Internet Porn Censorship

BangBros explained in a statement on the now defunct pornWikileaks.com website:

In the current world we live in, as we all know, once it's on the internet, it's forever. For too long, this site has unfortunately been a resource for hate, lies, and sensitive information. Many of us have had our real names online for the world to see. Over 15,000 performers real names were listed here. Some had phone numbers, addresses, even family members names posted as well. That type of information wasn't voluntarily submitted. It was stolen from anyone that had it posted.

BangBros had enough. We have purchased this site with the intention of shutting it down and removing all information associated with it. There's no catch. No hidden thing to getting your personal stuff off of it. We simply didn't want it out there for the world to see anymore. Yes, it's that easy. While shutting this site down doesn't purge the internet of all possible ties to real names and what not, it does make it one less place to harbor and find these things easily. A forum that had 300,000 posts on it, most of them negative and hate-filled, has now disappeared.

If you had anything ever posted on here, it will be removed and deleted forever from here. As well as BangBros nows owns the domain. Nothing will ever be up here besides this page that you see now. So you don't have to worry about it coming back either.

This industry has weathered a lot and at the end of the day we rely on each other more than we think. Sure, we all have competitors-BangBros has plenty in itself. But making enemies doesn't make us a stronger company. Treating others well and innovating does. So our innovation this week, while not groundbreaking, hopes to make the internet a little bit better for all of us involved.

Pornhub, the premiere online destination for adult entertainment, today announced the launch of its Dirtiest Porn Ever campaign to help clean the world's dirtiest beaches and to raise awareness around the growing pollution problem. As part of the campaign, Pornhub is debuting a video starring Leolulu, one of the internet's most popular amateur couples, shot at one of the world's dirtiest beaches. Each time someone watches the video in its entirety, Pornhub will make a donation to Ocean Polymers, a nonprofit that has developed a solution to collect and process plastic waste in the world's ocean and seas.

To showcase how plastic and waste can ruin an otherwise beautiful scene, the Dirtiest Porn Ever video features amateur couple Leolulu having sex on the beach amidst mountains of litter that are obstructing the view of the couple's naughty bits. After a few minutes, a cleaning crew will begin to clean up the beach, slowly revealing Leo and Lulu in all of their naked glory.

To bring the Dirtiest Porn Ever campaign to life, Pornhub worked to create the video and a landing page which features tips on what people can do to help. Additionally, the campaign encourages other porn stars and amateurs from around the world to shoot similar scenes, in an effort to inspire change within their own fanbases.

For more information on the Dirtiest Porn Ever campaign, to view the video and for tips on what you can do to help clean our oceans, please visit www.dirtiestporn.com

In 2007, the pornography website Pornhub averaged 1 million visits per day. By 2018 this had increased to 92 million visits per day -- or 33.5 billion views over the course of a year.

As an interdisciplinary group of sexademics, we're interested in porn's cultural role and impact. A common question we hear is whether this growth in porn consumption is good or bad for society.

Of course, the honest-but-unsatisfying answer is: It depends. But sometimes studying various aspects of porn consumption can change the way we think about it.

You might have heard, for example, that porn fuels misogynistic attitudes and sexual violence.

If this were the case, you would think that people who consumed a lot of porn would hold particularly negative views towards women.

So we decided to study a group of men whom we've dubbed porn superfans -- those who are so enthusiastic about porn that they'll attend the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas. We wanted to compare their attitudes about gender equality to those of everyday Americans. Profiling the superfans

Our study was inspired, in part, by the journalists and politicians who have said that porn consumption is at epidemic levels -- so much so that it constitutes a public health crisis. They write and speak of the perils of porn addiction and objectification, how porn encourages hatred of women and sexual toxicity.

Would this play out in the results of our study?

The 294 expo attendees we surveyed certainly differed from the general population in a number of ways.

Their average age was 44 years old. Almost half -- 47.3% -- indicated that they watched porn less than once a day, but more than once a week. Over one-third -- 36.1% - indicated they watch porn every day. In other words, over 80% of the attendees in our sample watched porn multiple times a week. Only 34.1% of them were married, but they were highly educated: 60.5% had a college degree or higher. A scene from the 2017 AVN Adult Entertainment Expo at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. Paul Maginn, Author provided

We compared these results to the results from the General Social Survey, a nationally representative survey conducted every couple of years that charts social trends.

