Live data from Hacker News

The porn industry is in a bind

Post reply on HN

Print view View original

151–160 of 168 posts

Re: The porn industry is in a bind

#151

Post by jenmcewen » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 3:08 PM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #72

jenmcewen wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's unethical. I love Android because it's open and am happy that Google kept it that way... to an extent. Some of the things they do are backhanded. For example, there's a strong campaign to condition users to only trust Google for apps. Downloading any third party APK from Chrome brings up a scary warning: https://v5j7s7h5.ssl.hwcdn.net/v2/mkstatic/chrome-warning.pn... If you do a mobile search for porn apps, half…

Thanks for the comprehensive reply! I'll look through those links tomorrow and may drop you a line. This is a political issue I care deeply about so I'd like to stay in touch.

absolutely. My email is jen@mikandi.com.

Re: The porn industry is in a bind

#152

Post by stonogo » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 3:51 PM UTC

vacri wrote: post #145

stonogo wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Strange, I remember going to linux conferences, of which the OLPC talks were heavily attended; competitions to win one were heavily patronised; colleagues going for the G1G1 program. There was a ton of interest in this low-cost, open-source laptop project. I remember the "for the children" argument for why they were partnering with Microsoft. The FLOSS community was pretty vocal in asking please don't do this, but OL…

And I remember being personally involved in the OLPC project, which was not driven by linux conferences. The G1G1 program was a massive albatross that generated almost nothing but bad PR. Nobody 'partnered with' Microsoft. The project never lacked developers (until it began to run aground due to the mismanagement).

I not only read the complaints, I made many of them myself. I disparaged noise on blogs as noise on blogs; the FLOSS community as a whole is fine but was not a major factor in the development of the project. This was not because they were unwilling; it was because the senior leadership made an executive decision not to engage with that community.

I understand that many people in the world confused OLPC's mission with that of free software. But the cold hard fact is that nobody really ever gave a shit about software licensing; the goal was to get computers to kids, and then try to set up a sustainable pedagogical practice around them. I'm not really interested in the completely tangential issue of whether you think Windows XP is sufficiently performant for this task -- the point is that FLOSS was never the point. It was an era where anyone's use of GNU software was considered to be some kind of philosophical statement on the validity of GNU, sure, but this was never the intention at the executive level. It was gratis software that was easy to customize. The decisions involved were primarily pragmatic. Any 'loud promises' you felt betrayed by are merely further examples of the wildly terrible expectations mismanagement perpetrated by the leadership.

I remember when the FLOSS community abandoned OLPC. It didn't make a damn bit of difference. But I'd be interested in which countries received Windows loadouts -- I don't recall ever seeing a single support issue regarding it, which makes me think you may be mistaken.

Re: The porn industry is in a bind

#153

Post by aninhumer » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 3:58 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #142

throwaway7767 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a great product, but of course, it'll likely offload most of the processing to "the cloud" so the manufacturer can spy on you and sell info on your sexual kinks to the highest bidder. Not that I'm cynical about tech or anything...

You're not cynical, you're being realistic...

I dunno, I feel like porn is one area where society in general really does care about their privacy. People who don't care about most tracking will still use private browsing to watch porn, and companies go to great lengths to highlight their discreet billing/packaging etc.

Re: The porn industry is in a bind

#154

Post by pmelendez » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 4:27 PM UTC

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…

> and now? When was the last time you installed a new OS on your smartphone? Your game console? Your VR device? Your smart watch? Etc?

I get your concern but I don't think the analogy holds up.

For instance, hacking a gaming console in the 80's is pretty much as hard as it is today, except that people who does this share it more efficiently.

Smartphones? You can jailbreak pretty much every platform and in some cases you don't even need to.

The thing that is changing in my opinion, is the easyness of access for locked-in software and digital content. For instance, I could spend an hour chasing an ebook and download it to my kindle. Or I can pay a few bucks to license the ebook in the Amazon Kindle Store in less than a minute.

Depending of the price tag I will be doing the second option most of the time, even if I don't control the copy. Just because I'm lazy ...

Re: The porn industry is in a bind

#155

Post by TeMPOraL » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 5:26 PM UTC

aninhumer wrote: post #153

TeMPOraL wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not cynical, you're being realistic...

I dunno, I feel like porn is one area where society in general really does care about their privacy. People who don't care about most tracking will still use private browsing to watch porn, and companies go to great lengths to highlight their discreet billing/packaging etc.

