Frightening speculation via The Next Web this morning, though not entirely unsurprising. Apparently, The Telegraph is reporting that a number of erotic novels have disappeared from the top UK sellers list of iBooks.

They report this seems to have occurred overnight. Analysts with whom they spoke told the paper, “Book chart analysts said it was unlikely that all the erotic titles could have dropped out of the list at the same moment without being deliberately removed.”

Apple, of course, declined to comment. Chad Catacchio at Next Web writes:

Let’s for a second say that Apple is intentionally removing them from either the charts and/or altogether (which we’re not saying it is doing either, but just for argument’s sake): this could become a very large issue. Aside from outright censoring of books (which is what this would be) what would it mean for other ebook apps on iOS devices? Does Apple plan to ban the Kindle app because of the kinds of books it sells? And if it doesn’t, why wouldn’t consumers just buy their erotic novellas from Amazon instead, skipping iBooks all together?

While we’re not 100 percent sure this is what occurred here, the fact that we suspect Apple of this is enough. We cannot trust that company to let us make our own decisions when it comes to sex. They have regulated what’s appropriate before and it’s ridiculous to think this will change any time soon.

Think about that next time you buy one of their products, iSheep. If you think hype and “slick design” is worth your freedom, you don’t deserve that freedom.

The new iPhone is out! Lines at all Apple stores, like club openings for unfortunate-dressed people. Sadly, the device is apparently having some issues. A lot of users are reporting reception issues. Per Engadget:

So, we just spoke with Apple and got the straight dirt on the reception issues that have been plaguing users today… and it’s a little surprising. In essence, Apple cops to the fact there are reception issues with the new iPhone — namely, that if you cover the bottom-left corner of the phone and bridge the gap between the notch there with your naked flesh, you could see some signal degradation.

Jobs’ response?

Yeah. That’s what he said.

Via Engadget.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard that Apple banned Pulitzer-winning satirist Mark Fiore from its app store for ridiculing public figures (um, he’s a satirist, like, hello). Apple CEO Steve Jobs has since called the ban a mistake, but he’s not done ruining the fun for everyone.

Last week, TechCrunch published an e-mail from Jobs sent to a consumer asking when Apple became the moral police. Jobs’ response said: “we do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can buy and [sic] Android phone.”

Assuming this email is legit, this isn’t the first time Jobs has suggested users try Android if they want porn. Earlier this month, during a Q&A session after the iPhone 4.0 OS event, Jobs said: “You know, there’s a porn store for Android. You can download nothing but porn. You can download porn, your kids can download porn. That’s a place we don’t want to go – so we’re not going to go there.”

We at Sex and the 405 find it incredibly ironic that Apple is pulling this nonsense. Remember the Apple 1984 commercial? Junior Anti-Sex League, anyone? Who’s Big Brother now?

Bastards.

Image from the Apple 1984 commercial, superimposed on an image of an iPhone screen. Information from TechCrunch.

Text messages. We’re willing to bet that eight times out of 10, these are the reason cheaters get caught — not that we have any experience with this or anything here at Sex and the 405. We never get caught.

Anyway, our dahlias of decadence and depravity, technology is smiling upon us again. Allow us to present to you an app especially suited to the misbehaving sexter (and low-budget spr-sekrit agent): TigerText.

Tiger for Tiger Woods, the professional golfer whose moral downfall was catalyzed by naughty texts? The founders claim the app was named before the debacle. Sure it was.

Interested? The app is free right now, so this is a great time to go snatch it up. Make an account with a username and password using your phone number and specify how much time you want to give texts before they expire.

Lifespan is the length of time a text will exist on the your phone, recipient’s device (whether the text is accessed or not), and the company’s servers.

Turning Delete History ON will remove all history of conversations from your device each time you close the application.

Turning Delete on Read ON will remove the message from the recipient’s phone one minute from the time the text is opened. If the text is unopened by the recipient, the default setting for text lifespan will come into play. In this case, that means the text will be deleted automatically in 15 minutes.

Drawback? The recipient must also install TigerText — fine if you have an iPhone, but versions for BlackBerry and Android are still not available.

Before we begin, we want to take a second to instantaneously orgasm at the realization that we are thisclose to living in a postcyberpunk universe, OMG. The cyborgs are so close, the Sex and the 405 newsroom can almost taste them! Nom nom nom! /geekery

But let’s explore the robots that are actually among us, shall we?

