Pinterest is about to allow art nudes, revenge porn site won't remove pics of underage girls, and Snapchats Leaked quits.
Oh — and did you know this column/ist won an award? The San Francisco Weekly named Sex Tech: Violet Blue in its Best of 2013 issue. Thank you for reading, and coming back for more Sex Tech.
XBIZ reports that adult entertainment attorney Marc Randazza filed two civil cases against revenge porn site UGotPosted.com on counts of distributing child pornography and failing to comply with 18 U.S.C. § 2257 (federal age record requirements for porn sites).
According to the Los Angeles case court document, the site posted “lewd and lascivious, sexually explicit images” of a 14-year-old girl’s genital or pubic area.
XBIZ adds,
Despite the ongoing case, and intervention by an FBI agent warning the defendants to remove what they deemed child pornography, the defendants have yet to comply and remove the photos in question.
I find it interesting that veteran adult industry lawyer Randazza seems to be stepping away from Big Porn's "circle the wagons" party line and is now taking on many revenge porn cases pro bono.
The mainstream porn industry's loudest mouthpieces typically attack critics of even its most consent-blurring violent filmmakers and racist production companies, while recently "girlfriend revenge porn" has been embraced as a genre for some mainstream porn producers.
I hope this heralds a signal change for Big Porn's old attitudes.
Let's also hope those images are removed ASAP, that UGotPosted.com gets its [redacted] caught in a combine, and media outlets that cover this story do not include the girl's name in their coverage.
Once a Utah security firm revealed that popular app Snapchat wasn't deleting user photos as it claimed (Snapchat was still storing the photos but not mapping them), a website called Snapchats Leaked hit the news, scaring Snapchat users (and its investors, no doubt) by publishing submitted Snapchat photos.
However, the site's photos were not obtained via the app's security flaw even though media headlines claimed hacking and nonconsent; the pics were user-submitted.
The site was up (shakily) for around 24 hours — and then the site creator backpedaled in the media, eventually removing all the material, and as of today the website now states that it's over and done.
Find out why we snapchatsleaked.com have closed our website...
— SnapChats Leaked (@snapchatleak) June 1, 2013
On the site's page, its creator reminds visitors that the Snapchat security issue still exists, and now there are numerous "Snapchats Leaked" copycats with intentions unknown.
Changing course on their initial 'zero tolerance' stance on human nature, and in light of the fact that people are posting adult imagery there anyway and that some of their branded clients use nudity in their pins, Pinterest says it will now officially permit nudity on its site "in order to placate artists and photographers who have complained about the current restrictions."
A Pinterest Terms of Service change appears to be in the works.
Pinterest's PR team told Business Insider, "pinners have asked us for a policy on nudity that makes a distinction between works of art and things like pornography. A change like that poses a lot of questions. We're working our way through those questions but we don't have any additional details to offer just yet."
The Pentagon announced Thursday the opening of The Safe HelpRoom (sapr.mil/), an online chat space where survivors of military sexual assault can find support amongst each other, while chat room moderators will provide referrals and enforce chat room safety for its users.
The U.S. military is currently in the middle of "what its most senior leaders refer to as a crisis in sexual assault and harassment in its ranks."
Google must show "moral leadership" and block pornography websites that act as a "gateway" to images of child abuse, a Government child protection adviser has said.
With the usual fallacious argument style (that a sip of beer turns you into a violent alcoholic), John Carr, a member of the Internet Task Force on Child Protection, said porn sites are accessible from search engines (!) and called on Google for a "default" block on porn searches — a block where people would have to "register" in order to opt-out of safe search settings.
Anyone else find the idea of being put on a secret list for looking at any kind of website scary?
A few months ago, porn "tube" website search engine Porn MD collated search data by topic and user location to make an interesting inforgraphic (even though it's only a slice of the world's porn search data).
Using the top highlights of Porn MD's results, Buzzfeed put together the entertaining video above — although with an SEO-friendly, somewhat misleading title.
The video is only slightly NSFW for text of sex terms and one image of condoms.
Adult Android app store MiKandi are making porn with Google Glass and are hard at work to have an app launch by the end of next week.
MiKandi told me, "We’ll make an announcement on our blog and MiKandi's Twitter when the [Google Glass porn] video is ready, and we are currently developing an app (or two) for Google Glass..."
