Adult/Dating/Webcam Industry News

[Xbiz]

Friday China Porn Site Closure Round-up

If it's Friday, it must be time to list the number of porn site closures by the Chinese government! This week in Fun with Dicktatorial Censorship, we have the announcement by the country's State Internet Information Office that yet another 1,222 porn sites have been shuttered by the government. At least we think it's a different 1,222 from previous closures, but who really knows for sure. The mystery is a part of the fun.

What we do know (because we were told) is that the government itself reports of these recent closures, via Global Post, "The websites including some on medical treatment and health, were closed for providing videos or photographs of a pornographic nature, or linked to porn websites abroad."

The government also claims that about "2,200 pieces of text containing pornographic information have been deleted in the 'Cleaning the Web 2014' campaign," and though we're not quite sure what that means, the Internet Information Office says the campaign has been effective and that "more efforts will be taken to curb the spread of pornography on the Internet."

This recent campaign to scrub the web of porn and porn information text reportedly ends in November.

source - www.business.avn.com

[Xbiz]

Is Bing Really the King of Search Engine Porn?

Ever since it launched in 2009, Bing has been a very porn-friendly search engine, even though it was (and remains) dwarfed by Google in terms of the number of people using it and the number of adult sites that looked (and look) to it for traffic.

Via an OutOfTheLoop reddit from a few months ago that spawned a Daily Dot article from a few days ago, which further gave birth to a story on Bustle.com, a web conversation about the best search engine for porn has been revived, with an expected consensus in favor of the world's third most popular search engine, behind both Google and Yahoo. That fact alone was noted by Bustle writer Emma Cueto, who wrote, "Overall, between the search results, the video preview feature, and the fact that it seems to be way easier to turn off safe searching, Bing does seem to be better at bringing you porn. But really that’s not so surprising—it’s actually the sort of thing I’d expect from a search engine whose commercials strongly suggest Google-related daddy issues. No, the surprising thing is that Bing actually did beat Google at something. Who would have ever guessed it? I mean, I know that Bing is the world’s third most popular search engine and all, but since that still means they’re losing to Yahoo, that isn’t saying much.

"But when it comes to porn," she added, "they seem to be number one."

Over at the Daily Dot, writer EJ Dickson notes the inescapable irony that "In the era of Pornhub and Redtube, griping about having trouble finding free online porn is a bit like complaining about how difficult it is to find shrooms at a jam band concert."


One very popular destination that became a "veritable shrine to the Bing porn search" was reddit, where users posted  "informal paeans to the search engine’s virtues in r/AdviceAnimals and r/GIFS. Here’s a redditor imagining what life is like in the Bing offices (NSFW)."

Why does everyone say that Bing is great for porn?

“Google introduced filters a while ago that remove a lot of porn from search results, even if you have safe search turned off.”

“Going on Bing and video searching gets you the porn you want. No one cares about text or image searching, it’s all about the video searching.”

“Also since no one uses Bing, they will never see your previous/recommended searches.”

“I just assumed that if someone else checks my search history, they sure as hell aren’t going to check my Bing search history. They’ll check my Google one.”

Dickson comments, "Basically, the consensus seems to be that unlike Google, which requires you to type insanely specific keywords to get the kind of results you’re looking for, Bing’s video search immediately calls up a well-organized series of short links and related search terms along with your search results."



source -  business.avn.com

[Xbiz]

Is Apple Allowing Adult Content Into App Store via Russian Apps?

Talking New Media has posted a new article that details the extent to which "Apple has been approving magazine apps from Russian developers that clearly violate developer guidelines."


Apple, according to writer D.B. Hebbard, is knowingly allowing the Russian app developers to engage in deceptive practices via the apps, by allowing them to "promote the name of one magazine [while giving the reader] access to magazines under other names" after the app has been installed.


What Hebbard says is a trend on Apple's part began in 2012, when he began writing about the Russian apps. "The apps in question," he writes now, "were from Sergey Rudnev for magazines with odd names like Magazine Father and Magazine Gun and Magazine Pick Up.

During this time, Hebbard says he contacted Apple more than once about content that "appeared to be far more 'adult' than what Steve Jobs had allowed when he was alive," but never got a response.

Then, in September 2013, "TNM wrote for the first time about the apps from ANASTASIYA RUDNEVA. These were something else altogether.

"In a series of four apps, all released at once, the developer was offering what appeared to be different digital magazines, but were in fact the same app when opened," Hebbard continues. "Each opened to a page where the reader could access the Oh! Yeah! magazines, plus video content." [Emphasis added]

"Why was the App Store team approving these apps, and why, after being told what was going on was Apple keeping them in the store," wonders Hebbard. "A month later I wrote about the apps again, comparing what was seen in iTunes with what the reader actually gets once the app is downloaded."

