In related news, developers are welcome to cast shootings, stabbings, explosions and other gory images.
Graphic violence seems to enjoy greater protection than nudity, both culturally and legally, in the U.S. For example, there's the variable obscenity standard, which shields children from sexual images but not images of extreme violence:
I wish software companies would stop trying to play moral police like this. It's so entirely subjective, and as you mentioned, moral standards vary wildly.
But whatever. I'm sure this is going to keep kids from seeing "graphic" material, right? None of us ever went around our parents to see something we shouldn't have...
It's especially strange on platforms that provide a full web browser. Apple won't let you sell a porn app on the App Store, but nothing stops you from using Safari to look at all the porn in the world.
Chromecast lets you display arbitrary browser tabs, right? If so, same thing here.
It seems that it's not so much trying to play moral police as just not wanting to be to blame. People know that a web browser is just a conduit and that the device maker isn't responsible for what you browse. People don't have the same attitude toward apps, even though there's nothing fundamentally different.
I doubt Google cares about keeping people from seeing nudity or porn. They probably care a lot more about the legal consequences of distributing porn apps, and the market consequences if religions try to get everyone to boycott Chromecast because it's sinful.
I am not religious but that does not mean I think its fine to watch porn. Much of the porn out there is absolutely disturbing (rape and what not) and the people who produce that grabage are the worest of the worest. Not all of it is that way of course but even the "classy" stuff is unhealthy in my opinion. I don't think the goverment should ban porn or anything but I have zero problems private companies banning it on their platforms.
> developers are welcome to cast shootings, stabbings, explosions and other gory images
Although I strongly agree with your general sentiment regarding the USA's backwards policies on sexual content, I'm not sure it's accurate in this particular case. From the article:
> Also verboten are hate speech, violence and bullying and online gambling.
It appears to me that Google is simply attempting to block all "R-rated content" as opposed to just nudity, sex, etc.
It's true that on the surface, this schism seems absurd. However, I believe there's a little more nuance to it than you realize.
Middle-class parents in a low crime neighborhood don't really have to worry about young Sally growing up to be a psychotic warrior because they to occasionally watch blockbuster movies like 300 or Saving Private Ryan.
But if family movie night regularly included films like Eyes Wide Shut or Fifty Shades of Grey, one can certainly imagine it may influence a young adult's sexuality. And at a time when they are exceptionally impressionable and have particularly poor judgement no less. This is an unsettling thought to most parents.
That said, I do believe that Americans generally overexpose their children to bombastic, violent movies. I'm certain that this has something to do with our relatively higher violent crime rates. I'm not sure if our media shapes our collective consciousness or the other way around. I suspect it's both.
Your use of a hypothetical scenario to defend puritan American values (with regards to sex on TV) strikes me as odd considering that its real-life variant exists... all of Europe, for example.
Who enjoys violence? Why possible value does graphic violence have for entertainment? There is nothing laudable about it. It is simply evil for evil's sake.
On the other hand, there's nothing abnormal about the desire to look at nudity or sexually explicit material.
I hope the prolonged exposure to low-sex-high-violence content from the US doesn't damage our moral compass over here. When I was a kid, there was still the occasional female toplessness in movies targeted at the whole family.
It'll be interesting to see if they stick to this globally.
The distinctly American prudishness regarding sex is almost a mirror image of large parts of the world with respect to cinematic violence. It's part of why you can be so sure these west coast companies will never monopolise the market in Germany, for example.
That prudish stereotype is a bit over-blown by a smaller (but louder) subset of Americans that really are prudish.
I'm in the "bible belt" (southeast US), and even here there's plenty of people who don't get too up in arms about this kind of stuff.
The internet has been the great equalizer for the younger generations. Smut, graphic video, violence, and all sorts of other things are only a keystroke away.
Also, there are plenty of non-US countries that now have legislated in filtering at the ISP level (which the US doesn't mandate on a federal level). This hasn't been updated since the UK adopted their silly filter, but here's a handy reference:
This is just name calling, and Americans get shit on for being culturally insensitive...
Pornography is awful stuff. It exploits the way our minds work, and ruins peace and happiness. This isn't religiosity, I don't believe in the supernatural. It's just something I've come to learn as I've gotten older.
> Pornography is awful stuff. It exploits the way our minds work, and ruins peace and happiness.
Is it OK for you to tell someone else what they are allowed to watch? That's the sticking point, and what is being done by Google (and so many others). You may not like porn, but there are a massive number that are OK with it. Is it right for you to impose your morals on others?
Definitely don't take this as inflammatory, but I personally (as an American) don't want my morals and beliefs forced on others. I think a lot of problems could be solved if everyone gave this a shot. Different strokes, etc.
> I personally (as an American) don't want my morals and beliefs forced on others
Impossible. At the end of the day, all laws and rules come from someone's morals and beliefs, regardless of who that is or what they've named those morals and beliefs.
I honestly can't even guess why someone downvoted that.
Morals/beliefs are a fundamental part of human thinking. Whether it's named, whether it comes from a religion or just a person's own experience in life, it always exists in the brain. That's kind of a fact. So, pretty confused about the downvote right about now...
Because it's a bit petty and flat out wrong. Many laws exist not for moral reasons, but to keep the whole system running. If we were allowed to murder one another without consequences, society would be vastly different. If we were allowed to cheat on our taxes without punishment, the system itself may collapse.
While there are certainly buffoons legislating their morals on others, I think the greater chunk of modern legislation is corporate/profit driven rather than this pressing of morals you mentioned. There are, of course, exceptions, but I think your comments harped on only one motivator (of many) for legislation.
