What of the people that have done nothing wrong that were just living their lives now at high risk because of ICE’s ridiculous false agenda?

At high risk, eh?

Ridiculous take on the situation. You’re either a bot or a maga pos. Not sure which yet.

They weren't "just doing their job", they were also doing something else. You'll find the something else as legitimate reasoning for ICEBlock.

"Befehl ist befehl."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders

In the United States reporting on the presence of law enforcement on your street is protected by the first amendment. You can even film them and broadcast their activity in public places to the world.

You may not like it. Apple may not like it. But there's not much ambiguity here.

There's no difference between ICEBlock and Google/Waze reporting on police activity on I5.

The Gestapo, too, was "law enforcement officials, who are just doing their job".

Sometimes the job is to be an armed thug for a racist authoritarian. In that case, just doing it is not a good excuse.

It's ok when users have choice. Those who don't like HN moderation can hang out somewhere else (and many do).

Not using app stores isn't an option for most users, especially on iOS.

But is HN the only forum for tech discussions available to you?

The whole point is that both phone platforms are required to participate in modern life. Imagine if your water or electricity company decides not to supply your house. There is a reason such fundamental services are made into universal rights and do not follow the usual competition rules.

Apple/Google can’t be both the store, the device and the OS.

Censorship by a website moderator means you need to move to another website to express your ideas. Censorship by the government means you need to move to another country.

Censorship on an app hosting page means you need to host your app somewhere else. Censorship on the only app hosting page allowed means you can't host your app at all.

Moderation is okay when it properly adjusts signal-to-noise ratio of discussion.

Censorship is about suppressing opinions which fall out of Overton's window, which is not okay, as all it does is to enforce status quo.

There was a good blogpost by Ex-reddit engineers about it where the idea was to treat it as signal which you cannot understand, and your core purpose as moderation(from automated PoV) is to adjust the signal to noise ratio without being able to comprehend/read the underlying data.

A bit hypocritical of them, looking at how reddit's moderation works.

Frankly i'm also against private censorship in case of social media - as it is basically outsourced government censorship.

I think it's inversely correlated with power, influence and reach. HN and Reddit don't have guns, can't throw you in prison, and there are lots of social medias to choose from, so a fair bit of censorship can be tolerated. Apple can't deport you, but you also don't have a lot of other choices, very low tolerance for censorship. The Government can really ruin your life if you get on the wrong side and your options for changing it or escaping it are pretty limited, we should demand the highest levels of transparency. Sure, some secrecy around military and intelligence for a little while, but we should eventually know what they decided and why.

I think the key here is choice.

Are there other sites where you can discuss the things you use Hacker News for, without much of a loss? Then it's probably moderation.

Is this the only forum that matters with respect to a certain topic? Then it's probably censorhip.

For example, if a private company controls the de-facto subreddit for a topic or product and uses that to control the narrative then it's more like censorship than moderation.

Also, it sounds like you think it's black-and-white but it's much more gray than that and something one might call moderation someone else might call censorship, and there might not be a clear-cut answer.

Whenever you enter a community, you implicitly agree to a small contract with the community. If I enter a running community, it's assumed that I'm not there to talk about cooking pasta, if I sign up to a book club, people will surely get tired of me if I don't stop yapping about music.

There's of course leeway around this, but communities, generally, have purpose, implicit (built by the community) and explicit (what it says on the sign).

We are okay with censorship when it serves to that purpose. We like it when HNs and Reddit delete viagra ads in comments. We don't like it when it runs contrary to or subverts the purpose of the communities. The userbase here would have gotten pretty mad if the threads about Cloudflare yesterday were deleted, as they evidently are of interest regarding current tech, and they would also have been pretty mad if anyone criticizing Cloudflare was banned, as we are supposed to be able to freely comment on such matters.

This is much more common on Reddit, where mods (and users!) will often silence stuff they don't like, even if relevant. This creates conflict regarding the two types of purpose mentioned before.

Now, countries should have as much censorship as they want, this is already patent in hate speech laws around the globe, before anyone brings up the 1st, do note that the US could also (at least in theory) change the constitution if the people so wished. Extreme caution should be taken in this regard though as one does not simply "stop being member of a country".

If it's not done on the basis of jurisdiction, then laws about what constitutes illegal content in Germany or China or United States applies to everyone.

Taking the stance of "we're not going to follow any laws and publish everything" puts the companies in very difficult places in those countries as publishers of the content.

>While censorship is one thing, they forgot another overlooked ability of these app stores: pushing unwanted apps/services to our personal devices without our knowledge

When was the last time the play store or app store pushed apps "without our knowledge"? I've only heard of it done by shady third party bloatware that OEMs bundle with the OS. The actual issue is a system that can perform OTA updates, not app stores themselves.

I prefer web versions because I trust the browser sandbox more than I trust the developers at Super Store 01.

There's also PWA, which while not perfect, is supported on iOS.

It's possible to criticize something without having the law "on your side". The OP characterizes Apple's action as "unacceptable, censorious overreach", but doesn't claim it was illegal. Once upon a time, slavery was illegal, but it would be daft to oppose emancipation on the basis of "How about slaves sue DOJ and/or slave owners if the law is on their side?".

Are you anti handheld radio?

Yes, that's the point of freedom. People can carry devices that do things. If they break the law, that's another question, but everyone should be allowed to have computers that communicate that they can control

The same can be done with a laptop, and millions of idiots carry those around.

> a free for all where millions of idiots are carrying devices where they can install and run anything on a device where arbitrary radio signals can be transmitted and received at will under software control

As a matter of fact, I can consider that opposite extreme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uG3uea-Hvy4