
Hurting For Cash, Online Porn Tries New Tricks - uladzislau
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/02/17/276897125/hurting-for-cash-online-porn-tries-new-tricks
======
beloch
Porn has long been at the forefront of internet technology, driving next-gen
solutions that eventually trickle down to many other sectors. However, when
faced with declining sales due to privacy fears, Kink (and many other sites)
are shrugging off privacy concerns in order to make a buck off of invasive
advertising ("Honey, why am I seeing so many ads for condoms and nipple clamps
today?"). Talk about self-destructive business practices!

North American society is _far_ too prudish about sex; especially sex that
isn't deemed "mainstream". BDSM themes in particular have long been used by
Hollywood to characterize particularly vile antagonists. Mainstream sexual
mores are becoming less parochial, but not nearly fast enough to alleviate
privacy concerns for most people. Acworth really ought to take this a _lot_
more seriously. His attitude ranks up there with the Sony exec's who figured
rootkits were a good idea! It really is a recipe for disaster when pirated
goods carry fewer risks than legitimately purchased goods!

~~~
broolstoryco
>when faced with declining sales due to privacy fears

thats where bitcoin comes in

~~~
saurik
To verify, you mean by ruining any idea of privacy by making all transactions
public? (It isn't clear if you are actually saying that bitcoin would increase
the privacy experienced in this situation.)

~~~
pgsandstrom
You wouldn't have to make a payment from "JOHN DOES ACCOUNT" to "PERVERTED
PORN ACCOUNT". You could easily set up several wallets in the middle,
obfuscation the transaction and gaining deniability.

However, beware! If your wife is an paranoid data scientist, she could still
find circumstantial evidence for your porn subscription.

~~~
saurik
So, if you aren't going through a remixer (which is the point at which my
paranoid data scientist friends point out "that doesn't even really help, at
least in the long run, if not even in the short run"; and it isn't like any
normal user is going to be doing this) the obfuscated wallet approach isn't
really helping you much, if nothing else due to timing correlations. Even
then, most normal people (the kind of people who are likely going to run into
this problem most often) aren't going to understand how to do anything other
than use the default features encoded into their wallet software (which are
remarkably deterministic in function, almost never obfuscates the change
making the middle steps trivially transparent, and generally don't provide any
control over which transactions will accidentally cluster). Bitcoin is simply
not trying to solve this problem: there are things bitcoin claims to solve,
and things bitcoin succeeds in solving (whether on purpose or as a side
effect), but "I want my transactions private" was never one of them. While it
would be awesome if it were true, not all things related to payments are made
better by bitcoin :/.

It also must be pointed out that you aren't just dealing with your spouse at
this point: you are dealing with everyone who might possibly care; maybe your
pastor is a "paranoid data scientist", or maybe the noisy person across the
street has taken up statistical correlation and inference as a new hobby.
Maybe someone makes a new service that helps companies screen employees, and
one of the things it does is scan the blockchain using some really epic
algorithm coming up with some kind of bogus (and questionably-legal) "morality
score" (I bring this up as there already have been companies constructed to do
this for data on Facebook). The transaction record of bitcoin is out there for
everyone to datamine, and if you make a mistake the record will still be there
and still be public years from now. There might even be new techniques
(whether bitcoin-specific, or generally in the fields of statistics or machine
learning) that will make this data more transparent in the future. The defense
model for "I don't want people I deal with to know about my porn addiction" of
bitcoin vs. even a normal credit card does not come out very strong.

~~~
pgsandstrom
Those are good objections. I guess the only safe way of dealing with bitcoins
is to get money into a wallet without in any way associating it with your real
life persona, which could be very tricky. And after that never ever use your
wallet to pay a service that is assigned to your real name.

Are there any good resources to read up on how the remixers work, and why they
cant be relied upon?

~~~
saurik
I do not have any resources related to that; the summary (as I vaguely
remember the arguments) came down to evidence being accumulated due to
reasonable caps on fees and delays (if giving your money to the remixer
occasionally ate 99% of the money and occasionally made it hold onto the money
for a year, you are no longer in a position to effectively utilize it)
combined with correlations on repeated transactions.

