That blog has a surreal intersection with the issues people talk about on HN.
Put aside the politics of pornography. She's a content creator trying to make a living, trying to have a reasoned discussion about how to make that happen.
But she can't get paid because we don't have easy, secure, anonymous payment systems, and her customers won't trust small time studios with credit card or personally identifying information because they don't want to get double charged by unscrupulous bastards or end up in a database.
So customers don't have a good way to pay her which means her work is inevitably going to get pirated more often than bought. At that point she wants the rational next best thing, which is to distribute her work for free to as many people as possible, because the only way to make money when only a small percentage of people pay is to grow your fan base so that it's a small percentage of many people. Which means that what she wants is a platform for community engagement -- something like BitTorrent and The Pirate Bay which is open to everyone and doesn't censor anything or divert your viewers to your direct competitors. But those platforms and their users are under attack by the aforementioned unscrupulous bastards and their extortionate "settlement letters" that push users to their own streaming sites.
So she writes a very reasoned explanation of this, only to have her entirely-not-inappropriate reasoned discussion blocked by overzealous corporate proxy servers.
Which can only lead to the conclusion that this content creator would be better off if the likes of Bitcoin, BitTorrent and Tor were more widely used.
Yet people keep saying that stuff is only useful to criminals.
So she writes a very reasoned explanation of this, only to have her entirely-not-inappropriate reasoned discussion blocked by overzealous corporate proxy servers.
To be fair, I did see an ad for a Fleshlight product when I visited the page.
The ad and the nature of the site is obviously the reason the page is blocked. But the page is still blocked.
If you mean to argue that this isn't a false positive, I disagree. It's just an extraordinarily hard false positive to avoid. The post and the ad shown contain no pornography but they're about pornography and other content from the same source might. None of the filters are that granular.
And that's the problem. Nobody's boss has any justifiable reason to allow their employees to read HN but not the post in question, but the burden of false positives doesn't fall predominantly on the company with the filter or even its employees. It's a negative externality that harms the author of the blocked content even though she has no ability to fix the filter.
So filters with false positives are a bug and anti-filtering proxies like Tor are the patch. Which is why everyone benefits when they're more widely deployed.
Just a heads-up, this appears to be _related_ to NSFW content. I say "appears to be" because I got a nasty "you're trying to access some sketchy domain and your admin has been notified" warning when accessing this through my work computer. Nothing in the title or URL seems to suggest this so I figured I'd share share in case anyone else may have a similar setup.
Ahh I see, so it's just our filter being a bit overzealous. Hope whoever looks at my "infraction" inspects the actual URL, and doesn't just do a simple "what is this domain for, oh a porn star" check :)
I work for a great company and I'm happy with my job. They also happen to censor my internet (very mildly, I should add). In fact, there are plenty of sectors where all viable positions would include internet blacklisting. And finally, plenty of people can't be so picky about their jobs to make litmus tests out of relatively minor factors like this.
So your company blocks "non-work" sites, but somehow allows Tor?
I'm reasonably certain that, even if I installed Tor at home to get around the site blocking, that the traffic would never make it through the proxy. Also likely is a call from security about wtf I'm doing.
How would you go about blocking Tor? The point of it is that anyone can access the Internet freely from anywhere, even if you are in Iran or China. Or behind a FascistFirewall, as Tor's config nicely puts it. I'm not sure whether it was a to-do or whether they succeeded in making it look like any https traffic, but it's not trivially blockable, not based on IPs of Tor nodes nor based on port.
> Also likely is a call from security about wtf I'm doing.
I wonder how "security" catches onto you. It's not legal (here anyway) to monitor every employees' Internet usage all the time. Investigating based on alerts may be, but what would trigger the alert in the first place?
Pretty simple where I work. First, they block all ports (including tcp 80 and tcp 443) from going out the firewall to the Internet. Second, they make you access web sites via a proxy server. Third, that proxy server uses software from a company called Blue Coat that strips out the actual site's SSL certificate and replaces it with its own that all of our workstations have been configured to trust. Fourth, it then stores all your SSL traffic in unencrypted form.
I work at a bank, but this is an extremely common scenario at all kinds of U.S. based companies. I make sure to not use any personal HTTPS sites while I'm at work for this reason.
>I wonder how "security" catches onto you. It's not legal (here anyway) to monitor every employees' Internet usage all the time. Investigating based on alerts may be, but what would trigger the alert in the first place?
Well, as the other poster said already, in the US it is very much legal to monitor your employee's internet. As long as they're "on the clock", and/or using company resources, you can monitor them. I know for a fact that my company's proxy / firewall superbox does on the fly MitM attacks on HTTPS connections. Even though I'm connected over HTTPS right now, they're going to crack this POST open and inspect the contents, potentially even logging it, before sending it on its way.
