The Porn Identity (2006) | Hacker News Reader

The Porn Identity (2006)

tnr.com

39 pointsyannis23 comments

Um, for a start this article is for 2006 people -- I'm not sure why this is of interest now.

The piece sounds fabricated/exaggerated - the author claims she was not involved in porn yet she was clearly happy to appear to be associated with the industry... That's totally the inverse of the norm (women get involved with the industry but DON'T want their true identity to be associated with their work).

Also a quick google of Eve Fairbank's name returns an Urban Dictionary result:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Eve+Fairbanks

"Her writing style is known as Fairbanksing: A gratuitous fabrication in a story when the truth would have served just fine."

She appears to be known to embellish stories that she writes in publications.

How authoritative is Urban Dictionary?

(I ask because I don't know, I haven't used it much)

Urban Dictionary is essentially Hot or Not for words and phrases. Take that for what you will.

I would actually like to suggest that wordhate (http://apps.facebook.com/wordhate/) is the Hot or Not for words and phrases. Haha

It's great for slang, but I wouldn't say it has authority in any other area.

I'm not quoting it an an authority - I'm making the concise point that colloquially she's known for fabricating or over-embellishing her stories.

Dude.

What's so awesome about your comment is that you just proved the authors point ;)

> "I've been talking to Google," my mother wrote, "and they got your name off all those sites." Sure enough, thanks to persistent attention from Google's user support, the links--byproducts of tricks to drive more traffic to porn sites--were gone.

How about that. I bet a lot of people wish they could talk to google.

My first assumption would have been that there was some sort of algorithmic trick behind that, like what you see when you google names of famous people. But that does require a fair amount of sophistication to suspect that.

Googling my real name used to turn up a lot of text porn, written by someone using my real name as a pseudonym (I admit, "Rod Ramsey" is tempting for that purpose). I just lived with it, didn't see that it really hurt me in any way.

Don't worry. Just chalk it up to na?vet?.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/naivet%C3%A9

I think you missed the joke. And the umlaut (diaeresis) on the i.

(diæresis)

I get question marks here, which is funny, because a UTF-8 content type usually sorts all that stuff out (in the response headers). Perhaps HN needs a <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/> as well.

Seriously? Anyone who uses the internet at all knows that searching names is likely to turn up multiple people, especially for common names like the author's. I don't really see how this is a problem. Should the phone company be liable if you look up someone by name in a phone book at it turns out they're a prostitute when people call them up?

Do I really need to point out the "facebook login" incident again?

A lot of people trust computers and assume they are magically correct. Example: THE DATABASE is magically and completely up to date in every detail. Just try getting incorrect information changed in a database some time. People trust computers way more than they should.

What was the "'facebook login' incident"?

A ReadWriteWeb article started becoming the first result when Googling for "facebook login", and the comments were filled with confused people who think they're accordingly on (the "new") Facebook.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1119184

In Britain, an advertising campaign for keeping your TV licence up to date carries the slogan: "It's all in the database".

I don't own a TV, yet regularly get threatening letters from their "database" saying "we know you're watching TV" and "we said we'd call". Meh.

(The government here seems to like this sort of thing. A recent long-running radio ad campaign went along the lines of "pay your car tax... you can't escape the computer". No, really.)

Yeah, but a lot of people don't.

My really mild mannered cousin got her Facebook hacked a while back, and the person who did it wrote really offensive stuff on all of her friends' walls. My family acted like it was the worst thing that could have happened, that her reputation was ruined, that I shouldn't bring it up to her because she was probably sensitive about it, etc. Of course, all of her friends knew she wouldn't say anything like that, so it was really a non-issue overall.

I don't know about the rest of you, but the moment I turned 18, this kind of assault on my privacy by my parents would have been completely unacceptable.

Long ago I complained to Google about my name being associated with pornographic ads. They fixed it very fast.

The lesson here is if you want to protect your reputation you need a name that is not likely to be a pornstar name.

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