Cybersex in the News/Media

"As humans and machines grow ever closer, it is the sexual aspects of the merger that are making the news. Can you commit adultery on the Internet?, asks the London Observer under the headline KISS OF THE CYBER WOMAN. It seems that you can…Eventually, it is inevitable that we’ll merge with computers, predicts Clive Sinclair, who invented the pocket calculator and went on to build computers. He doesn’t much like the idea" - Richard Glyn Jones, Cybersex, p. xiv


Time Magazine Porn Scare

The Cyberporn Debate


(Most Cybersex-Related News Gathered by EduPage and NewsScan)


Dot-gov sex: When it comes to sex and the Net, the at the National Labor
Relations Board become distinctly unamused.

The agency this week asked its inspector general to figure out how to shut down a sexually explicit website with a similar domain name, nlrb.com. A Panamanian company with a phone number in Ottawa, Canada registered the domain name, planetgov.com reported this week. The feds may have a tough time. Dan Parisi's whitehouse.com—a pornographic site that features a "first ladies gallery"—has never been taken offline.
Sep. 9, 2000
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,38691,00.html


THE WEB: NEW TICKET TO A PINK SLIP
Employees caught surfing forbidden Web sites are increasingly being fired. At Xerox, for example, 40 employees were fired after software recorded them visiting Web sites pertaining to shopping or pornography and spending inordinate amounts of their work day online. Overall, the company monitors the online activities of all of its 92,000 employees worldwide. In 1999, 45 percent of employers admitted they monitor employees' phone calls, computer files, or e-mail messages. The issue of privacy is therefore arising, but employers claim monitoring is needed to see if workers are sending hate e-mail or wasting too much time online. Employers can record and view everything done on a computer, which makes privacy obsolete in the workplace. The consequences for misusing the Internet are great, and employees may not find any help in a court of law, since the judges usually handling the cases do not often rule in favor of employees. Lawyers argue that employers should warn that they may read workers' e-mail and review their Web use. (New York Times, 12/16/99)


Fishing for smut: The Canadian government is cracking down on sex-related Internet surfing. (Salon, April 26, 2000)
"Beware the corporate internal review, especially if you're an employee of the Canadian government's Department of Fisheries and Oceans. One such survey, released last week, produced some startling news about the Internet habits of 10,000 department employees...on average, each employee visits a sex-related Web site seven times a day."


AOL TO REQUIRE RATINGS FOR VIDEO GAMES ONLINE
In a move that will surely be received well by parents and law enforcement agencies, AOL has announced that all video games offered via its online service must be rated for sexual and violent content. The Entertainment Software Ratings Board will determine the ratings for games, which could fall under categories such as "Adults Only," "Mature," and "Early Childhood." AOL says it will not offer games that do not display ratings or that are rated "Adults Only." The policy will apply to games played directly on the AOL service and boxed games that are advertised on AOL by the ISP's software-merchant partners. AOL's partners, including eToys and Beyond.com, have agreed to abide by the new policy. (Wall Street Journal, 11/19/99)


PRIVACY ISSUES RAISED IN SF CHAT ROOM CASE
In what health officials are calling the first case of a disease cluster being traced to cyberspace, the San Francisco Department of Public Health says six men who contracted syphilis in the last three months all found their most recent sex partners through an AOL chat room, San Francisco Men 4 Men. A seventh syphilis patient said he met his sex partners through an Internet relay chat room, I.R.C. Together. In many cases, only the online aliases of the sex partners were known. The public health department contacted AOL to find out whether the men's sex partners could be warned of their exposure, but AOL does not give out the names of subscribers unless presented with a court order or in the event of a physical threat. Instead, the ISP put the health department in contact with Planet Out, a worldwide online service for homosexuals, which then sent a bulletin to the chat room aliases and posted information on its Web site. Privacy advocates applauded AOL's handling of the situation. "This is a new way of defining the community," says Tim Westmoreland, a public health expert at Georgetown Law School. "It's not defined by physical geography, but by the use of cyberspace." (New York Times, 25 Aug 99)


