They appear to have shut it down by keeping DNS from resolving:
The government ordered ISPs to stop resolving addresses ending in .eg, Egypt’s domain name system, in addition to sealing off outside access.
So if they knew your IP # before, they could still communicate, for now.
Well, after a month of long nights and Saturday’s, we submitted our first app to the iPhone App Store the other day.
Today it was rejected.
This came as a HUGE surprise. The app was developed primarily by an experienced iPhone developer, and shown to several very experienced iPhone developers along the way. Everybody thought it was slick, well crafted and very cool. Nobody had any concerns about rejection.
There are objective standards in the App Store approval process. Things like “don’t’ crash”, “too big”, “and uses an unapproved API”. I don’t mind being held to those standards, for the most part. We got dinged under a “subjective” rule:
The app shall not be primarily marketing material or advertising.
First off.. do you really believe that is evenly applied? How about the Target app? Or the Disney app? The list goes on.
I read that “rule” to mean that direct clones of marketing material or ads should not be turned into an app. For instance, bundling a PDF of your catalog into an APP form. Even that interpretation of the rule doesn’t make any sense to me, but I didn’t think we were anywhere near it.
App Reviewers must review 80 apps per day. Giving our app, that we spent a month on, about 6 minutes of review. We then got a form e-mail.
We appealed, which generated another form e-mail.
The thing is, even if I win, how can I possibly invest in a system like that? Our next step involved serious development, and hiring of engineers to do it. That’s hundreds of thousands of dollars held hostage by 6 minutes of a person who may not understand our app, language, or business model. We planned on having hundreds of customers, whose investment would then be put at Apple’s whim.
I ain’t gonna do it.
Android and Windows Mobile are PLENTY big enough for me. In fact, combined they are much larger than Apple’s iPhone market share.
If Apple can’t convince me that their business is safe for investment, I won’t do it.
Do they care? Probably not. But the only power I have is my choice, and I intend to use it.
Update: They approved the app, unchanged after our appeal. This happened late Monday, so within one working day. As far as appeals goes, this seems rather fast and I suspect it reflects that the first reviewer did make an error that was pretty obvious.
Rapid approval upon appeal does take the sting out a bit. But my concerns remain… do I want a big investment made in an ecosystem where one entity can kill it at anytime?
At a minimum it means I’ll probaby lead with our Droid offerings.
On the “coarsening” political discourse in this country…
I’m irked I even feel the need to write this. But many on the left see everything in terms of political opportunity. Even tragedy is included in their calculus. Well… to hell with them. How’s that for “coarse discourse”?
I’ve got valid reasons to be mad, and their tragedy opportunism isn’t going to stop me from expressing it… at appropriate times and in peaceful ways.
Amount of time typical Tulane graduate spends testing alarm clocks.
A Tulane graduate from 2005 has lost her job due to being late, she claims, because of a glitch in the iPhone calendar app.
If you had warned me about the glitch, I could have at least picked up a $5, battery-operated alarm clock that would have saved my job,” she wrote in an open letter to Apple CEO Steve Jobs posted on the Huffington Post.
I test apps before I depend on them. For instance, before I ever used the Android’s alarm, I set it to go off through the day. This saved me from a bad volume setting. Now, they didn’t cover this at Utah State. Computers were as big as houses when I went there. How could they? But I did have an alarm clock, and I did TEST it before using it. You ALWAYS test alarm clocks before using them. Anything you depend on should be verified. Life 101.
Related… why 5 years later, is a Tulane graduate tending tables? What degree? Tulane, btw, costs $50K a year to attend.
Similar… was the reporter a Tulane graduate? She didn’t ask questions that seemed pretty obvious to me. Like “Did you test it?”, “Why are you waitressing?”, “What was your degree?”.
The graduate in question, btw, did not answer questions about if the tardiness was a habit. Which means “yep”.
I know, I know, I’m being unreasonable on the school. But I just couldn’t resist. I hope she doesn’t have too much school debt for what, by any reasonable view, was an economically fruitless time spent in college.
It’s time for some St. George residents to look in the mirror.
