According to Domain Name Wire, Apple has filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Forum against 7 porn sites that include iPhone 4S in their domain name, including iPhone4S.com (!) which currently redirects to “Free Naughty for Mobile”.

And really, you have to ask yourself why Apple didn’t proactively get that domain name before releasing the product. It was registered in August 2008, so someone else had the foresight to follow Apple’s naming conventions.

Indeed. Hopefully iPhone5S through iPhone 500S are now all safely registered by Apple’s agents.

Source: Domain Name Wire

Are the iPhone and iPad letting employees sneak a peek at porn while on the job? Recently, Harris interactive was commissioned by video surveillance company Qumu to survey 2,500 employees and ask them, “what do you search on your mobile device at work that you cannot do, or are afraid to do, from your work computer?” These are some of their top responses:

1. Look for another primary job
2. Watch pornography
3. Visit an online dating website
4. Research an STD

Harris also asked how employees sneaked a peek at their mobile devices while at work, and the most popular answers were:

1. Hiding their mobile device under the table
2. Excusing themselves to go to the restroom
3. Hiding their mobile device in their folders/notebooks/papers
4. Pretending to tie their shoes
5. Creating a distraction

While the results seem amusing, this is part of a growing trend affecting the workplace. A majority of Americans believe they should bring their own mobile devices to work to watch videos. This fits in the larger trend of a majority of Americans using more than one computing devices weekly, with 15% using 4 or more devices a week!

Obviously, Qumu’s intent is to generate interest in their video solution, but it’s not hard to imagine that democratized, popularized, ubiquitous internet connectivity will provide as many challenges for business as it does opportunities for individuals. Be that quickly scanning email at home, or the nudie-pic-of-the-day at work.

[Qumu]

Announced during the WWDC 2011 keynote and already available on all iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads running iOS 4.3.3, purchase history lets you go into the App Store and easily re-download all your previous apps, including your porn adult apps, and where by “you” it also means your significant other, kids, or anyone else on your iTunes account.

Yeah. Um. Awkward.

Of course Apple doesn’t allow real porn or even nudity on the App Store, but there’s an endless amount of “adult” apps with titles you may not want anyone else to know you ever downloaded, and aren’t prepared to make excuses for. “I was drunk.” “The app meant nothing to me.” “I came from Android, dagnabit!”

Should Apple offer a “permanently delete” option, where apps are removed from your iCloud locker? Even if it means you’d have to buy them again if you really wanted to re-download them?

[Thanks -- and sorry! -- Michael!]

Want to find out how to clear your browsing history in Safari? Need to make sure no one has a way of knowing what websites you’ve visited on your iPhone or iPad? Keeping that special gift you got your friend a secret or any other reason (at TiPb we don’t judge). Lucky for you there’s a quick and easy way to clear all of your browsing history in Safari so hit the jump to find out how!

To clear your browsing history in Mobile Safari all you need to do is follow these quick steps:

1. Go into the Settings app and select Safari

1. Scroll down to the very bottom and tap ‘Clear History’

1. Confirm.

That’s it! All of your browsing history will be gone the next time you launch Mobile Safari, so you don’t have to worry about someone finding something you didn’t want them to see!

Bonus Tip: From the Safari settings pane you also have options to clear cache and cookies. Mobile Safari stores a cache of websites you visit to help reduce bandwidth usage and server load. Cookies are used to store authentication information, site preferences etc. If you want to clear your cookies and cache just tap ‘Clear Cookies’ and ‘Clear Cache’. You’ll be asked to confirm for both, just like when you cleared your browsing history.

Bonus Tip 2**: Need to clear more than just safari? Check out our full iPhone and iPad clearing tip!

Tips of the day will range from beginner-level 101 to advanced-level ninjary. If you already know this tip, keep the link handy as a quick way to help a friend. If you have a tip of your own you’d like to suggest, add them to the comments or send them in to dailytips@tipb.com. (If it’s especially awesome and previously unknown to us, we’ll even give ya a reward…)

Giving away, returning, or just lending your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad and need to know how to clear off any porn — er, adult content — that might have somehow made its way onto your device? We may not have had the fun with this issue that our Android Central friends did over the holidays, but we can share their cautionary advice… after the break!

