[HN Gopher] Suspended from Google Play for listing supported sub...
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Suspended from Google Play for listing supported subtitle formats
Author : moneytoo
Score : 495 points
Date : 2021-01-25 18:30 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| fortran77 wrote:
| Are bible apps banned?
|
| https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.22.3?ven=Tanakh:_The_Holy_Sc...
|
| Some of the asses in the bible talk!
|
| https://www.sefaria.org/Numbers.22.30?lang=bi&aliyot=0
| stretchcat wrote:
| So this is the power of machine learning, huh? Just as shit as
| the old keyword blacklists of old.
| ksec wrote:
| Well luckily this is Google. Which means there are no real human
| behind the suspension, most likely just an Automated response
| before some one steps in. ( Or not )
|
| I would be furious if this was coming from Apple. And judging
| from the current Apple I would not be surprised if they will tell
| you to not use the "ASS" label in your support format.
| ttt0 wrote:
| Isn't their support service automated too? Isn't making a stink
| on the internet the only way to deal with issues like this,
| because it generates bad press for them?
| [deleted]
| userbinator wrote:
| Google is sure making a donkey of itself... a clbuttic problem
| indeed.
|
| Seriously, "ass" is probably one of the mildest of vulgar words.
| Hamuko wrote:
| ASS subtitles are particularly popular in anime fansubbing as it
| allows for advanced typesetting.
|
| You can take it pretty far:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9AgMlHJe7Y
| mlindner wrote:
| Warning: NSFW for those clicking this
| fastball wrote:
| Potentially NSFW (heh this is kinda pointless atm).
|
| Also wow, I'm guessing you need to adjust the subtitle with
| every frame, old-school animation style?
| Hamuko wrote:
| The subtitles are basically adjusted every frame but you
| don't necessarily have to do it by hand. You can for example
| generate motion data with Blender or Mocha and import that
| into Aegisub (the software that is used to create the
| subtitle files).
|
| https://unanimated.github.io/ts/ts-mocha.htm
|
| https://github.com/TypesettingTools/Aegisub-
| Motion/wiki/Appl...
| throwaway314158 wrote:
| Before newer tools automated the process by tracking motion
| of a target, folks wouldn't have to adjust them frame by
| frame per se but would instead annotate the subtitle script
| with keyframe times and positions. The video player would
| know to interpolate between those annotations.
| veddan wrote:
| The ASS format has some basic animation with the \move
| command (moving subtitles using linear interpolation) and the
| \t command (changing various properties of a line with the
| possibility of quadric interpolation). This takes care of
| some cases, but is often insufficient for complex stuff.
|
| Aegisub however has good automation support, and has (had?) a
| pretty active scripting community. Scripts can do a lot of
| stuff and often has simple dialog-box UIs. The base scripting
| support is in Lua, but a lot of scripts are written in a Lua
| variant called Moonscript. I've never seen it used anywhere
| else. And, as was mentioned in a sibling comment, there are
| scripts for importing motion-tracking files into Aegisub.
|
| The ASS format lacks support for a bunch of stuff that people
| want to do, or the native support is deficient in some
| manner, so scripting is very important for Aegisub. For
| example, a line can be given a color gradient by make a one
| copy of the line for each shade in the gradient (this can be
| 100+ times). Each copy is then given a different color
| according to the gradient, and a \clip command is used on
| each line to only show a 1-2 pixel wide slice of each line.
| If all those slices are lined up properly and the lines are
| displayed simultaneously, it gives the impression of being a
| single line with a color gradient. Tricks like this can
| actually cause performance problems in rendering the
| subtitles!
|
| I think this is an interesting little programming niche, but
| there isn't much complex typesetting being done these days.
| Tastes have changed, and due to licensed releases there's
| less need for fansubbing on all but the most niche titles.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| So the translated "fidget" parts are not hardsubbed but
| actually encoded in a subtitle format and therein animated to
| move around with the Japanese text?
|
| Quite impressive, notwithstanding the use of _bourgeois_ harem
| as example material.
| mlindner wrote:
| That's correct.
| throwaway314158 wrote:
| Yup. Recently there have been tools that will track selected
| things for you, but it wasn't too long ago when fansubbers
| had to manually animate them by annotating keyframes.
| ulucs wrote:
| Commie should be a national treasure
| jsheard wrote:
| I just watched a fansub recently where they replaced some
| environmental text in the background, and they used the ASS
| format to render the english text out of focus and seamlessly
| match the depth-of-field effect used in the show. Some groups
| really go above and beyond.
| throwaway314158 wrote:
| Groups like that are a dying breed. Many of them simply fell
| apart as key individuals quit or drifted away from the scene.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Definitely. For example, MTBB's subtitles for _Kimi no Na wa_
| are very impressive.
|
| There's a short showcase of them on YouTube (spoilers):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_c-eKTisI0
|
| It's a shame you basically cannot get anything close to the
| quality of fansubs from any commercial/legal options.
| TheRealNGenius wrote:
| Would you know if they are tracking the text frame by
| frame? That's quite the dedication if they are.
| motbob wrote:
| The most popular subtitling software has a script/plugin
| to export video, which can then be used in a motion
| tracking program, the data from which can be fed back
| into the subtitling program.
| novok wrote:
| Probably because they are forced to use really shitty
| subbing formats for assisted text in some compliance format
| :|
|
| Edit: Are those baked into the video or did they just use
| the ASS format?
| Hamuko wrote:
| They use the ASS format and the text isn't baked into the
| video. Here's the same video with the softsubs toggled on
| and off:
| https://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/10459
| Lammy wrote:
| Even the old-school analog EIA-608 captioning system can
| do positional captions. It's all these modern web players
| (like Youtube's) that have regressed to a single line of
| text bottom-center.
| jowsie wrote:
| You can definitely still do some interesting things with
| YouTube subtitles;
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cqqGOvOGfI
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvO8kcWFFT0
| erk__ wrote:
| YouTube actually supports it through a feature called
| WebVTT [0], though it is rarely used, an example of it is
| this video [1] where it is used for placement and
| lighting up text for karaoke.
|
| The actual code for it is looks like this:
| 00:03:31.485 --> 00:03:31.719 align:start position:0%
| line:0% <c.color96D2D3>Hey! nanika ga okoru spe
| cial </c><c.colorFEFEFE>night</c>
| 00:03:31.485 --> 00:03:31.719 align:start position:0%
| line:0% <c.color96D2D3>Hey! nanika ga okoru spe
| cial </c><c.colorFEFEFE>night</c>
| 00:03:31.719 --> 00:03:32.486 align:start position:0%
| line:0% <c.color96D2D3>Hey! nanika ga okoru special
| night</c> 00:03:31.719 --> 00:03:32.486
| align:start position:0% line:0% <c.color96D2D3>Hey!
| nanika ga okoru special night</c>
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebVTT [1]:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AufydOsiD6M
| iotku wrote:
| Here's another good example: https://youtu.be/ddWJatRxfz8
|
| And again, set language to Japanese.
| simlevesque wrote:
| Just a heads up for anyone who want to see the karaoke,
| set the CC language to Japanese.
| kuschku wrote:
| Actually most modern systems support image embedding,
| animations, styling, and positioning with TTML. It's an
| official spec, supported by every television, Netflix,
| Chromecast, etc.
|
| It's also a format no fansubber ever heard of.
| gaius_baltar wrote:
| > It's a shame you basically cannot get anything close to
| the quality of fansubs from any commercial/legal options.
|
| Fansubbers work for the shows they love while the
| commercial distributors just pick the cheapest option to
| get the thing done ASAP, don't matter how sh*tty the result
| is. There is no chance for quality here.
|
| The same happens with Blurays x rips streams: piracy is the
| best option (no DRM, no unskippable screens, no ads, no
| regional restrictions).
| astrange wrote:
| Hardware decoders have memory limits and can't render SSA
| subtitles, which were designed by an insane person and
| require emulation of quirks of the Win32 font APIs plus a
| custom buggy implementation of 3D text rendering.
|
| But this is also wrong because Crunchyroll uses the
| fansub toolset and SSA subtitles.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| I honestly find the idea of the English text inside of the
| picture as such, blending in perfectly with the scene to be
| most disorienting.
|
| It suggests that the character itself is writing the
| English text, or that it magically appears.
|
| If it were simple subtitles, it would be clear that these
| were translations, and that in the actual story there is
| only Japanese text.
|
| Notwithstanding the impressive technological nature of it,
| but that also seems the reason they did so. Methinks it's a
| case of using cool technology because one can, even though
| it doesn't produce a more convenient result, however cool
| it might look.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| I cannot agree after watching shows which embedded text
| well.
|
| Your argument kinda sounds right when you just imagine
| it... but doesn't hold weight once you actually
| experience them.
