Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Pornhub is one of the pre-eminent porn sites on the web. Each year Pornhub releases a year in review post with anonymous details about the site's users. More and more Linux users are visiting Pornhub, Linux saw an impressive 14% increase in traffic share in 2016.
[...] While Windows continues to dominate when it comes to which operating system users count on to watch Pornhub (about 80% of desktop users), Mac OS and Linux are on the rise, with Mac OS up 8% in traffic share and Linux up an impressive 14%.
Moving onto mobile. The playing field is pretty even here, with Android and Apple iOS almost at par with one another. Android leading with 3% more users on Pornhub than Apple iOS (47% of Pornhub's mobile users). Android's mobile market share has increase by 5% over the last year.
Look, it wasn't all me. I swear.
Source: http://www.infoworld.com/article/3158159/linux/linux-use-on-pornhub-surged-14-in-2016.html
Related Stories
Pornhub has begun to use machine learning to automatically tag videos:
Artificial intelligence has proven to be a dab hand at recognizing what's going on in photos and videos, but the datasets it's usually trained on are pretty genteel. Not so for Pornhub, which announced today that it's using machine learning to automatically catalog its videos.
The site is starting small, deploying facial recognition software that will detect 10,000 individual porn stars and tag them in footage. (Usually this information is provided by uploaders and viewers, who will still play a part by verifying the software's choices.) It plans to scan all 5 million of its videos "within the next year," and then move onto more complicated territory: using the software to identify the specific categories videos belong to, like "public" and "blonde."
In a press statement, Pornhub VP Corey Price said the company was joining the trend of firms using AI to "expedite antiquated processes." However, the speed at which PornHub's AI processes the data doesn't seem like it would be an improvement on its current crowdsourced system. While in beta the machine learning software apparently scanned some 50,000 videos in a month. At this rate it would take nearly a decade to scan the entire site, but presumably improvements are being made.
Meanwhile, a security firm has warned that millions of Pornhub users were targeted by "malvertising" for more than a year:
Millions of Pornhub users were targeted with a malvertising attack that sought to trick them into installing malware on their PCs, according to infosec firm Proofpoint.
By the time the attack was uncovered, it had been active "for more than a year", Proofpoint said, having already "exposed millions of potential victims in the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia" to malware by pretending to be software updates to popular browsers.
Although Pornhub, the world's largest pornography site with 26bn yearly visits according to data from ranking firm Alexa, and its advertising network have shut down the infection pathway, the attack is still ongoing on other sites.
Also at TechCrunch, Engadget, and The Sacremento Bee.
Related: BugReplay - Finding How Ads Get Past the Blockers
Linux Use on Pornhub Surged 14% in 2016
Malvertising Campaign Finds a Way Around Ad Blockers
Pornhub's Newest Videos Can Reach Out and Touch You
Pornhub will be deleting "deepfakes" — AI-generated videos that realistically edit new faces onto pornographic actors — under its rules against nonconsensual porn, following in the footsteps of platforms like Discord and Gfycat. "We do not tolerate any nonconsensual content on the site and we remove all said content as soon as we are made aware of it," the company told Motherboard, which first reported on the deepfakes porn phenomenon last year. Pornhub says that nonconsensual content includes "revenge porn, deepfakes, or anything published without a person's consent or permission."
Update: The infamous subreddit itself, /r/deepfakes, has been banned by Reddit. /r/CelebFakes and /r/CelebrityFakes have also been banned for their non-AI porn fakery (they had existed for over 7 years). Other subreddits like /r/fakeapp (technical support for the software) and /r/SFWdeepfakes remain intact. Reported at Motherboard, The Verge, and TechCrunch.
Motherboard also reported on some users (primarily on a new subreddit, /r/deepfakeservice) offering to accept commissions to create deepfakes porn. This is seen as more likely to result in a lawsuit:
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday January 21 2017, @02:45AM
I remember when visiting a porn site was almost automatic malware infection. I worked on computers off and on for a few years, and almost everything I saw with infections had a history of porn site visits. "Mrs. Smith, your computer picked this virus up on porn site xxx." "IMPOSSIBLE!! No one in my home looks at porn!" "Oh, alright - then someone outside of your house accessed your computer to visit this porn site." Ehhhh. That was one of the reasons I abandoned Windows. The average Linux user can easily erase all browsing history. Also, few malware writers support Linux.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 21 2017, @03:21AM
It would shock me to know that Windoze users aren't aware of how vulnerable their stuff is.
That Joe Average Windoze User doesn't have a support guy on speed-dial sounds surprising.
With Windoze being one giant attack surface, it would further shock me that, on his first visit, the support guy would NOT install Sandboxie[1] or whatever to try to isolate exploits.
Hell, the fact that Windoze boxes don't -come- configured like this seems pretty bizarre to me.
[1] There's even Firejail for I'll-click-on-anything Linux users.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 21 2017, @04:25AM
You may want to think twice about firejail (or sandboxie, for that matter) being bulletproof. There are still plenty of exploits that they provide zero defense against and they can also increase your attack surface with vulnerabilities of their own.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Saturday January 21 2017, @02:46AM
So either guys who understand privacy and telemetry, or high school dudes who found linux, are using pornhub. Not seeing any significant "I give a shit" hits here
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday January 21 2017, @03:34AM
The only significant bit of data seems to be that more people are becoming aware of privacy issues.
