The Loop quotes The Seattle Times, interviewing Gabe Newell, head of Valve:

Newell expects Apple to disrupt the living room platform with a new product that will challenge consoles, although he doesn’t have any particular knowledge of that new product.

“I suspect Apple will launch a living room product that redefines people’s expectations really strongly and the notion of a separate console platform will disappear,” he said.

I don’t think Apple will offer a new product specifically for gaming, because the building blocks already exist in AirPlay and iOS devices. Firemint’s recently showed off Party Play for Real Racing 2, which works over AirPlay to an Apple TV, enabling four-player split-screen racing on an HDTV, using iOS devices as controllers.

Here’s how I think things will play out for Apple in 2012:

• The next iPod touch revision will include an A5 chip and, with that, video mirroring/AirPlay gaming support;
• The Apple TV will retain its price point or perhaps even drop in price;
• More games devs will take advantage of AirPlay, offering TV modes and multiplayer.

You then end up in an interesting and seemingly somewhat absurd reversal of traditional gaming. With Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, you have affordable consoles and fairly cheap controllers. With Apple, you have a cheap ‘console’ (the Apple TV, priced similarly to the Wii, but cheaper than an Xbox or PS3), and expensive ‘controllers’, in the shape of iPods, iPhones and iPads. The Apple system isn’t one you’d buy from scratch, but once you realise families will increasingly own several iOS devices, Apple’s system becomes less crazy.

I’m not sure Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo will be significantly challenged by this model, should my three assumptions come to pass, but then people argued iOS wouldn’t get anywhere in handheld gaming, and it’s since punched the DS and PSP squarely in the face.

Stupid Apple Rumors:

When the “most accurate” site can only get 17% of their own sourced rumors accurate, it speaks volumes to the nature of Apple rumors.

Quite. As you’ll have noticed, we—SHOCK!—didn’t get an iPhone 5 with a curved screen, Apple didn’t kill the iPod touch, and the iPad 3 didn’t show up. And, yeah, those links are all to this blog, but they showcase one thing: if you’re smart, you’ll either ignore Apple rumours or take the piss out of them. You’ll gain pretty much no credibility for having any faith in them, because they are rumours and not facts.

Hat tip: Brooks Review.

BoingBoing on the UK porn filter:

I’ve yet to see any of them adopt a more rigorous, neutral phrasing, like “Some pornography, and things that an unaccountable group classifies as porn, will be blocked.” Instead, to a one, they imply (or state) that all porn will be blocked, and nothing but porn will be blocked. Parents who rely on this service to block porn are in for a surprise when they discover all their favorite stuff has been misclassified as porn and when their kids discover all the unblocked porn.

Still, this makes the UK government look like it’s doing something and makes a Christian charity feel all big and clever.

And in the article’s comments, ‘shadowfirebird’ says:

Not wishing to be critial—since work in this area is genuinely useful—but there is already a solution that stops your child seeing exactly what content you consider inappropriate.  It’s called “sitting with your child while they are accessing the internet”.

And ‘t3kna2007’, perhaps inevitably, adds:

My local public library blocks BoingBoing as adult content.  I was hoping otherwise, but wasn’t too surprised given the usual broad brushes used to paint blocklists.

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?”