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The Porn - MP3 Connection
quadra writes "New Musical Express has a strange
article based on a report by the British Phonographic Industry. According to them, sites are using MP3s in order to 'force' users to watch porn. " For those who aren't familar, the BPI is the British-equivalent of the RIAA [?] . Wow. I can't even imagine the thought process that leads people to say things like that.
While you are correct about having to click banner ads to get into MP3 sites being common, I think most MP3 trading doesnt happen on these sites. I know I use IRC for most of my MP3 needs and can usually find whatever I want within minutes on just one or two channels. Other then specifics, I trade with friends. The banner ad BS is precisely what keeps me FROM going to those sites. If I were BPI, I'd love these banner ad sites and go after the people who trade them freely...
-- iCEBaLM
For some weird reason, when I use Junkbuster, Slashdot doesn't remember my logins, but when I point to Squid (which junkbuster also uses), everything works fine. Even if I log in with a preview, and the preview screen says I'm me, and then submit, it comes out AC. Since Squid caches the dang ads, it doesn't matter.
I'm kind of bummed about this, because I had several posts that ended up as AC that got moderated up to 4 and 5. It's on my list of things to figure out, but I just haven't got around to it.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Can I be completely frank?
What's so bad about prOn? Let's face it, people do it and people watch it (specially music CEO's). Surfers are attracted to it because it's "politically incorrect" and because it tells them the naked truth (ok, well most of the time). Everything else just evades all the important questions about life (...). It is also a clear reaction to the totalitarian ways of feminists who, with their anax retentiveness, will just not accept anything that is not done by-the-book (i.e: male pornography is ok, we are more mature).
Hence the link between MP3's and SEX - in order to get either we'd have to go thru this process of figuring out what's right and what's wrong. All of this knowing you have no input in the process. As an example you might think a gal or a guy has a nice butt however you'd never say it - "You just can't do this sort of thing". But the natural thing to do is being honest...
I'd even go further. By linking MP3's and SEX the industry is telling people that beyond it's interpretation of facts, there lies nothing else. I guess that's completely predictable, but it still sends chills down my spine: not content with controling bank accounts, consuming habits and social behaviour, both the industry and the feminist movement try to control what people think.
My girlfriend won't even listen to a bloody MP3 even though I bought the album. What is the world coming to?
Emma Fanning of the BPI said: "It has always been the case that piracy has links with pornographers and organised crime..."
My response is "It has always been the case that the music industry has links with illegal drugs and satanic cults."
These two statements are about equal in their truthfulness. Actually I've far fewer doubts about the "piracy industry's" wholesomeness compared to the Music Industry. Which one is constantly portrayed as being the slimyest dirtyest industry in the business, somewhere between crack dealers and pimps? It isn't the piracy industry...
Personally, most of the illegal MP3 trading that I've seen has taken place on IRC. The people doing the trading usually refer to FTP sites (I don't think I've seen one HTTP site mentioned in relation to MP3 files.) Why should they bother setting up a web interface for what FTP does so well? I have never seen an MP3 site "force" you to watch pornography.
MP3's will eventually kill groups such as the the RIAA and the BPI, and good riddance.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The fact that there are porn banners on web sites and that sometimes you have to click on them to get mp3s is one thing, but this article is another.
This is NOT what the article was saying. It was saying that users are forced into looking at "horrific teenage sex" in order to get mp3s. This is not the same thing - if it was just banners, then they should have said something.
Think about it-what's their motivation for making a statement like that? It was in their interests to keep the statement vague and general - not mentioning porn sites at all, or commerce, but rather just choosing to say that people were forced into seeing porn as if all people who distribute mp3s are people who are consciously trying to corrupt the people looking for mp3s.
It's a crock of shit.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
I wish they would have posted links to those sites!!!! I love being forced to watch horrible teenage sex acts while downloading mp3s!!!!!!!! You can't go wrong with a combination like that!!!!!
If I read this correctly, does that mean I can tell my boss "the music made me do it" when he catches me at a porn site? :)
These are *MY* opinions.
They will not be *YOUR* opinions until the Orbital Mind Control Lasers are operati
If this appeals to you, come join my crusade against magazine articles. After all, all these people are getting sucked into looking at naked women after being lured to Playboy for the articles! Damn that sly Hue Heffner!
