Late last year, I wrote about the UK government’s stupid idea on attempting to block TEH EVILZ PORNZ online. I noted there were more than a few problems with this, not least the technical ineptitude of the UK government, the blacklist itself (in terms of deciding what’s on there—what about The Sun, for example?—but also in how it’s maintained), list targeting, and the very real fact that most households in the UK do not have dependent children.

The Guardian today reports that the government has got its way.

Subscribers to four of the UK’s biggest internet service providers will have to “opt in” if they want to view sexually explicit websites, as part of government-sponsored curbs on online pornography.

Because, you know, opting in to censorship would be the wrong way to go. Still, let’s hope this isn’t another government proposal driven by religious dogma, eh?

The measures will be unveiled on Tuesday as David Cameron hosts No 10 meeting with the Mothers’ Union, which earlier this year produced a raft of proposals to shield children from sexualised imagery.

Oh. Well, at least there’ll be no means for nutcases to put pressure on things they don’t like, right?

There will also be a website, Parentport, which parents can use to complain about television programmes, advertisements, products or services which they believe are inappropriate for children.

I see. Still, with an estimated 255 million websites in existence at the end of 2010, I’m sure it’ll take the Parentport no time at all to set up a blacklist of the worst ones. Completely ineffectively, of course, ignoring tons of hardcore porn and yet including the odd healthcare site, newspaper and Wikipedia in the no-no list.

The service providers involved are BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin.

So: all of the cable providers. That’s just dandy, not least given that BT and TalkTalk have been banging on about the horrors of the Digital Economy Act, and yet have now capitulated to government censorship.

Customers who do not opt in to adult content will be unable to access pornographic websites.

For now. The issue here isn’t just that adults should be able to decide what they want to access, without ending up on some kind of ‘list’; it’s also not just the fact that there is no way whatsoever that the blocks will be entirely effective, meaning kids won’t in fact be shielded from porn; it’s that this is the start of government-sanctioned nationwide censorship of the internet. And it’s using porn—the issue that most resonates with middle England—to get everyone to accept this. What’s to stop the government next deciding that ‘children’ (i.e. everyone) shouldn’t be able to access websites that showcase things it doesn’t want you to access, unless you’re on a list? Think about it.

Cameron:

[W]e should not try and wrap children up in cotton wool or simply throw our hands up and accept the world as it is. Instead, we should look to put ‘the brakes on an unthinking drift towards ever-greater commercialisation and sexualisation’.

We should also treat adults as adults, rather than wrapping up the entire country in cotton wool and censoring the greatest communications medium of the modern age, in a ham-fisted way that simply will not work.

I’ve no problem with opt-in censorship. I’ve no problem with the government setting up a website to inform non-technically savvy parents about how best they can deal with internet traffic coming into their house. I’ve not even got a problem with legislation to enforce ISPs to offer some kind of site-blocking option. But it shouldn’t be on by default, and this could be the start of the slippery slope. I just hope I’m wrong about that.

Note: the BBC is at the time of writing claiming the block will be opt-in, contradicting the Guardian’s report.

UPDATE: Duncan Geere on Twitter:

Just spoke to @virginmedia. Things are a bit more complex with this block than is being reported. Will detail in a story, coming soon. Crucially, they say that existing customers will have to opt IN to the block, not out of it. New customers will get the choice at signup.

If this turns out to be the case, fair enough. It won’t work. The ‘porn’ will include things people consider porn but that aren’t porn, but will ignore loads of actual porn, and I’m sure perfectly decent sites will get caught in the crossfire. But if that’s a household’s own decision, that’s their problem. That said, I still worry about government-sanctioned censorship in any form.

UPDATE: ISPs reportedly “livid”, and arguing government misleading the public over discussions and resolutions. (SROC)

UPDATE: PC Pro gets responses from the four ISPs in question. Three appear to be using opt-in parental controls for PCs, and a decision will be required on joining the service. TalkTalk, by contrast, will offer a network-wide content filter.

Yeah, that iPhone 4S. What a disappointment, eh? I guess the one million pre-orders in just 24 hours will be rapidly dismissed by idiots as being all made my idiots, with only the former idiots actually being proper idiots. Those idiots (the actual idiots, mind) will be crossing their idiot fingers, hoping desperately that Apple somehow manages to sell no more iPhones at all until the iPhone 5 comes out. The idiots.

Apple:

Apple® today announced pre-orders of its iPhone® 4S have topped one million in a single day, surpassing the previous single day pre-order record of 600,000 held by iPhone 4.

Translation: See? SEE? All you tech pundits that said we’d screwed up are dolts. SEE? This is why our PR people ignore you. Probably.

iPhone 4S is the most amazing iPhone yet, packed with incredible new features including Apple’s dual-core A5 chip for blazing fast performance and stunning graphics; an all new camera with advanced optics; full 1080p HD resolution video recording; and Siri™, an intelligent assistant that helps you get things done just by asking.

“Siri, how do we get tech pundits to think before they type?”

Ex-Apple and now venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki writes for CNN: “What I learned from Steve Jobs“. There’s some great stuff in there, which should be required reading for anyone in product design, sales, marketing and even journalism.

If you ask customers what they want, they will tell you, “Better, faster, and cheaper”—that is, better sameness, not revolutionary change. They can describe their desires only in terms of what they are already using—around the time of the introduction of Macintosh, all that people said they wanted was a better, faster, and cheaper MS-DOS machine. The richest vein for tech startups is creating the product that you want to use—that’s what Steve and Woz did.

