Hot Stuff
Homotron.net has received confirmation from Apple on the removal of an app promoting anti-LGBT rhetoric. According to Apple PR:
We removed the Manhattan Declaration app from the App Store because it violates our developer guidelines by being offensive to large groups of people.
We previously noted the app's removal from the iOS App Store, but it was not clear what the official reason was or if the removal was permanent.
No word yet from Apple on other lingering questions, including the reinstatement of a previously removed LGBT social app and the upcoming release of an app from "ex-gay" group, Exodus International. We'll be sure to keep you posted.
For their part, the members of the Anti-LGBT Industry behind the "Manhattan Declaration" have posted a response and call for action on their site in response.
Recent confusion regarding where social apps for gay men stand and approval of apps promoting anti-LGBT politics is prompting some debate about whether we should consider putting our iPhones and MacBooks away for the cause.
In late October, the application "gay men's social network: Jack'd" was removed from the App Store, allegedly due to sexually explicit images. The app's developer also revealed that he was previously warned by Apple's automated submission system that the app may be rejected for it's use of the word "gay".
The "Manhattan Declaration" made its way to the App Store, allowing people to declare their opposition to LGBT people's "right to engage in immoral sexual practices, and even a right to have relationships integrated around these practices be recognized and blessed by law". A Change.org petition has since been posted by LGBT activist (and outing extraordinaire) Michael Rogers demanding that Apple remove the app. Reports are now coming out that the app has disappeared - although no confirmation from Apple or the developer, yet.
Exodus International, the leading "ex-gay" organization (HA!), has also announced its intention of targeting victims as young as 10 with new outreach strategies. Among the use of podcasts and YouTube, the group is also developing an iPhone app.
Recent boycotts of other companies for financially supporting politicians who support anti-LGBT stances seem to be getting Tweeters and followers of activist bloggers (in comments and forum discussions) in the boycotting mood. While the immediate demand would presumably be the removal of the offending apps, it's not exactly clear what the ultimate end-goal for any proposed boycott would be. However, the lack of a stated end-goal didn't prevent the other boycotts from proceeding.
If the ultimate hope is that Apple will censor content that LGBT consumers find objectionable - then the company may find itself revisiting the App Store submission guidelines. Apple has been struggling with the issue of censorship for over a couple of years now. However, this call for more censorship seems to be in conflict with previous demands by progressive consumers.
While Apple has been known for supporting LGBT issues, such as its public opposition to Prop 8, they have not censored anti-LGBT content from podcasts or ebook submissions. Since this issue has gained momentum, Apple's offices have been closed for the Turkey Day festivities. So it's unclear what official response, if any, the company may have. It's also not clear if the removal of the "Manhattan Declaration" app is for good. However, we may have more clarity from the company as early as Monday.
So what do you think? Should Apple censor anti-LGBT content from the App Store? Would that set the foundation for future LGBT supported Apps which target anti-LGBT polices from also being censored? Where do you think Apple should draw the line?
General Motors' Chevrolet Volt has scored a 93 miles per gallon (MPG) rating by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) while running purely on batteries. Once your 25-50 miles of driving on a full charge runs up - you'll experience an average of 37MPG using traditional fuel alone.
While not as high as the Nissan Leaf's 99MPG, or anywhere near the original promise of 230MPG, GM is optimistic the rating will help secure the Volt's position as leader of the electric car pack. Perhaps with good reason, in comparison to the Leaf and other competitors - the Volt seems like an actual sedan rather than a subcompact.
Perhaps the best news of all is that with the sticker finalized, after a series of delays, we may actually see these babies in showrooms.
David Bohnett, who founded GeoCities at the age of 16 and after selling it to Yahoo! founded the David Bohnett Foundation, has made a $250,000 investment in LGBT social network Fabulis - founded earlier this year. As reported by Mashable, Bohnett's venture capital firm, Baroda Ventures, is known for investing in new social media and e-commerce websites - so long as they have a clear revenue plan in place.
According to VentureBeat and the company's own blog, Bohnett's investment joins ones by The Washington Post Company, Lars Hinrichs, Allen Morgan and Don Baer to bring the site's seed money to $825,000. The spherical looking interface, which ironically you can access after signing up via Facebook integration, is geared towards gay men and "their friends" to "discover where to go, what to do and who to meet."
If you've got an active Facebook profile - you'll fit right in. On my first visit I already had 2256 points, in a system that appears to be an elaborate popularity contest.
