Angry Rage Monkey

Don't call the apps Apple pulled Porn...

There have been a number of stories about Apple banning/removing “overtly sexual” content from the app store.  To my knowledge it started with this post from TechCrunch

I think this is a problem for a number of reasons, from the fact that I don’t see a problem with this content being available (there are parental controls after all), to the fact that Apple had approved these apps only to pull them after the fact months later.

As troubling as all of that is, there is something else that I find disturbing: many of the posts and articles I see reporting on this refer to the banned apps as porn.  For example John Gruber from Daring Fireball: Apple Removing Porno Apps From App Store

I would like to ask everyone to stop using the word “porn” when describing the apps that have been retroactively banned from the app store.

I don’t think anyone could legitimately call the apps that have been pulled as porn under the definition of pornography (obscene writings, drawings, photographs, or the like, esp. those having little or no artistic merit) or by the law (in the US: based on community standards).  Regardless of how you define it, simple nudity, or titillation do not count as pornography.

Nor does Apple allow true pornography on the App Store, and never has.  So none of the apps can be legitimately called porn.  Quod Erat Demonstrandum, baby.

The apps pulled might be only suitable for adults only, but that is a much larger category than porn.

And as we learn more about what is being retroactively disallowed, we see it extends as far as swimsuits.  Which again is a far far larger category than porn.

I think it is also a bit dangerous to blithely call the apps being rejected as porn, because the word holds a special negative place in so many people’s minds.  It conjures up images that start with hardcore sex and go far worse.  It makes it easy to defend this move as a good thing, and something we need to be protected against (despite the parental controls in the system).

So anyone writing about this issue, please — please! — don’t call it porn, because when you do you are just being lazy and judemental.  What is happening is big, it is complicated, and there are a lot of issues involved.  So even if you know where you stand, don’t muddy the waters by calling it porn.

Now that I have said that, I would like to suggest one possible reason for this change — at least one beyond the “there have been complaints” reason that Apple seems to have given.

A few days ago Apple quietly announced that they were extending the app store to 13 more countries.

One angle to this move by Apple I haven’t seen mentioned is the fact that the App Store is now available in a number of new countries: Armenia, Botswana, Bulgaria, Jordan, Kenya, Macedonia, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritius, Niger, Senegal, Tunisia, and Uganda.

Many of these countries have very strict rules about what can and cannot be shown.  Especially when it comes sexual, nude, semi nude, and suggestive content.  In fact, I have an easier time believing the “complaints” came from prudish countries rather than prudish individuals.

I don’t know if we will ever find out exactly why this happened, but I fear it represents a race to the most blad, lowest common denominator content around.  A world in which tip calculators rule the earth and the Vargas Girls must go into hiding…

Hearing and Touch

The old saw is that blind people have better hearing.  It seems to make sense, right?  The brain and body has left over capacity and a vital need for more information, so — like a muscle — it gets stronger at the remaining senses.

It doesn’t really work that way though.  What does happen is that when you lose a sense we have the option to pay more attention to the other senses.  It is an illusion to think that somehow when we are seeing our hearing is suppressed, or any other combination of senses you like.

It is also a myth that we only have five senses.  I have heard different numbers bandied about — seventeen is a common one — but no matter how you decide to count them, there are at least ten.

Personal revelation: I have lost most of the feeling in my hands.  I cannot feel texture at all, and my ability to sense hot and cold are greatly muted (I have to examine them periodically to make sure I haven’t cut, burned, or otherwise hurt myself).  I often wonder what other people thing when I turn to my wife and say “I think this is soft, right?”

Increasingly I am aware of how important my other senses are to my sense of touch.  What I see influences how I think something should feel.  The sound generated by my fingers feeds into the mix.  Etc.  They all work together to give me clues to what something is.  But all I truly feel at this point is a memory.

Think of walking in a dark room, especially one we know well.  How you rely on your sense of touch and balance, how every sound your hear provides a clue all swirling together until you can almost see.

It is true that we have discreet senses that can operate independent of one another, but that isn’t actually how we work.  I submit to you that we really only have one real sense, which is the combination of all of them.

We do not simply see, or hear, or whatever; what we do is to perceive based on the combination of all of our senses, and our memory and experience.

Dear golf sims...

Dear golf sims, lens flair used to be cool. It isn’t now.

It is as though we don't want to move beyond the Apple ][

I am listening to This Week In Google (episode 18) and they got into a sidebar complaining about those annoying things that Microsoft Word forced on them that they don’t want, things like Smart Quotes and curly apostrophes and the like.  You know the things it is supposed to do for the good of humanity.

I am not kidding about that last line.  The written word has evolved over a long period of time, and gained a number of non-verbal cues to help and ease our understanding of the text.  If you went back 50 years and gave someone a book with straight quotes and vertical apostrophes, they would complain.

Computers took that away from us for a while.  ASCII did an admirable job of cramming in the essential letters, punctuation, and other glyphs needed by the English language, into a mere 128 character set.  And that is what computers — and people — of the Apple ][ generation had to deal with.

And it broke our brains.

We started thinking that was all we needed.  Well we could understand needing lowercase letters, and the accents and diacritical marks.  Who needed more than that?  I mean except for people who don’t use a latin derived alphabet, and people who wanted more subtly in their text, and other freaks like that.

And that kind of thinking has dominated our (the technology) world, with only lipservice to the idea that we should all do our part for localization and internationalization.  In the mean time, people who knew better built the web as we know it.

And so you get browsers that do not do the right thing with smart quotes, et al; and who do we blame?  Not the browsers for not supporting them, not the web servers for not properly changing them on the fly for browsers that can’t handle them, but the programs that are doing the correct thing.

And this is what frustrates me about my kind — the engineers and technologists — they are used to the status quo, they are too safely placed inside their bubble of people who agree with them, to think challenge their assumptions or fix this kind of thing in a graceful way.

I loved the Apple ][ too, but I grew out of the thinking it forced me into.  You should do the same…