Adult World News

In 2014, the Canadian parliament, then dominated by the country's Conservative Party, passed Bill C-36, which for the first time made paying for sex a crime. The new law also outlawed receiving a material benefit from the sale of sex, as well as the advertising of sexual service.

The bill was misleadingly titled the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act, but the actual aim of the legislation was to serve as a first step toward stamping out sex work altogether in Canada.

When the 'Liberal' Party won a majority shortly after the bill took effect, the new government led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pledged to review the effects of the law after five years.

With 2019 coming to a close, that five-year wait is also up, and Canadian sex worker rights activists say that the 'Liberal' government has done nothing to evaluate or reform the law -- which they say has put sex workers' lives at risk , and been a gift to sexual predators.

According to a VICE report on the law's effects, Canadian sex workers now can't work in brothels, can't hire security and can't properly screen clients, because those clients generally will not give their true identities for fear of arrest.

A spokesperson for Canada's Ministry of Justice said only that the law mandates that a committee study the effects of Bill C-36, and that committee is now being formed.

China is to end a punishment system for prostitution that allowed police to hold sex workers and their clients in custody for up to two years in prison camps it euphemistically called 'education centres'. Detainees were forced to work, allegedly making toys and household goods.

The detention system will come to an end on 29 December. Those still in custody will be released, according to Xinhua, China's state media.

Prostitution remains illegal in China. It carries punishments of up to 15 days in detention and fines of up to 5,000 yuan (£546).

A 2013 report by Human Rights Watch interviewed 140 sex workers, clients, police and specialists and found that many sex workers were beaten by police in an attempt to coerce confessions.

China isn't totally abandoning the idea of 're-educatio'n. Authorities in the country claim a number of camps in the north-west region of Xinjiang are voluntary education camps that help to combat extremism.

Hotel chains owned by Hilton, Intercontinental and Best Western are among a number of leading global chains accused of profiting from sex trafficking. In a landmark case, that is bound to have wider ramifications for sex workers in gerneral, lawyers claim an industry-wide failure to prevent sex trafficking, It has been alleged that women and children were held captive, abused and sold for sex in their guest rooms across the US.

A total of 13 women have accused a dozen hotel groups of wilfully ignoring warning signs that sexual exploitation was taking place on their premises. The case has been filed in a federal court in Columbus, Ohio. It marks the first time the hotel industry has faced legal action as a group.

The lawsuit claims that an estimated 80% of all human trafficking arrests occur in or around hotels.

Surely campaigners around the world will pick up on the idea of attacking hotels as a means of attacking the entire consensual adult sex work trade. And even if the hotels only start demanding full ID, it is going to have a drastic effect on trade.

The annual No Nut November online event which is supposedly designed to encourage people to stop masturbating, at least for the month of November, appears to have been a massive failure, according to data research by the site Mashable.

The No Nut meme, along with the similar NoFap online movement (which advocates swearing off masturbation on a permanent basis) are basically anti-porn campaigns.

Consulting with the leading porn tube sites PornHub and xHamster, the Mashable reporters found that traffic during November either showed no tangible effect, or in xHamster's case, actually jumped by 10%. 

 xHamster Vice President Alex Hawkins speculated:

Trying to energize a whole population to not masturbate only results in them thinking about masturbating more.

Mashable also checked Google trending data to learn whether searches for the word porn showed any significant dips or rises in November. But for three straight years, Mashable found, porn as a Google search term held mostly steady during No Nut November.

Australia's Northern Territory Parliament has voted to decriminalise sex work through the Sex Industry Bill 2019 . The Bill decriminalises brothels, soliciting and indoor sex work, and gives sex workers access to workplace health and safety protections already extended to other workers in the state.

CEO of Scarlet Alliance, Jules Kim said :

This is a momentous day for all sex workers and sets a positive example that sex workers are valued members of the community, deserving of rights and protections. We applaud the NT Government for listening to sex workers and the evidence in fully decriminalising sex work in the NT. Sex work is work and it is fantastic that it is finally being recognised as such. We hope that these critical reforms will demonstrate the importance of best practice partnerships between sex workers and government and lead to similar campaigns for the decriminalisation of sex work in other states and territories throughout Australia.

Singapore's Parliament has voted to amend its Women's Charter, increasing penalties for sex work-related offences. The Women's Charter Amendment Bill, passed on 4th November, included provisions to strengthen the laws against online vice.

