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by timanglade 3323 days ago
Yup sorry about that, the app is available only in the US (& Canada) due to some legal restrictions we couldn't avoid. FWIW I also worked about on Richard's New Internet concept for this season so I definitely hear ya ;)
5 comments

Can you please enlighten us as to what kind of legal restrictions apply here? It is always interesting to see how these «little» legal details get in the way of running software.

Congrats for getting the app out!

Could it be that the app is using HTTPS? iTunesConnect has all these crazy questions with very little guidance about encryption and export compliance if you say you do use HTTPS.
Guys, we have HTTPS in the rest of the world now!

But seriously, the iTunes connect question specifically excludes stuff like HTTPS using the regular libraries, which is just as well as otherwise pretty much every app would be affected. Legal issue is probably boring IP rights stuff.

It's not that easy. Even the first question in iTunesConnect explicitly states you must answer "yes" even if you just make use of the built-in HTTPS libraries in the OS. If you start digging into the various guidelines you open a can of worms of recursive cross-references between documents and sections. Nowhere have I seen a statement that says "if you just use os HTTPS, you don't have to do anything". At the very least you may have to consider if you have to submit various annual self-classification reports.

For an app like this I could easily see a serious company deciding to skip the hassle and CYA, instead of potentially taking on a huge legal risk. Would you, as a regular worker-bee developer, be OK with personally signing off and accepting a legal risk on behalf of a large company without involving expensive lawyers to evaluate the validity of your opinion on this legalese? Would that be a responsible action to take?

NSA probably shared a few libraries/ pretrained models with them, and forgot the waiver.
What are those legal restrictions? Just curious.
Can we expect a similar POC for this P2P-based New Internet that you have scoped up? Basically, how feasible are the concepts explained by Richard?
It is called "Urbit".
How much of it is inspired by Ethereum? /r/ethereum is assuming loads
how does a decentralised mesh network cross oceans?