Muffinlabs!

ongoing by Tim Bray · Now A No-Evil Zone

The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.

This is unbelievable. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, having spent 15 years working with the Judge Baker Children’s Center, is being kicked out because Disney leaned on them for being called out on their bullshit baby einstein videos.

It is chilling that any corporation, particularly one marketing itself as family friendly, would lean on a children’s mental health center. We have great admiration for the Center’s staff, and the work they do for children. At the same time, we are deeply saddened that the institution ceded its ground and stopped supporting CCFC and our efforts to challenge powerful interests in order to protect children and support parents.

(see also The New York Times

The JBCC claims that it

promotes the best possible mental health of children through the integration of research, intervention, training and advocacy.

In 2006, the CCFC filed an FTC complaint against Disney, using a pile of scientific evidence to force Disney to stop making claims that Baby Einstein videos had educational value. They pushed to require Disney to offer refunds for the videos, and won.

This quote from the NYT nicely sums up how fucked this is:

But Dr. Carl Bell, president and chief executive of the Community Mental Health Council in Chicago, when alerted by a reporter, said he was troubled because advocacy was a core responsibility of the 1963 legislation that provided federal financing for community mental-health centers.

"Children are all gasoline and no brakes," Dr. Bell said, "and whether it’s cigarettes, alcohol or junk food, we need advocates to tell society to stop giving children so much gasoline."

Cracked always has something funny to say.  Their coverage of 9/11 truthers is brilliant This piece on Apple is funny too, although the best part by far is the comments.

5 Reasons You Should Be Scared of Apple | Cracked.com

But recently, a faint chorus has been growing--thousands of tech geeks suggesting that if you look under Apple's shiny white veneer, you'll find some practices that are less than user friendly. In fact, some of the things Jobs and Apple are being accused of are so over the top, Lex Luthor would have to take off his hat ... and then use it to cover the dark stain spreading across the front of his pants.

Larson Scanner - OpenProcessing

Alex Payne — On the iPad

The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. I wouldn’t have been able to fire up ResEdit and edit out the Mac startup sound so I could tinker on the computer at all hours without waking my parents. The iPad may be a boon to traditional eduction, insofar as it allows for multimedia textbooks and such, but in its current form, it’s a detriment to the sort of hacker culture that has propelled the digital economy.

I can say for sure that I wouldn't be writing code if it weren't for the Apple ][ I cut my teeth on as a kid. I still miss that box.