The porn industry is in a bind
wired.com
wired.com
VR and its cousin, “augmented reality,” are controlled by the big corporations.
Facebook owns the Oculus Rift. Microsoft built the Hololens.
Google does Google Glass. These will treat porn at least like Android
treats porn—or maybe even like Glass treated porn when O’Connell
unveiled his app. In other words, they won’t allow it through official
channels and maybe not at all.
Remember the early 80's, when anybody could buy a handful of 8086 processors, a Phoenix or Award BIOS, some cases, etc., and start pumping out IBM compatible PCs? That was pretty amazing, and arguably led to amazing things. How about the way you could take your PC and install ANY operating system on it: DOS, Xenix, Solaris x86, Windows, OS/2, BeOS, BSD Unix, various flavors of Linux, etc. Great opportunity for invention and creation there...
and now? When was the last time you installed a new OS on your smartphone? Your game console? Your VR device? Your smart watch? Etc?
Yeah... thought so.
Look, I'm not saying anything terribly new here, and I don't claim to be. Cory Doctorow said it all better, and before:
http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html
But we need to take this seriously. I don't want to live in a world where Google, Facebook, IBM, HP, Twitter, Microsoft, EMC, Cisco, Snapchat, etc., decide what content I can consume, what programs I can run, etc. And I doubt most of you do either.
I'm gonna ask around if they have any Google Glass knockoffs or components handy.
[0] - built on the backs of abused and impoverished people, but that's a topic for another day.
This is how Silicon Valley worked, back when the silicon was actually made there. My impression is that Google's obsessive culture of secrecy (necessary because it grew up in an environment where loose lips really did sink ships) is the strongest influence in destroying that culture of information-sharing, although of course NDAs, interface copyright lawsuits, DRM, and software patents have also taken their toll.
California's century-old legal limitations on what rights employees can sign away to employers have also been very helpful.
So it's not surprising that technological development is happening today in a place where employers' ability to own their employees' minds is more limited — the innovation is done by the engineers, after all, not the investors, so shifting the power balance in favor of the investors will damage your region's competitiveness.
I'm interested to hear about the abuse and impoverishment.
(I guess I should confess that my objectivity can probably be called into question here: I have lots of friends who work or have worked at Apple, Google, or both, and as far as I know, none who have worked at a company that either of them crushed. Unless you count OLPC.)
Eventually the organization was mismanaged into oblivion; there is currently some while-label vulture in possession of the commercial brand, and the non-profit arm has progressed rapidly into irrelevance.
As bad as things got (and are), OLPC never shipped a single machine running Windows -- if there are any out there, the participating school program installed it. As for FLOSS fans, mostly they made a lot of noise on blogs without ever having actually been involved with the program. If they had, they would have known that OLPC didn't spend a dime on Microsoft support; MS was allowed to send engineers to develop support within OpenFirmware for loading Windows, should the recipient nation desire it.
It was mismanaged, absolutely, and the proposed MS partnership wasn't the only nail in the coffin. But with my own eyes I've seen a lot more interest than "noise on blogs". With that silly move, OLPC lost a pool of enthusiastic, free developers and media buzz. It also caused the OLPC chief of software to resign.
Given that you disparage the FLOSS complaints as just "noise on blogs", it's clear you didn't read the complaints. It had little to do with dimes moving from OLPC to MS. The issue was OLPC letting MS use them as a conduit to train new users in 'the windows way' - that MS was effectively going to co-opt OLPC as a loss-leader program. How far would OLPC go with MS? Why bother developing when they're so intent on providing XP on a clearly underspecced machine for it? And how could a sluggish OS actually be a decision 'for the kids'? How else would OLPC break their previously loud promises? The license fees really had nothing to do with the FLOSS community largely abandoning interest in the project.
[1] You're wrong about Windows never shipping. Windows-only machines never shipped, but dual-boot Windows machines did.
I not only read the complaints, I made many of them myself. I disparaged noise on blogs as noise on blogs; the FLOSS community as a whole is fine but was not a major factor in the development of the project. This was not because they were unwilling; it was because the senior leadership made an executive decision not to engage with that community.
