Sex, Bombs and Burgers (25 page)

With most of the work done, Cerf left DARPA in 1982 for telecommunications company MCI, where he put together the first commercial email system. In 1983, with 113 nodes in operation, the American military split off from the ARPAnet into its own MILnet. The remaining ARPAnet nodes switched over to a new network constructed for academic use by the National Science Foundation, the NSFnet, which today sounds like something used to capture serial cheque bouncers. The final piece of the puzzle came in 1988, when regulators allowed Cerf’s MCI email system and others like it to connect to the NSFnet. MCI made the link in the summer of 1989 and the commercial internet was born.

The early internet was mostly all text, but even at this early stage, porn was there first. By 1995 the text-based Usenet was dominated by sex and porn; chat rooms such as alt.sex made up four of the ten most popular bulletin boards, drawing an estimated 1.85 million readers.
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Adult businesses helped develop uuencode, a tool that transformed lines of text code found on the
Usenet into pictures, many of which carried ads for magazines and sex-chat phone lines.
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The internet didn’t really take off until it got a shiny new paint job in the form of the World Wide Web. Text was nice and all, but people really wanted to
see
stuff on their computers, especially when it came to porn. Tim Berners-Lee, a Britishborn MIT professor working at CERN in Geneva, got the ball rolling. In the late 1980s he put together some code called Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which formatted text and electronic images onto a single page and allowed such pages to link to each other. On August 6, 1991, CERN uploaded its page, the very first thread in what Berners-Lee called the World Wide Web. The page contained links to information on how to create a browser that could view HTML code. Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, two programmers working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, used the information to create their own web browser, Mosaic, which they made available to the public for free in 1993.

Mosaic, which eventually morphed into Netscape, was the first browser to seamlessly integrate text, graphics and links into an easy-to-use interface. Its release was also timed perfectly with the first generation of university students graduating and going off into the real world. As Cerf puts it, “People left university and they’d say, ‘Where’s my internet? Where’s my connection?’” The stage was set for the internet and the web to take off, and the porn people were waiting. Berners-Lee knew it. “We have to recognize that every powerful tool can be used for good or evil. Legend has it that every new technology is first used for something related to sex or pornography,” he said years
after unleashing his invention. “That seems to be the way of humankind.”
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A Playground for Porn

With the launch of its website in August 1994, Playboy Enterprises was one of the first big businesses to embrace the web. Company executives say
Playboy
was the first national magazine with a website.
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The reasoning was pretty simple— porn is very much a visual medium, and the web removed the biggest obstacle to selling pornography and sexual services: the shame of being discovered.
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Not surprisingly, people flocked to sites that displayed nude pictures. On its launch day in March 1995,
Penthouse
’s website received 802,000 visits. By 1997
Playboy
was racking up five million visits a day, making it one of the most popular sites on the web.
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This instant success, however, meant that the big adult magazines were also the first victims of the problem that has plagued the internet since its inception: copyright infringement. Even before the web, enterprising computer programmers were digitizing
Playboy
and
Penthouse
photos for transmission over the Usenet (and image researchers were downloading the Lena picture). The web made it even easier because anyone could copy pictures from
Playboy
’s or
Penthouse
’s site and start their own clone website. The solution for the magazines was to innovate, both technologically and legally. In 1997
Playboy
unveiled technology that inserted a digital watermark into its images. The watermarks were invisible to the naked eye, but could be detected by a “spider” tool that crawled the web looking for them. “The worm is very appealing,” a magazine executive said. “We try to see who’s doing what, where and when to our
stuff.”
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Every major content producer on the web now uses some variation of this sort of technology. On the legal front, in 1998—well before the big music and film industries went after copyright infringers with lawsuits—
Playboy
won a $3.7 million judgment against a California operation that was selling the magazine’s images on the Usenet for $5 each.
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All of a sudden,
Playboy
was in the unusual position of suing someone else for distributing pornographic material—its own!

