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The porn industry is in a bind

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Re: The porn industry is in a bind

#121

Post by lmm »

pandaman wrote: post #106
scintill76 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The PS3 does have a crypto key, but it was recovered by hackers because Sony reused nonces in ECDSA signatures: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/sci.crypt/3isJl28Slr... Apple's probably isn't susceptible, especially with the PS3 failure in recent memory.

I am not an Apple user but I cannot help but notice some kind of "jailbreak" business going on there. Could it, perhaps, involve breaching iPhone security in some way that could lead to loading arbitrary code with system privileged and even modyfing the OS itself? It sure looks this way from a cursory googling. It appears Apple had been and still is susceptible to various attacks. As is every other company.

It's never going to be impossible to access these devices (and I suspect Apple deliberately doesn't make it too hard). But every year it gets more expensive, riskier, and requires more specialised knowledge. Modern BluRay keys are already out of reach for a casual home user (speaking as someone who tried to play my own BluRays on Linux). Soon we'll be at the point where you need a cleanroom and an electron microscope to bypass protection.

Re: The porn industry is in a bind

#122

Post by ZenoArrow »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #23
mindcrime wrote: post #16

Forget about the porn for a minute gang... this is, to me, the key insight in the story: VR and its cousin, “augmented reality,” are controlled by the big corporations. Facebook owns the Oculus Rift. Microsoft built the Hololens. Google does Google Glass. These will treat porn at least like Android treats porn—or maybe even like Glass treated porn when O’Connell unveiled his app. In other words, they won’t allow it t…

Right this moment I'm sitting in an office in the place that represents our hope, a capital of continued progress[0] - Shenzhen, China. Everything Facebook, Google and Microsoft designs gets built here (or nearby) anyway. China has a... quite healthy attitude towards copyright and trade secrets. That is, they don't give a flying fuck here. There was even a term for that, that eludes me at the moment, which described…

> "There was even a term for that, that eludes me at the moment, which described the idea of "I share my specs today with you, you'll share your specs tomorrow with me"."

Shanzhai?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanzhai

Re: The porn industry is in a bind

#123

Post by TeMPOraL »

mahranch wrote: post #117
TeMPOraL wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right this moment I'm sitting in an office in the place that represents our hope, a capital of continued progress[0] - Shenzhen, China. Everything Facebook, Google and Microsoft designs gets built here (or nearby) anyway. China has a... quite healthy attitude towards copyright and trade secrets. That is, they don't give a flying fuck here. There was even a term for that, that eludes me at the moment, which described…

> Everything Facebook, Google and Microsoft designs gets built here (or nearby) anyway. I'm going to have to disagree here. The vast majority of stuff is designed or thought up elsewhere. Things might get assembled or manufactured in Shenzhen (it is after all, the manufacturing capital of the world) but the innovations aren't coming from China. In fact, China doesn't even rate that high on manufacturing innovation (t…

That's why I wrote 'built there', not 'designed there'. I meant the factory aspect - but it also means people here have access to those designs as well as tools and expertise to iterate on them, tweak them and repurpose them.

Re: The porn industry is in a bind

#124

Post by TeMPOraL »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #122
TeMPOraL wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right this moment I'm sitting in an office in the place that represents our hope, a capital of continued progress[0] - Shenzhen, China. Everything Facebook, Google and Microsoft designs gets built here (or nearby) anyway. China has a... quite healthy attitude towards copyright and trade secrets. That is, they don't give a flying fuck here. There was even a term for that, that eludes me at the moment, which described…

> "There was even a term for that, that eludes me at the moment, which described the idea of "I share my specs today with you, you'll share your specs tomorrow with me"." Shanzhai? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanzhai

I meant gongkai, which is to shanzhai as 'hacker' is to 'cracker'. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10397138.

Re: The porn industry is in a bind

#125

Post by petra »

jenmcewen wrote: post #64
onedev wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should do an AMA here in this thread about the industry! I'll start. What are some common misconceptions about the industry in general and what do you think about the accuracy of the article and how it paints the industry?

An AMA sounds fun. :) I think the article covered the misconceptions and the state of the industry pretty well. I think the biggest misconceptions are: 1. No one pays for porn, but we know they do. 2. Selling is a sure-fire way to make a ton of money. It's only sure-fire if you're going to use less than favorable tactics, as with any business. 3. Everyone in porn is a scammer. There are bad apples, but most folks in…

Jen, how do you think the virtual reality porn industry will look like?

