Saturday, September 19, 2020

Como o poder da Apple reforça o poder dos governos

A fight over freedom at Apple’s core, por Jonathan Zittrain, no Financial Times (é um artigo de 2010, mas se calhar é atual):

Thirty years later Apple gave us the iPhone . It was easy to use, elegant and cool – and had lots of applications right out of the box. But the company quietly dropped a fundamental feature, one signalled by the dropping of “Computer” from Apple Computer’s name: the iPhone could not be programmed by outsiders. “We define everything that is on the phone,” said Mr Jobs. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work any more.”
The openness on which Apple had built its original empire had been completely reversed – but the spirit was still there among users. Hackers vied to “jailbreak” the iPhone, running new apps on it despite Apple’s desire to keep it closed. Apple threatened to disable any phone that had been jailbroken, but then appeared to relent: a year after the iPhone’s introduction, it launched the App Store. Now outsiders could write software for the iPhone (...)

But the App Store has a catch: app developers and their software must be approved by Apple. If Apple does not like the app, for any reason, it is gone. (...)

If Apple is the gatekeeper to a device’s uses, the governments of the world need knock on the door of only one office in Cupertino, California – Apple’s headquarters – to demand changes to code or content.

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