Photographs would only do for so long, though, and soon porn entrepreneurs turned to developing online video. A full decade before YouTube, Pythonvideo.com was streaming live video from a number of sex theatres in Amsterdam’s red-light district. Launched in 1995, the endeavour was limited by the early video compression standards and slow internet speeds of the time, but the small, choppy streams proved immensely successful. Originally intended as a promotional vehicle to encourage tourists to visit the theatres, by 2001 Python was streaming live video content to three thousand websites.

Other players, such as Virtual Dreams, took Python’s idea a step further and introduced two-way video-conferencing strip shows. Visitors to the site typed in their requests to the man or woman at the other end, who then acted them out. Presciently, Virtual Dreams’ owners predicted the technology would benefit “medical, educational and a whole host of commercial and industrial transactions.”
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Of course, video chat is now a standard tool offered by the likes of Apple, Google, Skype, Microsoft and Yahoo. Burger King even copied the idea years later with its hilarious “subservient chicken” website, where a man dressed in a chicken suit took requests from visitors.

Into the new millennium, several porn producers, including
Los Angeles–based heavyweight Wicked Pictures, pushed the adoption of better compression standards, particularly the H.264 codec (also known as MPEG-4)—now widely used in online video—to take advantage of the higher internet speeds being made available to consumers. “We don’t sell millions of copies of a title on hard goods like a mainstream studio does, so we choose to support new avenues to deliver our products,” Wicked founder Steve Orenstein says. “We embraced H.264 early on as our primary codec for online delivery for both archived and live high-definition streaming.”
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The porn industry’s video innovations did not go unnoticed by mainstream businesses, which quietly adopted them for their own purposes. One senior executive who would prefer to remain anonymous told me of how the multinational bank he worked for co-opted porn technology to help advise clients on their investments.
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In 2003 the bank was looking for a way to distribute a video multicast of each morning’s investment tips, but no one was offering such a service commercially and the bank’s own IT research team was stuck. “Then we said, ‘Hold on, having a talking image distributed by the internet is something the porn people have been doing for a long time,’” the executive says.

The IT team came up with the idea of having an employee sign up to various porn sites to snoop around, but the bank’s human resources department was, not surprisingly, “dead against it.” A junior member was sent home armed with a credit card, instructions to expense all his research as meals and a mandate to figure out how the porn companies were broadcasting their videos. He came back a few weeks later with a fully functional video system. “It was a direct analogue. It was completely the
same approach and the same technology,” the executive says. “The higher-ups didn’t care, they were completely in on the game and used to just laugh. They were completely conflicted.”

Mainstream businesses also latched onto the security methods developed by porn companies, which by the nature of their business had huge targets painted on them. “The mixture of how ‘adult’ is seen as less accepted in society and the idea that money flows like water through this industry makes it an ideal target for hackers,” says Paul Benoit, chief operating officer of the company that runs Twistys.com, a popular video download site. “Adult companies are less likely to work with the FBI or RCMP in dealing with hacker attempts since the nature of their business isn’t as accepted as banking or book selling.”
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Aside from having to deal with the same issues as mainstream websites, such as denial-of-service attacks, worms and viruses, adult sites also have to prevent hackers from stealing their content, which is usually hidden behind a paid membership wall. “This includes making sure our members area is locked down to authorized and paying customers only, but we also have to have defences in place to prevent password sharing, password brute forcing, proxy server abuse and such,” says Jack Dowland, systems administration director for a number of adult sites, including Pink Visual. “Everyone wants something for free. And not just free stuff for free. They want stuff that you would normally have to pay for for free. Add in the technical challenge, and you have a playground ripe for would-be crackers.”
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Porn sites have thus been a target for every horny fifteenyear-old computer geek with too much time on his hands. As with
Playboy
and its watermark software, porn sites have had to make big investments early to protect their content and
customers’ private information. For many, security has become almost as important as producing the sexual content. As such, while having “porn star” on your résumé may not get you acting gigs opposite Clint Eastwood or Meryl Streep, having “porn webmaster” can result in a warm welcome from mainstream companies looking for innovative IT employees. That’s not to say that many porn webmasters want to jump the fence—they tend to get paid well and enjoy more freedom at what are almost always smaller, more flexible companies. Working in the porn industry, Twistys’s Benoit says, means doing “whatever our imaginations can generate.”

