Hurting For Cash, Online Porn Tries New Tricks
npr.org
npr.org
North American society is far too prudish about sex; especially sex that isn't deemed "mainstream". BDSM themes in particular have long been used by Hollywood to characterize particularly vile antagonists. Mainstream sexual mores are becoming less parochial, but not nearly fast enough to alleviate privacy concerns for most people. Acworth really ought to take this a lot more seriously. His attitude ranks up there with the Sony exec's who figured rootkits were a good idea! It really is a recipe for disaster when pirated goods carry fewer risks than legitimately purchased goods!
thats where bitcoin comes in
However, beware! If your wife is an paranoid data scientist, she could still find circumstantial evidence for your porn subscription.
It also must be pointed out that you aren't just dealing with your spouse at this point: you are dealing with everyone who might possibly care; maybe your pastor is a "paranoid data scientist", or maybe the noisy person across the street has taken up statistical correlation and inference as a new hobby. Maybe someone makes a new service that helps companies screen employees, and one of the things it does is scan the blockchain using some really epic algorithm coming up with some kind of bogus (and questionably-legal) "morality score" (I bring this up as there already have been companies constructed to do this for data on Facebook). The transaction record of bitcoin is out there for everyone to datamine, and if you make a mistake the record will still be there and still be public years from now. There might even be new techniques (whether bitcoin-specific, or generally in the fields of statistics or machine learning) that will make this data more transparent in the future. The defense model for "I don't want people I deal with to know about my porn addiction" of bitcoin vs. even a normal credit card does not come out very strong.
Are there any good resources to read up on how the remixers work, and why they cant be relied upon?
To be clear, though, my argument was simply to move the "data scientist" line from "wallet obfuscation" (for which I then provided more concrete issues) to "remixers", and then to point out that normal people (the kind of person who didn't solve the underlying problem long ago using prepaid credit cards ;P) aren't using remixers and are unlikely to begin using remixers (as they probably aren't even using the more useful forms of wallet obfuscation: they are probably relying on what their wallet software is doing by default).
Can you give any examples? I worked with developers at one of the biggest networks, and while I found exactly one to be competent, I think I facepalmed myself bleeding. E.g:
"Can you give me the login credentials to the admin backend to view the stats of our affiliates?"
"Sure, you can use this link: http://genericbacked.com?login=john&password=john123"
While they would isolate their backends on different servers, it just a couple hours of being bored and some kiddy scanning on their netblocks and some manual SQLi to expose glaring holes and start dumping databases. Some CSV export sources were completely open.
I also found some nifty holes in their billing forms, when a user would do an authorization of future payments. (i.e. entering their creditcard, but not getting charged"). I could reuse the params that we could store, and change the template id of the presented form, to have the form present my the users CC data.
>When faced with declining sales due to privacy fears, Kink (and many other sites) are shrugging off privacy concerns in order to make a buck off of invasive advertising
Those privacy concerns were never addressed in the first place. Really common software to manage doorway sites, billing forms and affiliates is "NATS, The Next-Generation Affiliate Tracking Software" It stores all passwords in plain-text in the database, while a year ago it had some updates on its styling.. like actually use CSS and tableless layouts... nothing changed in regards to security. Log files also contained huge amount of privacy sensitive data.
Another common practice was to never destroy user data, just make it not visible anymore when they opt out of their account. It will still hold resell value on the e-mail address alone. My manager told me these could be worth $0.50 a piece for a validated e-mail address.
A lot of the things in the article are true. The saturation of the market means that we had to take any effort to gain an edge. In the end this meant we were starting to run our own ads, and crunch the data to display better / different ads. When we got good at that, we started accepting other people to use our ad-network. Coincidentally the big money is in all the ad-networks. Most of the big show online porn guys, next to having a gabillion of the same sites, is running their own ad-networks.
They certainly don't lead in terms of security (and definitely not in terms of privacy, much as they'll claim otherwise to their potentially easily embarrassed customers) as your examples suggest.
Where they have been pioneers in the past though are in the area of monetising content, online payments and related matters, particularly (but not exclusively) video content. Also in the early days some bandwidth management techniques where tested in the real world on porn content before anything else, and many other services lacked the constant high demand that needed them.
BitCoin will have properly "made it" when it starts being common for porn suppliers to accept it!
Hmm.. how about the same kinds of people who build websites that display mugshot information, but allow you to pay a fee to have yours removed.
Not really. Songs or artists are not perfect substitutes to one another; if you want to listen to a specific song from a specific artist, you'll be looking for that song and in most cases another song won't do. Therefore, if it was possible to make this song absolutely unavailable via illegal means, you'd have a very strong incentive to buy it.
Porn videos are mostly perfect substitutes to one another (in their respective broad specialty; a gay sex video isn't a substitute to a straight sex video, but a nurse video is a substitute to a teacher-student one).
Therefore, in order to make people pay for porn, the porn industry would have to make all free porn videos disappear, which is impossible.
It would seem they're in much direr straits than the music industry.
Perhaps it's only a matter of time till we see pornography crowdfunding.
Their fees are sky-high (30% of money collected) and the FAQ is not written in very good English, so I'd be rather weary of using them, but the idea is great!
Then all you need to do is start explaining bitcoin to your significant other just long enough for their eyes to go glassy, begging you to stop.
Granted there is the startup cost..
If your significant other works for a Three Letter Agency, then maybe it's possible they could reverse the network connection logs to the exchanges, dig through their databases and prove that you were the one who owned the coin that bought that porn. Maybe. But given how little the FBI has done with the cache of bitcash they seized, I doubt it.
So admittedly, it's not as clean as a cash business... but neither is the sex industry.
Rip, re-watermark, re-distribute.
No one can really complain, because everyone is doing the same.. Sure you could buy some "unique content" from time to time. Costs around $750 a video, shipped from Prague, Czech Republic. But there's not much value in that, because other people will just rip, re-watermark, re-distribute :)