Steve Jobs might say Android is for porn and iPhone is not (never mind the numbers…), but iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad have Safari, the best web browser in the mobile business, and as everyone but Apple’s CEO apparently knows — the web, it has porn. More than that, your texts might be sexts, your email extreme, your photos more than flirty, and while your App Store apps can’t be rated XXX, they still could be rated R. How do you tidy things up before giving away or lending your device? Here are some options

Total Wipe

If you’re just returning your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad to Apple, Best Buy, or another retailer your best option is to nuke it completely, i.e. “Erase all content and settings.”

• How to erase all personal data from your iPhone

The instructions are pretty much the same for iPod touch and iPad, and you’ll be left with a device almost in factory fresh condition.

Selective Wipe

If you just want to lend your device, or want to sell it while maintaining a Jailbreak on older firmware, you’ll need to be more selective.

Deleting Text/SMS/MMS Messages

1. Launch the Messages app
2. Tap Edit
3. Tap the red – icon on the left
4. Tap the red Delete button to confirm
5. Repeat for any and all conversations you want to delete

Or you can simply choose to delete only certain specific SMS or MMS messages.

Deleting Photos

You can only delete Photos that are in the Camera Roll. If you want to delete a synced album you have to connect to iTunes and deselect the photos so they don’t sync any more. To delete from the Camera Roll:

1. Launch Photos
2. Follow the directions for selecting multiple Photos (There’s no limit to the amount of photos you can select for deletion.)
3. Choose Delete instead of Share… carefully!

Clearing Mail

Just remove the email account. You can always add it back later, especially if it’s a server-side IMAP or ActiveSync account like MobileMe, Gmail, Exchange, etc.

1. Launch Settings
2. Scroll down to Mail, Contacts, Calendars
3. Tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars
4. Tap the account you want to delete
5. Scroll to the bottom
6. Tap Delete

If you really only want to delete individual email threads:

1. Launch Mail
2. Follow the same instructions as for Messages, as described above.

Clearing Safari

Streaming might be safer than storing on-device, but web sites, especially advertising heavy web sites, especially porn sites, love to keep track of you. While there’s no “private browsing mode” for iOS Safari like there is for Mac Safari, you can still manually clear it out.

1. Launch Settings
2. Follow the directions in our tip on how to clear out Safari

Deleting Apps

Deleting apps, or Home Screen clipped web site, is easy:

1. Touch and hold your finger down on the app until it goes into “Jiggly Mode” (starts to dance around).
2. Look for the small X badge at the top left of the app you want to delete
3. Tap the small X badge
4. A dialog box will pop up identifying the name of the app you’re about to delete and warning you that you’ll delete all the data in the app as well (your account login, game progress, etc.)
5. If you’re sure, tap Delete (if you’re not, tap Cancel)
6. If you decide not to delete an app, tap the Home Button to exit Jiggly Mode

Deleting Movies

If you have synced any movies over, they’re simple to delete as well:

1. Launch iPod
2. Tap Movies
3. Swipe from left to right over the movie
4. Tap the Delete button

Deny, deny, deny

Again, the “Erase all content and settings” is your first, best option if you’re really getting rid of your device. With everything else, your being human, you’ll eventually mess up. If you do, just remember what every celebrity and politician on every talk/news show in America has taught us — deny, deny, deny!

(Or if you have any better ideas, leave them in comments!)

Tips of the day will range from beginner-level 101 to advanced-level ninjary. If you already know this tip, keep the link handy as a quick way to help a friend. If you have a tip of your own you’d like to suggest, add them to the comments or send them in to dailytips@tipb.com. (If it’s especially awesome and previously unknown to us, we’ll even give ya a reward…)

In the bizarro world in which we might live, this late-night exchange between Gawker/Valleywag’s Ryan Tate and Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, where we’re promised a world free of porn, hardly even surprises any more.

Well, except that Jobs engages and responds far longer than I’d have figured he would. Since it’s long and provided in graphic form, we’ll just paraphrase the highlights and you can hit the read link for the whole screen-capped exchange:

Tate: Would Dylan think the iPad was a revolution, freedom?

