Be careful working in this field (pornography). In 2017 I wrote a mildly pornographic app (http://driftwheeler.com) and it appears on my resume. When hiring managers or recruiters take a look, some of them get upset.
For example, a scheduled interview was abruptly cancelled the night before. I pursued the matter through a friend who had a senior role at the hiring company and it was determined that the (middle-aged female) in-house recruiter had been deeply offended when she followed the link on my resume and had cancelled everything. Eventually, I received a sincere apology from the CEO.
There is a real stigma, and it will affect you. Beware.
“Don’t link to NSFW content on your resume” seems like a common-sense rule that’s applicable independently of whether you worked in the porn industry or not.
Maybe they did good work and felt proud of it and thought the hiring managers could look past the content of the product of the company and look at the real work needed to deliver that product.
Exactly. That is why such a entry in your resume works like a great filter.
If I had worked in NSFW and an application would get rejected because of that I would sincerely thank my former job for saving me a job in an environment I would not want to touch with a ten foot pole.
If people in (even small power) like HR drones abuse their position as to flag a resume because of such a former experience I doubt there is a company culture of honesty, openness, respect or value of the individual.
To me personally a great filter to have.
If one is desperately in need of a job. OK - remove it and try to jump ship once secured in the current place.
> If people in (even small power) like HR drones abuse their position
I call this the traffic warden principle: Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. A really tiny amount of power, in one specific area of your life, corrupts even more.
(Also, FWIW, it's "people in (even small) power", not "people in (even small power)".)
Seriously. All he had to do was make a SFW version for his resume if he was so keen on showing off the work. Use pictures of smurfs and puppies.
I might unfairly be making assumptions about how technically feasible the change would be. If it would be difficult to do so, I'd be interested to learn how/why, eg was it a system design choice or is it inherent to the tech itself...
It's probably true that most work worth keeping on a resume, after some experience, is going to be non-trivial to replicate at best, and awkward to lie about/dance around in explaining purely to accommodate the sensitivities of adults who should chill out. I've worked mostly for companies I wasn't fired from, and it'd be great to avoid talking about the experience directly. Could I re-create the frontend interface for massive auction company? Maybe, but it would take a large amount of extremely unsatisfactory work. Could I recreate the database, backend infrastructure, and conditions that really made the work hard? No
Yeah, you're definitely right. If I was in that situation, I think I would be up front about the nature of the work and offer a "sanitized" textual walkthrough of the project. Let people decide if they want to risk being offended.
I'm slightly conflicted here. I don't like pretending that facets of life don't exist, especially when they don't directly harm the involved, but I am also mindful of people's individual sensitivities.
To tie it back to something more general, it seems like a lot of software engineering work is predicated on the cis male perspective. It's hard for me to imagine the psychological impact that sexual harassment might have on a woman, partly because I have the privilege of moving through the world without having my body or attractiveness be a point of interest whatsoever. I feel safe walking outside at night. I don't check my car's backseat before getting in. I have no idea what the fear of kidnapping even is.
In light of the above, of being honest with the gaps in what I will ever experience, how can I venture to link to a site that might offend a woman? Even if it seems ok to me, and it's a joke or whatever excuse, how can I possibly say I fully understand her perspective when her lived experience places her in such vastly different situations?
I agree about a lot of that, but you also don't necessarily need to link to the site or compell someone to go and inspect it. There is a reason Pornhub's parent company is actually MindGeek. Just list it, describe what you did as your job or accomplishments, and if someone chooses to check it out, you never have control over that, and while you may mot share the experience of some or most women, you have your own experiences that other people aren't necessarily worried about, but that you might be bothered by. I can't try and guess what those are, and that's life; it's bound to happen. Many people have been sexually assaulted in this world, and that's just the sad reality. Should everyone always avoid mentioning the word rape? No. Should you regularly mention it in a professional context? Probably not. Same thing for theft, child abuse, bigotry, circumcision, regular assault, guns in general, being audited, adultery, divorce, robbery (different than just theft), sexual harassment, suicide, death of any kind, gaslighting or other manipulation, depression or using the word depressed as an exaggerated expression of ongoing sadness, alcholism, OCD, ADD, w/e...
There's nuance in there of course, pick your situations, but basically none of them are going to be broadly unique or predictable, and part of life is just dealing with those awkward moments if they come up.
There's a big difference between surprising someone by leading them to a website that immediate shows NSFW content and putting on your resume that you previously worked for a company that published NSFW content. The latter absolutely should not be considered "NSFW" and shouldn't be considered a red flag by a potential employer.
This is a soundbite falsehood. The military industrial complex is the driving force of the internet and all things computing. Porn is just another monetization.
If you closely study Twitter's actions (How did that Arab Spring turn out for everybody?), or read about the InQtel origins of google (Assange's "Google Is Not What It Seems"), or how the Israelis blasted the Palestinians with porn during a siege (the OnlyFans economy!), you will see that it is still very much a weapon.
Of the actual innovations in this field, how many came from defense (DOD, CIA, NSA, ARPA, & their contractors), and how many came from pornography?
I never said secret-services...governments etc have nothing to-do with the Internet, and it would be stupid not to use it for psyop's, but the money comes from private sectors and not the "military" anymore.
Back in the day, RedTube had incredibly high quality, low bandwidth video compared to YouTube (which at that stage had been owned by Google for a couple of years). They also had mouse-over previews on the seek bar years before anywhere else did.
Yeah, I often read about porn sites for their engineering (I'm not being sarcastic, I mean that 100% sincerely). It's a shadow world that counts among it some of the most highly-trafficked sites on the internet - and then bear in mind that most of the few sites above them are not devoted to serving high-quality long-duration videos. These sites are phenomenal feats of engineering. Anyone who discounts them just because of some silly pudeur about their content is not an engineer in my eyes.
I don't really see mouseover previews as being in the same league as ethernet, GUI, laser printers, cryptography, TOR, supercomputing, LISP, Ada, etc, etc...
Xerox, under a fat DARPA grant. If you read Kay's "Early History of Smalltalk", or any of the other writeups on PARC projects, it's a genealogy of DARPA projects:
who said puritanism has to be right-wing. It's also not necessarily about sexuality. It's about putting up a set of idealistic moral standards and trying to force everybody to comply or pretend to comply.
I mean, pretty much everyone associates puritanism with the right-wing, but ok my bad...
We put up sets of idealistic moral standards that some or most of a society generally agree protects vulnerable people. This is why we have age limits on alcohol, for example. This is why we have age limits on porn, too.
Everyone is forced to comply or pretend to comply with minimum drinking ages, which are pretty common throughout the world. I think all would agree.
It doesn't really seem to be puritanism that drives a society to protect its vulnerable populations. It's not out of a hatred of alcohol that drinking ages exist, it's because alcohol abuse has been proven to ruin lives. Just like porn.
> I mean, pretty much everyone associates puritanism with the right-wing, but ok my bad...
The fact that the right wing is puritan doesn't mean that puritanism entails being right-wing. This is, like, Logic 101, 'Socrates is a man'-level shit.
> pretty much everyone associates puritanism with the right-wing
That "everyone" must be old. The new phenomena are already lampooned in plenty of memes. The boomers aged pretty badly.
> It's not out of a hatred of alcohol that drinking ages exist, it's because alcohol abuse has been proven to ruin lives
If that were the case, alcohol would just be banned outright. The limits are basically virtual anyway, anybody can attest that getting alcohol is trivial once you start to really want it. Just like porn.
A lot of law is effectively performative morality, and no more so than in the area of personal pleasures. Prohibitionism always fails, eventually, because people want to feel.
Well I think at this point you're just using puritanism as short-hand for "people trying to enforce morals I disagree with".
So if you're left-wing, than in your terminology puritans will be by definition right-wingers. And the people enforcing morals you agree with cannot be called Puritan.
If you take a brief look at the history of the original Puritanism however, it was definitely a 'revolutionary' movement against tradition. Including the ones who came to America.
If merely being a software engineer who handled traffic for a crappy tube site, where most videos are uploaded by consenting freaky couples, gets you blacklisted from working in companies, while people who handle privacy destruction at Google and Facebook get cushy jobs - yeah, it is bad. It's not a software engineer's fault that some frat boy uploaded revenge porn and porn does not have to be bad. Plenty of feminists are also pro-porn, just when it's done in the right way and doesn't involve manipulation or coercion.
It's not the software dev's _fault_ that someone used their tool to hurt another person, but it _is_ the dev's _responsibility_ to consider how their tool might be abused and consider whether it's really a societal good to build it.
That's kind of the whole point of the original article, narrated by a guy who _ actually feels guilty_ about his role in enabling people like your hypothetical frat boy.
The Puritans weren't right-wing. They were the freaky liberals of their time, arguing that the Anglican church was too close to the conservative, traditional Roman Catholic church - ie they wanted massive social change and a break from the past.
Eh. Modern political cleavages map very poorly onto seventeenth century religious divisions.
I'm a Quaker. Early Quakers were radical (rejecting the religious authority of priests and the fighting of wars), conservative (looking backwards to a partially-imagined better, more wholesome Christianity of the past), obnoxious (turning up to Anglican churches to heckle the sermon), and disciplined (strong structures in place for the support of families of those imprisoned for their faith, and a communal discernment process that rejected 'do as thou wilt').
Puritans rejected catholic influence on the church, yes, but their focus on individual piety, and their association with the rising merchant class, puts them a long way from freaky liberalism. One of their critiques was that others were insufficiently sober and God-fearing!
I think it's pretty clear to me. Puritan aligned forces overthrew the English Monarchy and established a republic - some 150 years later left and right came about when opponents of the French monarchy would sit on the left. There's also a very clear relationship between Puritans and the Whigs - it's surely very clear that they were to the left of the Tories.
In either century, the right represents old moral values, and the left represents a fresh new source of moral values which seek to replace the old. Granted, in the 17th century those new moral sources were religious and in the 21st century they are secular - the substance of what is now left and what was then left has absolutely changed. But the overall structure is the same.
Regardless of whether the woman in question is a neopuritan -
I am not offended by OPs app, nor the display of a woman's breasts or genitalia. But I would greatly question what kind of employee OP would be if they're putting their jerk-off apps on their resume. If OP lacks the basic social awareness to not cause steam to come out the ears of the large percent of society that might be deemed neopuritan, then I have to suspect OP is lacking in social awareness that is going to affect their/coworkers performance in the office.
If I had written an app like that, and wanted to use it as a demo of my knowledge in some field on my resume, I would reimplement it to work on puppies or something.
You realize you have full control over your resume, right?
"It appears on my resume" makes it sound like some other controlling entity has put it on your resume, so that it now just appears there as a matter of fact.
I would assume it's affecting most countries with high speed internet. I just chose not to opine on those countries since I don't live in them and am less informed. You can view this comment I made for why porn is dangerous:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30443056
If I'm working on something interesting, something of real tangible value, it's very easy to tune out everything--noise, headache, hunger, hornyness. When I'm grinding out corporate stuff to pay the bills, it's another story. I think our impulses are bursting with wisdom. If the work loses out to the sex drive, how meaningful was the work in the first place?
If sex hasn't taken over pretty much everything else in the list of priorities, it just means that you haven't gotten horny enough.
There a whole wide spectrum between "I'm kind of horny", "I think i'm pretty darn horny" and actually full-blast horny.
In due time, sex will move up to no1 spot in the list of priorities.
And if doesn't, then you're either old (or getting there) or perhaps never had a particularly strong sex-drive to begin with.
Sex-drive is just an insanely powerful force in men, most men have experienced but
only a small sliver of how powerful it can get, since they never let it get there, because porn is always there and easily accessible, and you can just rub one out without porn too.
So is hunger. So is survival. I don't think you understand what I have written. If your instincts are putting sex at the top of the list, maybe it's time to have sex, with a real person, instead of muting your instincts with soma so you can earn more fiats?
>muting your instincts with soma so you can earn more fiats?
I actually love programming, and when I was refering to "programming work" I was specifically refering to my hobby projects.
> So is hunger. So is survival.
Unlike sex-drive, hunger and survival is very much aligned with what I want.
I have to eat so I can keep doing things that I love (programming, creating music, etc)
While sex-drive is a hardwired instinct to procreate and have children - which is very much polar-opposite of my best self interests.
More over I do NOT want to have sex with any of my EXes or bar slobs or hiring prostututes. It just seems "like a good idea" under an altered state of mind. No thank you, very much.
I'm not my body.
And I'm not even my mind half of the time (especially when overloaded with the horny hormones).
Obviously porn is not a necessity to rub one out, especially if you're really, really horny. As I was.
However, being in that really horny frame of mind, you really dont want to jerk off at all, or even watch porn frankly - that is not what you want at all. You want to fuck a woman in the most direct-est animalistic raw kind of way.
I wouldn't have rubbed one out without porn, it wouldn't have happened.
Instead you do stupid shit, like start texting all your EX-es, or going on dates with woman you don't really even like or consider booking a prostitutes and all sorts of fucked up stuff...
Being horny, really horny is a trip, an altered state of mind is what i'm going to say.
Porn very effectively brings you back to earth and disables biological imperatives in a quick and enjoyable way (hell, it's not even particularly enjoyable after an extended long abstinence, since it's is waaay to intense).
Porn is definitely easy to abuse for some people, but it doesn't mean it's all bad, it is extremely useful tool.
I'd be all for stigmatization if the ranking wasn't absolutely bonkers. Between advertising and porn, advertising is worse for the collected psyche. It is a constant onslaught that tells everyone to want, and never relents. Porn can be avoided approximately 10,000 times more easily than advertising.
Porn is almost as unavoidable as ads, especially for kids. We know the average age of a boy viewing porn is 11 (1)and that virtually all of them will see porn by 15(2). Of porn viewing done by minors 22% are done by children under 10 (3). Porn has also been proven to have significantly more impact over your brain than advertising. The dopamine response to seeing porn is similar to crack (4). You can't get addicted to ads. Pornography is categorically more dangerous to society than ads, tracking, and privacy invasions.
Where are these ads? I never see pornographic ads in my daily browsing.
> The dopamine response to seeing porn is similar to crack (4).
That doesn't prove anything about harmfulness. I think it was already obvious that humans are hardwired to be attracted to sex. Nothing in these links suggests that this response creates to an addiction similar to hard drugs.
> Pornography is categorically more dangerous to society than ads, tracking, and privacy invasions.
He was making a point about the proliferation of porn. It's not so bad if your settings turn off NSFW on various sites. However even then, it's often in your face. I won't go into details though.
Porn isn't sex. The repeated exposure to a huge volume of media can't be compared to a physical experience. It's more comparable to a drug.
That seems like equivocation on the word "unavoidable." There's a big difference between saying "ads are unavoidable because they are displayed on nearly every computing device you use" and "porn is unavoidable because people actively want to see it."
"yourbrainonporn.com" is about as reliable as quoting D.A.R.E. for information on drugs. In other words, it holds literally no weight and is likely religion-driven "family values" propaganda.
Just to correct myself, the page I linked to is actually about making the case for the link between dopamine and addiction. The effect of porn on the brain is made indirectly.
A lot of other things are also highly addictive though, like social media. So where do you draw the line? Also, why are some people so much more addicted than others?
I found this fairly dubious, and followed through with this and got to the study[0]. It uses [1] as its source. That source is a private antivirus company (bitdefender), and they don't quote any sources for those claims, but luckily they offer a solution:
> Use security solutions with Parental Control to watch over kids online. Features such as Bitdefender Parental Control block inappropriate content, restrict Web access between certain hours and helps parents remotely monitor their children”s online activity
I haven't followed through on the other statistics you quoted, but that seems like some major corporate BS you're basing your argument on there.
> The research was conducted by Bitdefender in September 2016 covering 706 users of Bitdefender's security solutions.
Midwest US, mid 30's. This sort of view is strongly held by the intellectual and political circles I support and follow. I think it is a very insidious and corrupting addiction, and the modern incarnation of it is orders of magnitude more stimulating than in prior eras. Infinite access to a stimulus that simulates in male brains "mating" with ever varied women, which is hijacking a strong biological imperative.
As another comment mentioned a similar problem with "advertising" in general, I think sexualization and over stimulus of the population weakens people, and not to say there is some conspiracy purposefully pushing this (it may just emergent from technology and human instinct) I do think the corrupting influence weakens a population and makes them more easily dominated by strong forces... media, business, government, etc. All to say that, in terms of "what is best to cultivate a strong society and people" porn is extremely antithetical to this. A stronger society is one that would be avoiding, however necessary, consumption and production of pornography.
This presentation [0] on the physiological effects of porn consumption is very informative. Observations mirror what strong opiates do to the brain
A good overview of the public health problem of porn[1]
The psychologically destabilizing and weakening effects of porn, and how they breakdown willpower to oppose stronger forces are illustrated by the time when the Israeli military broadcast pornography onto the televisions of Palestinian residents of the besieged West Bank town of Ramallah [2]. Why would they do this if porn was good for you?
Yes, they weren't a good thing but even those were taboo and fairly inaccessible to the average kid and came with a stigma for the adults buying them in public.
Do you not see how the infinite novelty of endless porn videos accessible in the palm of your hand is different than the (crude and still objectionable) magazines sold in corner stores?
I would suggest the photocopy of a crunched up semi-nude Madonna photo from the 80s caused our imagination to soak much more than what is available online.
At the time many lighters and cards had nude images. It was much more common and celebrated.
Oh wow. I am blown away. You just threw me back some 30 years.
Let me explain. About three decades ago I was (gladly not to strongly) part of a Christian youth group. Led by honorable members of the parish. They condemned porn, Sex, condemned schools doing sex ed. The condemned viciously youth magazines doing sex ed as well (German Bravo magazine).
Kids naturally discovered their budding sexuality. Looked at porn or nudism magazines. Tried maturation (oh what a sin in the eyes of the elders). As said everything sexusl, everything bodily was tabu.
Kids, especially in the inner part of these groups with parents active in the parish were fearful. Full of shame because they felt their bodies betraying them and their faith. Felt the touch of Satan. Felt dirty and without being worthy.
You (or at least others) might get the drift.
And - more importantly - these kids (boys and girls alike) were vulnerable. And believe me - easy prey. And prey they were. The most respected members of the flock, leaders of youth groups and excursions who prayed with us and always told us that we could always come to them with any question about our faith and life in general. These were the wolves. Males as well as females. They longed for the confessions. Let the kids show what they had done. Wanted to see in detail. Some even went further. Did not constraint themselves to confessions and private shows of underage maturation.
So yeah I learned early that porn is to blame for a rotten society. Porn is the culprit. Not people.
Sorry, but what you wrote is nearly verbatim the arguments that were hammered into us.
Porn is not sexual, it is anti-sexual. Young adults are having less sex than prior generations. The birth rate is collapsing. To equate compulsive consumption of a synthetic substitute for real sex and the natural reason for its existence is ridiculous.
Like equating criticizing unhealthy eating of candy and junk food to an opposition to "food" would be similar.
Thank you for this! This is something that is really really important to me and my wife. We have seen some horrible consequences in our parents' generation from porn addictions. I also had an addiction to it, but thankfully I am free now. My biggest desire as a father is that my children would grow up addiction free. Boys are exposed to porn when they are simply unable to understand what it is, what sex is, and what the price of the short-term pleasure is. I know I was. I hate what happened to me, I hate what I did, but I felt like I had to do it.