But the story of the Russian apps in the App Store was not over. "Now comes the new apps from a fourth Russian (presumably) developer, and these apps seem to believe they have nothing to hide anymore, brazenly advertising their wares: 'Sexy girls photos and video. Watch and enjoy…' the app description says."

The revenue model for the new apps has evolved as well, according to Hebbard. "The way these newer apps work," he writes, "the reader buys 'Coins' from within the app. The reader buys a few hundred of these 'coins' and then can buy the video and magazine content within the app. Rather than a magazine costing $2.99, for instance, it costs 100 coins, videos cost 20 coins. The reader gets credit by buying 5,000 at a time for $39.99, or a smaller amount for $9.99. Apple, of course, facilitates the transaction and gets its 30 percent."


Time will tell if Apple's apparent sneakiness in trying to make a few bucks on adult fare Steve Jobs would surely have forbidden on his network will come back to bite it in the ass. But one group of people who will not look kindly upon Apple's "sexual development" are adult producers who currently play a cat-and-mouse game that involves a far less direct method of laundering traffic through innocuous apps, hoping to ultimately drive the eyeballs to hardcore destinations. The revelation that Russians have been provided a deceptive fast-track to Apple-blessed income from adult content is bound to irritate them.

source - http://business.avn.com/

[Xbiz]

Google Reportedly Targeting Porn-Destined Shortlinks for Deletion


Last week, ZDNet columnist Violet Blue tweeted her concern that Google was disabling goo.gl shortlinks for Naked Sword without warning, and asked if it was happening to anyone else. Bacchus at erosblog.com responded with an article that expressed dissatisfaction with URL shorteners in general, but which especially took Google to task for its longtime practice of "letting an automated algorithm declare certain link targets to be 'spam' and then disabling the shortened links to them," and more to point, for expressing its opinion that all porn is spam through its shortlink algorithms.



Yesterday, the Google shortlink story got another boost when Bacchus published an update on the situation in a post titled, The Google Shortlinks #Pornocalypse In Action, where he wrote, "Remember last week when I blogged about rumors that Google was disabling certain shortlinks built using the Goo.gl link shortener, if the link targets were porn sites? Well, thanks to a pair of tweets from Rain DeGrey attempting to share a photo from HardTied.com, right now you can see that that little chunk of the #pornocalypse in live action."

Two tweets about 15 minutes apart from yesterday afternoon include one containing a goo.gl shortlink supposedly to the Hardtied photo. The second tweet states, "Evidently Google could not deal with the awesomeness that is @DarlingBDSM and disabled the link to her shoot Fine." She also adds the full link to the site.

The HardTied shortlink was indeed disabled, and if clicked lead to a page with a message reading, "http://goo.gl/GzBYwo – this goo.gl shortlink has been disabled. It was found to be violating our Terms of Service. Click here and here for more information about our terms and policies respectively."


He adds in conclusion, "The modern state of Google’s anti-spam software: there’s a rule in there that assumes that porn and spam are the same thing. Don’t be evil? My ass."

What is disturbing about this situation is that whereas in the past, Google has defended its disabling of shortlinks when they were used inappropriately—say, in emails sent en mass to many hundreds of people—arguing that their terms and conditions are quite clear about their prohibited use as spam.


Source - http://business.avn.com

[Xbiz]

U.K. Porn Filters Censor 20% of Websites


The parental filters of U.K. ISPs are blocking 20 percent of the 100,000 most-visited websites on broadband and mobile phone, according to the Open Rights Group.

Even XBIZ.com apparently is being blocked by six U.K. ISPs, as seen by a new tool released by the group. So is SFW sister site XBIZNewswire.com.

The Open Rights Group embedded tool runs checks on all the major broadband and mobile filters of U.K. ISPs — 3, Andrews & Arnold, BT, Everything Everywhere, O2, Plusnet, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk, Virgin Media and Vodafone — and allows users to query which sites are blocked.

U.K. ISPs have automatically been imposing filters on new customers since the beginning of the year unless specifically asked not to do so. Existing customers are next in the new policy under Prime Minister David Cameron.

Open Rights Group officials said that the ISPs, in many cases, are blocking sites that are not harmful to children.

"Sometimes, they are blocked by mistake," the group said. Sometimes, they are blocked deliberately. For example, many blogs and forums are blocked by default."

