Looks like another example of porn companies pushing the envelope with technology.
They were accepting credit cards online before virtually anyone. In fact, I think most innovations in technology come from either the military, video games or porn.
They were accepting credit cards online before virtually anyone. In fact, I think most innovations in technology come from either the military, video games or porn.
It was one of the only companies where I truly felt that they would let their engineers experiment and grow. If an idea sounded like it could bring more traffic or increase the quality of traffic, they'd let you do it. If that idea didn't pan out in a short period of time (~3 months), then it was canned and they tried something new.
I work at a very large global corporation now and I'm shocked (and bored) at how drawn out their development cycles are, and at how little license they give their engineers to be creative. The risk averseness makes it almost impossible to bring anything into production.
I'd go back to porn if it weren't for the fact the industry as a whole seems to be very secretive and mafia-like.
When you're building software for a specialized field like finance, health care etc., the end-impact is always obscured by layers of product managers, business analyst and the domain where you have no knowledge - web development in porn seems like a good biz to be into where "I'm not only the Hair Club president, but also a client."
One thing about being an engineer there was that you did actually own the product end-to-end. I remember taking systems from development to production without all the bullshit you normally encounter at large corporations. I would put something into production and my boss (the CTO) would leisurely say "Oh yeah, contact so-and-so in ops to have them secure the server." I would do that, and I didn't get a freak-out like you'd experience in more straight-laced companies: "YOU PUT THIS IN PRODUCTION WITHOUT FILLING OUT ALL THE REQUIRED JIRA TICKETS AND APPROVAL FROM 3 LAYERS OF MANAGEMENT?!?! WE'RE GONNA HAVE TO TAKE THIS DOWN AND HAVE A MEETING!" Nope, a dude in ops, who was usually stoned, would log in, add all the necessary protections and even redeploy the whole stack if he had to. No griping.
One thing about it was that you'd have to be okay with some unscrupulous/unethical practices. Copyright infringement is par for the course in that industry. Studios/companies stealing others' content is unavoidable (and encouraged).
I remember when I wrote a tube site and I was given a list of other tube sites to rip content from. For that particular project the product manager (who was also a high-ranking exec) strongly emphasized two things: every action had to be trackable, and it was a necessary requirement that handling DMCA take-down notices had to be a very streamlined and automated process.
Why? They would have people monitor which videos were heavily viewed and which were taken down frequently. If a particular studio's content generated lots of traffic but were frequently taken down, the sales/ad guys would contact that studio to make a deal. If no deal was struck, then an "anonymous user" would reupload the content to the site; starting the cycle again. Eventually that would wear down the studio into cutting a rev-sharing deal. Sometimes the company would buy the studio outright, if it made enough sense.
I mean, I use Libgen and usually get enough books to cost me 5k or 10k €. Hopefully it will bring sanity into that market (Even though it is already blocked in UK, for some obscure reason)
Take my Spotify away and I'll probably just stop caring about music that much at all
> Access to this website has been
> Blocked
> Blocking access to the ibgen.org and libgen.in website has been made pursuant to a Court Order dated 19 May 2015 obtained by the members of the Bloomsbury Publishing PLC and others.
> Any TalkTalk customer affected by the Court Order has a right under the Court Order to apply to vary or discharge it. Any such application must:
> (i) clearly indicate the identity and status of the applicant;
> (ii) be supported by evidence setting out and justifying the grounds of the application; and
> (iii) be made on 10 days notice to all of the parties to the Court Order.
The UK's asinine policy in regards to the internet is why I no longer use any connection that terminate in the UK.
I've been a very happy customer.
London and some other parts of the UK have FTTH now, and it's cheap I am paying 30GBP for a 1 gig symetric connection via hyperoptic.
Fiber to the curb is not fiber, anything below 300MBit should not even be considered broadband at this day and age tbh.
--------
Access to the websites listed on this page has been blocked pursuant to orders of the high court.
More information can be found at www.ukispcourtorders.co.uk
This is totally OT, but during my training at a large corporation, I was building a very simple web application and found it desirable to access the corporate phone directory to augment some of the information I presented to the users.
I looked around a little and discovered that there was indeed an LDAP server that served the phone directory for the entire freaking company. It would even speak to me after I did an anonymous bind. ;-) So I wrote my web application, handed it off to the guy who ended up maintaining it (me being a trainee and all), and the I thought I'd be a good corporate citizen and checked what I had to do to "legally" access that LDAP server. Turns out I had fill out an application form that was something like six pages long.