It is shaming the abuse of a naked body, and the mind that goes with it. I have more respect for the beauty of the naked body than do porn producers and consumers. Real meaningful sex is respect for the naked body, porn is a poor, pathetic, addictive, mind altering and weakening synthetic substitute. Get it?
Your view seems based on over-generalization.
It's fine to think "most porn is disrespectful", but that shouldn't lead you to conclude all porn should suffer from repressive laws or social norms.
Pornography is an active good for society that affords people an easy way to enjoy themselves and live out fantasies while causing no inherent harm to anyone else. It is certainly less harmful to society than tobacco, gambling or telemarketers.
Sex is a perfectly enjoyable past-time, similar to woodworking or snowboarding, and nothing changes about its morality when you record it on a camera.
It is also worth noting that pornography has existed in essentially every human culture that has had writing or visual artistry. The noble spirit of mankind, if such a thing exists, has yet to crumble.
F' that. I worked for Kink.com (NSFW) (as a software engineer) and I'm proud of it. I got experience building cutting edge, high demand systems and services that I wouldn't have gotten elsewhere. We did realtime 1080p streaming video before anyone else and a full micro currency (Kinks). I even built a whole ad serving system that served banners from sites like PornHub (so I got a taste of the traffic levels they had).
If that held me back from getting a job at some puritanical company, so be it. I wouldn't have wanted to work there any way.
You broke the site guidelines badly in this thread. We ban accounts that do that. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
This probably also breaks the rules, but uhh, thanks for smacking these bozos Dang. I have been here since HN started [ahem, I did lurk for a few years] and I really appreciate it being kept to high standards and a great place to discuss tech and such :)
It is funny, they describe it below as a character attack, but I don't even take it as that. Their quote is spot on and correct. Yes, I happily missed out on jobs to work on cool things like porn streaming.
I certainly could have gone to work for Facebook or some other FAANG, but given the choice of selling my soul for porn or selling my soul to Mark and FB... I'd pick porn any day. It was a great job. Full benefits, matching 401k, like minded coworkers, interesting and challenging use cases, best after work parties, etc.
The CEO sent him a written apology. I wouldn't call that a puritanical company.
All it takes is one person in the critical path to not like what you're doing, even if 99% of the rest don't give a shit, and that's a potential job off the table.
You're proud of your work, that's great, but also doesn't change the fact that your work also puts you at risk of having your resume tossed for a dumb reason.
My use of the word is a generalization, sorry that wasn't clear.
Agreed, your resume could be tossed for anything. US has some protections for this. Other countries don't have this at all. You don't take a job with a porn company without realizing that. It definitely made hiring more difficult as well.
While working there, we lost access to our web analytics tool because they got bought by a Mormon company that booted us. Endless issues with credit card processors. We also had to host our own server hardware because at the time, porn wasn't allowed on many hosting services and/or we were fearful of being booted from other cloud providers.
That's also what attracted me to my current business venture, which is to provide decentralized cloud infrastructure services (aka: web3). It seems weird to think of that being decentralized, but if we don't know the specifics of what you're running on our hardware, there is nothing for us to turn off. Based on my history, I see a lot of value in that.
Love to hear more about it. We have often been told porn are one of the largest internet video category. Even before the Internet, pornography decided the war on DVD or Blu-Ray. Or at least that is what I have been told, never fact checked on any of these.
And there are so many tech on these system I wish I could read more about it. And yet we dont. There could be loads of things that could be open sourced too. Or do we live in a world where an open source component from a porn company are not good enough to use. ( I would not be surprised if that is case right now in Silicon Valley ). And yet we are happy to read technology being used in warfares?
I would imagine you have lots of restrictions and barrier in your work, from hosting to payment or whatever. It will be interesting to see how those are worked out.
Oh but please post it in a separate blogging platform so we can all enjoy it during work hours.
> Even before the Internet, pornography decided the war on DVD or Blu-Ray. Or at least that is what I have been told, never fact checked on any of these.
Beta vs VHS.
DVD did not compete against BluRay, they are two different generations. BluRay competed against HD-DVD. From what I remember technically HD-DVD was superior, BluRay won because it had extra copy protection mechanism the HD-DVD lacked.
HD-DVD was inferior. BluRay could do 25GB per layer while HD-DVD could only do 15GB.
The major factor was that Sony shipped a BluRay player in the PlayStation 3. When HD-DVD was discontinued, Sony had sold 10.5M PlayStation 3 units while there were only 1M HD-DVD units. Sony spent a lot of money subsidizing the PS3 and its BluRay player, but a 10:1 ratio of PS3s to HD-DVD players won the market (and all the standalone BluRay players just made the ratio worse).
As the PS3 sold, rental chains like Blockbuster decided to go with BluRay exclusively - and at the time Blockbuster was the largest rental chain and really powerful. Netflix also moved exclusively to BluRay. As the PS3 sold, Target decided to move exclusively to BluRay. Once the PS3 had started selling way more units than all HD-DVD players combined, everyone started moving away from HD-DVD which just reinforced its decline.
BluRay won because Sony was willing to suffer pretty big losses on PS3 sales to push the format.
> There is a real stigma, and it will affect you. Beware.
Small anecdote, but I was recruited by and almost took an offer for the folks behind "BangBros." Their corporate structure was apparently such that the IT / Software roles worked for a shell company with a generic name, generic website, etc. This company apparently works in a "consulting" like capacity for all of their assets (BangBros, "tube" sites, cam sites, etc.)
I asked what was going on with the shell company, because it seemed sketchy as all hell. It was explained that because of industry stigma most of their employees use the shell company for their resume with generic "worked on highly-scalable systems handling N amount of traffic."
Apparently it was a highly professional outfit, and the closest you could get to dealing with FANG-level problems while not being a FANG-eligible person. Great pay and benefits, business casual dress located in a nice building in Miami Beach.
Same sort of arrangement, I casually discovered, is often in play for gambling sites (pun intended). Because the overall outfit can be seen as questionable (occasionally by accident: gambling regulations change very often, so what is legal today might well be illegal tomorrow), the technical side is kept at arm's length, so that they can still attract good talent.
If HR passed on them because 'porn' they either abused their position or gave a clear signal about company culture. They need to find someone that fits. In terms of skills and team fit/professionalism.
Either the company values prude/neoconservative value signaling (the at least I wouldn't want to work there and they should openly tell people what ideology is expected) or the HR person abused their position and did not do their job in finding someone that fits the skill set and role.
Being anti-porn is hardly limited to neocons, unless you think the totality of FAANGs are neocons. This is the sort of live wire that cuts right across all political groups.
I'll echo a sub post on this and say, with a most gentle: fuck. that. I consider it a positive signal that I would be rejected for some of my past work in adult. It shortcuts the whole you're-interviewing-them portion of the recruiting process. They've done my work for me. In the past, my involvement in the area has proven to be an interesting facet of my work history that others don't have, often resulting in interviews just out of curiosity on their end. Did I receive offers on all of them? No, and I don't care either and that's not the point.
My point is that I'm not going to censor myself or my background in anticipation of someone being offended. Let them be offended, there's lots of other places where that isn't a problem.
That is fine if you don't mind loosing out on some opportunities because a very religious recruiting coordinator 6 months out of college making 45K per year decides your profile is icky.
It's probably not the CTO, your direct manager, or even any of your peer that would be offended. Anyone in the long chain of people that are involved in your process from applicant to employee could cause a stink.
It's difficult to say one employees who might filter you out is indicative of the entire company culture. I know a lot of happy employees who absolutely hated their experience being onboarded because of 1 or 2 difficult people. But who gives a shit about how Michael from HR took 9 days to send an official offer letter if you're never going to have to interact with them again?
Absent some mitigating context, I would also conclude that something is wrong with you for putting NSFW content on your resume. The issue here is mainly what you're telegraphing about your grasp of social norms.
The hiring process is determining who is a good fit for whom, both skills-wise, and other-wise. What if they never followed the link, and you had been hired, and you ended up working with a team of people who were culturally incompatible with you?
This falls into the same category as "be careful having opinions in public". Ever since we've been easily Googlable, right-wing employers have canceled left-wing candidates and very much vice-versa (e.g. Antonio Garcia Martinez and Apple). There's been some degree of outcry and stink about this, but in the end it's probably a net good for employees to work with teams they are culturally aligned with. Getting cut early on account of what you believe or what else you worked on is probably best for everyone involved.
Would you like to be able to enjoy a beer with your coworkers or not?
You write about the unjust bias (and unjust it is) against you for having worked with porn, but then seem to to try to evoke ageist and gender stereotypes.
Agreed. And while I doubt this is what the author of the comment actually had in mind, I think it is important to notice that porn, by large extent, takes advantage of women, and so it’s women who naturally have bigger issue with it than man. And I assume the CEO who sent the apologetic letter was a man. In other words, the author inadvertently exemplifies how sexist IT can still be.
I think the implication is that women tend to have more of a problem with pornography than men. Perhaps if the CEO had been a man it wouldn't have gotten to the point where it resulted in their interview being cancelled.
OP never said the bias was unjust, only that the bias exists and people working in that industry should be aware it could be used against them.
Multiple studies exist showing that men and women have very very different views on pornography and in particular women's views on it are significantly more negative than men's views. Furthermore people's views on pornography change as they get older with older people having an even more negative view about it than younger people. This isn't like a fringe difference either, consumption of porn by women is less than 20% that of men. There's nothing sexist about pointing out that women can and often do have very different views on a subject than men, and no reason to think that women having a negative view of pornography somehow makes them inferior in anyway.
>Multiple studies exist showing that men and women have very very different views on pornography and in particular women's views on it are significantly more negative than men's views
Can you cite some of these studies?
IIRC there is a difference in consumption rates between genders, but not negative attitudes.
I tend to get suspicious when porn sites (or porn-related sites) avoid https. Maybe I'm paranoid, but it's so simple to use ssl today than I find it hard to give the benefit of the doubt.
Is there any reason to your choice in publishing content such as this in a way that exposes all visitors?
I looked at the "mildly pornographic app" you wrote and my reaction was, I would not choose to hire you. Basically I don't want to be exposed to people's sexual fantasies as a part of my job. It's obnoxious and way, way into the territory of TMI. Do what you like and keep it private. The fact you thought it was appropriate to share this with a potential employer reviewing your resume is a red flag. Your sense of what is appropriate to share in the workplace is clearly off.
This is quite different than merely listing an employer such as pornhub on your resume.
This is an interesting follow up to the morality discussion earlier in the week.[1]
It really does seem as though you'd wind up defending or turning a blind eye to a lot of shady practices for a paycheck working for companies like this.
"I often encountered videos that were uploaded again and again, no matter how many times I removed them. One day, a woman emailed me, calmly explained that her ex-boyfriend had uploaded a video of them having sex, and asked me to remove it. I deleted the clip. Later that week, it was re-uploaded. The woman wrote again, I removed it, and this continued for months; I must have pulled the same video down a dozen times. This was before I had ever heard the term “revenge porn.”
Requests like this were not uncommon. Once, a woman wrote to say there was a video of her on Tube8 that showed her being sexually assaulted after someone spiked her drink at a party. The video had tens of thousands of views, so I had to review it before making the call to remove it. In the clip, the woman is clearly high, laughing and head lolling, having sex on a bed surrounded by fully dressed people holding drinks and watching as colored lights flashed and music blared in the background. I took it down, but it was uploaded again repeatedly in the following months. Each time, the mortified woman flagged it, and each time, I removed it; both of us were aware that there was nothing we could do to stop the clip from resurfacing."
I have read the same thing from Facebook content moderators. They got so frustrated at having to watch and take down the same videos over and over.
This seems to be such a simple problem to solve: record a hash of the video file, don't allow uploading it again. That would probably get rid of most re-posting.
It could be bypassed by modifying the file slightly, but the hashing could also get more sophisticated. At some point, an ex-boyfriend is not likely to want to keep modifying a video to piss off his ex.
I've never used it, but apparently you can hash a image in such a way that small changes will result in the same hash. I think that is what Apple was doing with it's child abuse filter announced earlier this year.
You're probably thinking of a perceptual hash. [0] It's a relatively new field, academically speaking, so only a few players dominate, and there is a huge amount of research going into it.
There are other techniques for automatic flagging of similar files, like PhotoDNA's [1] enormous database - which I believe PornHub are already using.
It seems like a natural evolution of PhotoDNA to have this content (non consensual adult content) flagged programmatically, with a flow for folks to attest to content to be fingerprinted and scanned for.
I don't know if perpetual hashes will work with full videos though, and linking the hash to a singular frame seems very unreliable, especially considering how randomly lossy video compression is
Most video-based perceptual hashes work by taking a series of thumbnails at set intervals, say every 5% of the video, assembling a collage, and then making the perceptual hash against the collage.
As you note, it isn't particularly reliable, but it does actually tend to work fairly well against the loss of video compression. However, it doesn't tend to work well when the video is recut, with time added or removed. There is some research trying to combine approaches for finding important keyframes (ML-powered thumbnail searching) with perceptual hashing [0], which is looking promising, but it's still fairly unreliable.
I think the only real solution to this is going to be once we hold platforms accountable for the content they let people host.
I know the general HN crowd is very much against this, but it’s the standard we hold every other media platform and I don’t see why things should get a free pass just because they pretend to be platforms.
> I think the only real solution to this is going to be once we hold platforms accountable for the content they let people host.
I really don't see this as a solution, it's not going to stop the reposts laid out above.
I think reporting the infringing uploader to authorities etc would be more appropriate given revenge pr0n is a crime in most places. This would act as at least a deterant for some.
The hashing seems like it would filter out at least a few more, but there are a lot of patterns that could be picked up, audio track recognition, frame counts etc. There are better ways than manual intervention on every re-upload.
Would you agree to go to jail if a user posts something illegal on a forum you run?
No? Fair and reasonable. Neither do I. Now let's ask ourselves - would ANYONE reply yes? A bit unlikely? Therefore the result is absolutely no more forums/hosting of any kind.
I'm not talking pornhub here - even a cake recipe sharing site, a scientific forum, a community of model train enthusiasts, Stack Overflow, your MMO guild's site, even HN itself... nothing. No Discord, no Slack, obviously no social media (which I happen to dislike, but I'm quite firmly in the minority, I'm told), nothing at all.
> You should always have a right to sue if you are harmed.
Yes, but not to sue the hoster. If I offend you during a phone call, you should be able to sue ME, not the telco. Harmful content must be taken down once identified, and any technology reasonably helping its early identification should be put to use - but the hoster should be immune from lawsuits except if they do not act timely on legitimate takedown requests.
Please, stop suggesting you should have a right to sue the hoster - this can only end up in countless avenues of free speech disappearing, and dictatorial governments (and aspiring ones) abusing it to silence their victims or dissenters.
The bottom line for me is that people are being harmed and they have no legal means of recourse. Victims can probably sue the original uploader but what about other people who do not know it is harmful? And there is nothing to prevent users from uploading the same video forever. Is re-uploading this harmful content a crime?
I think the host should be held accountable if they keep allowing the same harmful content to be uploaded again and again. The first occurrence is their notice. Future occurrences is negligence.
> I think the host should be held accountable if they keep allowing the same harmful content to be uploaded again and again. The first occurrence is their notice. Future occurrences is negligence.
On this, I fully support your view. Something as trivial as a keeping list of hashes, to prevent repeat uploads of the exact same binary content, is incredibly easy to implement and I would fault any major hoster for not doing it. But people quickly learn to re-encode or subtly alter the content, so hashes, size, number of frames, etc don't match.
Perceptual hashes are a lot more expensive computationally, should be much harder to dodge, but even youtube, which supposedly has the best minds behind it, copes very poorly with the many popular evasion techniques (slight distortion, horizontal mirroring, superimposing a couple thin lines, showing the content in the left pane, while showing nonsense in the right pane, etc etc) so I'm not sure they're a viable option.
Can you really hold the hoster at fault when the technology doesn't exist, or is impractically slow and expensive? Would you rather have no hosters?
Facebook, Google, and other megacorps would be very happy when they're the only ones who can afford this - yet another barrier to entry to solidify their oligopoly.
> Would you agree to go to jail if a user posts something illegal on a forum you run?
> No? Fair and reasonable. Neither do I. Now let's ask ourselves - would ANYONE reply yes? A bit unlikely?
You seem to be asking rhetorical questions and then answering them on your own instead of letting the OP answer? So, I am not sure what the point is?
And if OP wishes to answer, and contradicts me, declaring themselves willing to go to jail for material not posted by them, but by a user of their forum, I will have to accept their perspective. I just stated mine.
This sort of occurred with pornhub. However users just migrated elsewhere. So the question is whether any heavy legislation is looming that might coerce all platforms to employ this type of screening, or if wackamole will pointlessly persist.
small data point I guess - but I've seen this issue in the world, just a few years ago. The ex-bf was using vpns to upload things, and sharing stuff on the darknet and taking screen shots of the things, and sms-texting the pics of the things via some remote voip service from a different country - or was paying someone else to do some of that.
He also got one of those spyware things added to her phone. That was interesting situation let me just say. Anyways..
Now I know there are some leo in some places that are sophisticated enough to possibly track down where a burner card was bought or something and maybe get a video feed and go from there.. but my experiences have shown that most leo offices have bigger fish to fry with less prep/cooking needed, and even if they could try, they won't spend the time.
You are right. If I distribute copyright infringing content on a USB stick and sell it, I can look forward to an FBI investigation, 5 years in prison, and a fine of $250,000. If I write an algorithm to do the exact same thing over the internet, and monetize it with ads and subscriptions, I'm in the clear--as long as I can afford a staff of wagies to play copyright whack-a-mole in a somewhat timely manner.
Investigation? Maybe. Punishment? Definitely not. As long as my financial benefit isn't "directly attributable," and my takedown procedure is "expeditious," DMCA has me covered!
I don't feel something to that extreme is necessary.
But I do believe something similarly controversial, which is: platforms which host user generated content should be required to enforce strong know-your-customer on UGC submission. That doesn't mean other users should be able to click on my HackerNews profile and see my real name, but at minimum the service provider should be required to have that information; to map an account back to a real person (though, I strongly believe people behave more positively when their name is known to everyone they're interacting with; its actually a good thing, overwhelmingly but not totally of course).
Argument against: right to anonymity. I don't feel this is a right any human has ever had in contexts of interpersonal communication. Moreover, I don't feel its a desirable right to uphold. HackerNews is a public square; anyone is welcome to join and talk. But public squares always had an element of accountability; I, being human and present in the physical plane of existence, had to travel there in person, accountable to anyone else there listening, authorities patrolling the square, etc. The only examples of anonymity in the non-digital are niche; masked protestors, maybe, but even that involves physical presence where improper conduct could be responded to by authorities unmasking the individual. Books published anonymously? Possibly, but...
Here's my strongest argument for it: there will always be platforms to express yourself truly anonymously. American law is written in absolutes, but is rarely enforced so; speeding is illegal, but I speed every day. Piracy is illegal, yet my NAS over there has twelve terabytes of totally legitimately obtained content. They've gone after the Pirate Bay more times than I can count, and its still there, at the same domain.
The point is not to build a totalitarian internet with one world government user registration; it's to correlate accountability with scale. Larger platforms have super-linear correlation with their ability to inflict real-world pain on their users (and those their users interact with nonconsensually). Larger platforms also tend to be built by corporations who have a difficult time escaping laws like this. If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, did it actually fall? If revenge porn is uploaded to a fly-by-night no-name site and no one sees it, was harm created? I'd argue Yes; but it's an improvement over our current situation of the tree falling and everyone hearing it.
