SEX, BOMBS & BURGERS

I'm not sure why, but I get a certain joy in pointing out Steve Jobs' hypocrisy. If you're a regular reader, you know I've taken the Apple CEO a number of times for taking a moral high road in claiming that his company's products are "free from porn," when in fact they are the best friends the adult industry could ask for.

The iPhone, of course, freed the mobile phone from the evil clutches of cell companies, bringing the entire existing web - with its multitude of porn sites - to the palm of every user. True, Apple's app store remains largely closed to adult entertainment companies, but they're finding ways around it. Many have jumped right into HTML5, the multimedia alternative to Adobe's Flash that is used by many mainstream websites and which doesn't work on Apple's mobile products.

Same goes for the iPad. While there was some early trepidation among porn producers, they got on board the iPad quickly and barreled even further into converting from Flash to HTML5.

Now, it's Facetime. Apple last week announced it was extending its video calling service, found initially on the iPhone 4 and newest iPods, to Mac computers. That means Mac users can now video call iPhone and iPod users. So far, iPhone and iPod owners can only use Facetime if they're on a Wi-Fi, but there's little reason to expect the iPhone won't soon be able to use its 3G cellular access to connect as well. The last piece of the puzzle is the iPad, which doesn't yet have a camera and is therefore incapable of doing Facetime. It's a poorly kept secret that the next iteration of the device will indeed have at least one camera, so it too will get the video-calling feature.

Naturally, the porn guys are getting in the game. A company called IP4Play is billing itself as the first to make commercial use of Facetime, not to mention video calling on Skype. Essentially, users sign up, pay a fee, and they get to video chat with nude models. Here's the site with some funny PG and X-rated commercials for the service (the page itself is safe to view at work).

The Cult of Mac website has a short interview with Travis Falstad, managing director of IP4Play, and he sums up the Apple situation nicely. When asked whether Jobs can keep Apple devices porn free, he says:

We certainly respect Steve Jobs’ decision to keep porn out of the app store but it would be a stretch to make Apple devices “porn free” unless he wanted to obstruct their access to porn on the internet. Millions of Mac users view porn daily on their Macs and we only think that number grows with the addition of FaceTime on the Mac in conjunction with the iP4Play experience.