I understand that many people in the world confused OLPC's mission with that of free software. But the cold hard fact is that nobody really ever gave a shit about software licensing; the goal was to get computers to kids, and then try to set up a sustainable pedagogical practice around them. I'm not really interested in the completely tangential issue of whether you think Windows XP is sufficiently performant for this task -- the point is that FLOSS was never the point. It was an era where anyone's use of GNU software was considered to be some kind of philosophical statement on the validity of GNU, sure, but this was never the intention at the executive level. It was gratis software that was easy to customize. The decisions involved were primarily pragmatic. Any 'loud promises' you felt betrayed by are merely further examples of the wildly terrible expectations mismanagement perpetrated by the leadership.
I remember when the FLOSS community abandoned OLPC. It didn't make a damn bit of difference. But I'd be interested in which countries received Windows loadouts -- I don't recall ever seeing a single support issue regarding it, which makes me think you may be mistaken.
Uruguay. This blog article clearly states that every OLPC runs linux, and also clearly states that some shipped with windows. Not many - they went to pilot programs and they weren't taken up largely because of that non-performance you hand-wave away - but they were shipped.
> Nobody 'partnered with' Microsoft.
Getting super-cheap licenses and Microsoft to customise their OS for your hardware is 'partnering with' Microsoft.
> the point is that FLOSS was never the point
I knew this, as did a lot of the FLOSS advocates. The point was that MS was still seen as the Evil Empire at the time. The geeks were interested both in the low-cost laptop and the idea of spreading FLOSS instead of MS's stranglehold. And they were naturally excited about OLPC's strong promises. And when OLPC went back on their promises... as I say above, why bother continuing to work on the machine? What other promises will they break?
While you characterise the FLOSS argument by the more frothy fringe's statements of betrayal, what I saw was more "what's the point?". What's the point of doing work we believe in if they're not going to stick to their statements? Especially for the people who were far more interested in the machine than the kids - the concern that if OLPC switched to MS, hardware might be used that wasn't supported by linux.
> Any 'loud promises' you felt betrayed by are merely further examples of the wildly terrible expectations mismanagement perpetrated by the leadership.
What a strange argument. You chide me for having a particular opinion, and then state the same thing that I'm arguing. You should be a spin doctor.
By the way, I was a Windows guy then, working in Windows support until 2009. I wasn't a FLOSS advocate, though I am now. Colleagues were into FLOSS, and I went along to conferences to hang out with them. I personally didn't feel betrayed, I just thought it was a stupid thing to do, and I noticed the buzz in both the tech and mainstream media evaporate with the FLOSS movement's disillusionment (which is a better description of the overall feeling than 'betrayal', I think).
However, it appears that we both agree that from the GP's original comment, it wasn't Apple or Google that crushed OLPC - OLPC crushed itself.
So, the $100 laptop is real. It just isn't very FLOSS-friendly or made by OLPC. Instead, the mainstream $100 laptop is an Android tablet or cellphone, or maybe an iPad or iPhone. It's Apple and Google's fault that those machines are so user-hostile and dangerous, but it's not their fault that OLPC failed to provide a user-friendly, safe alternative.
Disclaimer: I've only been in China for a week so far, so what I can tell is just what I see (besides what everyone hears in Western media, that is) and it may be biased.
Shenzhen is a city of many contrasts. I work in a relatively modern office building and live in a not-totally-crap hotel. I travel to work via taxis which seem to be staffed by poor people trying to make a living. Forget about Uber here.
When I get out of the hotel, I can turn left and find myself next to KFC, Starbucks and a big shopping mall full of expensive-looking clothes. Everything is plastered with ads like you wouldn't believe. Or I can turn right and find myself on a poor street that is flooded with trash and occupied by tons of people selling absolutely everything - meat, fruits, phones, barber services. Those people look impoverished and from what I can tell, pretty much sit there 24h/day 7 days a week trying to sell something to someone. They are all incredibly friendly, but you can feel the lack of perspective for a better life; it's heartbreaking. There's a family of street food vendors making fried pasta with various meats; a father, a mother and a son. I'm buying food from them pretty much every day. They're extremely proficient at what they do (and they use up scary amounts of propane for that), but you can see that they'll be doing it for the rest of their lives.
There's a big construction zone next to a metro station nearby. They'll probably be building skyscrapers, like a lot of others that are currently in progress. The zone is fenced off with 2m high concrete walls. I managed to take a look through a crack, and what I saw was something akin to a labour camp. Some metal sheds, minimum sanitation, lots of people cramped together. I've been told they're workers from local villages. They looked hungry and impoverished. They don't seem to have any safety equipment.
