A single smut-addicted official at the US Geological Survey led to an IT crisis there, according to an official report, with visits to more than 9000 porny URLs resulting in a malware infestation. The recommendations? Filter the web, and plug those damned USB ports.

Correction: More than 9000 sites, not 9000 infections. Read the rest

"Porn for women" was Pornhub's "top trending" search term for 2017; across the pornosphere, the number of women viewers continues its meteoric rise and rise, up to 25% now -- for the porn industry woman viewers represent a huge opportunity for growth. Read the rest

For at least a couple of years, Twitter has allowed one porn spam bot to clog up search results for common women's names, as well as for names of young female celebrities. It would not take a lot to create an algorithm to block this specific spam, but it's still here, because Twitter can't seem to address the platform's pervasive hostility to women. Read the rest

The porn extortion scam works like this: you get an email from a stranger claiming that he hacked your computer and recorded video of you masturbating to pornography, which he'll release unless you send him some cryptocurrency. Read the rest

In Internet Filtering and Adolescent Exposure to Online Sexual Material, two researchers from the Oxford Internet Institute reveal their empirical findings on the efficacy of porn filters -- the online systems that are supposed to stop users from seeing sexual images, videos, and text. Read the rest

Jiz Lee, Stoya, Nikki Darling, and Asa Akira talk about representation, the marketing of white women vs. women of color in adult movies, and how porn is still a very white industry. And unfortunately you have to click much deeper to find real, respectful diversity.

"What Porn Stars Want You To Know: We Don't All Look the Same" (Iris)

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.cm is the top-level domain for Cameroon, and the major use-case for .cm domains is typosquatting -- registering common .com domains as .cm domains (like microsoft.cm or apple.cm), in the hopes of nabbing traffic from users who fatfinger while typing a domain, and sometimes serving them malware or directing them to scams. Read the rest

Earlier this week, YouTube updated its policies surrounding what sort of gun-related nonsense people are allowed to get up to while using their services. Selling gun parts? Outta here. You wanna show folks how to build a gun? Take it outside. Are you a bumpstock or a semi-automatic to fully automatic modification enthusiast? Not around here you ain't. What's a group of gun oil-huffing video makers supposed to do?

Wind up in cahoots with pornography peddlers, apparently.

According to the BBC, video makers who once leveraged YouTube to educate the masses on how to make their own suppressors or illegally modify firearms are now looking to Pornhub as a new home for their gun-related videos:

Karl Kasarda and Ian McCollum, who run the gun review site InRangeTV, said they had started posting their videos on Facebook and pornography site PornHub.

"We will not be seeking any monetisation from PornHub... we are merely looking for a safe harbour for our content and for our viewers," the pair said in a statement.

Firearms manufacturer Spike's Tactical said the change reflected attempts to "slowly chip away at our freedoms and erode our rights".

Eroding their rights. Please. YouTube is a public forum, but not a public institution. Saying that it's responsible for chipping away at your freedom because you're butt hurt that you can't use it to sell gun parts or blather on about your AR-15's custom rails anymore is like being pissed at a Starbucks for not allowing you to run a brothel out of their bathroom. Read the rest

Fortnite is the most popular game to be searched about in Pornhub's online database of videos. I am not sure what that means, really. While I am enthusiastic about both forms of entertainment-art I find their intersection to be a bit confusing.

There are a lot of great stats and tables about what people are searching for, to answer their Fortnite related pornographic need.

Via PornHub:

The most popular Fortnite related searches include “hentai”, “battle royale”, “animation” and “strip”. Following some viral videos on YouTube, “try not to nut fornite” also became a popular search. “SFM” is a term often combined with game searches (see Overwatch Insights).

Rhode Island Democratic state Senators Frank Ciccone (@senatorciccone) and Hanna Gallo (@hannagallo27) have proposed grandstanding, unworkable legislation, "Relating to Public Utilities and Carriers—Internet Digital Blocking" which would mandate the state's ISPs to identify all the pornography on the internet, and then block it for all Rhode Islanders, unless those Rhode Islanders specifically requested their porn to be unblocked and paid $20 for the privilege. Read the rest

Deepfakes -- videos with incredibly realistic faceswapping, created with machine learning techniques -- are creepy as hell, except when they're not (then they're a form of incredibly expressive creativity with implications for both storytelling and political speech). Read the rest

Reddit has shut down /r/deepfakes, the subreddit where people collaborate to produce incredibly disturbing faceswapped pornography that uses machine-learning to put the faces of famous people who aren't pornography performers onto the bodies of people having sex in pornographic videos. Read the rest

Late last year, a redditor called Deepfakes gained notoriety for the extremely convincing face-swap porn videos he was making, in which the faces of mainstream Hollywood actors and rockstars were convincingly overlaid on the bodies of performers in pornography. Read the rest

When an alert went out warning Hawaiians they were about to get nuked, they immediately stopped fapping. Read the rest

British cops got software to help them identify children in abuse images, but it's having trouble telling the difference between skin and sand.

...the department is working with “Silicon Valley providers” to help train the AI to successfully scan for images of child abuse. But as we’ve seen, even the most powerful tech companies can’t seem to deploy algorithms that don’t fuck up every once in awhile. They have promoted dangerous misinformation, abetted racism, and accidentally censored bisexual content. And when Gizmodo recently tested an app intended to automatically identify explicit images in your camera roll, it flagged a photo of a dog, a donut, and a fully-clothed Grace Kelly.

What are the odds that Londons' finest paid fabulous sums of money for what amounts to a dumb imagemagick script that averages and compares color samples from various points on each image, and are now paying fabulous sums more to have some rinkydink machine learning grafted on. Read the rest

Got a relative or friend who doesn't understand the stakes in the net neutrality debate? The FCC Internet Porn Scrambler will help bring the issue into focus: "all of your favorite content will be instantaneously replaced on sites like Pornhub with unwatchable scrambled video." Remember to join today's protests at a local Verizon store! Read the rest

Pornhub is the world's largest pornography site and they're now the world's most accessible, with a new, extensive suite of accessibility features for users with visual disabilities: alternative descriptive text for videos, a high-contrast mode for navigation, and custom color-gamut shifting for colorblind people. Read the rest