The group, which released its findings today, said that the problem of over-blocking is not going away

"Different ISPs are blocking different sites and the result is that many people, from businesses to bloggers, are being affected because people can’t access their websites," the group said. "We've found that there is a lack of information about how to get sites unblocked."

Source - www.xbiz.com

[Xbiz]

US Airways Tweets Very Graphic Porn Image

Turns out companies really are people. News just broke that US Airways has done what so many humans do and sent out a tweet with porn attached to it. And similar to the way people tend to explain their own publicized porn tweets, the airline has a handy excuse.

According to the Baltimore Sun, "US Airways said the image was originally sent to the airline's account and US Airways tried to flag is as inappropriate.

The photo in question is a real doozy, and that's coming from AVN, a family friendly porn magazine. It's so graphic even we can't publish it, showing as it does a young lady on her back, legs over her head, with the nose of a 777 sticking into her vagina. Not a real 777, mind you, but a very nicely sized model of one, though too large by far to fit inside the entire shaft... er, fuselage. BuzzFeed has the graphic goods for those interested in exceptional in-flight entertainment.

It's sure to become a classic. "Although US Airways removed the tweet," reported the Sun, "the image has been posted throughout the Internet as a screen grab.

"The tweet that included the image," it added, "was directed at a Twitter user with the handle @ellerafter in response to her complaint about a delayed flight from Charlotte Douglas International Airport in North Carolina to Portland International Airport in Oregon."

Sticking with its story, an airline spokesperson issued a statement today that said, "Unfortunately the image was inadvertently included in a response to a customer. We immediately realized the error and removed our tweet. We deeply regret the mistake and we are currently reviewing our processes to prevent such errors in the future.”

source - www.business.avn.com

[Xbiz]

Global Traffic Said to Grow 3 Times in 4 Years


Global Internet traffic will grow nearly three times in the next four years due to an increase in Internet-enabled devices and better video streaming, according to a new report.

The CiscoVisual Networking IndexGlobal Forecast and Service Adoption for 2013 to 2018 said that the majority of IP traffic by 2018 will originate from mobile and portable devices other than personal computers.

Wi-Fi traffic will exceed wired traffic and high-definition video will generate more traffic than standard-definition video, the report said.

Global broadband speeds will reach 42 Mbps by 2018, up from 16 Mbps at the end of 2013.

The report said that in 2013, 33 percent of IP traffic originated with non-PC devices. But, by 2018, the non-PC share of IP traffic will grow to 57 percent. Wi-Fi and mobile-connected devices will generate 76 percent of traffic by 2018.

Wi-Fi will be 61 percent, and cellular will be 15 percent, the report said. Fixed traffic will be only 24 percent of total Internet traffic by 2018.

Gian Carlo Scalisi of adult mobile traffic specialist BitterStrawberry.com told XBIZ that for the majority of entertainment content the future is in mobile.

"The adult industry is no different," he told XBIZ. "The mobile is the most personal and interactive one, and the user 'addiction' to it will increase along with the technology development.

"The adult entrepreneurs need to follow the trends, predict and embrace the new technologies, in order to stay on top and evolve together with the market.


Source - http://xbiz.com

[Xbiz]

New Canadian Antispam Law Hits Violating Companies With $10M Fines


A new antispam law went into effect on Tuesday in Canada requiring email senders to verify that they have the recipient’s consent.

Regulators note that the rules apply to senders in the U.S. or anywhere else in the world who want to communicate with Canadians through email for any service or product — not just sexually explicit material.

The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission said that consent can come in two ways — implied or express. When it is implied, a company can assume consent if they have an existing documented relationship with the recipient.

With the new opt-in law, which will be phased in over three years, sending just one commercial email without permission could result in fines of up to $1 million (Canadian) for individuals and up to $10 million (Canadian) for companies.

After three years of implementation, the law will make it be possible for individuals and class-action groups to sue companies, organizations and directors for sending spam.

Source - http://xbiz.com

[Xbiz]

Russian SMS Trojan Pushing Porn App Hits United States


For the first time, researchers have detected an active SMS trojan in the United States. The malware program, Trojan-SMS.AndroidOS.FakeInst.ef, "dates back to February 2013 and was originally designed to operate in Russia," reports PCWorld.

"According to Kaspersky," adds InfoSecurity, "FakeInst disguises itself as an application for watching porn videos, and is capable of sending messages to premium-rate numbers. Once installed on the phone, the trojan can intercept incoming messages and then perform various actions, including steal messages, delete them or even respond to them.


"As well as sending unauthorized text messages that cost around $2 each," it continues, "the trojan can send an SMS from an infected device with a preset text to a number specified in a command and intercept incoming messages."

