Tim Hardwick:
In an attempt to crack down on gambling-related apps in the App Store, Apple has today implemented a new App Review policy for individual developers, but many apps that are being banned as a result appear to have very little to do with gambling at all.
[…]
The reason that apps unrelated to gambling are being removed appears to be because the ban currently applies to any apps that allow users “unrestricted web access”.
Talk about amateur hour. Apple didn’t just reject new submissions of apps, but rather it removed apps that were already in the store.
Simon B. Støvring:
Today Apple removed my 3 years old app for browsing and sending GIFs from the App Store. The reason? They no longer allow gambling apps submitted by individual developers 🤷♂️
Wojtek Pietrusiewicz:
Our newsstand/news/magazine app just got removed from sale from the App Store 24 hours after our 3.0 update was approved. Reason given: gambling/fraudulent activity. We publish a magazine — nothing to do with gambling or fraud at all. 😞😢😲😱
His app is now back.
Patrick McCarron:
Wow Apple pulled my almost exactly 11 year old Blackjack 21 game from the AppStore due to it simulating gambling AND me being an individual developer.
Not sure if I want to incorporate at this point to put it back in there as I never had time to update it fully for iOS 11+.
Update (2018-08-22): Joe Rossignol:
Apple today confirmed it has removed “many” illegal gambling apps, and developers distributing them, from its App Store in China.
Yoko Kubota (via Hacker News):
Under fire from Chinese state media, Apple Inc. said it removed illegal gambling apps from its App Store in China—a move that could help quell the latest challenge for the American tech giant in its most important market outside of the U.S.
App Store App Store Rejection China iOS iOS 11 iOS App
Jonny Evans (via Thomas Reed):
Top10VPN’s latest Dark Web Market Price Index suggests Apple users are becoming the most popular targets for online scammers. In March, the index reported that Apple ID data trades hands at $15 per account.
[…]
One thing the report does suggest is that rather than platform-based attacks, cybercriminals are moving to trust-based attacks to target the valuable Apple demographic. They work to persuade users to click on innocuous-seeming pages, persuade them to enter banking details on spoof banking pages, and so on. Apple is wise to this, and to help protect customers, it recently introduced new phishing protection tools for Macs and iOS devices.
Apple ID iOS iOS 11 Mac macOS 10.13 High Sierra Phishing
Jack Nicas:
For decades, the district south of downtown and alongside San Francisco Bay here was known as either Rincon Hill, South Beach or South of Market. This spring, it was suddenly rebranded on Google Maps to a name few had heard: the East Cut.
The peculiar moniker immediately spread digitally, from hotel sites to dating apps to Uber, which all use Google’s map data. The name soon spilled over into the physical world, too. Real-estate listings beckoned prospective tenants to the East Cut. And news organizations referred to the vicinity by that term.
[…]
Yet how Google arrives at its names in maps is often mysterious. The company declined to detail how some place names came about, though some appear to have resulted from mistakes by researchers, rebrandings by real estate agents — or just outright fiction.
Via Nick Heer:
Even the area I grew up in, West Hillhurst, is called Upper Hillhurst in Google Maps, which is just north of Westmount, another neighbourhood that doesn’t exist.
Google Maps Maps Web
