Mark Fiore may be a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, but Apple didn’t want him. That is, until the world blew up at his iPad app rejection. Fiore submitted “NewsToons,” an app full of his illustrations (and commentary, of course) about the world’s events. Because it contains material of a satiric nature and, “ridicules public figures,” Apple wouldn’t have him.

Obviously this has to change. Some of the best political commentary in the world is satire. Sorry pundits, you don’t always get it right, and you usually get it with just as much bias as any comedian or cartoonist and often a lot less honesty. I don’t know how Apple expects its media platform to succeed of even be taken seriously while ruling out what has become the common language of 21st century mankind: irony.

I checked my mail today to find a package from my mother including Hunter S. Thompson’s Kingdom of Fear. I know I’ve said before that I don’t really like ebooks, but what if I wanted to read this on the iPad. What about Vonnegut’s Man Without a Country? Are these things permissible because they’ve been published by someone other than Apple so Apple doesn’t get the lawsuit if a public figure catches wind?

Whatever the reasons, Apple’s got to change. I can understand keeping control of the software and hardware functions of the device, but controlling the content consumption through arbitrary censorship? C’mon guys, how dumb do you think we are?

Source: Nieman Lab

I’m always a little put off by profanity filters. They are increasingly built into video games and seem to find their ways into all sorts of other applications. What I didn’t expect was a filter on a cell phone, and then Google did it.

Yes, the Nexus One has a profanity filter as a part of its speech-to-text engine. At first I was pretty surprised. It seems mighty presbyterian of Google to pull something like that without talking about it. The real reason, though, makes a lot of sense.

We filter potentially offensive or inappropriate results because we want to avoid situations whereby we might misrecognize a spoken query and return profanity when, in fact, the user said something completely innocent.

So instead of something nasty when your four-year-old says ‘duck,’ all he’ll see is ‘####.’ Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to disable the feature, so you’ll have to write out that drunken text instead of just yelling it into your phone.