INSTITUTE WANTS ALL KNOWLEDGE ON WEB
The goal of the non-profit Information Access Institute is to assist in the distribution of library and museum knowledge records on the Internet. Its director, Kevin Marsh, dreams of a day when any questions or any interests can be satisfied on the Web. Currently Marsh and the Institute are helping put historic Texas constitutions online, and supporting the efforts of the Florida State Photographic Archive and Texas museums in cataloguing their holdings and putting them online. Marsh believes that by placing informative data on the Web, he and others will be able to overcome the Internet's reputation for more salacious things. "It's like New York," he says. "Everything from museums to red-light districts. The way we fight the red-light districts on the Internet is not by censorship, but by putting more of the good stuff online." (Associated Press 08/10/99)


ISP PUNISHES CUSTOMER BY POINTING ITS VISITORS TO PORN SITE
In a dispute over allegedly delinquent payments for three months of Internet access owed by the Chicago-area Spanish-language newspaper La Raza, the Ripco Communications service provider redirected surfers seeking La Raza's pages to an adult Web site. Saying that "at least the adult site pays its bills," a Ripco executive says he considered the La Raza domains "orphans," and explained that "the way we handle orphaned domains is to point them at a revenue-generating site for us." La Raza's online coordinator says, "The question isn't whether Ripco has the right to do what they did. I think the question is, how far do you have to go in a situation like this? Is their goal to embarrass their customers into paying quicker?" (Chicago Tribune/San Jose Mercury News, 1 Sep 99)


NET USERS "PAGE-JACKED" BY PORNOGRAPHERS
American and Australian investigators have zeroed in on an elusive Portuguese cracker and an Australian pornography company as the perpetrators of a fraudulent scheme to "page-jack" would-be visitors to legitimate Web sites, such as the Harvard Law Review, and transport them to online porn sites. The users reported that the only way they could escape was to shut down their computers and reboot. Attempting to use the "back" or "home" buttons merely resulted in being subjected to more pornography. Investigators say the page-jackers were able to steal viewers by copying legitimate Web pages and their so-called metatags, which provide key words and code that are used to index the site for search engines. Australian officials are considering civil or criminal charges against the company, and a federal judge in Virginia has ordered many of the sites run by the company off the Web, and directed the perpetrators to stop copying legitimate Web pages. Executives at Alta Vista, which was used for the scam, say that the search engine has taken steps to correct the problem by carefully monitoring their index and by offering filters that can screen out pornography. (New York Times, 23 Sep 99)


VOYEUR DORM TESTS CYBERLAW
A Web site depicting photos and videos of young women performing various functions of daily life in a house in a quiet residential neighborhood in Tampa is drawing the ire of city officials, who say the Voyeur Dorm is really an adult business, just like any strip club or porn shop, and should be moved elsewhere. "This is really a unique situation. We're dealing with cyberspace and city code," says Tampa's City Attorney. "The city code was written long before the Internet, so we've got to see where this kind of thing fits in." City officials have invoked the zoning code to try to shut the Voyeur Dorm down, but owners claim there's no impact on the neighborhood and that the house cannot be ruled a business because no money changes hands there. Subscribers to the site pay $34 a month to view the girls, and for an extra $16 can chat online with the women. (St. Petersburg Times 26 Apr 99)


ONLINE VOYEUR DORM RULED "ADULT BUSINESS"
A Tampa, Fla. Internet site where visitors can watch college coeds eat, cook, shower, and sunbathe has been ruled an adult business, similar to a strip club, and must obtain an adult occupational license to stay in business, says the city's Variance Review Board. Neighbors of the "Voyeur Dorm" had no idea anything unusual was going on in the house, which is rigged with 30 cameras. "No members of the public ever go to these premises," says an attorney for Entertainment Network Inc., which helps run the house and plans to appeal the decision. "The code was written before people could envision a business operating without people ever coming to it. The simple act of putting a camera in your home doesn't make it an adult use." The women receive free room and board, tuition and a stipend in exchange for living in the house, and viewers pay $34 a month for the privilege of watching them. (AP/Tampa Bay Online 15 Jul 99)


PLAYBOY OVERRULED IN TRADEMARK CASE
A U.S. district judge has ruled against Playboy Enterprise's request for a preliminary injunction that would have barred search engines Excite and Netscape from selling ads that link to such trademarked terms as "Playboy" and "Playmate." Legal experts say the ruling could set an important precedent in protecting search engine revenue from advertisers who want their ads to pop up when users type in a certain word. When users type in "Playboy," banner ads appear for X-rated sites that have nothing to do with the adult magazine, complained Playboy Enterprises. Judge Alicemarie Stotler, however, noted that Playboy and Playmate are also "English words in their own right," and that "The holder of a trademark may not remove a word from the English language merely by acquiring trademark rights in it." Playboy attorneys say they plan to appeal the decision. (Los Angeles Times 19 Jul 99)


