will have a more negative effect than those of us who were exposed to the ugliness of the world first hand.
I spent some of my childhood living in a cardboard box under a bridge and eating out of dumpsters, I saw people fight all the time, and I even watched a couple die before I even turned five. I remember it all quite vividly, but they have never negatively effected my life – they were just normal events to a young mind that gave me an appreciation for what little I had (a cardboard box to keep me warm and a bridge over my head to keep me dry).
Studies can only work within certain boundaries and cannot tell you how a particular child will react. It’s all about the frame of reference a child has in the beginning of their lives. If they are accustomed to seeing the world as it is, then they will treat problems properly. If they are accustomed to living in a dream world, normal problems can overpower them, leading to failures they are unable to manage or accept.
I see it all the time, and it’s usually because they were coddled as children. It’s also one of the biggest issues in the U.S. right now, most people were raised in sheltered environments and don’t understand how the world works at all.
Sounds like I would like to read your whole story.
I think this is a rather tin-foil-hat response to something I suspect has much less ominous reasons for happening.
Let’s say Apple allowed this content on their curated platform. Imagine just how many extra class action suits they’d suddenly have because they were “supporting and/or condoning jailbreaking of their platforms” – from users who would rather sue than take responsibility for their own actions and the risk they put themselves in.
Remember the “we want $5m because of wasted data” suit that hit mere days after the “offensive” setting appeared on devices around the world??
People are greedy. Apple are protecting themselves. Fine by me.
Maybe instead of completely blocking content, they should label content.
That way, they can’t be sued for the content of others.
Just like say, I don’t know: television or the movies.
But no, that is not the way people at Apple think about these things.
I take it you’ve had zero contact with the United States’ legal system, and those who utilize it?
I loled.
@Panthros did a “think of the children” and no one got it? Come on…
Call it a different approach, or a different philosophy, but I prefer to be the one who determines what my children will or will not be exposed to, and be there to guide them in understanding those things. Letting a faceless, emotionless corporation determine what your children see and read is not only grossly irresponsible, it’s plain lazy.
This modern attitude of letting the state (or in this case, the corporations) raise our children for us only serves to institutionalize them at an early age, when instead they should be learning and exploring, and on the path to independence. Being a parent is more than just providing food and shelter; take a hands-on approach and actually get involved in your child’s education, for their good and the good of the world around them.
The article here has nothing to do with protecting kids. Apple simply doesn’t want the PR nightmare associated with having content on it’s platform that teaches people to ‘hack medical devices’ and engage in ‘industrial espionage’ because this could (a) potentially kill people and (b) is illegal in most countries.
The comment I replied to did.
This is certainly a very responsible position to take.
However, if your child were to watch a video on ‘hacking medical devices’ on an Apple TV and then subsequently hack another persons medical device, thereby injuring or killing them, that would be bad: bad for you, bad for your child, bad for Apple and REALLY bad for the injured person.
In the courts Apple could arguably be held liable for ‘enabling’ your child to cause an injury or death.
That’s the primary reason why big companies do this – to avoid liability – it’s not because they have a moral position on what your children can and cannot see.
That argument is invalid. They can use the YouTube application, or the browser (on other iOS devices) to find the same information. No court is going to hold Apple liable for that, not in the least because Apple limits its liability in the EULA anyway.
I’d love to see some court cases on this!
Edited 2015-11-02 15:06 UTC
Uhmmm… Let me think about that… Just a second…. Uhmmm… NO!!!
I have children and I use absolutely NO parental control.
If I censor my children and rage on about companies or gourverments’ restrickting my access to anything. That will automatically make me a hypocrite.
And don’t get started on that “have to protect the children”-thing… They use the internet in a different way than me, and I am confident that they will not stumble on some gay-snuff by accident, the way they are using the internet.
<blockquote>Yes. I will take Apple curated content any day. And if you had children, you would too think that way.</blockquote>
I have 3.5 children, and I’m against this kind of censorship.
Edited 2015-11-01 17:43 UTC
Shitty parents never seem to grasp that limiting the choices of other people, who have nothing to do with them, has nothing to do with parenting.
Then again, you could be trolling…
Edited 2015-11-01 19:48 UTC
WHY WONT ANYONE THINK ABOUT THE CHILDREN!!!!
A sadly typical example of a skewed interpretation of events designed to foster the ‘OMG Corporations Are Evil’ narrative so common on OSNews these days.
First, Apple rejected this not because it’s ‘anti Apple’ but because some of the content the CCC produces implicitly promotes activities ( aka hacking ) which is illegal in many countries.
Second, restrictions on content which promotes illegal activities is universally prohibited by virtually all OTT vendors ( at least in the US ).
Third, Apple does restrict content beyond the strictly ‘we don’t allow videos promoting illegal activities’ including, for example, porn. You don’t like it, don’t buy it.
All that said, virtually all companies allow youtube, which includes videos that will show you how to hack stuff (the noob way), how to cook meth (no idea if it’s real), and how to build a pipe bomb (or a prop anyway) so have no fear, it’s all there in the name of your moral compass!
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And what noob hacker are you if your media center is from Apple and not a RPi w/ custom compiled Kodi?!!?!?!?
