I want to believe that the top level comment is satire that perfectly threaded the needle and is indistinguishable from the morons it's ridiculing.

How can you set a precedent for doing something without doing that thing? Here's a dictionary definition for precedent: "an earlier event or action that is regarded as an example or guide to be considered in subsequent similar circumstances."

Yes, this is what we do say when human traffickers are pardoned.

Leaving aside the obvious governmental influence in this “private company’s decision”, we, as a democratic society, have the right to decide when and if the two major smartphone OS makers have the right to ban apps. We even have the right to decide whether those exclusive app stores should exist. Whatever I thought about this matter before, my feelings are different after this decision.

Should that be true for a monopoly service though? I don't believe it's true for water, electricity companies. It's not tried for health insurance companies under the ACA. Are we teaching the point where technology should be treated similarly?

But never mind all those incremental precedents we helped set along the way. /s

It's a staircase, not a cliff.

>It’s only a dangerous precedent if you believe your opponents will ever gain power. If you believe your political opponents will never have power again, then who cares about precedent?

And that kind of thinking in years past is EXACTLY why we're here annoyed by dozens of organizations having and using power they probably ought not to.

Well, still dangerous for the people its used against.

> if you believe your opponents will ever gain power.

Or are already in power.

Avoiding traffic controls is no solution to reckless driving. Like surveilance cameras, they only move the crime elsewhere.

What you need is a gapless panopticon so that every suspect feels like being at the verge of getting caught, to enforce eg. traffic laws.

ICE does not target criminal behavior though. They literally disappear people based on appearance and any criminal record. Such a panopticon is an entirely different beast.

Immigrants with no criminal record now largest group in ICE detention: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/26/immigrants-c...

ICE Agents Rappel from Helicopter in Overnight Chicago Raid, Dragging Kids from Beds to U-Hauls: https://people.com/ice-agents-overnight-chicago-raid-1182308...

Feds detain WGN-TV staffer, slam into resident’s car in Lincoln Square: https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2025/10/10/feds-arr...

We Found That More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days: https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-...

Videos of violent ICE interactions flood social media: https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/ice-agents-violent-...

This is not "immigration enforcement".

It's paramilitary thugs beating up and disappearing political opponents. The closest equivalent would be the SA.

to go further: let’s say i don’t even define a purpose for the app but just leave it open to users to define their metadata labeling scheme and all the app does is index the videos labeled in a common way. perhaps endusers agree on redit or on some wiki how they will label posts. the app just traverses the labeling scheme and provides some basic viewing and searching locally; without a server involved beyond youtube. i’m just wondering whether this new situation essentially criminalizes metadata.

thanks for sharing! someone had explained to me the concept of “color of money” in payment systems years back and this matches up well.

or they can convince the payment processors to refuse to do business with you

> But no one talks about creating a Militia (yet) for some reason.

The line between "private militia" and "terrorism" isn't very well defined. If the people are unsuccessful, they will be labeled as terrorists and potentially put to death. Most people don't want to be executed, and as far as I am aware there's only been one successful violent insurrection in the US [1], so the odds are very much not in your favor.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_massacre#Aftermath

As a person who was previously involved with the (somewhat more "casual") parts of the American militia movement - meaning all the right-wingers with guns - I should note that they do have some organization. Not much of it, to be fair, but generally speaking they at least know of other neighboring groups and have points of contact to coordinate "when it's time". There are also some people involved into all this that specifically go around lecturing those militias and helping them network. In my state (WA), ten years ago, these guys were affiliated with Matt Shea, and were organizing to bring supplies to firefighters during the fire season as a front of sorts. But they were pretty clear about the real nature of the org in the lecture that I've been in.

So the reality of the situation is that the vast majority of US gun owners, especially if you look at who owns "tactical" guns and gear (a 3-round hunting rifle is one thing, an AR with a full 7-mag loadout in a plate carrier is a very different one) are people who actively support the present government, or castigate them for not going far enough. So the relatively small groups of armed lefties - mostly hard left, anarchists, SRA, some Black groups like NAAGA etc; but very few liberals and mainstream progressives - are largely inconsequential.

> Organized group of 100 with no guns is stronger than 10000 armed but poorly coordinated people.

What examples are you drawing from when making this conclusion?

> In other words, a "well regulated Militia" in the Second Amendment is more important than "bear arms".

Originally standing armies were not allowed. Each state was expected to perform it's own defense. The governor could create and disband a militia to defend the state. It was expected they would appear with their own arms.

> But no one talks about creating a Militia (yet) for some reason.

Subservient to what power?

I think if you were to look at how often a government is rebuffed by the courts, that's a pretty good indicator of how much they're trying to bend the rules or outright ignore them.

Also, "come and enforce it" is not undermining democracy. A law is only a piece of paper until a court upholds it. Even the federal government can write whatever it wants, if it's then ruled unconstitutional that's the end of that.

The problem going on right now is that so much is being broken that the already slow court system just cannot keep up.

Using firearms against the state never works. However, the oppression isn't in the enforcement of laws it is in how those laws are being enforced, selectively, against brown and black people. Also, something being a law doesn't make it right or just. For examples of this just look at slavery, women's suffrage, civil rights, etc at a certain point in time all of those things were against the law but people agonized, organized and resisted enough to change the law. By your logic those groups weren't oppressed since the law allowed for their oppression.

It does when it's the courts say the government is breaking the law.

Please don't fulminate or post inflammatory rhetoric like this on HN. And we don't need to use Grawlix like " bl@(k" here, it's ugly and unnecessary; we can use complete words here, no matter what they are.

I don't really get why these at least don't offer both "native" app and web. The people making these apps 1. surely understand that this was going to happen 2. are making them as fast as possible using hybrid frameworks (which is 100% the correct thing to do in this situation) 3. are easily capable of hosting them as a web app as well.

I don't want to be too harsh on people who made these apps but I am pretty peeved. They completely wasted the opportunity as now any new apps they'll get banned before they get onto the stores. I think all of us on HN could've told them this was inevitable ages ago and especially since they're engaged enough to be making these apps surely they knew themselves. If they from day 1 also hosted it as a webapp (as an alternative), that would be the immediate migration path. Heck, they could've advertised/linked it in the app itself. This is allowed and doesn't get one blocked from the stores unless there's payment options involved which is explicitly not the case here.

> You don't need to apologize for making the wrong choice, but you do need to put down the proprietary crap and reclaim your dignity.

Are you making the argument here that there is a free software alternative to ICEblock that is suitable for novice technology users - the wider public - and offered the same guarantees of anonymity that Apple’s notification system offered ?

> so that they could not be killed, jailed or exiled extrajudicially, just out of political expediency\

This is a naive surface level conclusion. Ask yourself why. The answer is because the nobles, or whoever matters in your example society, isn't gonna have much allegiance to a system then are basically disposable to and will be disposed of at the drop of a hat and so their allegiance will be just about the same.

A system where nobody really supports anything beyond the degree to which it keeps their head on their shoulders and everyone is looking over said shoulder is gonna have a lot of disruptive power transitions (in a "you go bankrupt slowly, then suddenly" sort of way as people all throw their weight behind the new thing as it starts to gain the upper hand) and engage in a lot less long term productive activity than societies with due process or some other way to keep people from losing everything at the drop of the hat. And it will get out competed by those societies.

Those scheming up evil ways to levy ruinous fines for failing to use one's blinker or get people kicked out of industries for having odious opinions on unrelated subjects ought to take note.

I wouldn't critisize the ICE on my main account either if I were American.

Yes, it's this bad. People feel they have to create throwaways to shield themselves from repercussions from that awful regime.