Setting aside the context of this quoted verse and how NSFW stuff is judged in religious texts, this doesn't address the more important point that OP raised: the visuals of this verse and more extreme ones can be easily found on Reddit and similar allowed apps. So OP's points stands.
The other apps are clients. The apps themselves don't actually contain any content, they're just code. An app that itself contains an offline copy of a book with NSFW text is not the same thing.
Meanwhile Reddit is a doubly poor example because even though the service contains NSFW content, it marks it as such, and then the client not only doesn't itself contain it but gives the user a separate opportunity to select against it when using the app to download pages.
Bible apps often don’t contain the text directly, but allow the user to download a preferred translation on initial startup. That didn’t prevent them from being marked NSFW.
And clearly that wasn’t the standard anyway. Before the introduction of the policy restricting religious texts, the only apps F-Droid had marked NSFW were frontends to porn sites, even though the apps presumably contained no sexual content directly.
It should be pretty obvious why porn apps are marked NSFW despite not containing any content. Substantially all of the content they can be used to access is NSFW, whereas it's reasonably possible to access only SFW content on Reddit.
Which would also explain the Bible apps without an initial copy. Choosing which translation to download when substantially all of them are translations of the same NSFW text means that substantially all of the users would end up with NSFW content on their device by using the app.
> Choosing which translation to download when substantially all of them are translations of the same NSFW text means that substantially all of the users would end up with NSFW content on their device by using the app.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The Bible has been around for a while, and translations exist to serve the current sensibilities of every period within that time.
Here's Ezekiel 23:20 in the King James Version:
For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses.
This has been euphemized so heavily that much of the original meaning is no longer present.
Except, of course, that the Bible in any translation is not NSFW, certainly in the common usage of the term. It contains depictions of violence and sex, yes. But so does Fanny Hill, and that hasn’t legally been considered obscene in the UK or the USA in over fifty years. F-Droid’s excuse, that they needed to restrict Bible apps to protect F-Droid from legal liability, is not believable.
1. They have a policy of marking apps as NSFW if using them has a high probability of loading NSFW content onto the device. We can't easily rule this out. It's a small project so they have to be reserved about compliance issues because they don't have the resources to defend against expensive litigation and they could just be exercising an abundance of caution.
2. They're trolling Republicans with malicious compliance. They don't like the laws being enacted, they know the people enacting them like the Bible, so they apply the policy in the way which is maximally adversarial to the opponents imposing it on them. "If you don't like the consequences of your law then feel free to repeal it."
Which one of these is even objectionable? It seems like you want that if they're doing the second one they should admit to it, but in that case they're just maintaining kayfabe. The trolling is more effective when it's ambiguous. It's obvious that it could be that. If the message is to invite their opponents to go eat sand then it's not being lost in translation. But making that explicit only makes it easier to dismiss them as antagonists, or retaliate against them for being overtly defiant.
Whereas if they play it straight, what is someone going to say? That it shouldn't apply to this, right? Okay, then we need to pin down the rules for how exceptions work. Exceptions that could then be applied to other things. Which is to their advantage to have their opponents doing in this context because then they want the exceptions to be broad and reasonable instead of not caring if someone else is getting screwed by them.
> We can't easily rule this out. … they don't have the resources to defend against expensive litigation and they could just be exercising an abundance of caution.
If F-Droid were being cautious:
• They would have restricted social media apps, which a lot of public hysteria targets, which many of the new laws explicitly target, and which other app store providers like Google and Apple have already faced and continue to face massive financial and legal consequences over. If F-Droid is unwilling to take a stand against censorship, this would be an obvious step to begin shielding themselves from liability.
• They would not have prioritized blocking apps providing ancient religious texts, since there’s no public hysteria over Bible and Quran apps, none of the new laws explicitly target them, and no app store provider has faced consequence or threat of consequence over providing them.
• Once the policy was in place, they would not have reversed it simply after receiving angry comments.
I’m completely comfortable disbelieving F-Droid was ever actually concerned that religious apps could be a liability risk.
> They're trolling Republicans with malicious compliance. They don't like the laws being enacted, they know the people enacting them like the Bible, so they apply the policy in the way which is maximally adversarial to the opponents imposing it on them.
If the targets of their trolling (and I’m glad you agree, it is trolling) are legislators in backwards U.S. states, they hit far off the mark. The only people impacted by F-Droid’s censorship have been its users, who are (for the most part) members of the free software community. What’s the point of a troll that is unnoticed by your enemies and only harms your friends who already agree with you?
> "If you don't like the consequences of your law then feel free to repeal it."
In case you haven’t noticed, these laws are being passed everywhere from the UK to Brazil to Australia to Singapore to the EU. And yes, some U.S. states, too. So your “realpolitik” remark in another comment is similarly pointless, because those other politicians and regulators are also completely unaffected by F-Droid’s actions.
> Which one of these is even objectionable?
In response to a law saying F-Droid must punch some of its users in the face, F-Droid of its own volition decided to punch a different set of users in the face rather than refusing to punch anyone at all. I find that objectionable, and the flurry of comments they received shows others do too. Instead of taking principled actions or practical actions, F-Droid’s maintainers decided to take a swipe at users of religious apps on F-Droid, refused to explain themselves (“kayfabe,” as you called it), then upon receipt of unexpected blowback on their forums and issue trackers, backtracked and reversed the policy without further comment. It was a boneheaded move that drove away some app developers and some users like me. How can I trust them to not make some other boneheaded move in the future? Can you imagine Debian or OpenBSD doing such a thing? Now F-Droid has a big banner up top pointing to https://keepandroidopen.org/ and making themselves (noticeably, not other FOSS app stores) out to be the defenders of app freedom. It’s completely tone‐deaf and shows poor judgment. If current or future F-Droid leadership actually addressed the issue, I might be convinced to use it again. But I won’t hold my breath.
