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      Tech bros need to realise deepfake porn ruins lives – and the law has to catch up

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Friday, 1 March - 09:18

    Taylor Swift is just one of countless victims of deepfake videos. Firms feeding off this abuse should pay for the harm they cause

    Imagine finding that someone has taken a picture of you from the internet and superimposed it on a sexually explicit image available online. Or that a video appears showing you having sex with someone you have never met.

    Imagine worrying that your children, partner, parents or colleagues might see this and believe it is really you. And that your frantic attempts to take it off social media keep failing, and the fake “you” keeps reappearing and multiplying. Imagine realising that these images could remain online for ever and discovering that no laws exist to prosecute the people who created it.

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      ‘Everything is hairless’: what 100 women taught me about porn and body confidence

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Tuesday, 20 February - 05:00 · 1 minute

    How is pornography changing women’s perception of what is normal, acceptable and beautiful? I interviewed them to find out

    Sorrel grew up during the 1970s, in a big Caribbean household in the north of England. One of two girls in a family with four boys, she learned early that not only was her vulva not to be looked at – it wasn’t even something she could name. “It was called a ‘munchie’,” she says. “We weren’t allowed to touch the munchie, we weren’t allowed to see the munchie, and we definitely weren’t allowed to speak about the munchie.”

    In this, Sorrel and her munchie still aren’t alone. No matter what we call it, many women grow up with the sense that there’s something unspeakable “down there” – and it shows. A 2019 poll of the British public found that 45% of women couldn’t label the vagina. Another, in 2021, found that, regardless of sex, more than a third of the people surveyed couldn’t locate the clitoris . It’s not something exclusively British, either; in 2010, an advert by the tampon company Kotex was banned by three US television networks just for saying the word “vagina”, and a 2020 poll found that roughly half of US women couldn’t identify the cervix or the uterus .

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      France is reckoning with the harms of online porn. But will anything change? | Marie Le Conte

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 9 November - 06:00

    A government-backed report is damning about the porn industry, painting it as inherently criminal. Sex workers, on the other hand, strongly disagree

    Online pornography has become inescapable. Hundreds of millions of people watch it every month. The global industry makes vast amounts of money every year. Countries and governments constantly debate its practices, excesses and dangers, yet nothing meaningful ever happens. Can it be stopped or curtailed? Should it?

    It is France’s turn to agonise over adult content, how it’s produced, what it leads to and whether it should be banned. The catalyst was a report launched by the High Council for Equality Between Women and Men (HCE), a government-nominated watchdog on gender equality.

    Marie Le Conte is a French journalist living in London

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      How the UK’s online safety bill aims to clean up the internet

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Tuesday, 24 October, 2023 - 10:45

    It’s complicated, contentious and sweeping. As the landmark legislation becomes law, here’s a guide to its key rules on everything from pornographic content to protecting children

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    Deepfakes, viral online challenges and protecting freedom of expression: the online safety bill sprawls across many corners of the internet and it’s about to become official. The much-debated legislation is due to receive royal assent, and therefore become law, imminently.

    The purpose of the act is to make sure tech firms have the right moderating systems and processes in place to deal with harmful material. “This means a company cannot comply by chance,” says Ben Packer, a partner at the law firm Linklaters. “It must have systems and processes in place to, for instance, minimise the length of time for which illegal content is present.”

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      AI-generated child sex imagery has every US attorney general calling for action

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 6 September, 2023 - 21:48 · 1 minute

    A photo of the US Capitol in Washington, DC.

    Enlarge (credit: Getty Images )

    On Wednesday, American attorneys general from all 50 states and four territories sent a letter to Congress urging lawmakers to establish an expert commission to study how generative AI can be used to exploit children through child sexual abuse material (CSAM). They also call for expanding existing laws against CSAM to explicitly cover AI-generated materials.

    "As Attorneys General of our respective States and territories, we have a deep and grave concern for the safety of the children within our respective jurisdictions," the letter reads. "And while Internet crimes against children are already being actively prosecuted, we are concerned that AI is creating a new frontier for abuse that makes such prosecution more difficult."

    In particular, open source image synthesis technologies such as Stable Diffusion allow the creation of AI-generated pornography with ease, and a large community has formed around tools and add-ons that enhance this ability. Since these AI models are openly available and often run locally, there are sometimes no guardrails preventing someone from creating sexualized images of children, and that has rung alarm bells among the nation's top prosecutors. (It's worth noting that Midjourney, DALL-E, and Adobe Firefly all have built-in filters that bar the creation of pornographic content.)

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      Pornhub wins injunction that blocks Texas age-verification law

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 31 August, 2023 - 19:37

    Pornhub wins injunction that blocks Texas age-verification law

    Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

    The day before a Texas antiporn law that requires age verification to access adult websites was set to take effect, the state's attorney general, Angela Colmenero, has been at least temporarily blocked from enforcing the law.

    US District Judge David Alan Ezra granted a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking enforcement after the Free Speech Coalition (FSC) joined adult performers and sites like Pornhub in a lawsuit opposing the law. Today, they succeeded in convincing Ezra that Texas' law violates the First Amendment and would have "a chilling effect on legally-protected speech," FSC said in a press release.

    “This is a huge and important victory against the rising tide of censorship online,” Alison Boden, FSC's executive director, said. “From the beginning, we have argued that the Texas law, and those like it, are both dangerous and unconstitutional. We’re pleased that the court agreed with our view that [the law's] true purpose is not to protect young people, but to prevent Texans from enjoying First Amendment protected expression. The state’s defense of the law was not based in science or technology, but ideology and politics.”

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      OnlyFans owner Leonid Radvinsky pays himself $338m in dividends

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 24 August, 2023 - 17:36


    Company’s 2022 accounts show pre-tax profits up by 22%, as Radvinsky pays himself $889m over three years

    The owner of OnlyFans, the mostly pornographic subscriber platform, paid himself $338m (£267m) in dividends last year as the UK-based company made pre-tax profits of $525m.

    Leonid Radvinsky, 41, the site’s Ukrainian-American owner, is the sole shareholder in the company, which was founded by the Stokely family in Essex in 2016.

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