|
| If this text isn't done like this then you have to either
| omit it entirely, possibly leaving out relevant details,
| or just put them next to the normal subtitles. The latter
| doesn't work at all for me, because I can't distinguish
| which text relates to what quick enough.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| It can be overlayed at the correct place, without
| blending into the picture.
|
| For instance translating the text on a piece of paper by
| writing the translation above the piece of paper.
|
| How it is written in this case, in charcoal, on the
| paper, in perspective, seamlessly blending into the
| paper, makes it seem as if, for whatever reason, the same
| text was written twice on the paper in English and
| Japanese.
|
| It's even more unnerving when the text be written and the
| English pencil charcoal appears out of thin air next to
| the Japanese charcoal that emerges from a pencil.
| hatsunearu wrote:
| The few groups that used to do that have stopped making
| fansubs. Mostly because HorribleSubs took a lot of the market
| share by just ripping CruncyRoll subs and re-packaging with
| RAWs.
|
| But now that HS is gone, I'm not sure what's happening to the
| scene. There is a power vacuum and I'm not sure if anyone
| took up the space.
| throwaway314158 wrote:
| Aside from HorribleSubs, these days you can hardly throw a
| rock without hitting a major streaming service that offers
| anime. Setting aside whatever free episodes you can get
| from Crunchyroll et al., Netflix, Amazon, Hulu... the list
| goes on. And for the majority of people, the services are
| convenient enough to outweigh whatever video quality
| advantage that HS or subtitle quality advantage (some)
| fansub groups offered.
| novok wrote:
| Isn't that basically crunchyroll taking most of the market
| by doing sub translations in the first place? Kind of like
| the netflix / spotify effect on piracy.
| jsheard wrote:
| The show I watched was a recent release, but it went
| through Netflix jail so I guess that's why it got the high-
| quality fansub treatment. There weren't any official
| subtitles for groups like HorribleSubs to yoink day of
| release which bought time for a high-effort group to do
| their thing.
| ihuman wrote:
| I don't want to name them here, but a new group has popped
| up that does the exactly same thing HorribleSubs did.
| jowsie wrote:
| Erai-raws has been at it for a while now.
| ihuman wrote:
| They rip the subs too? I assumed they just ripped the raw
| video because of their name.
| jowsie wrote:
| The few anime I've watched from their releases all had
| subtitles.
| teraflop wrote:
| There are definitely still anime fansub groups active,
| although not nearly as many as there used to be.
|
| Mostly they seem to work on shows that haven't been
| licensed by official simulcast sources, or that are
| licensed but aren't being released on a timely schedule (
| _ahem_ Netflix), or projects that for whatever reason they
| think the official releases haven 't done justice to.
| kuroguro wrote:
| Subsplease seem to have replaced them.
| mxfh wrote:
| With german word `Ass` for ace, among others. Could as well just
| be
|
| - playing card name,
|
| - tennis rule
|
| - or some medical advice on acetylsalicylic acid
| (Acetylsalicylsaure/ASS)
|
| and derived tradenames that also leave german language context as
| tradenames and the likes.
|
| https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ass
| [deleted]
| MFogleman wrote:
| Just wanna make sure I got this right. "ASS", automatic instant
| suspension with 0 human review.
|
| "King's Throne: Game of Lust.", with advertised gameplay content
| such as "I, [the King], shall interrogate this female prisoner
| privately in my bed chambers", is one of the top advertised games
| on google play.
|
| Got it.
| grawprog wrote:
| The world we live in is strange. On one hand, it's trivial to
| find and consume content full of profanity, violence, sex and
| other things deemed 'inappropriate' yet on the other hand we
| live in a world where this old George Carlin classic still
| applies
|
| https://youtu.be/5ssJtD08vCc
| pwdisswordfish6 wrote:
| It's not just Google, though.
|
| https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=7291
| [deleted]
| smsm42 wrote:
| One of those pays ad money to Google.
| hatsunearu wrote:
| I hate the ads for that game so much when I'm watching random
| crap on Youtube...
| ttt0 wrote:
| I wonder, why people suddenly forgot that adblockers are a
| thing?
| nitrogen wrote:
| Because they like the channels they watch and want them to
| get ad revenue?
| ttt0 wrote:
| Do you mean all those channels that have been demonetized
| and have Patreon accounts?
|
| And if this really is the case then stop complaining
| about it.
| nitrogen wrote:
| Everyone is well within their rights to want to support
| creators by tolerating some ads, while simultaneously
| complaining about ads they do not tolerate.
| ttt0 wrote:
| Not tolerating ads == using adblocker.
|
| And can we please stop turning every discussion, no
| matter how trivial, into a discussion about rights? Did I
| say anything that would suggest that I want to take any
| rights from someone?
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| IDK, but maybe the game is marked as mature, while the app is
| not, and the automated review gave the former a pass in
| profanity?
| falcolas wrote:
| Approved since it doesn't have a naughty word in it. /s
| bambax wrote:
| Yes. This is the current state of "AI" at Google: a faulty
| regexp that matches "ASS" in "SSA, ASS, TTML" but not, from the
| issue description, in "(SSA/ASS)".
| smt88 wrote:
| As an extensive and long-time user of Google Assistant, it's
| painfully obvious that a large percentage of "NLP" they're
| supposedly doing is actually regexp/keyword searching.
| extrememacaroni wrote:
| ehehe, sex
| tyingq wrote:
| Maybe Google could partner with a company that has lots of
| experience parsing language and deriving intent/context? /s
| bambax wrote:
| > _Your app contains content that doesn 't comply with the Sexual
| Content and Profanity policy._
|
| What the fuck is "profanity"? Are we a religious society? Why
| shouldn't we able to say "ass" (!) or show nipples??
|
| The ban on porn is defensible outside of any moral framework
| because once you allow porn then all what's left is porn
| (although it would be useful to think about why that is).
|
| But "profanity"? Come on.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| > _The ban on porn is defensible outside of any moral framework
| because once you allow porn then all what 's left is porn
| (although it would be useful to think about why that is)._
|
| _Reddit_ and _8chan_ allow the creation of pornography
| subboards and never even approached that state.
| ironmagma wrote:
| Yes we are a religious society. Our roots are in puritanism, in
| fact that's one of the main differentiators from the (Catholic-
| based) European countries from which we sprang.
| tpmx wrote:
| "We"? Google is booking less than 50% of its revenue in the
| US.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| The authoritarian shall always be more powerful than the
| libertarian, simply because he will leave with his wallet,
| if he find something that offends him, but the libertarian
| will not leave if he cannot find something that would
| offend the authoritarian.
|
| Therefore, it is commercially more viable to keep the
| authoritarian happy.
| tpmx wrote:
| That is unfortunately true, and the reason for so much
| injustice. Thanks for that succinct way of describing
| this.
| ironmagma wrote:
| Is this about Google's revenue as a whole (mostly ads) or a
| particular market (Android play store in the USA)?
| tpmx wrote:
| That level of granularity isn't provided by Google in
| their financial reports, so Google as a whole.
|
| That said, Android seems to be doing better outside the
| US than in the US.
|
| I wouldn't be _very_ surprised if US revenue was dominant
| within the Android BU (or whatever they call it today).
|
| Last time I heard (probably outdated) there were at least
| 2 billion non-US Google Play devices active; compared to
| the 120 million US Google Play devices figure that's
| widely available.
|
| Also: Wouldn't surprise me if Google makes more from
| licensing the Google Play store to non-US markets than
| they do from the Google Play sales revenue globally.
| Triv888 wrote:
| They need to take god out of politics and public schools...
| from the dollar bill, for example.
| ironmagma wrote:
| I disagree. God is already out of most schools, and it
| isn't working well at all. Each school needs its own fully-
| integrated approach based on the students at the school and
| what works for them.
| Triv888 wrote:
| Why would it be good to lie to them? What are the
| consequences when you don't?
| ironmagma wrote:
| We lie to children all the time to protect them. Reality
| isn't actually good to be exposed to when you are a
| child; it's much better to encounter it in a safer,
| nonthreatening way, which is why we have euphemisms and
| hide the fact of death and Santa Claus for so long. All
| of that however is separate from whether we should teach
| religion, which is more or less entirely orthogonal to
| facts. Religion covers that which is unobservable, almost
| by definition.
| jaspax wrote:
| Religion's got nothing to do with it. Racial slurs are a subset
| of "profanity", and I wager that you support Google's desire to
| not have apps in their store which prominently feature racial
| slurs. _Every_ culture has its "bad words" which are forbidden
| to use in polite company.
|
| (Of course the actual app in question is still completely
| innocent, because Google's vetting process is a trash fire.)
