[HN Gopher] Apple Banned an App That Simply Archived Videos of I...
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Apple Banned an App That Simply Archived Videos of ICE Abuses
Author : raw_anon_1111
Score : 68 points
Date : 2025-10-09 18:05 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.404media.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.404media.co)
| garyfirestorm wrote:
| i guess this one trick can help us ban facebook and instagram :)
| ratelimitsteve wrote:
| I love when coders run into fascists because we tend to think
| that deep knowledge of the rules and mechanisms will help us
| here the way it does everywhere else, but we're in a sphere
| where every rule is mutable by anyone who is capable of
| organizing enough violence.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Facebook won't let me make an account, so those videos are
| already gone from FB from my perspective
| valleyer wrote:
| Tim Cook is a Trump supporter.
| ratelimitsteve wrote:
| I don't think Tim Apple is anything but a Tim Apple supporter
| at the end of the day, it's just that this administration has
| shown that will abuse the civil litigation system to tie up
| your time and money endlessly without ever actually reaching a
| verdict until you finally just give up and pay Trump to go
| away...ahem, make a donation to the presidential library fund
| lovich wrote:
| A reluctant supporter is still a supporter at the end of the
| day
| ratelimitsteve wrote:
| but an enthusiastic supporter can be counted on to be a
| supporter tomorrow. he'll cow to whomever it is in his best
| interest to cow to, just like how Zucc banned Trump then
| paid him or how WaPo went from liberal leaning to only
| publishing pro-free market editorials as a matter of policy
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| sure, but there is damage being done _today_ by people
| who support trump _today_ , enthusiastically or not.
| valleyer wrote:
| Except he did that, and Trump continues to ask for more. And
| Cook keeps volunteering it.
|
| Why so many people fail to infer the obvious answer here --
| that Cook is a Trump-supporting Republican -- boggles my
| mind.
|
| And not that it really matters, but I say this as a longtime
| Apple user and employee.
| Marsymars wrote:
| Even if Tim Cook didn't vote for Trump, his actions are
| _currently supporting Trump_.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| I think Apple has enough money to fight civil actions if Cook
| had a spine.
| watwut wrote:
| One has to love it when the most powerful and riches members
| of society are suddenly casted as if they were the weakest of
| the poor.
|
| Tim Cook and the rest of the billionaire class do exactly
| what they want to do politically.
| Cornbilly wrote:
| I don't think it's even litigation they're worried about.
| It's the tariff power that the cowardly GOP-controlled
| Congress has given up to Trump to use as a cudgel.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| They want something from the government that is at the
| government's discretion, such as semiconductor access, data
| facilities, subsidies, clearances, inclusion in circular
| partnerships
|
| that's why they are not challenging this
| nocoiner wrote:
| What do you call the guy who graduates last from his med school
| class?
|
| A doctor.
|
| What do you call the guy who abhors the tenets of national
| socialism but joins the Nazi party solely for the business
| opportunities and to keep his family fed and kids in school?
|
| A Nazi.
| vlod wrote:
| full:
| https://archive.is/20251008205650/https://www.404media.co/ap...
| nebula8804 wrote:
| I think with the case of Iceblock the developer talked about how
| the app is super simple by design so that it can be used by 80
| year old grandmas. I believe thats part of the reason it wasn't a
| PWA or something of that nature (among other reasons)
|
| In the case of this application, the circle of users may shift
| more towards technically savvy.
|
| If we assume this to be true, I could see how it may make sense
| to provide the application as a sideloadable APK or as open
| source so that it can be compiled and installed using TestFlight.
| Its unfortunate that we've reached the point that users can't
| even run software on their own computing devices.
|
| I wonder if things continue to get bad will we start to see a
| greater number of people refraining from installing updates to
| their devices just because prior versions allow more things like
| jailbreaks. Apple is burning their reputation with these moves so
| it may happen.
| OGEnthusiast wrote:
| > Apple is burning their reputation with these moves so it may
| happen.
|
| I highly doubt there will be any noticeable backlash against
| Apple for removing ICEBlock, sans negative online commentary
| (which to be fair isn't exactly zero, but doesn't have enough
| noticeable effect by itself).
| nebula8804 wrote:
| >I highly doubt there will be any noticeable backlash against
| Apple for removing ICEBlock, sans negative online commentary
| (which to be fair isn't exactly zero, but doesn't have enough
| noticeable effect by itself).
|
| No not just IceBlock but overall increasing the blocking of
| users from running the software that they want to run.
|
| In the past we've just had niche applications blocked
| (emulators, some porn applications and apps maybe hackers
| would use).
|
| Everything else was fair game to be in the app store. Now
| that semi-mainstream applications are getting banned, it
| encourages more people to find ways to get the software they
| want to run.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Apple defined ICE as a "protected class" in blocking anti-ICE
| apps_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45520407
| Dig1t wrote:
| If you want to archive videos isn't YouTube (or Vimeo or Rumble)
| the best place to do that? What's the point of a dedicated app?
| hackable_sand wrote:
| Resilience. Archive the videos on all the platforms. Seed the
| torrents.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Allowing preferences or downloaded videos to be stored in local
| storage.
|
| Downloading from YouTube is hard, Google keeps trying to kill
| yt-dlp. You can download manually from your own site using a
| web browser, but the app wrapper would make it easier to search
| by metadata ("Find ICE videos from my town") and to make sure
| you don't accidentally download the same thing twice.
|
| Plus YouTube might take those down for ToS violations sooner or
| later.
|
| Anyway it doesn't matter - We should have the right to have
| apps like this and make them available to the general public.
| If you can't get it from the App Store, and you can't install
| an apk on Android, and you can't install an alternate store
| trivially, then it's as good as dead.
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