NEW HOTEL TREND: BED-AND-PC
Choice Hotels International is going beyond giving tech-oriented guests data ports and second phone lines -- they're supplying them with the computers, too. The hotel franchiser plans to have PCs in more than 1,000 rooms by early August, with 50,000 rooms wired up by year's end. "It's pretty revolutionary," says Choice CEO Charges Ledsinger Jr. "It's a real pain to lug these laptops around." The company has signed an installation agreement with GuesTech, which estimates the average in-room computer will generate $6 to $7 a day, producing a $2 to $3 profit over operating expenses. Of course, that profit will go up if guests choose to use fee-based business applications such as Excel or Powerpoint, or pay to log onto GuesTech's "Afterhours" porn site, which is expected to be one of the leading uses. In an experiment earlier this year, GuesTech found that many of the guests logging onto the porn site were simultaneously watching adult movies on their TV set. "They had them going stereo," says GuesTech co-founder Craig Ziegler. "Can you believe it?" (Wall Street Journal 26 Jul 99)


DESPERATELY SUING PORNO SITES
Porno sites are hard to sue. When the Web site NYGateway.com published 22 lines of obscenities and the name "Nancy Kerrigan" (the popular ice skater and Olympic medalist), her lawyer sued for defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, intentional injury to right of publicity, and other offenses; but NYGateway and its linked sex sites quickly vanished from the Web. The lawyer, Victor H. Polk Jr., says: "These Pornographers can pop up, you slap one down and four others pop up under different names. They are really judgment-proof, and the legal system can't deal with them well." Polk wants to be able to sue Internet service providers. How? By holding a service provider to the same kind of responsibility it has under copyright law, and making it responsible for online defamation unless it quickly removes or disables access to material that is claimed to be defamatory. (New York Times Cybertimes 30 Jul 99)


No Barbie porn sites, Mattel says


PRIVACY ISSUES RAISED IN SF CHAT ROOM CASE
In what health officials are calling the first case of a disease cluster being traced to cyberspace, the San Francisco Department of Public Health says six men who contracted syphilis in the last three months all found their most recent sex partners through an AOL chat room, San Francisco Men 4 Men. A seventh syphilis patient said he met his sex partners through an Internet relay chat room, I.R.C. Together. In many cases, only the online aliases of the sex partners were known. The public health department contacted AOL to find out whether the men's sex partners could be warned of their exposure, but AOL does not give out the names of subscribers unless presented with a court order or in the event of a physical threat. Instead, the ISP put the health department in contact with Planet Out, a worldwide online service for homosexuals, which then sent a bulletin to the chat room aliases and posted information on its Web site. Privacy advocates applauded AOL's handling of the situation. "This is a new way of defining the community," says Tim Westmoreland, a public health expert at Georgetown Law School. "It's not defined by physical geography, but by the use of cyberspace." (New York Times 25 Aug 99)


WORKERS FIRED FOR PORNOGRAPHIC E-MAIL
Dow Chemical has fired 50 workers and disciplined 200 others for using company computers to send pornography and violent images by e-mail. After receiving an employee complaint about what was happening, the company examined all e-mail use for a one-week period in May. What it found was objectionable behavior by employees at all levels: "We’re not talking about personal uses of the computers and letters to mom. There was a whole range of things, from mild pornography to very graphic pornography and some seriously violent images." (San Jose Mercury News 27 Jul 2000)


CYBERSEX JOURNALISM IN HONG KONG
Hong Kong lawmakers are demanding more control over Internet content and access after reports that an online publication showed a 16-minute video clip of a journalist picking up a prostitute and engaging in sex with her. The chairwoman of the Hong Kong Journalists Association said: "This was not professional news reporting. It was totally unnecessary for the journalist to engage in the act, let alone posting it on the Web." (Reuters/San Jose Mercury News 5 Dec 2000) http://www.mercurycenter.com/svtech/news/breaking/internet/docs/707867l.htm