There's a fucking Starbucks and a KFC and lots of people with smartphones few hundred meters downstreet. And a modern, high-tech metro station on the other side of the wall.
Then there are electronics markets. Tons of fancy stuff. Everything you could imagine. Sold by people cramped together in small spaces that look like they couldn't afford what they're selling. Basically third world selling first-world products.
It's really unnerving that you can have a place that is so amazing and yet so sad at the same time, with nothing but an occasional concrete wall separating the two pictures.
Why is there only trash on the poor street? Do people not throw trash on the ground on the rich street, or is there a municipal street sweeping service that takes care of that? If so, why doesn't it clean the poor street? What's up with the lack of safety equipment? I'm happy to live in a country where I can still enjoy fast merry-go-rounds, but safety equipment in construction work is super important for preventing accidental death.
The derivative and the causality are more important than the current state.
My Polish co-worker who is here with me and has been here before tells me of a girl working here who somehow escaped the poor villages far away from the metropolis and ended up working as a software tester. He says that he tried to talk with her about life, but that her English proficiency is limited to the technical matters; she can't express herself in English if asked about non-work topics, probably due to lack of general vocabulary.
I'll be happy to post something if I learn the answers to those questions.
Andrew "bunnie" Huang coined the term gongkai to explain this concept, as differentiated from the Western-originated idea of open source (kaiyuan)[1]. It was based entirely on his observations of the semi-open hacking culture that is hopefully still flourishing in Shenzhen.[2]
EDIT: [0] was the post that introduced the term to me.
haha, I used to live in Dongguan.. Well, actually, Changping Town, Dongguan. It was impossible to get software that wasn't pirated.
True. Poland market was so small (and so far away, relatively - that was before fast Internet connections) that no one gave a "flying fuck" what was happening here. I remember buying pirated CDs in broad daylight at the mall circa '95, no one cared. A few years later I wanted to buy Visual C++ 6.0 (standard edition) and it took me half a year to finally get it - nobody had it for sale at all. You theoretically could buy software abroad, but then it was so expensive no one really did this. The only software distribution platform was sneakernet.
Actually, I was on the phone with Microsoft once, applying for internship. I was asked what is my favourite dev software; I answered something along the way of "VS C++ 6.0, because the 200x editions kind of suck", just little more politely. I didn't get the internship eventually, but I want to believe this was for unrelated reasons.
I'm going to have to disagree here. The vast majority of stuff is designed or thought up elsewhere. Things might get assembled or manufactured in Shenzhen (it is after all, the manufacturing capital of the world) but the innovations aren't coming from China. In fact, China doesn't even rate that high on manufacturing innovation (they rank 41st place). While they may manufacturer more than anyone else, the bulk of their manufacturing is low tech stuff (Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-innovative-countries/). - Scroll down to manufacturing.
I don't see how that's relevant. If they're designed elsewhere, then who is going to be tweaking and re-purposing? The Chinese slave labor? Anyone who matters will be back in their home country, doing the work there. Anyone overseeing manufacturing operations in China literally doesn't matter from a design or innovation standpoint.
And honestly, who "matters" is a matter of a point of view. Big tech companies try to lock you in to maximize their profits out of devices they sell. Meanwhile in Shenzhen, nobody gives a fuck and you can get any permutation of electronics you can imagine for fraction of the western price, and it's often user-servicable. This is the place where actual innovation happens - selling overpriced gadgets that do 5% of features everyone saw in Star Trek 30 years ago is not innovation. I want to live in the world with more gongkai[0] and less attempts at locking people in unneccessary, wasteful, idiotic cloud platforms.
I want the Western tech giants to lose the war on general-purpose computing.
[0] - Check out the links at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10397138; you'll see where the innovation really happens.
And this is exactly why China is on the road to nowhere. With a lack of IP protection, blatant IP theft and rampant piracy, nobody (big businesses) will invest the time and money into China. In fact, those that have, have pulled out (see: Microsoft, Google, etc). It's why despite having over a billion people, nobody really seriously considers China a potential client.
And yet, despite having over a billion citizens, their innovation and technological breakthroughs are non-existent. They are simply not a technological innovative country. Nearly every article you find on google will back this up. Just do a quick google search. Again, see the link I included above.