KYC won't work on anything related to sex work, and most of the people uploading videos to these websites are semi-professionalized to sex work now. KYC doesn't work because sex work is largely illegal in most countries or states/provinces.
> The point is not to build a totalitarian internet with one world government user registration: it's to correlate accountability with scale.
You can already do this with PGP. You'd just need an operator/vendor who values confidentiality but also can handle the overhead of managing identities from a systematic viewpoint.
A nice consistency test would be to create a "platform" for production-ready, revenue-generating source code and data sets--using pornhub-style content moderation policies of course!--and see what happens.
This actually made me wince. It's the nerdiest thing to say, but this actually made me understand better. (And I say this as someone who does have porn of myself on the internet - without my consent - but I suppose I'm not the sort of person who really cares or gets embarrassed about that sort of stuff. I don't have that sense of pudeur. But this made me understand how it would feel to be that way.)
It turns out that it's quite difficult, because people modify the videos before re-uploading. Search YouTube for something like "Bob's Burgers full episode" and you will find plenty despite the uploaders not having the right to upload those videos to YouTube. And if you look in a week, those exact video files will be gone, but the same episodes will all be there again, with different edits and different uploaders. It's a hard problem to solve, that even the biggest tech company in the world is not entirely successful with.
But they are very successful taking down my dashcam video, because there was a song that played in a radio. And of course, appealing is automatic so it doesn't work either.
Yeah, you didn't edit it in any way to disguise the song. In these pirated videos on YouTube, any music sections are replaced with different music. It's quite weird.
> It could be bypassed by modifying the file slightly, but the hashing could also get more sophisticated.
Which is the same thing as saying "have a higher false positive rate," and then we have the problem.
This is exacerbated by the same kind of system having the same application for copyright infringement, which means there will be a large community of people dedicated to defeating it. Every time they find another workaround, you have to increase the false positive rate. It only ever goes up.
This is why everyone hates Content ID. The pirates know how to defeat it, meanwhile it regularly flags public domain works and recordings of randomly generated white noise to say nothing of fair use etc.
The solution to revenge porn isn't platforms, it's why isn't the ex getting called "defendant" by a judge for making the recording without permission?
Isn't a high false positivity rate favorable to revenge porn being uploaded? Shouldn't it be on the uploader to prove that a scene depicting sex is legally filmed rather than assuming that it is?
> The solution to revenge porn isn't platforms, it's why isn't the ex getting called "defendant" by a judge for making the recording without permission?
The court system's responsiveness to sex crimes could be greatly improved if we had the collective will to do so. But the problem is both in the courts specifically (because of who the judges are, and who the legislators who write our laws are), and also the wider world. Victim blaming and dismissal/minimizing of the harm inflicted are par for the course everywhere, in the justice system, in the general population, and in many subgroups. (You'll see them here on HN all the time.)
> But the problem is both in the courts specifically (because of who the judges are, and who the legislators who write our laws are), and also the wider world.
I don't think this is it. It's a matter of resources. Police and courts are already so overburdened that it's hard to get enforcement on anything that isn't practically life or death. Have you or a friend ever had your apartment burglarized or a vehicle stolen? The police will show up, usually after several hours, take a statement, after which you'll never hear from them again. In fact I don't know a single person in real life who was a victim of a burglary or auto theft where the perpetrator was caught, save for those cases like a car jacking where significant violence was involved.
When the police and district attorney in any given city in the U.S. are looking at double-digit unsolved homicides and God knows how many unsolved rape cases, I don't think they're going to put a high priority on the fact that there's a naughty movie out there that someone willing filmed themselves in and is now regretful about. This does not mean folks don't believe these things matter, because they do. It's that relative to what the justice system is already dealing with, these things are much less important.
When the NYPD have a guess at who did around 30% of murders, compared to the London police at 90% - and despite more funding than a small army - you have to wonder if the problem is purely resources. In fact, the vast majority of police are assigned to tasks like traffic enforcement, in part because that brings in more reliable revenue.
(I'm using "guess at" to refer to clearance rate because if the cops tell a prosecutor they think you murdered someone and the prosecutor says it was obviously someone else so they're not charging you that's generally counted as cleared.)
> In fact, the vast majority of police are assigned to tasks like traffic enforcement
NYPD is not known exactly known for a particularly large amount of traffic enforcement, to the point that I think you'd find most residents wish they did more of it.
The FBI's UCR Data Explorer used to give you an easy to use breakdown of crimes and clearance rate at the national/state/metro/city level, but unfortunately they redesigned it and now it is both harder to use and presents less data. I guess that is one way to hide data that isn't favorable? There seems to be more emphasis on the danger presented to law enforcement officers, but the #1 cause of death for officers by a large margin, per https://www.odmp.org/search/year?year=2021, has been COVID.
Maybe in the early 2000's, when stories about it kept making evening television, but nowadays, the rest of the developed world is roughly on par with it.
I agree that lack of resources is a contributing factor.
> I don't think they're going to put a high priority on the fact that there's a naughty movie out there that someone willing filmed themselves in and is now regretful about.
This characterization of revenge porn is exactly the victim blaming and minimization of harm inflicted that I was talking about. Consenting to film a sex act is not consenting to have it published to the wider world.
> This characterization of revenge porn is exactly the victim blaming and minimization of harm inflicted that I was talking about.
While it certainly isn't minimal in terms of the harm inflicted, it very much is minimal compared to the kinds of things that police departments and courts are already dealing with.
There's also a weird and very unproductive ethos that's evolved around the concept of victim blaming. Something my not be your fault, but that doesn't mean we're all free to be careless with zero chance of consequences. If I'm walking through a neighborhood at night that I know to be dangerous, it would be very foolish of me to be carrying several thousand dollars of cash on my person. That does not mean it's my fault if I get mugged and lose my money - it's purely the mugger's fault. However, my actions were stupid and I should have known better. Both those things can be true.
Many judges, police, and prosecutors agree with you that the victims "should have known better" and that their cases are not important in the grand scheme of things, which is why it is more difficult at every step of the way to get any sex crime through the court system.
Many in the media also agree with you. So do many in the wider society. (Including many in the ridiculously male-dominated HN.)
All of these factors contribute to why if a victim even goes to court, not only is the likelihood of actual consequences for the perpetrator absurdly low, but the experience of going down that path will be horrible. Instead of sympathy, they get an avalanche of contempt and shame dumped on them.
This is the thin end of the wedge fallacy. It's disproportionate to load of the possible extreme outcomes of a - true - idea on that idea. The idea is fine. Other things you list that are bad and not that idea are not fine.
We're talking about revenge porn here. Who uploaded a file is not he-said/she-said, there are going to be logs. And with regards to the question of whether there was consent, "I don't have it in writing but she said it was OK to upload our sex videos to pornhub" should be treated with extreme skepticism.
Piggybacking on this point, in a civil lawsuit you only need prove that a "preponderance of the evidence" (51% or more) supports your position. (The burden is greater for criminal cases, of course).
Meanwhile, if the video is of consensual sex, the main problem is really that society looks down on people having sex. If it had all the reputational impact of a cooking video, she’d be less likely to care (though she certainly can care about anything she wants).
>And with regards to the question of whether there was consent, "I don't have it in writing but she said it was OK to upload our sex videos to pornhub" should be treated with extreme skepticism
I don't think you're gonna find many cases for non-professionals where they had consent and it was given in writing.
I don't actually know, it's just a guess given observed human behaviour.
If that's the scenario, why doesn't the burden of proof fall on the person doing the upload of mortifying materials? Shouldn't the uploader protect themselves by getting permission in writing, similar to how victims are constantly badgered to take every action to protect themselves?
>why doesn't the burden of proof fall on the person doing the upload of mortifying materials?
Because the people of your country didn't make your politicians codify that into your law.
>Shouldn't the uploader protect themselves by getting permission in writing, similar to how victims are constantly badgered to take every action to protect themselves?
I dunno, do you get written permission before having sex so you'll be sure you won't get falsely accused of rape afterwards?
People will only follow what is culturally ingrained or enforced on them, and getting permission in writing isn't a thing right now.
As someone with a friend who was on a jury that was overseeing a sexual assault casae, this is categorically false. You can do this by the numbers too, which show that it is false.
There’s also the small issue of the First Amendment. Anyone that thinks these revenge porn laws are going to get more than 2 votes with this Supreme Court - that’s pretty 1A absolutist - isn’t thinking clearly.
There are multiple factors that are involved, but generally speaking, consent laws end at the production of the photo/video. Distribution falls under copyright. Unless the subject was surreptitiously recorded with the intent of distribution or blackmail or was trespassed upon for the recording to be made, there is no copyright or consent violation.
There has long been a debate in the judiciary about the extent to which there exists a privacy carveout in First Amendment rights against disclosure of private information. What this means is that depending on judicial philosophy, either any such law must be carefully tailored (which seems reasonable and desirable), or any such law is inherently unconstitutional (which seems to me to offend common sense):
> Under current First Amendment guidelines, any laws regulating revenge pornography would have to be narrowly drawn and made in pursuit of a “compelling state interest.”
Unfortunately, I agree with tiahura that there's little question how the current SCOTUS majority would rule — it's unlikely that they will find a "compelling state interest" in protecting the victims of revenge porn. The result will be that any victim without the resources and circumstances to bring and win a civil suit will be SOL.
Whether there is a debate or not is not what I was addressing. I'm simply pointing out that, under current Federal law, that's not the case.
But If you want my opinion as an individual, I wouldn't agree with a privacy carveout. Firstly, because "revenge porn" doesn't qualify under currently prescribed limitations (defamation, incitement to imminent lawless action, obscenity, "fighting words", etc.) and I'm skeptical of adding any more. Secondly, most "revenge porn" legislation is overbroad and does not require a mens rea to prosecute. They are strict liability laws in all but name. They amount to prior restraint and violate the requirements of content neutrality and strict scrutiny towards limiting speech. Thirdly, these laws can be used to silence journalists reporting on relevant events (such as the Katie Hill debacle).
"Revenge porn" laws do nothing but coerce individuals into becoming bearers of secrets. Even if they had no interest in doing so to begin with.
I would also like to add that not every person charged under "revenge porn" laws is the stereotypical ex-boyfriend uploading sex tapes to Pornhub. It's in situation like Bethany Austin's where rights are needed most. https://www.cato.org/blog/picture-worth-thousand-words-priso...
Before one can answer that, one would have to know what a proper legal definition of "revenge porn" is.
If you're referring to today's overbroad interpretation that has swept legislatures across the country, then I would say there should be no legal consequences at all. I'm firmly convinced those laws should be repealed and the cases involved reheard.
However, if you're referring to something much narrower and applicable with in the framework of the First Amendment as it is currently, then I could consider a limited and proportionate civil fine appropriate.
For example: a man records a video of his girlfriend performing a solo sex act. Before the recording, they discussed the matter via text and it was clear from the written record that the video was only for their own use and would never be shared with anyone else. Later, he uploads the video to PornHub, in direct contravention of her wishes and their previous understanding.
As another commenter examined, that sounds like a contract violation and would already incur a civil fine. In such a case one would have to prove at least three elements:
* that there was an oral or written contract
* that said contract was made by two informed and sober parties
* that one party uploaded the video to Pornhub against the wishes of the other and not anyone else.
Well, although civil suits are an utterly inadequate stratagem given the scope of the problem (which includes millions of victims who are not practially in a position to pursue and win a suit), at least it's something.
Criminalizing speech would not solve the issue. The example you cite involves two private parties engaged in a contractual dispute. There are millions of those every week. Barring the involvement of criminal behavior such as theft or extortion, a civil court is the only forum to adjudicate these matters.
The point of a court, criminal or civil, is not to invent legislation favorable to the most sympathetic party. The point is to interpret the law within the constraints it was written under.
As a practical matter, throwing the matter to civil court ensures a vast epidemic of revenge porn. There are a lot of people who don't think that's a big deal. But there are also a lot of people who do: 46 US states have have passed laws criminalizing revenge porn. There are lots of problems which are theoretically resolvable by civil courts but where the results would be too inefficient or incomplete and so criminal statutes have been passed. Criminal legislation to stem revenge porn is happening, even if you would rather it not.
"Revenge porn" laws have been on the books for about a decade or so and haven't slowed it down at all. In fact, all they've done is push it further underground. The only practical effect has been on the media of distribution, not if or to what degree "revenge porn" is distributed. That most legislatures across the country favor over-broad criminalization does not make your claim meaningfully representative of the people who are subject to these laws or of the courts who will ultimately adjudicate the issue. Every case is tried on its own merits, not ones prescribed by popularity or mere practicality.
> In fact, all they've done is push it further underground.
Deplatforming revenge porn is a win. Having less revenge porn on PornHub is a win.
You're welcome to disagree, just as advocates for Voat, Parler, etc. would — and as companies such as Manwin who would prefer to exploit the victims of revenge porn for profit would.
> Every case is tried on its own merits
The vast majority of civil cases don't even become cases let alone get tried on their merits. For a huge swath of the population who do not have the expertise, the resources, the time, or the life circumstances to obtain a lawyer and pursue a case, civil courts are not practically accessible. In contrast, while reporting to criminal authorities has all kinds of issues including that those authorities may be unsympathetic, the criminal system at least does not place such outrageous demands on those who report a crime.
Holding civil court aloft as a sufficient remedy for revenge porn may not be disingenuous if you actually think that a typical victim could sue, but it's wildly unreasonable.
> Deplatforming revenge porn is a win. Having less revenge porn on PornHub is win.
PornHub didn't deplatform "revenge porn". It nuked more than half of its vast library of legal content under outside pressure and questionable allegations of hosting what may or may not have been "revenge porn". Even when there has never been a law in Canada that has defined in any way, shape, or form what "revenge porn" is. Millions of videos became martyrs for a cause of dubious effectiveness and even more dubious reasoning. On a practical level, the indiscriminate purge of content did nothing but punish innocent users. If you think that substituting due process with such massive collateral damage is a "win", then one cannot conclude your opinion to be reasonable at all.
> The vast majority of civil cases don't even become cases let alone get tried on their merits
For vast majority of cases, civil and criminal, filings fail to pass muster for multiple reasons. Common ones are Failure to Make a Claim or Lack of Subject Matter Jurisdiction among other legal errors. Many claimants have a chance of refiling, however legal standards shouldn't be lowered on grounds of sympathy based upon hitherto unsubstantiated claims. That only encourages witch hunts and fallacious charges.
I'm not sure how you reached the conclusion the first amendment applied. The MA SC ruled, not that Casillas had a first amendment right to post "revenge porn", but that the law, as drafted, was too broad.
We have insanely well established laws and precedent regarding expectations of privacy, and laws regarding two party consent. Other states have successfully narrow laws (see CA).
The First Amendment thing is red herring nonsense, sadly boosted by one zealous and incompetent legislature.
Let's not claim that police are ONLY investigating rapes and murders all day. There's a lot of other time spent on stuff like pulling people over for expired tags or other more-minor-than-this shit.
This is very true. I lived in a fairly high-crime city for a while. The police never really investigated burglaries or car thefts because of a lack of resources. But man, leave your car parked on the street for a couple of minutes after the meter expired, and BAM! a cop would appear out of nowhere to write you a ticket.
> In fact I don't know a single person in real life who was a victim of a burglary or auto theft where the perpetrator was caught, save for those cases like a car jacking where significant violence was involved.
Me! My car was broken into and my audio deck was stolen. I had to report the crime to the police for insurance purposes. I didn't even give a proper description of my deck but the police called me back a few weeks later saying they found it inside a stolen car and mailed it back to me.
But maybe violence had occurred, .. maybe some shaddy shit went on with that stolen car that led them to investigate it.
"The court system's responsiveness to sex crimes could be greatly improved if we had the collective will to do so. But the problem is both in the courts specifically (because of who the judges are, and who the legislators who write our laws are), and also the wider world."
Responsiveness could be improved on just about any crimes if we had the will to do so. Just look at how many murders go unsolved (about 38% unsolved). Then look at the difference in response the system makes when it's some nobody whose murder didn't even make the news vs a cop/judge/[system participant] who was murdered.
Frankly, who the people are that comprise the system are doesn't matter. The system is not appropriately sized to handle current criminal and civil case volumes. In many cases you wait years for trials. A majority of people accept plea deals, including the innocent. There's very little justice in the system. Between 2 and 10 percent if the incarcerated are wrongly convicted. I assume this is even higher for plea deals that avoid jail time.
And on victim blaming, both "sides" do it. It just depends on which issue it is.
> Frankly, who the people are that comprise the system are doesn't matter.
The fact that the system cannot cope with the volume of cases means that the people who are in a position to prioritize which cases move forward is critical. That's the very nature of selective enforcement.
And that's largely irrelevant to the topic at hand (revenge porn) as emotional crimes will always be at a lower priority than violent and physical crimes.
Selective enforcement (law enforcement or prosecutorial discretion) is a larger issue that should be addressed. By unevenly enforcing the law, they are likely exhibiting biases, they will end up eroding what trust there is in the system, and it will allow bad laws to continue to stand (if everyone was being screwed over then they would demand the law change).
Basically, we should be fixing the system, not just shifting priorities based on some individual's preference.
Revenge porn often has devastating impact on the emotional health of its victims[1], with half reportedly considering suicide. But it is not strictly an "emotional crime", since publication loops in many people beyond the victim and the perpetrator — there are frequently reputational, professional, and economic consequences for the victim as others become aware of the published materials.
There is a huge variety of potential problems which require the attention of legislators, law enforcement, and the courts, and priorities change all the time. It's not as though the only recourse we have is to increase the system capacity.
"there are frequently reputational, professional, and economic consequences"
Which can and should be handled under civil cases.
You can extend many these problems, health effects, and the thoughts of suicide to many other issues too - victims of rape, assault, harassment, burglary, etc.
So we end up with violent and property crimes which also contain these emotional damages, vs just an emotional crime. You would need to prove that this emotional-only crime is somehow more important and these other crimes that contain those damages plus violent or property damages. It's not that there isn't harm done by revenge porn, but that the damage done by others is objectively worse because it contains additional elements.
"It's not as though the only recourse we have is to increase the system capacity."
Then please, do explain. Because the only logic I see is that you ignore other crimes to pursue these, or you increase capacity. And frankly, ignoring any crimes undermines the entire system due to unequal enforcement and ostricizing some victims but not others by not giving them the recourse due under law.
> Then please, do explain. Because the only logic I see is that you ignore other crimes to pursue these, or you increase capacity.
For example: There's a difference whether the Attorney General is Bill Barr or Merrick Garland — and it does indeed involve choice as to which cases to pursue.
The same holds true for many other offices in law enforcement and the courts. Who the district attorneys are, who the judges are, who sets budgets for police and who decides how those budgets are allocated and law enforcement resources are deployed... all of that matters.
Which isn't contrary to what you quoted - they are ignoring some laws in order to pursue others. Unequal enforcement is wrong and should be ended. This should be fixed through increasing capacity.
> Revenge porn often has devastating impact on the emotional health of its victims[1], with half reportedly considering suicide.
This obviously is a very important issue to you. While massive enforcement that punishes offenders and gives justice to victims would be the ideal, from a technical and legal perspective, that's very hard to do. Why not take the less morally righteous, but infinitely more practical, path of convincing folks to stop making porn movies of themselves? If our main goal here is to alleviate suffering, the discussion should center on how best to prevent this from happening, regardless of what the morally correct solution would be in an ideal world. While there is nothing morally wrong about making a sex video, it's a classic high-risk, low-reward activity. If everything goes perfectly, you have a video that you will likely never watch again. On the other hand, that video may find it's way online and ruin your life.
