Scanning and auto-deleting your email, combined with the Gatekeeper technology wich houses the possibility of Apple telling me what Apps I can or can not run makes me seriously start to wonder the direction Apple is headed...
Edit: Gatekeeper is OSX technology. It allows users to only install Apple certified Apps on your mac, not your phone. It's fairly new and possible to turn it off (for now at least).
Apparently they're also against criticism of their products, but not against forging network traffic, which is why you get fake 404's if you try to visit "The Best Page in the Universe" from an Apple Store. Interesting sense of morality they have...
That's probably just done via host file (or otherwise at the DNS level) for filtering undesirable sites. It's rather sensationalist to call that "forging network traffic". I don't even know if you can reasonably call it "censorship". What Apple does with the internet in their own stores is both inconsequential and also totally their own business.
In contrast, deleting email based on content is neither inconsequential nor their own business.
As trivial as it may be, I consider it censorship when they stop being transparent. Displaying "Blocked!" when someone tries to access the site is, as you said, totally their business. Implying a successful HTTP connection but a missing file? Still, as you said, inconsequential. The attitude that leads someone to make it look like a 404 instead of a blocked site? That's the same attitude that makes them block emails on the presence of a text string.
I don't know how they have it set up, but the laziest way to block pages is to add them to /etc/hosts mapping them to 127.0.0.1 . If you do that in OS X and Web Sharing (apache) is enabled (and it might be on their machines, although I hear Mountain Lion got rid of it?), then navigating to http://blocksite.com/whatever.html will give a 404 unless the web sharing directory actually contains the file "whatever.html". So it's very likely a simple matter of a lazy configuration rather than a nefarious attempt to make you think that the blocked site doesn't exist (which, really, what would be the motivation there?).
404 is an accurate statement by the browser when the distinct hosts file maps xmission.com to localhost. A 503 error would be a forged response. 404 is the expected type of response with two separate modularized/encapsulated systems where the browser merely reports that it found nothing from the typed in URL. Saying that the site is "blocked" would involve creating a special facility just for this purpose.
I don't think this is at all like the ISP redirection pages that were more clearly non compliant with IETF internet standards.
mistercow's response explains it better. If it redirected to localhost, and there was a certain filesharing service enabled, then it's possible a browser was listening but obviously didn't have the specific file requested.
Why are you inclined to believe this isn't the case? What possible reason would there be for Apple to care one whit about the email that goes to iCloud accounts? The only thing that makes any sense at all is virus/spam filtering.
No you didn't. They don't care what's on your phone. They care about two things:
1) What's on their store, and
2) How apps get on your phone, e.g. they must be codesigned by Apple.
The former is where they apply their content standards. The latter is a (very effective) security measure.
But, for example, Apple doesn't care in the slightest if I make a hardcore pornography app, sign it with my own developer cert, and install it on my phone. They only care if I try and submit it to their store. Similarly, they don't care if I open up Safari and visit some pornographic website, even if it uses HTML5 offline mode and gets added as an independent icon to my home screen.
> But, for example, Apple doesn't care in the slightest if I make a hardcore pornography app, sign it with my own developer cert, and install it on my phone.
You don't know that. They don't know you've done this and they can't know you've done it, so how you do you if they care or not?
You're acting like Apple has some vast conspiracy to eradicate objectionable material from the face of the planet. That's ridiculous.
Apple has been pretty open about the fact that they just care about what's on their storefront. The only reason that this effectively means they control what's on your phone is because most people can't install apps on their phone except via Apple's App Store. Although, as usual, everyone in the world is free to view whatever objectionable website they want.
Because they feel (rightly or wrongly) that they can practically provide a better, more secure, etc. experience for their customers by controlling/curating what executes on their devices.
The security implications of only allowing codesigned code to execute is completely divorced from the decision to control what content is allowed on Apple's storefront. The former limits what's on your phone, but does not make any judgement about the content. The latter makes a judgement about the content, but doesn't limit what you can run on your phone if you can find some other avenue to run stuff (e.g. self-signed with a dev cert, or web apps).
Because of Apples previous stance on porn on 'their' devices. I bet all sorts of spammy messages get marked as spam and filed in SPAM or JUNK, but porn related just disappears.
It's easy to temporarily disable Gatekeeper, install what you want, and then turn it back on. In no way does it prevent you from running what you want on your own computer. The point is to put another wall against unintended installs (aka exploits), and corrupted/infected versions of known-good software.
> If you forget to re-enable Gatekeeper, you're hosed
Let's not exaggerate. Everyone got by perfectly well for years and years just using common sense about what to install. Gatekeeper is a welcome layer of defense but I doubt many experienced users would be "hosed" without it.
iOS devices effectively run Gatekeeper full-time with no way to turn it off (aside from jailbreaking). I don't think it's unreasonable to think that the Mac's current Gatekeeper is just a stop along the way toward that.
Because the use-cases for phones and macs are exactly the same! Because there is no valid use-case for GateKeeper other than Apple wanting to control every piece of software on your machine. Because Apple totally doesn't care if third-party developers jump ship from their platform because the developer tools are locked down.
Because paranoia is so much more fun than rational thought.
Excuse me. I only meant to point out that Apple already has a platform where they control every piece of software on your machine, and so it's not absurd to think that they might try to do this on their other platform. I don't think my post merits your implication that I'm not thinking rationally.
I don't think jumping to that conclusion is any more rational than worrying about the Mustang getting watered down based on Ford's releasing a new Fiesta. Even if Ford does share Fiesta door handle parts with the new Mustangs.
OS X is a certified Unix that ships with a CLI and admin accounts with sudo powers. To lock it down the way you're fearing, they would have to completely rewrite the userland of the OS.
Oh wait, they already did that: it's called iOS.
iOS is the ultimate proof that Apple does not intend to lock users out of their Macs: they already created a different product to enable that hand-held computing experience.
Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking. Their choices make me worry you'll need a licence to develop for mac in the near future. After that you can only install via the OSX App store, with Apple taking their cut.
> The point is to put another wall against unintended installs (aka exploits)
Unintended installs may be a type of exploit, but they're not synonymous with them, as 'aka' indicates. Gatekeeper does nothing to protect against, say, your browser being compromised remotely, as you can run unsigned code in a signed application. Gatekeeper raises the barrier to entry, but only slightly.
Right, but it does create a barrier to entry if you want laymen to run your software. This is especially annoying if you're a developer who doesn't own an Apple PC.
As others have pointed out in this thread, gmail silently drops emails that contained zipped EXE files. It doesn't tell you it dropped it, it doesn't tell you it didn't send it, it just vanishes.
This is (sadly) not new behavior. Other email providers drop emails (which is sad), and Apple acting puritanical isn't exactly news.
Edit: Gatekeeper is OSX technology. It allows users to only install Apple certified Apps on your mac, not your phone. It's fairly new and possible to turn it off (for now at least).