About every 2 to 3 years the Feds descend on St. George and bust somebody for fraud. This week’s was a doozy… a claim of $275 million in fraudulent activity by one Jeremy Johnson and his companies. Jeremy is well known in St. George, mainly for donation of his various aircraft to search and rescue efforts and flying humanitarian missions where they need to go. If you believe the Federal claims, the gas for those missions of mercy may have been bought with defrauded money from hundreds of thousands of other people.
I’ve been suspicious of his businesses since I first heard of them, so these charges surprise me not. On issues of guilt or innocence, I’ll let the courts decide. But if you read Jeremy’s defense of his business, your concern will rise:
Johnson said the order forms for his products prominently detail terms and disclosures that show customers will be charged $59.95 monthly if they do not call to cancel within a seven- to 14-day trial period. He pointed to prominent companies such as American Express that feature similar offers where consumers who are offered a “free” product must cancel or they will be charged for other goods or services.
I think anybody who bases a business on fine print that takes monthly $60 fees that they can’t cancel easily is doing a bad thing. The courts can decide if laws were broken. I’ll just say the business model was contemptible.
Now here is the rub…
the complaint says. Johnson and others (emphasis added) then created dozens of “shell” companies to accept credit card payments in order to avoid fines and detection, it says.
There are people running around this town, the “others” mentioned above, that helped Mr. Johnson in his schemes. I’m sure I know some of them. I just have to wonder how they feel about being part of such shoddy business practices and how they kept doing it so long.
Last night, at midnight, 725 new California laws went into effect This is on top of the 75,000 laws already on the books.
Jewels “protecting” you newly as of last evening:
AB 119 prevents insurance companies from charging different rates for men and women for identical coverage.
Are men safer drivers than woman, or worse? Do men have a higher risk of accidental death? Not any more. Really what this means is that the safe subsidize the risky.
SB 782 prevents landlords from evicting tenants who are victims of domestic or sexual abuse or stalking
Gosh… do you think this will be abused?
SB 1317 allows the state to slap parents with a $2,000 fine if their K-8 child misses more than 10 percent of the school year without a valid excuse. It also allows the state to punish parents with up to a year in prison for the misdemeanor.
Parents, we need your biology, but we will take it from there.
AB 97 bans the use of trans-fats in food facilities.
Will there be any restaurants open in 2012?
I was thinking of relaxing in San Diego again this summer. I’m not too sure now. Perhaps a coastal town in Texas instead? And Disney has “Disney World” in Florida for my wife and kids to waste time and money as well as Disney Land ever provided.
Is it surprising that the next most likely 10 cities to default/go bankrupt are all run by Democrats, and have been for a long time?
http://www.businessinsider.com/first-city-pensions-insolvent-2010-12?slop=1#slideshow-start
Democrats are the symptom. They are really just hired hands for public employee unions that are the real cause of the terrible financial situations.
It starts small, and reasonable sounding, “hey, lets make sure Internet providers treat everybody the same”. This keeps Comcast, for instance, from blocking Netflix – a potential video on demand competitor.
But this is the Government. So it may start simple, like the 1% tax on zillionaires, but it will NEVER stay simple.
Best to keep them out.
If I don’t like the way my Internet service provider is behaving, I’ll just switch them. I, and most Americans, have 5 or 6 to choose from. In some places, even more.
I don’t think it is an accident that 3 Democrats voted for this, and 2 Republican’s against. Democrats LOVE to start small little things that grow into big pains in the ass.
The only role the government should play is ensuring competition.
That’s the spirit!
Government names usually mislead. An “Internet Security Act” would undoubtedly make the Internet less secure. The “Dream Act” isn’t about a dream, but a nightmare. The National Recovery Act (Stimulus) was really pork for teachers. So forth…
So you can imagine just how backwards “unemployment insurance” would be if a government provided it.
Insurance works like this… you have a risk, you bet against yourself with an insurance provider, and if your risk happens, they pay.
Insurance doesn’t work like this… you have a risk, you bet against yourself, the risk happens, they pay, you decide you need more pay, they pay, you decide you need more, they pay.
But that is how unemployment insurance, provided by the state and Federal government is working. As unemployment length increased they kept extending benefits to recently unemployed until some actually get 99 weeks of unemployment insurance, when they only had been paying for a 1/3 that period before they lost their jobs..