"Nobody owns the fucking words man." - James Dean
I can't say I've ever heard of anyone being turned into a teen sex snake fscking addict by listening to mp3s. Neither have I come across an mp3 site that forced you to visit porn to get the mp3s. It's all choise, you can click the banner ad or leave the site. These kind of FUD reports are sensationalizing something so Joe Automaton thinks mp3s are bad, dispite his small collection of them. I don't really think anyone is paying attention to this crap. No one REALLY cared about the RIAA's case or their insistance that mp3s would ruin musicians. The only people ruining music are the ones protesting distribution of music. It's a lot like Ticketmaster's shiznit they pull whenever someone tries to go against their ticket monopoly. They have the monopoly on distrobution and don't want to see anyone/thing come between them and it. But when it comes down to it, no one gives a rat's pajamas. Mp3s mean Joe Automaton can download a song he likes for little or no money down, and if he doesn't like it he doesn't have a silver disk laying around his desk. I won't say mp3s are necessarily the future but their method of distrobution most likely is. Joe and Mary Automaton want the cheap easy system, not the espensive tedious one, knuckles to the economics and politics.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
To get into my site, use the Username "w4r3z". To get the password, go to http://blah.blah/blah and click on the banners. The password is the third word on the first banner page plus the fifth word on the second banner page. Naturally, 90% of the banners are porn banners...
Is this what they really meant?
--
Rob, you're forcing me to login. You're forcing me to read those advertisements on top of your page. I'm not responsible - society has forced me to spend my hard-earned cash and turned me into a social reject. Now I'm forced into posting to slashdot and hitting reload several dozen times an hour. It's not my fault, I'm a victim of Rob Malda! Help, help! Somebody's forcing me to think independently! It hurts, make them stop!!!
--
All I get is music, and maybe some hippie graphics.
I especially liked the part about horrifying teenage sex, what exactly is that? Drinking a six pack, getting queasy, fumbling for a thick, old Trojan in your wallet and then prematurely ejaculating while her mom walks in on you? And then hurling on the floor?
Pretty horrifying to me.
George
so... you get *free* porn while downloading *free* music. what the hell is the problem here?
The MP3's themselves:
Personally, I see no great point in prawnographic sites. You can see shelled shrimp any time, for a lot less. And would -you- hand over your credit card, over a (typically) insecure line, to a complete stranger who has no interest in keeping the number safe? In fact, is probably in a country you couldn't even prosecute them in, even if they did run your card up to the limit the next day.
Sure, you say, but people would go elsewhere. How, exactly? Over half the sites aren't registered and go by IP address alone. Easy enough to change that. Virtually all use redirection, making it impossible to tell where you're connected to. And all of them are multihomed, so the name is useless to telling where you are.
Unless you fancy tracerouting to every single site you ever connect to, but still insist on viewing prawnography, you're not going to avoid fraud. It can't be done, because you've no means of ensuring trust, and it's not in the other person's interests to be trustworthy.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Ahh, but you're forgetting about the fact that people who are out looking for mp3s are already criminals, and probably insane too! :)
The unfathomable depths of depravity that a person undoubtedly has to sink to in order to want to download such blatantly illegal material procludes the possibility of self control. How could such perversions of humanity, so low that they would want to rip off poor starving companies with their underpaid CEOs possibly have the self restraint needed to resist the evils of horrifying teenage sex? How can they be expected to stray away from the evils offered by the snake with the ripe, luscious red fruit of lasciviousness and towards the light of corporate holiness and honor? Those who do not know the corporate pledge of allegiance, ("Buy, possess, own, consume, rent, lease, buy, possess, own, consume, rent, lease, buy...") couldn't possibly have the restraint needed to click the back button.
(Warning-this was a joke. If you though I was serious with the above article, then you need a good LART.)
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
www.puremp3.org is a website which promotes keeping porn off of mp3 sites. It's a good effort; check it out.
Boy are they out of touch. I wonder what percentage of the CEOs that are railing against this horrific teenage sex are bastard sons of unwed teenage mothers in their own rite.
When companies put out press releases and such, you would assume that because of the diversity in opinions of the public as well as for other reasons, they would want their announcements/press releases to contain factual information. But instead you get emotionally charged garbage that it meant solely to further their agenda. Of course companies are going to try to further their agenda, but it shouldn't be by trying to manipulate the passions and biases of what they doubtlessly assume are the "ignorant unwashed masses"
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
To paraphrase the immortal Claud Rains, the recording industry is shocked, shocked to discover that somebody is using sex to sell music.
(the revenues from your music video, sir,)
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It's more likely to depend on wether or not the author(s) 'got any' as teens. Were they popular, socially successful and well adjusted individuals, or repressed, snobby off-spring of right-religious neo-puritan freaks. You know, those that spell out the word S.E.X. in front of their kids until they're grown and married.