> Check out the links at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10397138; you'll see where the innovation really happens.
I'm sorry, but the data and reality shows otherwise. You're not going to find anyone saying "innovation happens in China". Quite the opposite in fact. The only way they've been keeping up with the rest of the world has been through theft and buying the technology from those who created it.
And that's the problem. Since they're so used to stealing and buying their technology, they don't have a foundation in which to create their own. That's what China hasn't grasped yet -- the process of creating new technology and being innovative (the discovery) is itself just as important as the end result because it's a foundation that allows you to move forward onto the next breakthrough. China doesn't have that. And they're getting left further and further behind.
Shanzhai?
I think we will end up losing a lot in this process, not least of which the ensuing moral crisis as system software research becomes increasingly dead in favor of having our machines just be whatever black box the vendor has crafted, indeed our very mental model of a computing environment being whatever is presented to us obliquely.
And all of this happening while many beat their chests demanding that programming be made a compulsory subject in public schools. What a sickening irony.
Indeed. Also note how the typical curriculum offered by proponents is geared towards teaching people to create things that will be ad-supported or will be providing ads.
I wish to know if there's a way to fight back somehow. Maybe not to reverse the trend, but to separate ourselves from it? Let the masses have their appliances if they really like them, but let us keep our tools.
The thing I fear is professionalization of programming, when we become a legitimate engineering discipline and thus will have to work for an expensive license to legally use a turing-complete language, and compilers is something you can go to jail for if they see you trying to run it without credentials.
I'm a little skeptical this will happen with software, but it is well underway in the case of hardware[1].
The arguments aren't actually that bad (of course we know that currently the strongest side supporting them is media companies trying to kill general-purpose computing to make unbreakable DRMs, but in principle they sort of have a point...) - it's the cost that is too high.
Well, the baking industry is certainly more productive of human comfort and happiness than certain other industries demanding protection from the laws the rest of us live by -- such as finance.
The SSSCA as introduced would have prohibited, with criminal penalties, the possession without a license of a compiler capable of producing programs that could process, copy, or decrypt data in media files. Every Turing-complete programming language in the country would have required a special federal license to use. Finally, only licensed, bonded, qualified, and tracked professionals taking responsibility for their actions could violate our precious copyrights.
But Hollings wasn't as spry as his senior colleague from South Carolina and retired before he could finish his final good work for the corporations that made him. Even that business so famously unashamed that its own mascot is a rodent would have to settle for waiting a little longer to achieve its aims.
Of course, at least on android devices, it's not at all uncommon to install custom variants of the OS (CyanogenMod, etc.), so it does happen.
Of course, I recognize that most people aren't going to want to install a different OS anyway. And that's OK. Most people didn't install a new OS on their PC's either. But some do, and some want to tinker, create, invent, hack, and innovate. And if we slip into a world where that's not possible, or where it's incredibly difficult, I posit that that is a bad situation for everybody (except, I suppose, Google, Samsung, Apple, etc. stockholders).
I don't know, I think there will always be people who will drift towards areas where they feel/embody this, and where the field is so niche that most people just don't care about what you are doing at that moment in time or it's so far removed from what most people engage with on a daily basis.
Fields where the current "monied" players are all running like chickens with their heads cut off, peddling snake oil (too many times have friends heard about some device and asking me if it can really do xyz, and I just facepalm to myself only to realize that things are just so new and most people have the faintest idea of what is actually possible now and what will be possible in the near future), and things like laws/incentives restricting xyz aren't even talked about because people are still trying to figure out what the hell is going on (at least from my perception working in a research lab on the outer tech world).
And even if it is not bad for Google, Samsung, Apple, et al today, years from now, they'll be where ibm is, peddling their watson equivalents to everybody that will listen fighting off their own obsolescence.
The hard part of course will be the software, with the motivation of making it an increasingly realistic companion. The Dark Matter series placed an interesting spin on it, where the "entertainment android", in addition to sex, is also specialized for cooking, backrubs, songs, etc.
Not that I'm cynical about tech or anything...
The interesting thing here is that sexbots can come in both genders, which might mitigate the stigma. There are probably a lot more women with vibrators than men with various appliances, yet no one calls a woman a pervert for owning one. If it becomes common for women dorks to own sexbots, then the path might be clear for men dorks.