The Bill amended the Women's Charter to widen the definition of a brothel, to make it easier for prosecutors to prove a premises is being used for vice activities. The prosecution will now be able to use circumstantial evidence as proof that sex work activities are being offered, whereas before they would have had to prove sex work was being provided.

The Bill also increases punishments for people who facilitates sex workers entering Singapore, meaning those convicted face a prison sentence of up to 7 years, and a fine of up to $100,000 ($150,000 for repeat offenders). Penalties are also increased for living on the earnings of prostitution (from $10,000 to $100,000).

The Bill also increases enforcement powers for brothel-keeping offences; brothels were already criminalised in Singapore, but this Bill increases penalties from $3,000 to $100,000 and a 5 year prison sentence. Changes to the law mean anyone letting or sub-letting a property is expected to undertake reasonable diligence to ensure the premises will not be used for sex work, including identity checks and face-to-face interviews.

The Ministry of Home Affairs has focused specifically on those using remote communication services to facilitate the provision of sexual services in Singapore, even if the websites used to provide such services are hosted overseas.

The language of the Bill focuses on women and girls, and has not followed the trend to criminalise se workers' customers.

Global consumer giants Kraft Heinz and Unilever have come under fire for advertising on the world's massively popular porno website, Pornhub.

Both companies launched huge advertising campaigns on Pornhub in the last year.

Unilever, which makes Dove soap, Marmite and Hellmann's mayonnaise, ran a campaign for it's grooming company Dollar Shave Club which sends members razors in the post. It joked that Pornhub viewers won't need to visit the site so often if the use the advertiser's grooming products.

The company reportedly spends roughly £6billion a year on marketing and Dollar Shave Club's creative director, Matt Knapp, said the company chose to advertise on the porn site because it has guys backs'.

Yesterday Unilever vowed it would never advertise on the site again after miserable PC campaigners questioned the company.

Meanwhile spokesman for Kraft Heinz played down the significance of its activity on Pornhub, but did not explicitly say it would not advertise on the site again. He said:

The Devour frozen-food brand, which is only sold in the US, had a one-day promotion solely as part of the brand's Super Bowl activation. The brand was explicitly talking about #Foodporn, which has become a cultural phenomenon on Instagram.

Pornhub has 110million daily visits and is the most popular pornography site in the UK. It is surely an attractive site for advertisers who are targeting campaigns toward men.

Several popular camgirl sites have exposed the email addresses and other sensitive information of millions of users and sex workers after a backend was left wide open.

VTS Media, a company based in Barcelona, runs the affected sites, out of which amateur.tv is one of the most popular cam sites in Spain, according to traffic-ranking service Alexa. Others include placercams.com and webcampornoxxx.net.

This data exposure does not come at the hands of any sort of hack or exploit, instead, just an oversight by the company, TechCrunch reported. The administrative backends were left open, without a password, for several weeks. This allowed anyone to access the network's database, which included usernames, email addresses, IP addresses, browser user-agents, private chat logs, login timestamps, and even failed login attempts, which stored attempted passwords in plaintext.

The backend also contained data related to the videos that registered users were watching and renting. Users who broadcasted sexual content to viewers on these sites also had some of their personal information revealed.

With millions of users affected, this is one of the largest data exposures for adult sites since Ashley Madison's massive breach in 2015, and rather highlights jsut how dangerous it is to hand over personal details to porn sites, and just image how much worse it would have been if UK age verification were in place, the date would include names and addresses, birthdates ad passport numbers.

Earlier in the year, Rebekah Charleston, an ex-prostitute turned morality campaigner, filed a lawsuit against the State of Nevada, its Governor and Legislature, in which she attempted to have the laws which allow Nevada's legal brothels declared unconstitutional.

Thankfully the case has now been dismissed by the Nevada District's Chief Judge Miranda M. Du for lack of standing.

Because the plaintiffs failed to meet the standing requirement, the legal issues involved in the case were not discussed in Judge Du's decision, but the judge did make clear why the plaintiffs, aside from their being residents of Texas, wouldn't have met the standing requirements even if they had lived in Nevada. The concept of standing is something along the lines that one has to be an injured party to complain about an injury.

The owner of the Mustang Ranch brothel near Reno had a few choice words to say about the lawsuit's dismissal:

We are extremely pleased that the United States District Court deemed this lawsuit baseless and without merit and, as such, dismissed it, said Mustang Ranch owner Lance Gilman. However, we are equally frustrated at the persistent and reckless attempts by Mr. Guinasso [the plaintiff's lawyer] to ban Nevada's historic brothel industry through incendiary allegations that are steeped in moral judgment rather than facts and education. This was a complete waste and misuse of taxpayer dollars and, from the very get-go, appears to have been done for political gain rather than the establishment of sound policy.