Haha touché! Actually I don’t own a TV at all, but my company builds OTT apps ( among other things ) for media companies big and small.
So how do you custom compile support for Netflix and other similar services?
I like how you counter “skewed interpretation” with your own skewed interpretation.
How is my interpretation skewed?
If you look at the ( very large ) list of CCC content considered objectionable to Apple only one item is related to Apple gear. The list includes ‘hacking medical devices’ and ‘industrial espionage’, this is not content ANY tangible OTT vendor would accept.
Edited 2015-11-02 02:05 UTC
Except Apple already accepts it in their own youtube app.
You seem to live in a very small universe.
Sadly, there are a very small number of OTT vendors outside of the US. Indeed, outside of Opera I can think of no other that has an international presence.
And guess what, Opera is even more stringent in who they allow on their platform because their software is installed on all sorts of vendor devices going to countries where all sorts of things are objectionable.
Every media provider takes these kind of measures both to abide by laws in the countries they serve as well as to protect themselves. Apple, in this case, aren’t acting any different than other mainstream news agencies. It doesn’t change anything one way or the other. Those who just want curated content will stick to Apple, and the rest of us will find what we want to find on the internet anyway… using, I might add, our Apple devices if we have them because last I checked we can still use the internet.
But then imagine a world where the software provider would also decide which websites you can visit on your own hardware and which not. If the app model suddenly adds all kinds of restrictions, we have to wonder if we really want that model.
The app model already has ‘all kinds of restrictions’.
I don’t see why you’re having issues with this particular instance in particular. Apple has banned anything that even remotely hinted at jailbreaking since forever. It could even be a feel good Play-Doh app for kids, but it’s still get banned as long as the work “jailbreak” was mentioned.
Edited 2015-11-01 01:54 UTC
“Still feel comfortable with letting Apple police the news you read?”
Sounds like they’re censoring controversial news on politics or religion. I would agree with you if this was Apple censoring anything else that is permitted in free speech. But I will not be visiting IBM’s developerWorks website expecting to find descriptions on how to install AIX on their Linux-only servers or installing Virtual I/O server on a machine lacking a PowerVM license. And I do not expect Samsung, if they had anything similar, to allow discussions on how to root their phones or circumventing the eFuse.
If I owned an iDevice and wanted to jailbreak it, I wouldn’t be expecting to find this information from any source provided by Apple!
As the information is available from my Apple supplied device then I don’t really care one way or the other.
Putting my layer ‘tin-foil’ hat on I’d fully expect that some concerned parent would soon be filing a suit against Apple if one of their ‘little darlings’ was able to access the sort of hacking date available on the CCC site and used it to bypass the parential restrictions placed upon their kids internet access.
Far fetched?
Not in the USA where you can sue anyone for everything.
As for Thom’s argument about parents wrapping their offspring in cotton-wool. I totally agree.
As a child, I roamed far and wide and experienced the world. I know of one family who take their childred (now aged 15) everywhere. They really have no experience of the public transport system let alone the world in general.
True…
Wich is one of the really bad things about it.
Sadly, we in europe are going down the same route.
How would you know? Oh you would read other sources too? That was not the point.
That’s a meaningless question because Apple does not control the news I read.
It doesn’t control the new that anyone reading this website can read.
It can only control the news that anyone reads if they are completely isolated from all other sources of news (i.e no one).
All channels of new delivery are selective but luckily there has never been a time when there has been more information available to people than right now, never a time when there has been more ways to get information or news than right now.
We live in an information and news rich environment.
I grew up in the UK when there was only three TV channels, very little commercial radio and a handful of large circulation newspapers (all with a strong political bias). That was a time when news and information was scarce and controlled, so what we did when were young was invent underground newspapers and magazines. As much fun as underground newspapers and magazines were they are not needed now because its possible now to access vast amounts of news, data, opinions and diverse culture in an instant. Information has never been freer than it is now.
It is logical that Apple says in its development guidelines that one cannot play illegal content on its devices.
But Apple is not a legal authority. It is not to Apple to decide which content is illegal or not. This is pure censorship, driven by commercial motives. The fact that there is no blocking on Youtube, proves that Apple is abusing a legal argument for commercial purposes
The consequence is that Apple imposes its (American) view to other countries. A reprehensible policy.
As far as I know child pornography (and sometimes even pornography) is illegal in most civilized countries around the world. I haven’t tried, but I’m pretty sure there is no such thing to be found on the “non-blocking” pillar of liberty (you know, because Google), Youtube?
How do you explain this “reprehensible policy” and obvious intrusion into you personal freedoms?
This is the result of laws made by representatives of the people. Not the decision of some random guy in an american private company.
They do not claim to be. They simply are not permitting this particular content on their curated platform. I don’t recall them ever claiming to be a legal authority and, if they really were attempting to “force” their view upon any of us, they would be blocking access to the internet right now. Last I checked though, I’m on an Apple device right now as I write this and… well, look at that. OSNews isn’t in Apple’s curated system either. Funny thing though, here I am looking at it.
This will only be a problem for those who allow Apple to do their thinking for them. The rest of us know that there is no one source for content and, to find what you might want, you may have to step outside the garden a bit. Just because Apple has a news platform doesn’t mean you must view your content there.