FINDING PORNOGRAPHY

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Perhaps in a backhanded attempt to shut down file sharing networks, several U.S. government officials have focused on the fact that file sharing networks can be used to distribute pornography (as if cable TV, printed magazines, and the government’s own post office can’t also be used to distribute pornography).

U.S. Rep. Joe Pitts (R-PA) actually introduced the Protecting Children from Peer-to-Peer Pornography Act (HR 2885) in 2003 to keep pornography off file sharing networks. But before trying to slap government controls on legally evasive file sharing networks, Pitts might want to start by legislating search engines, webcams, and websites, all of which offer free porn to anyone who can find it.

FINDING PORNOGRAPHY WITH SEARCH ENGINES

Perhaps the simplest way to find pornographic pictures on the Internet is to ask for them using an image search engine, such as Google’s image search (http://www.images.google.com). By searching for the word porn with Google’s filter turned off (click Advanced Image Search and choose the No Filtering option under SafeSearch), you can find hundreds of pornographic images (see Figure 14-1). Add your own words after porn to fine-tune your search to your own fetish. Although Google can’t serve up sound or video, it’s fast, free, and accurate.

Figure 14-1: Google turns up plenty of free pornographic images if you turn on its No Filtering option.

To find more pornographic images for free, visit AltaVista Image Search (http://www.altavista.com/image), Excite Image Search (http://www.excite.co.uk/search/image), or Lycos Multimedia Search (http://multimedia.lycos.com) and turn off their parental controls so you can access pornographic images.

Visit any search engine, such as Yahoo!, and type in words like sex, xxx, or porn, and you’ll find plenty of adult-oriented websites to satisfy your carnal desire. Most adult websites offer free samples, but if you want access to a variety of pictures, you’ll have to sign up with a credit card.

For voyeurs, type in the words upskirting, downblousing, or voyeur in your favorite search engine to find websites that offer pictures taken from underneath a woman’s skirt, down a woman’s blouse, or in shower rooms in public gyms. (With cameras shrinking in size and even embedded in cell phones, it’s easy for strangers to sneak pictures of unsuspecting men and women in public places and then post the compromising images on a website.)

In case you prefer video to static images, type adult webcams in your favorite search engine, and browse through the list of adult-oriented webcam sites that offer continuous, unedited video of naked people posing in front of a webcam. (If you have a webcam attached to your own computer, you can often share your own captured video of yourself with others.)

Perhaps video and static images don’t excite your libido as much as your own imagination. In that case, type in the phrase cybersex chat rooms and browse through the list of adult-oriented chat rooms where you can chat about any particular sexual fetish you might desire. (Just remember that cybersex chatting can lose its appeal real fast if you’re a slow typist prone to frequent misspellings.)

Type the phrase naked celebrities into a search engine, and you can browse through websites that offer real (and faked) video and photographs of celebrities having sex, including video of Pamela Anderson having sex with Tommy Lee, Paris Hilton having sex with her boyfriend, and early photographs of Dr. Laura Schlessinger posing nude.

With so much free pornography available, how does the porn industry avoid the piracy that’s rampant with music and videos? Basically, they don’t, but instead of suing individuals who trade copyrighted porn pictures and videos, the porn companies sue the pirates who make money copying and reselling the porn industry’s products.

To make money from individuals, the porn industry takes advantage of the fact that horny people don’t have much patience. As a result, people are willing to pay for reliability, something rarely found when scrounging the Internet for free porn. If you search the file sharing networks and find a porn video called Sex Bomb, you could download the whole thing before realizing that its video quality is shoddy, or that it’s actually a completely different movie than what you expected.

Successful porn sites combine quality and reliability with convenience so customers know exactly what they’re getting. Click a few buttons on an inexpensive pay porn site and you can look for anything ranging from blonde cheerleader pictures, gay black male videos, or interactive webcam sessions with a Russian amputee.

“Free is very anarchistic and hard to deal with,” one successful pornography entrepreneur told the New York Times. “You don’t know what you’re getting. Cheap is more convenient.” Their strategy seems to be working. Nielsen/NetRatings says about 35 million people visited porn sites in December 2003.

Other porn publishers use file sharing networks as a promotional tool. When award-winning porn publisher Jules Jordan saw yet another of his DVDs ripped and swapped on the Internet, he began placing his website’s name (JulesJordan.com) in the screen’s bottom corner, as shown in Figure 14-2, similar to the way television stations add their call signs to advertise themselves.

Figure 14-2: To profit from piracy, porn publisher Jules Jordan watermarked the Flesh Hunter 4 DVD with his website’s name in the lower right corner.

“The main thing is to deter pirates that are ripping off images from the DVD and using it on the Internet,” Jordan told AVN (http://www.avn.com), a porn industry news site. “If these pirates still want to rip off my shit, essentially, I’m going to use them for promotion.”

FINDING PORNOGRAPHY ON FILE SHARING NETWORKS

Pornography is the weak link in the file sharing networks. Sure, you can type phrases such as Traci Lords or pornography and have a file sharing network overwhelm you with more pornographic pictures and videos that you could ever watch in a lifetime. The problem is that government officials, under prodding from the recording industry, have blamed file sharing networks for spreading pornographic material to minors and for distributing child pornography.