Unfortunately, filling out that form and sending it to the designated address were my last actions as a member of that team, as my time with that particular team was up. So I never found out if "they" rejected the application or not. (I guess they approved it, because if it was such a big deal, they would not have opened that LDAP server for anonymous access, but you never know - could have been plain stupidity.)
Ruffle a few feathers, but organisational inertia would kill off anything particularly useful for our teams that are 24/7 fighting fires.
I just found it kind of funny that I should fill out a six-page form to get information I could technically access already, anonymously. (Also, it was the first time I saw such a form, that might have been a bit of a culture shock for me.)
I think every service owner should know who their 'customers' are, it's important because of things like Pager Duty rotations for example. Remember that scene from Hackers, "God wouldn't be on this late?"... in a sense, the 6 page form might seem like overkill but it beats sifting through a conversational email thread asking for all the same pieces of information. They could gamify the form I suppose, if that's better than a paper form... but on their end there should be a spreadsheet used for op budgeting etc and they need the info.
It's my first time coming across them - I suppose it's a good idea, but slightly overkill since I write documentation for my code and it's in source control as well.
That made me laugh. The guy in charge of securing a production server is usually stoned...
I do think the porn industry by nature tends to push some limits in terms of tech... It's to the likes of the riaa, mpaa and LinkedIn to be the ones who push the bounds of unscrupulous tech.
I've been saying for years, eventually it will have to come full circle, that ad delivery controls will have to be first party, and that if they continue to push the overbearing, over the top ads, people will just not read the content and leave. That's what will start to come next. FTR, it didn't have to be via websocket, it could still be services, rpc, and other channels... though websocket to a canvas would allow for a different level of control, and less chance for adblock bypass.
All the same, it's interesting and somewhat cool...
I was encouraged to stick with it for a month to see if it normalized, it didn't... I don't even remember the medication, but would never want to experience that again... I'll take the half dozen to dozen stray thoughts in my head at once... I'm far more effective that way. Though stress makes it hard to get/stay asleep.
Thinking slower will make me freak out. I need my mind to be clear and my brain going at top speed every waking moment.
And if I send the former prince of Nigeria $5,000 he will unlock billions and send me half, lol.
Do try to keep up, uh... dad?
For the record, I'm currently working at a financial institution, worked at another previously, and moving into a position with a medical industry company. It's a matter of striking a balance.. and there are others that cope with it far better than I do.
I still find it funny, when you have full github proper access, but can't access gists... and then when searching for things, a lot of programming examples, and even blog articles reference gists... that is painfully stupid.
Do not have the proper paper trail when shit hits the fan? Well there goes your share value, you get a hefty fine from government oversight, and the premium just went through the roof.
Nobody really fined Target for its data breaches - pretty sure that PCI audits had passed repeatedly, in fact. Their stock easily recovered as well. So why are big companies so worried about security? Because breaches are a drag upon everyone and slows down features and improvements. I'm familiar with environments where change freezes are enacted for months after every critical outage, and nobody's regulations say to do anything like that. That's purely a belief in the false equivalency that stability and development velocity are antitheses. Gosh, someone tell Google and Amazon to fire their SREs and stop deploying any new code to get better availability numbers!
Is there an actual word for this type of management stupidity?
How do porn companies continue to handle credit card payments without complying with PCI standards and processes?
My former company solved this problem by simply acquiring a payment processor company. They had total control over their processing that way. As a bonus, they had access to other porn vendors' account activities, since it was one of the 4-5 major high-risk processors used by porn companies. It was a win-win for them.
They just keep getting more clever, devious, and entertaining, don't they? Shit, I'd do my own Braintree for my porn company with the company's positive gains from legit customers covering the losses from the others. Who cares if my bottom line at my main company was good. Success of processor could even pay for better fraud management.
Of course, already having enough cash to buy an established one is always nice. :)
Whether you can find an auditor that will let you get away with merely following the rules is another matter.
Try finding porn while not seeing any male genitals during searching/browsing. It's virtually impossible, and it totally ruins the UX :)
It was actually really exhilarating, if you could overlook the fact that the work you're doing offered absolutely zero value to anyone involved except the bosses whose pockets you were lining if you succeeded. I don't work at a large global corp now, but at a small company (can't really call it a startup anymore, though that's how I would have described it a year or two ago), where there is still a relatively quick development cycle, but it's glacial compared to what I did at that last job. We are also trending toward much slower turn around times as we grow, which there was no danger whatsoever of at my ad industry job.