This is the one that almost no companies understand. They’re too scared to create something they really want to use, and they focus-test everything to death. But focus testing often results in safe decisions and mediocrity. You can see it in high-profile tech right now, with Metro being welded to Windows 8, rather than Microsoft making a braver move; but you see it everywhere in media, too, with most games, television shows and movies being tiny incremental steps, more or less copying what already exists.

Take a look at Steve’s slides. The font is 60 points. There’s usually one big screenshot or graphic. Look at other tech speaker’s slides—even the ones who have seen Steve in action. The font is 8 points, and there are no graphics. So many people say that Steve was the world’s greatest product introduction guy. Don’t you wonder why more people don’t copy his style?

This goes for more than just presentations: it’s about communication and clarity in a more general sense. Plenty of print and web design doesn’t follow this mantra—there’s a desire to try to get too much information over, which overwhelms the readers. Stick to what’s important and make it clear. If someone wants more detail, they can always ask you.

Changing your mind is a sign of intelligence. When Apple first shipped the iPhone there was no such thing as apps. Apps, Steve decreed, were a bad thing because you never know what they could be doing to your phone. Safari Web apps were the way to go until six months later when Steve decided, or someone convinced him, that apps were the way to go—but of course. Duh! Apple came a long way in a short time from Safari Web apps to “there’s an app for that.”

The problem with changing your mind is that too many people consider it a sign of weakness. This is most common in politics: politicians will run with the most bone-headed idea, because otherwise the press will be on at them for weeks about a “humiliating U-turn”. And the same sometimes happens in tech, too. The reality, as Kawasaki says, is that you can often think you’ve got it right, but experience states otherwise. I’d argue stronger people are willing to admit they got something wrong, not weaker ones. People who fix problems are strong; people who ignore them are idiots.

“Did Google and Samsung do what Apple wouldn’t?“, asks Joe Wilcox. As you might have heard, Samsung/Google pulled the Nexus Prime announcement, arguing it was “just not the right time”. I wondered if other reasons were behind the delay, but the two companies later confirmed:

We believe this is not the right time to announce a new product as the world expresses tribute to Steve Jobs’s passing.

Of course, this might still be misdirection to deal with some other problem with the device, but anyway.

Wilcox argues, bizarrely, that Apple should have done the same thing with the iPhone 4S:

So what? Google and Samsung show respect for Jobs, but Apple doesn’t?

Apple announced iPhone 4S on October 4. A day later, the company revealed that Jobs, Apple’s chairman and until late-August its CEO, had died. The world is mourning the loss of one of the rarest of humans — a true visionary who compelled loyalty among the people closest to him and those who used Apple’s products, in part by aspiring for something better. How does Apple remember Jobs? By keeping business as usual.

News of Jobs death came late-day on October 5. My colleagues and I couldn’t really discuss it until the following day. When everyone was online in group chat I chimed: “Now comes the test of the new management’s character. I would delay iPhone 4S launch a week out of respect”.

If that’s really what Wilcox chimed, he doesn’t get Apple and he didn’t get Jobs. Steve Jobs was hugely proud of everything he achieved at Apple. The iPhone 4S is one of the last things that will have his direct involvement. Delaying its release and therefore potentially hampering its success, to mourn Jobs, would have not been respectful but an insult to the man. More to the point, Jobs remained involved with all things Apple right to the end. Does anyone really believe that Jobs himself wasn’t pushing the rest of the team to go ahead with the launch, regardless of his health?

[The] assertion that “business is business” is bunk. Google and Samsung show respect for Jobs’ passing in ways the Apple hasn’t — and should have. The new management has failed the test of character I put before my colleagues two days ago.

Absolute garbage. The best way to show respect for Jobs is to celebrate his life and to ensure the company he rebuilt continues to thrive. The way Apple can do that is by ensuring the latest thing he worked on is a success, and you don’t do that by shutting down.

Also, it’s hardly like Apple is entirely without heart. There can’t be too many companies that would remove everything from their website’s home page—including details about their shiny new product—in order to present a picture of their late visionary. But perhaps in his desire to bash Apple and its management team, Wilcox has failed to visit apple.com at any time since Steve Jobs died.

You probably already read Stephen Fry’s intelligent, thoughtful article on Steve Jobs. If not, go and do so now, because it’s very good. But the Macalope‘s column today reminded me that I wanted to briefly discuss a couple of points Fry makes that at least half the tech press simply doesn’t seem to understand, and yet that drove almost everything Jobs worked for: design is about how something works, not just how it looks. Good design encompasses everything, from form to (where relevant) technology to human impact.

Fry:

Only dullards crippled into cretinism by a fear of being thought pretentious could be so dumb as to believe that there is a distinction between design and use, between form and function, between style and substance. If the unprecedented and phenomenal success of Steve Jobs at Apple proves anything it is that those commentators and tech-bloggers and “experts” who sneered at him for producing sleek, shiny, well-designed products or who denigrated the man because he was not an inventor or originator of technology himself missed the point in such a fantastically stupid way that any employer would surely question the purpose of having such people on their payroll, writing for their magazines or indeed making any decisions on which lives, destinies or fortunes depended.

This is something I entirely agree with. The mistake people make is to assume not only what Fry mentions later, quoting a Jobs interview with Fortune magazine —

In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa.

— but also that this was all Apple and Jobs have ever been involved with.

It’s depressing that too often these days in technology, someone will talk about design in the negative. They will dismiss a well-designed product as an expensive trinket, or something unsuitable for anyone who doesn’t want a dumbed-down experience. They’ll suggest cheaper alternatives. But, really, good design improves everything: how something looks, how something works, how something interacts with you, how something can save you time or bring you joy.

The final words,I’ll leave to Jobs:

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.