Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.