You're trying to be clever, but the context from the drop has been to distinguish "a sincere belief" from this sort of rhetorical underhandedness that you are indulging in.
Not only is this not going to convince anyone that there's anything behind it other than an attempt to formulate a winning argument (having set that as your goal) irrespective whether there's any actual sincerity to the words you're choosing, but it's going to come comes across to a healthy portion the world's population as the opposite of clever: that anyone who's convinced themselves that it really is clever and that no one can possibly permeate this forcefield of insincerity is a perhaps-delusional, and definitely-insufferable halfwit.
I feel like if you want to call something "rhetorical underhandedness" you should at least pay attention to which fork of the argument you're criticizing.
The original complaint was that if they were doing it to be controversial, why not do the same thing to viewer apps for Reddit or Wikipedia? But those are necessarily distinguishable. If the standard was that a viewer merely could load external NSFW content rather than was likely to, you would have to do web browsers, mail clients, podcast managers, file transfer apps, video players that can open external links -- it'd be most of the repository. And that would be far less defensible, because you can point to specific controversial Bible verses, but how are you going to make the case that generic FTP clients and web browsers are NSFW with a straight face? But conversely, how would you argue that a Reddit viewer is NSFW but a web browser that can open Reddit isn't?
The fork where they need "a sincere belief that these apps contained content unsafe for minors" was the other fork, where they're doing it because of potential liability rather than to make a statement. But that fork was flawed to begin with, because they're not required to think that it actually is unsafe. They could also be concerned that someone else could claim that and then even if the people claiming that are jerks and even if the jerks could ultimately lose, they could prefer to be risk-averse when they don't have the resources to handle things like that.
I mean, do you want the realpolitik version? If you're doing something to be controversial/oppositional then you need people to feel troubled by it. Labeling Reddit as NSFW is something many of them want, which is the opposite.
<Insert boilerplate disclaimer about your threat model here>
The short answer is no, despite what the VPN sponsor of your favorite YT videos might say. This is actually a good question to ask if you want to assess how up-to-date someone's infosec knowledge is. In a few sentences, you can tell if they're just regurgitating the classic scary myths about public WiFis or have a more nuanced take* that boils down to 'no' (bonus points if they go on a tangent about how cool WiFi deauth attacks are).
In the linked thread, they clearly mentioned that he's an investor in the company:
> Well, a few months ago @Aura_Protects reached out and asked me to show them how I hack – and who better to demonstrate this on than their investor Jeffrey Katzenberg?
The fact that he consented to it is also mentioned in the thread. How is that dishonest? I personally think the attack is interesting on its own, using a recent vuln that was widely reported in the infosec community.
I personally think the thread is more interesting than the video anyway, which is why I linked it. (Also, in the YT video's description, they mentioned that he's an investor in the company.)
This "Google Search sucks" discussion is officially getting boring. We get it, it sucks; we already know. It's been discussed ad nauseum. This article is particularly bad because it's a rehash of (and commentary on) content that already appeared here, with no significant new information (much like the original article it's commenting on, which was also a rehash of HN threads and comments made by people popular with the HN crowd).
Just because you're bored and in the know, doesn't a) mean the problem has gotten any better and isn't relevant and b) hasn't given others, newcomers a place to express their grievance. The fact that it still persists and still gets upvotes shows people aren't done and discussions of alternatives still need to be had.
I’m glad it’s not just me. I’ve done so many fairly basic searches and gotten back absolutely awful results. I imagine most of the web isn’t even accessible through. This is an important topic that deserves even more discussion, especially since there isn’t even another solution yet
This. The Internet needs search. I took a screenshot the first time Google showed only ads and no organic search.
It's critical to the functioning of the free market that consumers have accurate information.
The fact that Google is crap is less important. The fact that Google squashes competition and there is no unbiased search engine, is of national interest.
Current situation is because of a combination of Google's monopoly abuse and the fact that US govt does not recognise that search engines are(is) the entry point to a significant market.
If you believe in the free market, then the state of Google search indicates huge inefficiency. A lot of people treat the term free market to mean "I, personally, am free to get rich, however I can, at the expense of everyone else." Which is pretty much the opposite of what it really means. It really means "you are free to join the market and compete on equal terms."
Under those conditions best product/price should win.
It was pleasantly surprising to see the article cite Hacker News as a source ("“Google is dead. Long live Google + ‘site:reddit.com’ ”—became the No. 10 most upvoted link ever on the tech-industry discussion board Hacker News."), which likely inspired the pitch to write the article.
The article still adds value as the reporter got a Google spokesperson to comment, and also brings the issue to a much wider audience outside of Hacker News.
Nothing will change until the discussion enters the mainstream and every boring HN thread on the subject helps bring that goal closer.
I switched to DDG more than a year ago and I can honestly say that I've not had to revert to google search more than a handful of times since. A regular user would probably forget about Google in a breath if only they knew that such an alternative existed.
It may be coincidence, but around the same time that the "Google Search sucks" articles and comments starting becoming more frequent I am now getting pop ups on the Google Search results page to rate the results between 1-5 stars.
I’ve thought about creating HN Tropes, similar to TV Tropes to categorize the repetitive discussions with comments that are easily predicted. I haven’t convinced myself it’d help things, might just fuel the fire.
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