OFAC sanctions are far more nuanced than what you make them out to be. Very often "general licenses" are carved out for providing IT services or technology to individuals for personal use. The purpose of this is for censorship circumvention, which often supports American interests abroad.
This is not something that you apply for; a general license already applies to everyone. The legalese or restrictions companies use exist because they cannot (or will not) validate everyone is who they say they are. This obviously doesn't apply to companies who deal with controlled exports, where they are responsible for whoever ultimately receives the controlled export.
I get this, but you say "very often", but it's not, and generally, looking at OFAC lists, there's only a few countries with personal carveouts (less than 5 of the countries on the list), usually for remittances, and in a few of those countries only to US persons residing there.
Generally the software carveouts are very limited - it's not just "providing IT services or technology to individuals for personal use", i.e. Sudan:
> software updates for medical devices to Sudan
Indeed, of the software carveouts listed on that page, only two are not related to the operation or update of medical devices:
- provision of Internet services to the people of the Ukraine (read: "Starlink")
- provision of messaging services to members of the Government of Venezuela.
I understand people don't like this kind of OCR stuff for privacy reasons, but selecting text from images is probably the most useful feature added to iOS in the last ~5 years for me.
I would imagine it has more to do with its principal function in recycling ADP back to ATP (fuel for cells). People who are sleep deprived also have impaired glucose metabolism, meaning that the cellular "fuel pipeline" is impeded. Perhaps creatine is especially helpful under these conditions.
Disordered sleep can cause executive dysfunction similar to ADHD, but it does not cause ADHD. It certainly can exacerbate it or be diagnosed incorrectly.
There are dubious results for "uBlock" as well on browser extension stores. If it's not breaking rules (copyright violation, malware) it's precarious for companies to take action. It's obvious to me that uBlock Origin is the "correct" result, but how would a company determine that at scale?
The app was removed a day after your article was posted. The app name, developer, icon, and images are all different. It's absolutely a problem, but it was addressed.
If Apple aggressively took action against this with a high error rate, the headlines would probably be about anti-competition, censorship, and upset developers.
> but how would a company determine that at scale?
Two-way signature validation. Apple distributes unique developer IDs; make the dev sign the app locally before uploading it, like Google does for the Play Store. If those trojan horses still make it through Apple's manual inspection process, then they need to fire everyone working for the App Store and replace them with AI.
> If Apple aggressively took action against this with a high error rate
They need to take action. Apple's entire argument for an App Store monopoly is that they curate apps individually before they're uploaded to ensure a baseline of quality. When they stop vetting apps and allow the App Store to become like every other store, their argument in favor of monopoly control evaporates.
So yes, it would be anti-competitive censorship, but that's nothing Apple hasn't done before. The real issue is that their "premium" store interface is getting shown-up by the Google Play services. At the going rate there won't be anti-competitive behavior to complain about since Apple will be forced to accept competing storefronts - and they have no one to blame but themselves.
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