In my experience, teen sex was pretty damn great! Even with a partner (doh!).. Tastes and experiences differ, and tantric love-making is certainly not the same as fornicating with the stab-wounds of the departed, but I digress.
We can infer a lot about the psychological repression of the author(s), just by observing their language as it's used in the article. That, coupled with the remnants of a repressive society what would have jailed Alan Turing for being gay rather than having him assist in the deciphering of the Enigma engine, had he 'come out' publicly during his career. Silly islanders.
One can only hope that saner minds will prevail and this gets exposed as the ignorant sensationalism that it is. And that this never crosses the pond, since in the U.S. saner minds are shouted down by the likes of Jerry Falwell and Tipper Gore.
'Paying-off Karma at an accelerated rate' - Susan Ivanova
"Bite me. Call me. bCandid" Wow, Rob! What an appropriate banner ad...
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Well, we've all seem crap like this before, but I'm not sure even the RIAA is dumb enough to make a statement like that. Horrific scenes of teenage sex? Have you ever seen a more crystal clear piece of FUD in your life? I spit on this "BPI" just like I spit on the RIAA.
It's too bad they didn't use the word pedophelia instead of teenage sex...or maybe that would make it too obvious that this is pure FUD. The "pedophelia" or "pedophile" keyword is a favorite among politicians when they want to take away personal freedoms in favor of government regulation to "protect your children." Unfortunatly it's a just a way for them to protect their power base in the face of a changing world. It's obviously the same thing for the BPI. They're trying to protect their profit margins and distribution channels.
I've seen this same porn argument so many times over the past 3 years or so now that it's really funny and really sad at the same time. It's been applied to almost everything involving the internet. The BPI will be linking the words "pedophilia" and "child porn" to mp3's soon enough, since thats what really gets the public going. They're just lagging behind the US propeganda machine a bit, since America is the undispuded leader in propeganda, FUD, and P.R. bullshit. We've got all the cutting edge tactics over here. Lucky us.
But on the upside, when companies or organizations are resorting to pure FUD tactics, they're already losing the battle.
well, that's different
George
I download mp3s _almost_ constantly, and run into these kinds of sites _almost_ every day.
...
... after all that, upon login a message is displayed saying, "there are too many users currently logged into that account. Please try again later", and I'm instantly logged out.
The majority seem to have an incredibly good range of music, but are extremely difficult to get into. Let me explain
Firstly, the hosts have their site listed in an mp3 FTP search engines (such as audiogalaxy.com). Once their site is displayed (showing the username and password), I login via FTP. The first message displayed, is usually one saying that this is a 'looking only' account, and for 'leech access', one has to go to their website www.blah.whatever.etc.etc.
Once at the website, there are banners at the top of the page, and a message at the bottom. The message says to "click on the top banner, and the fourth word on the page is the login, then click on the second banner, and the second last word on the page is the password." Both of these banners (of course) are porn sites. The host obviously gets paid a few cents every time someone clicks on them.
Next, having finally got the 'leech' username and password, FTP to the server can be attempted. Now comes the fun part
This doesn't happen once or twice, it happens 90% of the time.
What I don't understand, is why the porn site keep paying them.
...is that when I hit the page, the freakin' banner ad started playing a background sound file! They wanna talk about the evils of forcing somebody to watch porn? How about the evil of forcing me to listen to Brad Pitt say "How much ya really know about yahself yah never been inna fight?" before I can lunge for the volume control?
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Apparently, they were complaining about the lack of quality and poor photography at their teen porn sites. They must believe that there should be much better teen sex out there than what these horiffic pictures show.
Maybe we should all send them the URL's to some high quality teen sex sites so the BPI won't be forced to view the horiffic ones.
Just a thought.
This should be a pretty easy problem to fix. Just use a browser or plugin that supports external comments (e.g. Third Voice, and I think Mosaic had something like this too?). Then just one person looks up the password and posts it for everyone. Nothin' the MP3/w4r3z d00d can do about it.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
It sounds to me like someone at BPI got caught looking at porn, and had to think fast. "The MP3s made me do it!" And then things got out of hand when the boss took him seriously.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
As someone who's seem more than his fair shar of sites which allow... um... "alternative means of software procurement" as well as MP3's, I've seen this. Most sites will not allow you to access them until you've clicked on one or more banners; they do this to make money for the owners. Furthermore, most of the banners are porn. The way that you prove you clicked this link comes in the fact that the password for the server is some word in a specific position on the page. Sometimes you have to use two banners, one to get the login and one to get the password.