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| > _Religion 's got nothing to do with it. Racial slurs are a
| subset of "profanity", and I wager that you support Google's
| desire to not have apps in their store which prominently
| feature racial slurs._
|
| I have no objection.
|
| > _Every culture has its "bad words" which are forbidden to
| use in polite company._
|
| I'm not so sure that that is true.
|
| I do not think there is but a single word in the Dutch
| language that cannot be featured even on children's
| programming. Some cultures have a concept of "taboo words",
| and others seem to lack it.
| klyrs wrote:
| Wikipedia has quite a long list, including wide assortment
| of racial slurs. Would all of this really be acceptable in
| kids tv?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_profanity
|
| Also this entry is interesting:
|
| > Kankerlijer means "cancer sufferer". It is a strong
| insult: an example of its legal status can be found in a
| 2008 court case, in which using the word kankerlijer to
| insult a police officer was cited as a serious offense.
|
| Though, little surprise if "offensive to an authority
| figure" is a lower bar than "offensive to parents"
| handoflixue wrote:
| It seems disingenuous to bring up racial slurs in the context
| of profanity. They're two very different categories, even if
| they are both subsets of "words that can get you in trouble."
| As you acknowledge, the app in question was blocked for
| profanity, not slurs.
|
| As parent comment says, profanity seems to be mostly a
| religious issue. I can say "fuck" on TV, or in my novel, or
| even in my Hacker News comment. But I doubt I'd get away with
| such language in church, or a show I wanted to sell to a
| Puritanical USA audience.
|
| None of that has anything to do with slurs, which are much
| more widely agreed as "wrong." You can reasonably expect a
| service or file extension that turned out to accidentally be
| a slur would get a lot more attention, unlike "ASS"
| ttt0 wrote:
| First of all, do you think that promoting LGBT would fly in
| a church? I'm pretty sure it's far more offensive to a
| religious person than saying "fuck". Second, before this
| issue got so big and everyone started talking about it, the
| official line was that they need to be "advertiser
| friendly". As stupid as I think it is, it seems far more
| likely than your explanation.
| kube-system wrote:
| Generally speaking, profanity is language that is
| _socially_ offensive. The reasons that the language might
| be offensive depends on the social makeup and norms of the
| group you 're referring to. Sometimes those norms are
| driven by religion, sometimes they are driven by other
| factors, and sometimes it is a combination of reasons.
|
| For example, you can find instances of social groups that:
|
| 1. are not religious, but recognize the concept of
| profanity.
|
| 2. do not recognize some slurs as profane.
|
| 3. are religious, but do not recognize the same profanity
| as other social groups that belong to the same religion.
| protomyth wrote:
| Well, speaking of religion or at least Christianity, the word
| "ass" is used quite a bit in the Bible.
|
| [edit]The dangers of such filters can be observed at this link
| http://bash.org/?178890 [/edit]
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| I guess the Scunthorpe problem is still a thing.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
| int_19h wrote:
| A long time ago, I saw a guy unable to post on a corporate blog
| of his own team. Turned out that his name was flagged by a
| filter.
|
| What made this particularly egregious is that the name in
| question: "Hui" - wasn't even a swear word in either his own
| native language - Chinese - nor in English. But it closely
| resembles a Russian profanity. Turned out that the filter was
| "multilingual", and applied rules for _all_ languages to all
| posts...
| grishka wrote:
| Why the hell would it even apply Russian filters to something
| that isn't written in Cyrillic? And this isn't the best
| English transliteration of that word either... That's really
| some dedication.
| emayljames wrote:
| Yeah, they would have to do literal translation based on
| phonetics. That is just insane.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > they would have to do literal translation based on
| phonetics.
|
| That seems pretty unlikely to have happened here; I don't
| know the Russian word in question, but the Chinese "hui"
| rhymes with English "clay". (It also rhymes with the more
| sensibly spelled Chinese "wei"; the 'e' is only omitted
| when the syllable begins with a consonant. Compare "feng
| shui".) I'd be surprised if that were a possible reading
| of any Russian that might be transliterated "hui".
| emayljames wrote:
| The example where the AFA filtered a news article about Tyson
| Gay, to replace any instance of his surname to 'homosexual' is
| an hilarious example of why you need context.
| 015a wrote:
| Reminiscent to me of Call of Duty Warzone; it has loadouts
| which you can give custom names (that only you see!) which are
| protected with a profanity filter. Comically, some of the
| literal names of the guns are banned as being profane, like
| "MP5".
| mikestew wrote:
| My CoD group of friends still occasionally calls the assault
| rifle "analsault". Stupid, huh? Not as stupid as an earlier
| version of CoD (Black Ops 1, IIRC) that wouldn't let you name
| a load out "assault $WHATEVER", 'cuz you know, "ass". But
| "anal" is so much better so that was allowed.
|
| They fixed it in later versions, but I still have a
| "penetration" class because I'm immature that way.
| wheybags wrote:
| Maybe I'm being dense here, but what possible profane meaning
| is there in MP5?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| The RIAA is trying to get ahead of various up-and-coming
| formats that will be used to pirate their content.
| vaduz wrote:
| Isn't it just to double-plus-ensure that no one
| "accidentally" uses a name that ActivisionBlizzard did not
| license from the appropriate gun manufacturer?
|
| I.e. It has little to do with profanity but a lot to prevent
| someone from making screnshot of a loadout with a gun that
| looks like MP5, is named by them as "MP5 whatever" and
| behaves like an MP5 in some type of legal action?
| 015a wrote:
| Unclear. They do absolutely refer to their gun as, say, the
| "MP5" in-game.
|
| Though, interestingly, in Modern Warfare (2019), many guns
| have two names; for example, the MP5 is also called SMG
| Charlie (as in, NATO phonetic alphabet for C). I kind of
| got the impression that it was laying groundwork for a
| long-term goal of removing the actual names of the guns;
| possibly due to licensing fees, or maybe to divorce the
| ugly reality of killing with video game killing, I don't
| know.
| sli wrote:
| I cannot imagine horror of the precedent it would be set if
| H&K successfully sued AB over copyright infringement for
| names that are visible only to the player who entered them.
| Those names are not shown publicly.
| vaduz wrote:
| Whilst I agree - and fervently hope we won't have to live
| in such a world - I thought the same about the API
| copyrightability and that one is not exactly going the
| _reasonable way_ at the moment.
|
| H&K has an US trademark consisting of just "MP5" in
| relation to a ton of things (though not video games!) so
| they could at least try make a case out of it not being
| purely nominative use and tie AB in court, if they
| wished. It would be PR suicide, but still, not the most
| stupid thing they have done.
| ufmace wrote:
| It feels like it would be pretty bizarre if a court
| somewhere actually ruled in favor of a gun manufacturer for
| lost revenue in a trademark suit because somebody was
| genuinely confused between a weapon in a video game and
| ordering an actual physical weapon, that can only be
| legally ordered by licensed firearm dealers and government
| organizations.
| tschwimmer wrote:
| See also Dark Souls multiplayer, in which you can see many
| "K***hts" running around.
| hatsunearu wrote:
| Oh my god that's fucking hilarious.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I'm just agog that people are still doing dumb pattern matching
| for profanity filters. I just assumed that YEARS AGO people
| realized how dumb it is, but apparently: No.
| boring_twenties wrote:
| Not super relevant or anything but I just can't help but
| share my favorite profanity filter story, so here you go.
|
| I worked at a place that had a profanity filter in two parts.
|
| The first part was in C, several pages of if (!strcmp(x, a))
| return 0;
|
| After all that, it then invokes popen() to ssh to another
| machine and run a shell script there, which contains several
| more pages of string comparisons, this time in shell.
| siltpotato wrote:
| Hold on, what? Okay, return false if they aren't equal,
| then open another process to repeat this method once again
| in the shell... I can't guess the reason. Would you know if
| there is any reason this might have been done?
| tyingq wrote:
| Doesn't popen() pass strings to a shell? Sounds dangerous,
| as you would have to escape semicolons, quotes, etc.
| ljm wrote:
| I might be wrong but I think it's about censoring the
| 'hell' in 'shell'. Because some parts of the world
| consider words like 'hell' and 'damn' to be profane.
| aidos wrote:
| I once had a bug that I traced back to a rule (can't remember
| in which part of the stack - though I think it was client
| controlled IIS) that was striping the "select" from the word
| "selected" in query string params in an attempt to thwart sql
| injection. From memory it was naive enough that
| "sselectelect" was converted nicely in the process.
| jimsmart wrote:
| Similar: Yahoo used to (2002) replace any instance of the
| character sequence 'eval' (and other 'bad' strings) in
| their emails, in an attempt to prevent Javascript exploits.
| Needless to say it created a small amount of havoc!
|
| http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2138014.stm
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/medireview
| distances wrote:
| I hadn't heard of this and I'm now flabbergasted. Is it
| even legal for a service provider to secretly change
| email contents? It's absolutely outlandish to imagine how
| someone first thought this could be a good idea, and then
| found someone capable of executing the plan and
| apparently agree.
| simion314 wrote:
| I had similar issues, the software is Mod Security that
| some hosting companies use and some rules will empty out
| your POST request field if it contained text like "....
| select ...from..." where the 2 keywords were paragraphs
| apart.