This survey only asks whether people have seen an X-rated movie in the last year, and 37.6% of the men indicated that they had. Just over half of the men in the General Social Survey sample were married, while just 28.7% of them had a college degree or higher. Misogyny unmasked?

But we were most interested in comparing the gender attitudes of each group. So we asked the expo attendees the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with four statements from the General Social Survey:

• A working mother can establish just as warm and secure a relationship with her children as a mother who does not work.

• Most men are better suited emotionally for politics than are most women.

• It is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.

• Because of past discrimination, employers should make special efforts to hire and promote qualified women.

After parsing the results, we discovered that male porn superfans actually expressed more progressive attitudes towards gender equality on two of the questions. For two others, they indicated just as progressive -- or, said another way, just as sexist -- attitudes as the general population.

Over 90% of porn superfans -- compared to just over 70% of the GSS sample -- agreed that working mothers can have just as warm and secure relationships with their children than non-working mothers.

For the statement that men and women should hold traditional gender roles within a family, 80% of porn superfans disagreed. Nationally, 73% percent of respondents disagree with this statement.

A similar proportion -- 80% -- of AVN Expo attendees and General Social Survey respondents disagreed with the statement that men, rather than women, were more emotionally suited for politics.

Although a majority of porn superfans and General Social Survey respondents -- 72.4% and 74.5%, respectively -- agreed that women, due to past discrimination, should get special preference in the workplace, this was the least supported statement we tested. Notably, however, this level of support is higher than a recent national poll indicating that 65% of Americans support affirmative action for women. Porn crisis or moral panic?

These findings challenge what porn scholars call the negative effects paradigm, which sees porn as an inherently bad thing that cultivates harmful attitudes.

Our survey isn't the only one that upends this way of thinking. A 2016 study based on General Social Survey data found that male porn consumers held more egalitarian views on women in position of power, women working outside the home, and abortion than those who didn't view porn.

And while most porn is produced and consumed by men, a growing number of women -- straight and LGBTQ -- are producing porn and consuming different genres of porn, a trend that's largely been ignored.

For now, it's probably best to pump the brakes on the idea that pornography causes negative attitudes toward women. The evidence just isn't there, and much of today's rhetoric about pornography seems to be more of a moral panic than public health crisis.

New Zealand's Children's Minister Tracey Martin has been calling for ideas to modernise internet censorship laws to protect kids from porn.

So the country's Chief Censor David Shanks has been on the campaign trail seeking to grab some of those powers to censor internet porn.

Shank's made an interesting pitch when invited on to the AM Show on breakfast TV. Speaking of ideas for porn censorship he noted:

Tracey Martin says all options are on the table. There are ethical dilemmas involved in cutting the supply, however. Are we going to become like China, in terms of state-imposed restrictions? And who decides where the limits to those are? These are difficult questions.

He said he once stood in front of a room full of people at a conference and outlined a scenario and said:

'I'm the chief censor. Imagine I've got a box with a button on it - a big red button - and if I push that button, I've terminated all access to pornography for everyone in this country. Should I push the button?'

There was a stunned silence from the room, then someone said, 'Who gets to decide what pornography is?' I said, 'I am! I'm the Chief Censor.' But I think that highlights some of the issues underpinning these questions.

No one in the audience urged him to push the button.

A working party has been set up to investigate what can be done, involving the Office of Film and Literature Classification leads the group, and other agencies involved are Netsafe, the Ministry of Health, Internal Affairs, the Ministry for Women, the Ministry of Social Development, ACC and the Ministry of Education.

An adult website that specializes in hentai porn left a database unsecured that exposed the details of about 1.2 million users.

It was vpnMentor's researchers who discovered the issue with Luscious.net. While the breach is now closed, hackers could have accessed users' personal email addresses, their usernames, blog posts, followers, uploads, likes, and locations.

While around 20% of luscious accounts use fake emails, that still leaves a large number of genuine addresses exposed. Some users included their legal names as part of their emails, which makes them prime targets for criminals.