As far as how they would know about Tor, you're possibly right. They might not... to be honest I've never inspected exactly how Tor gets around the Great Firewall. However, I'm totally not risking it, as I'm 100% sure that intentional, willful bypassing of their security system in that matter is grounds for immediate termination. Maybe they don't notice it at all, maybe they can MitM Tor too, or maybe they notice via abnormal logs coming from my MAC. Either way, it's totally not worth it to me and since I have to use their hardware and their pipe, there are no guarantees anyway.
> I wonder how "security" catches onto you. It's not legal (here anyway) to monitor every employees' Internet usage all the time. Investigating based on alerts may be, but what would trigger the alert in the first place?
I don't know where "here" is, but in the US it is definitely legal to monitor everything you do on company resources.
"Here" is the Netherlands. For example installing a camera to monitor employee's screens or their movements the whole day is illegal because that invades their privacy. They are your employees, not your slaves. If you are unhappy with the amount of work they perform in a given amount of time or for a certain amount of money, tell them so.
On the other hand, if things are being stolen or suspected of being stolen from the supply room, hanging up a camera at the entrance is surely a reasonable measure. A judge would have no issues with that security measure. It's all about reasonableness.
IIRC the only US regulation on this is that in the state of Connecticut you can't install cameras in places that are solely for employee recreation, like bathrooms or break/lunch rooms. Otherwise, anything goes, pretty much.
This was an interesting read. It is pretty crazy, and easy to parallel to something like Youtube, how the Manwin empire is built on linking to work that someone else produced and using the ad money to buy the creators of that work out. I wonder if Manwin makes an effort to keep content that Manwin-owned properties put behind a paywall off of the tube sites.
If this works out for Stoya like it did for Louie, you should see work from new/upcoming artists coming from her studio soon after the business method is validated.
Porn and comedy. Really the same, when you get down to it.
That isn't wrong, but a bit oversimplified.
The difference between streaming and Torrents is that it's easy to get hold of the IP addresses of Torrent users but
difficult for streamers[1].
The situation is special in Germany because:
1. It is possible go get the name and postal addresses if
you have the IP address. The lawyer just asserts
infringement and the prosecutor will hand it over.
2. Legal fees for cease and desist letters are based on the
amount in controversy and to be paid by the addressee.
No lawsuit will be filed, just a cease and desist letter sent with a fictitious amount. People will pay out of fear,
it's border line extortion.
As far as I can tell, Torrents are dead in Germany.
[1] Assuming the copyright holders don't cooperate with the streaming services.
You are mistaken. In many countries an explicit, legal line is drawn between uploading and downloading copyrighted material, and some allow downloading because otherwise clicking on a link might already incriminate you. What k___ is saying is that it's the illegal upload part that moves people away from torrent.
In many countries an explicit, legal line is drawn
between uploading and downloading copyrighted material,
Not true in Germany, as far as I know.
Nach aktuellem Urheberrecht stellen sowohl Download als
auch Upload eine Urheberrechtsverletzung dar und sind
als solche prinzipiell auch strafbar. [1]
My translation:
Under the current copyright law both download
as well as upload are copyright infringement and
as such, in principle, punishable.
and some allow downloading because otherwise clicking
on a link might already incriminate you.
In Germany it does.
The most prominent case, so far, was when in 2013 the law firm Urmann + Collegen sent a large number of cease and desist letters to people that
used a popular adult video portal. They obtained the IP addresses
from ads they allegedly published themselves. This was major news in Germany.
The reason it doesn't happen more often is that going against Torrent users
is much easier and less risky for the law firm. Urmann + Collegen went bankrupt in 2014 from the fall out of this case, but this is the exception.
I don't have a number for 2013,
but in 2011 the mentioned law firm alone sent 70000 cease and desist letters amounting 90 million Euro.
What k___ is saying is that it's the illegal upload part that moves
people away from torrent.
I understood, but that's not relevant for Germany.
Even if it was true it wouldn't matter, because the two points I mentioned
give the cease and desist lawyers (Abmahnanwälte) a much easier way to go
against downloaders.
That's correct for the technical side. As far as I understand the legal side works like this:
The lawyer files charges against a person or persons unknown.
A judge decides about the request for information according to
§ 101 UrhG[1] (Anspruch auf Auskunft). With this document the
lawyer can obtain the name, address and other data from the
provider. The lawyer sends the cease and desist letter, people pay (usually) and the legal case is dismissed.
I agree with the sentiment. Charging for pirated content is among the worst things someone can do. It’s also why I was at least a little bit glad when the megaupload/rapidshare sites were taken down. There may be an argument to be made about traffic costs and the like, but that doesn’t legitimize anything.
Nevertheless, the real issue here is that those services exist because there is demand for them and the "legitimate suppliers" don’t seem to feel a need to attend it. As Valve’s founder put it "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem".
Is there any service out there with Netflix-level breadth of the titles available? Is there any service out there that let‘s you watch without having your name associated to "adult videos" in various databases? Is there anywhere people can turn to when still underage? Is there anywhere people can go to for getting the latest "fappening" leaks?
Hence piracy.