That's very true.
> I think the same people who wore glass around in public and didn't get why people called them assholes would be the same people who buy sexbots and don't get why people call them perverts. A few dorks with calf-high white socks with birkenstocks would go nuts for them, and most of the rest of the world would look on with a mixture of disdain, amusement and repulsion.
It's interesting how this polarizes people. Because you see, I consider everyone who called Google glass wearer 'glasshole' to be a total dick. I understand the reason for their hate and I think they're stupid and they should get over themselves and their jealousy and fear of technology. It doesn't warrant hostile behaviour to another human being.
Yeah, it's only signed by cryptographic keys that nobody else is likely to ever possess.
You "only" need to put in a new Boot ROM with your own key ("When an iOS device is turned on, its application processor immediately executes code from read-only memory known as the Boot ROM. [...] The Boot ROM code contains the Apple Root CA public key, which is used to verify that the Low-Level Bootloader (LLB) is signed by Apple before allowing it to load." https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf) AFAICT this ROM is probably deeply integrated into the CPU, so hopefully you have some really precise tools and/or plan to make your own replacement CPU as well.
Apple's probably isn't susceptible, especially with the PS3 failure in recent memory.
Android device makers from China maybe haven't been told about their own inability to pump out clones. Somebody should let them know.
A VM instance from Digital Ocean costs $5/month. Go buy a dozen, and install Xenix on all of them.
All your platforms up to about 1995 have emulators that run on your phone, completely opensource, and gratis.
The devices are locked down, because the cost of unreliability can easily exceed the cost of the device, many times over, and the single biggest point of failure are trojan horses & operator errors.
Oh they know about it. They just don't give a fuck. What is the US going to do, sue them?
(Actually, the Chinese government started cracking down on that industry, because it pisses off the West too much and thus "hurts economy".)
As for the rest of your comment, this is the golden age we're having, but we're seeing more and more signs that the big companies - both technology and media ones - are trying to put an end to it. One reason is that "cost of unreliability can easily exceed the cost of the device, many times over, and the single biggest point of failure are trojan horses & operator errors." The other is that it's easier to make money off people if you lock them down behind dumbed down devices and your own propertiary ecosystem. Yet another is that people like media but don't like to pay MAFIAA for it. Surveillance is also a an issue. This all adds up in a way that threatens the future hackability of stuff.
I also acknowledge that if you're willing and able to (find|build|buy) hardware that skates around patent law and the like, then you have more options. And as long as that's a possibility, that's a Good Thing. But I still argue that it's a Bad Thing when major computing platforms become "lock down by default".
OTOH, I don't mean to be all "gloom and doom". Clearly there have been some positive developments over the past few years. The resurgence of the burgeoning DIY/hacker/maker movement, the advent of cheap single-board-computers like Arduino, rPi, BeagleBone, etc., are all good signs. But as they say "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty".
That assumes that "we collectively" were ever in control.
The reality is that these breakthrough technologies, no matter what the century, took massive amounts of money and time to become adopted and by and large they were built by the bigs in some fashion - either through license deals or direct investment from IBM, US Government etc...
Sure there have been FOSS wins, but if you look at the major technologies, basically since forever they were funded and owned by big corporations.
I get your concern but I don't think the analogy holds up.
For instance, hacking a gaming console in the 80's is pretty much as hard as it is today, except that people who does this share it more efficiently.
Smartphones? You can jailbreak pretty much every platform and in some cases you don't even need to.
The thing that is changing in my opinion, is the easyness of access for locked-in software and digital content. For instance, I could spend an hour chasing an ebook and download it to my kindle. Or I can pay a few bucks to license the ebook in the Amazon Kindle Store in less than a minute.
Depending of the price tag I will be doing the second option most of the time, even if I don't control the copy. Just because I'm lazy ...
Ultimately I think I cashed in like $7000 when I was 12 before shit hit the fan and the company my buddy and I were using sent him a check that bounced. It was tough explaining it to our parents, but ultimately everyone knew about alladvantage and we would always say it was something similar to that. We also cashed in on alladvantage, I think it was $20/month just to have the thing on for a few hours.
Holy hell! So that's where those companies had money from. As a kid I always wondered how those bullshit "install our app, get paid for surfing" companies got their money; it turns out they were burning VC funds all along...
