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Apple Bans Sexy Apps, Developers Upset
An anonymous reader writes "Apple is now removing many risque applications from its App Store so as not to 'scare off potential customers.' The removed applications, including SlideHer and Dirty Fingers, allowed people to see scantily clad women. Although they were once approved by Apple, even reaching the 'most downloaded' lists, Apple removed them after getting complaints that they were degrading to women. That said, the Sports Illustrated application is still available for those who want scantily clad women on their iPhone, and developers are up in arms over the perceived inconsistency. It's sure a good thing for those worried parents that they don't have any kind of web browser on there. On the internet, you're never more than one click away from something horrible."
Some are speculating that this is a ploy from Apple to drum up interest in the iPad from educators.
Apple Bans Sexy Apps, Developers Upset
Shoot.
Damn.... here I was just about to submit v1.00 of VirtualCunt.
.
Trolling is a art,
A merchant app that sold bikinis was dropped too, for showing girls in bikinis. http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/02/23/swimwear_seller_hit_by_apples_removal_of_sexual_apps.html
I guess axing ~5,000 applications is easier than building a more effective and granular per-device rating setting system...
Lazier, though, a lot lazier.
I'd say taking down a best seller App based on its "Risque-ness" is censorship, any way you want to slice it.
Apple can stock and sell whatever products it wants to choose from. Yes. It is still censorship - but we've come to terms that private companies have the right to censorship. Apple is fine with censoring, its their product. And I agree - there's nothing wrong with that. But to say it isn't censorship is like saying the Chinese government isn't censoring web searches, they are just choosing to provide what they think is best, not censorship at all.
They were hardly real apps. "Big Boobs," "Large Boobs," "Young Boobs," et cetera, et cetera. Recipe: Make an image display app, throw some pictures into it, make another version with different pictures, repeat indefinitely.
They probably really only deleted five or ten real distinct apps.
Not that I am a big fan of getting rid of a bunch of content because of seemingly arbitrary rules, but from the sounds of it many of this 'apps' are nothing more then a image (or a few images) of a girl/boy/goat in a bikini. It seems like a bit of a stretch to refer to those who create such content as developers.
On the internet, you're never more than one click away from something horrible.
Hmmm.. "Read More..." *click*
Aww, crap.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I find it irksome that people have such an impoverished understanding of how censorship works.
Yes, the sort of censorship where a government bureaucrat with a slightly sinister mustache uses the threat of state violence to control your speech is the most extreme and severe form. And, if you simply must, you are free to assert that this is the only "true censorship". You can then go on to assert that anything else isn't "real" censorship, and anything that has some link to a contractual relationship, no matter how tenuous the link or adhesive the contract, is happy and voluntary and not at all censorship. Hurray, hurray!
However, and this part is important: Censorship is evil and dangerous in two distinct respects: The first is that it involves the illegitimate use(or threat of use) of violence for coercive ends. The second is that it distorts a society's flow of information in whatever direction is favored by the powerful and the incumbents. Since both democracies and free markets depend on informed actors, this is a major practical problem(and, of course, vibrant cultures arguably depend on the ability of individuals to express themselves without constraint).
It is true that the various forms of "censorship lite" practiced by the private sector(and some aspects of the public sector, through subtler than armed force means) possess relatively little of the first respect(though, unless you have ample resources, private sector use of lawsuits and contracts of adhesion to secure your silence can be unpleasantly close to coercive force). However, these forms of censorship possess the second respect to an enormous degree, likely greater than that of state censorship in all but the most repressive societies. The majority of controls over access to, and expression of, information faced by the people of any moderately free society are private sector. Many of them are, at least ostensibly, voluntary to some degree. Nevertheless, they have an effect.
Police-state censorship is evil; but dramatic and(in the more or less free world) relatively rare. The creeping death-by-a-thousand-cuts of the private sector, with its arbitration clauses, cryptographic controls, content filters, lawsuit threats, media ownership consolidation and so on and so forth is where the vast majority of information landscape distortion is happening. It is subtle, and most of it can be rationalized as "voluntary" with enough jesuitical hair-splitting about contracts; but that makes it no less dangerous.
I love the quote from the CNN article:
>>>Agreed. Sony learned from their VHS vs. Betamax lessons and proved it with the success of Bluray. What was the lesson? Betamax discouraged porn on their format.
>>>
I wish people would stop posting false stories. Sony allowed Betamax to carry porn, and have (or rather had) a whole library to prove it. Playboy, swimsuits, unmentionable stuff - it was all available on Betamax. You are quoting a false urban legend. In reality the reason Betamax failed is because it only supported 1 hour per tape (in 1975) and people felt 1 hour was not long enough to record an evening football game, or primetime programming, or afternoon soaps.
So instead they chose VHS which supported 4 hours (in 1976). While Sony later increased the max record time to 3 hours in 1980, the damage had already been done, and VHS had already gained dominance.
As for quality between VHS and Betamax, that is yet another urban legend. Just as Sony tried to dupe people into believing the PS2 had Toy Story-level graphics, so too did they try the same with Betamax, but in reality, there's no statistical difference:
- Both are 3 megahertz video bandwidth (250 lines analog horizontal resolution)
- Both have 0.6 megahertz chroma bandwidth
- Both have AM-quality sound recording... and later Hi-Fi recording
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Apple allows Big Content to put up porn apps, just not little publishers, so your explanation doesn't really stand up to scrutiny.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I've always been a PC at heart.
Not like the rest, the others. Everyone around me. I was at odds with my society and knew it early since birth. Unlike them, I did not "Think Different!"--the mantra of the Macs around me, the phrase on all the billboards in the city that served as a reminder to its citizenry. Sameness pervaded the essence of my being and no amount of self-conditioning I did could change that. Eventually, I gave up and isolated myself emotionally from society.