Porn sites got wise to this, though. People would click through the banners, get the word they wanted, and leave. This wasn't making the porn vendors happy, so they switched to a new tactic; only giving their referrers money for people whop actually signed up for the service. Because of this now, you actually have to join many porn sites to access certain servers, and come back with information about a "Members Only" page.
I don't know. I'd consider that forcing a user to view porn to get MP3's. You're just as forced to join the sites as many people are to use Windows; let's put it that way.
Luckily, a few people still provide MP3's without banners. But there's some truth, at least, to that statement. Granted, you're not held at gunpoint and forced to relentlessly navigate these sites, but you think you're forced, and that's just as bad.
This article illustrates many problems with the
current state of the music industry. The music
industry as a whole is proving that they cannot
keep up with technology.
One of the main reasons that illegal mp3's are
so popular is that buying legal copies of most
music is prohibitively expensive for many people.
This is especially true of teenagers. Heck, I work
in Computer Software and have to be careful about
how many CD's I buy.
Since the crux of the problem lies in money, that
is the first place to look for a solution.
#1 The only real problem is that that the artist
doesn't get paid for illegal copies of their work.
In order to fight the illegal mp3's, we need to
make legal sources of music more affordable. One
way to do this would be to provide cheap mp3's
through valid distribution channels.
Calculate the amount of money that the artist
gets when a copy of their music is sold, add on
a small distribution fee for the internet site
and wala you can charge $2 for a CD worth of
music and still make a profit.
There is no more risk to the artist than with
conventional distribution channels. Anyone
these days can copy a CD or make a tape off
of a CD or tape, so the "mp3's are easy to
pirate" argument doesn't hold water. Once music
is affordable again, illegal mp3's will be much
less of a problem. (Once you drop the amount of
money saved by illegal activity, it becomes far
less attractive.)
The one remaining problem is coming up with a
way for people who don't have a credit card to
use these theoretical music sites. I leave that
to others, but what does need to happen is that
the music companies need to realise that if they
don't make a presense for themselves on the net,
they will swiftly become dinosaurs and soon thereafter, become extinct.
MP3 sites are aimed at the teeny-bopper crowd. A bit stupid, as I'd put teeny-boppers in the "CD drive=cup-holder" crowd.
um, hullo? Computers have become tremendously more widespread in the last few years, graybeard. And comp. savvy has followed suit. They're not that tough to use with a few years experience. The one demographic that has shown the largest drop in CD purchases is 13-18. Wonder why that is? Music execs are scared for a very good reason.
That being said, I found this amazing lobster prawn site, full tails and all.
+&x
I use those banner MP3 sites all the time. "The leech password is the 4th word in the 1st paragraph after you click the 'Hot Teens' banner." 4 out of 5 times the password is either "teen" or "explicit". Doesn't bother me too much if I get the music I want.
grep -ri 'should work'
What are they talking about? I read the article, and it says that not only are users exposed to porn, but "horrific pictures of teenage sex". They don't give any examples, or sites that do that, they simply assert this, and then have the article wander on to a history of mp3s.
:)
Horrific teenage sex? Have any of these people EVER visited a porn site? If the pictures are that "horrific", it's probably something you'd have to pay an arm and a leg for given some of the strange "tastes" that are out there. Can anybody think of a single good reason why a site would want to FORCE you to look at porn before you could get MP3s? The only thing I can think of is banner ads that are a bit lewd, and I'm sure we've all seen a lot of seedy banner ads, but never ones that had "horrific teenage sex".
Is this just a ploy on the part of recording companies to convince parents that if their child has any mp3s on his drive that he must be becoming a morally depraved pervert? Jeez, if that were true, I would have been blind LONG ago.
I guess though, if you can't attack the consumers of the material your against, (i.e. the kids downloading MP3s) then you can attack those who have control over the consumers.
It's this type of misinformation and ignorance mixed with a healthy dose of dishonesty and selfish corporate interest that gives some large corporations the appearance of being chicken shit money grubbing scumfucks.
Now, I'd love to rant on for 10 pages about how diffusion of responsibility and passing the buck leads to unethical business decisions and press releases, but I guess I'm just content to take the 50 point karma hit that I'm already in for.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
I can't even imagine the thought process that leads people to say things like that.
Actually, having to click on banner ads before entering MP3 sites is quite common.