Yes, some of those reasons may be questionable or outright wrong, but given that the situation is what it is, why not try to at least make the best out of it and settle for some youtube-like service/agreement where the content creators will get at least some share of he profits and at least some control over the contents can be retained?
The argument about torrents vs "tubes" however seems pretty irrelevant. If you want HQ videos, don’t mind the wait and have plenty of storage available then torrents are likely the better choice. If you need something right now, don’t have much bandwith or storage and don’t care much for quality, a steaming service might work well enough for you. That there exist some unscrupulous streaming service providers is no different from torrents containing malware or torrent-indexing/tracking-sites/communities engaging in similar behavior as streaming services.
> Long term crew members have found themselves replaced by inexperienced people willing to do their jobs for lower pay. The quality of videos made under these conditions tends to suffer.
Do people care that much about video quality in porn? Hopefully the people gone can use their experience and go to higher payed industries.
Well, I mean, the video depictions are the whole point. Videography is a huge part of porn, and when you've seen enough (cough) you can definitely tell the difference between when the person behind the camera knows what they're doing and when they don't.
Like what? I mean, the problem that people with expertise are being replaced by people without it but who will work for less is not a phenomenon unique to this industry, in the first place (look at the rise of services like MyGengo or Mechanical Turk or TaskRabbit or or or), and, besides that, if a whole industry's worth of filming people are suddenly unemployed how can the other industries (which are presumably already well-staffed) really absorb them all?
"people with expertise are being replaced by people without it"
Worth noting that the replacements presumably lack expertise initially but inevitably improve along the way. Being paid to learn isn't all bad and is better than occurs for many trades.
Yeah but it's an ever-rotating parade of amateurs and since the road to advancement is gone they don't stick around to build up the expertise. When I was young you'd walk into a place selling hi-fi stereo equipment and the guy there had worked in the field for decades and had some appreciable knowledge of it. Does the guy at Best Buy do that?
Best buy will never pay more than a few dollars above the minimum wage, thus best buy has decided that the guy behind that counter will be pulled from the lowest acceptable pool of candidates. I'm sure stores that have knowledgeable people for that type of thing still exist, you just have to pay more for that service. Myself, Ill just read the reviews on Amazon.
> Best buy will never pay more than a few dollars above the minimum wage, thus best buy has decided that the guy behind that counter will be pulled from the lowest acceptable pool of candidates. I'm sure stores that have knowledgeable people for that type of thing still exist, you just have to pay more for that service.
And so this brings us back to my initial contention. Yes. That's true. The problem is that this sort of "good enough" stuff makes being an expert an untenable position and those stores are pretty much just gone, even if you are willing to pay (the pool of customers who are is too small to support it).
There’s probably a lot more than what is obvious here.
Compare a modern clip to something that was made in the 70/80s. I guess it does take some skill to not end up with 2 bodies just lying atop each other and properly cutting away the boring/disgusting stuff while still maintaining some "flow".
And there’s lots and lots of competition .. so differentiating on quality might still be worthwhile, despite it possibly not being the most important factor.
I care, how much depends on the price and the cost, but video is the entire point of 99% of porn (audio porn is supposed to be hot and literotica has a lot of porn, including things even the Japanese haven't figured out).
I care about production too, and acting quality, and setting. All things I feel a bit out of touch for caring about.
Audio porn is hot, and often quite a lot more intimate than video porn (if you're not a 100% visual person). And gonewildaudio (for audio) and literotica (for stories) are both communities where creators share their work for free, and explore settings and characters off the ... ahem... beaten track.
We're limbically wired for vision, but if you can get past your inner homo-erectus, then there's a lot of goodness in that 1%.
I checked the index to see what topics she typically covers and found a story which I thought was well-written (NSFW for prudish workplaces; no inappropriate images though) -
Put aside the politics of pornography. She's a content creator trying to make a living, trying to have a reasoned discussion about how to make that happen.
But she can't get paid because we don't have easy, secure, anonymous payment systems, and her customers won't trust small time studios with credit card or personally identifying information because they don't want to get double charged by unscrupulous bastards or end up in a database.
So customers don't have a good way to pay her which means her work is inevitably going to get pirated more often than bought. At that point she wants the rational next best thing, which is to distribute her work for free to as many people as possible, because the only way to make money when only a small percentage of people pay is to grow your fan base so that it's a small percentage of many people. Which means that what she wants is a platform for community engagement -- something like BitTorrent and The Pirate Bay which is open to everyone and doesn't censor anything or divert your viewers to your direct competitors. But those platforms and their users are under attack by the aforementioned unscrupulous bastards and their extortionate "settlement letters" that push users to their own streaming sites.
So she writes a very reasoned explanation of this, only to have her entirely-not-inappropriate reasoned discussion blocked by overzealous corporate proxy servers.
Which can only lead to the conclusion that this content creator would be better off if the likes of Bitcoin, BitTorrent and Tor were more widely used.
Yet people keep saying that stuff is only useful to criminals.