Kapersky Lab Expert Roman Unucheck, in a blog post today, also noted that "14 various versions of [FakeInst] have emerged," and includes in a post the names of all the countries that appear on the versions' "support list."

More problematically, Unucheck writes of the sophisticated malware:

* "FakeInst disguises itself as an application for watching porn videos. The application asks the user to agree to send a text message to purchase paid content. However, after sending the message the Trojan opens a free-access website."

* "In order to send the message, the Trojan decrypts a configuration file which contains all phone numbers and prefixes."

* "From this list, FakeInst selects the appropriate numbers and prefixes for the user’s mobile country code. For instance, for an MCC within the range 311-316 (which corresponds to the USA), the Trojan would send three messages to the number 97605, each costing about $2."

* "The Trojan also contacts its C&C server for further instructions. Of all the commands that it can receive and process, we’d like to highlight the ability to send a message with specific content to a number listed in the C&C command, and intercept incoming messages. The Trojan can do various things with incoming messages – steal all of them, delete them, or even respond to them."

He adds, "We believe that FakeInst was created by Russian-speaking cybercriminals. Firstly, its early versions were only designed to operate in Russia. Secondly, all its C&C servers are registered with and hosted at Russian providers.

“It appears that the cybercriminals have built up sufficient resources to expand their illegal business on a global scale,” Unuchek concluded.

Image: The geographical distribution of Trojan-SMS.AndroidOS.FakeInst.ef infections, courtesy of securelist.com.

source - www.business.avn.com

[Xbiz]

Report: Bad Bots on the Rise


Following a year-long study into the state of bot traffic, website security firm Incapsula found that "bot traffic went from consisting of 51 percent to 61.5 percent of all Internet traffic, a 10.5-percent increase," csoonline.com has reported. More worrisome, however, is the fact that data from the study indicates that thirty-one percent of the bots are malicious.

"For this story, a bot is a malicious mobile, social, porn, or spam robot that lives on the Internet and unsuspecting users’ devices," adds David Geer for CSO. "People errantly install mobile bots on smartphones as hidden elements of software bundles or free apps from third-party app stores. Since phone vendors do not authorize these downloads, users typically jailbreak or root their devices in order to enable a wider selection of free apps.

Geer explains the different types of bots in his article, Bad bots on the rise: A look at mobile, social, porn, and spam bots, but we are of course mostly interested in the porn bots, about which he writes, "Porn bots include chat room spammers and bots that pop up on adult websites. Chat room spammers crawl the Internet looking for chat forums that use technologies such as Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and web-based chat. Porn bots invade these sites, messaging offers of free adult images via links.

"Porn chat bots," he adds, "live on free adult websites where they pop up chat windows with pictures of attractive people saying, I see you are from [your town here]. I live in your area. Would you like to chat?' The chat bot determines the user’s location based on their IP address."

The whole point, explains security strategist Richard Henderson to Geer, is to lower an individual's defenses. "There’s some rudimentary intelligence in those bots, designed to build familiarity with the user to entice them to click to another porn site, which will require them to pay for premium content," he said.

It could be argued that the other types of malicious bots actually represent more danger to the unaware surfer that the porn bots do, but because the use bots are put to is ever-evolving and can always become more dangerous, all bots, writes Geer, "increase the impact of malware, and social engineering through the sheer number of people they can reach almost instantaneously.


For that and other reasons, another security expert approached by Geer, James Brown from JumpCloud, suggested that firms not be complacent about trying to deal with bots. "Enterprises should monitor network traffic for all uncharacteristic, unexpected, and suspicious network behavior," he told Geer. "In particular, traffic leaving servers for anomalous locations such as countries where the enterprise does not do business."


source - www.business.avn.com

[Xbiz]

ExoClick 'Big Data' Infographic Looks at World Cup Porn Traffic


 ExoClick has used its ability to analyze “big data” by releasing a lighthearted infographic that looks at the “World Cup 2014 vs. Porn.”

The analysis was culled from data that the company has been collecting before and during the tournament's group play rounds and quarter finals held between June 13 and July 5.

ExoClick said it examined adult traffic data from all of the countries playing in the football [soccer] championship and was able to pull out some fascinating and fun facts about the adult viewing habits of those countries during the build up to the World Cup final.

The categories include: “Porn views per capita” that examined each country’s adult traffic prior to the tournament; “Top five football addicts” — countries where porn traffic decreased during the games; “Half-time happiness," that gauged if porn traffic rose during breaks; “The top sites" watched during the World Cup;  and “USA becomes addicted to soccer" — showing porn consumption dropping as the games went on.