It's interesting that this article touts "Sandvine, the primary source for internet traffic research," without mentioning the company's unethical astroturfing on Glassdoor http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Sandvine-Reviews-E32683.htm and their criminal past activities disrupting BitTorrent: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/08/06/21/1814239/sandvine-ceo-...
I bought my first computer with cheques from a porn affiliate program. Soon after I started, they required visitors click through an age-verification to confirm and pay out.
So I put together a protected zip file of M-rated images and set the password as the xth word of the yth paragraph on the page after the age verification.
That only worked for a couple of weeks, but it was enough.
For sure, tired unattractive content won't make it. But then you have the true artists of fucking, like James Deen, Pierre Woodman, and those guys working at Czech AV. They seem to be doing quite well.
The innovation in porn, from what I've seen (hehe), is on the personal level, when a performer interacts regularly with viewers through social networks. To successfully provide illusion of intimacy or a relationship is the next frontier in porn, in my humble opinion.
Good point but I think there is room for innovation at the film side. Porn is the most conservative genre: films are cloned with different actors.
Much of anime has followed a similar evolutionary adaptation there.
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> illusion of intimacy or a relationship
Could that lead to sexrobots as a mass market in, say, five years? Or do you think it would go more into the VR direction? Could / should both be merged? Would that be useful? Perhaps AR would be better in that case.
Thoughts on that?
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The response I tried to submit when parent got deleted:
I think this is the angle that will try and resist automation for a while. The first world is getting somewhat devoid of genuine relationship experiences, and people seek to fill the hole somehow. Or from a more cynical point of view - we're building a superstimulus, where we can provide stronger emotional satisfaction through porn that you could get in a real relationship.
Personally I think VR/AR will make a killing much sooner than sexrobots, even assuming that the latter will become popular at all in the coming decades. One of the biggest constraints on... enhancing your sexual experience, if you're young and lonely, is what if your parents/family/friends/current partner discover your sex toys. Hiding sex dolls from them is a significant OPSEC issue. VR/AR will be as easy to hide as video porn today is - the device you're using is a general purpose, you could always say you bought it for World of Warcraft 2 or something. The porn component is just data, which is trivial to hide from less technical friends and family.
Better fidelity and added depth perception do not bring better illusion of intimacy. It's a red herring.
This trend is not limited to porn actors but everyone - youtube celebs commenting on posts, livestreaming gaming where you interact directly and the audience feels right there with the streamer.
Loneliness is the largest cause of unhappiness in the developed world. Intimacy on demand is something people will pay well for as long as they don't feel to silly about it.
that is a very good insight that i never thought about! I m sure there's billions in it for someone who can crack the case and solve it in a systematic fashion.
They shatter the prejudices about porn stars with almost every tweet. It's a bit weird though. To follow these smart, funny girls and then be able to switch website and see them have hardcore sex.
Also, historically, people have associated working in the pornography industry as an act of desperation.
Desperate girls can't be smart and funny?
I'll start. What are some common misconceptions about the industry in general and what do you think about the accuracy of the article and how it paints the industry?
I think the article covered the misconceptions and the state of the industry pretty well.
I think the biggest misconceptions are: 1. No one pays for porn, but we know they do. 2. Selling is a sure-fire way to make a ton of money. It's only sure-fire if you're going to use less than favorable tactics, as with any business. 3. Everyone in porn is a scammer. There are bad apples, but most folks in the adult industry are really great to work with. 4. That porn tube sites are the common enemy. But in many ways it's the big mainstream tech giants that threaten the industry. Take a look at Tumblr. They made it so easy to spread and share pirated content with one click and even if you wanted to claim your content back by adding your affiliate links, they will ban your account and call that "spam".
A couple of things:
1. I tried buying account credit (aka "Mikandi Gold"), but it wouldn't work, looks like jQuery isn't being loaded, error from console:
> ReferenceError: $ is not defined [1]
2. Do you guys accept Bitcoin/cryptocurrency? If not, why? Seems like the perfect venue for it, I would think most geeks wouldn't want those types of purchases tied to their credit card.
We've talked about cryptocurrency but go back and forth on it. Right now, we're mainly focused on streamlining credit card, direct debit, and SMS billing, and carrier where we can get it. We just got approved to use Paypal through Epoch so that's really exciting for us since a lot of people want to buy adult content by Paypal.
