Apple: supporting the war effort

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It’s always wonderful when somebody you loathe behaves even worse than you would have expected. Thanks to a facebook ‘friend’ who is also actually a friend, without the quotes, I read with immense pleasure that:

Apple Inc., which has received over $9 million in Pentagon contracts in recent years, has rejected from its App Store, and therefore from all iPhones, a simple informative application.

Drones+ is an application that shows no depictions of the carnage of war and reveals no secret information.  It simply adds a location to a map every time a drone strike is reported in the media and added to a database maintained by the U.K.’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Apple has rejected the app as “objectionable and crude.” 

I apologize for the extremely poor Gimp skillz exhibited in the image above. After an hour of increasingly frantic swearing and expostulation, which drove my wife and children from the room, I decided that I would never understand how to overlay a transparent layer on another.

PS, December 9: I finally figured it out. Still a little clunky, but better than the original. I wish I could tell you how I did it, five minutes ago, but now I can’t reproduce it.

15 thoughts on “Apple: supporting the war effort”

  2. That’s why all Apple products are verboten in our household except for the freebee’s we got from our old evil employer. Of course, you may recall the story of my daughter getting ripped off on her secret attempt to buy an iPhone over the craigslist. Much to my dismay, she has yet to be indoctrinated.

  5. At the more benign end of the spectrum of evil: I feel like Apple is really pioneering the lockdown of personal computers. Something Microsoft has wanted to do since DOS’s failed abortion resulted in the unwelcome birth of Windows. However, were hitherto prevented from fully achieving in part, I suspect, because of projects like GNU, Linux as well as Netscape’s release of their source code forcing Microsoft’s developers to allow a minimal level of accessibility.

    Thanks to iTunes and iOS, where all files and applications installed or removed (as well as other modifications) are, without hacking the device, mediated by a proprietary gatekeeper mechanism, the music and apps store, Apple has effectively gained total control over the use of their phones and tablets. And are increasingly applying what they’ve learned to their` desktop OS–through perhaps being overtaken in this respect by Microsoft with the release of Windows 8.

    Meanwhile hardware is evolving too. As EFI replaces BIOS, computers are now able,–though I don’t think any yet exploit this feature–like most smartphones, to prevent the end user from removing the original operating system or other preinstalled applications* or installing a new OS the computer OEM hadn’t specifically approved.

    *My HTC Android phone, e.g., is able to restore manually deleted applications or even the whole OS upon rebooting thanks to a so called NAND chip–no way has been found to alter or erase the NAND firmware. It is, however, possible to subvert the reinstallation process but it takes a lot of work and risks permanently destroying the phone (fortunately, between temp rooting and the SDK shell one has enough access for most “housekeeping” tasks).

  6. this just will not due think
    20 minutes ago · Like

    radicalized KLA members high
    19 minutes ago · Like

    on Afghan poppy flying Parrot[s]
    15 minutes ago · Like

    within major city lordy lordy who
    13 minutes ago · Like

    knows counter-parrot pac3 will not du/do/due/doodle

    http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/532175_10151109603623344_191591151_n.jpg

    chewing down whatever pretentions to privacy and civility may remain
    as marlena sings along

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=fvwp&v=GYXg7LlzyO8&NR=1

    wheres owen de la p

  8. Poetic justice! Foul play or not, the newspaper that trashed Julian Assange had to eat crow and declare Manning the Person of the Year. I read the article and I don’t think they implied foul play. If anything, they implied a grass root mobilization of the supporters. Either way, it made my day:-)

    • “after some rather fishy voting patterns that belied earlier reader comments on the poll,”…..

      Fowl play or fishy play, perhaps. The Guardian lets us know that the wounded school girl was the *proper* choice. And, imo, that is because her courageous project harmonizes with the official narrative of the western involvement in the wounded girl’s region of the world. We gonna educate ’em, even if we have to kill their parents first. Boom.

  12. i’m sending this via my sister laura paine
    i’m utterly with out internet here
    since early november
    i’ve been visiting my brother royal
    in …well ..u know …parts better left unknown

    we get a short wave now and again
    laura told me my sister sally claims
    vulture candidate mitt
    has suddenly demanded a recount
    in ohio
    wisconsin and florida

    his case :

    based on his own careful internal polling
    he won all three states
    if sally isn’t pulling my short leg
    like she often did on warm summer nights in 1957

    i got one question

    has it gotten to the supreme court yet ?

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