Alternatively, it may mean that more Linux users are frustrated nerds who can't get laid.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 21 2017, @06:05AM
On that topic, I just noticed that, apparently to mark Trump Day, XKCD has made its site HTTPS-only.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 21 2017, @07:01AM
On his last day as president, Obama's CIO says all new .gov domains will be HTTPS-only [theregister.co.uk]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday January 21 2017, @03:46AM
First, I'm not even sure why I'm commenting on a story about porn, other than I can't stand bad stats usage, and the summary immediately sounded "off" to me, so I read TFA.
I'm not sure how "impressive" this is in context of actual numbers, rather than percentage of change. The actual share of traffic from each OS was 80% Windows, 14% Mac OS, 3% Linux, and 3% "other". The changes were +1% for Windows, +8% for Mac OS, +14% for Linux, and -28% for Other.
Or, to put it another way, it looks like "Other" (whatever that includes... stuff less popular than LInux) lost a bit over 1% of the total 100% in the traffic "pie," and the remaining "big 3" got those.
And if we run the numbers, it looks like Mac OS actually got the largest gain in actual numbers, followed by Windows, and a distant third for Linux. There isn't enough precision given in the reported percentages to know exactly how these compare, but no matter how you look at it, this isn't exactly some "victory" for Linux when the only OSes that are losing people are "Other" and both Windows and Mac beat Linux in their gains.
And that's assuming that the traffic stats for a porn site are actually meaningful for... well, I'm not sure why these numbers are supposed to be of interest to anyone other than people running porn sites??
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 21 2017, @05:20AM
There's also the possibility that the gains made for linux were in fact linux distros that pornhub previously didn't count as linux. That being said, I'm still glad to hear about the increase. We're* getting a lot more ports these days.
*linux users
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Saturday January 21 2017, @05:31AM
Yea, 3% is better than the 1% we have always been in site metrics until you realize that most of it is now ChromeOS and settop boxes. On the other hand most Linux users are smart enough to find porn without going to somewhere as dangerous as pornhub. (Dangerous in pretty much every definition.)
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday January 21 2017, @11:46AM
Pornhub is only dangerous if you're running without script/ad-blocking.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 21 2017, @06:54PM
actual share [...] 3% Linux
...including the "14 percent".
As you say: misleading.
"Other"
Dollars to donuts, a significant portion of that is Linux boxen.
Robert Pogson mentions this often in his blog.
I like the first reply to your comment:
It's just sloppy sniffing by the site and/or poor configuration on the users' appliances.
There's also the possibility that some folks are having too much fun with their User Agent Switchers.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Sunday January 22 2017, @03:15AM
Very interesting number analysis you did. It certainly gives a different perspective to the summary. Thank you.
I can tell you a good reason. The porn community is an indicator species [wikipedia.org] for the internet -- not just for bad things, but good things as well. They were the first in many areas -- including delivering malware and then in fixing the malware problem. They are now dabbling in 3D. If you want to know how 3D and holography are going to be accepted by the general populace, watch the porn community closely.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Saturday January 21 2017, @03:58AM
You can pick up AndroidTV quad cores for like $50 these days and if you are gonna weatch porn? Well it'll look a hell of a lot nicer on that 42in TV than on some 22in monitor.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 21 2017, @05:33AM
Well [porn]'ll look a hell of a lot nicer on that 42in TV than on some 22in monitor.
I don't know about that. If you're paying for it, maybe. But most videos on free sites like Pornhub are such low resolution, not to mention blurry, they probably look bad on a smartphone. ......... er, from what I hear.
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Saturday January 21 2017, @10:31AM
I think they also have a HD channel, at least xhampster and largeporntube and....well, you know I heard they had an HD channel from somebody at the bar, yeah, the bar.
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday January 24 2017, @03:54PM
They aren't counting Android as Linux, so those Android TVs are probably miscategorized as "mobile devices" rather than being miscategorized as Linux devices...
(Score: 3, Informative) by Hairyfeet on Tuesday January 24 2017, @10:34PM
You haven't tried those Chinese "Android TVs" I take it? It IDs itself not as Android but as Linux. Don't ask me why, maybe its something about not using gapps on the things, but it says its Linux. I've been looking into adding them in the shop, they are actually quite impressive for such small devices, really sweet little HTPCs they are.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 21 2017, @06:17AM
MrPlow reports on Porn. That made me chuckle ...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 21 2017, @08:39AM
MrPlow reports on Porn. That made me chuckle ...
Not as much as Hairyfeet commenting on it!
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday January 21 2017, @08:38AM
So it is really more Linux users going to Pornhub, or is it rather more Pornhub users going to Linux?
Given that porn sites have a reputation of being malware hubs, and Linux has a reputation of being secure against malware, I can see why specifically Pornhub users would prefer to use the site from Linux computers.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Bot on Saturday January 21 2017, @10:13AM
It is "more linux users going to porn sites". A coping mechanism after being exposed to systemd. Other users smash their monitors when stressed, but linux users actually like their gear so they have to find alternative ways to vent off frustration.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 21 2017, @09:38AM
Pornhub was one of the first sites to move to html5 from flash and they're still one of the best implementations of it across platforms. Not a big perk compared to other sites on windows (where flash is convenient) but it does draw you more loyal Linux users than the multitude of flash only sites. I'd be curious if the desktop linux included ChromeOS as well, as cheap chromebooks in developing countries could account for the large spike.
Also, a lot more interesting data over here [pornhub.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 22 2017, @02:10AM
exactly. should have been obvious.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday January 21 2017, @11:26PM
I submissively subject myself to Windows' punishment every single day.
Happily I just bought a Mac Mini. Now it's just going to get worse.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]