> Why not take the less morally righteous, but infinitely more practical, path of convincing folks to stop making porn movies of themselves?
A ton of reasons[1], including that such preaching is ineffective and so the only impact of doing it is to justify excoriating the victim later and excusing failing institutions.
Who said the video was made without permission? That is a rare case. The far far more common situation is where both parties consented to the video at the time, but later one side uploaded/shared it without permission.
Just look at all the pictures/videos from that iphone celeb hack a few years back. They all consented at the time. Many even took the pictures themselves (selfies, very common with teenagers too). The harm came far later when the material became public.
I don't know where you got "made without permission" from in the post you're responding to. This discussion appears to be about "uploaded without permission" in terms of the OP and the one you directly replied to.
And then even in that even-more-obviously-bad made-without-permission case, the argument here seems to be "we can't make tools to handle these [assumed rare] cases because false positives"?
Is the harm of an uploader having to follow up with a human about a false positive seen as WORSE than the harm of having these videos uploaded over and over and over...?
Not me — that was a quote from the comment I was responding to. :) I agree with the implication that the question should have been about publishing rather than creating.
So something the legal system doesnt take into account is people changing their minds.
Why do people changed their minds, because their chemistry changes, this is seen as aging or might even be a short term change like getting drunk, going through stress, even having people you dont want to know, knowing about it.
So it shows even the law isnt perfect.
I would say that the legal system is open to revokable consent, it just does not currently have the capability of having that record
Similar to how the legal system recognizes that verbal business contracts are valid (a form of consent), it just does not have a way of proving them essentially rendering them invalid.
So it boils down to exploiting peoples knowledge and when you look at the dire educational system in many parts of the world, all I can conclude from it, is its just good enough to make you a slave.
I think law and sofware are very similar in this. Basically read the parent post, except replace words of tech with law and court process ones.
As you increase the number and the precision of laws, you inevitably increase false positives.
First you will hit the resource issue. Secondly, you will see laws being weaponized.
If you can pay a lawyer 1k/hour, you can get anyone arrested. They will find a way. More laws you have, more ways they can use. See the case of Steven Donziger: https://twitter.com/SDonziger
I don't follow the argument that the false positive rate necessarily goes up if you notice some successful attempts to defeat your system and update your system to detect some attempts. Is this some statistical law you're referencing, or do you just mean that people tend to do naive updates to these detection systems to make them more sensitive (not necessarily "more sophisticated")?
YouTube has definitely been flagging more false positives over the years, as pirates have gotten smarter. When you broaden the algorithm to flag more bad content, you also end up flagging more good content unless you narrow it in some other way.
But the issue with YouTube etc. isn't flagging innocent people, it's flagging innocent people and then rejecting their appeals. It should be pretty easy for PornHub etc. to get videos "verified" by getting explicit consent from all parties filmed, so that they cannot be flagged and removed from the system.
In fact, I really don't see any reason against a law requiring all porn sites to require verification for all videos (w/ retroactive revoke on the hosts). Nobody's being censored, and if you agree to be in a porn video you kind of waive your right to anonymity.
> Nobody's being censored, and if you agree to be in a porn video you kind of waive your right to anonymity.
Then the host gets hacked and your government ID gets published as a creator of amateur pornography. The risk of that is de facto censorship by chilling effect.
Although I think that says "produces" rather than "publishes" or "distributes", so pornhub themselves aren't liable but the boyfriend "producing" the film has committed an offence. Not that there's any will to enforce this.
Closer to home, Scotland explicitly banned revenge porn, and has actually achieved some prosecutions.
There is a natural law in pattern recognition governing the split between sensitivity and specificity in scenarios with uncertainty, though I don't know if it has a special name. Catching more edge cases in a poorly-defined group requires allowing the inclusion of more things that look a lot like edge cases, but cases on the edge of a group are by definition similar to things outside of the group. The more you want to eliminate false negatives the more likely you are to produce false positives.
In binary classification, this is basically a precision/recall trade-off. More precision (ie, fewer false positives) necessarily means less recall (ie, more false negatives). Classifier statistics like AUC basically tell you how good the classifier is in terms of how bad the trade-off is.
Adversarial situations - any time humans are trying to trick your classifier, in other words - will always make the trade-off worse.
More to the point, I don't buy that a higher false positive rate isn't worth it in this application. From a social perspective, the inconvenience of the false positive rate seems so small as to be impossible to measure on a scale weighed against the harms of uploading revenge porn.
I know the companies are optimizing for other metrics where the inconvenience might be measurable but I think that's a failure of regulation then. The platform could be made liable like we do with copyright material, for example, and then like YouTube they would be incentived to accept a higher false positive rate and automatically filter repeat offenders out.
They're out there for sure. The problem is, entities that own feature length films usually have more pull (money and lawyers) to get it removed. Furthermore, other easier avenues exist for sharing movies.
What about this: Take their IP. Make sure that, to them, it displays as uploaded. They can watch it. It registers natural-looking traffic. It does whatever else is necessary to satisfy them that it's on the internet (besides Google SEO; I'm not sure if that's expected). Otherwise, it doesn't exist and doesn't show for anyone else. In other words: blackhole it, shadow-block it. I feel like that has a chance of working.
We had a problem with anonymous trolls on a message board I managed decades ago. We created a simple profiling system and combined it with shadow-banning. It was highly effective. Surely in the decades since and with the profitability of profiling, this could be done here too.
In the case of trying to block a specific video, it could be even more effective, because as soon as that video gets uploaded, you can assume the 'new' person is the same person as the existing profile—it doesn't really matter if you're wrong because even if it's two people, you're trying to stop them both.
I'm not sure how this would in any way inhibit journalists or activists except that, they too, would not be able to upload the disallowed video to your site.
I don't think there are perfect answers here. Someone might use the same IP address of a bad actor (e.g. they share a VPN provider). One person may use the provider to watch Netflix, another person may use it to hide their identity to do bad things.
From my limited experience in this space (I moderate a tiny social app that has problems with bad actors), IP address blocking had high false positives and low false negatives.
> The solution to revenge porn isn't platforms, it's why isn't the ex getting called "defendant" by a judge for making the recording without permission?
I imagine the repeated uploads aren't by the ex, after the first one
> The solution to revenge porn isn't platforms, it's why isn't the ex getting called "defendant" by a judge for making the recording without permission?
I would be happy to see more of that (expanding 'recording' with 'posting'), but the law itself has certain protections against false positives, that we need to be careful about.
Yeah, I pity the poor soul who has to ID content for takedown and goes into it thinking "This seems to be such a simple problem to solve: record a hash of the video file".
There are regularly stories in the news about judges giving slaps on the wrist for full on sexual assault. In comparison to that, what would a punishment for this kind of thing be? Absolutely nothing.
I would do something like this, should work for any type of image.
Original -> Upscale and Downscale.
Alter the frame sizes ie 4:3, 1080p, 4K
Encode all video formats in all video codex's.
Make stills for timelines which are likely to be interesting.
Use a variety of background filters like those seen in Zoom calls to obscure backgrounds and then use all the stills with and without backgrounds, and also alter the colouring/whitebalance.
Hash Stills and you will have loads of stills!
Train an AI to look for the stills allowing for colour changes like a slight filter to alter the colouring, or maybe do it in black and white.
When still is suspected, hash the AI found stills against known stills
Obviously different websites allow uploading of different formats/codexes which is a filter in itself and frame sizes
Because of editing, an AI needs to scan the film, when a still is found, make a copy and hash it to see if there is a match.
At least thats how I would do it.
I think you can spend too much time looking at other stuff AI & training data and sometimes its the background objects which are more important, like clothing, jewellery & furniture, but these new background filters seen on Zoom calls also makes it harder for the AI stills recognition.
Expensive in terms of cpu processing, but probably a better way to spend money than on human wages going through stuff/moderating.
What's the problem exactly with a higher false positive rate there?
We're not talking about a crime enforcement unit here. We're talking about access to a platform, which doesn't owe it to anyone to provide it in the first place.
You can take down 90% of content on Pornhub without any loss to anyone; adult models would gladly take a 1% false positive rate on new uploads vs. content getting rampantly stolen and shared without consent.
The solution to revenge porn might not be platforms, but platforms can easily make this problem an order of magnitude smaller.
That's to say, platforms can be the most significant part of the solution.
There are inaccurate hash algorithms like ahash for images, isn't there something like this or even ML to detect this? Why just delete instead if blacklist?
How is this not the same as spam, and with the same solution: require some cost to be borne by the uploader. The video hosting site can require a credit card and a small fee, like $1, and this problem will go away.
But Pornhub won't do that because it will cut profits.
Which is the real problem here. Pornhub is making $$$ off the victim of sexual assault. They will do just enough to pretend that they are fighting the problem, but not do the one thing that will actually end it.
One piece of context that's important is Pornhub only submitted to those changes due to mass public demands for credit card processors to cut them off, largely due to reporting on this exact problem by Nicholas Kristoff[1] in the opinion section of the New York Times.
Idiot that I am, just clicked a Pornhub link on my work computer because it was "non-porn"... I guess today I learned Pornhub is not blocked on my work computer.
Another commenter already described how difficult it is to upload on pornhub now; but I think there is an incredible myopia when it comes to Pornhub. For some reason people believe if you shutdown pornhub then the problem goes away.
The profit aspect is misguided as well - there are probably millions of porn sites out there and on 4chan there are probably hundreds of illegally, coerced images trading around for free by obsessed weirdos who will dox women just to feel closer to them. Pornhub likely makes most of it's money from the top 10-20 pornstars; the bottom 99% just represents a headache which is why they probably found it easy to ban non-verified porn.
I'm sympathetic to sex workers who should be allowed to make money from their work; but the very distribution of content over the internet exacerbates this problem whenever there is porn involved.
certainly requiring a cc and charging money would get people to upload less, but 'the problem' would not go away. Not at $1 and not at $10.
I've run into some of these revenge post people - and they would pay $10, and they'd do it every week.
Heck some service would crop up to pay someone in country X to upload to 10 different sites every week for $20 with bulletproof hosting and darknet distribution for $50 - and most of these revenge folks would pay that.
I get your sentiment, and I'm pretty sure phub has already cut into uploading in more ways than that already, and they have certainly lost money and traffic with the changes they voluntarily pushed out a while back.
They deleted way more than the non-knowledge uploads, and making it harder for sharing is giving the other tubes an advantage and growth (at their expense) the past so many moons.
in my small data point experience in real life - the offender was using vpns and burner phones to post and to harass with different numbers in one case here locally.
I've also unfortunately discovered that there are services that handle this kind of thing; using a stolen ID from a different country to do these things for you - trust me when I tell you that those who really want to bypass all the auths / payments / hashes - will find ways to do it again and again.
I've also tracked down some of these folks and was very plainly told that "the army of my country was not going to invade their country to harass them" for harassing someone here - and they were right.
After spending months putting together verifiable evidence to hand over to agencies in neighboring countries and countries abroad, zero people were arrested.
I did get one person's VPN account disabled once though!
They did return the next day using a new vpn service. So yeah, there are jerks out there that will spend $10 a week, or $50 a week to harass people, I've witnessed it many times.
Anyone you would catch doing something like this (using their own credit card and phone/computer) would already be caught with basic ip logs - no need to set all the extra hoops that make it harder for the average user, because those hoops are not stopping those who are extra shady in the first place. imho, ysmv.
I've always been interested in the technical problems in the adult entertainment industry, so I tend to read all the porn-related submissions here.
Along with the quoted passage in the parent post, I think adding a couple more for TLDR will do justice in relaying much of the author's intended conveyance of sentiment/sorrows (note the original headline's mention of `moderation problems`):
```
When you work at a company that is doing well, that showers employees with generous pay and a sense of belonging, you become saturated with the sense that what you’re doing is right. Even as performers shouted from rooftops that we were destroying their livelihoods and people begged us to remove videos that showed them in their most intimate moments without consent, those negatively impacted [..] were shrugged off as an afterthought, unfortunate collateral damage to a great undertaking.
[..]
I’d like to think that if I hadn’t been “Nate-Tube8” for those two years, the women I tried to help perhaps wouldn’t have had an ally on the other side of the screen to help them regain their dignity. But maybe I’m just trying to convince myself I was the good guy, despite the fact I was tweeting to promote the company in between video takedowns.
And more importantly: it doesn't matter what Pornhub.com does. If they develop ethical scruples, another site will simply spring up to serve that supply and demand. Like a gas, the market will expand to fill the legal space available to it.
There is some truth to this idea, but it doesn't trump all other dynamics, always. These markets can have their structure changed by evolving cultural effects / morals / etc.
> At some point, an ex-boyfriend is not likely to want to keep modifying a video to piss off his ex
It is not only the ex who keeps uploading again and again. Once videos get into the wild, you have all sorts of people/bots who do this, some just for the kinks, some for money / promoting the next pill/crypto whatever spam, some "fans" genuinely wouldn't know that the video was made without consent and that she is really high, There is so much "situational" or "incest" porn out there many cannot differentiate acting high and being actually high.
Also lines get blurry, how much of any actual porn (amateur or professional) is with real informed consent, do actors really know what they are getting into? . How many young OF streamers are doing it for small money and it will haunt them later in life ?
A ton of legal porn is exploitative too, we don't have solutions for any of this.
>> A ton of legal porn is exploitative too, we don't have solutions for any of this.
Money. That is why they get paid. We can debate how much and tell stories about porn stars who are stuck in bad contracts, but the systemic answer to exploitation is the exchange of money.
A slaver feeding their slaves is an answer to slavery.
Just because you get something in exchange, doesn't mean that there's no power imbalance, the exploitation doesn't exist, and the people with less power don't actually have few alternatives to survive.
If you're arguing for: "they should be paid more!" Because currently the pay is unfair and doesn't take into account potential long term damage, that's fair... But it's not a realistic solution (how do you unionize gig workers? Because at the end of the day, people on OF have more in common with the gig economy than with porn actors of yore)
No. With money comes contracts and consent. The contract (offer and acceptance) creates evidence of intent. Then after things go horribly wrong and courts get involved, money is used to provide compenation for wrongs done. The system exists. It is an imperfect answer but it does function.
Imagine you are compelled by a few seasoned guys to enter a contract when you are at the youngest age that is allowed by law (which is how they like it). You are half intimidated, half curious and you don’t have a lawyer you can ask for legal advice on this matter.
The power asymmetry, physiological and emotional factors at play, the irreversibility of the action (the guys working you know that once they have a tape, you are quite easily manipulated), their gain and your potential damage exceed those in any legal industry.
Yeah, you are paid a hundred bucks and “money makes it legal”.
Here's the thing though, we do set a line after which you're legally given as much rope as you want to hang yourself with. I don't see how you fix the adverse outcomes without causing even worse failure in other areas.
Let’s be stark: to equate military to this is to treat military service as exploitation for someone’s financial gain and pleasure. It could be a valid position, but not necessarily the one I would consider mainstream.
Addendum: ah, and vastly different implications. Service in most countries is not associated with a stigma, is much more transparent, etc.
How many people getting a mortgage really know what they're getting into? A credit card? The people buying GME stock... do they really understand what's going on?
Are you implying exploitative consent is okay in porn because it normalized in other places?
I don't really wish to argue your examples that all lead to financial ruin( arguably easier to reverse in life) is definitely worse than the social stigma and mental health damage the way revenge or commercial porn can have , there better examples you could have used[1]. However it doesn't matter if something else is just as worse or exists and also exploitative[2], that has no bearing on how porn should be better handled.
[1] Here is a better example for your whataboutism argument - informed medical consent , most patients are neither in a mental state to give informed consent nor they have subject matter expertise to do so. Decisions can be fatal or have irreversible impact on your life
[2] Non ETF investing definitely needs to be gated with some certification/ educational course on risks especially for derivatives trading, it should also cover crypto , we already have some gating for accredited investors, but this is not relevant for this discussion.
> Are you implying exploitative consent is okay in porn because it normalized in other places?
>...
> Here is a better example for your whataboutism argument ...
Not OP, but I think you might be over-analyzing their comment. I am interpreting their short comment as opening a thread of conversation on the notion of what "real informed consent" means, and adding other circumstances where an outsider would also reasonably expect informed consent, yet people find themselves in undesired circumstances. That's it, as that's all that's written.
Perfect understanding can not be achieved yes also defining what is ideal consent is hard and arbitrary, that shouldn't mean we abandon any hope of improving current state of consent which is not effective.
To improve informed consent say for trading[1], a basic training course required by SEC on risks and options would go long way for a lot of people to understand how derivatives work before allowing them to open account in Robinhood style apps, this could be even be extended for crypto and NFTs. It could be limits based rather than hard blocks. Schools could include such material to educate kids.
Speculating and losing money in today's gamified simple UX apps like Robinhood is attracting a ton of people who cannot afford to loose their money and don't really understand the basics of the market, it wasn't a problem when you had to go through a broker who would advise you a bit or use high end Bloomberg terminal . The next market correction/crash is going to be very painful for many people who cannot afford to loose that money.
[1] I don't know what would work for Porn, trading is lot easier to solve.
> getting a mortgage really know what they're getting into
Also most people, I'd say. It may not be the best choice for them if they had a magic omniscient oracle, but most people can understand the concept that they need to pay $XYZW/month for the next 25 years if they don't want to lose most of the value of their house.
Now, if your example was of 18-year olds with zero life experience suckered in by shitty colleges that promise the world, and deliver nothing but misery...
Yes, if you can hash then that would help. People then turn to putting the video in a frame and adding some music in order to repost it. I suspect the hash though gets rid of most reposts
Another hard problem is user based tags. Many users are basically advertising. They post a clip of something and then say "for the full thing, go here". They then tag their video with as many tags as possible to spam the site.
Now a user comes by and searches for their favorite tag and the tag is filled with stuff that has nothing to do with that tag.
I've seen this issue on Soundcloud, Pornhub, XVideos, and others.
As it affects my favorite tags I often which I had the guts to make a pornhub clone, somehow make it popular, and basically ban/demote or in some way discourage anyone who tags things wrong.
I also think I wish pornhub had content id so that creators could somehow get compensated regardless of who posts their content. Something I see a lot is people posting collections of other people's content and asking for you to support them on patreon to post more collections of other people's content ?!??!?! People suck! >:(
It seems like facial recognition would actually be useful in this case. Rather than ban a hash of the video itself, ban a specific face appearing in any content on the platform.
Facial recognition would be really tough to get right, but maybe the opposite would work. All faces are blurred unless uploaded by a known performer or verified account.
I don't think you need facial recognition at all. You need a robust video hash. Need a way to map videos to a perceptual space that's independent of the resolution, the exact length and the colors. Seems very doable to me. IMO the answer here is probably to use deep learning, which would likely turn out to be very effective.
I would think that either FB-level facial recognition, or Disney-level copyright/ContentID frame recognition would be helpful for all this. I don't suppose they're thinking of open-sourcing it.
There are many ways to properly implement content-id, for example using fingerprinting (like Shazam does). These methods are able to detect matches even with a lot of noise and changes...
I hope they implement something like this, to make detecting duplicates and blocking "revenge porn" much easier and to have regression against re-uploading.
Don;t take legal advice from someone online who cannot even spell correctly. I am not your lawyer. I will never be your lawyer.