As you interact with the site - RSVPing for events online or in your area, networking with other peeps and answering questions in their Formspring style Q&A system - you gain "fabulis bits". For now you can only use these bits to vote up your friends on the fab list (aforementioned popularity contest), but according to a post to their help section - more uses of bits are coming in the future. Personally - I'm hoping you can use bits as currency in their online store featuring some cool pride items (most of which don't have rainbows - Hallelujah!).
I'll be looking more closely at Fabulis over the coming weeks - but in the meantime - what do you think of this new online venture? Valuable addition to the online queer universe or a waste of cyberspace?
At 11:34 AM EDT Saturday I received an iPad. It took awhile to get my data sync'd and even longer to download and update apps; yet the end result is pretty outstanding. Ok, yes, it's a big iPod Touch, but saying that doesn't do it justice. I believe that you have to hold it appreciate how different that it is, especially when dealing with apps that are written for the device. In fact, it is notable enough that I felt the need to write about it and finally revive Homotron.
GayGamers may want to check it out. It's my opinion that it will be an incredible platform for games. Even iPhone games seem to work fairly well. I know that many people complain about the 2x enlargement, but I find that that is only annoying on text-based apps. Graphical apps do get a little jaggy, but overall it's not too terrible, especially if you have any history playing the 8 or 16 bit games of yore.
I have spent much of the day exploring the iPad, and I have not yet encountered the problem of it not having support for Flash. I know that I will encounter it eventually, and I expect that to be a bummer when it happens. Until then, there is plenty to keep me entertained.
Like the iPhone, learning to type well is going to take some time. It's still not the same as a regular keyboard, but I know that I got much faster typing on my iPhone, so I'm expecting that I will get the feel for how to type quickly with the iPad.
The number of iPad apps is still a bit limited at the moment, but now that independent developers have the device in their hands, you can expect to see an explosion of iPad apps just like happened for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
After a recent quarterly loss of $209 million, Sun Microsystems may not look like the ideal purchase, but it was Oracle and not IBM that announced today it will be buying the home Java and Solaris for a sum total of $7.4 billion, which nets out at $5.6 billion after cash and debt.
Said Oracle president Safra Catz:
We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle's earnings by at least 15 cents on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing. We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle's non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined.
Speculation as to the motivation behind the buyout has run toward ideas about Oracle "integrating hardware and software with Oracle's Exadata database machine," and the transaction was approved unanimously at Sun.
Safra Catz, who owns a super cool name in addition to one, now two, of the world's top tech firms, made it clear that he does not consider the purchase of Sun as much of a gamble:
"We intend to ensure that it is profitable... We believe we will be able to run Sun at substantially higher margins."
Oracle to buy Sun in $7.4 billion deal [CNet]
The four defendants in Sweden's uber-high-profile PirateBay case have been found guilty, and are facing millions in fines and a year of jail time. I'll let my darling colleague Pixel Poet explain it all:
A ruling from a Swedish court was given today on the case that was brought against the founders of Pirate Bay by many of the big giants in the recording industry. Turns out the founders were found guilty and charged with one year of jail time as well as $4.7 million in damages to pay. The verdict partially came as a surprise to the defendants, the founders of Pirate Bay, since they argued the fact that their servers never held any of the copyrighted material and therefore were not breaking any copyright laws. Peter Sunde, one of the founders, had this to say about the verdict:
"It's serious to actually be found guilty and get jail time. It's really serious. . . It's so bizarre that we were convicted at all and it's even more bizarre that we were [convicted] as a team. The court said we were organised. I can't get Gottfrid out of bed in the morning. If you're going to convict us, convict us of disorganised crime."
So it seems like the verdict is currently a big win for the record companies who fear the effects that music file torrents has on their bottom line. The verdict also indicates that a program that can be used for malicious purposes, such as the torrenting of copyrighted material, can have legal repercussions on the makers of that software and/or system if they are knowledgeable about its illegal use; however, the founders of Pirate Bay are not going to be walking the plank just yet, one of their lawyers told the press that the verdict is:
". . . outrageous, in my point of view. Of course we will appeal. . . This is the first word, not the last. The last word will be ours."
The internet exploded upon hearing this news. Sites like TorrentFreak seem to have been brought to their knees by the verdict, one way or another.
Court jails Pirate Bay founders [BBC]
[Thanks to Philip for the pic, Neij is a cutie!]
I just received an official response from Amazon regarding the Amazon petition I signed earlier today, which corroborates our stalwart Sgt. Sausagepants' update suggesting the whole affair is/was human error rather than human malice:
Hello,
This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.
