Tag: internet

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YouTube Hit by 'Porn Day'

In case you missed it, Wednesday, May 20 was "Porn Day." Though of course, every day is porn day in the adult business. But two mainstream websites "celebrated" by hitting YouTube with a barrage of porn clips. Article By Edward Duncan, AVN Business A group of users on image-based message board 4chan and multi-media content site eBaum's World staged the "porn day" prank and YouTube has been cleaning up the mess, though it seems some images still come up in searches, despite the actual videos being yanked. The uploads actually began on Tuesday afternoon, according to ArsTechnica. Many of the uploaded clips appeared legitimate at first, starting with non-porn content, such as news or an interview.

"It may take some time for video search results and thumbnail images to disappear from the site," Google spokesperson Scott Rubin told Ars, adding the takedowns would be finished within a couple of days.

The adult clips were uploaded without any warnings on them that they contained adult content, which is certainly not funny in the least to parents whose children might frequent YouTube as well as those simply not interested in porn viewing at all and no desire to stumble upon it. Additionally, because the thumbnails in searches were still appearing as of Thursday morning, it was a cause for concern among parents in particular, considering some of the search tags included kid topics or heroes like the Jonas Brothers. Another problem is such a reckless stunt can only reflect poorly on adult companies and the industry, which could be blamed, though the prank came out of the mainstream. This could undermine responsible industry efforts in conjunction with child-protection groups such as the Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection.

“It is upsetting when someone from outside the industry thinks it’s funny to expose everyone to content that is inappropriate for minors and to others who chose not to see. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was done by an anti-adult entertainment group just to discredit the adult industry which only produces content for and by adults,” ASACP CEO Joan Irvine told AVN.com.  “Many of the industry leaders support ASACP’s online child protection efforts as members and sponsors and over 2.2 million sites are labeled with the Restricted to Adults – RTA Website Label in order to help parents who use parental control systems.”

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Ending Affiliate Commissions

The newest Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox include a privacy feature that has a lot of webmasters concerned about losing their monthly affiliate commissions. "Private browsing" will prevent browsers from retaining browsing history, temporary Internet files, saved passwords, search history and — of greatest concern to webmasters — cookies. Cookies are used by most affiliate programs to track which affiliate referred a surfer, so when they are erased by the browsers, affiliates no longer will receive signup credit if the surfer joins a site at any point in the future. As a result, the existing business model will need to adapt — and pronto because IE 8 and Firefox 3.1 are already being downloaded to consumer-end users.

The purpose of private browsing is to prevent any information from being retained after the browser is closed — i.e. nothing is written to disk. Microsoft and Mozilla avidly promote that private browsing has many different use cases, such as researching a medical condition or shopping for a surprise birthday gift. But in actuality, there's only one major use case: porn surfing. In fact, tech bloggers already have dubbed the feature "porn mode."

Private browsing is not the default setting on any browser; users have to enable it by pressing a button or selecting it from a menu. When enabled, the browser launches a new session and copies all existing cookies into memory. Any new cookies acquired during the session are deleted when the session ends. This basically reduces all cookies to "session" cookies that expire when the user closes the browsing session. In terms of affiliate marketing, affiliates mostly will have to rely on users clicking on an affiliate link and signing up during the same browser session. If a user clicks on a link before beginning a private session and signs up during the session, the affiliate still will get credit. But if a user clicks on a link during a private session and signs up anytime afterward — for example, an hour later they open a new browser in either private or nonprivate mode, then sign up — the purchase won't be tracked. IE and Firefox are not the first browsers to introduce this feature. Apple's Safari has had the feature for some time, and Google's Chrome browser includes a similar "incognito" mode. However, with a combined market share of 80 percent, the new releases of IE and Firefox will make a huge impact as users really begin to adopt the new functionality. How fast will users adopt the new browser versions? Microsoft and Mozilla use auto-update mechanisms that are very effective. For comparison, looking back at the release of Internet Explorer 7 in October 2006, users updated at a rate of 1.2 million a day, reaching a 30 percent market share within five months. Assuming a similar trajectory, and also making the assumptions that one in three users will adopt private browsing while surfing porn and that 50 percent of purchases will be lost because of cookie deletion, we arrive at the following projections: By the end of 2009, affiliates around the world would lose 9.17 percent of their commissions. By the end of 2010, the loss would approach 12.5 percent.