Back when I practiced I had several clients come to me with the same story: My daughter is at home crying because she got drunk at a party and now there is a topless photo of her on facebook/youtube/email etc. We had the image taken down but it keeps popping back up in reverse-image searches. To these clients I offer two scenarios:
(1) Pamela Anderson's approach: Sue the internet. Bring lawsuits against every platform where you find the picture. Everyone in town will hear about this. It might make the news. You daughter will probably change schools. She will likely have to testify or record a statement describing the impact the sharing of these images have had on her. She will need to talk to the police at least once, perhaps many times.
For the next several years her life will be interrupted by this issue again and again. It will define her life as a teenager.
(2) The "what's best for my daughter" approach: Only go after those incidents where her name is attached. I, your lawyer, send a note to the platform and they remove the image. If necessary we get the boy who took the picture to sign over copyright and I get the image added to the platform content management engines. It might be uploaded again it but won't be associated with your daughter's name. Your daughter never has to involve herself with this again. Unless she is trolling deep in amateur porn forums she will likely never see the image. It will be lost into the constant churn of a thousand other images uploaded every day. Net result: It will not define her life.
(Yes, this might well be an illegal image of an underage person, but enforcing that law isn't the responsibility of the victim or her family. Once it is reported to authorities the victim is under no obligation to hunt down copies all over the internet.)
Indeed, but you have to see it. You are not obligated to go looking for it. If you don't look for it you don't see it. Even if you do find it again, no prosecutor would ever dare think of bringing charges on a victim for not reporting her discovery of such images days/weeks/years down the line.
But things can go very very wrong whenever kids talk to cops. The story they tell their parents might not be totally accurate. (ie it wasn't some boy. She in fact uploading the image herself.) Tell a false story to a cop and horrible situations can happen very quickly. Scenario B above avoids this by limiting police involvement.
IANAL, but from the US stand point there are a few specific occupations that make a person a "mandatory reporter"[1] but for the general public I am not aware of any statute that requires a normal citizen to report any crime at all. Edit: Except 3 states that appear to have laws for all persons....
If you are a police officer, a medical professional, social worker, etc then you likely are a mandatory reporter[1] but other then those occupations... In some states IT workers are included in that as well but not all.
Make it the boy’s responsibility to hunt down the picture. He, after all, is the one who produced non-consensual underage material and knowingly distributed it. He can make sure stuff is taken care of or get registered as a sex offender and have to go to court where he might win, or not.
Ah, the answer is to "make" the other child remove the images from the internet. I suppose if you "make" him do it hard enough it somehow becomes less impossible?
I get that it's his responsibility because he caused the problem, but if I run over your dog because I wasn't driving carefully, it won't give me the ability to bring your dog back to life. Spilt milk is spilt. Call a professional.
> the answer is to "make" the other child remove the images from the internet
The answer is to get the content removed from the internet. Who does it and how is an implementation detail. If he can't or won't then it's up to the judge to determine if he should be tried as a child & the justice system to make sure he's properly labelled for potential neighbors and employers protection. Producing and distributing that kind of revolting content isn't a crime most people look kindly upon.
> but if I run over your dog because I wasn't driving carefully, it won't give me the ability to bring your dog back to life.
That's, again, implementation details. If you can't bring it back to life then yeah, we'll go for reckless driving, damages and try to get your license revoked.
It's 2022 and people still don't know that on the internet nobody knows you're a dog. These disclaimers always make me chuckle. I bet the amount of people successfully sued for giving advice on the internet is zero.
Hell, I bet the number of people who have even had a lawsuit successfully filed for advice on the Internet is very very small. A potential plaintiff would need contact info, for starters...
Possibly. It's pretty ridiculous what some courts/prosecutors consider "practicing law without a license".
For example, I was told by a judge that just if I help my wife fill out an appeal form, or if a real estate agent explains about a sale contract, that could be considered practicing law without a license. Frankly, that judge seemed like he was either an idiot or corrupt/biased based on some other stuff he did too.
He replaced a few components such as the CPU but we have seen Linux booted on a hard disc. Not from a hard disc but on the controller itself on the hard disc.
ESP8266 and ESP32 and the like are pretty tiny and have wifi and BT and a shedload of GPIOs and whatnot available. At £2 or less retail a pop! A "monster" system involving a Pi Zero costs about £5 retail.
My toaster is clockwork based or me and a long fork and a open hearth. My fridge/freezer on the other hand has a wifi link. It is on the SEWER VLAN which is for those devices that scare me somewhat and has a rather limited view of the world.
If you are a lawyer, you need to say "this is not legal advice".
IIRC, in the US, if you're a lawyer and someone "reasonably" believes you're giving them actual legal council, regardless of your intent, I'm pretty sure you're culpable (for lack of a better word).
Far as I can tell, it's not so much that you're actually culpable. But someone can sue you for it, and it won't be immediately thrown out, which means you may need an expensive and time-consuming defense. You'd probably win in the end, but what a pain in the ass.
My approach is actually (1) but with a time delay. If you react immediately it gets re-uploaded and streisan'd. If you wait a few weeks or months you can do a precision strike and its gone from people's minds and their cache's.
We don't allow driving without a seatbelt in most states. We have rules saying you must be 21 with ID to purchase alcohol. We ban minors from purchasing firearms. Giving drugs to a child will see you behind bars for a very long time.
But heaven forbid that we regulate porn even though it has been scientifically shown to have effects similar to meth in addictiveness in the brain, has caused erectile dysfunction diagnosis to explode, and has caused societal damage from changing the brain to view women as sex objects. It's not extremist to say, considering the above, it needs to be controlled and potentially even banned.
Also, the article is the story of a former porn moderator. Of course he would classify anyone opposed to the industry he worked in and anyone who wants to hold him accountable as extremist.
Uh, well, hang on - it already is regulated exactly the same way alcohol and firearms are regulated. The law says you have to be an adult to consume it.
So, think about the children? I think a much more constructive dialog about your legitimate concerns is useful, but not the over the too “I know best” presentation:)
> It is illegal for an individual to knowingly use interactive computer services to display obscenity in a manner that makes it available to a minor less than 18 years of age (See 47 U.S.C. § 223(d) –Communications Decency Act of 1996, as amended by the PROTECT Act of 2003).
> The standard of what is harmful to minors may differ from the standard applied to adults. Harmful materials for minors include any communication consisting of nudity, sex or excretion that (i) appeals to the prurient interest of minors, (ii) is patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community with respect to what is suitable material for minors, (iii) and lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.
This might not be a popular opinion for some, but can't we move as a society beyond the point where having a naked picture online would not be upsetting or harmful for the person involved? I can't help but think that if we were all to put a couple of nudes online, the whole "Oh! Shame!" moral outrage would be pretty much over.
On the one hand, there's a person's privacy and individual rights, but on the other hand is also society's response which makes a bigger deal out of erotic and sexual material than it perhaps needs to be. It might be worthwhile to also fight this from the other side and try to re-educate society not to point the finger at people for having sex or appearing in nude imagery. After all, the concern seems mostly about the consequences to the lives of the people involved rather nudity itself, so why not also try to turn the whole concept into something more positive on a societal level and fight the victimisation and shame that way?
Because sex is intimate and personal. Today getting involuntarily filmed kissing is more harmful than involuntarily filmed playing golf, and kissing is socially acceptable in most western cultures.
Of course sex is normal, but thousands of years of societal development in vastly different circumstances around the world tend overwhelmingly to agree that it is a private matter, not a spectacle for public entertainment.
Perhaps we shouldn't be in quite such a hurry to discard centuries of tradition just because "gee, the internet makes it easy and anonymous..."
I disagree. I'm not trying to be inflammatory but it seems like your statement is similar to saying "rape is so harmful specifically because of our society's attitudes to sex". Yeah, social stigma can make the consequences of rape a lot worse, but that's not at all the only reason why rape is bad. I think the same logic applies to involuntary porn.
Among other things, involuntary porn is a massive violation of privacy. Maybe some individuals don't feel that this area needs to be private, but what matters is whether the _victim_ wants it to be private. If your solution is "the victims shouldn't make such a big deal of this", that's wishful thinking not a solution.
God, you're so, so close. I seriously urge you to go talk to somebody who's had revenge porn distributed of them, or go read an account of the personal violation they felt.
I cannot help you any more than that, it's your own journey to discover empathy and theory of mind.
I don't disagree, but a problem can be solved – or at least improved upon, because I'm not sure this can be solved – on multiple fronts. Leaving the question of whether containment is possible on the internet aside for a minute, we could also work on improving society where the stigma connected to nudity and pornography – voluntary, non-voluntary and anything in between – is not such a burden it destroys people's lives.
To throw back your own example, topics such as rape, drug abuse and depression can be made discussable openly in society instead of keeping them hidden, shameful and isolating. It might also be good for young people to understand that what they do in private in the heat of the moment, might later on come back to haunt them, exactly by keeping the conversation going.
It seems to me people make a big deal out of it exactly because of society's overwhelmingly negative response, which is also something we could work on. In the case of rape, there is something going wrong between two people, but in the case of sexual imagery leaking, there's the added element of a voyeuristic society imposing moral judgement, the negative impact of public opinion, which is a problem beyond whatever happens between two people in their private lives.
In a few generations when some stigmas go away and we are slightly closer to this mythical society… distributing personal moments of others, especially in compromising positions will still be wrong.
So now, and in the future, we need to punish the victimizers.
I wondered if Fabian Thylmann would be mentioned; it always gives me a chuckle to see his name as he's the brother of one of the co-founders of the company I work for.
>When they caught a competitor ripping off content from Pornhub to create a knockoff website, engineers placed a link to the offending website in a few pixels of the Pornhub homepage, where millions of people clicked daily. The resulting tsunami of web traffic swamped the pirate site and knocked it offline in minutes — the kiss of death.
Content copying competitor aside, is this type of response even legal? It feels like another form of DDOS.
Thieves don’t go to police for stolen goods. This is all shady. No way in hell, are they going to take legal action. Let alone when they are getting legitimate traffic, instead of automated bots.
> One day, I received inquiries from journalists looking to find out more about Manwin. Believing it was a major threat, I sent off a panicked email to the owner of the company and some vice presidents. My bosses were stunned, and not in a good way. Corey, the guy who had originally hired me, marched me into an office, and I nearly got canned. They had mercy on me. I think they could tell that I was trying to protect the company in my own overzealous, entirely inappropriate way. It was true — I felt like part of a team and wanted to do my best for them. But I had blown it.
> After that, with my reputation tarnished, my fortunes at the company started to dwindle.
That seems wrong to me, but I'm interested in other people's responses. It doesn't seem like 'blowing it' at all. How many companies have problems with employees that are too motivated?
First, afaik, CEOs generally work to have open lines of communication with their lower level employees - the problem is people not paying attention, not communicating important information, or it getting filtered by the interests of layers in between. Second, Manwin can't be that big a company. It's not like emailing the CEO of Microsoft, who has >100,000 people working for them (and again, wouldn't Satya Nadella just say - 'hey, thanks for keeping a sharp eye out and for the heads up. It may look bad, but we've seen it many times before. I'm going to forward this to corporate communications, who can handle these things astutely.')
Maybe other companies are just different than the ones I've seen.
I read the piece, it’s very interesting and personal. But I don’t understand this: how do the porn tubes make money? Could it be advertisement? Or selling user profiles? I can’t understand it. Does anyone know more?
Just like Google Ads, it's a huge network of affiliates trying to bring the viewers into paid services like cams, paid porn or straight out prostitution services, these are often linked to violent organized crime forcing women into prostitution.
Lots of chatter about the tech side, my experience is quite vintage that came back to be relevant over two decades later. In the mid 1990's, while a grad student, I was approached by a fellow student to help build 'secure image library' (the details never discussed because I didn't sign his NDA) server that could be pretty locked down. At the time, that was quite out of my league and I passed. I also passed on the project and didn't try to use it to learn more, because the guy gave my now ex-wife the creeps.
Fast forward 25+ years, his name popped up in the news as being arrested for some rather fucked up child-sex exploitation.
It did make me think how I could have contributed to potentially aiding this guy in his journey down the exploitation road so I'm quite content that I passed. I'd hate to know anything I built was used in that realm.
I have seen a lot of comments about people re-uploading videos with some changes to fool hash-detection software. Can AI help with this? AI is getting very very good at identifying important parts of videos.
I am willing to bet that AI can detect similar videos even if 1 of the videos has a black box or is inverted or has some changes.
I always presumed that all video-sharing sites (including adult video sites) already had implemented such mechanisms. This would be really great for society in general, as this would prevent revenge-porn.
Ten to fifteen years ago, computer vision was already fingerprinting video with landmark detection (SIFT, region segmentation, Canny edges, biomimetic color correction---or simply converting to grayscale). It helps that you'll almost always have a unique audio stream that closely tracks the video stream which can also be fingerprinted and time-scaled and/or time-shifted.
It's likely they're already doing machine learning. Why wouldn't they? With what essentially boils down to content recommendation as a way to increase ad viewership targeting an audience likely to have short site visits, wildly different tastes and habits, and a constant influx of new users and new videos, they probably already fingerprint videos (and users) as a method to immediately link new users and new videos to an existing pattern maximizing ad revenue.
Another questionable method which might cut down on abusive/unlawful behavior would be shadowbanning offending uploaders once you have a reliable fingerprinting method. Upload a video that's close but not exactly matching a fingerprinted video? Thanks, here's the URL. Privately, we're not adding it to the index for anyone outside your subnet until someone can manually verify the two streams are unique. It's probably even possible to spoof the view count and other properties based on similarly fingerprinted clips, so only the people who make a living from aggressively reuploading are aware of the shadowban.
As a bonus, if such a fingerprinting/shadowbanning combo cuts down massively on casual/bot/opportunistic reuploading, the people who continue to modify the video _and_ audio stream enough to bypass the filter could be (just a theory) more likely to be malicious/abusive, and these are the people you definitely want to exclude from your community
I used to work there and I can confirm the identities and names mentioned in the article. The mysterious investor is Bernard, originally owner of YouPorn.
I used to work in multiple of these websites, and helped on preparing the plan to hand over Spankwire and other "small tubes" to another company to drive them.
431 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 349 ms ] threadFor example, a scheduled interview was abruptly cancelled the night before. I pursued the matter through a friend who had a senior role at the hiring company and it was determined that the (middle-aged female) in-house recruiter had been deeply offended when she followed the link on my resume and had cancelled everything. Eventually, I received a sincere apology from the CEO.
There is a real stigma, and it will affect you. Beware.
Pro tip: Your resume is your greatest hits album, not an encyclopedia entry on you.
We must calibrate our messaging to have the intended effect. If what you’re putting out isn’t being received as intended, modulate the signal.
If I had worked in NSFW and an application would get rejected because of that I would sincerely thank my former job for saving me a job in an environment I would not want to touch with a ten foot pole.
If people in (even small power) like HR drones abuse their position as to flag a resume because of such a former experience I doubt there is a company culture of honesty, openness, respect or value of the individual.
To me personally a great filter to have.
If one is desperately in need of a job. OK - remove it and try to jump ship once secured in the current place.
I call this the traffic warden principle: Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. A really tiny amount of power, in one specific area of your life, corrupts even more.
(Also, FWIW, it's "people in (even small) power", not "people in (even small power)".)
Want to get into FAANG? Corporate HR is dominated by women, better clean up your act.
Wanna get hired by the hot bro-startup to be single-digit-employee? No purge necessary - if anything, those blue entries will score more points.
Seems like a way to shock the people actually putting real effort into vetting a candidates resume/credentials.
Maybe a warning that it’s nsfw would cause less extreme reactions.
I might unfairly be making assumptions about how technically feasible the change would be. If it would be difficult to do so, I'd be interested to learn how/why, eg was it a system design choice or is it inherent to the tech itself...
I'm slightly conflicted here. I don't like pretending that facets of life don't exist, especially when they don't directly harm the involved, but I am also mindful of people's individual sensitivities.
To tie it back to something more general, it seems like a lot of software engineering work is predicated on the cis male perspective. It's hard for me to imagine the psychological impact that sexual harassment might have on a woman, partly because I have the privilege of moving through the world without having my body or attractiveness be a point of interest whatsoever. I feel safe walking outside at night. I don't check my car's backseat before getting in. I have no idea what the fear of kidnapping even is.
In light of the above, of being honest with the gaps in what I will ever experience, how can I venture to link to a site that might offend a woman? Even if it seems ok to me, and it's a joke or whatever excuse, how can I possibly say I fully understand her perspective when her lived experience places her in such vastly different situations?
There's nuance in there of course, pick your situations, but basically none of them are going to be broadly unique or predictable, and part of life is just dealing with those awkward moments if they come up.
Porn and advertising is the driving force of the Internet.
Was the initial force...but since we call it "internet" and "personal computers" instead of "mainframe" and "arpanet" not anymore.
Of the actual innovations in this field, how many came from defense (DOD, CIA, NSA, ARPA, & their contractors), and how many came from pornography?
Xerox
>GUI
Xerox
>laser printers
Xerox
>cryptography
Maybe the Babylonian empire?
Look i stop here..super-computing , TOR, LISP or Ada is not a driving force, they are a product...you could have said WWW made at cern...but hey
http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/
As for actual innovations, porn still scores bupkis.
The article specifically talks about people's lives being ruined by sites like this.
Plenty of feminists are anti-porn, and are not right wing nor "puritan" in the least.
We put up sets of idealistic moral standards that some or most of a society generally agree protects vulnerable people. This is why we have age limits on alcohol, for example. This is why we have age limits on porn, too.
Everyone is forced to comply or pretend to comply with minimum drinking ages, which are pretty common throughout the world. I think all would agree.
It doesn't really seem to be puritanism that drives a society to protect its vulnerable populations. It's not out of a hatred of alcohol that drinking ages exist, it's because alcohol abuse has been proven to ruin lives. Just like porn.
The fact that the right wing is puritan doesn't mean that puritanism entails being right-wing. This is, like, Logic 101, 'Socrates is a man'-level shit.
That "everyone" must be old. The new phenomena are already lampooned in plenty of memes. The boomers aged pretty badly.
> It's not out of a hatred of alcohol that drinking ages exist, it's because alcohol abuse has been proven to ruin lives
If that were the case, alcohol would just be banned outright. The limits are basically virtual anyway, anybody can attest that getting alcohol is trivial once you start to really want it. Just like porn.
A lot of law is effectively performative morality, and no more so than in the area of personal pleasures. Prohibitionism always fails, eventually, because people want to feel.
So if you're left-wing, than in your terminology puritans will be by definition right-wingers. And the people enforcing morals you agree with cannot be called Puritan.
If you take a brief look at the history of the original Puritanism however, it was definitely a 'revolutionary' movement against tradition. Including the ones who came to America.
That's kind of the whole point of the original article, narrated by a guy who _ actually feels guilty_ about his role in enabling people like your hypothetical frat boy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Dissenters#/media/File...
I'm a Quaker. Early Quakers were radical (rejecting the religious authority of priests and the fighting of wars), conservative (looking backwards to a partially-imagined better, more wholesome Christianity of the past), obnoxious (turning up to Anglican churches to heckle the sermon), and disciplined (strong structures in place for the support of families of those imprisoned for their faith, and a communal discernment process that rejected 'do as thou wilt').
Puritans rejected catholic influence on the church, yes, but their focus on individual piety, and their association with the rising merchant class, puts them a long way from freaky liberalism. One of their critiques was that others were insufficiently sober and God-fearing!