Re: The porn industry is in a bind

#126

Post by ZenoArrow »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #124
ZenoArrow wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "There was even a term for that, that eludes me at the moment, which described the idea of "I share my specs today with you, you'll share your specs tomorrow with me"." Shanzhai? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanzhai

I meant gongkai , which is to shanzhai as 'hacker' is to 'cracker'. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10397138 .

Ah right, thanks.

Re: The porn industry is in a bind

#127

Post by TeMPOraL »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #111
mindcrime wrote: post #16

Forget about the porn for a minute gang... this is, to me, the key insight in the story: VR and its cousin, “augmented reality,” are controlled by the big corporations. Facebook owns the Oculus Rift. Microsoft built the Hololens. Google does Google Glass. These will treat porn at least like Android treats porn—or maybe even like Glass treated porn when O’Connell unveiled his app. In other words, they won’t allow it t…

>the point is, we, collectively, are losing control of our use of computing and technology. That assumes that "we collectively" were ever in control. The reality is that these breakthrough technologies, no matter what the century, took massive amounts of money and time to become adopted and by and large they were built by the bigs in some fashion - either through license deals or direct investment from IBM, US Govern…

Before the microcomputer most technologies were totally hackable and often buildable from scratch. Out of the things you had in the 60s, probably only TV could not be built in-house. Radios? Washing machines? Cars? All could be constructed by general population with various levels of effort. But what's more important, all those things were user-servicable, user-modifiable and it was a popular hobby to tinker with stuff.

Re: The porn industry is in a bind

#128

Post by TeMPOraL »

erikb wrote: post #104
mindcrime wrote: post #16

Forget about the porn for a minute gang... this is, to me, the key insight in the story: VR and its cousin, “augmented reality,” are controlled by the big corporations. Facebook owns the Oculus Rift. Microsoft built the Hololens. Google does Google Glass. These will treat porn at least like Android treats porn—or maybe even like Glass treated porn when O’Connell unveiled his app. In other words, they won’t allow it t…

But is losing control really that bad? Often we don't want control as much as we want to do more stuff. We don't have control about our food, but we are as fat as never before. We don't have control over what happens with our taxes, but still live for most people in the western world is stable, there are roads, public transport, doctors. I don't think people really want to keep control over their computers.

We want things that enable us to do more. Food designed by experts and good taxation financing a stable public service system empowers us to do more. So does control over tools we use. Also keep in mind that the reason we're talking about losign control is because greedy corporations are greedy. It's not a good reason to give up anything.

Re: The porn industry is in a bind

#129

Post by TeMPOraL »

rdancer wrote: post #115
TeMPOraL wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a comment posted here, that sadly got deleted. I think it raises an interesting topic. Let me reproduce it: --- > illusion of intimacy or a relationship Could that lead to sexrobots as a mass market in, say, five years? Or do you think it would go more into the VR direction? Could / should both be merged? Would that be useful? Perhaps AR would be better in that case. Thoughts on that? --- The response I tri…

VR headsets have been here since the 1990's, and nothing ever came of it, despite the tons of productions shots from the point of view of the male performer. Even 3D is extremely rare. Better fidelity and added depth perception do not bring better illusion of intimacy. It's a red herring.

True. However I don't recall any quality VR headsets available for reasonable prices before Oculus Rift though. There was something going on in the late 90s, but back then we didn't have PornHub.

Re: The porn industry is in a bind

#130

Post by stonogo »

vacri wrote: post #114
chinpokomon wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that OLPC has been crushed, it had never had a capitalistic mission. The shareholders back home aren't demanding a particular volume is met.

OLPC crushed itself. FLOSS fans were clamouring to develop for it, seeing it as a way to bring emerging minds into the OSS mindset. It created a lot of buzz. Then OLPC jumped into bed with Microsoft, and the FLOSS geeks were driven away, with no similar group of developers to replace them. OLPC made a massive miscalculation, and never regained the buzz they had back then.

Microsoft had nothing to do with OLPC's downfall. It had everything to do with failed project management, and at the highest levels, failed leadership. Expectations (on national levels) were not managed correctly, strange omissions in implementation (such as even rudimentary technical support) crippled uptake, and in the end participating nations had to work with volunteers to get anything done. The volunteer effort continues.

Eventually the organization was mismanaged into oblivion; there is currently some while-label vulture in possession of the commercial brand, and the non-profit arm has progressed rapidly into irrelevance.

As bad as things got (and are), OLPC never shipped a single machine running Windows -- if there are any out there, the participating school program installed it. As for FLOSS fans, mostly they made a lot of noise on blogs without ever having actually been involved with the program. If they had, they would have known that OLPC didn't spend a dime on Microsoft support; MS was allowed to send engineers to develop support within OpenFirmware for loading Windows, should the recipient nation desire it.

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