> If we were allowed to murder one another without consequences, society would be vastly different
There's an inherent belief that the difference in society would be bad. Is that true? Bad is pretty qualitative, so it comes down to a belief.
> If we were allowed to cheat on our taxes without punishment, the system itself may collapse.
There's an inherent belief that "the system" is a good thing, and that we don't want it to collapse. But again, this is a subjective belief, not universally held.
Your comment is based on implicit beliefs of what is "best" for society (or even humanity) as a whole. I'm pretty sure you can't prove that your beliefs are "correct", because I'm sure most people would argue that subjective beliefs can't be correct or incorrect, they're just beliefs.
Unless you plan to cite some peer-reviewed research on that, you should probably not generalize to me and everyone else. If you find that porn is bad for you, by all means avoid it. But don't pretend that you know it's bad for other people too.
The "Report of the Surgeon General's Workshop on Pornography and Public Health" in 1987 identifies a clear and present danger in pornography, among other studies.
The abrasive effects on Pornography on human brain for some strange reason does not get enough attention in the media. I like what Google and Apple are doing, at least there is a first line of defense.
You're more than welcome to think that, but I'm an adult, and you shouldn't get to decide what I can and can't see, anymore than I should be allowed to do the same to you.
> The distinctly American prudishness regarding sex is almost a mirror image of large parts of the world with respect to cinematic violence.
Don't American blockbusters, chock full of graphic violence, do quite well overseas in general? That seems to imply that the attitude towards cinematic violence is not the same at all.
In France we don't have any special opposition to either sex or graphic violence in movies (if you check the minimal age required for some movies on imdb, you might be surprised by the amount of movies we put at 12 years old when other countries do 16 or 18), and Hollywood movie have become "tame" enough that dubber (movies are dubbed in french) often add swearing to make it sounds more realistic ...
"No nudity" is a lot more strict than just "no porn". Does that mean that, for example, you could not make a Flickr app that lets you slideshow your photostream on your TV because Flickr allows artistic nudity? Or could you, but you'd have to restrict it to only show photos that are marked as 'Safe' in the safety filter? What about similar sites that don't have multiple content safety categories?
I'm pretty sure it means, "Don't do anything that Google worries might get them bad press in the US."
If you'd like to know the details of that, just ask! Just ask your nearest lamppost, garbage can, or alley cat. They're much easier to reach than developer support at Google, and they're almost as likely to give you a useful answer.
Anecdotally, during last year's annual Christmas Monopoly game, my mother-in-law (who was out the game early) flashed us a YouTube movie of a lady getting her privates waxed, asking what the f was up with YouTube for allowing this.
I must say it quite surprised me this type of content was allowed/condoned.
Looks like Google just lost a large percentage of the entertainment market:
- The large percentage of people who like porn, plus...
- The smaller (but outspoken) percentage of people who don't like to be told what content they're allowed to watch on the devices that they've purchased.
We'll see if the market segment they're trying to attract with this policy (families with children, if I had to guess) will make up for this loss.
I seriously doubt the correlation between "liking porn" and "refusal to purchase a device that does not have official porn apps, especially considering I could stream porn from my phone or computer to my Chromecast just fine. In fact, if I'm being honest, I never install porn apps, even on devices that allow them, even if I intend on watching porn on them anyway.
It's rules such as these (and all the other rules of app stores) that keep many developers from working with such limited platforms. Too bad Google doesn't focus on keeping malware out of its app store as much as it focuses on keeping porn out of it.
Yes. This is one area where I think having some rules in place can go a long way towards eliminating malware and extremely buggy software (sometimes, but better than nothing).
They don't care if you stream your own porn on it. They just don't want to sell/distribute porn themselves. There's a big difference that nobody seems to be getting.
I guess this is kind of nice because I won't have to worry about people connecting to my <insert non-technologically adept person>'s open or poorly secured WiFi and start playing porn as a joke.
But you can still stream a Chrome tab, so... maybe they are not really preventing anything except good audio sync.
So what ever happened to Ubuntu TV ? There seems to be like half a dozen different "Chromecast like" sticks in the Chinese market [1], clearly building these things isn't too hard to master. So where is the open stick version?
Last time I spoke to some Canonical devs, it's still being worked on, with a target for 14.04 as an alpha I think. I'd love to have ARM Ubuntu-everything; ARM laptop, Ubuntu TV stick, Ubuntu phone that turns into a full desktop when plugged in... The tech is so nearly there. Sigh, one can dream :)
EDIT: the main issue is ARMs lack of anything remotely similar to a BIOS. That's sort of changing, linux now has some stuff in the kernel to help target various ARM chipsets, but it's still difficult. Would be cool to see a kick starter for an ARM Ubuntu TV Stick -- I wonder what protocol would be best for "flinging" content to it?
I'm familiar with the BIOS issue, the devtree work is an interesting response to that. I wonder if they are waiting for 14.04 so that they can use Mir as the compositing platform.
As for protocols, good question. I see the streaming protocols which work reasonably well, I keep hoping for something like the DisplayLink protocol over ethernet with say WPA2, basically "connect" have it show up as a frame buffer to your client. Then some software on the stick so that you could slide back and forth to different "screens" ala the Amiga with each one being connected to a different device. But that is just speculating on what might be possible.
What a bunch of hypocritical Presbyterian nuns. A 3-feet pile of dead bodies is OK on TV for 16-year olds, but people actually undressing before having sex is morally corrupting. I propose capital punishment for every U.S.-ian who was not born from a virgin.
Graphic violence seems to enjoy greater protection than nudity, both culturally and legally, in the U.S. For example, there's the variable obscenity standard, which shields children from sexual images but not images of extreme violence:
http://www.communitydefense.org/cdcdocs/obscenityman/ch10.pd...