While I’m a big fan of the iPad’s ease of use, this aspect worries me.
Ninjawords dictionary iPhone app
When I purchased an iPhone it was with the casual understanding that I was buying into a product that was controlled not by me, in the way I control my computer, but by the company selling me the product, Apple.
It’s what Jonathan Zittrain describes as a “tethered appliance.” In contrast to a “generative PC.” Have enough of these tethered appliances and the internet would cease being the internet.
The latest negative example of this tethering is the most outrageous App Store rejection to date: the censorship and adult-rating of the English dictionary!
Update: If you’d like a chance to tell these self-appointed arbiters of culture what you think you can go to the Ninjawords App Store page (App Store link) and click on the “Report a Problem” button at the bottom. You’ll need to use an iPhone as the “Report a Problem” button doesn’t seem to appear in iTunes.
Update 2: Apple’s vice president Phil Schiller responds to Gruber.
Amazon has remotely wiped a book that people had already purchased for the Kindle (an ebook reader).
As John Gruber notes:
It’s one thing to stop selling them. It’s something else entirely to remove them from the Kindles of those who already bought them. That this happened with1984, of all the books that have ever been written, is simply incredible.
(Point of comparison: when apps get yanked from the App Store, they don’t get deleted from the iPhones of people who already bought them.)
I don’t care what reason Amazon has for this. If the book shouldn’t have been sold they should have stopped it in the first place.
This is a very different world to that of the free and open internet; this is the world of “internet appliances,” where the companies that sell these products have remote control over them. I feel cagey enough about owning an iPhone, which is also an internet appliance, but there’s no way I’m going near the Kindle after this episode.