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Internet Only 1% Porn
Eli Gottlieb writes "In what surely comes as a complete and utter surprise to everyone here, a new calculation shows that only one percent of web pages contain pornography. While the calculations were performed using data forced from Google's and Microsoft's search indices by the government, they will help the American Civil Liberties Union to keep enforcement of the Children's Online Protection Act of 1998 banned. A loss for business privacy has become a victory for free speech, even though netizens lose a beloved old proverb."
As if this will change the opinions of any of the powers that be in favor of increased legislation and restriction of online content? The argument will shift to "...but that 1% makes up (20 / 30 / 50 / arbitrary number) % of internet traffic! Save the children now!"
Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am master of my fate and captain of my soul.
Let's face it... The supply of women ready to put themselves out on display on the internet pales in comparison to the sheer mass of teen angst that flows out onto myspace/youtube/livjournals etc. :)
Search engines don't index all of the things on porn sites that are for members only i.e. Terabytes of member's only pages, video, and pics. For example sex.com could only have a few pages for the public that Google would show, but in reality they have thousands more. So it would be hard to be accurate at only 1%
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
Well, I'm glad we've cleared up that little misunderstanding. I guess ISPs can block everything except port 80 now. Many thanks.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Percentages mean absolutely nothing if you don't know the sample upon which the percentage is based.
.com sites? how was the random number generated? presumably sites beginning with "s" (e.g. sex) will tend to be porn sites - was the generator biased in any way? if *pages* were chosen (unlikely, I guess, since it means indexing entire sites, and some porn sites will be pay access, so their pages will be hidden), was it a sample of pages from a sample of sites, or a full set of pages from a sample of sites?
"30% of the Internet is porn".
Was the entire Internet checked? of course not. So what sample was taken? was it a list of random domains, or a list of random pages - which will produce quite different results. If it was random domains, which list was the sample taken from? was it from all sites, or just
Also, pointedly, what exactly *is* a site with porn? do we mean hardcore porn (peneratration) or do we include softcore porn (glamour)? shouldn't we differentiate between the two, and have two percentages?
So propositions like "the xxx is nn% yyy" are so trite that they are meaningless.
During a business trip to Alabama several weeks back, I met a fellow who I'd describe as the typical sort of Christian fundamentalist you'd find in the southeastern US. He's not a bad person, but his views are somewhat, in my mind, unusual.
We were talking about the Internet, and some of the work he'd done speeding up the TCP implementation for an embedded OS. He mentioned at one point that he was worried it'd be used to transmit pornography at a faster rate. I found this absurd, so I asked him to elaborate on what he considered pornography. He was telling me that he thought pictures of the adult women modelling underwear and bras in Wal-Mart flyers were pornographic!
Now, I don't know this guy very well. My best guess is that he's got a raging erection most of the time, but due to the beliefs and customs of the society and religion he has been exposed to his entire life, he's had to build up this anti-pronographic personality. It seems he's taken it to the extreme. But it showed to me the problem with pornography: its definition differs so widely between different individuals.
What would be interesting is the amount of data transfered.
I suspect that the porn content of the Net is highly underrated. Having done such surveys in my life for businesses, I can say that any metric that you're looking for can be skewed drastically by looking at the numbers differently. For example, if you many porn sites want only a handful of pages to be indexed, so if you go by page count, porn will be very low. If you go by machine or domain names, then porn will rank fairly high, since many porn sites use domains to isolate different types of content for the same service.
If you discount auto-generated pages, you willl also eliminate a huge fraction of the Web.
There's an awful lot of play in these numbers, so don't be too shocked if they're just dead wrong from most points of view.
Doesn't surprise me. Less than 1% of my house's floor space is occupied by dining room chairs, yet somehow I manage to spend nearly 10% of my time in these chairs daily. Likewise, the percent of waking time spent by our household watching the 0.1% of our wallspace occupied by the television is a (disproportionate) 10%.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
On a more serious note: So what makes up the Internet? Webpages or the data that flows over networks.
Add to that the different avenues to pr0n (P2P, Usenet, IRC, etc) that this study didn't even consider that is likely to raise that 1% some. All-in-all, I still think (right or wrong) that pr0n is a big motivator for Internet access especially broadband.
B.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
As with any government endeavour they hired scientist, computer experts, and a slew of other specialities. Do you think those people are come back with data that doesn't support their continued existance?
Yes, that's EXACTLY what they did. The government was trying to prove that there is a need for COPA. Instead they proved that there isn't.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
has experienced that one percent
which is totally what she said
User-driven content ("Web 2.0") has led to a massive increase in the parallelism of page creation. Every single story submitted to Digg becomes a new Web page, as does every Flickr page, every Wikipedia page, every Match.com profile, every Youtube video, every Myspace page, every Slashdot comment, etc.
Some porn sites allow user-generated content (pun intended, eewww...), but overall the number of people willing to share recordings of themselves having sex is probably pretty small compared to the number willing to share their favorite song or interesting link or thoughts on a subject. (At least I hope to God it is.)
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Apparently whatever gives you the result you are looking for.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
All jobs are based on exploitation. You might work a desk job where your employer is exploiting your knowledge. Or you might do physical labour where your employer is exploiting your energy. Or you might work in porn where the employer is exploiting your abilities to perform in that role. They all exploit equally, and it's up to you to decide which form of exploitation best suits your preferences and abilities.
You seem to be a Christian, so let me ask you this: in the Bible, Jesus spent his time with the poor and destitute. He spent time with criminals and prostitutes. Have you ever actually met anyone that currently works in pornography and befriended them? You might be shocked at what they have to say about their chosen profession. Judge not, lest ye be judged.
Well, then, you must be okay with Gay porn.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
The important question is whether or not children need to be protected from porn at all.
I ask this question seriously: Have there been any studies done that shows that exposure to pornographic images makes a child more likely to engage in sexual activity sooner, or makes them somehow less likely to use protection during intercourse? If not, it seems to me that this isn't about protecting children -- it's about protecting parents from uncomfortable discussions that, frankly, are part of their job as parents.
Personally I wish children were exposed to MORE porn and MORE sexual discussion. It seems to me that the US has become entirely too prudish about sex. It is a natural and necessary part of life and we should stop treating it as a depravity. Sex is what it is. If we, as a society, instill maturity and responsibility in our children, I believe the vast majority of the concern of sex is rendered moot.
I suspect that people who weren't abused as children are really a minority- or at least will be in the future as our idea of what constitutes abuse seems to encompass more stuff every freakin' year.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.