I love Android because it's open and am happy that Google kept it that way... to an extent. Some of the things they do are backhanded. For example, there's a strong campaign to condition users to only trust Google for apps. Downloading any third party APK from Chrome brings up a scary warning: https://v5j7s7h5.ssl.hwcdn.net/v2/mkstatic/chrome-warning.pn... If you do a mobile search for porn apps, half the screen is taken up by anti-porn apps available in Play Store. They campaign that Play is the only legitimate and safe source, but malicious apps find their way in Play too. Instead of lumping all third party sources as "Unknown" and potentially dangerous, there ought to be a way for third parties to earn "Known" status and verified as a trusted source. But I doubt we'll ever get that fair treatment.
It's not just Google though, obviously. These tech giants have the opportunity and thus responsibility to make a positive difference here. Instead, by blocking one of our most basic human desires, they often chose to devolve and perpetuate the war on sex.
I daydream that, one day, tech giants like Google, Amazon, or Yahoo, or VCs and banks will say, “Let’s open our doors to SexTech companies we can trust.” We try to operate everyday as if this is a possibility, because one day I hope it will be.
If you have time to spare, I go into a lot of it here https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/sextech-startups-in-a-ho... There's also a long read on our blog about Operation Choke Point and how the government used banks and credit card companies to take down legal industries they deem immoral https://mikandi.com/blog/featured/guide-to-operation-choke-p...
I just want to say, it was a nice stunt you did with Google Glass! I think the jokes were even better than the... more explicit part. It was also the first time I heard of MiKandi. Please do something like this with HoloLens as well, such take on up-and-coming technologies is a material for infinite amount of laughter over at watercooler at work.
Perhaps it is a sign of the times that the lack of original content has led to content-mill-esque pieces that aren't the least bit provactive or controversial.
or pixelated
So far it's a great service for adult art and fiction creators. But as with any mainstream service and adult content, you can't ever be sure how long it'll last. Past experience has shown it's a matter of time before adult gets kicked out of the party. I hope that won't be the case with Patreon.
I hope that Kink implodes. That side of the industry started as an almost joke. Bush, pre-911 Bush, talked about going after violent porn. So a couple producers got together and said: "Well, lets give them a target." They had first amendment lawyers primed for battle. Then 9/11, and the feds never showed up. Fast forwards a decade or so, and the violent porn meant to trigger a freedom of speech battle is practically mainstream. Kink.com is now a giant and customers are leaving for content that even Kink wouldn't touch. The old hats are aghast at the beast they've unleashed.
I've got clients that come to me when employees are caught downloading things they shouldn't. I'm the guy that has to go through this material and figure out whether anything is illegal, whether we have to bring in the cops. It isn't fun.
(But i did once practically fall out of my chair at a client meeting when I was introduced as "the external expert on child porn". I was in fact the guy there to explain that the material wasn't such. The employee was fired, but the police were not involved.)
Of course, I'm not counting things like guro, crushing or vore. S/M is a long established subculture, though I suppose the more hardcore stuff is relatively recent in practice. I don't think it should be marginalized in the slightest. It's certainly not a joke, however.
What Kink has done is to take insex and add lawyers. They dropped some of the more legally-dangerous aspects (plots/scripts) and added comical "interviews" with all involved. But heaven help the attorneys who might have to defend Kink against obscenity charges. They are in totally unknown waters.
The interview was definitely an Insex plot device, as well.
Though my point was the S/M subculture should not really be viewed negatively or marginalized. I somewhat received that sentiment from your parent post.
Insex did interviews during, Kink cut those. Kink does interviews afterwards, out of character, as evidence that the violence was consensual. These are not normally reproduced in filesharing communities. So when someone downloads one of these via filesharing it often looks fare worse than it is. Some investigator (me) then has to dig up the interview to assure the client the violence was staged. This all goes into a report, and a few encrypted thumbdrives, to be filed away in case someone comes knocking in the future with wrongful dismissal or sexual harassment allegations.
I really hope most people aren't expecting US web sites to follow Russian media laws (and vice versa), that would be horribly undemocratic.
I certainly don't mean to make light of your concerns. I can appreciate that involuntarily dealing with this material is depressing at best and dehumanizing at worst, and have often made the case for censorship and government intrusion in regards to contraband material such as child porn on both legal and moral grounds. However, I am unable to understand your seeming animus towards an individual production company, notwithstanding its prolific output and the exploitative tone of its branding.