Try looking up a popular song on Palavista and see how many of the listed sites let you in immediately. Very often the user name and password required for downloading files are chosen from the text of sites linked through banner ads; so you have to visit the sites (and usually click through to their sign-up page) before logging on. Very often these banners are pornographic, perhaps because such firms are not as picky as to who they permit to advertize them.
In this way illicit MP3 sites finance themselves, since simply displaying a banner ad often generates no banner revenue. Apparently the biggest difficulty in running such a site is trying to avoid 100% click-through ratios, as they tend to attract the attention and suspicion of banner advertizement firms.
What the article refers to are the many sites that require you to click on banner adds, usually pornographic but not always, in order to piece together a password to access 3l33t w4r3z and MP3. It wasn't exactly hidden in the article seeing as it was mentioned in the second paragraph. The article should've stopped there unfortunately.
The British Phonographic Industry then did a few hits of acid and through some unmentioned convolution of logic blames music piracy on organized crime.
The commentary by the BPI is sensationalistic, its designed to influence Joe Luddite consumer into buying into their party line. Its trying to convince them that piracy isn't just illegal, its backed by evil groups.
They'd have been better off using a different angle: Illegally distributing copies of our music is illegal, but not only are these people doing that they're also making money off of it.
You see it most on hotline sites. It goes like this:
Pick up some mp3 trackers for hotline, search 'mp3', and you get a big list of hotline servers. Usually they're run by some guy in a college dorm. Log onto Joe's server, and you'll get a message that says something to the effect of "You are logged in as a guest. To download files, you need a password. To get the password, visit my homepage at xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx ip address and click on the second banner. The tenth word on the resulting page is the password."
So they get income that way. And then the user downloads a bunch of music and moves on to the next one.
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Are they so concerned about the porn that they'll work to make mp3s easier to get, so that people won't have to look at those "horrifying" pictures?
That would be interesting...
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Unfortunately, this is one of those situations where someone can see trees but doesn't realize that there's a forest...
The internet/Internet (the first being a network of computers, the second being a society) has unleashed upon us a billion new ideas and things that have been unimagined in real life. Such as profitable porn banners. Or, the idea that you must respond to an advertisement so that the person displaying the advertisement gets the money for displaying it. (Hey, imagine that you leased out a billboard on Highway X to you local ABC affiliate but that you got paid only when people who drove on Highway X actually tuned into ABC later that night). Or, that the porn industry would blindly provide funding for any legal or illegal activity, as if what they already did wasn't seen as the devil's work by half this country...
Anyway, as it works out it's true that many mp3 distributors make you hit some porn banners in order to get access to the files. It's highly annoying anyway, since it doesn't work all the time and since you have to work hard to get rid of all the residual pop-ups. This is true of any warez, and the deal works out quite nicely for many people especially since mp3's and porn are both friends of many here on the 'net.
However, some things that are failed to be recognized by the "mp3's-cause-porn" concept:
- the connection is merely a coincidence. If cigarette vendors had pay-per-click banners on the net, we'd be saying that mp3's cause smoking too.
- there are also ways to get mp3's without any one-handed typing. Napster, for instance.
- Porn is extremely popular and profitable. Mp3's are also extremely poplular and profitable. The record companies don't like mp3s because they think that even if they used them, they couldn't make any money off of them. Hence, the record companies are figting a silly losing battle.
- People are willing to go through a lot of trouble with the porn banners to get to mp3's. Any company not jumping on this bandwagon is extremely stupid. The potential for both advertisers and mp3's are extraordinary. It should be grasping the attention of both Motown and Madison Ave.
- Law enforcement is too slow and two disinterested to stop this. This is what Al Capone would be doing today if he were alive.
- People today are totally disinterested in ethics and justice. They don't care who's getting ripped off, they don't care how young the girls or boys are, and they don't care that society doesn't approve. People are used to getting ripped off, fucked early, and being hated by society. Nothing to lose, folks, just like those kids in Colorado (Or those gunmen in Armenia, or that guy in Atlanta, or those guys at the post office, or whoever's on the news tonight)...
- The media will gladly repeat any juicy lie or idiot opinion that they are handed. Mp3's encourage porn. Coppermine's better than Athlon. Windows NT is a much better choice than Linux/Unix. Britney Spears has breast implants. Lauryn Hill said she doesn't want white people buying her albums. Harvey Keitel did a bad thing in Nicole Kidman's hair.
- Oh, finally, maybe it's a good new portal strategy. I like having my porn and mp3's in the same place...
