There is a new scam afoot where you are sent one of your passwords in the title of an email, then in the body copy are threatened unless you fork over some bitcoin. The threat is that your
navigation to porn sites will be sent to your entire contact list.
To be clear, I have yet to receive such a threat — but I read that it has been pretty successful in collecting from
frightened users.
Why in the world would anybody want to hide that they have been to porn sites? Or, more specifically, pay money to keep that information private?
While you can
find lists as long as your, uh, arm of the benefits of the digital age, without question one of the top two or three has been easy access to pornography. I don't want to get into a big moral debate
about who has been compromised or exploited because they are featured on porn sites (although I would be happy to draw a fat line at those assholes who take pictures of little kids and post them), but
for the sake of argument, can we agree that it is nice to click over and spend some quality time watching some reasonably attractive people have sex with one another? Many who have also had sex with
the Commander-in-Chief, it seems.
Porn used to be a relatively small industry with the same couple of hundred "actors" appearing in thousands of videos under different names. Now every
middle-class couple with a digital camera thinks the world would enjoy watching THEM have sex, even though both could stand to lose a couple of pounds and he needs a good dentist. Thousands more send
nude picture of at least one part of their bodies they are proud of to websites that specialize in collecting pictures of the naughty bits of ordinary people (often with a hazy look that emerges about
halfway through a bottle of tequila).
It used to be you had to go to New Orleans during Mardi Gras to watch women expose their breasts (in exchange for plastic beads that ended up in the motel
trashcan). Nowadays there are hundreds of digital pages of them doing pretty much the same thing on beaches, in schools, on the street, and even during church. (Thank yew, Jesus!). Nearly every
model and movie star in the world has stripped for a person who said he could get them a part, and that content is pretty easy to find as well.
Meanwhile teenagers (and even younger) have made
it a thing to send naked pictures to each other by phone, if only to have them disappear after eight seconds. Kind of makes "What are you reading these days" a less revealing question on a date,
huh?
The bottom line (so to speak) is that pretty much everybody in the world has accessed some kind of porn on the internet. Yes, some of it is a little extreme, with activities that are
probably still against the law in most communities. But after a while it gets to be so repetitive and redundant that most folks just ignore it. Either that — or it makes you feel so inadequate
that it hurts your pride to watch it anymore.