In either century, the right represents old moral values, and the left represents a fresh new source of moral values which seek to replace the old. Granted, in the 17th century those new moral sources were religious and in the 21st century they are secular - the substance of what is now left and what was then left has absolutely changed. But the overall structure is the same.
I am not offended by OPs app, nor the display of a woman's breasts or genitalia. But I would greatly question what kind of employee OP would be if they're putting their jerk-off apps on their resume. If OP lacks the basic social awareness to not cause steam to come out the ears of the large percent of society that might be deemed neopuritan, then I have to suspect OP is lacking in social awareness that is going to affect their/coworkers performance in the office.
If I had written an app like that, and wanted to use it as a demo of my knowledge in some field on my resume, I would reimplement it to work on puppies or something.
Demo video literally depicts naked chicks. Sure, it's soft porn, but it's fully pornographic lol
"It appears on my resume" makes it sound like some other controlling entity has put it on your resume, so that it now just appears there as a matter of fact.
What an odd statement to make.
What most people don't realize is how awfully strong the sex drive is and can get given time... since they never let it get to that point.
And I'm saying this after 6weeks of complete abstinence.
It's utterly distracting and frustrating, making it extremely hard to focus and get any work done.
Rubbed one out and I can finally focus again and do some quality programming work.
Should have rubbed one out way sooner than that. The amount of actual work I've missed out due to this is not negligible.
There a whole wide spectrum between "I'm kind of horny", "I think i'm pretty darn horny" and actually full-blast horny.
In due time, sex will move up to no1 spot in the list of priorities.
And if doesn't, then you're either old (or getting there) or perhaps never had a particularly strong sex-drive to begin with.
Sex-drive is just an insanely powerful force in men, most men have experienced but only a small sliver of how powerful it can get, since they never let it get there, because porn is always there and easily accessible, and you can just rub one out without porn too.
So is hunger. So is survival. I don't think you understand what I have written. If your instincts are putting sex at the top of the list, maybe it's time to have sex, with a real person, instead of muting your instincts with soma so you can earn more fiats?
I actually love programming, and when I was refering to "programming work" I was specifically refering to my hobby projects.
> So is hunger. So is survival.
Unlike sex-drive, hunger and survival is very much aligned with what I want. I have to eat so I can keep doing things that I love (programming, creating music, etc)
While sex-drive is a hardwired instinct to procreate and have children - which is very much polar-opposite of my best self interests.
More over I do NOT want to have sex with any of my EXes or bar slobs or hiring prostututes. It just seems "like a good idea" under an altered state of mind. No thank you, very much.
I'm not my body.
And I'm not even my mind half of the time (especially when overloaded with the horny hormones).
However, being in that really horny frame of mind, you really dont want to jerk off at all, or even watch porn frankly - that is not what you want at all. You want to fuck a woman in the most direct-est animalistic raw kind of way.
I wouldn't have rubbed one out without porn, it wouldn't have happened.
Instead you do stupid shit, like start texting all your EX-es, or going on dates with woman you don't really even like or consider booking a prostitutes and all sorts of fucked up stuff...
Being horny, really horny is a trip, an altered state of mind is what i'm going to say.
Porn very effectively brings you back to earth and disables biological imperatives in a quick and enjoyable way (hell, it's not even particularly enjoyable after an extended long abstinence, since it's is waaay to intense).
Porn is definitely easy to abuse for some people, but it doesn't mean it's all bad, it is extremely useful tool.
1: https://youthfirstinc.org/pornography-viewing-starts-as-earl...
2: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1753-6405.1...
3: https://www.magonlinelibrary.com/doi/abs/10.12968/bjsn.2017....
4: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11058476/
Where are these ads? I never see pornographic ads in my daily browsing.
> The dopamine response to seeing porn is similar to crack (4).
That doesn't prove anything about harmfulness. I think it was already obvious that humans are hardwired to be attracted to sex. Nothing in these links suggests that this response creates to an addiction similar to hard drugs.
> Pornography is categorically more dangerous to society than ads, tracking, and privacy invasions.
I don't accept that based on your sources.
Porn isn't sex. The repeated exposure to a huge volume of media can't be compared to a physical experience. It's more comparable to a drug.
The ultimate list of the effects of porn on the brain: https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/relevant-research-and-articl...
The site is founded by an atheist, and looks to science for making an informed view: https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/about/about-this-site/
Porn mags where everywhere from corner stores, barber shops and some doctor offices. If you never saw porn by 8 you might be considered legally blind.
> 3: https://www.magonlinelibrary.com/doi/abs/10.12968/bjsn.2017....
I found this fairly dubious, and followed through with this and got to the study[0]. It uses [1] as its source. That source is a private antivirus company (bitdefender), and they don't quote any sources for those claims, but luckily they offer a solution:
> Use security solutions with Parental Control to watch over kids online. Features such as Bitdefender Parental Control block inappropriate content, restrict Web access between certain hours and helps parents remotely monitor their children”s online activity
I haven't followed through on the other statistics you quoted, but that seems like some major corporate BS you're basing your argument on there.
> The research was conducted by Bitdefender in September 2016 covering 706 users of Bitdefender's security solutions.
Oh okay, that about settles it.
[0] https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.12968/bjsn.2017.12.7.3...
[1] https://www.bitdefender.com/blog/hotforsecurity/one-in-10-vi...
As another comment mentioned a similar problem with "advertising" in general, I think sexualization and over stimulus of the population weakens people, and not to say there is some conspiracy purposefully pushing this (it may just emergent from technology and human instinct) I do think the corrupting influence weakens a population and makes them more easily dominated by strong forces... media, business, government, etc. All to say that, in terms of "what is best to cultivate a strong society and people" porn is extremely antithetical to this. A stronger society is one that would be avoiding, however necessary, consumption and production of pornography.
This presentation [0] on the physiological effects of porn consumption is very informative. Observations mirror what strong opiates do to the brain
A good overview of the public health problem of porn[1]
The psychologically destabilizing and weakening effects of porn, and how they breakdown willpower to oppose stronger forces are illustrated by the time when the Israeli military broadcast pornography onto the televisions of Palestinian residents of the besieged West Bank town of Ramallah [2]. Why would they do this if porn was good for you?
[0] "The great porn experiment | Gary Wilson | TEDxGlasgow" https://youtu.be/wSF82AwSDiU
[1] https://eppc.org/publication/a-science-based-case-for-ending...
[2] https://reason.com/2002/04/03/porn-and-politics-in-palestine...
Do you not see how the infinite novelty of endless porn videos accessible in the palm of your hand is different than the (crude and still objectionable) magazines sold in corner stores?
At the time many lighters and cards had nude images. It was much more common and celebrated.
There are endless videos on any topic.
Let me explain. About three decades ago I was (gladly not to strongly) part of a Christian youth group. Led by honorable members of the parish. They condemned porn, Sex, condemned schools doing sex ed. The condemned viciously youth magazines doing sex ed as well (German Bravo magazine).
Kids naturally discovered their budding sexuality. Looked at porn or nudism magazines. Tried maturation (oh what a sin in the eyes of the elders). As said everything sexusl, everything bodily was tabu.
Kids, especially in the inner part of these groups with parents active in the parish were fearful. Full of shame because they felt their bodies betraying them and their faith. Felt the touch of Satan. Felt dirty and without being worthy.
You (or at least others) might get the drift.
And - more importantly - these kids (boys and girls alike) were vulnerable. And believe me - easy prey. And prey they were. The most respected members of the flock, leaders of youth groups and excursions who prayed with us and always told us that we could always come to them with any question about our faith and life in general. These were the wolves. Males as well as females. They longed for the confessions. Let the kids show what they had done. Wanted to see in detail. Some even went further. Did not constraint themselves to confessions and private shows of underage maturation.
So yeah I learned early that porn is to blame for a rotten society. Porn is the culprit. Not people.
Sorry, but what you wrote is nearly verbatim the arguments that were hammered into us.
I don't buy them. Not anymore.
Like equating criticizing unhealthy eating of candy and junk food to an opposition to "food" would be similar.
You say that like those are bad things.
And they have been quoting it in a few threads in this conversations.
Doesn't the abuse of the innocent image happen in the minds of the users. How do you police those thoughts?
Isn't it fun to assemble a string of highly judgmental sounding words and tired clichés without providing any actual scientific data behind them?
Sex is a perfectly enjoyable past-time, similar to woodworking or snowboarding, and nothing changes about its morality when you record it on a camera.
It is also worth noting that pornography has existed in essentially every human culture that has had writing or visual artistry. The noble spirit of mankind, if such a thing exists, has yet to crumble.
If that held me back from getting a job at some puritanical company, so be it. I wouldn't have wanted to work there any way.
Perhaps you should evaluate whether your post adds to the conversation, or is intended to be a character attack on the GP.
I certainly could have gone to work for Facebook or some other FAANG, but given the choice of selling my soul for porn or selling my soul to Mark and FB... I'd pick porn any day. It was a great job. Full benefits, matching 401k, like minded coworkers, interesting and challenging use cases, best after work parties, etc.
I wonder where twiclo works...
All it takes is one person in the critical path to not like what you're doing, even if 99% of the rest don't give a shit, and that's a potential job off the table.
You're proud of your work, that's great, but also doesn't change the fact that your work also puts you at risk of having your resume tossed for a dumb reason.
Agreed, your resume could be tossed for anything. US has some protections for this. Other countries don't have this at all. You don't take a job with a porn company without realizing that. It definitely made hiring more difficult as well.
While working there, we lost access to our web analytics tool because they got bought by a Mormon company that booted us. Endless issues with credit card processors. We also had to host our own server hardware because at the time, porn wasn't allowed on many hosting services and/or we were fearful of being booted from other cloud providers.
That's also what attracted me to my current business venture, which is to provide decentralized cloud infrastructure services (aka: web3). It seems weird to think of that being decentralized, but if we don't know the specifics of what you're running on our hardware, there is nothing for us to turn off. Based on my history, I see a lot of value in that.
And there are so many tech on these system I wish I could read more about it. And yet we dont. There could be loads of things that could be open sourced too. Or do we live in a world where an open source component from a porn company are not good enough to use. ( I would not be surprised if that is case right now in Silicon Valley ). And yet we are happy to read technology being used in warfares?
I would imagine you have lots of restrictions and barrier in your work, from hosting to payment or whatever. It will be interesting to see how those are worked out.
Oh but please post it in a separate blogging platform so we can all enjoy it during work hours.
Beta vs VHS.
DVD did not compete against BluRay, they are two different generations. BluRay competed against HD-DVD. From what I remember technically HD-DVD was superior, BluRay won because it had extra copy protection mechanism the HD-DVD lacked.
The major factor was that Sony shipped a BluRay player in the PlayStation 3. When HD-DVD was discontinued, Sony had sold 10.5M PlayStation 3 units while there were only 1M HD-DVD units. Sony spent a lot of money subsidizing the PS3 and its BluRay player, but a 10:1 ratio of PS3s to HD-DVD players won the market (and all the standalone BluRay players just made the ratio worse).
As the PS3 sold, rental chains like Blockbuster decided to go with BluRay exclusively - and at the time Blockbuster was the largest rental chain and really powerful. Netflix also moved exclusively to BluRay. As the PS3 sold, Target decided to move exclusively to BluRay. Once the PS3 had started selling way more units than all HD-DVD players combined, everyone started moving away from HD-DVD which just reinforced its decline.
BluRay won because Sony was willing to suffer pretty big losses on PS3 sales to push the format.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-work-on-the-develop...
(I hired @latchkey, though he stayed a few years longer than I did)
Small anecdote, but I was recruited by and almost took an offer for the folks behind "BangBros." Their corporate structure was apparently such that the IT / Software roles worked for a shell company with a generic name, generic website, etc. This company apparently works in a "consulting" like capacity for all of their assets (BangBros, "tube" sites, cam sites, etc.)
I asked what was going on with the shell company, because it seemed sketchy as all hell. It was explained that because of industry stigma most of their employees use the shell company for their resume with generic "worked on highly-scalable systems handling N amount of traffic."
Apparently it was a highly professional outfit, and the closest you could get to dealing with FANG-level problems while not being a FANG-eligible person. Great pay and benefits, business casual dress located in a nice building in Miami Beach.
Years later after I went on to another job, we told them "the truth" and they just shrugged it off.
for a tech company, and a porn company? that's completely absurd.
Either the company values prude/neoconservative value signaling (the at least I wouldn't want to work there and they should openly tell people what ideology is expected) or the HR person abused their position and did not do their job in finding someone that fits the skill set and role.
Either way is hypocritical in my book.
My point is that I'm not going to censor myself or my background in anticipation of someone being offended. Let them be offended, there's lots of other places where that isn't a problem.
It's probably not the CTO, your direct manager, or even any of your peer that would be offended. Anyone in the long chain of people that are involved in your process from applicant to employee could cause a stink.
It's difficult to say one employees who might filter you out is indicative of the entire company culture. I know a lot of happy employees who absolutely hated their experience being onboarded because of 1 or 2 difficult people. But who gives a shit about how Michael from HR took 9 days to send an official offer letter if you're never going to have to interact with them again?
This falls into the same category as "be careful having opinions in public". Ever since we've been easily Googlable, right-wing employers have canceled left-wing candidates and very much vice-versa (e.g. Antonio Garcia Martinez and Apple). There's been some degree of outcry and stink about this, but in the end it's probably a net good for employees to work with teams they are culturally aligned with. Getting cut early on account of what you believe or what else you worked on is probably best for everyone involved.
Would you like to be able to enjoy a beer with your coworkers or not?
Not a job requirement for adults.
Open-minded professionalism and civility should trump only working with frat buddies.
Not sure how that's relevant here.
You write about the unjust bias (and unjust it is) against you for having worked with porn, but then seem to to try to evoke ageist and gender stereotypes.
Multiple studies exist showing that men and women have very very different views on pornography and in particular women's views on it are significantly more negative than men's views. Furthermore people's views on pornography change as they get older with older people having an even more negative view about it than younger people. This isn't like a fringe difference either, consumption of porn by women is less than 20% that of men. There's nothing sexist about pointing out that women can and often do have very different views on a subject than men, and no reason to think that women having a negative view of pornography somehow makes them inferior in anyway.
Can you cite some of these studies?
IIRC there is a difference in consumption rates between genders, but not negative attitudes.
I tend to get suspicious when porn sites (or porn-related sites) avoid https. Maybe I'm paranoid, but it's so simple to use ssl today than I find it hard to give the benefit of the doubt.
Is there any reason to your choice in publishing content such as this in a way that exposes all visitors?
The upside is you don't get matched with prude co-workers.
This is quite different than merely listing an employer such as pornhub on your resume.
It really does seem as though you'd wind up defending or turning a blind eye to a lot of shady practices for a paycheck working for companies like this.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30436189
"I often encountered videos that were uploaded again and again, no matter how many times I removed them. One day, a woman emailed me, calmly explained that her ex-boyfriend had uploaded a video of them having sex, and asked me to remove it. I deleted the clip. Later that week, it was re-uploaded. The woman wrote again, I removed it, and this continued for months; I must have pulled the same video down a dozen times. This was before I had ever heard the term “revenge porn.”
Requests like this were not uncommon. Once, a woman wrote to say there was a video of her on Tube8 that showed her being sexually assaulted after someone spiked her drink at a party. The video had tens of thousands of views, so I had to review it before making the call to remove it. In the clip, the woman is clearly high, laughing and head lolling, having sex on a bed surrounded by fully dressed people holding drinks and watching as colored lights flashed and music blared in the background. I took it down, but it was uploaded again repeatedly in the following months. Each time, the mortified woman flagged it, and each time, I removed it; both of us were aware that there was nothing we could do to stop the clip from resurfacing."
I have read the same thing from Facebook content moderators. They got so frustrated at having to watch and take down the same videos over and over.
This seems to be such a simple problem to solve: record a hash of the video file, don't allow uploading it again. That would probably get rid of most re-posting.
It could be bypassed by modifying the file slightly, but the hashing could also get more sophisticated. At some point, an ex-boyfriend is not likely to want to keep modifying a video to piss off his ex.
For the purpose here, robust hashing seems to be the relevant term:
https://www.netclean.com/netclean-report-2019/robust-hashing...
There are other techniques for automatic flagging of similar files, like PhotoDNA's [1] enormous database - which I believe PornHub are already using.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_hashing
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/photodna
As you note, it isn't particularly reliable, but it does actually tend to work fairly well against the loss of video compression. However, it doesn't tend to work well when the video is recut, with time added or removed. There is some research trying to combine approaches for finding important keyframes (ML-powered thumbnail searching) with perceptual hashing [0], which is looking promising, but it's still fairly unreliable.
[0] https://doi.org/10.1007/s10207-013-0211-z
This is equivalent to image recognition. It works ok, but has lots of false positives and false negatives.
I know the general HN crowd is very much against this, but it’s the standard we hold every other media platform and I don’t see why things should get a free pass just because they pretend to be platforms.
I really don't see this as a solution, it's not going to stop the reposts laid out above.
I think reporting the infringing uploader to authorities etc would be more appropriate given revenge pr0n is a crime in most places. This would act as at least a deterant for some.
The hashing seems like it would filter out at least a few more, but there are a lot of patterns that could be picked up, audio track recognition, frame counts etc. There are better ways than manual intervention on every re-upload.
No? Fair and reasonable. Neither do I. Now let's ask ourselves - would ANYONE reply yes? A bit unlikely? Therefore the result is absolutely no more forums/hosting of any kind.
I'm not talking pornhub here - even a cake recipe sharing site, a scientific forum, a community of model train enthusiasts, Stack Overflow, your MMO guild's site, even HN itself... nothing. No Discord, no Slack, obviously no social media (which I happen to dislike, but I'm quite firmly in the minority, I'm told), nothing at all.
You should always have a right to sue if you are harmed.
Yes, but not to sue the hoster. If I offend you during a phone call, you should be able to sue ME, not the telco. Harmful content must be taken down once identified, and any technology reasonably helping its early identification should be put to use - but the hoster should be immune from lawsuits except if they do not act timely on legitimate takedown requests.
Please, stop suggesting you should have a right to sue the hoster - this can only end up in countless avenues of free speech disappearing, and dictatorial governments (and aspiring ones) abusing it to silence their victims or dissenters.
I think the host should be held accountable if they keep allowing the same harmful content to be uploaded again and again. The first occurrence is their notice. Future occurrences is negligence.
On this, I fully support your view. Something as trivial as a keeping list of hashes, to prevent repeat uploads of the exact same binary content, is incredibly easy to implement and I would fault any major hoster for not doing it. But people quickly learn to re-encode or subtly alter the content, so hashes, size, number of frames, etc don't match.
Perceptual hashes are a lot more expensive computationally, should be much harder to dodge, but even youtube, which supposedly has the best minds behind it, copes very poorly with the many popular evasion techniques (slight distortion, horizontal mirroring, superimposing a couple thin lines, showing the content in the left pane, while showing nonsense in the right pane, etc etc) so I'm not sure they're a viable option.
Can you really hold the hoster at fault when the technology doesn't exist, or is impractically slow and expensive? Would you rather have no hosters?
We might see some innovation, like how HN allows you to opt in to seeing dead comments, just have all comments dead-by-default.
there's more friction there, but IMO anything is better than hiring overseas workers to view flagged content 8 hours a day.
HN would have to go offline anytime dang decided to sleep.
I just wouldn't run a forum unless I had the proper staff and a legal team. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing.
