Approved: Apple's 'Anti-Sexting' Software Patent - Tom's Guide

Approved: Apple's 'Anti-Sexting' Software Patent Tom's Guide, Tech for real life Gadgets Home Web Life Gadgets Software Style Downloads Shopping Tech Support Forums Tom’s Hardware Tom’s Games Sign Up |Sign In Gadgets News Articles Ads Tom's Guide> Gadgets > Smart Phones > News Smartphones > Approved: Apple's 'Anti-Sexting' Software Patent Approved: Apple's 'Anti-Sexting' Software Patent 10:40 PM - October 13, 2010 - By Jane McEntegart - Source : Tom's Guide US

Apple has just been awarded a patent for what people are already calling 'anti-sexting' software.

Kids these days and their cell phones -- you just never know what they're talking about with their friends. Fear not, Apple can help you! TechCrunch reports that the Cupertino, California-based company has just been awarded a patent for a "text-based communication control for personal communication device." The patent description claims that there is "no way to monitor and control text communications to make them user appropriate," and goes on to give children sending and receiving messages with objectionable language as an example.

"Users such as children may send or receive messages (intentionally or not) with parentally objectionable language," it reads.

The software would allow parents to implement parental controls that evaluate whether or not the message in question contains only approved words. If an unauthorized word is detected, it can be omitted from the message, and the application could alert the user or a designated third party to the presence of the unauthorized text. The application may require the user to replace the unauthorized text with words that are allowed, or it may automatically delete the offending words. A third option is that the application would just delete the entire message.

However, despite it being easy to assume that anti-porn Apple's main goal for this software is to help parents prevent kids from swearing or telling each other all about their naughty, hormone-induced urges, it seems the company is also aiming to improve language education.

The abstract for the filing says that although some incoming or outcoming messages could be blocked if they contain "forbidden content," parental controls also make it possible for the phone to require certain text be present in messages. The company goes on to give the example that you could require a certain number of Spanish words per day to be included in emails if your child is learning Spanish.

Check out full details of the patent here.

Source: TechCrunch

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Send* The email addresses collected via this form are not recorded on our servers and are only used for the sending request Sony Reveals Google TV New Product Line-upApple 'Back to Mac' Event Hints at OS X 'Lion'Spotted: Palm Pre 2, Which Could Hit Next MonthSoon Mac Users Can Sync Windows Phones TooFCC Cracking Down on Cellphone ''Bill Shock''LG Launching World's Largest 3D TVGoogle Will Gladly Help Fight Piracy... for a FeeBlizzard Banning SC2 Single-Player Cheaters Too?Google Improves Map Images Using ''Kite View''Porsche Car Chase Ensues Because of PlayStationDeleted Facebook Pics Still There 16 Months Later Featured topics Apple Here Comes Windows Phone 7 Web Site Redesign: Dos and Don’ts The New Xbox 360 Dashboard Latest Apple News Approved: Apple's 'Anti-Sexting' Software Patent Apple 'Back to Mac' Event Hints at OS X... Soon Mac Users Can Sync Windows Phones Too FCC Cracking Down on Cellphone ''Bill... iPhone 4 Glass Breaking 82% More Than on 3GS Latest Apple reviews Apple Vs. Everyone Else: The Top 4 iPad Alternatives Apple iPod Retrospective Take Your iPad To College How To: Turn A Netbook Into A Hackintosh Will iTunes 10 Bring 10 Companies Down? Comments Read the comments on the forums Show comments: By defaultAllGood ratingsPoor ratings   zerapio10/14/2010 4:51 AMHide-1+Can it return the message to the sender if it's written in ALL CAPS? If so sign me up!

Lekko10/14/2010 4:55 AMHide-3+Considering how kids spell these days, that software is going to have to work really really hard to catch stuff.

nukemaster10/14/2010 4:57 AMHide-2+Yay, now any phone company that wants to implement a filter will have to pay apple.

keczapifrytki10/14/2010 5:07 AMHide-0+In other news, 11 year old kids know more swear words than their clueless parents regardless of the censorship imposed on their lives.

eric_son10/14/2010 5:11 AMHide-1+I like the idea...

However, I think this will just encourage the kids to invent their own language where the offending words are masked inside plain old non-offensive words.

zachary k10/14/2010 5:23 AMHide-0+Quote : "text-based communication control for personal communication device."
so that covers sex-based ascii art. wonder when they will move on to media file-based communication.

BBS user10/14/2010 5:25 AMHide-0+How in the hell could Apple get a patent approved on this. There is prior art on text based keyword / bad language filtering from way back in the BBS text chat days. The US PTO doesn't have a clue and just doesn't do the research before approving these bogus patents. I guess Apple now gets to sue anyone who puts a bad language filter into their smart phone?

jdevoy10/14/2010 5:29 AMHide-0+These big companies are just falling over themselves to patent every idea they can come up with, no matter how stupid or obvious...or with how much prior art.

