SEX, BOMBS & BURGERS

Sometimes, you just gotta love porn. And I don't mean that in a "love the actual sex and nudity" kind of way, but rather in a "stick it to the Man" kind of way. And in this case, when I say "Man," I mean Steve Jobs.

I don't know the guy, nor am I likely to ever meet him and get to know him, given his evident disdain for journalists, so I don't know if on a personal level he deserves a sticking to. But on a professional level, when he goes around spouting nonsense about how his newest creation - Apple's iPad - is a wonderful freedom-dispensing device, then he's just begging for it.

Ryan Tate over at Valleywag got into a scrap with Jobs last weekend after initially sending the Apple CEO an angry email regarding his company referring to the iPad as "a revolution." Tate didn't like that term being applied to a piece of plastic, and said as much to Jobs:

If [Bob] Dylan was 20 today, how would he feel about your company? Would he think the iPad had the faintest thing to do with 'revolution?' Revolutions are about freedom.

Jobs, in his infinite arrogance, replied, much to everyone's surprise:

Yep, freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. The times they are a-changin', and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is.

I've about how Apple in general and the iPad in specific is worrisome because they are seeking to redefine how much freedom the user gets with what they can put and/or view on devices. That would seem to be the essence of the Tate/Jobs exchange - the Apple CEO evidently thinks that by telling people what stuff they can and can't put on the iPad, he's saving them from the world's ills (porn included).

Lo and behold, the folks at YouPorn (you may not want to click on that at work) have once again proven Jobs to be a massive hypocrite. The hugely popular video website - the 62nd most-visited site in the world, according to Alexa rankings - announced yesterday that it is converting many of its videos to the HTML5 format, a web language and emerging alternative to Adobe's Flash for internet video.

Jobs has been waging a fairly public war against Flash, the de facto video standard that many websites including YouTube use, and he's been saying it's not good enough to be allowed on the iPhone and iPad. Apple is instead a strong supporter of HTML5.

Hats off to YouPorn for fighting fire with fire and for making Jobs look like a giant ass. What's even funnier is that the site isn't the first, merely the biggest, to make itself available on the iPad. The tech nerds at Pink Visual and Digital Playground announced compatibility well before Jobs made his "freedom from porn" comments.