| drzoltar wrote:
| FWIW, general profanity detection is a highly nontrivial
| problem. It's true that such subword profanity filters aren't
| that great, but slightly more sophisticated ones (eg whole
| word matching or n-grams) tend to have relatively good
| precision. You could train a fancy neural network, but the
| overall return on precision and recall tends to be not that
| great (compared to the exponential change in speed and cost).
| The problem almost always crops up in out-of-distribution
| sentences (such as "bone" at a paleontology conference).
| wiml wrote:
| Even humans with full general intelligence and domain
| knowledge will fail at profanity detection. I think the
| problem here is not so much that there are false triggers,
| but that there is no way to deal with the false triggers --
| no way to appeal to reason or utility.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| It's a problem with a subjective answer.
|
| One man's profanity is not another man's profanity.
|
| Of course, the personality trait of desiring censoring
| "bad words" seems to highly correlate with a belief in
| objective morality. -- _the others are wrong about what
| they find profane!_
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| A great many places do this and automatically refuse content
| based on arbitrary "bad words" regardless the context.
|
| I remember being denied to post a forum post containing the
| phrase "tardive dyskinesia", as it appears that it rejected
| anything with the string "tard" in it.
|
| I'm not sure as to whom they think to be helping with that,
| but it's entirely possible that their advertisement revenue
| will actually suffer, if the string "tard" be found on their
| pages.
| gaius_baltar wrote:
| They just rebranded it as "AI-powered profanity filter" :)
| Majromax wrote:
| This is Google. It's probably _very smart_ pattern matching
| for profanity.
|
| The neural network may have taken millions of core-hours to
| learn to be as dumb (here) as a blind keyword search.
| smichel17 wrote:
| Well, obviously. If it were a dumb profanity filter then it
| would be possible to fix it!
| ttt0 wrote:
| We had to give up our privacy to create a highly
| sophisticated technology that doesn't even work half of the
| time. I love the future, it was totally worth it.
| [deleted]
| tyingq wrote:
| My particular favorite is this one: _" In October 2020 a
| profanity filter banned the word bone at a paleontology
| conference."_
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/dyzamj/a-profanity-filter-ba...
| ourcat wrote:
| And the Arsenal pocketwatch.
| gokhan wrote:
| Got some pages on my site banned from displaying Google ads
| because the user generated content on the pages includes a
| discussion on "Penisilin" (Penicillin in Turkish).
|
| Never appealed since it's mostly a time sink with Google when
| you're nobody.
| robomartin wrote:
| How long until people just stop relying on these platforms as the
| foundation...sorry, no, the single unstable column, that supports
| their entire business?
|
| Same issue with third party sellers on Amazon getting destroyed
| when Amazon irrationally shuts down their products or entire
| account.
|
| It's crazy. This has been screaming for government regulation for
| years.
| newbie578 wrote:
| Oh how I long for the app stores to get regulated by the
| government. Or even better, to make Apple and Google allow full
| integration with PWAs, so that anyone anywhere can use it,
| without downloading APKs.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Google's ML-based ad optimizer was literally called "SmartASS".
| You may also know the name because the team of the same name was
| a perennial winner of the ICFP Programming Contest.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/google-exec-our-40-billion-s...
| sub7 wrote:
| lol they'll fix this tomorrow
| chovybizzass wrote:
| Time for a p2p app store that works on all devices.
| contravariant wrote:
| I'm pretty happy with F-droid so far, any other
| suggestions/thoughts?
| redsolver wrote:
| https://skydroid.app/ is a decentralized app store for Android
| exyi wrote:
| Yes. It actually exists and is fairly popular - the web.
| Unfortunately, Google has squeezed itself into it too and can
| now block whatever it wants ;(
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25802366)
| bzb6 wrote:
| Yes, federated and decentralised which can run Windows and
| SPARC applications.
| kevincox wrote:
| So HTTP or IPFS? We just need a standardized update mechanism.
| tw04 wrote:
| What you're actually saying is: time for government
| intervention.
|
| There's no planet on which Apple or Google will voluntarily
| give up the revenue stream produced by their respective app
| stores.
|
| *If you're going to downvote me, at least provide some evidence
| that I'm off base. Google and Apple both refuse to allow other
| app stores and there's absolutely 0 recourse that doesn't
| involve the government stepping in. F-droid and the rest don't
| cover anything approaching "all devices".
| int_19h wrote:
| This kind of thing is exactly what anti-trust laws are for.
| Thaxll wrote:
| Right so when you have some childporn showing up, illegal
| material what are you going to do?
| falcolas wrote:
| Contact the police so they can arrest the poster?
|
| Also, maintain a _public_ denylist of packages with an
| transparent process for overriding or correcting the list?
| hotz wrote:
| Is a denylist a blacklist? Denylist as a word doesn't
| really roll off the tongue.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| Yes. A news search points to last July when many social
| media/tech orgs decided to switch from
| whitelist/blacklist to allowlist/denylist.
|
| see https://grahamcluley.com/blacklist-whitelist-
| terminology/
|
| I would've gone with yeslist/nolist - due to being
| shorter in writing and speech.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| And blacklist doesn't actually mean anything without the
| context of an archaic idiom; it was a large barrier for
| me when I was younger, until I eventually learnt what the
| word means. You can go with "blocklist", if you'd rather;
| that's similarly meaningful and sounds similar.
| falcolas wrote:
| It rolls off the tongue better than blacklist, since a
| hard consonant in the middle of the word is slightly
| harder to enunciate than one starting the word.
|
| But, should you instead mean "I don't like it so I'll
| ridicule it," well, I can't please everybody. Sorry.
| jowsie wrote:
| We could just go back to killfile
| stretchcat wrote:
| You mean like what happens on the web, the system you're
| using presently?
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Report it to the FBI so the developers of the app get sent to
| prison, where they belong.
|
| Are you in the habit of reporting serious crimes to the
| nearest advertising agency?
| vmception wrote:
| Investigate the people that created or are the primary
| distributors of the childporn because they are trackable on
| clearnet, and let everyone else make their own choice of not
| installing or stop being able to access when the servers
| disappear?
|
| Can you explain why thats not the first thing that came to
| mind? Why are our realities so different?
| txsoftwaredev wrote:
| If you are Twitter, then you just let it ride.
|
| https://nypost.com/2021/01/21/twitter-sued-for-allegedly-
| ref...
| h_anna_h wrote:
| I do wonder what the justification for banning apps that "contain
| or promote sexually explicit content or profanity, including
| pornography".
| worik wrote:
| Me too.
|
| Where I am from prostitution is not illegal. On line tools are
| a real boon for the workers.
|
| Pornography is entirely normal, and pornographers need all the
| protection other workers have, attitudes like this make that
| hard.
|
| I really thought we were over prurience! Silly me.
|
| Silly Google. If you are going to be Evil (TM) at least be
| grown up about it!
| username90 wrote:
| American companies will enforce American cultural norms, simple
| as that.
| mbg721 wrote:
| America is in the midst of a weird struggle to decide what
| those are; the companies are just trying to minimize local
| reputation risk.
| worik wrote:
| Some one said, and was downvoted into oblivion (?)...
|
| " Yup, that's about how much effort I expected them to put into
| their app store: absolutely nothing beyond cheap, automated
| heuristics. Why invest in a decent ecosystem when you're one of
| the two options in town?
|
| I'm about an inch away from throwing my phone in the river and
| switching to a GPS-only device for navigating in my car. All the
| convenience a mobile device offers can't make up for the crap
| software experience you're forced into--literally ransoming the
| use of your phone through their company store. "
|
| Me too! I have ordered and am awaiting my Pine Phone for this
| exact reason.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I literally own a pinephone so dont misunderstand me as
| disagreeing, but you could always just stay on Android and use
| F-Droid.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Google put limits in Android such that the Play Store is the
| only app distribution method that can implement background
| installation of apps, batch installations of apps and
| automatic upgrading.
|
| F-Droid provides those features only if you're able to root
| your phone, which manufacturers actively try to stop users
| from doing. Also, rooting your phone opens it up to
| vulnerabilities and exploits.
| grishka wrote:
| If you have root and/or install an alternative store as a
| privileged system app, it will be able to install apps in
| the background just like Play Store.
| wheybags wrote:
| I use lineageos (pure foss fork of android, with the exception
| of firmware) without installing google play services. It works
| pretty well!
| m-p-3 wrote:
| And Google AI made another victim to the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
| jennyyang wrote:
| Once companies become monopolies like Google, Facebook etc, I
| believe the government should impose regulations like mandatory
| SLAs for customer support.
|
| Right now, companies like Google can completely ignore customer
| service because they are a monopoly. And they do this, because it
| saves them billions of dollars. If they had actual competition,
| they would spend more on customer support because it would be a
| point of contention, but since they have no competition, they
| just let bots handle everything and they completely ignore their
| customers who have no choice but to continue to use their
| products. This is a form or monopolistic behavior that needs to
| be addressed by regulations.