Meet Roxxxy, a 5-foot-7-inches TrueCompanion that outweighs our editrix at 120 pounds. Her skin is soft, her orifices are willing and! She will talk to you about anything that interests you. For as long as you like. Without rolling her eyes!

(Our editrix should send one to her ex-husband.)

A TrucCompanion is a talking sex robot. Priced at $7,000, Roxxxy is the brainchild of Douglas Hines, a mad scientist who thought to slap silicone skin on a computer with voice-recognition and speech-synthesis software, and five pre-programmed personalities ranging from Frigid Farrah to Wild Wendy — take your pick!

A motor in her chest pumps heated air through a tube that winds through Roxxxy’s body, which keeps her warm to the touch. She also has sensors in her hands and genital areas that elicit vocal responses from her when she’s touched. She even shudders to simulate orgasm (like most women you know! Just kissing, sorry).

Her battery-life is only three hours, but then, that’s more than our iPhones, so we’re not going to complain too much.

“There’s a tremendous need for this kind of product,” said Hines, who’s really a computer scientist and former Bell Labs engineer, and happily married in Licoln Park, New Jersey.

This version of the bot cannot move on its own, though it can be contorted into many positions. We’re looking forward to advances in the technology that will allow for Roxxxy to get up and make dinner, give us a back massage, then go service our boyfriends and husbands so we can deal with our deadlines.

And once they figure out all the bugs, we expect her male counterpart, a sexy man-thing to change lightbulbs, play with our hair for hours on end and, of course, do us 24/7 — between deadlines, of course.

It’s not cheating if it doesn’t have a pulse, right?

Ew, that’s gross. Sorry. YOU KNOW WHAT WE MEAN.

Image from TrueCompanion. Information from CNN, via Denise Tanton.

Here’s an excellent argument on the suffering we’re enduring at the hands of anti-porn Apple, by Gizmodo’s John Herrman:

Apple has a ratings system in the App Store. It has a 17+ rating, for apps with violent, crude or sexual content—or app that have a browser function, which could be used to access objectionable content. Most of the apps above are 17+, which means that if parents so choose, they can block their iPhone-having children from even being able to download them. It follows that they could do the same for 18+ apps, so why haven’t they?

I can understand Apple not wanting to get into the porn business, which, by taking 30% of developers’ revenue, I guess they would sort of be doing. But the current setup just doesn’t make any sense. You can buy an app with a built-in browser, which can access the most horrible smut on the web, and get a 17+ rating. But if you link said app to one of those sites, and disable general browsing, suddenly it’s verboten. Again, I can understand how we ended up here, but the results, as you’ve seen, are depressing.

It’s fair to say that most people just assume there are porn apps, when there really aren’t. But there are hundreds of apps that look like porn apps, cost money, and that are, effectively, bait-and-switch scams. Apple can fix this in two ways: they can open the floodgates and just let people have their real porn apps, which would effectively kill these in-between semi-porn apps, or they can revise how the App Store works: by instituting a 24-hour open return policy for paid apps, like the Android Market has, people would simply return these worthless apps, and developers, now unable to trick people into giving them boner money, would stop making them. They would tumble down the rankings and into oblivion.

Anyway, no matter what Apple does, people will continue to look at photos of naked humans on their iPhones. It may make the company squirm, but there’s no reason to pretend it’s not happening, and to let scammers screw up the App Store more than they already have.

The system is broken, Apple. Please fix it.

Image from MapData. Information from Gizmodo.

As an iPhone user, I can’t tell you how much it bugs me that the Apple doesn’t carry any sexy apps in their store. Yes, we have some web apps to satisfy the cravings, but web seriously limits what developers can do for us. These are fast times! Our porn should be up to speed!

Bastards.

Well, looks like Android just got a one-up over Apple. Introducing the MiKandi App Store, the first marketplace of porn apps, now in beta.

All you need to do to access the porn store on your Android is go to MiKandi.com on your mobile browser. Voilà! Porn at your greedy fingertips. You’ll have to tell me what you think, seeing as I made the gruesome error of choosing the iPhone over the Android and can’t do it myself. #fail

Image from MiKandi. Information from Mashable, via @harrylang.

It’s the age of oversharing, baby, and it just got better.

Introducing, I Just Made Love–think Foursquare, only instead of marking places you’re hanging out, you mark places you’re getting down.

Unlike Foursquare, of course, which immediately lets all your friends know where you’re at, IJML simply marks the space on the map, keeping your identity off the map–unless you let us know who you are in the comments section when you input other details of your tryst, of course!

Image from IJustMadeLove. Information from Mashable.