You seem to be asking rhetorical questions and then answering them on your own instead of letting the OP answer? So, I am not sure what the point is?
And if OP wishes to answer, and contradicts me, declaring themselves willing to go to jail for material not posted by them, but by a user of their forum, I will have to accept their perspective. I just stated mine.
He also got one of those spyware things added to her phone. That was interesting situation let me just say. Anyways..
Now I know there are some leo in some places that are sophisticated enough to possibly track down where a burner card was bought or something and maybe get a video feed and go from there.. but my experiences have shown that most leo offices have bigger fish to fry with less prep/cooking needed, and even if they could try, they won't spend the time.
You are more likely to get the fbi over the internet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_...
But I do believe something similarly controversial, which is: platforms which host user generated content should be required to enforce strong know-your-customer on UGC submission. That doesn't mean other users should be able to click on my HackerNews profile and see my real name, but at minimum the service provider should be required to have that information; to map an account back to a real person (though, I strongly believe people behave more positively when their name is known to everyone they're interacting with; its actually a good thing, overwhelmingly but not totally of course).
Argument against: right to anonymity. I don't feel this is a right any human has ever had in contexts of interpersonal communication. Moreover, I don't feel its a desirable right to uphold. HackerNews is a public square; anyone is welcome to join and talk. But public squares always had an element of accountability; I, being human and present in the physical plane of existence, had to travel there in person, accountable to anyone else there listening, authorities patrolling the square, etc. The only examples of anonymity in the non-digital are niche; masked protestors, maybe, but even that involves physical presence where improper conduct could be responded to by authorities unmasking the individual. Books published anonymously? Possibly, but...
Here's my strongest argument for it: there will always be platforms to express yourself truly anonymously. American law is written in absolutes, but is rarely enforced so; speeding is illegal, but I speed every day. Piracy is illegal, yet my NAS over there has twelve terabytes of totally legitimately obtained content. They've gone after the Pirate Bay more times than I can count, and its still there, at the same domain.
The point is not to build a totalitarian internet with one world government user registration; it's to correlate accountability with scale. Larger platforms have super-linear correlation with their ability to inflict real-world pain on their users (and those their users interact with nonconsensually). Larger platforms also tend to be built by corporations who have a difficult time escaping laws like this. If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, did it actually fall? If revenge porn is uploaded to a fly-by-night no-name site and no one sees it, was harm created? I'd argue Yes; but it's an improvement over our current situation of the tree falling and everyone hearing it.
> The point is not to build a totalitarian internet with one world government user registration: it's to correlate accountability with scale.
You can already do this with PGP. You'd just need an operator/vendor who values confidentiality but also can handle the overhead of managing identities from a systematic viewpoint.
So, KYC + legalization.
There are many forms of sex work, usually only specific forms are illegal.
Which is the same thing as saying "have a higher false positive rate," and then we have the problem.
This is exacerbated by the same kind of system having the same application for copyright infringement, which means there will be a large community of people dedicated to defeating it. Every time they find another workaround, you have to increase the false positive rate. It only ever goes up.
This is why everyone hates Content ID. The pirates know how to defeat it, meanwhile it regularly flags public domain works and recordings of randomly generated white noise to say nothing of fair use etc.
The solution to revenge porn isn't platforms, it's why isn't the ex getting called "defendant" by a judge for making the recording without permission?
Yes. Will it? No.
The court system's responsiveness to sex crimes could be greatly improved if we had the collective will to do so. But the problem is both in the courts specifically (because of who the judges are, and who the legislators who write our laws are), and also the wider world. Victim blaming and dismissal/minimizing of the harm inflicted are par for the course everywhere, in the justice system, in the general population, and in many subgroups. (You'll see them here on HN all the time.)
I don't think this is it. It's a matter of resources. Police and courts are already so overburdened that it's hard to get enforcement on anything that isn't practically life or death. Have you or a friend ever had your apartment burglarized or a vehicle stolen? The police will show up, usually after several hours, take a statement, after which you'll never hear from them again. In fact I don't know a single person in real life who was a victim of a burglary or auto theft where the perpetrator was caught, save for those cases like a car jacking where significant violence was involved.
When the police and district attorney in any given city in the U.S. are looking at double-digit unsolved homicides and God knows how many unsolved rape cases, I don't think they're going to put a high priority on the fact that there's a naughty movie out there that someone willing filmed themselves in and is now regretful about. This does not mean folks don't believe these things matter, because they do. It's that relative to what the justice system is already dealing with, these things are much less important.
(I'm using "guess at" to refer to clearance rate because if the cops tell a prosecutor they think you murdered someone and the prosecutor says it was obviously someone else so they're not charging you that's generally counted as cleared.)
This is false.
NYC homicide clearance rates for 2021 look to be over 70% for the year, with Q4 2021 at 78%. (worst quarter - 55%, best - 86%).
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/stats/reports-analysis/cleara...
> In fact, the vast majority of police are assigned to tasks like traffic enforcement
NYPD is not known exactly known for a particularly large amount of traffic enforcement, to the point that I think you'd find most residents wish they did more of it.
I wonder if a large contributor to the higher London clearance rate is related to socioeconomic factors or surveillance laws/systems.
The FBI's UCR Data Explorer used to give you an easy to use breakdown of crimes and clearance rate at the national/state/metro/city level, but unfortunately they redesigned it and now it is both harder to use and presents less data. I guess that is one way to hide data that isn't favorable? There seems to be more emphasis on the danger presented to law enforcement officers, but the #1 cause of death for officers by a large margin, per https://www.odmp.org/search/year?year=2021, has been COVID.
> I don't think they're going to put a high priority on the fact that there's a naughty movie out there that someone willing filmed themselves in and is now regretful about.
This characterization of revenge porn is exactly the victim blaming and minimization of harm inflicted that I was talking about. Consenting to film a sex act is not consenting to have it published to the wider world.
While it certainly isn't minimal in terms of the harm inflicted, it very much is minimal compared to the kinds of things that police departments and courts are already dealing with.
There's also a weird and very unproductive ethos that's evolved around the concept of victim blaming. Something my not be your fault, but that doesn't mean we're all free to be careless with zero chance of consequences. If I'm walking through a neighborhood at night that I know to be dangerous, it would be very foolish of me to be carrying several thousand dollars of cash on my person. That does not mean it's my fault if I get mugged and lose my money - it's purely the mugger's fault. However, my actions were stupid and I should have known better. Both those things can be true.
Many in the media also agree with you. So do many in the wider society. (Including many in the ridiculously male-dominated HN.)
All of these factors contribute to why if a victim even goes to court, not only is the likelihood of actual consequences for the perpetrator absurdly low, but the experience of going down that path will be horrible. Instead of sympathy, they get an avalanche of contempt and shame dumped on them.
I don't think you're gonna find many cases for non-professionals where they had consent and it was given in writing.
I don't actually know, it's just a guess given observed human behaviour.
Because the people of your country didn't make your politicians codify that into your law.
>Shouldn't the uploader protect themselves by getting permission in writing, similar to how victims are constantly badgered to take every action to protect themselves?
I dunno, do you get written permission before having sex so you'll be sure you won't get falsely accused of rape afterwards?
People will only follow what is culturally ingrained or enforced on them, and getting permission in writing isn't a thing right now.
There are multiple factors that are involved, but generally speaking, consent laws end at the production of the photo/video. Distribution falls under copyright. Unless the subject was surreptitiously recorded with the intent of distribution or blackmail or was trespassed upon for the recording to be made, there is no copyright or consent violation.
And yes, the First Amendment does apply. In fact, there have been cases where such laws have been struck down on the basis of the First Amendment (https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/equality/475968...).
https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1532/revenge-pornog...
> Under current First Amendment guidelines, any laws regulating revenge pornography would have to be narrowly drawn and made in pursuit of a “compelling state interest.”
Unfortunately, I agree with tiahura that there's little question how the current SCOTUS majority would rule — it's unlikely that they will find a "compelling state interest" in protecting the victims of revenge porn. The result will be that any victim without the resources and circumstances to bring and win a civil suit will be SOL.
But If you want my opinion as an individual, I wouldn't agree with a privacy carveout. Firstly, because "revenge porn" doesn't qualify under currently prescribed limitations (defamation, incitement to imminent lawless action, obscenity, "fighting words", etc.) and I'm skeptical of adding any more. Secondly, most "revenge porn" legislation is overbroad and does not require a mens rea to prosecute. They are strict liability laws in all but name. They amount to prior restraint and violate the requirements of content neutrality and strict scrutiny towards limiting speech. Thirdly, these laws can be used to silence journalists reporting on relevant events (such as the Katie Hill debacle).
"Revenge porn" laws do nothing but coerce individuals into becoming bearers of secrets. Even if they had no interest in doing so to begin with.
I would also like to add that not every person charged under "revenge porn" laws is the stereotypical ex-boyfriend uploading sex tapes to Pornhub. It's in situation like Bethany Austin's where rights are needed most. https://www.cato.org/blog/picture-worth-thousand-words-priso...
If you're referring to today's overbroad interpretation that has swept legislatures across the country, then I would say there should be no legal consequences at all. I'm firmly convinced those laws should be repealed and the cases involved reheard.
However, if you're referring to something much narrower and applicable with in the framework of the First Amendment as it is currently, then I could consider a limited and proportionate civil fine appropriate.
Should there be consequences?
* that there was an oral or written contract
* that said contract was made by two informed and sober parties
* that one party uploaded the video to Pornhub against the wishes of the other and not anyone else.
The point of a court, criminal or civil, is not to invent legislation favorable to the most sympathetic party. The point is to interpret the law within the constraints it was written under.
Deplatforming revenge porn is a win. Having less revenge porn on PornHub is a win.
You're welcome to disagree, just as advocates for Voat, Parler, etc. would — and as companies such as Manwin who would prefer to exploit the victims of revenge porn for profit would.
> Every case is tried on its own merits
The vast majority of civil cases don't even become cases let alone get tried on their merits. For a huge swath of the population who do not have the expertise, the resources, the time, or the life circumstances to obtain a lawyer and pursue a case, civil courts are not practically accessible. In contrast, while reporting to criminal authorities has all kinds of issues including that those authorities may be unsympathetic, the criminal system at least does not place such outrageous demands on those who report a crime.
Holding civil court aloft as a sufficient remedy for revenge porn may not be disingenuous if you actually think that a typical victim could sue, but it's wildly unreasonable.
PornHub didn't deplatform "revenge porn". It nuked more than half of its vast library of legal content under outside pressure and questionable allegations of hosting what may or may not have been "revenge porn". Even when there has never been a law in Canada that has defined in any way, shape, or form what "revenge porn" is. Millions of videos became martyrs for a cause of dubious effectiveness and even more dubious reasoning. On a practical level, the indiscriminate purge of content did nothing but punish innocent users. If you think that substituting due process with such massive collateral damage is a "win", then one cannot conclude your opinion to be reasonable at all.
> The vast majority of civil cases don't even become cases let alone get tried on their merits
For vast majority of cases, civil and criminal, filings fail to pass muster for multiple reasons. Common ones are Failure to Make a Claim or Lack of Subject Matter Jurisdiction among other legal errors. Many claimants have a chance of refiling, however legal standards shouldn't be lowered on grounds of sympathy based upon hitherto unsubstantiated claims. That only encourages witch hunts and fallacious charges.
We have insanely well established laws and precedent regarding expectations of privacy, and laws regarding two party consent. Other states have successfully narrow laws (see CA).
The First Amendment thing is red herring nonsense, sadly boosted by one zealous and incompetent legislature.
There are really only two things the government actually cares about:
1. staying in power
2. collecting taxes
So yeah, they're not going to overlook expired tags.
Me! My car was broken into and my audio deck was stolen. I had to report the crime to the police for insurance purposes. I didn't even give a proper description of my deck but the police called me back a few weeks later saying they found it inside a stolen car and mailed it back to me.
But maybe violence had occurred, .. maybe some shaddy shit went on with that stolen car that led them to investigate it.
Responsiveness could be improved on just about any crimes if we had the will to do so. Just look at how many murders go unsolved (about 38% unsolved). Then look at the difference in response the system makes when it's some nobody whose murder didn't even make the news vs a cop/judge/[system participant] who was murdered.
Frankly, who the people are that comprise the system are doesn't matter. The system is not appropriately sized to handle current criminal and civil case volumes. In many cases you wait years for trials. A majority of people accept plea deals, including the innocent. There's very little justice in the system. Between 2 and 10 percent if the incarcerated are wrongly convicted. I assume this is even higher for plea deals that avoid jail time.
And on victim blaming, both "sides" do it. It just depends on which issue it is.
The fact that the system cannot cope with the volume of cases means that the people who are in a position to prioritize which cases move forward is critical. That's the very nature of selective enforcement.
Selective enforcement (law enforcement or prosecutorial discretion) is a larger issue that should be addressed. By unevenly enforcing the law, they are likely exhibiting biases, they will end up eroding what trust there is in the system, and it will allow bad laws to continue to stand (if everyone was being screwed over then they would demand the law change).
Basically, we should be fixing the system, not just shifting priorities based on some individual's preference.
There is a huge variety of potential problems which require the attention of legislators, law enforcement, and the courts, and priorities change all the time. It's not as though the only recourse we have is to increase the system capacity.
[1] http://jaapl.org/content/44/3/359
Which can and should be handled under civil cases.
You can extend many these problems, health effects, and the thoughts of suicide to many other issues too - victims of rape, assault, harassment, burglary, etc.
So we end up with violent and property crimes which also contain these emotional damages, vs just an emotional crime. You would need to prove that this emotional-only crime is somehow more important and these other crimes that contain those damages plus violent or property damages. It's not that there isn't harm done by revenge porn, but that the damage done by others is objectively worse because it contains additional elements.
"It's not as though the only recourse we have is to increase the system capacity."
Then please, do explain. Because the only logic I see is that you ignore other crimes to pursue these, or you increase capacity. And frankly, ignoring any crimes undermines the entire system due to unequal enforcement and ostricizing some victims but not others by not giving them the recourse due under law.
For example: There's a difference whether the Attorney General is Bill Barr or Merrick Garland — and it does indeed involve choice as to which cases to pursue.
The same holds true for many other offices in law enforcement and the courts. Who the district attorneys are, who the judges are, who sets budgets for police and who decides how those budgets are allocated and law enforcement resources are deployed... all of that matters.
I wish I were joking.
Suppose I dropped by, tossed you out of your house into the street, and took possession of everything you had.
You'd certainly feel your human rights were violated.
This obviously is a very important issue to you. While massive enforcement that punishes offenders and gives justice to victims would be the ideal, from a technical and legal perspective, that's very hard to do. Why not take the less morally righteous, but infinitely more practical, path of convincing folks to stop making porn movies of themselves? If our main goal here is to alleviate suffering, the discussion should center on how best to prevent this from happening, regardless of what the morally correct solution would be in an ideal world. While there is nothing morally wrong about making a sex video, it's a classic high-risk, low-reward activity. If everything goes perfectly, you have a video that you will likely never watch again. On the other hand, that video may find it's way online and ruin your life.
A ton of reasons[1], including that such preaching is ineffective and so the only impact of doing it is to justify excoriating the victim later and excusing failing institutions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_blaming
Just look at all the pictures/videos from that iphone celeb hack a few years back. They all consented at the time. Many even took the pictures themselves (selfies, very common with teenagers too). The harm came far later when the material became public.
And then even in that even-more-obviously-bad made-without-permission case, the argument here seems to be "we can't make tools to handle these [assumed rare] cases because false positives"?
Is the harm of an uploader having to follow up with a human about a false positive seen as WORSE than the harm of having these videos uploaded over and over and over...?
Not me — that was a quote from the comment I was responding to. :) I agree with the implication that the question should have been about publishing rather than creating.
So something the legal system doesnt take into account is people changing their minds.
Why do people changed their minds, because their chemistry changes, this is seen as aging or might even be a short term change like getting drunk, going through stress, even having people you dont want to know, knowing about it. So it shows even the law isnt perfect.
Similar to how the legal system recognizes that verbal business contracts are valid (a form of consent), it just does not have a way of proving them essentially rendering them invalid.
As you increase the number and the precision of laws, you inevitably increase false positives.
First you will hit the resource issue. Secondly, you will see laws being weaponized.
If you can pay a lawyer 1k/hour, you can get anyone arrested. They will find a way. More laws you have, more ways they can use. See the case of Steven Donziger: https://twitter.com/SDonziger
But the issue with YouTube etc. isn't flagging innocent people, it's flagging innocent people and then rejecting their appeals. It should be pretty easy for PornHub etc. to get videos "verified" by getting explicit consent from all parties filmed, so that they cannot be flagged and removed from the system.
In fact, I really don't see any reason against a law requiring all porn sites to require verification for all videos (w/ retroactive revoke on the hosts). Nobody's being censored, and if you agree to be in a porn video you kind of waive your right to anonymity.
Then the host gets hacked and your government ID gets published as a creator of amateur pornography. The risk of that is de facto censorship by chilling effect.
Although I think that says "produces" rather than "publishes" or "distributes", so pornhub themselves aren't liable but the boyfriend "producing" the film has committed an offence. Not that there's any will to enforce this.
Closer to home, Scotland explicitly banned revenge porn, and has actually achieved some prosecutions.
There is a natural law in pattern recognition governing the split between sensitivity and specificity in scenarios with uncertainty, though I don't know if it has a special name. Catching more edge cases in a poorly-defined group requires allowing the inclusion of more things that look a lot like edge cases, but cases on the edge of a group are by definition similar to things outside of the group. The more you want to eliminate false negatives the more likely you are to produce false positives.
Adversarial situations - any time humans are trying to trick your classifier, in other words - will always make the trade-off worse.
I know the companies are optimizing for other metrics where the inconvenience might be measurable but I think that's a failure of regulation then. The platform could be made liable like we do with copyright material, for example, and then like YouTube they would be incentived to accept a higher false positive rate and automatically filter repeat offenders out.
Is this true? I never see feature-length movies on YouTube for example.
This inhibits journalists or activists that may want to obscure their identity.
In the context of porn, perhaps the person uploading the video is the performer and does not want to attached their real ID to the performance.
In the case of trying to block a specific video, it could be even more effective, because as soon as that video gets uploaded, you can assume the 'new' person is the same person as the existing profile—it doesn't really matter if you're wrong because even if it's two people, you're trying to stop them both.
I'm not sure how this would in any way inhibit journalists or activists except that, they too, would not be able to upload the disallowed video to your site.
From my limited experience in this space (I moderate a tiny social app that has problems with bad actors), IP address blocking had high false positives and low false negatives.
But a false positive here just means someone can access the video who isn’t supposed to access it. Without the system in place anyone can access it.
I imagine the repeated uploads aren't by the ex, after the first one
I would be happy to see more of that (expanding 'recording' with 'posting'), but the law itself has certain protections against false positives, that we need to be careful about.
Original -> Upscale and Downscale.
Alter the frame sizes ie 4:3, 1080p, 4K
Encode all video formats in all video codex's.
Make stills for timelines which are likely to be interesting.
Use a variety of background filters like those seen in Zoom calls to obscure backgrounds and then use all the stills with and without backgrounds, and also alter the colouring/whitebalance.
Hash Stills and you will have loads of stills!
Train an AI to look for the stills allowing for colour changes like a slight filter to alter the colouring, or maybe do it in black and white.