|
| Monopolies should be forced to spend money on real humans or some
| form of effective customer support, with a regulated SLA. It's
| the only way to keep these companies in check once they have
| completely starved any form of competition away from them.
| [deleted]
| alex_c wrote:
| It is infuriating that Google's default action for these
| automated takedowns is to _remove_ the app and ask the developer
| to upload a new build _with a new package name_ , which means not
| keeping any of the existing users.
|
| It's happened to two of my clients in the past 6 months based on
| small infractions in the app metadata, but no issue with the app
| itself.
|
| In both cases the app was taken down with no advance notice, and
| eventually reinstated after an appeal and several very stressful
| days of waiting.
|
| Apple seems to be very selective during the approval process, and
| is often inconsistent so a minor update can get rejected for
| something that was approved many times before. I guess different
| people review and interpret the rules differently so maybe this
| is unavoidable.
|
| Google (from what I can tell) seems to take a very different
| approach and relies much more on automated enforcement. The
| process is on average much lower friction for the developer, but
| getting previously approved app listings removed at any time
| without warning is _not_ a good experience.
|
| Edit: I forgot to mention that you can't actually edit the
| metadata while the app is suspended and re-submit it for review.
| The only two choices are to appeal and edit the description
| _after_ the app is reinstated, or create a completely new app
| listing.
| FriendlyNormie wrote:
| I once submitted an update for my app and Google banned it from
| the Play Store for nearly two weeks. A lot of people were
| cloning my app at the time and the dumbfuck app reviewers were
| so accustomed to denying the clones that they assumed my app
| was a clone of itself. Nearly everyone on this planet is a
| complete fucking retard.
| chedabob wrote:
| Apple at least keep your app up, and it's obvious there's a
| human on the other end. The responses are usually pretty quick
| (often within minutes if you reply straight away), and you can
| pinky-promise to fix the issues in the next release if it's an
| update.
| mmastrac wrote:
| Unless you're iSH and have to go to the court of public
| opinion and shame Apple into doing the right thing.
|
| Apple was going to remove the app itself.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I wonder if you could make a dummy app (a canary), submit it,
| and use that to test if your metadata is acceptable?
| ncann wrote:
| You have to be very careful about doing that. Every rejection
| is a potential strike against your developer account
| (especially for serious offenses like trademark violation).
| Get too many strikes and your dev account will get banned.
| ffhhj wrote:
| Google uses blacklists of words to demonetize Youtube channels.
| They have similar blacklists to ban Play apps. I found it the
| hard way when they removed my video recording app after I
| simply added "spy cam" in the list of features.
|
| Lesson of life learned, so I implemented ways to keep in
| contact with my users in case of sudden ban and ask them to
| move to a new app or another channel.
| mchusma wrote:
| We have had this happen twice as well. Maddening.
| fjabre wrote:
| I don't understand Google's App store play. Just another walled
| garden where things like this can happen.
|
| They were the champions of the open web for a long time. What
| happened?
| rodgerd wrote:
| > They were the champions of the open web for a long time.
| What happened?
|
| It was a con.
| pjmlp wrote:
| ChromeOSissfication of the Web happened, with lots of FOSS
| developers putting Chrome everywhere, including bundling it
| as "native" application.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| Joseph Stalin was a champion of the poor, before he became
| very rich.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| They automated everything in order to not have to invest in
| human labor, in order to profit most greatly from scale while
| paying the fewest people they can get away with. Their
| original index was just an algorithm that distilled human
| labor from webrings and indexes, that supposedly was great on
| its own (hint: nope, they crawled the entire Internet, and
| yet they still remain critically dependent on blogs and news
| sites for the volunteer labor their algorithm depends on).
| rmsaksida wrote:
| > What happened?
|
| People fell for it.
| cgb223 wrote:
| They found out if you close it and own it, you can make more
| money
| jacquesm wrote:
| Schmidt, greed.
| brookmg wrote:
| They removed the "don't be evil" motto.
| _jal wrote:
| > They were the champions of the open web for a long time.
|
| Because that's what you say when you're the underdog.
|
| Remember Apple's 1984 ad?
|
| Microsoft's "a computer on every desk"?
|
| The tech industry seems to support a rotating cast of
| monopolists riding atop whatever gate-keeping function
| emerges, each one holding on as long as it can until replaced
| by something that ends up looking a lot like the last top
| dog.
| toyg wrote:
| You could replace "the tech industry" with "capitalists"
| and it would only gain in correctness. There is no market
| incentive to be "good" past a certain size, and plenty of
| incentives to be "evil".
| comboy wrote:
| I'm quite confident you can't run a company as big as
| Google without being evil but it seems useful to ponder why
| does it happen.
|
| Corpo structure seems to have something to do with it,
| separate things into categories, then teams get categories
| and optimize locally without taking bigger picture into
| account (or even knowing what the picture is). Some
| regulations, maybe some pressures from some agencies about
| which they are not allowed to talk about. Etc.
|
| But at some point I have to wonder about the mind of
| someone decisive in the company when "are we the baddies"
| question appears. Do they rationalize and think that "well,
| we need to do this because security botnets blahblah users
| have no idea what we are dealing with here and it's for
| their own good even if they don't understand it yada yada",
| or do they just don't give a shit. Or maybe it's like with
| me disliking my government - I definitely don't like it but
| I don't feel like fighting that giant machine at the
| moment, I can't do anything on my own, it would require
| cooperation and a plan and I have some stuff to do.
| rtkwe wrote:
| There's a lot of reasons. Building a closed guarden that
| locks people in feels a lot safer from a competition
| standpoint than the alternative, if you can make it hard
| to steal your customers and only a few (always remember
| that being on and reading HN means you're not much of an
| average user), it's also just easier than being open, a
| closed system can make changes much faster than an open
| one that has to get concensus before adding a new feature
| for example.
|
| In this specific case and most of the time where Google's
| complete lack of support shows up it's because having
| manual review costs money and the process that screws the
| app developer is easier than having a secondary process
| that needs more people to decide if the first automated
| or rote manual scan made a mistake.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| It's quite simple: if one not be evil, one won't become
| or remain as big.
|
| It's simple survival of the fittest. The lion who feels
| compassion for his prey will not pass his genes to the
| next generation.
| deckard1 wrote:
| > seems useful to ponder why does it happen.
|
| Ooooh. I know this one! Because _that 's what VCs want_.
| AirBNB, Uber, Postmates, Google, Facebook, Apple.
|
| VCs want to invest in winner-takes-all platforms and
| markets with incredibly strong network effects. But don't
| say any of that out loud: https://themarkup.org/google-
| the-giant/2020/08/07/google-doc...
|
| All these people rushing in to Silicon Valley with hat-
| in-hand going from VC to VC talking about how they care
| so much about the user or the product. It's all a giant
| colossal fucking sham. You're there to become a
| billionaire. Can we all stop dancing around this fact
| already? Paul Graham and his fucking essays. The
| pretentious VC Twitterverse. It's always been about the
| money. Facebook's earliest slide deck tells the story of
| how they are going to harvest their users' private data
| and offer it up to advertisers:
|
| https://app.slidebean.com/p/s15UZQkE7T/Facebooks-
| original-pi...
|
| This is back when they were still "The Facebook" and a
| tiny startup. They didn't suddenly become evil and
| greedy. Greed and evil _was the plan_. It 's right there.
| Google is no different.
| comboy wrote:
| Many people at the top are set up for life (and maybe
| next few generations). Why would they care about money?
|
| Yes of course you can tell the tale how it's not ever
| enough, how money equals power and people want power, but
| I don't really buy that. These are highly intelligent and
| creative individuals. They probably also know that power
| is responsibility and have enough of that.
|
| Additional millions/billions have zero impact on their
| life and I really doubt many of them playing a game
| between themselves about who has the biggest number.
| Popular media probably care more about that.
|
| If you want to scream at the rich, I think you won't find
| names of those most interesting in any rankings and not
| much in tech. They have they patents, oil wells, gov
| contracts, connections, HFTs and wealth well hidden from
| the public eye.
|
| Most of companies you list offered something that people
| wanted and that's why they got a lot of money*. That's
| how the money is supposed to work. Compare it to trading
| companies that got money from banks which got money from
| Fed which was created out of thin air. Those at the top
| of banks and big funds effectively get money from
| everyone else, without providing them any value, without
| their consent. Even innocent real estate investment seem
| to involve more evil and greed than making a and running
| a huge company without pretty much any realistic
| vacation.
|
| I'm not saying that your point is completely without
| merit, there is a lot of greed especially in the startup
| world. I just think that's a huge oversimplification.
|
| * more realistically they won at something new that was
| growing fast
| Yeroc wrote:
| Yeah, this is what doesn't make sense to me. Why not leave the
| current approved app listing up? Why, during an update would
| they completely remove the listing for previously approved
| versions?!? Is the process really that broken?