The database had been exposed since at least August 4 until it was closed on August 19. While there is no evidence of it being accessed by hackers, users should beware of phishing attempts, or extortion.. As a security measure, members are being advised to change their Luscious usernames and associated email address.

Pornhub is pulling out all the stops for its prestigious Pornhub Awards ceremony set for 11th October. The event will be hosted by superstar Asa Akira and will feature a musical performance by Bad Bunny.

As the world's leading adult entertainment site we are proud to be working with the most artistic and libidinous talent in the industry. The Pornhub Awards will highlight their talents and the winners will be decided by actual data from Pornhub.com!

We have more than 10M videos and over 120M daily visitors who will be the ones determining our winners. We made history last year with our first ever awards show and this year's 2nd Annual Pornhub Awards has even more to look forward to!

This year's Second Annual Pornhub Awards will be held on Friday October 11, 2019 at the magnificent Orpheum Theatre in Downtown Los Angeles. The 2019 Pornhub Awards will be unique, fun and will undeniably go down as the sexiest and most trendsetting awards show in recent history. This kind of event is truly unprecedented and is sure to make a huge mark in both mainstream and adult media!

ICO's Data Protection Training The Pavlov Method
☑	Yes I won't read this message. and yes you can do what the fuck you like with my porn browsing data
☑	Yes please do, I waiver all my GDPR rights
☑	Yes I won't read this message. and yes, feel free to blackmail me
☑	Yes you can do anything you like 'to make my viewing experience better'
☑	Yes, no need to ask, I'll tick anything

With callous disregard for the safety of porn users, negligent lawmakers devised an age verification scheme with no effective protection of porn users' identity and porn browsing history.

The Government considered that GDPR requirements, where internet users are trainer to blindly tick a box to give consent to the internet companies doing what the fuck they like with your data. Now internet users are well conditioned like Pavlov's dog to tick the hundreds of tick boxes they are presented with daily. And of course nobody ever reads what they are consenting to, life's too short.

After a while the government realised that the total lack of data protection for porn users may actually prevent their scheme form getting off the ground, as porn users simply would refuse to get age verified. This would result in bankrupt AV companies and perverse disinsentives for porn websites. Those that implement AV would then experience a devastating drop off in traffic and those that refuse age verification would be advantaged.

So the government commissioned a voluntary kitemark scheme for AV companies to try and demonstrate to auditors that they keep porn identity and browsing history safely. But really the government couldn't let go of its own surveillance requirements to keep the browsing history of porn users. Eventually some AV companies won the right to have a scheme that did not log people's browsing history, but most still do maintain a log (justified as 'fraud protection' in the BBFC kitemark scheme description).

well Now it appears that those that try to avoid the dangers of AV via VPNs may be not s safe as they would hope. The Henry Jackson Society has been researching the VPN industry and has found that 30% of VPNs are owned by Chinese companies that have direct data paths to the Chinese government.

Surely this will have extreme security issues as privately porn using people could then be set up for blackmail or pressure from the Chinese authorities.

The government needs to put an end to the current AV scheme and go back to the drawing board. It needs to try again, this time with absolute legal requirements to immediately delete porn users identity data and to totally ban the retention of browsing logs.

Anyway, the Henry Jackson Society explains its latest revelations:

Chinese spies could exploit Government's new porn laws to gather compromising material on businessmen, civil servants and public figures, say think tanks.

They say Chinese firms have quietly cornered the market in technology that enables people to access porn sites without having to register their personal details with age verification firms or buy an age ID card in a newsagent.

The new law require those accessing porn sites to prove they are 18 but the checks and registration can be by-passed by signing up to a Virtual Private Network (VPNs). These anonymise the location of a computer by routing its traffic through a server based at remote locations.

It has now emerged through an investigation by security experts that many of the VPNs are secretly controlled by Chinese owned firms -- as many as 30% of the networks worldwide.

It means that a VPN users' viewing habits and data can not only be legally requested by the Chinese Government under its lax privacy laws but the VPNs could themselves also be state-controlled, according to the Adam Smith Institute and Henry Jackson Society.

Sam Armstrong, spokesman for the Henry Jackson Society, said:

A list of billions of late-night website visits of civil servants, diplomats, and politicians could -- in the wrong hands -- amount to the largest-ever kompromat file compiled on British individuals.