Jobs:Yep, freedom from data theft, from battery trashing, from porn.

Tate: Why not let Wired do a cross-compiled Flash app. Porn is fine! My wife would agree!

Jobs: Wired is doing a Cocoa app. You’ll care about porn when you have kids.

Tate: Why should Wired have to do Cocoa. Time is doing a $#!tty PDF port. And Apple would f**k Gawker on app approval. At least [Google] is fair about what gets indexed.

Tate: PS: I’m not a porn fiend.

Jobs: No one has to make an iPad app but it appears Wired wants to. It’ll be better in the end because it’s native. Why are you so bitter? You don’t have to buy or develop or publish on iPads.

Tate: I’m disappointed to see its all the same revenge power bull$#!t.

Tate: PS: I don’t like Apple’s pet police force literally kicking in my co-workers’ doors. [Reference to Jason Chen of Gizmodo).

Jobs: You are so misinformed. You believe erroneous blogger reports. We're just doing what we can to make (and preserve) the user experience. You can disagree but our motives are pure. And what have you done that's so great?

Would have been funnier if Jobs ended the exchange with Gawker thusly: "Educate yourself. Launch Safari for Porn. Bazinga."

Check out the full exchange via the link below.

[Gawker]

Apple CEO Steve Jobs is once again hitting the send button and lighting the internet on fire, this time telling someone who would prefer parental controls over outright bans that if he wants porn, he can go Android. (Is that what the kids are calling it these days?)

The email from Matthew Browing, who also expressed concern over the initial rejection of Mark Fiore’s political satire app:

I’m all for keeping porn out of kids hands. Heck – I’m all for ensuring that I don’t have to see it unless I want to. But… that’s what parental controls are for. Put these types of apps into categories and allow them to be blocked by their parents should they want to.

The response from Steve Jobs:

Fiore’s app will be in the store shortly. That was a mistake. However, we do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can buy and Android phone.

Or, as the cliche goes, just launch Mobile Safari on their iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad…

This isn’t the first time Jobs has linked Android to porn; he did so during the iPhone OS 4 sneak preview event‘s Q&A session in response to a question about why Apple doesn’t allow side-loading of apps:

You know, there’s a porn store for Android. You can download nothing but porn. You can download porn, your kids can download porn. That’s a place we don’t want to go – so we’re not going to go there.

We’re shocked and appalled to find this out, of course, and if that’s the case, we wonder how our good buddy Phil from Android Central manages to get any reviews done…

[via Techcrunch]

We are sorry to pass on the news, but Apple has yanked the “explicit” category that was spotted earlier today within the App Store submission software, iTunes Connect.

An iPhone developer tipster told Gizmodo s/he verified the removal by contacting Apple via telephone and were basically told it was something Apple was considering but not to expect to see the explicit option back anytime in the near future.

So it looks like explicit content has seen its day in App Store — just another reason for some of you to jailbreak, eh?

[Via Gizmodo]

Chillifresh, who first sent TiPb word of their Wobble iBoobs app being removed from the App Store due to what Apple termed its “sexual content” has followed up with another blog post, now claiming 5000 apps have been removed and presenting what they say are the new App Store rules:

1. No images of women in bikinis (Ice skating tights are not OK either)
2. No images of men in bikinis! (I didn’t ask about Ice Skating tights for men)
3. No skin (he seriously said this) (I asked if a Burqa was OK, and the Apple guy got angry)
4. No silhouettes that indicate that Wobble can be used for wobbling boobs (yes – I am serious, we have to remove the silhouette in this pic)
5. No sexual connotations or innuendo: boobs, babes, booty, sex – all banned
6. Nothing that can be sexually arousing!! (I doubt many people could get aroused with the pic above but those puritanical guys at Apple must get off on pretty mundane things to find Wobble “overtly sexual!)
7. No apps will be approved that in any way imply sexual content (not sure how Playboy is still in the store, but …)

Apple has already commented to TiPb that they took action following customer complaints over objectionable contents, and our readers have been split between “good on Apple, we don’t want to see that in the App Store” and “shame on Apple, we should be able to decide for ourselves” camp.

