Bad Hombre is an award-winning satirical game created by 16-year-old Jackie George. Two days after it won the Shortly Award and was recognized in her school newsletter, Bad Hombre was removed from both Apple’s App Store and Google Play (George notes that her town of Naples, FL is very conservative with a lot of Trump supporters and is suspicious that one of her neighbors reported the app).
Continue reading “Apple removed a teen’s award-winning anti-Trump game “Bad Hombre” because they can’t tell the difference between apps that criticize racism and racist apps”
Tag: app stores
Project Atlas: Facebook has been secretly paying Iphone users to install an all-surveilling “VPN” app
The “Facebook Research” VPN is an app that circumvents Apple’s ban on certain kinds of surveillance by cloaking itself as a beta app and distributing through the Applause, Betabound and Utest services, rather than Apple’s App Store: users get up to $20/month, plus referral fees, to run the app, which comes with a man-in-the-middle certificate that lets Facebook intercept “private messages in social media apps, chats from in instant messaging apps – including photos/videos sent to others, emails, web searches, web browsing activity, and even ongoing location information by tapping into the feeds of any location tracking apps you may have installed.”
Continue reading “Project Atlas: Facebook has been secretly paying Iphone users to install an all-surveilling “VPN” app”
Supreme Court looks ready to let customers sue Apple for abusing its App Store monopoly
The Supreme Court hearing on Pepper v Apple has not gone well for Apple; the Supremes are considering whether App Store customers are entitled to sue Apple over its monopoly control over the Ios App Store.
Continue reading “Supreme Court looks ready to let customers sue Apple for abusing its App Store monopoly”
Sole and Despotic Dominion: my story about the future of private property for Reason
Reason’s December issue celebrates the magazine’s 50th anniversary with a series of commissioned pieces on the past and future of the magazine’s subjects: freedom, markets, property rights, privacy and similar matters: I contributed a short story to the issue called Sole and Despotic Dominion, which takes the form of a support chat between a dishwasher owner and its manufacturer’s rep, who has the unhappy job of describing why the dishwasher won’t accept his dishes.
Continue reading “Sole and Despotic Dominion: my story about the future of private property for Reason”
The most popular “privacy” tool in Apple’s Mac App Store was stealing users’ browsing history and sending it to China
Apple pioneered the idea of “app stores,” where operating system vendors got to decide who could distribute software that ran on their platforms, arguing that these “curated” stores would ensure high quality and protect users from malicious and inferior code.
Continue reading “The most popular “privacy” tool in Apple’s Mac App Store was stealing users’ browsing history and sending it to China”
With the App Store monopoly case, the Supreme Court could reverse decades of frustrated antitrust enforcement
On Monday, the Supreme Court will review the 9th Circuit’s decision in Apple Inc. v. Pepper, in which the plaintiffs argue that Apple has established a monopoly over apps for Ios (this part is actually incontrovertible, as Apple has used both technology and law to prevent rival app stores from operating), and that Iphone and Ipad owners have a right to ask the government to break up this monopoly (that’s the controversial part).
Continue reading “With the App Store monopoly case, the Supreme Court could reverse decades of frustrated antitrust enforcement”
The internet promised open markets, delivered rigged ones, then fake ones, then outright monopolies
Markets don’t solve all our problems, but they sometimes produce remarkably efficient systems for producing and distributing goods, and the internet traded on that promise with marketplaces like Ebay (anyone can sell, anyone can buy); Google (anyone can publish, anyone can read), and Amazon (one marketplace where all goods are transparently priced and ranked).
Continue reading “The internet promised open markets, delivered rigged ones, then fake ones, then outright monopolies”
Chinese social media went a-flutter at this photo of an apparent App Store clickfarmer
This year-old photo of a woman seated at a wall of Iphones went viral on Chinese social media, where it was identified as a clickfarmer whose job is to repeatedly install apps on multiple phones in order to inflate their App Store ranks.
Continue reading “Chinese social media went a-flutter at this photo of an apparent App Store clickfarmer”