The king of revenge porn had just slept with a girl on her 18th birthday at an inconspicuous hotel in Chinatown, and he claimed he had the cell phone snap of her driver’s license to prove it. Though he lives in San Francisco, the notorious Hunter Moore was in New York to serve a community service sentence following an incident in which he’d headbutted a go-go dancer.
“I was so coked out,” Mr. Moore told Betabeat, as we made our way from the lobby of his hotel to a Broome Street bar called Lolita. Tall and thin with ink-colored hair and eyes to match, wearing a black sweatshirt with the hood pulled over his head, Mr. Moore sipped a rum and coke as we slid into a booth toward the back. Black tattoos reached like spiders across his arms.
Actually, being in the billion dollar startup club kind of sucks. [New York Times]
Any person with children who purchases a computer in the U.K. will be forced to apply anti-porn safety controls to it, because there’s absolutely no way kids who want to look at porn will be able to get around that. [Daily Mail]
Cisco balls so hard they just dished out $1.2 billion in cash for Meraki, a wifi startup. [TechCrunch]
How did nerds impact the election? Turns out 30,000 Redditors registered to vote after President Obama linked to a voter registration page in his AMA. [The Atlantic]
According to U.S. search results, Americans care more about Twinkies than the Israel/Gaza conflict. We are all the worst. [Virtus Machina]
A study conducted by an internet safety non-profit called the Internet Watch Foundation has revealed that the vast majority of sexualized multimedia uploaded by teens to places like Facebook is lifted and hosted on outside porn sites. Most of the content was never meant to leave social networks, but 88 percent of the images studied by the IWF were later found on porn sites. Read More
Just a couple of weeks ago, the Internet got what it’s so clearly needed all along: an, ahem, portal to the universe of smut. Launched September 27, Search.xxx is meant to provide a secure alternative to just Googling your most secret fetish, so you won’t get outed the next time someone borrows your laptop.
ICM Registry, the company behind the site, reached out to Betabeat to share a few statistics. Search.xxx received a whopping billion impressions within its first week, as grateful porn connoisseurs and teens stuck using the family computer flocked to the site. Read More
While the bigwigs of Cornell’s NYC Tech program gathered at their temporary digs in the Google HQ to pat each other’s backs, word was spreading about one enterprising cam girl who decided to use Cornell’s Carpenter Engineering Library as a backdrop for a self-made porno.
A tipster sent the video to IvyGate, which was uploaded to Xhamster and posted to Cornell’s forums, EzraHub. The video shows a young blonde woman masturbating; at one point, she angles the computer to show that someone is studying behind her, providing a pretty comprehensive view of the library which IvyGate confirmed is “Carp.” Read More
Awhile back, a friend confessed that she used Safari exclusively for watching porn, so her . . . unconventional searches wouldn’t pollute her Google results–or good moral standing. Last week, another friend admitted to clearing out his browser history every single time he indulged. (I got the impression this was a fairly regular ordeal.)
Even with the advent of privacy (read: porn) mode, one never quite feels incognito. “You could have been looking for Brazilian midget transsexuals or something, you know?” Stuart Lawley, CEO of ICM Registry told Betabeat in a booming British accent. ”And then you’re looking for Brazilian wax and it autocompletes. How are you going to explain that to your partner looking over your shoulder?” Read More
When we first heard about Offbeatr (NSFW) back in February, the Kickstarter for porn prompted us to ask ourselves: What other fast-growth startups could benefit from a porn-y clone? Quite a few already had one, as the commenters noted.
Well today, Offbeatr, the delightfully open-minded brainchild of cofounders Ben Tao and Eric Lai, finally launched, billing itself as non-equity based platform to fund “sex and adult related creative projects.” Read More
From the realm of the utterly unsurprising, Neuroskeptic, a blog about neuroscience, clues us in on a study of Google Trends that confirms what anyone who ever hit puberty has known from age 13 on: to everything there is a season, especially getting naked: Read More
Plenty of people have been sued for illegal downloading. But an increasing number of defendants are basically giving plaintiffs the finger, in the form of countersuits. Today TorrentFreak offers up yet another example, that of a put-upon Colorado man who’s filed a lengthy countersuit demanding millions in damages and also a public apology in a local newspaper.
Presumably he also faxed the company a handwritten note saying, “And that’s what’s up.” Read More
