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Monday, October 22, 2007
Apple’s new OS shows how porn rules the market
Posted by The Dean of Cincinnati
Somewhere along the line (perhaps when reading Eric Schlosser’s Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market), I came across the idea that most innovations in personal computing interfaces are dictated by the online porn industry. Now that Apple is about to release its latest update (which means Windows will be following suit in a few years), I thought it might be a good opportunity to reflect on this awkward truth.
I remember when Apple released something called “Automator” a few years ago, I thought it proved the premise true. Automator can be set to visit a certain set of web pages, then download all pictures from them, then load them into a slideshow which gets burned to DVD.
For the porn-lover, what a great tool! Just a few clicks in the morning will create a pornographic slideshow by the return from work!
Apple also released something called “Private Browsing” on their Safari browser. Check this screenshot, from the link in the last sentence:
What is the most common activity any web browser would want to hide so profoundly? I can only think of two: some sort of terrorism, or porn-hunting.
Now, with the upcoming Leopard Operating System, Apple brings “Guest” email accounts:
Guest Log-In Accounts
Allow anyone to surf the web and check email as a guest on your Mac. When they log out of the guest account, Mac OS X purges the account, removing any trace of their activity. So each time someone logs in as a guest, he or she gets a fresh, unused account.
If a guest wanted to check email, why not just use webmail? Or webmail with the “Private Browsing”? The only reason I can think: an easy way to delete all traces of questionable email content. Again, I can think of two possibilities: terrorism, or porn-hunting.
And these DVD options seem self-explanatory:
Chapter Thumbnails
See dynamically generated thumbnail images representing each chapter of a DVD. You can even create your own chapter thumbnails as you watch, using any frame from the movie.
Time Skip
Skip ahead or skip back five seconds to replay that moment you missed or just see something one more time.
Anyway, just something to think about. And here is a fact I know for sure I remember from Schlosser’s book: America has Earth’s strictest anti-pornography laws, while at the same time being the planet’s largest producer of porn—creating, on average, over 400 new hard-core movie titles per week.
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23 Oct 2007 at 03:34 am | #
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”...Again, I can think of two possibilities: terrorism, or porn-hunting.”
With Rove and the state street boys hiring and firing based on political affiliation and the bush whackos spying, ease dropping, and data mining we think privacy and constitutional protections are the “best possibility’ !
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01 Nov 2007 at 11:09 pm | #
You make blog. You don’t know computers. Private browsing has been a Safari feature for years. Using a Guest account clears the cookies and history for each new user. Library computers do the same thing. If a guest wants to check email, they *have* to use webmail. What else are they going to use? You’re an idiot.