“We wanted to have some fun with our big data assets and so we selected a global event like the World Cup to demonstrate how useful big data can be,” said Benjamin Fonzé, CEO and founder.

He added, “The ExoClick network has access to a global network of traffic, which enabled us to have a pretty accurate figure of the habits of each countries porn viewing activities.”

The “World Cup 2014 vs. Porn” infographic can be seen here

Source - http://www.xbiz.com
http://www.exoclick.com

[Xbiz]

Texas Man Charged After Sending Dick Pic With Job Application


A Texas job-seeker made the unconventional decision Friday to include a photo of his penis with an application submitted to the Texas Workforce Solutions in Dallas. According to the Dallas Observer's Eric Nicolson, however, "TWS is not the proper launching point for your porn career; its bureaucrats aren't paid nearly enough to stare at your junk. And if the caseworker is anything like the 25-year-old worker at TWS' Alpha Road office who found a client's dick pic waiting in her email this morning alongside his job application, she will promptly call police, who will know from the personal email address who sent it and thus gets a ticket for 'obscene display or distribution.' That's a class C misdemeanor."

source - www.business.avn.com

[Xbiz]

Apple: Leaked 'Sex Tape' Scenario Not Possible on iCloud



While Hollywood’s comical take on the whole leaked porn tape scenario, titled “Sex Tape,” may rely on a surprising villain — a haywire iPad used by Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel to film a home blue movie — Apple says its product would never do such a thing in real life.

In the film, Diaz and Segel play unassuming couple Annie and Jay,  who decide to “spice things up” in their languishing marriage by shooting a homemade porno. But things turn from well and spicey to horribly awry when the iPad they use to record their sexcapade uploads the video to iCloud, and accidentally sends the video to all of their friends and family who they gave iPads to for Christmas — which even includes the mailman.

The concerned editorial staff at GQ contacted Apple headquarters to see if such a technological aberration could actually happen — and apparently it can’t.

“Videos can be backed up to iCloud, but what that means is the video would be saved as, like, a backup,” an AppleCare specialist told GC. “But you wouldn’t be able to share it with anyone. No one can go into the iCloud and watch the video.”

The Apple rep also pointed out that a video can’t accidentally be uploaded to the iCloud like it is in the zany romcom, explaining, “You would have to make special settings for anyone to be able to see that — like a shared stream.”



Source - http://www.xbiz.com

[Xbiz]

Japanese Woman Arrested for Selling 3D Printable Files of Her Vagina


A 42-year-old woman, Megumi Igarashi (AKA Rokudenashi-ko), was arrested today by Tokyo Metropolitan Police for allegedly selling and distributing 3D printable design files of her own vagina.

Ironically, a vagina activist of sorts, Igarashi said she was selling her 3D design files to raise money to make a life-size boat that looks like a vagina to sail around the world. Ultimately, she hoped her art would decrease the Japanese taboo and prejudice surrounding female genitalia, which baffles her.

“I cannot understand why the police recognize the 3D data as obscene material,” Igarashi told the Tokyo police.

“As an artist, I focus on my own vagina as the motif for my art,” Igarashi worte on her website (translated into English from the original Japanese). “My work is against discriminative/ignorant treatment of the vagina. I thought it was just funny to decorate my vagina and make it into a diorama, but I was very surprised to see how upset people got when they see my works or even hear me say the word Manko.”

The Japanese public remains divided on the issue of vaginal mainstreaming, with some condemning Igarashi and others demanding her release, including a group that has launched an online petition to have her released from custody. 

Source - http://www.xbiz.com

[Xbiz]

UK Begins World's First Experiment in Public Wi-Fi Censorship




The United Kingdom has begun what The Mirror is calling "the world’s first scheme to stop hardcore porn being accessed in public wi-fi area.More specifically, the article adds, "In November, The Mirror tested 129 free Wi-Fi hotspots around the country and found 32 of them did not block access to pornhub.com, a website where thousands of hardcore pornographic videos can be viewed for free."

As AVN reported at the time, The Mirror survey found that "Places where children could access the site through free Wi-Fi included Waterstones bookshops in Birmingham and Southampton, The Cardiff Story museum, the play area at the At-Bristol Science Centre, the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Coffee Republic and Esquires Coffee House in Doncaster and the Odeon cinema at the Liverpool One shopping centre."

As a result, beginning today, "Parents who see a 'Friendly Wi-Fi' sign in cafes, restaurants, hotels and museums will know their children cannot access explicit content," reported The Mirror, which proudly listed Tesco, Starbucks and Samsung as having signed up for the "scheme."

Source - http://business.avn.com