| TrianguloY wrote:
| Don't worry, this is just the Google way: "act first, fix later".
| It's better to ban at the first sign of a problem, and then if
| something bad happened review and fix it.
|
| Nothing to worry about, they also expect this from you, simply
| act first and if you are doing it wrong they will act...and
| ban...and disable your account...wait.
|
| (They are the big, you are the small, they can, you don't)
| monadic3 wrote:
| Yup, that's about how much effort I expected them to put into
| their app store: absolutely nothing beyond cheap, automated
| heuristics. Why invest in a decent ecosystem when you're one of
| the two options in town?
|
| I'm about an inch away from throwing my phone in the river and
| switching to a GPS-only device for navigating in my car. All the
| convenience a mobile device offers can't make up for the crap
| software experience you're forced into--literally ransoming the
| use of your phone through their company store.
| black3r wrote:
| What's up with this American obsession with censoring
| profanities? Who gets to decide what's a bad word? And why are
| people suddenly okay with "censored" versions of "swearwords"
| like heck vs. hell, or bleeping out the middle of f*ck while you
| can still hear both F and K...? The intent is still there...
|
| If there is enough of other people who are annoyed by this, can
| we please start doing something about this?
| interestica wrote:
| Netflix just release a series of episodes on the history of
| curse words. Hosted by Nicholas Cage of all people. The jokes
| are kinda weak and don't land enough... but there are a couple
| interesting spots. I think just the fact that a show like this
| can now exist on a medium like this says a lot about how far
| we've come. And I think it speaks to where we're going ---
| where we collectively just care less and less about
| 'profanity'.
| chmod600 wrote:
| Arbitrary rules like that are a way to teach children impulse
| control, restraint, and patience.
|
| I can't easily find the exact passage, but _The Better Angels
| of Our Natue_ talks about how it 's improper in English culture
| to use a knife to help eat peas. He credits these kind of
| arbitrary rules for helping reduce violent impulses. (Note: I
| read the book a while back so I'm probably misrepresenting the
| author's point in some way, but I think that's the general
| idea.)
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| You've really got to enjoy the walled garden experience which at
| least half of the HackerNews commenters claims to be ultra-
| supremely-superior for the end user.
|
| I imagine whoever is in charge of the review machine, though,
| reads Kafka for enjoyment and inspiration.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| So is this born from plain old moralfaggotry, or is there
| actually a commercial reason behind this policy?
|
| They say sex sells, so I wonder if there actually is a reason to
| deny content that is "sexually gratifying"?
|
| I find this to exist in many commercial endeavors and I wonder if
| there are actually sound financial reasons behind it, or whether
| it was similar to the strange culture shock tourists in the
| U.S.A. faced in the 70s, being denied a shared hotel room because
| they did not have the same surname. Or perhaps that too was
| actually for commercial reasons rather than being moral
| guardians?
| smartties wrote:
| Google's bots strike again.
| fastball wrote:
| Can we just, forget about profanity being a thing and pretend it
| isn't?
| BnotABotHQ wrote:
| Once an appeal is submitted I would expect actual humans to
| intervene and check the content out. But no, it seems like bots
| took over.
| thomasz wrote:
| It's really breathtaking. They take an astonishing amount of your
| revenue. And they do not even try.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| The mobile app distribution market really needs some
| disruption.
| thomasz wrote:
| It needs regulation. There is no way a functioning market is
| going to grow out of the current ecosystem.
| malinens wrote:
| Related from my native language (Latvian): ass nazis means sharp
| knife:
|
| https://translate.google.com/?sl=lv&tl=en&text=ass%20nazis&o...
| jonas21 wrote:
| At least you got a reason from Google. I have an update to an iOS
| app that's been stuck in review for two weeks now with zero
| feedback from Apple other than boilerplate responses from
| support. This is causing me serious stress as I have no idea how
| long it's going to be in this state and I rely on this and
| another app for 100% of my income.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Google and Apple have inhibited the growth of the mobile app
| distribution market for over a decade now, and it's developers
| and users like ourselves that are punished to maintain their
| monopoly.
| smartties wrote:
| Would you rather have your whole app suspended indefinitely
| from a random google's bot decision or have a human reviewing
| your update and possibly rejecting it ? From my last 3
| rejections on iOS, they always provided me screenshots and I
| could discuss with the Apple reviewers. Same story for youtube
| (bots everywhere...), the only Google service where I could
| talk to human was Google Ads.
| jonas21 wrote:
| In this case it's not an indefinite suspension. The email
| said exactly what he needs to do to resolve the issue.
|
| I'd rather be in that situation because there would be
| something I could do to make progress, even if I didn't agree
| with the decision.
|
| In my case, I have no idea how long this is going to take -
| and I've seen horror stories on the Apple Developer forums of
| people being in review for months. It's also clear that a
| person hasn't actually been reviewing my app for 2 weeks
| straight, even though its been in the "In Review" state for
| that long. There's just not enough functionality in the app
| -- and previous updates to this app have only spent an hour
| or two in review. Maybe it's just my personality, but waiting
| in limbo with no end in sight really drives me nuts.
|
| EDIT: to be clear, neither situation is good, but if I had to
| pick one, I'd pick the former.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Going by another comment, it is not just a suspension, but
| a removal of the app identifier, which means all existing
| users are gone.
| smartties wrote:
| I see and understand your point, but I think most people
| would rather choose the later. Some business just can't
| afford to have their app suspended/users acquisitions
| stopped until their appeal is approved by someone at Google
| (and it can also takes some time). Then when you appeal,
| you only have 1 try. If this one appeal is denied you can
| say goodbye to your application forever (except if you can
| make enough noise on social medias[1]). Imagine knowing
| that each update could stop your business because a bot
| made a mistake. What a nightmare...
|
| [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/gkvic1/podcas
| t_add...
| rzz3 wrote:
| Legitimate large corporations are actively putting in effort to
| make sure apps don't contain the word "ass" in their
| descriptions? What the actual fuck. What parent cares if their
| kid sees the word "ass"?
| vander_elst wrote:
| I feel lots of the comments are polarized and don't take into the
| account the magnitude and difficulty of the problem at hand.
| Additionally, I wonder what the comments would be, if the
| opposite would have happened, an app with explicit content lands
| on the playstore. Are there any data available about the false
| positives false negatives etc. ?
| dessant wrote:
| It should have been flagged for human review. People are taking
| issue with the automated takedown, not that automated detection
| can produce false positives.
| phjesusthatguy3 wrote:
| I have a hunch that if Google actually wanted to fix the issue,
| they could afford to pay enough people enough money to find a
| solution.
|
| In the meantime, they're doing this.
| spideymans wrote:
| I mean... even Apple uses manual reviewers. If Google wanted
| to address this problem, they would have.
|
| (And no saying that App Store reviews are perfect by any
| stretch)
| ttt0 wrote:
| They're simply being put up to their own standards. They shut
| down anyone for a slightest mistake, so I'm just not going to
| feel sorry for them for their own incompetence or because it's
| hard. If they fuck up, the government will bail them out. If
| smaller companies they often destroy fuck up, no one will bat
| an eye. Split them up if necessary, maybe that will fix at
| least some of the problems.
| asudosandwich wrote:
| This showed up here six minutes after the issue was opened. Kudos
| for being proactive I guess.
| Phillips126 wrote:
| Sadly, sometimes this is the only way to get a human review on
| issues like this. Go public and be heard or face the ceaseless
| automated rejections.
| Macha wrote:
| Well, this is the closest to an actual app review support forum
| that Googlers actually read, sadly.
| Fordec wrote:
| Does a single soul believe the Google review process is fair
| and reasonable any more? Only the social media option gets
| results because it causes them enough PR pain. And there's no
| sign, at all, of that changing.
| kazinator wrote:
| I used this before. Some seven years ago I needed to hard-sub
| something, and the way to do the rendering from my .srt file
| involved some libass plugin to ffmpeg, or something like that.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Google and Apple have kept a stranglehold on the mobile
| application distribution market for over a decade now. It's time
| to break them up, or require them to allow other mobile app
| distributors on their platforms.
|
| Surely other companies can be more efficient with the 30% cut or
| less that Google takes, without forcing users to put up with the
| poor service that's exemplified by the article in the OP.
| nickysielicki wrote:
| How do you suggest they recoup the losses that come with
| developing and maintaining entire ecosystems of power-efficient
| operating systems and mobile devices?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Not my problem, Google already makes a ton of money off of me
| through their mobile ad platforms and tracking, and they can
| charge the OEMs to use Android. That might even incentivize
| the much needed competition in the mobile OS market, given
| Apple and Google's monopoly in that space, too.
|
| How does Apple do it with macOS? What about Microsoft with
| Windows?