Apple does present parental controls for the App Store, but they currently lack sophistication enough to handle situations like this. For example, because Apple tags any app that provided unfettered access to the internet as 17+ (’cause there’s violence and porn on them there webs), enabling that parental control wouldn’t just kill sexy apps, it would kill any app with an embedded WebView (like all Twitter apps — see Tweetie 1.3 rejection).

This isn’t the first time Apple has removed apps for content first, figured out ways to re-introduce them later either — many developers went through this before, prior to parental controls in iPhone 3.0. (And after, when some nudity briefly slipped into the App Store, only to be promptly removed).

Again, it’s conceivable Apple will provide more granular parental controls in iPhone 4.0, perhaps even create an opt-in “adult-but-not-porn” category. It’s that or Web App-only land.

This is what happens when a company like Apple (or Walmart, or Blockbuster) chooses to curate content in their store — they become divided between serving the “family friendly” vs. “freedom to choose” customer bases, and the developers who get caught in between. (And we sympathize with those developers, who must feel trapped in a giant pit with a blind, startled T-Rex at times like these).

Let us know what you think of those guidelines above, and what you’d like to see Apple do to better serve all their customers and their developers.

TheFlashBlog‘s Lee Brimelow, Platform Evangelist at Adobe “focusing on the Flash, Flex, and AIR developer communities” has put up a series of iPad mockups highlighting a wide range of web sites all showing the blue lego brick of Flash plugin fail — and they feature the range of games like Farmville, news sites like CNN, TV sites like Hulu, and online porn like… well, you get the idea.

In all fairness porn is underplayed compared to the rest, but that it’s played at all by someone from Adobe is — forgive us — a ballsy move. Of course easy to access, free, online porn is a major reason a certain segment is upset there’s no Flash on the iPhone or iPad. Regardless of your personal feelings one way or another about it, porn is historically a huge early adapter of technology, including VHS, DVD, online video — now increasingly Flash-based — and even the iPhone via Jailbreak and web apps.

Brimelow is using the visuals, mainstream and adult alike, to point out how ubiquitous Flash is on the ‘net, and how Apple shouldn’t be calling the iPad (and previously the iPhone), the ultimate browsing experience” when it doesn’t include Flash.

That’s a valid point, and one Adobe’s Photoshop Product Manager John Nack addresses candidly and, in our opinion more convincingly, on his own blog. He made me rethink some preconceptions, so it’s well worth a read.

But Apple isn’t aiming the iPhone or iPad at the web, or computing, as it is today. They’re attempting to reframe their mobile devices as appliances for tomorrow. Yesterday’s web was all about Internet Explorer 6 and Microsoft’s proprietary ActiveX platform. Today is about Flash. We’ve moved passed IE6 and ActiveX, and Apple is betting we’re moving past Flash as well.

The porn industry, interestingly, will likely be one of the early indicators on whether that ends up being true or not. Along with sites like Hulu, Brimelow’s post might just end up being less an inditement of Apple today, but a checkbox for HTML5 conversion tomorrow.

As to gaming, Gruber’s right. How would Flash games written for a mouse and keyboard on an iPad — or iPhone — anyway? They’d need to convert them for multitouch and fingers anyway, and then why not make an app that fully leverages the hardware?

[Via Daring Fireball]

Porn and iPhone, it is out there and every once in a while you may even find porn in there. In an Apple Retail Store on one of the iPhone and iPod Touch demos, that is.

That’s exactly what happened just the other day as a mother found her 10 year old girl mesmerized by some X-rated content on one of the Apple Store demo devices:

“I called to complain and was told matter of factly by staff this happens a lot as people come in and download it for a laugh, I don’t find it funny and all my friends think it’s disgusting, but Apple say there is nothing they can do to stop it.”

Apple does a fantastic job of keeping smut out of iTunes and their App Store, surely they can figure something out for their real-world stores.

[Via Cult of Mac]

Last week the first iPhone (and iPod touch) app to feature nudity was live in the iTunes App Store. Technically, however, it was simply a change in the server behind the app — the developer added nude images.

