geekosystem

In news that will no doubt come as a blow to many of the Internet's more sex-crazed denizens, developers for Google have 86ed pornographic apps for Google Glass in an update of its policies earlier this week. We can all sleep easier knowing that the guy on the bus is not looking at people's naughty bits, but narcissistically checking his Facebook feed, which is more noble and dignified than watching a skin flick...for reasons that I'm sure I will think of eventually.

Google Glass has raised some interesting questions of etiquette. When is it rude to wear a camera on your face? What are acceptable uses for the wearable technology in public? One thing I think everyone can agree on is that watching porn in public makes you a creep, but that doesn't mean it won't be an option for Glass users. There's obviously already a porn app for Glass.

One of the things that's understood but rarely said about the Internet is that most of it, by volume, is made of naked people, many of them engaged in a whole galaxy of exotic sex acts. There's porn for everything and everyone, no matter what weird stuff you're interested in. And while porn is a big business on its own, the way it dominates Internet search traffic means that web sites that have nothing to do with porn may still benefit from the erotic quality of the Internet at large.

It's common knowledge that the Internet is primarily a method of delivering pornography to consumers at unheard of speeds, but that may not be the case much longer in Iceland. Lawmakers there are the latest working to put in place a firewall that would block citizens from viewing pornography online. Iceland isn't the first Western nation to take a swing at 86ing Internet porn -- the United Kingdom has flirted with the idea in the past -- but a growing call among lawmakers suggests it might be the first nation that has an actual shot at passing legislation to make the Internet measurably less naughty.

Ah, Google. Never change. Well, okay, change a bit, but please always have strange search bugs. Thanks to what's being called an "impossible query," there's a way to make Google churn out a bunch of strange links to pornography when it should only be trying to solve a mathematical equation. It appears that Google's been made aware of this via a Quora question, but there's still time to experience the phenomenon for yourself.

Twitter's new Vine service lets people post six-second-long videos to the Internet, so people are obviously using it for porn. Apple goes out of its way to make it look like they keep porn off their devices, so they boot apps from the App Store pretty quickly if people start using them for porn. To avoid getting booted altogether, Vine has preemptively changed their rating to 17+, and made a few other adjustments in their new update.

After being removed from the iOS App Store last week for problems with users submitting pornographic images, photo sharing app 500px has made some adjustments and is back in the game. The biggest change is that the app now features a way for users to report images that violate Apple's draconian terms. It's stupid for Apple to go to such great lengths to kill apps that people are using to share naked picture when Safari is still the best porn app for iOS.

This took... actually a little bit more time than we would have expected, but it looks like users have already started using Twitter's new Vine app to post sexually explicit material. Vine is a service that lets people post six-second videos to Twitter, and it seems that a lot of people have been using it to post six seconds of porn, once again proving that if you give people a new way to communicate, they will almost immediately use it to send each other pictures of their genitals.

Futilely wishing that this development won't be used as more justification for the misinformed anti-video game agendas of parent groups and law makers worldwide, children in Britain were met with the most unexpected of search results when scouring Google for anything related to the next installment in the Pokémon game franchise, Pokémon X: Links to a hardcore pornography website. Parents across the country no doubt spat out gallons of tea in shocked reaction to their children seeing what cannot be unseen, with many reaffirming that the Internet still has a way to go in regards to blocking minors from inadvertently stumbling upon unwholesome content.

The untamed wilderness of the Internet is still something that people across the globe tend to find suspicious. There could be anything out there, after all, and we need to protect the children. That's how the argument typically goes, anyway, when calls for censorship crop up. That's what appears to be the case in South Korea, as the nation's reportedly planning on installing filters on the smartphones of teenagers in order to block unsavory material like pornography.

The United Kingdom has, in the past, been notoriously difficult on Internet pornography. There's even a Wikipedia page dedicated to their anti-pornography movement, if that's any indication. A recent campaign sought to automatically block all pornographic content from being accessed by residents of the U.K. unless they explicitly told their ISP they wanted access. That surely wouldn't have been entirely awkward. "Greetings, company that provides my Internet. I would like access to porn, thanks." Thankfully, ministers have rejected this proposed filter.

Earlier this week, Google had put a search filter in place that made it difficult for those with a taste for adult entertainment to scroll through Google Images for pornographic pics. While they weren't expunged entirely from the system, it did manage to discourage some from putting in the time and effort to find them. While the number of pornographic searches on Google have gone down, there's one search engine gaining from the billion dollar corporation's loss. The porn-only search engine known as Search.xxx has reported a 50% traffic increase in matter of 24 hours. That's whole lot of people with a desperate need to get their unsavory fix.

Google has added a new filter to their image search to make it harder to find porn, thus defeating the purpose of Google image search and the Internet as a whole. They insist this isn't a censorship measure, but rather a move to make sure users find "exactly what they're looking for." Are people using Google image search for something other than porn? Huh, I'll be damned.

For years Apple has really gone out of their way to try to prevent porn from tainting their products, so it's almost karmic that the launch of iTunes in Russia has been plagued with links to pornography and escort services. It's very unlikely that Apple has somehow relaxed their policy on adult content to this extent, and the mistake has already been explained by a bug. Sorry, Russia. You'll just have to get porn on almost every single other site on the Internet, just like the rest of the world.

Let's just get this out of the way immediately: Never, ever, miss the chance to defend yourself if you're being accused of piracy. Regardless of whether you're guilty to some degree, plaintiffs have consistently shown that they believe any infringement upon their content to be worth millions of dollars. This public service announcement is unfortunately far too late for Anwar Ogiste of Maryland, as a federal judge has already awarded a default judgment of $1.5 million to adult company Flava Works. Ogiste's crime? Sharing seven porn videos.