If you’re an iPhone user, you know the tyrants that be at Apple are hell bent on refusing us our sexy. Lucky for all of us, the world is full of naughty people who know how to get around the rules, like folks at Pink Visual, who run one of the best known iPhone porn web apps and who launched iTouchHer, a naughty games web app this summer.

They only have a handful of games, and not all of them are winners, but they reward high scores with tons of nudity and we like that, so whatever. Could it get better? You bet your sweet assets!

Pink Visual has teamed up with Fleshbot to make a new web app called Kinky Games. If you can come up with a game that’s hotter, edgier and all-around better than theirs, you score a free membership to iPinkVisualPass, the mobile porn section of Pink Visual’s site.

Don’t have an iPhone? You can watch right in your browser! Not sure why you’d wanna do that, seeing as you could just as easily find high-rez porn to enjoy without any restrictions from Big Brother at Apple, but, hey, I’ve done weirder things, so I’m not judging.

Go on, give it a shot. The official rules are on Fleshbot.

Off you go, my sweet perverts, to make app like a porn star. I have faith in you.

Here’s hoping that Apple doesn’t find a way to ruin the fun for all of us.

Image from Kinky Games, modified with a picture of a certain someone we won’t mention–hey, why use stock when you have so many friends who love to get naked?

Are the digital tools that make it easier to find sex compounding the confusion that accompanies it? New York mag’s Wesley Yang explores the different anxieties that we face in this digital dating age, based on two years of confessions in their Sex Diaries:

The anxiety of too much choice.
A fact so readily apparent that it has escaped reflection: The cell phone has changed the nature of seduction. One carries in one’s pocket, wherever one goes, the means of doing something other than what one is presently doing, or being with someone other than the person one is with.

The anxiety of making the wrong choice.
One with any game at all has unlimited opportunity. A few find this enjoyable and are up to the task: Identify the single best sexual partner available, or at least the person most amenable to their requirements at the moment. They use their cell phone to disaggregate, slice up, and repackage their emotional and physical needs, servicing each with a different partner, and hoping to come out ahead. This compulsive toggling between options winds up inflicting the very damage it was designed to protect against.

The anxiety of not being chosen.
The worry that one will make the wrong choice is surpassed by the fear that one might find himself without one. To guard against this disaster, everybody is on somebody’s back burner, and everybody has a back burner of their own, which they maintain through open-ended texts, sporadic Facebook messages, G-chats, IM’s, and terse e-mails.

Sometimes being relegated to the back burner is a sign of uninterest: the late-night booty call, the option of last resort. As often, it is a place to confine anyone who might become emotionally dangerous. The back burner is a confusing, destabilizing, and exhausting place to be, and yet none of the Diarists—even ones who appear sexually sated—appear to view it as anything but a fact of life. It is clearly less terrifying than the alternative, which is to not be on anyone’s.

The anxiety of appearing overly enthusiastic.
The back burner is a game, and while the Diarists have various ideas about what constitutes winning, they all agree on how you lose: by betraying a level of emotional enthusiasm unmatched by the other party. Everyone’s afraid disarmament won’t be mutual.

To disarm unilaterally is a strategic error on so many levels—it commits you to a degree of openness you might not be able to maintain, and it exposes vulnerabilities that your counterparty might not be able to resist exploiting. It signals desperation, clinginess, high-maintenance. Most of all, it risks exposing the fond hope, better kept to oneself, that one yearns to leave behind the serial fuck buddies, friends with benefits, and other back-burner relationships to which one had, at some significant expenditure of effort, inured oneself.

The goal of any Diarist playing the game, therefore, is to withhold one’s own expectations until one understands what is expected by the other party. These negotiations require supreme discipline. If you betray the wrong kind of avidity at the wrong moment, your counterparty will not hesitate to pitch you into the shark tank.

The anxiety of being unable to love.
True love! Who could say these words in public without acute embarrassment? It is nonetheless something that the Diarists keep referencing, despite the impression they convey that it is an ever-receding ideal. It’s an odd, negative sort of tribute—a vague longing for something all but lost, but perhaps worth clinging to nonetheless.

10 p.m. I want to love her. And I should. I just, well, don’t. She’s the best girlfriend anyone could ever hope to have. I wish that were enough to love her.

These are just five I hand-picked. If you want them all–and trust me, you do want them all–you’re going to have to visit A Critical (But Highly Sympathetic) Reading of New Yorkers’ Sexual Habits and Anxieties.

Image by Dushaun.