It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles - in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search.
Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.
Thanks for contacting us. We hope to see you again soon.
Please let us know if this e-mail resolved your question:
If yes, click here:
If not, click here:
Please note: this e-mail was sent from an address that cannot accept incoming e-mail.
To contact us about an unrelated issue, please visit the Help section of our web site.
Best regards,
Amazon.com
We're Building Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company
Okay. 'Ham-fisted' indeed and it's good to see Amazon acknowledge that. But all those horrible anti-gay books are still popping up on a simple "homosexuality" search for me, which makes me wonder how long it will be before that ham's fist gets removed from Amazon's guts, so to speak. Or have these shenanigans now legitimately skewed the rankings, or something woeful like that?
It seems that Conficker's ultimate purpose has finally been revealed!
Drum roll please!
.
.
.
It's a spam bot!
Yes, that's right. Despite huge amounts of hysteria painting Conficker as some world destroying super spy doomsday botnet, it seems Conficker's makers are a little more practical and therefore... money driven.
According to a report by Karpersky Labs, the purpose of the mysterious download by Conficker machines on April 1 has been revealed as a directive to send out spam offering users a fake anti virus programme for $49.95.
Yep, it's peddling snake oil spam.
How anticlimactic, but money makes the world go round, neh?
Conficker Doomsday Worm Sells Out For $49.95 [Wired]
This is just one more reason I wish I were Sandy Duncan: Canadian filmmaker Rob Spence, who lost his right eye at the age of 11 while playing with a shotgun at his grandfather's farm in Ireland, is planning a second serious upgrade to his cybernetic components.
Spence and the rest of the Eyeborg Project have installed a red LED into his prosthetic eye, and want to follow up the success of that drop-dead awesome trick by installing a video camera into the eye to "explore privacy and surveillance issues." And to look wicked cool, I'm guessing.
Check out Locutus of Borg Spence's autobiographical video below. Gross eyeball footage is par for the course, so you've been warned. Look out for the hot techie who's building Spence's video-eye.
eyeborg: canadian filmmaker installs a red LED into his prosthetic eye [Technabob]
That roadrunner may no longer be fast or fun: if you want unlimited internet access from Time Warner, you'll have to shell out $150 a month. That's about twice what I currently pay for my Time Warner cable modem, which as of yesterday was still downloading totally clothed pictures of totally appropriate men at speeds nearing 1 MB/s.
But in certain test locations (like Texas), Time Warner has a strict and unfriendly bandwidth-capped, tiered-pricing system. This week it altered those restrictions, but you'll still be paying through the nose for what used to be unmetered. In Texas, limits were raised from 5GB to 40GB per month to 10GB to 60GB per month, ranging in price from $25 to $65 per month. An additional option of 100GB per month was added for $75. Additional data will cost you $1 per GB up to $75, at which point you're shelling out $150 per month for unlimited access.
Compared to Comcast's $43 monthly rate for 250GB, Time Warner's plan looks abysmally stingy. Of course, if you're not a high-bandwidth user, it matters not a lot. But with Time Warner charging more than twice as much for less than half the bandwidth, Comcast looks positively generous. (Cue Jesse James!)
And my endless stream of totally appropriate video material isn't safe here in NYC either, since Time Warner is testing out data caps here too, earning the ire of at least one politician.
Time Warner: Unlimited Internet for $150 Per Month [DailyTech]
One of the longer-running patent cases against Microsoft was resolved yesterday, and not in the computing giant's favor.
Microsoft faced allegations from Uniloc that Uniloc's patented technology has been used as part of Microsoft's software activation service, and a federal jury in Rhode Island found that, indeed, Windows XP, Office XP and Windows Server 2003 all infringed upon the Uniloc patent in question.
Microsoft will appeal the decision that granted Uniloc $388 million in fines:
"We are very disappointed in the jury verdict," Microsoft spokesman Jack Evans said in an e-mail. "We believe that we do not infringe, that the patent is invalid and that this award of damages is legally and factually unsupported. We will ask the court to overturn the verdict."
Microsoft slapped with $388 million patent verdict [CNet]
And girls who like girls who like fembots!
Gadget of the Week
3D iPhone glasses. Why?
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No word yet from Apple on other lingering questions, including the reinstatement of a previously removed LGBT social app and the upcoming release of an app from "ex-gay" group, Exodus International. We'll be sure to keep you posted.