ARE PARENTS LEGALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR CHILDREN'S INTERNET USE?
In a controversial ruling, Illinois Judge Ward S. Arnold of McHenry County declared a parent legally responsible for his child's alleged Internet abuse. Arnold determined that a woman could sue J. Bowen Palenske, because his son allegedly published defamatory statements and posted a digitally doctored pornographic image of her on a Web site. The plaintiff, "Jane Doe," is a high-school classmate of Palenske's son and charged Palenske with several counts of negligence, invasion of privacy, and defamation. Some lawyers have praised the ruling, but others claim the decision essentially makes parents guilty for supplying their children with a writing instrument. Furthermore, parents would be hard-pressed to monitor and supervise their children's computer use, a lot of which is hidden, critics contend. Jane Doe claimed that Palenske was notified earlier of a "negative and harmful" Web site created by his other son that was removed at the urging of school authorities but did nothing to prevent the incident that prompted the lawsuit. More parents are likely to be sued for their children's Internet activities, given the rampant proliferation of online sexual misconduct by high school students, says National Law Center for Children and Families President Bruce Taylor. (New York Times Online, 8 December 2000)


NET SURFERS RICH, SEX-MAD AND IDLE.
The South African Microsoft MSN portal says its "definitive survey" shows that South African Internet citizens are rich, have too much time on their hands and are inclined to shop online. Cybersex is a favorite pastime.... 12/14/00(Article indexed) Newsbytes 11/03/00 http://cma.zdnet.com/texis/techinfobase/techinfobase/display.html?docid=66672398


WEB DOMAINS PROVIDE NO DOMAIN FOR FREE SPEECH
A federal judge has ruled against plaintiffs who relied on First Amendment rights to incorporate obscene or vulgar words in the addresses of the "adult" Web sites. Arguing that Web names are not only to provide addresses but also to communicate the nature of the product, their attorney gave the example: "When you're looking for antiques, the first thing you would put in is antiques.com." (And when you're looking for ... ) American Civil Liberties Union attorney agreed that domain names are "more than just signposts," but the position of University of Miami law professor Michael Froomkin is that the judge's ruling prevents individuals from arguing that domain names are simply words in the public domain, that can be used by anyone. (AP/San Jose Mercury News 11 Dec 2000) http://www.mercurycenter.com/svtech/news/breaking/merc/docs/026011.htm


India Wrestles With Net Porn An Indian lawyer claims that Rediff.com, a premier Indian site, can be punished under Indian Penal Code because its search engine gives access to millions of pornographic sites. Manoj Joshi reports from Mumbai, India.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,39132,00.html


Porn a Thorn for Indian Portal
A judge in Pune, India, orders executives at Rediff.com to stand trial for "giving access to pornographic material." The execs could be imprisoned for up to two years. Manu Joseph reports from Mumbai.
http://www.wirednews.com/news/business/0,1367,40432,00.html


Madonna Gets Back Her Good Name
The Material Girl wins her case against New York cybersquatter Dan Parisi, who was the first to register madonna.com.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,39473,00.html


Sex Survivor
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,39876,00.html

Sex Survivor's Sleazy Demise
The triple-X version of the hit TV show suffers from a plethora of personnel and personal problems, and shuts down in a ball of flames. By Noah Shachtman.
http://www.wirednews.com/news/culture/0,1284,40332,00.html


Porn Sites Fear a Crackdown
Recent FTC action against the adult Web business may be, as one attorney put it, the beginning of a "clean-up-the-Internet sweep." Also from Leander Kahney's Comdex notebook: Sexy sites are techno wonders.... Find a Mercedes in a parking lot.
http://www.wirednews.com/news/technology/0,1282,40218,00.html


"It's dead in here. If we were surrounded by barbed wire and guns people would be fighting to get in." - Porn advocate William Margold would welcome a crackdown on the industry to make its appeal more taboo.
http://www.wirednews.com/news/technology/0,1282,40218,00.html


http://www.msnbc.com/news/493473.asp?cp1=1
Yahoo! vows to stop pedophiles
New ‘inspector’ to eradicate pedophiles from chat rooms
By Richard Barry and Wendy McAuliffe

ZDNET Nov. 22 In an exclusive interview with ZDNet News U.K., Martina King, U.K. managing director of Yahoo!, confirmed that the company is about to employ a Yahoo! ‘inspector’ charged with ensuring that Yahoo!’s Messenger system is not polluted with pedophile content.