One doesn't really exclude the other. What you wrote is true, but people primarily care about not being discovered by people they know, and cloud is a go-to business model for people too lazy to invent something that's sustainable and actually beneficial to the user... Given how hard it is to monetize causal porn browsing, I wouldn't be surprised if some companies started giving in to the temptation...

Re: The porn industry is in a bind

#156

Post by gkya » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 7:47 PM UTC

stonogo wrote: post #133

gkya wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smart and funny girls can't have sex?

People generally don't in public. Also, historically, people have associated working in the pornography industry as an act of desperation.

generally

Desperate girls can't be smart and funny?

Re: The porn industry is in a bind

#157

Post by kwhitefoot » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 7:49 PM UTC

WildUtah wrote: post #103

TeMPOraL wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And all of this happening while many beat their chests demanding that programming be made a compulsory subject in public schools. What a sickening irony. Indeed. Also note how the typical curriculum offered by proponents is geared towards teaching people to create things that will be ad-supported or will be providing ads. I wish to know if there's a way to fight back somehow. Maybe not to reverse the trend, but to…

Senator Fritz Hollings (D-Disney) in 2001 introduced the SSSCA, the bill to take away all the pansy freedom of speech provisions of the DMCA and really lock down computers for the legitimate big business that should control programming. It was Hollings's 35th year as the junior senator from South Carolina and -- as chairman of the Commerce Committee -- he had really decided to crack down. The SSSCA as introduced woul…

> that business so famously unashamed that its own mascot is a rodent That's a line I'll remember!

Re: The porn industry is in a bind

#158

Post by imglorp » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 7:57 PM UTC

hoorayimhelping wrote: post #135

imglorp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the next big thing after VR will be sexbots, as in, per Philip K Dick, "your basic pleasure model." The pieces are almost all on the shelf and coming together. The hard part of course will be the software, with the motivation of making it an increasingly realistic companion. The Dark Matter series placed an interesting spin on it, where the "entertainment android", in addition to sex, is also specialized for…

I don't think so. Google Glass proved that tech, fashion and social cues are all deeply related. I think the same people who wore glass around in public and didn't get why people called them assholes would be the same people who buy sexbots and don't get why people call them perverts. A few dorks with calf-high white socks with birkenstocks would go nuts for them, and most of the rest of the world would look on with…

Yes, of course, this is dork territory.

The interesting thing here is that sexbots can come in both genders, which might mitigate the stigma. There are probably a lot more women with vibrators than men with various appliances, yet no one calls a woman a pervert for owning one. If it becomes common for women dorks to own sexbots, then the path might be clear for men dorks.

Re: The porn industry is in a bind

#159

Post by mahranch » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 8:27 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #123

mahranch wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

I don't see how that's relevant. If they're designed elsewhere, then who is going to be tweaking and re-purposing? The Chinese slave labor? Anyone who matters will be back in their home country, doing the work there. Anyone overseeing manufacturing operations in China literally doesn't matter from a design or innovation standpoint.

Re: The porn industry is in a bind

#160

Post by TeMPOraL » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 8:55 PM UTC

mahranch wrote: post #159

TeMPOraL wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. I don't see how that's relevant. If they're designed elsewhere, then who is going to be tweaking and re-purposing? The Chinese slave labor? Anyone who matters will be back in their home country, doing the work there. Anyone overseeing manufacturing operations in China literall…

Oh this is very relevant. You need to see things that are happening here in Shenzhen. Western companies may bankroll some interesting designs, but they are not innovative wrt. applying technology to life. Not compared to "the Chinese slave labor".

And honestly, who "matters" is a matter of a point of view. Big tech companies try to lock you in to maximize their profits out of devices they sell. Meanwhile in Shenzhen, nobody gives a fuck and you can get any permutation of electronics you can imagine for fraction of the western price, and it's often user-servicable. This is the place where actual innovation happens - selling overpriced gadgets that do 5% of features everyone saw in Star Trek 30 years ago is not innovation. I want to live in the world with more gongkai[0] and less attempts at locking people in unneccessary, wasteful, idiotic cloud platforms.

I want the Western tech giants to lose the war on general-purpose computing.

[0] - Check out the links at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10397138; you'll see where the innovation really happens.

Post reply on HN