You might call this harsh of me, sitting here in my relatively secure job, but this is CRAZY and is gumming up our whole employment system. If you pay me for two years to not get a job, I won’t make adjustments in pay, geography, and skill set needed to find work.
If I’m a $50K a year welder, and you are paying me $35K a year on unemployment, why would I move to Chicago to be a 35K a year Assistant Manager at McDonalds?
The RIGHT answer is to honor insurance obligations and no more. If people can’t find a job, they can use up assets, and then go on welfare.
I guarantee you that once they start paying for their own vacation, it wont’ last long.
What happens when the group becomes more important than the individual.
Between 2 and 3 million of these victims were tortured to death or summarily executed, often for the slightest infraction. People accused of not working hard enough were hung and beaten; sometimes they were bound and thrown into ponds. Punishments for the least violations included mutilation and forcing people to eat excrement.
More here.
Skeptics will say “oh that was China, it couldn’t happen in a Western Democracy”. Uhmmm… it has and can again, if you let force become centralized.
I can afford it myself if my wife needs it. Why keep me from buying it FDA?
In a country where other people’s money is allocated by voting block, women with breast cancer apparently don’t vote or donate often enough to escape the FDA’s death panels. In a move done entirely based on money the FDA intends to revoke approval for the breast cancer drug Avastin.
However, many American women are getting something priceless in return for those dollars: life and vitality. In one clinical trial, nearly 50% of patients receiving Avastin witnessed their tumors shrink. Another study found that patients receiving the drug in conjunction with chemotherapy lived “progression-free” twice as long as patients without it.
Sure it is expensive. But the FDA shouldn’t be basing approvals on cost. This way, even woman who can self-fund it won’t have access to it. Is that the FDA line now? You have to die early because a poor woman has to die early?
The right answer is to base the drug approval decisions on medical merit to the specific patient. The longer right answer is to disband the FDA and let doctors and the market manage drug introductions. They will do just fine without the FDA.
This is just another in a long line of the government doing too much, and doing it poorly.
Corruption personified.
Ethanol subsidies are up for renewal and are likely to be part of this bogus tax deal Obama and the Republicans are cooking up.
Why? One Senator, Charles Grassley, from the state that gets most of the subsidies.
First with Iraq and Afghanistan war dumps, and now with State Department cable traffic, WikiLeaks keeps agitating. For what purpose? It seems clear they want to harm America. I don’t know why a guy from Sweden would hate America so, but he does.
If WikiLeaks would do more to expose world secrets – like its coverage of Keyna massacres in 2008 – then it would be a better tool. But its diversion into American derangement syndrome basically makes it a weapon of the socialist / progressive left.
What should we do about WikiLeaks? Well… we should kill it. They aren’t terrorists, but like terrorists, they have declared a one sided war against us. We should respond as in war. Destroy it and its operators. War is war, after all.
Not pleasant? A strike against free speech? Well, WikiLeaks is free to be a pox on everybody’s house, but in choosing to focus on harming the US, it gives us no choice but to act in our national interest.
Is Obama capable of doing this? Yes, but only if WikiLeaks goes specifically after him. Hurting the US won’t prompt him to act, after all, that is his main purpose as well. Should WikiLeaks dump something bad about him, thus harming his narcissistic self-love, well…watch out.
It is a shame, WikiLeaks had such potential. Their move away from user provided content, towards published, editor chosen, material makes it biased and dangerous to America.
If we kill it, will others arise? Maybe. And if they aim at America, we should aim right back. Eventually, they will get the message.
Moron
Steny Hoyer seems pretty stupid, you know, for an educated, “elite”, kind of fellow.
Military members are under paid, relative to risk and responsibilities. Now is NOT the time to cut their pay.
Federal employees, however, are over paid and except for paper cuts at very little risk. We need to not only cut their pay, but also cut their numbers, their duties, and their reach.
Hoyer is of age to have served, but never did. I don’t require it in order to speak about military issues, but this level of stupidity rises to the point where the man’s qualifications should be questioned.
His is a classic Democratic stupidity. HIs “constituency”, Federal district workers, aren’t happy, and he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the country in his efforts to please them. What is so stupid about it is that the Federal workers, if asked, wouldn’t want what is happening to them to also happen to members of the military.
Pssstt…. Hey Steny… there’s a WAR ON.