Those in sensitive jobs are precisely the types of individuals who would seek to use a VPN to circumvent the trip to the newsagent to buy a porn pass.

Yet, the opaque ownership of these VPNs by Chinese firms means there is a real likelihood any browsing going through them could fall into the hands of Chinese intelligence.

ICO's Data Protection Training The Pavlov Method
☑	Yes I won't read this message. and yes you can do what the fuck you like with my porn browsing data
☑	Yes please do, I waiver all my GDPR rights
☑	Yes I won't read this message. and yes, feel free to blackmail me
☑	Yes you can do anything you like 'to make my viewing experience better'
☑	Yes, no need to ask, I'll tick anything

Digital Minister Margot James has apologised for the six-month delay on the so-called porn block, which had been due to take effect today (16th July). It is designed to force pornography websites to verify users are over 18.

But the law has been delayed twice - most recently because the UK government failed to properly notify European regulators. James told the BBC:

I'm extremely sorry that there has been a delay. I know it sounds incompetent. Mistakes do happen, and I'm terribly sorry that it happened in such an important area,

Of course the fundamental mistake is that the incompetent lawmakers cared only about 'protecting the children' and gave bugger all consideration to the resulting endangerment of the adults visiting porn sites.

It took the government months, but it finally started to dawn on them that perhaps they should do something to protect the identity data that they are forcing porn users to hand over that can then be pinned to their porn browsing history. They probably still didn't care about porn users but perhaps realised that the scheme would not get of the ground if it proved so toxic that no one would ever sign up for age verification at all.

Well as a belated after thought the government, BBFC and ICO went away to dream up a few standards that perhaps the age verifiers ought to be sticking to try and ensure that data is being kept safe.

So then the whole law ended up as a bag of worms. The authorities now realise that there should be level of data protection, but unfortunately this is not actually backed up by the law that was actually passed. So now the data protection standards suggested by the government/BBFC/ICO are only voluntary and there remains nothing in law to require the data actually be kept safe. And there is no recourse against anyone who ends up exploiting people's data.

The Open Rights Group have just written an open letter to the government to ask that government to change their flawed law and actually require that porn users' data is kept properly safe:

The Rt Hon Jeremy Wright QC MP Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport

Re: BBFC Age Verification Privacy Certification Scheme

Dear Secretary of State,

We write to ask you to legislate without delay to place a statutory requirement on the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) to make their privacy certification scheme for age verification providers mandatory. Legislation is also needed to grant the BBFC powers to require compliance reports and penalise non-compliant providers.

As presently constituted, the BBFC certification scheme will be a disaster. Our analysis report, attached, shows that rather than setting out objective privacy safeguards to which companies must adhere, the scheme allows companies to set their own rules and then demonstrate that these are being followed. There are no penalties for providers which sign up to the standard and then fail to meet its requirements.

The broadly-drafted, voluntary scheme encourages a race to the bottom on privacy protection. It provides no consistent guarantees for consumers about how their personal data will be safeguarded and puts millions of British citizens at serious risk of fraud, blackmail or devastating sexual exposure.

The BBFC standard was only published in April. Some age verification providers have admitted that they are not ready. Others have stated that for commercial reasons they will not engage with the scheme. This means that the bureaucratic delay to age verification's roll-out can now be turned to advantage. The Government needs to use this delay to introduce legislation, or at the least issue guidance under section 27 of the Digital Economy Act 2017, that will ensure the privacy and security of online users is protected.

We welcome the opportunity to bring this issue to your attention and await your response.

Yours sincerely,

Jim Killock Executive Director Open Rights Group

The implementation of teh UK's new pron censorship regime was recently delayed by 6 months due not not filing the details with the EU as required by European law. Well the BBFC censorship rules have now been duly filed.

The EU websites note that they were filed on 1st July 2019 and there is now a period for people to comment up until 2nd October 2019.

When announcing the delay censorship minister Jeremy Wright noted that at the end of this period another month or so may required to respond to comments.

The EU website noted above provides for comments but maybe only MEPs and the like can hold of the process by asking questions or making comments. Or perhaps any European can comment.