While everybody has been obsessing over the iPhone 4G “Antennagate” issue, the British IT news website The Register notes that Apple has submitted a continuation of a patent they submitted in 2009 that integrates advertisements into the operating system in a way that literally stops everything the computer is doing and forces the user to watch the ad before letting them continue working.
The code would allow the user to temporarily delay the ad, as shown in the diagram above. The revised code in the new patent filing does remove provisions that would deter users from disabling or tampering with the function by causing the OS to stop responding to an input device (keyboard, mouse, etc.) or by causing the application that was running to “cease generating output”.
Apple explains the idea as a way to let people have “free” OS upgrades — instead of paying the typical $69-$129 that Apple charges for a major upgrade, you could have it for free in return for letting your computer be crippled by occasional advertisements popping up, with no way of escaping them. Building in ads in return for free software isn’t a new idea — I have a couple of apps that I use all the time that always display an ad because I didn’t want to fork over fifty bucks — and there were even some PC makers who literally gave away their computers to people but forced them to have a frame of ads around their web browser window at all times, so I suppose it was just a matter of time before somebody applied the idea to the whole damn OS. It’s just disappointing (not surprising, just disappointing) that Apple might be the first one to implement it.