I've been to these sites before, and there's just one thing you need to do before clicking on that banner. Go into Netscape (or IE's) preferences and turn off "Automatically Load Images". You can then go find the password that you need to get in.
One thing about the article
"It has always been the case that piracy has links with pornographers and organised crime."
Are they kidding with this one?
I haven't seen any links to http://www.mafia.spb.ru/.
has anyone else?
Sheesh, peoples...
By the looks of the comments here, it seems the readers of slashdot are as quick to post a flaming critism of the article as the BPI is to denounce MP3s.
THE ARTICLE IS NOT THE PROBLEM!!!!
The article is not the problem!! The views or organization like the BPI and the RIAA. Theis article, is only reporting on them. And if you read the article, you'lll realize they are also reporting on BECAUSE they too think it is alittle absurd. I mean, just look at the title:
DOWNLOADING MP3S WILL
MAKE YOU GO BLIND, WARN BPI
And their talk-back link:
"Is this the big labels running scared and looking for a scapegoat? Have you ever been forced to witness "horrific scenes of teenage sex" while downloading Mp3 files? Was it good for you?"
I think that the Porn sitez should fight back by posting tons O' mp3's on there site, tricking those perverts into listening to Engelbert Humperdink and Yani. ;) The year 2000 porn warz... duh nuh duh nuh.. weee oooo.
Clearly they want to hunt down illegal MP3 sites, and since they can't get people to agree it's a dangerous activity, they're using a bit of collateral damage. It's the same argument being used against, for instance, pot and prostitution. (Disclaimer: I'm not defending nor promoting either, just observing.)
Whereas many people say pot is not bad for your health and not intrinsictly dangerous, the main argument used by the police to crack down on pot is that it leads to other criminal activities. You're smoking pot? Well, you'll probably snort cocaine in the long run. And you're encouraging criminal groups that commit worse crimes because of it.
Never mind that it's a bit of circular logic.
Anyway... It's true. If you're looking for a few "illegal" MP3 and enter "MP3z" in any good search engine, you'll run into sites (sorry, sitez) who also have a lot of warez, and plenty of "passwordz" for porn sites. You'll also get so many sex banners you may as well go blind.
It's really just incidental. What it shows is that people willing to distribute copyrighted MP3s are the same crowd that distribute pr0n passwordz and cracked software. Come on, admit it. I'm not generalising, but on the whole, it happens a lot.
So... We're back to the whole collateral damage argument. It's hard to argue that free music is damaging in itself, so the BPI has to find another easy target. So they latch unto a well-known enemy likely to cause public outrage. Pornography.
And voila. Looking for MP3s makes you see a lot of porn.
Nice FUD, eh?
"Knowledge = Power = Energy = Mass"
Many sites dealing in illegal (copyright-wise) material will ask you to click porn banners or succumb to wave after wave of JavaScript popup ads. I remember coming into my room last summer to find windows recursively opening more windows, all pornographic. My roommate insists that he was just trying to get some Nintendo and Genesis ROMs, and I felt compelled to believe him.
Personally, I'm more appalled by sites that 'force' you to join pyramid money-making schemes like AllAdvantage or GoToWorld (or both, in some cases!) Apparently people are obsessed with making five bucks a month off of every sucker who wants MP3's. More power to 'em, but count me out of this. (Besides, in my typical nonconformist style, most ad-viewing proggies are Windows-only, and I can't run them.)
For more information, click here.
I used to run a hotline server (yes, I was one of those that give us all a bad name).
Anyway, I set up an account with a company named Safe-Audit which would let you set up banner accounts that pay up to $1 and $2 per successful registration... most of them paid out an average of $15 per 1000 page views.
What I would do is let people log into my hotline server anonymously and look around, but they weren't able to download anything unless they got the username and password. These could only be acquired by going to a page that I designated (anonymous web hosting of course), clicking through the banner, and then signing up for a free contest or something, and then on the confirmation page, there would be two words that would be the username and password.
of course, the people never really had to input the correct information, they just had to sign up. If I found that too many people were getting in by passing around the username and password, I'd change them once a week which would require everyone that had already signed up to do it again.
I made about $8k in 3 months with about 1.5 gigs of prOn movies, some beta software releases, and a few mp3's.
And yes, the company paid out until they started questioning why hundreds of people were going to my stupid homepage and the amounts of click-thrus were almost identical to the # of page visits...
but yes, it was a nice, successful little scam, and unlike that poor guy in coloroda, I made money and wasn't jailed for it.