Monday nibbles: Apple censorship edition

* Above is a side-by-side of censored and uncensored panels from the award-winning print graphic novel that Tom Bouden based on Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Ernest.” Slate’s The Big Money reported that Apple had censored the gay kisses while leaving this explicit heterosexual sex scene from “Kick-Ass” as is. It took media controversy and blogger noise (originating with Prism Comics), but faced with public scrutiny TechCrunch reports that Apple has now uncensored the gay comic. TechCrunch’s Jason Kinkaid wisely writes, “Apple may not be censoring this content as a matter of official policy, but it’s clear that some of its reviewers are doing it anyway, or are at least unsure about what the rules are. And it isn’t a comforting that it took the media spotlight to get these cases reversed.”

Still, this is pretty egregious — to think someone armed with censor power to alter the work of another based on moral content would not have proper sexual orientation training, screening or understanding. I hate to wonder if while 500,000 of use were wondering if when Steve Jobs talked about “freedom from porn” he didn’t mean freedom from gay. Makes me look at all the iPad ads in the Castro with a little more anger. Were you aware that the App store is also censoring fashion magazines? So much for the iPad “saving the magazine industry.” Fashion, art and design magazine Dazed and Confused bitterly called their iPad version of the magazine “the Iran edition.”

* Porn sites, viruses, and security: is conventional wisdom right about porn sites and malware? BBC reports about a recent study on security led by International Secure System Lab that took a look at what the rest of us call ‘circle jerk linking’ and ‘browser hijack’ (practices as old as TGP galleries, that I tell you how to stay safe from, circa 2005). What are some interesting takeaways? They state that “12% of all websites offer pornography of one sort or another,” while “More than 90% of the 35,000 pornographic domains analysed in the study were free sites” (with “269,000 websites hosted on the 35,000 domains”). That’s a lot of free porn. But before you believe media hype about the study that’s hitting sites like HuffPo (“How ‘Shady’ Porn Sites Can Put Visitors At Risk”), remember that when the researches gave their presentations at Harvard last week the researchers stated that “relatively few porn sites were infecting visitors.” What an article like this in the BBC and its resulting spin means to someone like me is that more than ever, people need adult tastemakers they can trust. I also think there should be similar studies on the same practices as used by corporate news websites and other non-porn outlets like travel sites and social media startup leeches.