Earlier this year, one county in Virginia suddenly found itself the focus of the Mac community's attention when it announced its plan to lease 23,000 iBooks for its public school students. At the time, the superintendent stated that the project would bring students a "vibrant, engaged-type of learning," and we at AtAT wondered what exactly he meant by that. As it turns out, "vibrant" was a pretty appropriate adjective for the kind of learning going on, although we imagine that "pulse-pounding," "mouth-watering," and "sizzling hot" may have been even more apt descriptions. Yes, this holiday season, some of the iBook-enabled students in Henrico County have visions of something dancing in their heads, all right-- but those aren't sugar plums.

See, faithful viewer (and fabulous babe) Helen alerted us to an Associated Press article about those naughty high school kids and the iBooks that were accessories to the crime. It seems that "graphic sexual images" have been found on "dozens" of iBooks so far, with over fifty students having been suspended or worse for "using the hardware to access porn." More accurately, we'd have said those students are being disciplined for lacking the good sense to hide said porn, but it's a subtle distinction nonetheless. And while we'd consider a Henrico County high school porn-fiend ratio of just 0.5% (an estimated sixty students out of 11,800) to be impressively low, some people are still understandably upset.

"Don't these schools have filtering software?" you ask. Well, yes, they claim to have a package that's "one of the best... on the market," but as everyone knows, that isn't saying much. It's a well-known fundamental law of the universe that technology can never advance quickly enough to keep teenagers from looking at pictures of nekkid people. Nevertheless, Henrico County is game to try, and expects to install "security features to make it more difficult for students to download porn" when the iBooks are collected for a RAM upgrade over the upcoming holiday vacation. Doubtless those "security features" will soon be thwarted by the ingenuity born of the adolescent need for filth, the extra RAM will allow the iBooks to download and display even more sophisticated forms of smut (say, video instead of still pictures), and the world will continue turning on its axis just as it has for millennia. Such is life.

The only thing we're wondering is whether Apple is miffed that the iBook is mentioned by name in the article as the instrument of porn acquisition, or if it's more upset that the name "iBook" is mentioned only once. After all, there's no such thing as bad publicity, and if the iBook becomes associated with easily-downloaded Internet pornography, why, just think how sales would skyrocket. Imagine the ad campaign!