| smartties wrote:
| Apple now takes a 15% fee and has a really good review process
| (updates are reviewed by humans within a day or two)
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _Apple now takes a 15% fee_
|
| Surely if there was real competition in the mobile app
| distribution market, we could see how efficient competitors
| can be with that 15% or less cut compared to Apple.
|
| > _and has a really good review process (updates are reviewed
| by humans within a day or two)_
|
| In this very thread, an iOS developer is lamenting the fact
| that their iOS app has been held in limbo for weeks by Apple
| reviewers[1]. It's responsible for 100% of their income, and
| Apple's arbitrary rules and reviewers are cutting into that.
|
| That doesn't instill confidence in me that Apple has a really
| good review process at all. To me, it shows that we need real
| competition in the mobile app distribution space.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25907375
| bubblicious wrote:
| > Surely other companies can be more efficient with the 30% cut
| or less that Google takes, without forcing users to put up with
| the poor service that's exemplified by the article in the OP.
|
| The fact that no other actor has done that speaks to the fact
| that it's probably not as straightforward as you might think.
| Go one step further and take any product in killedbygoogle.com
| and see how many other actors have benefited from recreating
| and living off a better version of any of those services... I'm
| curious how you think that breaking down Google or Apple would
| help us the end users in this case? Surely a smaller company
| with less assets/employees will spend even less time doing
| manual reviews for the same amount of apps.
|
| Meanwhile while HN seems focused on gov to put pressure on big
| tech to break, I keep getting reminders that my family of 5
| using video conferencing for school/work is about to hit its
| monthly data cap of 1.2TB imposed by Comcast in the middle of
| the pandemic...
| pottedplant wrote:
| How do you break them up when they control the device hardware?
| mumblemumble wrote:
| This tracks. One of the things that always gets me about US media
| is that gratuitous rape - even fairly graphic rape scenes on TV -
| is just fine as long it doesn't involve visible nipples.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| Is that so? I find that U.S.A. media tends to avoid rape but
| features all other kinds of violence.
|
| Anything related to sex, nudity and swearwords is held to the
| utmost standards of censorship.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| It depends somewhat. There are very strict rules around sex
| on broadcast TV, but those rules largely do not apply to
| cable TV or internet streaming.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| The rules might not apply, but the subject matter is
| avoided all the same for commercial reasons, since the
| audience finds it very sensitive.
|
| The rules, of course, exist as a reflexion of the
| sensibilities of the people.
|
| It's similar to how in Germany anything related to the
| Third _Reich_ is treated with the utmost sensitivity, with
| many rules; these rules exist as the people willed it so.
| The end result was that the videogame _Wolfenstein 3D_ had
| to be significantly edited ere it could be legally sold on
| the German market, as it depicted Third _Reich_ soldiers in
| accurate uniforms, which was considered too sensitive, even
| though they are the opposing side the player is fighting
| against.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| Several very popular US shows come to mind: Weeds, Game
| of Thrones, Orange is the New Black, just to take the
| first three that come to mind.
|
| I admittedly don't watch a whole lot of TV, so I may be
| off base here, but my impression is that, here in the
| USA, on TV, onscreen depictions of rape are more common
| than onscreen depictions of positive sexual activity.
| rtkwe wrote:
| In a general sense yes. The instant there's a (female) nipple
| on screen there's basically no way you're going to show up on
| broadcast TV and largely get relegated to paid cable or
| internet streaming. You don't get onscreen rape but a lot of
| sex on TV is really rape adjacent and perpetuates the kind of
| "when she says no you really need to keep asking" thing
| that's messed up so much of the US's sex culture.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| > _when she says no you really need to keep asking_
|
| I must say that I find it rather tame compared to Japanese
| fiction.
|
| Though, I suppose there the perspective is invariably
| reversed. It is almost always the perspective character
| that is the defending party, so perhaps it doesn't have the
| same influence.
|
| It's an interesting difference. I find that in U.S.A.
| romance fiction, more often than not, the protagonist is
| the party who falls in love, and the story is about the
| protagonist courting and succeeding in winning the love
| interest, whereas in Japanese romance fiction, the
| protagonist usually starts out strongly disliking the love
| interest, who is the offensive party, but eventually is won
| over.
|
| I find that say, _Boston Legal_ is essentially a _cliche_ d
| Japanese teenage girl's romance fiction from the other
| perspective. If one think of Alan Shore's many love
| interests as the protagonists of such stories, who are
| initially quite disgusted and annoyed by his antics and
| sexual harassment, but more and more find themselves
| falling for him, it's actually quite similar but reversed.
| rtkwe wrote:
| > I must say that I find it rather tame compared to
| Japanese fiction.
|
| It's definitely shades all over the world. I only really
| know about Japan's culture 12th hand honestly so the only
| thing that's really filtered down is that it seems kind
| of repressed in public having gotten a big infusion of US
| laws and ideas post WW2 and there's some issues with
| creeps in public?
|
| > I find that in U.S.A. romance fiction, more often than
| not, the protagonist is the party who falls in love
|
| I think a lot of that is due to the target audience being
| largely women so it's written from and towards what the
| audience wants to read. Most TV and movie romances show a
| predominantly predatory almost (sometimes explicitly)
| coercive romance especially in media aimed at men.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| > _It 's definitely shades all over the world. I only
| really know about Japan's culture 12th hand honestly so
| the only thing that's really filtered down is that it
| seems kind of repressed in public having gotten a big
| infusion of US laws and ideas post WW2 and there's some
| issues with creeps in public?_
|
| Japan is a civil law country with an entirely different
| legal system than the U.S.A..
|
| Japanese law knows the principle of " _one witness is no
| witness_ " as many others do. In particular in sexual
| assault cases it is often the word of the accuser _vs._
| that of the accused, in Japan as a matter of law that
| cannot result into a conviction absent further evidence,
| in the U.S.A. it can.
|
| Another issue is that in Japan, confessions are treated
| far more seriously and the police is permitted to
| interrogate in quite extreme ways, often without a
| defence attorney.
|
| So it often comes down to willpower, whether the
| defendant can keep protesting innocence when being sleep
| deprived and mentally worn down, without such a
| confession, a conviction is almost impossible, but with
| it, it is assured.
|
| > _I think a lot of that is due to the target audience
| being largely women so it 's written from and towards
| what the audience wants to read. Most TV and movie
| romances show a predominantly predatory almost (sometimes
| explicitly) coercive romance especially in media aimed at
| men._
|
| And in Japanese fiction the target audience's sex is
| irrelevant for this.
|
| Romance fiction targeted at females will typically
| feature a female protagonist who initially despises the
| love interest, but is eventually won over, often still
| having rather mixed feelings about the latter.
|
| This story is more or less the same in male-targeted
| Japanese romance fiction, except the protagonist is now
| male.
|
| The only real difference is that, quintessentially, the
| female protagonist is conflicted and indecisive, on some
| level attracted to the love interest, but on another
| considering him very unsuitable, and in male-targeted
| stories, the protagonist is implausibly dense and fails
| to realize the love interest is in love with him, despite
| all the cues obvious to the audience.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Might be a product of what you watch.
|
| One of the longest running dramas on American television is
| Law & Order, a crime drama. The most popular spinoff of this
| series, Law & Order:SVU has focused on this topic for the
| entirety of _twenty-two_ (!!!!!!) season run. That 's nearly
| 500 episodes of detectives investigating and describing some
| pretty brutal rapes and sexual assaults of people of all
| ages, genders, and walks of life.
|
| Pretty much any crime drama is going to hit on this subject
| pretty regularly. Based on the stuff I've seen on shows that
| run on broadcast TV during primetime, there is not really
| much taboo around the subject. Comedian John Mulaney has a
| very popular skit that focuses entirely on the ridiculous
| things that are said on this subject during day-time TV.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| But do they show the rape scenes, or do they merely
| discussed that they happened?
|
| As I find that a great deal of violence is often shown
| rather than merely referenced, but rape never is. This also
| seems to apply to _The Practice_ , with which I am more
| versed.
| TeaDrunk wrote:
| I'm confused how USA Media tends to avoid rape but Game of
| Thrones, which has plenty of rape (and even implied rape of a
| teenager) was massively popular in USA?
| mr_custard wrote:
| That's been my impression for as long as I can remember. Very
| puritanical compared to, say, Europe... and yet violence is
| no problem. I honestly don't think that I'll ever understand
| what the hangup with nipples is all about.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| It seems to be compared to most places that aren't Anglo-
| Saxon, even Canada seems to be excluded, and the U.K. seems
| to be quickly moving away from the nudity puritanism as of
| late. -- Australia is very much still the iron bastion of
| Anglo-Saxon purity with it's censorship laws.
|
| Even the many developing nations that have very strict
| moral standards on such matters seem to have no problem
| featuring it as an evil in fiction, in the same way the
| U.S.A. might feature murder as an evil in fiction, for the
| point is for the audience to condemn it.
|
| But rape cannot actually be shown, as that would be too
| sensitive.