This past summer, without much fanfare, Facebook updated their censorship rules concerning sexual expression on the company's platforms, including Instagram.

The new language, under the guise of preventing sexual solicitation, restricts even further the posts that sex workers are allowed to share, making them even more exposed to targeted harassment campaigns by anti-sex crusaders.

Among the new things that could get someone Instagram's account flagged and/or removed for Sexual Solicitation: the eggplant or peach emoji in conjunction with any statement referring to being horny; nude pictures with digital alterations or emojis covering female nipples and buttocks.

The new rules include:

Do not post:

Attempted coordination of or recruitment for adult sexual activities, including but not limited to:

Filmed sexual activities Pornographic activities, strip club shows, live sex performances, erotic dances Sexual, erotic, or tantric massages

Explicit sexual solicitation by, including but not limited to the following, offering or asking for:

Sex or sexual partners Sex chat or conversations Nude photos/videos/imagery

Content that meets both of the following criteria:

Criteria 1: Offer or Ask

Content implicitly or indirectly offers or asks for:

Nude imagery, or Sex or sexual partners, or Sex chat conversations

Criteria 2: Suggestive Elements

Content makes the aforementioned offer or ask using one of the following sexually suggestive elements:

Contextually specific and commonly sexual emojis or emoji strings, or Regional sexualized slang, or Mentions or depictions of sexual activity (including hand drawn, digital, or real world art) such as: sexual roles, sex positions, fetish scenarios, state of arousal, act of sexual intercourse or activity (sexual penetration or self-pleasuring), or Imagery of real individuals with nudity covered by human parts, objects, or digital obstruction, including long shots of fully nude butts

Australian men's magazine the Picture and the 69-year-old People magazine will close at the end of the year, ending decades of printed weeklies featuring topless models and readers' sex stories.

Their publisher, Bauer Media, was forced to axe the magazines after retailers lined up to ban them from sale at service stations; and readership fell to 0.02% of the population over 14 for People magazine and 0.01% for the Picture. They are already banned from sale in supermarkets.

Discussions to close the Picture and People magazines have been taking place, as the magazines have lost ranging [visibility], which has affected their commercial viability, a spokeswoman for Bauer Media told Guardian Australia.

The magazines will be closing at the end of the year and we're working closely with staff to find suitable redeployment.

The latest retailer to ban the publication is BP who own 350 stores at petrol stations. BP's statement followed a decision by the 7-Eleven chief executive, Angus McKay, last month to order all 700 franchisees and store managers to urgently pull the magazines from sale.

Warning...the T-3000 model is equipped with a summary justice module

Designing Virtuous Sex Robots

By Anco Peeters and Pim Haselager

Abstract

We propose that virtue ethics can be used to address ethical issues central to discussions about sex robots. In particular, we argue virtue ethics is well equipped to focus on the implications of sex robots for human moral character.

Our evaluation develops in four steps.

• First, we present virtue ethics as a suitable framework for the evaluation of human - robot relationships.
   

• Second, we show the advantages of our virtue ethical account of sex robots by comparing it to current instrumentalist approaches, showing how the former better captures the reciprocal interaction between robots and their users.
   

• Third, we examine how a virtue ethical analysis of intimate human - robot relationships could inspire the design of robots that support the cultivation of virtues. We suggest that a sex robot which is equipped with a consent-module could support the cultivation of compassion when used in supervised, therapeutic scenarios.
   

• Fourth, we discuss the ethical implications of our analysis for user autonomy and responsibility.

Account details of more than 250,000 people who used a site for sex workers in the Netherlands have been stolen in a hack attack.

Email addresses, user names and passwords were stolen from a site called Hookers.nl.

The attacker is believed to have exploited a bug in its chat room software found last month. Reports suggest the malicious hacker who took the data has offered it for sale on a dark web marketplace.

The website's media spokesman Tom Lobermann told Dutch broadcaster NOS that the site had informed everyone who had an account about the breach. The message sent by the site's administrators also advised people to change their passwords.

Hookers.nl used a popular program for hosting online forums and discussions called vBulletin. In late September, security researchers identified a vulnerability in the program that could be exploited to steal data. VBulletin quickly produced a patch for the bug but several sites were breached before they could deploy and install the protection.