NYT's Tedeschi misses the iOS Porn story

Sadly, Bob Tedeschi, who should know better, missed the big story in his NYT article on Porn and iOS parental controls.

When he wrote that it was "an hour's work" to secure an iOS device I almost snorted coffee out my nose.

This is the article I wrote him:

re: Safeguarding a Child’s Mobile Device From Pornography

Bob, I'm surprised you missed the truck-sized loophole in Apple's iOS Parental Controls. Alas, by missing it you came to precisely the wrong conclusion.

It is not 1 hour's work to secure an iOS device. It is almost impossible.

The loophole is embedded WebKit. Disabling Safari does not disable WebKit.

Almost all free Apps, and many commercial apps, include links that will, when clicked, bring up an embedded WebKit browser. From that browser it is often only a few clicks to anything.

For example, my 15yo showed me how he could use the links on this travel app to bring up wikipedia, and from there Google.

Almost all iAds, and all Google platform ads, use Webkit.

This problem is common in apps that are rated for children.

The solution is simple. Apple should provide an option to block Webkit use as well as Safari use. They haven't done this because they aren't feeling any pressure, and their ad platform is already doing poorly.

I am sorry you missed a golden opportunity to put some pressure on Apple, but I hope in a follow-up article you might mention this.

You can write him too.

Update: I was amazed and impressed to get a personal response to my email - on a Sunday night! He's verified the issue and is now researching it. Wow. I am a fan.

iPhoto 9.2.1 to Aperture 3.2.1 - it doesn't actually work

Apple promotes Aperture's seamless import of iPhoto content.

I've been skeptical, but I gave it a try on a plane flight. I added 21 images to a brand new iPhoto 9.2.1 Library and I created albums and events. I then gave descriptions to images and to both albums and events. Then I imported the images into Aperture.

The iPhoto.Events became Aperture.Projects. The iPhoto.Albums became Aperture.Albums. iPhoto.Folders became Aperture.Folders.

Eventually. At first the iPhoto.Albums were missing. They showed up minutes later on reopening Aperture. This took so long it feels like a bug.

Image metadata seems to have been preserved - titles, captions, etc. I've written about this previously for iPhoto, Aperture and Picasa Web Albums.

That's the end of the good news. All of the descriptions I added to Albums/Events were lost. Aperture Projects/Albums can't have annotations. So that description you wrote in iPhoto about the family reunion? It's toast.

Aperture's iPhoto import is feeble - and Apple's marketing of Aperture's iPhoto import is deceptive.

Apple does stuff like this though. I'm not surprised they did a crappy job on iPhoto import.

What's truly weird however, is that nobody besides me seems to care. That means Apple isn't going to fix this.

There are times when I know I live in the Twilight Zone. This is one of those times.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: Lessons in Software: Aperture 3 and iPhoto 11 10/2010
• iPhoto '08: don't embed metadata in JPEG originals 12/2007
• Stuck in Apple's photo management Limbo 5/2011 - still stuck today
• Apple Aperture: iPhoto replacement?: 10/2005 - seven years later, it's still not a full replacement
• Migration of metadata from Aperture to iPhoto and Google's Picasa web albums

How to cancel or reschedule an Apple Genius Bar Reservation

I don't think you can currently cancel or reschedule a Genius Bar Reservation from Apple's GB reservation site.

If you have iOS though, you can cancel or reschedule using Apple's Apple Store.app. It's not obvious how ...

1. Tap Stores
2. Find store where you have reservation.
3. Click Store then Genius Bar. From here you can create a new appointment, or cancel or reschedule an existing appointment.

I don't think there's an Apple Store.app equivalent for the desktop, so, like iMessenger, this is strictly an iOS service.

OS X opens Aperture every time I start

Every time I logged into my Lion machine, Aperture started up.

I checked the Login items option on my user account. Nothing there.

Then I figured it was a bug with OS X 10.7 Lion resume. I deleted all the saved states, including Aperture's (Delete Specific Application Saved States from Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Resume).