DEZigns33310/14/2010 5:32 AMHide-0+It's censoring software. It's not about sexting, it's for censoring conversations by government agencies like China and UAE.
But your mom can use it too.

ccobrachoppergirl10/14/2010 5:38 AMHide-0+Yes, that's right, condition citizens to be censored from an early age. They'll be great subservient tools for the police state. As if they aren't already, ripped away from the family and schooled in slavery conditions to state mandated education. None of them had a vote as to whether they have to go to school or not, none of them get paid for a darn bit of work they do at school, and none of them have any free time with homework spilling into all the rest of their lives. Why let them have freedom of speach as well.

frostyfireball10/14/2010 5:44 AMHide-0+This is rediculous and there better be a way to trun it off if it's ever implemented. Honestly, who wants this BS except overprotective parents and the likes of jobs. I don't want some software telling what i can or can't say.

the_krasno10/14/2010 5:45 AMHide-0+Answer: use 1337 H4X0|2 M4D SKILZZZZ

People can always circumvent these sort of BS, teenagers are very crafty for the credit people give them.

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Google on new path, developing self-driving cars - Computerworld

Computerworld - Picture sitting in your car, maneuvering through busy downtown traffic while talking on your phone or sending a few texts.

This isn't a scene of illegal texting or phone use. Why not? Because the car in this scenario is driving itself, leaving the passengers inside free to use their mobile phones. (In Google's ideal scenario, you'd be talking on an Android phone.)

This is Google's image of the future. The company known best for its search engine announced this past weekend that its engineers are working on developing technology for cars that can drive themselves. Autonomous cars may be a bit far afield from Google's normal work in search, browsers, operating systems and maps, but the company is looking to head down a new road.

"Our automated cars, manned by trained operators, just drove from our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard," wrote Sebastian Thrun, a distinguished software engineer at Google, in a Saturday blog post. "They've driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe. All in all, our self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles. We think this is a first in robotics research."

Thrun also noted that the cars use video cameras, radar sensors and a laser range finder to virtually "see" other cars and the basic traffic flow. The company that introduced Google Maps and Google Earth also used mapping technology to navigate the roadways, and it took advantage of Google's massive data centers to hold and process all of this information.

While the autonomous cars were on the road, they were occupied by a "trained safety driver," as well as a software engineer who could monitor the vehicle's software operations.

"We've always been optimistic about technology's ability to advance society, which is why we have pushed so hard to improve the capabilities of self-driving cars beyond where they are today," Thrun wrote. "While this project is very much in the experimental stage, it provides a glimpse of what transportation might look like in the future thanks to advanced computer science. And that future is very exciting."

So why would Google, a company whose name is a verb for Internet searching, set its sights on autonomous vehicles?

One reason is because it can, said Ray Valdes, an analyst at research firm Gartner.

"The long answer is that likely there are multiple reasons," Valdes said. "This may have been an offshoot of the Street View mapping in Google Maps, and that took on a life of its own. Probably the project was not killed because it is cool, had support of senior management, and there is some potential reward further down the road, so to speak."

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Microsoft, Facebook Introduce New Social Search Features - eWeek

Microsoft and Facebook are partnering on a set of new social-search features accessible via Bing. The features will also activate for Web results on Facebook, which are powered by Bing.

One new feature, Liked Results, displays the Websites and links ?liked? by a Facebook user?s friends. If you search in Bing for ?Halo: Reach,? for example, your friends? Facebook profile images will appear next to certain results. ?So, you can lean on friends to figure out the best Websites for your search,? reads an Oct. 13 note on The Facebook Blog.  

The other new feature, Facebook Profile Search, factors into searches for specific people. In response to a search request for a particular name?e.g., ?John Smith??Bing will now leverage a user?s Facebook connections to deliver more relevant results. ?Those with whom you have mutual friends will now show up first,? reads The Facebook Blog note. ?Bing is also making more prominent the ability to add these people as friends on Facebook directly from Bing.?

The tighter partnership between Facebook and Bing is unsurprising, given Microsoft?s $240 million investment for a 1.6 percent stake in the social network. During an Oct. 13 presentation, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared onstage with Microsoft executives to talk through the background and details of the deeper search integration. 

?We?re hard-wired so that information about people is the most interesting information we track in the world,? Zuckerberg told the audience.

Microsoft likely hopes that the new layer of Facebook data will help Bing in its continuing battle against Google, which recently added real-time search results in a bid to streamline its service. Analytics firms give Bing around 27-30 percent of the U.S. search-engine market, once Bing?s powering of Yahoo?s backend search is taken into account, while Google occupies between 65-71 percent. 

?We think it?s time for a real, robust, persistent social signal,? Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft?s Online Services Division, wrote in an Oct. 13 posting on the Bing Community blog. ?Facebook has led a transformation of the Internet already. It has reached and passed 500 million members, and the amount of content created inside Facebook each day is staggering.?

The new social-search features are scheduled to roll out in the U.S. over the next few weeks.

?What?s most exciting to us at Bing is the evolution of this new signal, based on something more than just pattern recognition or keyword matching,? Nadella wrote in that blog posting. ?This new signal will allow us to do a better and more comprehensive job predicting what resources and content are most relevant to you because, in addition to all the other signals we use, other people you trust have found them interesting.?

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