It's unfortunate that these developer-candy-store development cultures largely seem to be limited to get-rich-quick industries which can be unattractive from an ethical standpoint, or new startups which can be unattractive from a job security standpoint.
I lasted barely a year in advertising, the whole industry is a scam, top to bottom, big players and small, just scam and horrible people. Worked 5 years at MindGeek/Manwin, saw/did some dodgy shit but nothing that made me want to distance myself from the industry.
Come up with a new "widget", implement, push it out there, monitor monitor monitor, if players don't embrace just leave it to rot while you push out the next one.
(I'm not saying that working for a porn company is bad! Far from it. It just seems like it would be really difficult to break back into the corporate mainstream after working for a porn company due to the raised eyebrows during the screening process.)
The more difficult part is tolerating the passive-aggressive culture of "polite society" that exists at most "legitimate" companies. Porn company culture is very aggressive. At my current dull-corporation job it's almost a weekly occurrence where I want to tell my manager or someone else up the chain to fuck off and get out of my way, in regard to getting work done. Porn is the only industry I've worked in where an aggressive (tinged with a modicum of respect) attitude is rewarded. I hate the hypocrisy at large corporations who encourage "take initiative/leadership, get-it-done!" attitudes, but then push back when an employee actually does that.
The funny part was how curious everyone was about what went on there. I never really felt that much stigma about it from others...most of it was actually self generated. The other way I got past the potential stigma, though, was that I discussed how serious the business side was. The analytics we did, how much detailed knowledge we had about what downtime cost us, etc. Our HR training was done by lawyers, not consultants, because if the company got sued they were not going to get a sympathetic jury so I knew what what not to do as a manager there. That was actually pretty attractive to the VP of HR at my next company.
I'm not saying you won't find those that pass on you because of having porn on your resume but I don't think it's that big of an issue. As others have noted before most porn companies do business under a pseudonym that is innocent sounding and it's usually enough to get you past the screening that might filter if it said "Bang Bros" or whatever company it was.
The bigger issue is if you had school aged kids. They'd never have let me talk at career day. :-)
When asked by a recruiter for more portfolio I said "Well, there are more, but they're adult". Her response was "Wow, I've always wondered about who does those and how that all works!"
and:
"That must be great, you'd have all the passwords!"
Mind you, this is in the more liberal Australia.
My boss here in Brisbane keeps seriously considering getting into online adult services of some description. He also wants to build a weed dispensary web app, so we can launch the moment they legalise it!
Then cross-fingers hoping they find that description generic and boring enough that they don't Google it.
Either way, its turned out to be a total non-issue. I always used the innocuous name on my resume, but everybody generally already knew, and nobody cared. Seemed like most people I end up working with have worked there or have had a friend that did or hired someone that did at some point.
I was kind of surprised.
Most coworkers at companies I have worked at know what I have done in the past. Never had an issue. You don't bring it up at the office and you use calibration and gradually give out details and judge whether coworkers would be cool about it when talking to them outside of work.
Turned out I only looked for 2 weeks before finding a good job.
Devs rarely hung out with the production staff. I almost never saw the talent. The production was done in warehouses several miles from where the back office work was done. However, the owners occasionally threw parties where the talent would show up. If you wanted to fuck a porn star you met at these parties, you could, if you were mostly discreet about it. Devs would also go to tech conferences (flying first class no less), but we never shared the nature of our business with people we met (at least I never did).
Compensation was comparable/above average, perks were good (free membership at high-end gyms, fully paid health insurance), but bonuses were meager and there were essentially no equity possibilities. However, after 1.5 years working in the area of the country where I was, I had enough saved to put a down payment on a nice condo. I didn't, and I used that money to move to the Bay Area, where I had to start that process all over. And the Bay Area is definitely not a place where a developer can buy a condo after saving for ~2 years.
Yes, porn stars do get tested for STDs regularly which I believe is generally twice a month. What about the period in between tests? You don't know who they just fucked yesterday or earlier that day.
You must realize for every porn star who has had a long career there are 50 who lasted a minute. There are reasons for that... Yes, many just can't hack it but drug use and STDs are high on the list.
Porn stars are nasty... Period.
I shot on set here and there but the money was unreliable. I did shoot once or twice a week at the agency doing portfolio shoots of all the girls. That was a lot of fun. I couldn't believe I was getting paid to do it.
I had to eventually move into full time programming at various companies (pay wasn't good enough at agency) and they were completely separate from content production, they just bought it from someone else usually.