When debating the problems of pornography on file sharing networks, Orrin Hatch (R-UT) even asked law enforcement officials, “Do you suggest we put out of business the networks that allow this to occur?”

Wendy Seltzer, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (http://www.eff.org), claimed that cracking down on child pornography was just a pretext to targeting the file sharing networks in general. “We don’t have hearings calling the photo industry to task when their film is used to create child porn,” Seltzer said.

Until the government succeeds in using the threat of child pornography to shut down your favorite file sharing network, you can still find your favorite pornographic videos and pictures by typing in the titles of pornographic movies ( Deep Throat or Debbie Does Dallas), the names of famous porn stars or celebrities ( Ron Jeremy or Cameron Diaz), descriptions of different centerfolds ( Playboy playmate or Penthouse pet), or words often associated with adult entertainment ( fetish or lesbian). Figure 14-3 shows the typical pornographic files you can find on a file sharing network, such as Kazaa.

Figure 14-3: You can find both pornographic video and photographs on file sharing networks like Kazaa.

Trading copyrighted pornographic images may be a crime, but you probably won’t get sued by the porn industry. However, if you start swapping child pornography, you could get caught in a government dragnet designed to catch child pornographers. When police asked one child pornographer why he used the file sharing networks, he simply replied, “Because the cops are in the chat rooms.”

FINDING PORNOGRAPHY ON NEWSGROUPS

If you visit any adult-oriented newsgroups, you’ll find them flooded with pornography. (Many ISPs block access to adult-oriented newsgroups, so if you want to see them, you may need to subscribe to a separate newsgroup server, as discussed in Chapter 3.) In fact, pornography fills 28 of the top-29 most trafficked binary newsgroups, according to NewsAdmin (http://www.newsadmin. com/top100reads.htm).

Unfortunately, pornography is so popular that many virus writers launch their work by disguising their latest virus creations with misleading headers, such as “Christina Aguilera Nude,” “Britney Spears hot sexy nude 3034,”

“Hillery_Duff.scr Nude,” or “Halle_berry.scr Nude.” Perhaps the one advantage for the porn industry is that with so many viruses and Trojan horses masquerading as free pornography, many people are flocking to fee-based porn sites as a way to avoid catching viruses.

Still, if you want to take the risk of catching a virus when looking for free porn, you’ll find more than 100 newsgroups devoted to nearly every fetish, as shown in Figure 14-4. And those are just the newsgroups devoted to photos.

Figure 14-4: You can find more than 100 different newsgroups catering to different types of porn.

The videos live on alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica (ABME), with each fetish separated into its own newsgroup. Most contain DVD rips of popular erotic videos, although rips of “classic” VHS tapes and even old 1920s movies turn up occasionally.

Because video takes some time to download, most posters include “ previews” containing several screenshots from the video. A look at the subject header on the porn video in Figure 14-5, for instance, shows the name of the star (Dina Jewel), the movie clip’s length (nine minutes and 17 seconds), and that it includes ten JPEG screenshots. By downloading the screenshots, you can find out exactly what you should expect if you take the time to download the entire clip.

Figure 14-5: The headers of this porn video clip indicate that it includes ten JPEG screenshots of the video, which will let you know at a glance whether you should download the entire clip.

Although some uploaders simply use Windows’ PRTSCR key to take screenshots, and then post the JPEGs as individual files, others prefer creating “contact sheets” of the video, each full of thumbnail shots. Here are some of the most popular programs for creating and viewing previews of images:

ACDSee http://www.acdsystems.com

Graphic Workshop Pro http://www.mindworkshop.com

IrfanView http://www.irfanview.com

LView Pro http://www.lview.com

VirtualDub http://www.virtualdub.org

ImageMagick http://imagemagick.sourceforge.net

The ABME FAQ (http://abmefaq.net) is one of the longest, most current, and best researched tutorials on newsgroups and computer video anywhere, which is a strong testament to the seriousness of its fans. Some unrelated newsgroups forward new users to the ABME FAQ to find answers to questions about Internet video. The FAQ comes in especially handy when explaining codecs —the algorithms used to compress video into easily transmitted computer files.

Often you may download a video file only to find that your computer won’t play it because it lacks the right codec. Most porn videos use DivX (http://www.divx.com) for compression, but some use other, less mainstream codecs. When you try to play such a video back, Windows Media Player displays an error message, as shown in Figure 14-6.

Figure 14-6: Windows Media Player displays an error message when you try to play a video that uses an unfamiliar codec.

The solution is to figure out what codec you’re missing, and then download and install it. Sometimes an NFO file that accompanies the video file will contain information on the exact codex needed to play the video, but otherwise you might need to visit the Codec Corner site (http://www.codeccorner.com). This site can test which codecs are installed on your computer and, if necessary, download and install the ones you’re missing. Although it is maintained by the adult video enthusiasts, the page comes in handy when your computer is missing a decoder for nearly any downloaded video.

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