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ExtraBITS for 31 July 2017

In ExtraBITS this week, Apple is removing VPN apps from the Chinese App Store at the Chinese’s government’s request, and MacPaw has acquired the Unarchiver family of decompression apps.

Apple Removes VPN Apps from Chinese App Store — Under pressure from the Chinese government, Apple has removed some virtual private network (VPN) apps from the App Store in China. Chinese users use VPNs to tunnel through the so-called “Great Firewall” that censors Internet traffic there. Apple says that the Chinese government now requires a license for all VPN software, so it had no choice but to comply with the law. Apple is in an awkward position in China because it’s torn between wanting to support user privacy and needing government approval to sell to the lucrative Chinese
market.

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MacPaw Acquires The Unarchiver — Ukrainian developer MacPaw, which operates the Setapp app subscription service, has acquired the Unarchiver family of decompression apps and will keep them free for all users. Unarchiver creator Dag Ågren said that after ten years of work on the apps, he had less time to maintain them properly, and he expressed confidence that MacPaw would keep Unarchiver going for a long time. MacPaw said it would “support the Unarchiver, keep it up-to-date, localize into popular languages, and make design improvements.”

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