To be clear, though, my argument was simply to move the "data scientist" line
from "wallet obfuscation" (for which I then provided more concrete issues) to
"remixers", and then to point out that normal people (the kind of person who
didn't solve the underlying problem long ago using prepaid credit cards ;P)
aren't using remixers and are unlikely to begin using remixers (as they
probably aren't even using the more useful forms of wallet obfuscation: they
are probably relying on what their wallet software is doing by default).

------
hmsimha
> Acworth says no one has to worry about personal data getting sold to outside
> advertisers. "I shouldn't think anyone would really be interested in that.
> Who would want to buy data pertaining to whether somebody likes bondage or
> spanking?"

Hmm.. how about the same kinds of people who build websites that display
mugshot information, but allow you to pay a fee to have yours removed.

~~~
nwh
Porn habits on one side of the table, real name pulled from the credit card
used to pay for it on the other. $50 and this all disappears from the
internet!

------
bambax
> We're suffering what happened to the music industry a while back

Not really. Songs or artists are not perfect substitutes to one another; if
you want to listen to a specific song from a specific artist, you'll be
looking for that song and in most cases another song won't do. Therefore, if
it was possible to make this song absolutely unavailable via illegal means,
you'd have a very strong incentive to buy it.

Porn videos are mostly perfect substitutes to one another (in their respective
broad specialty; a gay sex video isn't a substitute to a straight sex video,
but a nurse video is a substitute to a teacher-student one).

Therefore, in order to make people pay for porn, the porn industry would have
to make _all_ free porn videos disappear, which is impossible.

It would seem they're in much direr straits than the music industry.

~~~
YokoZar
Don't be so sure. Some porn stars are brands unto themselves, and go on
stripping tours not dissimilar from musician's concerts.

Perhaps it's only a matter of time till we see pornography crowdfunding.

~~~
rickenharp
Pornography crowdfunding already exists:
[http://offbeatr.com/](http://offbeatr.com/)

~~~
bambax
Excellent! The logo is a little reminiscent of Ted
([http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1637725/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1637725/)),
is this on purpose?

Their fees are sky-high (30% of money collected) and the FAQ is not written in
very good English, so I'd be rather weary of using them, but the idea is
great!

------
awalton
Given where we are (hacker news) I'm astounded the first response to this
article wasn't "Use bitcoins!" since that's exactly the type of thing that it
is best at.

Then all you need to do is start explaining bitcoin to your significant other
just long enough for their eyes to go glassy, begging you to stop.

~~~
lightcatcher
Paying for porn with bitcoin puts all of your porn purchases on a public
ledger. I don't think too many people want that.

~~~
awalton
Let's be serious here, laundering a bitcoin is as easy as trading it at an
exchange for another one. Getting a wallet is as easy as generating a new one.
There's no permanent record that person X had bitcoin Y, just which wallets it
passed through along the way.

If your significant other works for a Three Letter Agency, then maybe it's
possible they could reverse the network connection logs to the exchanges, dig
through their databases and prove that you were the one who owned the coin
that bought that porn. Maybe. But given how little the FBI has done with the
cache of bitcash they seized, I doubt it.

So admittedly, it's not as clean as a cash business... but neither is the sex
industry.

~~~
hmsimha
All true, but who needs to launder bitcoin to keep a transaction hidden from
their significant other, unless their SO is well-versed in the technology
behind bitcoin AND really likes to snoop. In that case, an easier and more
likely point of failure is a session logger/keylogger on one's porn-browsing
device

------
easy_rider
Also people who actually end up paying for porn, will end up seeing the same
stuff they can watch for free. The big porn clips get their watermarks
removed, chopped up, re-watermarked, and spammed on tube sites to compete with
all other parties who are doing the exact same thing:

Rip, re-watermark, re-distribute.

No one can really complain, because everyone is doing the same.. Sure you
could buy some "unique content" from time to time. Costs around $750 a video,
shipped from Prague, Czech Republic. But there's not much value in that,
because other people will just rip, re-watermark, re-distribute :)