 

So how will the affiliate-marketing model adapt to these changes? There are three potential fallouts: The first is simply a market solution. Affiliates will continue working with sponsors, knowing that a portion of their sales are continuously lost. This already is happening on a small scale as a result of users who have manually disabled cookies. Sponsors even might compensate for the loss by raising their payouts. The second possibility is that affiliates could pressure sponsors to convert to a publisher/advertiser model, which does not depend on cookies. Affiliates simply would get paid for ad impressions or clicks instead of actual signups. Many affiliates already are doing this with part of their ad inventory, and the trend could move considerably in this direction. This would complicate matters for many sponsors because the quality of clicks and impressions varies greatly, and sponsors would need to track their affiliates' performance constantly. A third possibility is for affiliates to persuade their users to adopt their own browsers. One site doing just that is xPeeps. By promoting its own xPeeps browser — powered by HeatSeek.com — the site is able to provide its users with the same privacy features they want, while retaining all the affiliate credit. The HeatSeek software allows users to surf in private but preserves all cookies normally across uses. The relationship also helps xPeeps to increase user retention because the xPeeps browser always starts on the xPeeps home page, thereby continuously turning visitors into return visitors.

Heatseek is a pornography focused browser that quietly launched. The point of this software is to make porn browsing more efficient and more secure. The browser is available on Windows machines only, and is built on top of Internet Explorer. They’ve clearly thought this through. Every feature is aimed at either making porn consumption easier or making it less likely that others will know what you are up to. I’ll walk through some of the features first and save my editorial for the end. On the security side: Credentials are needed just to open the browser. Downloaded files are encrypted and viewable only through Heatseek. They do their best to eliminate popups, spyware and viruses. Finally, they’ve even included a panic button to shut down the application immediately. On the ease-of-consumption side: Downloading of images and videos is assumed, and can be accomplished with a single click. As mentioned above, these files are encrypted and can only be opened within Heatseek. Downloaded files can be organized in, well, playlists, and can be dragged and dropped to reorganize. They’ve included a bookmark feature that allows users to quickly jump to their “favorite” scene.

Heatseek is also guaranteeing that their software contains no spyware.

The basic version of Heatseek is free, with a premium version available for a one time fee. The main feature of the premium version is that it allows the user to unencrypt downloaded files and move them directly to the hard drive for use in other browsers and media players. The premium version also allows users to access “special content”. The Heatseek team is making significant efforts to remain anonymous, although there is at least one tie to another browser startup - the Mozilla-based media browser Songbird. Rob Lord, the founder of Songbird, is also a shareholder and board member of Heatseek. A note to would-be users: Many employers  install monitoring software on computers that Heatseek will not bypass. A note to my fellow webmasters: Start promoting HeatSeek on your site and begin to require your affiliates to provide you with more better ways to ensure you won't lose sales. The best affiliate programs are those that allow users to sign-up for free using an email address. When sales occur from that email address you will always get credit regardless of cookies - as long as your guys maintains that email address you are all set ! You can also see where this article was ran on a April 6, 2009 Edition of XBIZ.com. Tole at Heatseek is the author of The End of Affiliate Commissions. I have supplemented this article with the Heatseek review which would not appear in the printed version made by XBix.

The End of Affiliate Commissions?

"Private browsing" will prevent browsers from retaining browsing history, temporary Internet files, saved passwords, search history and — of greatest concern to webmasters — cookies.

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Teenagers Make Porn Video

Ten teenagers from the Florida Keys were charged Wednesday with making child pornography after detectives confiscated a videotape of a 16-year-old runaway girl having sex with a 19-year-old man as another man is ''directing,'' according to the Monroe County Sheriff's Office. Seven other teens made comments about ''making a porn'' as they watched the taping for an hour, a detective's report said. ''This is not some minor kid's thing,'' Monroe County Sheriff Bob Peryam said. ``While it may seem like innocent fun to some, it's a horrible situation. These are felony offenses that can follow these teenagers for the rest of their lives.'' The case came to light when a 14-year-old runaway told a school resource officer that she was worried her friend -- the girl having sex on the tape -- had been raped. That triggered a Monroe County Sheriff's Office investigation and the arrest of the four adults and six juveniles. The girl having sex on the tape told investigators she had not been raped. The tape was still in the recorder when the mother of one of the participants gave it to the sheriff's office on March 23, a day after the videotaping took place in her home in Key Largo. ''I explained the allegations to her and told her how important it was for me to recover the tape as soon as possible to prevent its duplication,'' Detective Linda Mixon, who works in the Crimes Against Women and Children's Unit, wrote in her report. ``She was not aware of the tape but went into her son's room and retrieved his Canon video recorder and charger.'' Peryam said the charges would have been much more severe had the videotape been duplicated, distributed or put on the Internet. ''We don't know what the intent was,'' Peryam said. ``But bottom line is it's a crime for people that age to photograph and videotape themselves having sex. Then it becomes child pornography.'' The taping happened March 22, when a group of 10 friends -- seven boys and three girls age 13 to 19 -- gathered at the Key Largo apartment.   Read full story here