The vast majority of programmers in the adult industry have no exposure to the production side. An agency or production company is where you need to be at. The really small production companies that have production and programming at the same office would get you exposure to it though.
Everyone is completely open about porn and there's no hiding it. It's quite refreshing not having to worry about being PC about anything. There's porn on everyone's computer at work and nobody bats an eye. Surprisingly, there are about the same number of women in a porn tech office as there is in a typical Silicon Valley startup.
The technology is really archaic though. FTP, PHP, Apache, really? It drove me nuts that I wasn't doing anything innovative and I eventually moved back to Silicon Valley.
Would definitely recommend it if you ever get the opportunity though.
I wonder if you don't mind discolsing the perks? Just curious, not trolling.
Your goal is to keep people jacked into their streams for as long as possible. To do that you basically take advantage of every human weakness ever documented. There are better things to do with your time and skills imho.
The drawback to driving traffic is that the porn companies are constantly shaving you. You had to track each of your referrals very carefully. Though generally, if the affiliates saw they were getting fucked over, they just switched off their firehose and directed it to another porn company. That always resulted in a face-to-face meeting with apologies and increased incentive to redirect the firehose.
I don't agree with the fact that porn is a frontier of tech anymore. Just read some of the forums on GFY (NSFW). They are all using PHP still and are absolutely clueless about anything that was invented after 2004. Also, read through the API docs for some of the billers. It's amazing how bad the docs and APIs are.
And no, I'm not going to give you FTP access to my server to set up your "script" because I haven't used it in over a decade, and second, I'm not giving you access to my server period. Who the hell still uses FTP? LOL
The porn industry is like the Cuba of the tech world.
Lots of fun times. Lots of horror stories too. Very unethical stuff going on though. Funny thing is, the porn sets were probably more ethical than the programming jobs.
All kinds of shady stuff happen at porn tech companies. Making the favicon look like a lock to fool users into think it was a secure site. Creating fake sites en masse just to get credit card approval because the accounts got shut down so fast for deceptive hidden cross sales.
Front load everything with something like Varnish (Nginx can do some of it to a certain extent) and you'll be handling 15+ millions users a day on a skeleton server stack. Hell back in '09 Pornhub was running smooth on a similar stack with very few servers (when you consider the traffic).
If you ask me most of what was "invented" after 2004 is stuff invented by Google/Facebook who are realistically the only ones needing it, but they saw an opportunity to scoop up market share in dev so they marketed their stack as "bleeding edge". The only thing bleeding is my eyes when I see something that could be wiped up in a standard PHP/Python/Ruby stack but instead is made with so many dependencies and 3rd party library that you wonder if the dude who wrote it actually knows programming or if he just glued cool techs together because Techcrunch and HackerNews say they are cool.
But yes, the smaller players are usually using outdated stuff, then again 99% of the web is. Hence why Wordpress is still a thing.
And as a former Lead Dev of Pornhub, I can assure you that tech peeps definitely are aware of the bleeding edge of tech, just that most have a tendency to not buy the hype. My most recent experience still prove to me that 95% of the cool tech I see mentioned is pure mental masturbation, it makes life easier I keep hearing yet I've never seen it, always a mess, "Goddamnit Grunt!", "Fucking npm", 'Damn dependencies not resolving!", "npm is down", are so commonly heard nowadays I wonder if people who tout it as modern development practice have actually done any "old" school development and realised "modern development" is mostly vendor lockin and provides very little added value to a competent developer.
/rant
I introduced Redis to the company after using it for a distributed system (the web scraper I built to suck down other tube site content). There was initially pushback from other devs on using redis, because it was new at the time. I ignored their concerns and used it anyway, then they started using it for future projects.
At my current company I feel that the leads are largely driven by articles and buzz they glean from Twitter. They'll make a technology choice on hearsay and then shoehorn it into a running stack. Or if they start a new project, they suck in a whole ecosystem of janky libraries and frameworks that are so abstract or unstable that they end up in a rabbit hole wasting time solving problems in their dependencies. "We can commit this to open source!!!" says the lead. No, you won't. That code is shit, your code is shit, and you're not being paid to solve other people's problems.
Development at porn companies is actually more like a sprint; development at most other companies is like old people shuffling down the nursing home corridor to get their weekly enema - you don't really want to get there, so you go slowly, only because you've got nothing else to do.
I tried really hard to use Stripe to bill for an adult project I was working on (which was being built with Django so I could learn Python, which I needed to sharpen up on for my day gig), and Stripe wouldn't budge on it because it was an adult site. I was willing to hold excessive reserves, accept chargeback charges at a higher rate, whatever. Ended up having to use a well-known biller instead.