|
| https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RapeIsASpecialK
| i...
|
| It's a rather interesting thing. It does not seem to be
| entirely isolated to the U.S.A., but definitely more common
| there. I remember reading an interview with a Dutch
| criminal defence attorney, who talked about the principle
| that every man deserves a trial and the best legal defence,
| but also said that even though he personally feels that a
| man suspected of a sex crime should get a legal advocate,
| he would personally praefer it not be he, as he had moral
| problems with it that would make him less effective.
|
| This was a man that regularly defended murderers, who no
| doubt confess to the crime within the seal of attorney-
| client confidentiality to him, but sex crimes are the
| limit? -- it seems an odd standard to me.
|
| Which was exactly the argument that the Dutchmen in the
| comments raised, so the mentality seems les common in the
| Netherlands, but not nonexistent either.
| coldtea wrote:
| Any kind of violence is fine. Sex is a sin though.
| Lammy wrote:
| Sex that a woman enjoys is a sin. That's why rape scenes are
| fine.
| Veen wrote:
| Is that really true. I can think of lots of sex scenes in
| American movies and TV where the woman is depicted as
| enjoying it.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| It doesn't seem true to me, as well as that rape scenes
| are common in U.S.A. fiction. They seem to be avoided,
| whereas all other crimes are liberally shown.
|
| It seems to be a subject that often makes the U.S.A.-man
| extremely uncomfortable, especially when it pertains
| children, whereas other crimes such as child murder are
| seemingly discussed and shown with little issue.
| sneak wrote:
| I was actually thinking about writing a blog post about one
| of the more culturally transgressive things Google has done
| lately: they stopped banning naked yoga videos on YouTube:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=naked+yoga
|
| There's absolutely nothing wrong with videos showing the
| human form, but people doing yoga without wearing a single
| thing--on YouTube--is definitely going to surprise some
| people. I'm honestly quite surprised that Google permits it,
| but I'm glad that they do.
|
| Someone has to challenge the ridiculous American cultural
| taboos surrounding the human form. I think YouTube is a
| terrible dangerous tarpit of censorship, a sort of societal
| "attractive nuisance", but they should be credited with
| challenging ridiculous unnecessary censorship norms when they
| take steps in the _right_ direction for once.
| alufers wrote:
| Somebody recently sent me a link to a video on YouTube
| about the infamous prickasso [1]. I was very surprised to
| see YouTube hosting a video of him, well, painting on
| camera.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/4oDT99KKvdE
| dudul wrote:
| Could it be because when it comes to nudity, the rules can be
| clearly defined? "No nipples" is a pretty simple rule that
| doesn't leave room for interpretation.
|
| "No violent rape", "no violent murder" not so much. These are
| fairly subjective, and even tautological.
|
| Not saying it's not a funny paradox, just trying to figure out
| why.
| _jal wrote:
| Nope, that's an unenforceable rule, too. Here's a great
| article explaining the evolution of FB's nipple policy:
|
| https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190503/17322942136/conte.
| ..
| dudul wrote:
| Interesting article, but I don't think that applies to TV
| media. People don't share their content on TV, it is very
| easy for TV censors to say "no female nipple on screen,
| period". For sure this becomes a problem on social media
| where there are plenty of reasons to share pictures with
| nudity (arts, breast feeding, etc), but not for movies/tv
| shows.
| [deleted]
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| "female nipples" have seen many amusing challenges, such as
| censoring female nipples by hiding them behind male nipples
| edited over them.
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25907230.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| While I think it's BS that Google just delete things like this
| (YouTube is the other classic example). I also wonder what anyone
| expects when the DCMA exists and people demand Google start
| censoring apps?
|
| At the very least, incorrect (frivolous) DCMAs need to lead to
| huge payouts for the victims.
| hawkesnest wrote:
| Obligatory TheDailyWTF reference:
|
| http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Clbuttic-Mistake-
| LocalH wrote:
| Soon as I saw this headline I was like "I bet this is about ASS
| subtitles". Sad, really. Would have figured the Scunthorpe
| problem was well enough known that it wouldn't exist in a project
| of this scale.
| smsm42 wrote:
| It's because of their scale they can afford not to care. So,
| some app gets kicked out, who cares, they have literally
| millions more, most of them (like the abovementioned sex game
| that is all over the ads) actually bringing in the sweet $$$$s.
| So they can afford to both pretend they are pure guardians of
| morality and make money, and given their size they don't need
| to have any customer service, because what you gonna do - go to
| a different store?
| avipars wrote:
| The automated system has too much control
| darkwater wrote:
| So, the masters of machine learning, where most of.human work is
| automates, who employ the finest brains in the CS world use... a
| stop words list to flag an app as indecent? I'm not being
| sarcastic, I'm really surprised.
| tpmx wrote:
| It means the Google Play store is something they don't care
| that much about.
| dgregd wrote:
| I run a small company and offer an app to monitor sales reps
| work. Managers use it also to see how much time employees spend
| in the field. To count how much time is spend in some specific
| location my app uses background location updates.
|
| 10 years ago I was distributing just the apk file. Then I moved
| to Play store. It turned out that most people on their company
| owned Android devices don't configure Play Store. App updates are
| disabled until you log in. So I had to educate my customer
| employees how to log in to Play Store and install my app. The
| additional benefit was that people had security updates of Chrome
| and other apps.
|
| Two months ago my app was suspended after I made all necessary
| changes to support Android 10. The Gbot claims that background
| location updates aren't essential for my app. As you may guess I
| wrote appeal without success. My customers pay mainly for that
| time report feature but Gbot knows better what my paying
| customers want.
|
| And I just do not care about securing my customer devices and
| Play Store any longer. Now I distribute apk files again and train
| people how to install apk files from unknown sources.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Good - There's a clear theme in the motivations of both major
| mobile OS companies here:
|
| You, a 3rd party developer making custom software products for
| a mobile platform, are no longer allowed to have customers
| yourself.
|
| Instead you must grovel and beg and pray that our lords
| Apple/Google consent to allow you to rent _their_ customers.
|
| This consent can be revoked at any time, you will pay through
| the nose for it (20%+ of total mobile revenue), and for
| basically all but the largest of customers - this consent is
| machine based and you will never be able to get a living person
| to so much as glance at any content you put into the process.
|
| ---
|
| Fuck em both.
| [deleted]
| sa1 wrote:
| Me, a customer, is very happy that they play a regulatory
| role and are taking steps to prevent surveillance of the form
| GP is proposing.
|
| I'm glad that I don't have a direct relationship with shady
| 3rd party developers.
| dgregd wrote:
| > I'm glad that I don't have a direct relationship with
| shady 3rd party developers.
|
| To enable background locations update, a sales rep has to
| open a check-in screen, wait 10 seconds to see their
| location on the map and then press the big check-in button.
| Because people were often forgetting to check-out, my
| customers requested auto check-out feature which requires
| background location updates. Once a sales rep leaves the
| check-in area, background location updates are stopped.
| Managers and employees see exactly the same time reports.
| And if some sales rep is suspicious then it is always
| possible to diable that GPS icon in the quick menu settings
| after work hours. It is almost like using your batch card
| to open doors in a workplace.
|
| A popular alternative solution to my app is to use GSP
| devices which are installed in all corporate cars. And
| there managers see their employees background location
| updates 24/7.
| yholio wrote:
| Android already has a very fine grained permission system
| that allows blocking such behavior, you simply revoke an
| apps right to access location data.
|
| So the argument then becomes an appeal to protect less
| knowledgeable users that would be tricked to enable
| advanced features for some eye candy. It has some merit;
| but there has to be some compromise there for advanced
| users, short of relegating then to APK install with no
| security updates, like in the Windows days.
| LunaSea wrote:
| When it's an explicit feature your argument is a difficult
| one to hold.
|
| It amounts to not being able to use features that are
| available in the API.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| They aren't preventing surveillance at all, they're
| monopolizing it.
|
| Google is _LITERALLY_ a fucking ad company.
|
| Apple is tracking the exact time and location you use any
| piece of software on their systems (Don't worry guys, it's
| just for security purposes! /s)
|
| ----
|
| I'm no longer sympathetic to the "They're securing my
| device from the boogeyman!" argument.
|
| It has the same overtures as "Won't anyone think of the
| children!!!!" in policy debates - It's rhetoric designed to
| obfuscate the true intentions of the parties involved, and
| short-circuit real discussion with an immediate emotional
| response.
| privacyking wrote:
| > Apple is tracking the exact time and location...
|
| Source?
| SilasX wrote:
| A few months ago it came out that MacOS was constantly
| making unencrypted calls over the internet to check
| signatures of non-Apple software; such calls were thus
| feeding back to Apple (and anyone sniffing the
| connection) the time and IP address of each application's
| being opened. (Technically, only the company, but each
| company usually only has a few apps.)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074959
| ttt0 wrote:
| https://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-yours/
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