Didn't help.

Finally, something clued me. This wasn't a new Lion problem, it was the old 'launch Aperture when iPhone connected' bug. Same thing can happen with iPhoto or Image Capture or Preview or "Auto Importer". This particular machine is connected to a USB hub that had some iPhones attached.

I don't know the proper place to control this peculiar OS X behavior, but I do know it can be controlled through Image Capture. I opened that app, and clicked on the iPhones icons on the left side. For each one I set 'Connecting this iPhone' to 'No application'.

Problem solved.

10.7 Lion: Automation and AppleScript

Surprise! Via Macintouch we learn that Mac OS X 10.7 Lion has Automation features.

It is weird that Apple's official Automation documentation is hosted on macosxautomation.com which is "not hosted by Apple". Even though it's seemingly an Apple site (with a broken icon on page 1).

Even weirder for all of us who figured AppleScript and Automator were dead, is that Lion has a lot of AS/Automator features. Some show up on Apple's Lion Features page, but many do not. Given rumors about Apple's new focus on textbooks and iPads, it's noteworthy that Automator has many new ePub support features.

Apple is eccentric.

WordPress doesn't have a built-in table editor

The WordPress visual editor doesn't include tables. Neither does Blogger of course, nor, for that matter, MarsEdit.

FrontPage had terrific table support in 1995. WindowsLive Writer has decent support now. Otherwise, web tables doesn't get a lot of love. RapidWeaverdoesn't do tables. Sandvoxisn't any better and neither is Apple's abandoned iWeb.

SeaMonkey inherits the table technology built into Netscape Composer in the 1990s. TextEdit does tables (!) and (unlike Pages) will export HTML. It's hardly a web page editor though.

DreamWeaver does tables - and costs $400 (though I qualify for the $150 teacher edition).

It's too bad. HTML tables are really brilliant. I'm guessing implementation is very expensive especially when tables are combined with CSS; the market doesn't support this level of complexity.

Parental Controls on iOS and OS X: what we do now

A year or two ago I wrote about how Google and Apple have both failed Parental controls. Since then things have not gottenmuch better.

In response to a comment on an old post, this is the compromise I use for the children's accounts on iOS and OS X.

1. Google is blocked. I find Bing searches easier to track and control because it doesn't use https.
2. Children get our family Google Apps domain email through mail.app IMAP, not through Gmail.
3. Children access our family Calendars from their iPhones, not from the desktop. (I could use iCal on the desktop, but iCal is one of the worst pieces of software garbage ever produced.)
4. A 'Family and Learning' account can be accessed at any time. It has very limited net access, has WorldBook, has apps, iTunes, etc.
5. Each child has their own account. Parental control is set to 'automatic'  with a few domains specifically allowed. I was never able to get domain specific filtering to work. After they are on the computer I review their browser history with them. They could of course delete specific browser pages, but I don't believe they have (the computer is very visible and public). I stopped reviewing log files because Apple's log file review UI is almost as crappy as iCal.
6. Because iOS apps have so many back doors to webkit, particularly via ads, we don't use any 'free' apps. Safari is disabled. For now we allow iTunes despite the content it provides -- the boys are getting older.

This works for us, but Apple's Parental Control support is lazy and incompetent. They simply don't care.

Android/Google, as best I can tell, are worse. Note that Google Gmail explicitly states all US users must be 14 or over (COPPA partly, but really this is a Google copout). i don't think Android OS includes any default parental controls.

I don't know how Windows 7 does. I suspect it's a bit better. I can't find anything about parental controls in Metro/Windows Mobile.

See also:

• Back to the future: OS X Parental Controls, DVD Encyclopedias, and MacKiev 9/2011
• Steve Jobs hates me: Viewing Mac OS X Lion Parental Control logs 8/2011
• OS X Parental Controls Review - State of the art in OS X 10.5 and 10.6 6/2011
• Parental controls: Apple and Google joint fail 6/2010