Some of the tools the adult industry ends up using is solely because there are limited options for that business avenue, and because of that, captive audience.
Also, at the company I worked at, they had a sort of level of employee where you were "made". You got to go on lavish trips (the owner had a private jet) and dinners with executives. At that point, you had a job for life as long as you didn't fuck them over.
(To elaborate - strip club owners would often set up dorms where women hung out all day doing cam stuff. They would "import" the women, but eventually the porn companies came up with a less risky idea. They simply went to the origin countries and set up (with the help of the shadier people) these porn dorms. No need to illegally bring talent into other countries.)
I don't know the ratio but there's a lot of pushers.
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/cockblocked-by-redis...
http://www.rooshv.com/katie-j-m-baker-purposefully-distorted...
In the case of Eastern European girls - the overwhelming majority are shot in Eastern European countries (especially Czech and Hungary).
http://www.marketplace.org/2015/11/18/tech/codebreaker-it-ev...
They don't want they employees to be stigmatized for it, I would guess.
I have a couple questions that I hope you would not mind answering:
- Is there a stigma to have such company on your resume? (for a technical position obviously)
- Could you elaborate on the engineering culture, the salaries and the general atmosphere? What do you mean by mafia-like?
The engineering culture was great. Most of the engineers were genuinely about trying new stuff, improving the sites and were heavily into tech outside of the office. Every engineer who made it past the 90-day probation period was solid/competent. Management was very selective during the probation period. I would say about 60% of new hires left or were fired before probation was over. If you made it through, you really had to fuck up to get fired.
They were pretty conservative about their stacks. I see why, because it's hard to hire in that industry. They want to keep their stacks as uniform and simple as possible, so the skill requirements were easy to meet. However, no one was constantly vetting your projects. If you wanted to use something new, and it worked, they didn't care. You owned the whole process. Getting resources wasn't too difficult, if the project was desired by management. A fat pipe to serve content? You got it. Tons of storage for media? You got it. Servers to process large amounts of media? You got it.
There were never any meetings of any sort. I only attended 3 meetings in my entire time there. We had 10-minute scrum-type stand-ups now and then, but it wasn't religiously followed. I miss this aspect the most. I can't tell you, as an engineer, how resentful I am that managers take up 2-3 hours of my week because they need to fill slots in their calendar to prove they're "working."
Salaries were competitive with the area; at least 50% above the median household income. When I was given an offer, they gave me 10% more than I asked for, which has never happened to me before. I actually think I was underpaid relative to coworkers, and could have asked for 20-30% more and gotten it. Perks were okay; raises and bonuses were minimum. Promotions were very rare, but someone told me engineers, in general, don't often get promotions (this is my experience at my current company - one developer out of 20 in my department got promoted last cycle).
The general atmosphere is unlike anything I've experienced before. It's a boys club. The only women in the company were assistants/secretaries - of two types: related to their boss, or fucking their boss. There were women who worked in accounting and HR, but they were located away from the the rest of the company. All the engineers, QA, designers and salespeople were men. Surprisingly there were no real HR issues I heard of. I guess when you're dealing with all men, they tend to work out differences among themselves. I rarely got into the office before noon, because my boss wouldn't come in until after 2pm. Very relaxed and pet friendly. There was a little hazing of new employees, but nothing abusive. It's a culture you wouldn't find at a modern "let's be inclusive and supportive with hugs and validation of everyone's concerns" corporation.
It was mafia-like in the way that there was an inner circle of employees that didn't give you much regard. But if you proved yourself, they warmed up to you and welcomed you.
The whole industry is legitimized by one object: a camera. If you pay someone to have sex, it's prostitution. If you pay someone to have sex and you record it, it's business. This very fine line is one they constantly walk; they're always a step away from criminal behavior.
But they're okay with running a business that depends (in part) on some very bad people using trickery and violence to acquire and control new talent.
I'm not here to berate you. I worked on amusement gaming machines, but started to get cold feet when it would have turned into casino work.
I want devs considering working in porn to consider how their work contributes to human trafficking -- modern slavery.
Thank you for your post
Basically, tobacco is one of the most regulated, taxed and restricted products in Australia. The government doesn't take kindly to them, no matter who is in power, so they have to be incredibly careful to follow the rules as closely as possible. The company I consulted at decided that as they needed to do it anyway they decided to use that to their advantage and did something interesting: they tried to incorporate the regulations into their process improvement model and leveraged the regulations to, rather ironically, increase their efficiency and expand their market share in an increasingky shrinking overall market.