Subsequently, however, the app became unavailable. The developer first reported that their own servers couldn’t keep up with demand for the newly nudified images, but it turns out Apple laid the hammer down on the “soft-core porn” app:

Apple will not distribute applications that contain inappropriate content, such as pornography. The developer of this application added inappropriate content directly from their server after the application had been approved and distributed, and after the developer had subsequently been asked to remove some offensive content. This was a direct violation of the terms of the iPhone Developer Program. The application is no longer available on the App Store.

Given that Apple has included new parental controls and App Store restrictions in iPhone 3.0, including a declaration for nude content, and given the eternal argument that nudity is available for age-appropriate viewers via iTunes movies, is there some contradiction still at work? Or is Apple drawing the line artificially close for now while it watches and gauges reaction?

[via CNN]

Well, at least it took longer than push notification or turn-by-turn navigation, right?

As should be no surprise, given how the porn industry is typically among the first to adapt to new technologies, Macenstein reports that the first app to feature nudity has made it into the iTunes App Store.

The app is rated 17+ for frequent/intense sexual content or nudity, and frequent/intense mature/suggestive theme. This means the new Settings > General > Restrictions > feature for parental controls in iPhone 3.0 can be used to globally allow or block the app (or any app based on several age-based levels). MacRumors explains the results:

If an App falls outside of the allowed rating they will simply disappear off your home screen. Once you turn the restrictions off again, the affected apps reappear.

This should mean we don’t see any more app rejections for search-based language or content, but it also leads us to wonder how long it will be before we see major adult entertainment companies come knocking on the App Store door…

Newsflash: There’s porn on the internet. The iPhone brings you just the internet. Now, with tortoise-like speed, the rocket scientists over at Time seem to have put 1 and 1 together and come up with ZOMGiPR0nZ!!11 Mobile erotica. The pornet in your pocket. Seems people are even — gasp! — Googletubing for it!

Now, I don’t want to get off on a rant here, because, frankly, I’m not a sociologist, and I can’t tell you if North American faux-puritanism, divided by ultra-conservatives perpetually getting their hands caught in the proverbial cookie jar, multiplied by institutionalized madonna/whore complexes, all equals a continental multiple-personality disorder so confusing it makes the average episode of Lost seem like a linear 1970s serial drama.

How so? Read on while I rant on… after the break.

What I can tell you, without being an economist either, is that there’s a boatload of money to made in pornography — both defending and decrying it. (And often both, as Captain Family may well spend the day fund-raising a righteous protest only to rush home at night, whip out the credit card, and get his Gonzo on).

And I can certainly say, without being a porntrepreneur, that the first racy code was likely programmed for Apple’s revolutionary internet device somewhere between Steve Jobs saying i and Phone on the Macworld stage way back in 2007. And by a 13 year old no less. In between breaking Blu-Ray encryptions. For porn.

So is this, as doubtlessly many pundits will claim, a reason to panic?

No. It’s just another in a long list of reasons to parent.

Of course the internet has content — pornographic, violent, cruel, hateful, duplicitous and otherwise — that is utterly inappropriate for children (and it doesn’t take the Dali Lama to argue a lot of adults would be better off unexperiencing them as well). The world is a dark dangerous place, online and off. It’s a parent’s job to keep their kids out of the alleys, and off the hitch-hiking, and away from the saber-tooth tigers, and no where near the internet pr0n.

Unfortunately, that means getting daddy off his Xbox and mommy off her RAZR long enough to remember they have a kid buried somewhere under all the techno-babysitters money can unfortunately buy. (Hey, TiVo-to-go up some 50s sitcoms sometime for a refresher on what it looks like to have more than one family member stationary in the same room).

And if they do, Apple offers all sorts of parental controls for their iPhone. For the Mobile Safari browser. For the iTunes store. For content ratings. And what about the argument that poor, addle brained parents who can’t even program their TiVo’s might not know how to activate parental controls on their child’s iPhone? Apple even provides a parental control simple enough for them — don’t buy an iPhone for your child.

(And while you’re at it, put their computer in the living room, walk up behind them at random intervals, and don’t let them out of a Linux Live CD sandbox. I don’t need little Jimmy’s XP becoming spambot #876,762,912,662, b’okay daddy Luddite?)

Now excuse me while I go lock you out of, and myself into, the mother load of haptic hedonism…

That’s the rant, and I am out of here…

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