Apple Removes Two RSS Feed Readers From China App Store To Please China's Censors (techcrunch.com) 15
Two RSS reader apps, Reeder and Fiery Feeds, said this week that their iOS apps have been removed in China over content that deemed "illegal" by the local cyber watchdog. TechCrunch reports: Apps get banned in China for all sorts of reasons. Feed readers of RSS, or Real Simple Syndication, are particularly troubling to the authority because they fetch content from third-party websites, allowing users to bypass China's Great Firewall and reach otherwise forbidden information, though users have reported not all RSS apps can circumvent the elaborate censorship system. Those who use RSS readers in China are scarce, as the majority of China's internet users -- 940 million as of late -- receive their dose of news through domestic services, from algorithmic news aggregators such as ByteDance's Toutiao and WeChat's built-in content subscription feature to apps of mainstream local outlets. Major political events and regulatory changes can trigger new waves of app removals, but it's unclear why the two RSS feed readers were pulled this week.
Inoreader, a similar service, was banned from Apple's Chinese App Store back in 2017. Feedly is also unavailable through the local App Store. The history of China's crackdown on RSS dates back to 2007 when the authority launched a blanket ban on web-based RSS feed aggregators. The latest incidents could well be part of Apple's business-as-usual in China: cleaning up foreign information services operating outside Beijing's purview, regardless of their reach.
Inoreader, a similar service, was banned from Apple's Chinese App Store back in 2017. Feedly is also unavailable through the local App Store. The history of China's crackdown on RSS dates back to 2007 when the authority launched a blanket ban on web-based RSS feed aggregators. The latest incidents could well be part of Apple's business-as-usual in China: cleaning up foreign information services operating outside Beijing's purview, regardless of their reach.
Fuck the CCP (Score:1)
Communist
Censorship
Propaganda
Why don't you like China? (Score:2)
Why don't you like China? Don't you enjoy having everybody running around wearing little clown hats over their face? Mask up people! It's for the greater good! Plus, we get to work from home now!
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... meanwhile, the American government is trying to force the removal of TikTok and WeChat.
So how is China different?
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Last time I checked we can talk about 64 or Tiananmen Square Massacre. Let me know when you can practise Falun Gong in China.
When you aren't getting fired [campusreform.org] for saying "BLACK LIVES MATTER, but also, EVERYONE'S LIFE MATTERS." the US still has some free speech.
now when china wants login bypass app installed wi (Score:2)
now when china wants login bypass app installed will they force install it?
If the US asks them to... (Score:1)
...they'll also remove apps. How is it news that a company must comply with laws and regulations in the countries they do business in?
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What's so special about RSS readers? (Score:3)
A RSS feed is just like a web page, except that instead of HTML, it uses a different, more structured format. For Slashdot, it is http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashd... [slashdot.org] . If you open it with your browser, chances are that it will look like just another webpage. A dedicated RSS reader can do something more fancy with it, like mixing it with other feeds, auto-refresh it, sort it, make it more pretty, etc...
There is no firewall-busting tech here. If you block the site, you block the RSS feed with it since it is just another resource. So maybe the banned apps use proxies, and if that's the case, they are not so different from VPNs. And understandably considering China's internet policy, they get banned. Other than that, I don't really understand the problem the Chinese government has with RSS readers.
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Services like Feedly read the RSS feeds, cache them and then serve the content up from their own servers. So the only solution is to block Feedly.
The problem with that is they use cloud services like Microsoft Azure. Those are not blocked in China because Microsoft collaborates with the Chinese government, and also because it would break millions of web sites. Apps like Tor use it to get around the block on Tor by simply routing traffic through an HTTPS connection to an Azure server. So again, the only reli
Yeah, we've sure introduced them to democracy (Score:3)
Anybody else remember when all the tech and social media giants assured us that by moving into China, they'd open the country up and make it more democratic? LOL. Instead, it's been the exact reverse. They've helped China become even more of a nightmare Orwellian surveillance state, and exported all the poisonous surveillance hardware and software they've developed doing so to willing government and corporate Big Brother wannabes over here.
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Anybody else remember when all the tech and social media giants assured us that by moving into China, they'd open the country up and make it more democratic?
It wasn't just the tech companies saying that.
The entire geopolitical strategy of the West was based on the assumption that prosperity in China would lead to liberty.
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We might think that everybody in the world would like to live in a liberal democracy, but the fact is that strong leadership is also something people like. I presume this is how populist leaders come to power. I think a psychological point is that a strong leader just simplifies everything, whereas continual debates and bickering between political factions looks like weakness. The tendency towards totalitarian rule is occurring in countries in Europe, so it is not just China.
The worrying thing is that total
Apple is fucked (Score:1)
embargo (Score:1)