Absurd. I'm sure it was an influence, but let's not forget that the century kicked off with videos of things like Al Qaeda terrorists sawing off Daniel Pearl's head and horrific ethnic cleansing abuses in the Balkans. To think that these would not have been on Eli Roth's radar and ascribe it all to a porn site strains credulity.
legally-dangerous aspects (plots/scripts)
Do please explain your theory of what makes these legally dangerous. I am sure you have more legal knowledge than I, a law school dropout, but I'm interested enough censorship and first amendment issues that this claims seems highly questionable.
Also, it's wrong unless it's based on some very recent news. I may as well admit I'm somewhat into SM myself and so I'm familiar with Kink.com's output, though I don't consume much porn. Last time I looked they were still doing things with plots, albeit the very rudimentary plots that amount to little more than verbal foreplay to set up the scene for the sexual activity. Now, I have no professional or personal relationship with them (although I have loose acquaintances with several people who have worked or performed for the firm) and don't find their offerings very erotic, but I fail to see why you would think it falls outside the bounds of first amendment protection, unless you are of the opinion that no sane person could consent to engage in sadomasochistic practices.
Without getting too graphic, putting an actress in a cheerleader outfit is perfectly acceptable in porn, you can even throw in elements of BDSM. But give her the backstory of being kidnapped from her school and forced into sex ... that same BDSM imagery is now a graphic rape.
The same goes for age. Putting an actress in a schoolgirl outfit is one thing, giving her lines about being the the 9th grade (and therefore underage) is very different. Kink knows it's best to avoid scripting.
Obviously suggestions of being underage would be hugely problematic. While I don't see anything illegal about an adult performer pretending to be younger in a fictional context (but with the requisite 2257 filings in place) it would certainly border on commercial suicide due to adverse publicity, not to mention international problems (eg UK law is now considerably stricter on obscenity, banning the appearance of various acts as well as the performance thereof in real life).
Now I can certainly see how a fictional kidnapping and rape could be similarly problematic, and the material I've seen steers away from such themes (but there's some self-selection bias there as that's not erotic to me anyway). But ISTM you'd have a very strong defense under the first amendment notwithstanding the graphic nature of the amterial. I mean, I can watch films like Nymphomaniac or The Night Porter on Netflix or DVD even though they are both graphic and include scenes of sexual coercion. They're not as graphic as a porn movie, obviously, but differences of degree haven't usually been enough to get an obscenity conviction in US courts in recent memory, eg US v. Stevens being found overbroad.
You mentioned having written some articles and I'd certainly be interested in reading those even if they're primarily aimed at HR contexts. By chance I recently downloaded the Meese commission report to refresh my knowledge of the area so I would be interested in hearing more of your professional perspective (same name at gmail if you prefer). I eke out a living in indie film and have never worked in porn myself, but from a political and professional standpoint freedom of expression is a huge issue for me so I feel obliged to go to bat for other producers even where I find their output distasteful or straight-up trashy.
Thanks again for engaging with me on a difficult topic.
Your characterization of the company is wildly inaccurate. The company started with one kind of shy British guy who liked to tie up girls & get tied up more than he liked writing banking software. There weren't any lawyers - not even through the end of my tenure in 2007 - and if you ever watch any of the early material, it's almost comically Ed Woodish in production value. Peter hacked together the original website software himself. It was innovative in the sense that that Kink had one of the earlier affiliate programs in adult, but the main focus was always on producing content that was genuine - for people into that kind of thing. Those interviews that you call "comical" aren't made up.
Furthermore, "...customers are leaving for content that even Kink wouldn't touch" offensively paints folks into BDSM as miscreants. It's also not true. Kink's audience is leaving, but for content that is free. Porn economics have changed; tastes probably not so much.
what do you think these figurines were 20000 years ago? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_figurines
"Most of them have small heads, wide hips, and legs that taper to a point. Various figurines exaggerate the abdomen, hips, breasts, thighs, or vulva. In contrast, arms and feet are often absent, and the head is usually small and faceless."
It's my impression that the pornhub network is quite healthy, financially.
Steve Jobs was such a piece of work. As if browsers don't exist.