Andrew Currie

Today I give you three technological trends that signal the rising pervasiveness of pornography:

1. “Private Browsing” on desktop computers.

Apple’s Safari was the first desktop browser with this feature, enabling you to surf prurient sites with wild abandon and not worry about anything being stored in your browser history. The perils of not clearing your browser history are effectively (and hilariously) illustrated in this cartoon.

So now Internet Exploder and even Firefox are following suit with porn-friendly modes of their own. Are people becoming so lazy that we need our web browsers to cover our tracks for us, or are the very notions of cache, cookies and history becoming too much for the average computer user to understand?

2. Kickstands on media devices, like Nokia’s N96 (shown above).

This one is especially creepy. If I’m going to watch something on a 3-inch screen I’ll be holding it with two hands pretty close to my face. And if my eyesight was better I’d still have the screen no further than my lap. And why would I possibly need to put my media device on my night table and have my hands free? Only one reason I can think of…

3. In-flight porno?!1!

Flight attendants on American Airlines are concerned that passengers will be stretching the limits of “in-flight entertainment” when WiFi access becomes available on their aircraft, so their union is fighting for the right to filter content on the service.

I personally would have no problem with this, though it does raise some legitimate questions about the possibility of blocking other sites — like competing airlines, for example. But what blows my mind is that a passenger would even consider looking at such stuff in the company of other people. And the bathroom lineups are already bad enough, thank-you very much…