While many web developments came from companies that simply made erotic films, the darker and creepier side of human sexual desire has also, unfortunately, inspired big advances. The arrival of Java, a programming language that made possible many multimedia applications, is one such example. Patrick Naughton was part of the team at Sun Microsystems that designed Java in the mid-nineties. In 1999 Naughton was nabbed by an FBI sting at the Santa Monica pier in Los Angeles, where he arrived for what he believed would be a sexual rendezvous with a thirteenyear-old girl he had met online. Naughton, who at the time was overseeing Disney’s internet content, was convicted of travelling across state lines to have sex with a minor, but avoided jail time by brokering a deal to help the FBI capture pedophiles online.
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Java, meanwhile, proved to be a great tool for web designers to create all sorts of in-browser applications, from games to interactive weather maps to real-time chat functions. It also allowed designers to create new functionality without having to worry about how to get past the firewalls used by many corporations, which tend to block employees from downloading
add-on software for their computers. This proved to be a huge boon to the porn industry, which sees about 70 percent of its traffic happen during the nine-to-five work day.
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Observers within the IT industry, meanwhile, have for years speculated about why Naughton was so interested in creating communications tools that could bypass corporate firewalls.

Show Me the Honey

The porn business is a business, after all, and none of these innovations would have happened if there wasn’t a whole pile of money to be made. To cash in, adult companies were quick to develop a variety of payment systems, some good, others bad. Aside from adapting the automated credit card payment systems they had developed for phone sex, porn producers also invested in things like e-gold and OmniPay, digital currency transfer systems that allowed people to pay for goods online without a credit card. These systems have fallen into disrepute in recent years because they’ve become the primary payment vehicles of online casinos, which in North America are largely banned from accepting traditional financial transactions. (They did, however, inspire well-regarded systems such as eBay-owned PayPal.) One of the shadiest systems required customers to download and install special software. In one of the most insidious scams the Federal Trade Commission has ever seen, the software then made its own connection to an internet provider in Moldova where, unbeknownst to the customer, it racked up huge longdistance phone charges. Customers only found out when their phone bill arrived.
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On the plus side, porn companies also pioneered cooperative affiliate systems where one website advertised on
another. If a visitor followed a link on Site X to Site Y and ended up joining Site Y, Site Y then gave Site X a payment for the referral. Not only did mainstream businesses such as Amazon and eBay co-opt this innovation, it also formed the basis for Google’s entire context-based advertising system. When you enter a query on Google, a number of text ads pop up on the right hand of your search; if you click on one of those ads, the company behind it sends Google a payment for the referral. In ten short years, Google has used this ad system to become the massively profitable behemoth it is today.

Regardless of the payment systems used, putting porn on the internet was—and is—akin to printing money. The traffic and revenue numbers have been simply huge, even if they have been hard to accurately measure, since most producers are not large, publicly traded companies required to report earnings. Still, analyst estimates have painted an astounding picture. In the early days of the web, sexually oriented products accounted for an estimated 10 to 30 percent of the entire online retail market.
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By the turn of the millennium, while mainstream content providers such as
The Wall Street Journal
charged online subscribers $59 a year, adult sites such as Danni’s Hard Drive were able to charge $25
per
month
, which explained how porn accounted for more than half of the estimated $2 billion spent on online content in 1999.
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The most profitable non-sex category of websites, online gambling, took in only $150 million in 2000, a paltry amount compared to the $1.7 billion raked in by adult sites.
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Mainstream businesses also quietly benefited from the heavy traffic being generated by porn. Of the eighty-one million people who accessed popular search sites Yahoo and MSN in March 2001, more than thirty million made their way to an adult site.
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At the same time, about
40 percent of Germany’s and Italy’s entire web traffic was aimed at porn sites, with similar numbers found across Europe.
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That traffic helped the portals sell advertising space on their sites.