Monthly Archives: January 2011

Watching Porn Makes You Vulnerable To Web-based Attacks

Watching Porn Makes You Vulnerable To Web-based Attacks

The last fortnight has brought news that porn searches lead to around half of internet security threats and that a malware worm spreading through infected porn sites has managed to extort money from 2,500 web users. Studies conducted by Symantec (the company behind Norton anti-virus) and BitDefender (another internet security company) have revealed that searches for pornography account for 44% of web-based attacks and that 63 per cent of users attempting to access porn on their PCs compromised their security on multiple occasions. Also, a Russian ransom worm that locks people out of their files has been spreading in recent weeks using infected porn websites and has found at least 2,500 victims willing to pay up to get back control of their PCs. Read...

From Jekyll to Hyde: The grooming of male pornography consumers

Rebecca Whisnant has written this chapter for a new book on pornography entitled ‘Everyday Pornography’. It starts: “in contemporary mainstream pornography marketed to heterosexual men, hostile and humiliating acts against women are commonplace. Consumers of such pornography routinely see women treated in ways that most people would neither choose for themselves nor accept for those they care about. While some of these consumers may be sociopaths or utterly unregenerate misogynists, I assume that the majority are neither. Thus, many consumers must experience ethical qualms about at least some of the pornography they encounter and about themselves in so far as they enjoy such material. These qualms pose a threat to their continued enjoyment of pornography. Thus, if they are to continue . . ....

Ofcom misses the point

Four “adult” channels have had their licences revoked by the regulator Ofcom after criticisms of their content emerged. Over the past eighteen months the four channels, owned by Bang Channels Limited and Bang Media Limited, have broken broadcasting rules over 60 times. The channels have been found guilty of breaking rules intended to protect children by broadcasting “mature” content before the watershed. Some of this content was considered to be so extreme that it was on the same level as hardcore pornography, which cannot be broadcast on British TV. Ofcom said that it had acted to make it “quite clear how seriously Ofcom takes its duties in relation to the protection of television audiences and in particular children”. Obviously we should be glad that...

Blackberry to apply porn filter in Indonesia

Research In Motion Ltd. said it will filter Internet content on BlackBerrys in Indonesia “as soon as possible,” after a minister threatened to shut down Internet browsing on the smartphones if the company didn’t block websites that have pornography… …Setting up filters to block access to certain Web sites typically isn’t difficult. Indeed, most countries require ISPs to offer content filtering, said John Pescatore of research firm Gartner Inc. Research In Motion said it will apply Internet filtering on BlackBerrys in Indonesia to comply with a government demand to block websites containing pornography. WSJ’s Spencer Ante reports on Digits. But the process becomes more complex when it comes to corporate BlackBerry users. Corporate BlackBerry data traffic is heavily encrypted and routed through a BlackBerry...

Cambridge University Union Society to debate pornography

The society will debate the motion “This house believes that pornography does a good public service”. The debate will see British porn actor Johnny Anglais, porn director Anna Span, and Jessi Fischer, an American writer who calls herself ‘the Sexademic’ proposing the motion. Debating against them will be former porn actor Shelley Lubben, child psychologist Richard Woolfson, and sociologist Dr Gail Dines. Read more about it at Cambridge News and Cambridge First.

Porn Expo 2011

Last weekend was the Adult Entertainment Expo held in Las Vegas. Read about it here from CNBC and Gail Dines take on it in her article for the Guardian.

Internet porn is ruining your relationship: XXX marks the rot

BY Rachel Henes a social worker and youth violence prevention specialist who has been working within New York City public schools since 2005. “Boys have told me that from a very young age, they have been taught that for a ‘real’ man, sex is about the aggressive conquest of female bodies. These ideas are more socially sanctioned now than ever before.” Read the entire article on the NYDailyNews site here ‘While pornography has always been around, it exploded with the advent of the Internet. The days of accessing porn via forbidden magazines, pay-per-view movies or videotapes hidden behind bead curtains seem like ancient history. We increasingly take it for granted as part of the cultural background in our world; late night talk show hosts...

China shut over 60,000 porn websites in 2010

(Reuters) – China shut down more than 60,000 pornographic websites this year, netting almost 5,000 suspects in the process, a government spokesman said on Thursday, vowing no let-up in its campaign against material deemed obscene. Read the whole article here.