They used over-regulation to their advantage. I've never seen anyone else do this, and whilst I frankly find what they do deadset evil (hence my conflicted feelings on this job) I could not help but to be impressed by the most innovative response to a frankly impossible situation.
joking aside, you never hear about porn companies hiring, how did you get in?
It might have something to do with profitability and margins.
When you make a lot of money, it's easier to justify investments.
But it's completely true that those are the classic 3.
If only we could get them to all combine their powers. Sort of a DARPA-Psyonix-PornHub merger. I'll bring it up at the next G8.
I've got a bunch of projects on that kicking around. Wish I had more time.
Westworld springs to mind
Imagine... World War of Dicks.
Also, finance. Machine Learning for trading algos, Bitcoin/Blockchain etc.
Bitcoin is the exception, not the rule. And the machine learning in finance isn't very innovative at all. In fact, working in the industry I'd say they really don't know what they're doing! They just try stuff and see what works (at a glacial pace no less).
On June 27th, someone pointed out in the Chrome bug tracker[0] that an ad network called RevDefender started using WebSockets to deliver ads.
[0] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=129353...
I used to work as the lead developer of a big adult online store and its associated social network website, at the beginning I was ashamed to talk about it with my non-coworker friends because talking about porn and sex toys is not well seen in my home country because there is a lot of religious people.
It was not until at year later that I realized that I was gaining more experience as a software engineer with the challenges in this project than in previous jobs. Now I am very proud of the work I did there, and although HR people still cringe every time I talk about it during interviews I always end up seeing a face of amusement when they hear about the challenges that my team had to face.
If it weren't because finding the careers page in these websites is difficult I would happily apply to work there. I understand that working in the sex industry is still a taboo (either as a model, manager, developer, etc) we have to agree to what my grandfather used to say: Sex and Food, that's what sells.
My point being that you can see technological innovation from the perspective of pursuing 'base' desires or as an outgrowth of intellectual curiosity or basic research, and make a good argument either way depending on what other points you want to make.
Your friend the chemist might seem to enjoy explosions a lot, but also be systematic and detail-oriented.
- Guy grabs a Magnum Condom and proudly puts it on while girl smiles. - A couple have a picnic lunch in the bed of a Ford F150 pickup truck and end up having sex - etc...
I'm sure you couldn't get a deal with every company (McDonald's probably wouldn't buy in) but there are quite a few adult companies that would work. As long as you could accurately track views across distributors you would be golden. :)
Just an idea.
1) distorts the ad marketplace, resulting in impressions that may be paid and not seen, or seen and not paid, and;
2) anti-consumer experience, as the consumer expects no ads.
Disclosure: Years ago I cofounded a company that offers a private ad exchange to large sites, and recently released a Subscriptions service that is able to blank out ads with good technical hygiene for paying subscribers. [1]
A good chunk of porn site revenue comes from rebills to people who forget to cancel their subscription after they've joined at 2am Saturday morning, drunk/high, needing to pound one out before passing out. (This is literally the description of a typical customer a porn studio manager gave me.)
That by itself could be a great market. Porn sites are notorious for inefficient, disgusting, and sometimes malicious advertisements. Getting the product without all that for low cost would appeal to many. I'm curious what the actual numbers are on one of the highest, trafficked sites. It could provide a nice, upper bound on what others might expect with their actual results being lower unless they're a niche operator like Kink.
But everything for movie and TV show is available for free easily but still everything is working great for Netflix.
Actually they are available - including 4k, even VR - just not on public trackers :)
Porn is reliably served by many _respectable_ sites.
Sounds like a good thing to me.
The first online orders were processed by Netmarket[1][2] which had nothing to do with the porn industry.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetMarket
[2] - http://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/12/business/attention-shopper...
First off, we can dispense both porn and video games as important technological drivers since both are realms of extremely narrow focus compared to the breadth of the military; neither can for instance be credited with driving development of automatic telephone exchanges.
The military has much more diverse needs, and could therefore plausibly drive "innovations in technology" over a large enough breadth of technologies to count. Still, the technology the military directly develops or pay for being developed is of a decidedly military nature, and as we all know the civilian sector of society is quite sizable and contains a multitude of technology unique to it, none of which are directly developed by the military.
Frankly, the fact that the Board of Longitude lead to portable timepieces does not mean the military can be credited with all advances in timekeeping henceforth.