When still is suspected, hash the AI found stills against known stills
Obviously different websites allow uploading of different formats/codexes which is a filter in itself and frame sizes
Because of editing, an AI needs to scan the film, when a still is found, make a copy and hash it to see if there is a match.
At least thats how I would do it.
I think you can spend too much time looking at other stuff AI & training data and sometimes its the background objects which are more important, like clothing, jewellery & furniture, but these new background filters seen on Zoom calls also makes it harder for the AI stills recognition.
Expensive in terms of cpu processing, but probably a better way to spend money than on human wages going through stuff/moderating.
We're not talking about a crime enforcement unit here. We're talking about access to a platform, which doesn't owe it to anyone to provide it in the first place.
You can take down 90% of content on Pornhub without any loss to anyone; adult models would gladly take a 1% false positive rate on new uploads vs. content getting rampantly stolen and shared without consent.
The solution to revenge porn might not be platforms, but platforms can easily make this problem an order of magnitude smaller.
That's to say, platforms can be the most significant part of the solution.
But Pornhub won't do that because it will cut profits.
Which is the real problem here. Pornhub is making $$$ off the victim of sexual assault. They will do just enough to pretend that they are fighting the problem, but not do the one thing that will actually end it.
Try to upload a video to pornhub right now. Go on.
(Perhaps next time do the tiniest amount of research before throwing around nonsense like this?)
This has been the case for over a year https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Pornh...
Also FWIW they also allow non-porn content. For example https://www.pornhub.com/view_video.php?viewkey=ph604a53bb0c9... And as you can see, it gets a plenty of views.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra...
The profit aspect is misguided as well - there are probably millions of porn sites out there and on 4chan there are probably hundreds of illegally, coerced images trading around for free by obsessed weirdos who will dox women just to feel closer to them. Pornhub likely makes most of it's money from the top 10-20 pornstars; the bottom 99% just represents a headache which is why they probably found it easy to ban non-verified porn.
I'm sympathetic to sex workers who should be allowed to make money from their work; but the very distribution of content over the internet exacerbates this problem whenever there is porn involved.
I've run into some of these revenge post people - and they would pay $10, and they'd do it every week.
Heck some service would crop up to pay someone in country X to upload to 10 different sites every week for $20 with bulletproof hosting and darknet distribution for $50 - and most of these revenge folks would pay that.
I get your sentiment, and I'm pretty sure phub has already cut into uploading in more ways than that already, and they have certainly lost money and traffic with the changes they voluntarily pushed out a while back.
They deleted way more than the non-knowledge uploads, and making it harder for sharing is giving the other tubes an advantage and growth (at their expense) the past so many moons.
No they wouldn't, because the upload would no longer be anon, and they'd be charged under a revenge porn law.
I've also unfortunately discovered that there are services that handle this kind of thing; using a stolen ID from a different country to do these things for you - trust me when I tell you that those who really want to bypass all the auths / payments / hashes - will find ways to do it again and again.
I've also tracked down some of these folks and was very plainly told that "the army of my country was not going to invade their country to harass them" for harassing someone here - and they were right.
After spending months putting together verifiable evidence to hand over to agencies in neighboring countries and countries abroad, zero people were arrested.
I did get one person's VPN account disabled once though!
They did return the next day using a new vpn service. So yeah, there are jerks out there that will spend $10 a week, or $50 a week to harass people, I've witnessed it many times.
Anyone you would catch doing something like this (using their own credit card and phone/computer) would already be caught with basic ip logs - no need to set all the extra hoops that make it harder for the average user, because those hoops are not stopping those who are extra shady in the first place. imho, ysmv.
Along with the quoted passage in the parent post, I think adding a couple more for TLDR will do justice in relaying much of the author's intended conveyance of sentiment/sorrows (note the original headline's mention of `moderation problems`):
```
When you work at a company that is doing well, that showers employees with generous pay and a sense of belonging, you become saturated with the sense that what you’re doing is right. Even as performers shouted from rooftops that we were destroying their livelihoods and people begged us to remove videos that showed them in their most intimate moments without consent, those negatively impacted [..] were shrugged off as an afterthought, unfortunate collateral damage to a great undertaking.
[..]
I’d like to think that if I hadn’t been “Nate-Tube8” for those two years, the women I tried to help perhaps wouldn’t have had an ally on the other side of the screen to help them regain their dignity. But maybe I’m just trying to convince myself I was the good guy, despite the fact I was tweeting to promote the company in between video takedowns.
```
It is not only the ex who keeps uploading again and again. Once videos get into the wild, you have all sorts of people/bots who do this, some just for the kinks, some for money / promoting the next pill/crypto whatever spam, some "fans" genuinely wouldn't know that the video was made without consent and that she is really high, There is so much "situational" or "incest" porn out there many cannot differentiate acting high and being actually high.
Also lines get blurry, how much of any actual porn (amateur or professional) is with real informed consent, do actors really know what they are getting into? . How many young OF streamers are doing it for small money and it will haunt them later in life ?
A ton of legal porn is exploitative too, we don't have solutions for any of this.
Money. That is why they get paid. We can debate how much and tell stories about porn stars who are stuck in bad contracts, but the systemic answer to exploitation is the exchange of money.
as
A slaver feeding their slaves is an answer to slavery.
Just because you get something in exchange, doesn't mean that there's no power imbalance, the exploitation doesn't exist, and the people with less power don't actually have few alternatives to survive.
If you're arguing for: "they should be paid more!" Because currently the pay is unfair and doesn't take into account potential long term damage, that's fair... But it's not a realistic solution (how do you unionize gig workers? Because at the end of the day, people on OF have more in common with the gig economy than with porn actors of yore)
The power asymmetry, physiological and emotional factors at play, the irreversibility of the action (the guys working you know that once they have a tape, you are quite easily manipulated), their gain and your potential damage exceed those in any legal industry.
Yeah, you are paid a hundred bucks and “money makes it legal”.
Here's the thing though, we do set a line after which you're legally given as much rope as you want to hang yourself with. I don't see how you fix the adverse outcomes without causing even worse failure in other areas.
Addendum: ah, and vastly different implications. Service in most countries is not associated with a stigma, is much more transparent, etc.
How many people getting a mortgage really know what they're getting into? A credit card? The people buying GME stock... do they really understand what's going on?
I don't really wish to argue your examples that all lead to financial ruin( arguably easier to reverse in life) is definitely worse than the social stigma and mental health damage the way revenge or commercial porn can have , there better examples you could have used[1]. However it doesn't matter if something else is just as worse or exists and also exploitative[2], that has no bearing on how porn should be better handled.
[1] Here is a better example for your whataboutism argument - informed medical consent , most patients are neither in a mental state to give informed consent nor they have subject matter expertise to do so. Decisions can be fatal or have irreversible impact on your life
[2] Non ETF investing definitely needs to be gated with some certification/ educational course on risks especially for derivatives trading, it should also cover crypto , we already have some gating for accredited investors, but this is not relevant for this discussion.
>...
> Here is a better example for your whataboutism argument ...
Not OP, but I think you might be over-analyzing their comment. I am interpreting their short comment as opening a thread of conversation on the notion of what "real informed consent" means, and adding other circumstances where an outsider would also reasonably expect informed consent, yet people find themselves in undesired circumstances. That's it, as that's all that's written.
"I have consent right here, the actor signed a literal release form."
"But that's not real, informed consent."
To improve informed consent say for trading[1], a basic training course required by SEC on risks and options would go long way for a lot of people to understand how derivatives work before allowing them to open account in Robinhood style apps, this could be even be extended for crypto and NFTs. It could be limits based rather than hard blocks. Schools could include such material to educate kids.
Speculating and losing money in today's gamified simple UX apps like Robinhood is attracting a ton of people who cannot afford to loose their money and don't really understand the basics of the market, it wasn't a problem when you had to go through a broker who would advise you a bit or use high end Bloomberg terminal . The next market correction/crash is going to be very painful for many people who cannot afford to loose that money.
[1] I don't know what would work for Porn, trading is lot easier to solve.
Online forums even here has made me jaded with these subtle what about it arguments you see constantly.
Most people, I'd say.
> getting a mortgage really know what they're getting into
Also most people, I'd say. It may not be the best choice for them if they had a magic omniscient oracle, but most people can understand the concept that they need to pay $XYZW/month for the next 25 years if they don't want to lose most of the value of their house.
Now, if your example was of 18-year olds with zero life experience suckered in by shitty colleges that promise the world, and deliver nothing but misery...
Another hard problem is user based tags. Many users are basically advertising. They post a clip of something and then say "for the full thing, go here". They then tag their video with as many tags as possible to spam the site.
Now a user comes by and searches for their favorite tag and the tag is filled with stuff that has nothing to do with that tag.
I've seen this issue on Soundcloud, Pornhub, XVideos, and others.
As it affects my favorite tags I often which I had the guts to make a pornhub clone, somehow make it popular, and basically ban/demote or in some way discourage anyone who tags things wrong.
I also think I wish pornhub had content id so that creators could somehow get compensated regardless of who posts their content. Something I see a lot is people posting collections of other people's content and asking for you to support them on patreon to post more collections of other people's content ?!??!?! People suck! >:(
Oh honey...
Have you ever seen spam advertising videos on the free porn sites?
A good chunk of the spam/advertising videos are cropped/edited/blurred/sharpened/what-have-you copies of copies of copies.
Most likely because their similar hashed copies get flagged.
You cant do that without big recording studio claiming copyright, its the Law!
I hope they implement something like this, to make detecting duplicates and blocking "revenge porn" much easier and to have regression against re-uploading.
Back when I practiced I had several clients come to me with the same story: My daughter is at home crying because she got drunk at a party and now there is a topless photo of her on facebook/youtube/email etc. We had the image taken down but it keeps popping back up in reverse-image searches. To these clients I offer two scenarios:
(1) Pamela Anderson's approach: Sue the internet. Bring lawsuits against every platform where you find the picture. Everyone in town will hear about this. It might make the news. You daughter will probably change schools. She will likely have to testify or record a statement describing the impact the sharing of these images have had on her. She will need to talk to the police at least once, perhaps many times. For the next several years her life will be interrupted by this issue again and again. It will define her life as a teenager.
(2) The "what's best for my daughter" approach: Only go after those incidents where her name is attached. I, your lawyer, send a note to the platform and they remove the image. If necessary we get the boy who took the picture to sign over copyright and I get the image added to the platform content management engines. It might be uploaded again it but won't be associated with your daughter's name. Your daughter never has to involve herself with this again. Unless she is trolling deep in amateur porn forums she will likely never see the image. It will be lost into the constant churn of a thousand other images uploaded every day. Net result: It will not define her life.
(Yes, this might well be an illegal image of an underage person, but enforcing that law isn't the responsibility of the victim or her family. Once it is reported to authorities the victim is under no obligation to hunt down copies all over the internet.)
IANAL, so I might be mistaken, but isn't the law in some places "if you see it, it is illegal for you not to report it"?
(EDIT: specifically when it comes to CSAM, that is)
But things can go very very wrong whenever kids talk to cops. The story they tell their parents might not be totally accurate. (ie it wasn't some boy. She in fact uploading the image herself.) Tell a false story to a cop and horrible situations can happen very quickly. Scenario B above avoids this by limiting police involvement.
It's not hard to imagine as you state, that the police is an unknown risk that it's best to avoid in these cases.
If you are a police officer, a medical professional, social worker, etc then you likely are a mandatory reporter[1] but other then those occupations... In some states IT workers are included in that as well but not all.
[1]https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubPDFs/manda.pdf
Make it the boy’s responsibility to hunt down the picture. He, after all, is the one who produced non-consensual underage material and knowingly distributed it. He can make sure stuff is taken care of or get registered as a sex offender and have to go to court where he might win, or not.
And I specifically started with ‘if it’s not done by him’.
I get that it's his responsibility because he caused the problem, but if I run over your dog because I wasn't driving carefully, it won't give me the ability to bring your dog back to life. Spilt milk is spilt. Call a professional.
The answer is to get the content removed from the internet. Who does it and how is an implementation detail. If he can't or won't then it's up to the judge to determine if he should be tried as a child & the justice system to make sure he's properly labelled for potential neighbors and employers protection. Producing and distributing that kind of revolting content isn't a crime most people look kindly upon.
> but if I run over your dog because I wasn't driving carefully, it won't give me the ability to bring your dog back to life.
That's, again, implementation details. If you can't bring it back to life then yeah, we'll go for reckless driving, damages and try to get your license revoked.
For example, I was told by a judge that just if I help my wife fill out an appeal form, or if a real estate agent explains about a sale contract, that could be considered practicing law without a license. Frankly, that judge seemed like he was either an idiot or corrupt/biased based on some other stuff he did too.
At long last! I've been waiting for your emergence!
ESP8266 and ESP32 and the like are pretty tiny and have wifi and BT and a shedload of GPIOs and whatnot available. At £2 or less retail a pop! A "monster" system involving a Pi Zero costs about £5 retail.
My toaster is clockwork based or me and a long fork and a open hearth. My fridge/freezer on the other hand has a wifi link. It is on the SEWER VLAN which is for those devices that scare me somewhat and has a rather limited view of the world.
IIRC, in the US, if you're a lawyer and someone "reasonably" believes you're giving them actual legal council, regardless of your intent, I'm pretty sure you're culpable (for lack of a better word).
But heaven forbid that we regulate porn even though it has been scientifically shown to have effects similar to meth in addictiveness in the brain, has caused erectile dysfunction diagnosis to explode, and has caused societal damage from changing the brain to view women as sex objects. It's not extremist to say, considering the above, it needs to be controlled and potentially even banned.
Also, the article is the story of a former porn moderator. Of course he would classify anyone opposed to the industry he worked in and anyone who wants to hold him accountable as extremist.
> The standard of what is harmful to minors may differ from the standard applied to adults. Harmful materials for minors include any communication consisting of nudity, sex or excretion that (i) appeals to the prurient interest of minors, (ii) is patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community with respect to what is suitable material for minors, (iii) and lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.
https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/citizens-guide-us-fede...
Is there really a documented causal link here?
Or, fair, if the thing being caused is the diagnoses then this is technically causal. :P
On the one hand, there's a person's privacy and individual rights, but on the other hand is also society's response which makes a bigger deal out of erotic and sexual material than it perhaps needs to be. It might be worthwhile to also fight this from the other side and try to re-educate society not to point the finger at people for having sex or appearing in nude imagery. After all, the concern seems mostly about the consequences to the lives of the people involved rather nudity itself, so why not also try to turn the whole concept into something more positive on a societal level and fight the victimisation and shame that way?
We could just accept that sex is normal and a video of you fucking isn’t different than a video of you playing golf.
There is no good reason it has to be this way, sex is one of the most normal activities one could be engaged in.
Perhaps we should assign some blame to the society around the victims?
What straw man are you referring to?
Perhaps we shouldn't be in quite such a hurry to discard centuries of tradition just because "gee, the internet makes it easy and anonymous..."
Among other things, involuntary porn is a massive violation of privacy. Maybe some individuals don't feel that this area needs to be private, but what matters is whether the _victim_ wants it to be private. If your solution is "the victims shouldn't make such a big deal of this", that's wishful thinking not a solution.
That’s a really twisted interpretation of what I wrote.
Rather, I believe that we should strongly condemn those who further victimize these people by voicing their puritanical views in any form.
Lets not pretend that this is some inherent part of human nature.
Everybody thinks muggings are wrong, and yet people are traumatized by muggings. People thing school shootings are wrong, yet they’re traumatic.
I suggest you go ask one for yourself if you don’t believe me, because frankly you don’t know what you’re talking about.
This is cultural, not something we’re inherently born with.
Muggings are inherently worse, someone taking your freedom and possessions under the threat of violence.
God, you're so, so close. I seriously urge you to go talk to somebody who's had revenge porn distributed of them, or go read an account of the personal violation they felt.
I cannot help you any more than that, it's your own journey to discover empathy and theory of mind.
To throw back your own example, topics such as rape, drug abuse and depression can be made discussable openly in society instead of keeping them hidden, shameful and isolating. It might also be good for young people to understand that what they do in private in the heat of the moment, might later on come back to haunt them, exactly by keeping the conversation going.
It seems to me people make a big deal out of it exactly because of society's overwhelmingly negative response, which is also something we could work on. In the case of rape, there is something going wrong between two people, but in the case of sexual imagery leaking, there's the added element of a voyeuristic society imposing moral judgement, the negative impact of public opinion, which is a problem beyond whatever happens between two people in their private lives.
Could you provide some evidence to support that claim?
I am claiming is that this isn’t an inherent part of human nature, and therefore we can do better.
If you are instead making a statement regarding current state of things, you’ve failed to read the comment you’re replying to
So now, and in the future, we need to punish the victimizers.
Content copying competitor aside, is this type of response even legal? It feels like another form of DDOS.
> Provisions addressed the distribution of malicious code and denial-of-service attacks.
found out
> After that, with my reputation tarnished, my fortunes at the company started to dwindle.
That seems wrong to me, but I'm interested in other people's responses. It doesn't seem like 'blowing it' at all. How many companies have problems with employees that are too motivated?
First, afaik, CEOs generally work to have open lines of communication with their lower level employees - the problem is people not paying attention, not communicating important information, or it getting filtered by the interests of layers in between. Second, Manwin can't be that big a company. It's not like emailing the CEO of Microsoft, who has >100,000 people working for them (and again, wouldn't Satya Nadella just say - 'hey, thanks for keeping a sharp eye out and for the heads up. It may look bad, but we've seen it many times before. I'm going to forward this to corporate communications, who can handle these things astutely.')
Maybe other companies are just different than the ones I've seen.
- Directly tell your subordinates to help you hide it. (Hint: Worst idea ever.)
- Select for people who hide everything, unconditionally, as a cultural norm.
https://independent.co.uk/money/amazon-underpaying-workers-e...
Fast forward 25+ years, his name popped up in the news as being arrested for some rather fucked up child-sex exploitation.
It did make me think how I could have contributed to potentially aiding this guy in his journey down the exploitation road so I'm quite content that I passed. I'd hate to know anything I built was used in that realm.
I am willing to bet that AI can detect similar videos even if 1 of the videos has a black box or is inverted or has some changes.
I always presumed that all video-sharing sites (including adult video sites) already had implemented such mechanisms. This would be really great for society in general, as this would prevent revenge-porn.
Is this already used? If not, why not?
It's likely they're already doing machine learning. Why wouldn't they? With what essentially boils down to content recommendation as a way to increase ad viewership targeting an audience likely to have short site visits, wildly different tastes and habits, and a constant influx of new users and new videos, they probably already fingerprint videos (and users) as a method to immediately link new users and new videos to an existing pattern maximizing ad revenue.
Another questionable method which might cut down on abusive/unlawful behavior would be shadowbanning offending uploaders once you have a reliable fingerprinting method. Upload a video that's close but not exactly matching a fingerprinted video? Thanks, here's the URL. Privately, we're not adding it to the index for anyone outside your subnet until someone can manually verify the two streams are unique. It's probably even possible to spoof the view count and other properties based on similarly fingerprinted clips, so only the people who make a living from aggressively reuploading are aware of the shadowban.
As a bonus, if such a fingerprinting/shadowbanning combo cuts down massively on casual/bot/opportunistic reuploading, the people who continue to modify the video _and_ audio stream enough to bypass the filter could be (just a theory) more likely to be malicious/abusive, and these are the people you definitely want to exclude from your community
I used to work in multiple of these websites, and helped on preparing the plan to hand over Spankwire and other "small tubes" to another company to drive them.