Not all of people, and in this case means software developers, are planning good seeds on iPhone. And it looks like not only Apple that has to be worried, but all of us are also have to watch out on the bad fruits that are to come along with the new upcoming iPhone 3G.What am I blabbering about? It's porn, my dear good friends. Porn industries have set their eyes on the refreshed new tehcnologies in iPhone 2.0 platform, which include faster data network and more support rich web experience.
I've just talked about how Apple is currently planning to build a new technology that's similar alike Flash player, within its iPhone 2.0 platform. And it's not only iPhone users in general will rejoice to hear the news, but in particularly porn industries.
The technological feats of the 3G iPhone are key to the coming pornucopia, as wht Jeremy Capaln from Time.com has wrote about this. To date, mobile porn has consisted largely of still images, racy text services and "moan tones," which are sultry-sounding ringtones. In Europe there is an active market for video chatting; customers pay on average $50 a month to exchange dirty messages with actresses.
Devan Cypher, representative for San Francisco–based Sin City Entertainment even called iPhone as the "porn-friendliest phone". "There are a few hundred iPhone porn sites now in use," says Farley Cahen, vice president of business development for AVN Media Network, the adult industry's trade body. Many others are currently in the works targeting the iPhone 2.0, which goes on sale July 11.Mark Kirstein, president of Multimedia Intelligence, a mobile-research firm, says "The iPhone becomes a portal where people can get to content directly without worrying about the social mores of the network operator." About a third of iPhone users watch video on their phone, according to Nielsen Mobile, which is nearly 10 times the number that watch video on other cell phones. Three out of four iPhone users are men with above-average incomes, and iPhone users spend heavily on entertainment.
Apple has taken seriously about this "porn-friendliness" in its flagship mobile phone, Apple spokeswoman Jennifer Bowcock says the company doesn't condone iPhone porn distribution and will ban adult content from official applications, just as it has restricted adult content in the podcast section of the Apple store.
"Our iPhone 2.0 software will give customers the opportunity to turn on parental controls," says Apple spokeswoman Bowcock.
And this "Parental Controls" in iPhone has been confirmed by The iPhone Dev Team who have stumbled across a hidden feature in the next version of the iPhone firmware; the picture found is reminiscent of the iPhone SDK "Organizer". Further more, the screenshot shows a "Parental Controls" setting inside the "General" iPhone settings. It looks as though you can enable these parental controls and turn on or off:
- Playing explicit songs in iPod
- Website control in Safari
- YouTube control
- iTunes Wi-Fi Store control
- AppStore control
But unfortunately, the fight is not that easy. Some parents may not be tech-savvy enough to figure that out, though, and some kids may be clever enough to find a work-around. "If a minor with one of these phones pokes around, he could easily access adult sites without his parents' knowledge," says Holden, who authored "Adult Content in the Palm of Your Hand," Juniper's latest research report.
Looks like it all wind down to the core again, where it's up to us as parents and adults to protect the young ones from explicit and hazardous contents that are everywhere in the net. And the mobile wireless carriers are also should play an important role to prevent porn from spreading too far into the reach of our innocent children; by limiting & ban such contents right from the start. Are you with me? And are they with us?
Sources are from:
- The iPhone's Next Frontier: Porn (Time), via Switched
- Turning the iPhone into the xxxPhone (Time)
- iPhone parental controls? (TUAW)
[blogged with my Treo 750v]
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