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VPNs don't help here. https://panopticlick.eff.org https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29
According to panopticlick, Chrome is 100% secure in incognito mode.
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> Porn has always been leaders in technology. This is typically repeated but I question if there is actual proof of it rather than one of those '8 glasses of water a day' which just keeps getting passed along or some kind of plausible and believable anecdote.
I don't know about formal studies, but I've read many an article (insert appropriate "reading for the articles" joke here) talking about how demand for porn influenced early adoption of most new forms of media: printing, broadsheets, photos, different forms of film, and definitely computer video. (Here in Seattle I recall reading about some form of early adult film that shows up notably in local laws...some form of -…
Parroting the same about HD/Blu-ray is kind of hilarious though. Porn was deep into the streaming game long before blu-ray hit the scene.
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VPN protection from site-level tracking is basically nonexistent. Browser fingerprinting is widespread and bypasses anything a VPN might offer. VPN is effective against network-level issues, not against browser-based tracking - it's a different level in the stack.
Sounds like that's fairly easily solved by just using a different browser only for your porn habits. If you use FF for your normal web browsing, only use Chrome just for porn, etc.
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Values change wildly depending on where you are from. I am mostly talking about second and third generation atheists from Montréal and the surrounding region. The way of life is obliviously very different than what it would be in let's say, conservative southern USA. That being said, being open about sexuality brings openness. For example, I had a very long conversation with a woman from Haiti this last weekend. She…
I am not arguing the merits of openness, or whatever. But you don't need to travel all of the way to southern US to find that most people even in that age range aren't open about sharing their porn habits. Claiming there would be no consequences from sharing publicly is unrealistic at best and dishonest at worst.
Could you provide examples on where disclosing your sexual preferences could be hurtful or dangerous? I honestly cannot imagine any situation except some edge cases where illegal habits are involved. (E.g. a high school teacher that searches for pornography involving people roleplaying as minors.)
The only other situation that comes to my mind is people not out of the closet being found out and outed before being ready.
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I’ve met their head of data science. They’re doing all that stuff and have been for many years. Porn has always been leaders in technology. They were the first to embrace home video and can arguably be credited for VHS winning over BetaMax despite being inferior, because it was cheaper and all the porn was VHS only.
> Porn has always been leaders in technology. This is typically repeated but I question if there is actual proof of it rather than one of those '8 glasses of water a day' which just keeps getting passed along or some kind of plausible and believable anecdote.
Maybe a good moment to commemorate the infamous RedTubeGate from 2013 in Germany: A couple lawyers and fishy business men launch an ad campaign on RedTube. Through that advertisement they collected IP addresses of visitors. Before launching that campaign they allegedly bought the rights for three cheap porn flicks. Now they also claim that they have some miraculous software which allows them to track who has been wat…
Maybe a good moment to commemorate the infamous RedTubeGate from 2013 in Germany: A couple lawyers and fishy business men launch an ad campaign on RedTube. Through that advertisement they collected IP addresses of visitors. Before launching that campaign they allegedly bought the rights for three cheap porn flicks. Now they also claim that they have some miraculous software which allows them to track who has been wat…
But people obviously do. And get nailed by stuff like RedTubeGate, and the Ashley Madison leak. It's mind-boggling.
Edit: OK, so I get the "I love my porn, and you closed-minded idiots can just sod off". That's easy to say, when you live somewhere that porn is legal and ~accepted. But many who read HN aren't in such places. And they may not realize just how much they're not in such places. Until the come to a prosecutor's attention, and they're screwed.
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Funny related story! At Reddit we built a tool to create thumbnails for webpages. The algo was basically find the biggest “squareish” image and then remove a row or column of pixels. The row/col was chosen based on which one left the image with the most entropy. We kept doing this until the image was a square. That algo basically cuts off women’s heads and leaves just their cleavage. Obviously we had to adjust it to…
I thought that a face would contain more entropy than two flesh mounds! Color me surprised. Could the algorithm be tweaked to favor removable from the bottom part of the image, since humans generally perceive from top to bottom? Most images contain the 'meat' at the top or middle, I'd assume?
I don’t remember exactly how we fixed it but I think biasing towards the top was involved.
Looks like everyone - vulnerable population or not - should be using VPN when viewing pornographic content.[1] [1] https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2019/07/why-you-n...
I don't think a VPN is enough, it will mask your location but there are so many ways your browser can be fingerprinted so you would need to have fingerprint resistant browser profile, maybe with JS off is possible.
> Within our dataset of several hundred thousand visitors tested in the past 45 days, only one in 417.05 browsers have the same fingerprint as yours.
> Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys 8.7 bits of identifying information.
So yeah, pretty much all web privacy is broken by Javascript.
Mindgeek runs all of the biggest porn sites, and also runs its own ad network. Since the biggest of those sites are their "tube" sites, they run into the same issues as youtube when it comes to tracking individual tastes. Since the product is porn, which is very easily classifiable with a list of the physical features of actors (with maybe a few behavioral distinctions), the actors in the video, how they are matched…
Good thing those times are over.