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Online Hookups Expose

Savage Love: Seeking sex online can be hazardous to your health. Looking into the murder of George Weber with composite photo gallery.Story By Dan Savage Tampa Creative Loafing - Photos: NY Daily News

I hope you address the recent rough-play-gone-bad death of New York City radio newsman George Weber. According to reports, it appears Weber met a guy on Craigslist for "violent sex," and the guy stabbed Weber to death. It's a reminder that if you have these kinds of fantasies -- Weber wanted to be bound and abused -- you're better off doing it with someone you trust and not with some random trick off the Internet. No one should wind up dead trying to fulfill a sexual desire.

Safety Conscious

First, I want to extend my sincerest condolences to George Weber's family and friends.

Second, reading about Weber's death reminded me of a joke -- this has to be the worst start to a second paragraph ever -- that Jon Stewart told on The Daily Show during the darkest days (er, years) of the insurgency in Iraq. Conservatives were complaining that a biased media wasn't reporting any of the good news in Iraq, nothing about all those freshly painted schoolrooms or, um, all those other freshly painted schoolrooms; the news out of Iraq then was all bloodletting, beheadings, and car bombs, all the time.

"Yeah," Stewart deadpanned. "We never hear about the cars that don't explode."

What happened to Weber was horrifying. And, yes, there are lessons in this horrific crime for anyone seeking sex and/or love online. But looking for sex online is not, as some have insisted in the wake of Weber's murder, so inherently risky a pursuit that only a lunatic would contemplate it. Remember: We never hear about the people hooking up online who don't get brutally murdered -- and unlike cars in Iraq that haven't exploded (yet), it's actually relevant that most people hooking up online aren't brutally murdered.

Every day, tens of thousands of people -- hundreds of thousands -- find partners online. While lots of folks online are seeking relationships at sites like Match.com or Christiansingles.com, there are more people online at any given moment seeking NSA sex at sites like AdultFriendFinder.com or Recon.com. If random Internet hookups were even half as dangerous as crimes like this make them seem -- if they were even one-one-hundredth as dangerous -- there would be a dozen online-hookup murders in New York City every day, and scores more in Toronto and San Francisco and Miami and Vancouver and Chicago.

No one should be cavalier about safety when it comes to Internet hookups, of course; people seeking NSA or fantasy-fulfillment sex online need to use common sense and take all reasonable precautions. Insist on a verifiable exchange of real names and real phone numbers before meeting; meet in person first, in a public place, preferably at a time when you can't mess around immediately after your first meeting. And people seeking the services of a pro should go to one of the dozen or more established Web sites out there that host ads from pros along with client reviews.

And it's always a bad idea to post an offer for $60 in exchange for sex to the crowd of fakes and freaks who have overrun Craigslist, as Weber is reported to have done. Meeting cheap whores via Craigslist ups your odds of hooking up with, say, a mentally unstable teenage "satanist" with a coke problem and a MySpace page packed with pictures of him wielding knives and swords.

Now perhaps Weber, working as a freelancer, couldn't afford the services of $200-an-hour professional dominant; maybe he had lowballed it on Craigslist a dozen times before and always had good experiences. Most people who ignore my advice about safety, or hook up with cheap CL hookers, do live to tell the tale. But when it comes to realizing a fantasy that involves violence or helplessness, someone safe, sane, and expensive is more than worth the investment.

Finally, people take calculated risks all the time for pleasures less essential than sex. You're assuming a certain degree of risk -- of injury, of death -- every time you get in a car, go skiing, or order the chicken. We do what we can to minimize those risks (buckle the fuck up, wear a helmet, don't order your chicken rare), but we don't hold up deaths on highways, slopes, or at the dinner table as evidence that people who even think of driving, skiing, or chickening have to be out of their minds.

