It’s Optenet’s business to find porn and, apparently, they’re pretty good at it. In a recent press release, the company that offers family-friendly filters for your computer claims that one-third of internet is porn.

Ana Luisa Rotta, director of child protection projects at Optenet, says in the release:

“When you consider that more than one third of the Internet’s content is pornographic, combined with the overwhelming increase in young people now curiously visiting Websites with such ease of access, it is becoming increasingly imperative that adults take responsibility for the management of home PC security.”

“Home PC security”? Was that a subtle reference to Homeland Security? We don’t know, but according to Optenet we’re all in danger. Their study, which looked at “a database of hundreds of millions of URLs,” churned out these stats:

-Pornography makes up 37% of the total content on the Internet
-Websites related to online role-playing games (RPGs) have grown by 212%
-Websites that contain violence have increased by 10.8%
-Websites that contain terrorism content have increased by 8.5%
-Websites that contain illegal drugs purchase have increased by 6.8%

An excellent point made on the blog Geeks Are Sexy, which broke the story:  if these numbers only reflect the total number of sites in each category, then an increase doesn’t really mean much of anything. If the whole internet is getting bigger, then of course the number of each type of page on the internet is also increasing.

One wonders if that huge database also showed an increase in more wholesome websites–for example, corporate pages for porn filtering businesses.

Related content:
Discoblog: To China’s Internet Filter, Garfield is Pornography, Porn is Not
Discoblog: Got Child Porn Stored in Your Xbox? New Forensic Tool Will Find It
Discoblog: Bad News for Cyberporn: Internet Sex Linked to Depression, Anxiety

Image: flickr / gcfairch

The next time your partner isn’t in the mood for some nookie, how about tempting him or her with a piece of… er… pork? It may sound strange, but Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez swears that a little bit of pig has a whole lot of pop to it.

Reuters quotes the president:

“I’ve just been told something I didn’t know; that eating pork improves your sex life… I’d say it’s a lot nicer to eat a bit of grilled pork than take Viagra,” President Cristina Fernandez said to leaders of the pig farming industry. She said she recently ate pork and “things went very well that weekend, so it could well be true.”

(more…)

PCs are typically the first place forensic scientists look when they suspect suspicious activity. That’s why many criminals are storing anything they don’t want people to know about on their Xboxes—and, according to authorities, that includes plenty of child pornography.

To combat this problem, computer scientist David Collins at Sam Houston State University developed a tool that can read the game consoles for illegal hidden materials, which he calls XFT. This the first tool designed to read Xboxes for strictly forensic purposes.

The original Xbox hard drive can be modified so that the game console behaves like a PC—and there’s no physical evidence that the system has been changed. While it’s normal for law enforcement officials to confiscate a suspect’s Xbox, forensic scientists must then make a copy of the hard drive to analyze its contents (which is the same process that is used when digging for clues on PCs). Without the interface that Collin’s tool provides, the bit-for-bit information on an Xbox remains buried, unable to be read by current forensics software.

(more…)