I gaze at the faces going by, the white earphones contrasting their black turtlenecks, connecting their ears to their pockets, their blank faces engrossed in hip Indie rock music and various garage bands. I envied them for their perfection against my flaws and my compulsive nature to expand, to burden my life with troubles instead of remaining, like them, simple and easy to deal with. The grandest of virtues, simplicity... the philosophy by our loyal benefactor Steve Jobs, who descended from the heavens, creating the Earth, the iron, the wind and the rain. Steve Jobs, who defined the parameters of existence, the one who set about the patterns of reality, the constants, the variables. He who made gravity, electromagnetic energy, and shaped atomic structures and brought forth motion. From these things, he crafted the elements, processed them, refined them, and from these things engineered Apple products through the purity of his mind. Each Apple product was individually crafted by his own hands with the programming code used to run each device having being compiled in his brain and uploaded to each device telepathically, breathing life and perfection into each and every unit.
Except, it seems, for me, for I was not among the many. I was a PC. They were Macs. I've always been a cold, stiff person. I got by, disguising myself by keeping my non-Ipod music player safely out of sight, which I use because of my depraved nature demanding more functionality than the simple and easy-to-use Ipods have to offer.. In the safety of my own home, behind locked doors, I ran a Forbidden, a contraband computer from more depraved, earlier days that was not given the love and blessing of being birthed by Steve Jobs. I dual booted, out of the great sin of curiosity-- curiosity, a shameful value of a PC, as curiosity has no place where simplicity matters most--using two of the great unutterable blasphemies-- something called "Windows Vista" and something else called "Linux." Although, as I mentioned before, although my tendency to be a PC and towards conformity has always been inherent to me, I was truly transformed when I found these old things in a hidden cache of computer parts predating The Purging. Perhaps the greatest sin of all, the single evil that, if discovered, would damn me forever, was the fact that my mouse had more than one button.
As I walk among the Macs on the streets, passing the Starbuckses as I went along, I wondered how it all came to this. I glanced at The Holy Marks on the foreheads as the people wandered down the streets, the Bitten Apple tattooed on all our of us at birth, and wondered if, perhaps, there could be something more to life. But again, this was a PC's thought, and not, like everyone elses', a Mac's. We were to hold ourselves to the philosophy of Steve Jobs--so as his products were designed for idiots, so too were we to be idiots. But I was not a Mac--I was not an idiot. I was simply too complicated to be a worthwhile person.
Nature called. I found a nearby public iPoo--squeaky clean and sparkly white, things weren't all bad--and let myself go, expelling the waste that had accumulated inside me. After relieving myself and committing the overly-complicated and thus illegal act of wiping my ass (I did not flush as iPoos, designed to be idiot-proof, did not flush) I left and once again wandered the streets aimlessly, hoping to find some meaning in a world where I simply did not belong, a world where if my true nature was discovered, I would be endlessly persecuted by smug, self-righteous sons of bitches.
The fact is, a consumer retailer like Apple can stock and sell whatever products to choose to its customers. What they don't stock is really none of your business, and if you don't like, take your products and have someone else carry it.
This is just another non-issue. The problem with Apple is that they are too successful, they need to keep out the riff raff.
Hm, I'm not so sure about that. Schiller has already intimated that Apple is now operating a cartel with certain app developers when responding to a question about why Sports Illustrated's and Playboy's apps are not banned:
“The difference is this is a well-known company with previously published material available broadly in a well-accepted format”.
I also suspect that Apple's App Store practices will lead to an antitrust investigation at some point. The iPhone is gaining dominance in the smartphone market and if its capricious App Store behaviour continues, accusations of monopolistic behaviour are bound to crop up.
Well, it's an Apple product; I expect it to be hostile to heterosexual male sexuality.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
but you're wrong. when vhs and beta came out, beta supported 250 lines of resolution vs vhs' 240, and the heavy luma/chroma 'bleed' in vhs made the picture look noticeably worse. eventually vhs upped to 250 lines of resolution, and incidently beta actually downgraded to 240 lines of resolution in order to fit 2 hours onto a tape. however, the misconception about betamax picture quality is often attributed to people who've seen superbeta tapes, which weren't introduced until 1985 when the format war was already over. however, at 290 lines of resolution these tapes were/are significantly clearer than vhs. as for porn, yes there was beta porn, but it came much later than vhs porn and was significantly harder to come by, and this was because sony initially tried to block it from the platform completely. so while the common stories told about the format war aren't fully accurate, calling them 'false urban legends' is well, a false internet legend.
All men masturbate. Some just lie about it. But playing the moral superiority, 'real men don't fantasize' card is such nineteenth century, Victorian ere crap. All the studies I've read show fantasy and masturbation as normal, healthy aspects of human sexuality.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The only people up in arms are sleazy dudes out to make a quick buck off of someone else's boobies.
They've had their day and nothing of value has been lost.
So all the apps that were pulled for collateral damage are nothing important? (See above post for the Bikini seller that had the app pulled - and that wasn't the only one)
Also compare this with Apples statement when questioned over why SI and Playboy didn't have their apps pulled - "Because they were established brands". So Old porn is good, but new porn is not???
Or what about the "iWobble boobs" (or whatever it was called - and yep terrible juvenile name) which didn't supply content - you had to download and add your own content. That is like last year when the eBook reader was not approved because you could download the Karma Sutra
I can understand why some people want to remove some lower common denominator apps from the App store, but the heavy handed manner in which Apple did this does smack of censorship, and they had to be aware of what they were doing
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