Truly, everyone's a "rogue capitalist" now. It's almost like the problem with companies isn't whether their business model is based on showing you ads or charging you money, but rather, whether they can abuse you for profit and get away with it.
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It is recommended people switch to the report a traffic snarl function on maps to tell where the gestapo troops are ambushing people illegally.
@pluralistic at least for me, the "long form link" is failing (in Firefox) with "This page isn't redirecting properly" (2025-10-06 11:10 am). Same thing happens if I go to pluralistic.net and click on the link. Luckily, I can read it in pieces on Mastodon.
In killing ICEBlock, Apple insists that it is only complying with lawful orders, which is patently untrue. Pam Bondi has no authority to order the censorship of this legal speech tool, which is likely why she didn't seek a court order and instead merely rage-tweeted about it. This was sufficient to get Apple CEO Tim Cook, the billionaire who moved Apple's manufacturing to Chinese sweatshops where working conditions are so brutal that they require suicide nets, to cave in.
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Apple does not permit its iPhone customers to install software unless it is delivered via their App Store. They claim they do so in order to protect their customers from their customers' own bad choices about which apps to install.
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But time and again, Apple has shown that they exercise this control over their users to pursue their own ends, blocking:
* A dictionary (because it contained swear words);
* A game that simulated working in an Apple sweatshop;
* An informative app that cataloged civilian casualties of US drone strikes;
* The Tumblr app because some Tumblr blogs contained adult content; and
* Working VPN apps for the entire nation of China.
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Apple uses its app store control to extract 30 cents out of every dollar spent by its customers in the apps they use. That's a 30%, economy-wide, worldwide tax on news outlets and podcasts that collects subscriptions through apps, Patreon performers whose subscribers pay by app and games publishers who sell via the app store.
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Apple also uses its app store control to block rival browser engines (every browser on iOS is just a reskinned version of Safari). Apple's own browser engine, Webkit, is riddled with longstanding, grave security vulnerabilities, and there is no way to distribute more secure browsers on iOS:
https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apples-browser-engine-ban-persists-even-under-the-dma/
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Apple claims that it must be able to override its customers' choices about which software they'd like to run, lest those customers make foolish software choices and compromise their own security. Bruce Schneier calls this "feudal security," in which a digital warlord offers you sanctuary from the internet's roving bandits within the mercenary-studded walls of his impenetrable fortress.
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