The sad fact is that some of us will die at the hands of our intimate partners. Do what you can to minimize your risk of being murdered by a sex partner, because some people are dangerous lunatics -- and not just Internet hookups. Yes, George Weber took the wrong guy home, no question. So did Laci Peterson.

PHOTO GALLERY OF GEORGE WEBER MURDER

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Gay Chat Room Murder

A traffic stop in a small southwest Georgia town last week led to an arrest in the slaying of a 19-year-old man, bringing to an end an investigation of a relationship that started in a gay chat room. Lee Carl Banks III, also 19, is on his way back to Katy, Texas after an astute Grady County sheriff’s deputy stopped Banks on March 30 as he was driving the damaged Mitsubishi Eclipse of Spenser Vogt (photo) in Cairo, Ga. Vogt was later found dead in Texas, shot twice in the head and his body wrapped in a tarp and dumped. Police say the two men, who knew each other for less than a week prior to the killing, initially met in a gay chatroom. Banks was stopped early in the morning of March 30. As sheriff’s deputies questioned him, they later searched the car and found a .38-caliber handgun inside. Two days later, a Texas Ranger and a homicide detective were in Cairo to interview Banks, who then said the shooting was accidental.

[Sheriff’s Investigator Steve] Clark says Banks told the Texas officers he had met Vogt in an Internet chat room about a week before his disappearance, and the two had been out together the evening of Friday, Mar. 27. That night the couple went to Banks’ apartment, where Banks claims he accidentally shot Vogt in the head. Banks told the officers he then dumped the body in a ditch in southeast Houston. By Wednesday night, officers had found a body with multiple gunshot wounds to the head dumped and wrapped in a tarp in the area Banks described. Because the body had been there five days, authorities had to wait on a medical examiner’s report to positively identify it as Vogt.

On Monday, Banks appeared in a Grady County court, where he waived extradition. Authorities returned from Texas Tuesday to transport Banks back to the state. Coverage of the case in the Houston Chronicle has generated scores of comments.

That is so sad. Now is the killer really gay or just out searching for people to rob and kill? Death Penalty is in order and hopefully he’ll get it! Gay or not, this young man did not deserve this. I agree with SUEGAR who wrote “Was it really necessary to report that the two met in a gay chat room?” NO, it wasn’t. This was someone’s son.. I am sure they would give anything to have him back in their arms. Yes. It brings out all the anti-gay crowd to the boards. Now they can use this tragic event as ammunition to further their homophobic cause. Its the same reason they publish immigrant status, race, and religion to excite the opposite crowd. Have you ever noticed 300+ comments on an immigrant crime versus >20 on a regulat crime?

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E-Harmony Goes Gay

The adamantly heterosexual dating website, E-Harmony which has accepted only male-female couples since its inception in 2000, has launched a gay matchmaking service called Compatible Partners (www.compatiblepartners.net). The site officially opened on Monday. But E-Harmony's new relationship with the gay community is more like a shotgun wedding: The company agreed in November to start the dating service as part of a settlement with the New Jersey attorney general in the wake of a discrimination suit. As part of the settlement, Pasadena-based E-Harmony must make a "good-faith commitment" to promoting Compatible Partners. But the company seems as nervous as the groom at a rehearsal dinner, insisting that the only on-the-record interview be with Chief Executive Greg Waldorf. That interview was canceled when the company learned Warren had spoken with The LA Times. Dating site consultant Mark Brooks tells the LA Times that Compatible Partners will be watched closely. "This will be one of the most scrutinized products in Internet dating," said Brooks, who hasn't worked for E-Harmony. "They will have to introduce an A1 product." Brooks thinks Compatible Partners could be a winner. "Niche products are proving to be very effective," he said. "People are more likely to connect with a brand that serves it, specifically." It's not a comfortable fit for EHarmony's founder, Neil Clark Warren, who based the original service -- which requires applicants to fill out lengthy questionnaires -- on his own practice as a psychologist. "It's what I did for 40 years," said Warren, 74, who is retired but remains on the board. "I never had a gay couple." Warren is the former dean of the psychology graduate school at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. Much of the early promotion of EHarmony was done by well-known figures in the evangelical community, some of whom preach against gay rights. Even Warren is finding out that gay couples might not be so different after all. He and his wife are friends with a male couple they met in Maine, where they live most of the year.

