Free Porn Will Destroy the Net

[gonzo]

Jonathan Zittrain is a professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University. He recently wrote a book called, “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.” The basic premise seems to be: on a long enough life span all good things are likely to get subverted in ways that leave them unusable; the internet, an accidental creation/discovery in the late 70s by a few computer nerds, is no exception.

Take spam. We all hate it. The more time passes the more sophisticated it becomes. It’s one form of internet abuse that threatens to bring down the house if its allowed to evolved unchecked.

Zittrain warns that eventually abuse of the web, including evolved spam, can reach such levels that people feel it is no longer worth the effort to go online — or if they do, it could become a musical chairs-like situation, where users habitually skip around as certain sites lose out to internet abusers.

Recently websites and blogs have begun requiring users to enter letters into a “captcha“* (see below), in an attempt to zero-out spam content in comment sections. This we know.

But did you know that spam originators — people who make it – have upped their game to where they’ve now set up websites that offer free porn to hackers who can crack captcha codes?

Not cash, porn — the new, great motivator.


Every second — second — more than 28,000 users are viewing pornographic material online. And every second — second — over $3,000 is being spent on porn.

In fact, the internet porn industry does more revenue than the big tech companies combined: Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, eBay, Netflix, Amazon, Apple and Earthlink.

Porn is the crown jewel of the internet, and though business is good there’s a problem on the horizon — one at least partially of porn’s making.
The internet is just a hodgepodge of technologies layered on top of one another in order to keep it viable for ever growing numbers of users. Since the internet was created/discovered by accident, questions of how much space there is on the world wide web have had to be continually revisited.

As the internet has grown at an astronomical rate, more technologies have needed to be developed and added in order to keep it sustainable — a hodgepodge scenario.

But there’s a problem that may leave us all in for a rude awakening much sooner than you think (less than 2 years): the internet is running out of space!

What’s killing it? We are of course, but specifically videos (and mobile technology). Videos are being uploaded so frequently and are taking up so much space that they’re threatening the overall usability of the web.
(FUCKING PORN!)

It’s kinda like an expanding waste line. It started out small but each year it gets more bloated. Till eventually it gets so big it threatens to burst wide open, killing the person. Either they can shed the fat or buy bigger clothes. But this is America so we already know what they’re gonna do: buy bigger clothes for the web.

But it’s not a done deal; unless some deep pockets invest hundreds of billions of dollars to build more capacity, entire swaths of the web could experience “brownouts” before 2010.

Young people are generally apathetic when it comes to government, but imagine the holy terror they’ll unleash when they hear the words: No more Facebook. They’ll raise arms against the powers that be and the whole campaign will be coordinated via IM.

So let’s recap: pay-for-play porn is the most lucrative game on the web, dwarfing the earned revenues of the biggest “legitimate” internet business out there. Unlike porn sites which spam you death, these companies are dependent on a secure internet and thus stand to lose out if spam cripples the net’s infrastructure. Meanwhile, hackers are being bribed with free porn to make spam even more lethal, thus guaranteeing that the web becomes increasinlgy unsafe.

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