"I asked them, 'Are you guys committed?' " Warren said, "and one said yes and the other said, 'I think so.' "And the first one said, 'You'd better be!' "

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THE HUNTING PARTY Manhunt

Gay In Gay Mag Takes Strong Stand Against Gay Sex Site

In the new issue of Out, Michael Joseph Gross takes on the thing that gay guys sort of refuse to but also can't stop talking about: the hookup site Manhunt. The website, founded in 2001, claims a million members, with 400,000 uniques a month—and a stupendously long time-per-visitor, on average, 40 minutes. (The New York Times would kill for that.) They get 30,000 new members a week, and that is a lot of horny gays. How do those numbers stack up in gayland?

Matt Foreman, former executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, notes with some awe that Manhunt's membership is "larger than the membership of every major gay political organization combined."Manhunt's annual income from memberships alone is roughly the same as the total amount of individual contributions to this country's two biggest gay political groups, the Human Rights Campaign and NGLTF. Foreman says, "If we could leverage their membership for activism, there's no limit to what we could do."

The problem is, no one wants to give money to those groups because they're (at least perceived as) wasteful and their politics and priorities are, in some ways, not shared. Or also—maybe gay guys are actually more interested in ass-fucking than marriage rights. And maybe they should be! So, but, and, as this article progresses—and it's a very interesting read—this weird, not-so-well-thought-out take on the whole thing comes through.

When you came out, you did it because you wanted something. Part of what you wanted was sex, but part of what you hoped for was the possibility of being loved as your true self. And when, as often happens while cruising online, we diminish the hopes that drew us out of the closet, we reduce sexy to a purely physical act.When we do these things we lie to ourselves -- and worse, we tell the same lies that our enemies tell about us. The fundamentalist canard about loving the sinner but hating the sin draws a nonsensical distinction between person and act. Cruising online, by encouraging us to separate sex from the rest of our lives, does exactly the same thing. These are falsehoods about human nature and about the place of love in our lives, and they undermine the belief that sex can be anything more than a pastime.

Okay hold the phone, pal. Yeah, there is such a thing as terrible junk food sex—and even worse crystal meth sex. And sure, spending all day in front of your computer, shopping for available guys is mindless, dehumanizing and a waste of time. But Gross is, how you say, not 20-something exactly, and this stuff isn't all necessarily true for people younger than him. (Or for some his age and older as well.) The kids today (damn kids!) don't see much difference between the community they run into on Manhunt and the community they run into in the local bars of Brooklyn, for instance, or on the street. Those are the same people, going the same places. And some of them are cheap sex partners, and some of them become boyfriends, and some of them are a community of friends. Hookup sex isn't a lie. It's not some betrayal of the self. This incredibly conservative view—he gets affirmation in the piece from Larry Kramer even, the original anti-hookup jeremiadist—is just silly. And he goes way over the top:

We still don't know how to have enduring relationships. We still don't have examples. We still don't have mentors. We still don't have courtship rituals. We are still getting HIV.

Uh, speak for yourself? And seriously, talk about needy! Who feels this desperate drive for someone to tell you how to live? The other thing about Manhunt is it brings together people who aren't part of this mythical community "we" that Gross thinks is so desperate for courtship ritual examples. Not every guy, on the Manhunt or off, is a West Hollywood and Chelsea gay looking for "role models," is not desperately looking for someone with better abs or a better credit rating. Not everyone even wants to even be a gay. Plenty of them just want to get fucked. And really, no matter how many times you do that, it still doesn't make you part of this little cultural club.

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Cybersocket Web Awards

At our annual awards show, the winners are announced and presented with a one of a kind Cybersocket trophy! The 9th Annual Cybersocket Web Awards will be held in Los Angeles, California in conjunction with the 2009 XBiz Hollywood Conference in February 2009.  Time and location TBD. Industry leaders, executives, porn stars, and celebrities from around the world will be out in full force to join Cybersocket in recognizing and rewarding our industry’s achievements.

Click here to View Gallery

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Facing NASDAQ Delisting, Gay.com Continues Liz Taylor-like Slow Death

Stock price and market cap may be the least of their problems, however. Last week, mutual fund Vanguard dumped all their remaining holdings in the company, and in July, they announced that they had accumulated a debt of nearly nearly $100 million.

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Live Dance Music ... Give Us A Try